It looks like America will get to see The Interview on Christmas Day after all — heck, even before. After Sony announced yesterday that the Seth Rogen-James Franco film will be shown in select US cinemas on Christmas, the announcement came this morning that Americans can exercise their freedom and watch the film online too — right now.
How does Martin Scorsese deliver dramatic moments with such impact? Why do Jackie Chan’s kicks and punches, even those performed in service of jokes, land with such impact? And why do Michael Bay movies, despite their near-fetishistic inclusion of things crashing into other things, seem to lack any kind of impact at all (apart from that on audience adrenaline and box office numbers)? Questions like these keep cinephiles, filmmakers, and cinephilic filmmakers up at night, and they also apparently drive editor and video essayist Tony Zhou to make his series Every Frame a Painting. At the top of the post, you can watch his analysis of Scorsese’s use of silence; below, of how Jackie Chan does action comedy; and at the bottom, how Michael Bay crafts his unique brand of cinematic “Bayhem.”
Michael Bay, you might incredulously ask — the guy who directed the Transformers movies? Indeed. But as Zhou puts it, “Even if you dislike him (as I do), Bay has something valuable to teach us about visual perception.” His video essays aim to learn from all films, drawing lessons from those that succeed at every level (as some say several of Scorsese’s do) to those that exemplify a kind of highly specialized mastery (as Jackie Chan’s best surely do), to those that fail at even their own aims (as Jackie Chan’s American productions tend to do), to those that aggressively and successfully pursue questionable aesthetic ends (as, well… perhaps you can guess).
Having watched these threevideos and thus come to understand what situations bring on a Scorsesean silence, why Hong Kong money allows Jackie Chan to perfectly kick a bad guy down a staircase, and which traditions Michael Bay exaggerates to achieve his brand of visual maximalism, you’ll want to move on to Zhou’s other analyses, which break down the techniques of directors like Edgar Wright, David Fincher, and Steven Spielberg. Evidently a fan of both East Asian cinema and animation, he also looks hard at what working outside live reality allows Japanese director Satoshi Kon to do, and what superstar Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho gets out of telephoto profile shots in Mother. “There’s actually a lot of great videos on the internet analyzing movie content or themes,” he says in the latter essay, “but I think we’re missing stuff about the actual form — you know, the pictures and the sound.” Every Frame a Painting shows us exactly what we’re missing.
One’s never too old to be read a story. There’s no shame in stealing a couple of minutes from your busy, stress-filled day to let actress Susan Sarandon read you one, above.
Goodnight Moonwas never a part of my childhood, but it came into heavy rotation when my own kids were little. It wasn’t a title they clamored for—in my experience, the intended demographic favors the junky and cringe-inducing over classics of children’s literature, but no matter.
All day, I indulged their hankering for tales of preschool-aged dinosaurs who had to be taught how to share, giant silly cookies, and a certain television character who reacted poorly to being passed over as flower girl. In return, I ruled the night.
I treasured Goodnight Moon not so much because it made them fall asleep—there are shelves upon shelves of dependable choices in that department—but rather for its simplicity. There were no moral lessons. Nothing sparkly or magic or forced. Nothing that catered to their supposed whims. Author Margaret Wise Brown’s stated aim with regard to the child reader was “to jog him with the unexpected and comfort him with the familiar.”
I approve. But there’s not a lot of jogging in Goodnight Moon. Just that comb and that brush and that bowlful of mush. What a blessed relief.
As one approaches the end, Goodnight Moon begins to rival Charlotte’s Web as children’s literature’s great meditation on death. The catalogue of all those things we’re saying goodnight to harkens to the final scene in Our Town, when the newly dead Emily, revisiting her childhood home, cries, “All that was going on in life and we never noticed.”
Every time my small crew made it to “goodnight stars, goodnight air, goodnight noises everywhere,” I was croaking. (Not figuratively, though a little research reveals I am not the only one to think this lovely phrase would make a great epitaph.)
This emotional collapse was equal parts cathartic and embarrassing. What can I say? My cup ranneth over. I was glad to learn that E. B. White’s voice betrayed him, too, recording Charlotte’s Web’s most poignant scene.
Narrating the lightly animated story for 1999’sGoodnight Moon & Other Sleepytime Tales, Sarandon exhibits astonishing self control. It’s probably a good thing for children everywhere to see that there’s at least one adult out there with the steel to soldier through. Her youngest child was still little when she went into the recording booth. If she’d wanted, she could’ve milked it for every last drop of pathos, but I’m glad she played it straight, because most of us can’t.
(And few of us can write a book so elegant on a topic so profound. Sarandon’s would-be publishers rejected her children’s book about a “very funny raccoon” who dies.”)
How does a movie become a “classic”? Explanations, never less than utterly subjective, will vary from cinephile to cinephile, but I would submit that classic-film status, as traditionally understood, requires that all elements of the production work in at least near-perfect harmony: the cinematography, the casting, the editing, the design, the setting, the score. Outside first-year film studies seminars and deliberately contrarian culture columns, the label of classic, once attained, goes practically undisputed. Even those who actively dislike Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, for instance, would surely agree that its every last audiovisual nuance serves its distinctive, bold vision — especially that opening use of “Thus Spake Zarathustra.”
But Kubrick didn’t always intend to use that piece, nor the other orchestral works we’ve come to closely associate with mankind’s ventures into realms beyond Earth and struggles with intelligence of its own invention. According to Jason Kottke, Kubrick had commissioned an original score from A Streetcar Named Desire, Spartacus, Cleopatra, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf composer Alex North.
At the top of the post, you can see 2001’s opening with North’s music, and below you can hear 38 minutes of his score on Spotify. As to the question of why Kubrick stuck instead with the temporary score of Strauss, Ligeti, and Khatchaturian he’d used in editing, Kottke quotes from Michel Ciment’s interview with the filmmaker:
However good our best film composers may be, they are not a Beethoven, a Mozart or a Brahms. Why use music which is less good when there is such a multitude of great orchestral music available from the past and from our own time? [ … ] Although [North] and I went over the picture very carefully, and he listened to these temporary tracks and agreed that they worked fine and would serve as a guide to the musical objectives of each sequence he, nevertheless, wrote and recorded a score which could not have been more alien to the music we had listened to, and much more serious than that, a score which, in my opinion, was completely inadequate for the film.
North didn’t find out about Kubrick’s choice until 2001’s New York City premiere. Not an enviable situation, certainly, but not the worst thing that ever happened to a collaborator who failed to rise to the director’s expectations.
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Warm and fuzzy, she wasn’t. But that’s partly why it’s fun to imagine the acerbic Ayn Rand taking a crack at reviewing children’s movies. And that’s why it’s fun to read Mallory Ortberg’s parody in The New Yorker, which features 17 Randian reviews of classic kids films, beginning with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs:
An industrious young woman neglects to charge for her housekeeping services and is rightly exploited for her naïveté. She dies without ever having sought her own happiness as the highest moral aim. I did not finish watching this movie, finding it impossible to sympathize with the main character. —No stars.
Get the remaining movie reviews — and a few more laughs — right here.
Ask Orson Welles enthusiasts to name the filmmaker’s masterpiece, and most will, of course, name Citizen Kane. While Welles’ very first feature film may lay credible claim to the title of not just the finest in his oeuvre but the finest film ever made, a growing minority of dissenters have, in recent years, plumped for his last: 1974’s F for Fake. Too truthful to call a fiction film and too filled with lies to call a documentary, it brings together such seemingly disparate themes as authorship, authenticity, art forgery, architecture, and girl-watching into what Welles himself thought of as “a new kind of film,” but which cinephiles might now consider an “essay film,” a form exemplified by the works of, to name a well-known proponent, La jetee and Sans soleil director Chris Marker.
Alas, Welles revealed F for Fake in 1974 to an unready world: audiences didn’t quite understand it, and what distributors showed interest in buying it didn’t quite offer enough money. The feature finally came out in America in 1976, and for the occasion Welles put together the nine-minute “trailer,” never actually screened in a theater, at the top of the post, a short essay film in and of itself possessed of a similar style to but consisting of no footage from the full-length F for Fake. As with the picture to which it ostensibly offers a preview, Welles made it in collaboration with B‑movie cinematographer Gary Graver and his girlfriend Oja Kodar — the one you see posing with the tiger — hoping to tantalize with a suggestion of the dance of truth and falsity the film does around such storied figures as Pablo Picasso, Howard Hughes, and infamous art forger Elmyr de Hory.
In the clip after that, you can hear filmmaker (and something of a Boswell for Welles) Peter Bogdanovich briefly discuss the origin of F for Fake as well as the film’s sheer unusualness. “My favorite moment is when he talks about Chartres, this extraordinary cathedral of Chartres which nobody knows who designed, how its authorship is anonymous and he connects that to the whole idea of authorship and fakery.” That sequence from the full movie appears just above; just below, have another taste in the form of one of its passages on Picasso, featuring Kojar as the artist’s ostensible former mistress. Seem strange? Take Bogdanovich’s words to heart: “If you get on the film’s wavelength and listen to what he’s saying and what what he’s doing, it’s riveting. It takes you along through the rhythm of the cutting, and of Orson’s personality. If you fight it, and you expect it to be a linear kind of thing, then you’re not going to enjoy it.”
As we’ve noted before, the English coffeehouse has served as a staging ground for radical, sometimes revolutionary social change. Certainly this was the case during the Enlightenment, as it was with the salons in France. And yet, by the early 20th century it seems, coffee shops in London had grown scarcer and more humdrum. That is until 1953 when the Moka Bar, the UK’s first Italian espresso bar, opened in Soho. On his blog The Great Wen, Peter Watts describes its arrival as “a momentous event”:
London’s first proper coffee shop—one equipped with a Gaggia coffee machine—opened at 29 Frith Street. This was a place where teenagers too young for pubs could come and gather, and it is said by some that the introduction of this coffee bar prompted the youth culture explosion that soon changed social life in Britain forever.
“By 1972,” Watts writes, “coffee bars were everywhere and the teenage revolution was firmly established.” Places like the Moka Bar might seem like the ideal place for countercultural maven William S. Burroughs—a London resident from the late sixties to early seventies—to hobnob with young dissidents and outsiders. Burroughs, who so approvingly refers the possibly apocryphal anarchist pirate colony of Libertatia in his Cities of the Red Night, would, one might think, appreciate the budding anarchism of British youth culture, which would flower into punk soon enough.
But rather than joining the coffee bar scene, the cantankerous Burroughs had taken to frequenting “plush gentlemen’s shops of the area, not to mention the ‘Dilly Boys,’ young male prostitutes who hustled for clients outside the Regent Palace Hotel.”
And he had grown increasingly disillusioned with London, fuming, writes Ted Morgan in Burroughs biography Literary Outlaw, “at what he was paying for his hole-in-the-wall apartment with a closet for a kitchen” and at the rising price of utilities. “Burroughs,” Morgan tells us, “began to feel that he was in enemy territory.” And he thought the Moka coffee bar should pay the price for his indignities.
There, “on several occasions a snarling counterman had treated him with outrageous and unprovoked discourtesy, and served him poisonous cheesecake that made him sick.” Burroughs “decided to retaliate by putting a curse on the place.” He chose a means of attack that he’d earlier employed against the Church of Scientology, “turning up… every day,” writes Watts, “taking photographs and making sound recordings.” Then he would play them back a day or so later on the street outside the Moka. “The idea,” writes Morgan, “was to place the Moka Bar out of time. You played back a tape that had taken place two days ago and you superimposed it on what was happening now, which pulled them out of their time position.”
Burroughs also connected the method to the Watergate recordings, the Garden of Eden, and the theories of Alfred Korzybski. The trigger for the magical operation was, in his words, “playback.” In a very strange essay called “Feedback from Watergate to the Garden of Eden,” from his collection Electronic Revolution, Burroughs described his operation in detail, a disruption, he wrote, of a “control system.”
Now to apply the 3 tape recorder analogy to this simple operation. Tape recorder 1 is the Moka Bar itself it is pristine condition. Tape recorder 2 is my recordings of the Moka Bar vicinity. These recordings are access. Tape recorder 2 in the Garden of Eden was Eve made from Adam. So a recording made from the Moka Bar is a piece of the Moka Bar. The recording once made, this piece becomes autonomous and out of their control. Tape recorder 3 is playback. Adam experiences shame when his discraceful behavior is played back to him by tape recorder 3 which is God. By playing back my recordings to the Moka Bar when I want and with any changes I wish to make in the recordings, I become God for this local. I effect them. They cannot effect me.
The theory made perfect sense to Burroughs, who believed in a Magical Universe ruled by occult forces and who experimented heavily with Scientology, Crowley-an Magick, and the orgone energy of Wilhelm Reich. The attack on the Moka worked, or at least Burroughs believed it did. “They are seething in there,” he wrote, “I have them and they know it.” On October 30th, 1972 the establishment closed its doors—perhaps a consequence of those rising rents that so irked the Beat writer—and the location became the Queens Snack Bar.
The audio-visual cut-up technique Burroughs used in his attack against the Moka Bar was a method derived by Burroughs and Brion Gysin from their experiments with written “cut-ups,” and Burroughs applied it to film as well. At the top of the post, see an interpretive “meditation” based on Burroughs’ use of audio/visual “magical weapons” and incorporating his recordings. Above is “The Cut Ups,” a short film Burroughs himself made in 1966 with cinematographer Antony Balch, a disorienting illustration of the cut up technique.
Not limited to attacking annoying London coffeehouse owners, Burroughs’ supposedly magical interventions in reality were in fact the fullest expression of his creativity. As Ted Morgan writes, “the single most important thing about Burroughs was his belief in the magical universe. The same impulse that lead him to put out curses was, as he saw it, the source of his writing.” Read much more about Burroughs’ theory and practice in Matthew Levi Stevens’ essay “The Magical Universe of William S. Burroughs,” and hear the author himself discourse on the paranormal, tape cut-ups, and much more in the lecture below from a writing class he gave in June, 1986.
In a new video by Tested, Adam Savage (model maker, industrial designer and television personality) shows you how to build a replica of the space rifle from the 1968 sci-fi film Barbarella. To design the replica, Savage had only one document to work with — a photograph showing Jane Fonda holding the gun, which originally appeared on the cover of a 1968 issue of LIFE Magazine. The 77-minute video above takes you inside Savage’s build process, moving from start to finish. If DIY is your thing, you won’t want to miss it.
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