Right now, PBS is in the midst of airing The Vietnam War, a ten-part, 18-hour documentary film series directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. The “immersive 360-degree narrative” tells “the epic story of the Vietnam War,” using never-before-seen footage and interviews. If you’re not watching the series on the TV, you can also view it on the web and through PBS apps for smartphones, tablets, Apple TV, Roku and Amazon Fire TV. Episode 1 appears above. Find all of them here.
Note: If these videos don’t stream outside of the US, we apologize in advance. Sometimes PBS geo-restricts their videos. Also, these videos likely won’t stay online forever. If you’re interested in watching the series, I’d get going sooner than later.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
FYI: If you sign up for a MasterClass course by clicking on the affiliate links in this post, Open Culture will receive a small fee that helps support our operation.
If you need to make movies, if you feel like you can’t rest until you’ve told this particular story that you’re burning to tell, then Martin Scorsese has a course for you. Through MasterClass, the director of Goodfellas, Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, and Mean Streets is now set to teach his first online course. According to the video trailer above, Scorsese will explore in 20+ lessons everything from cinematography and editing, to working with actors, on-set directing, and developing a personal filmmaking style. The $90 course won’t be released until early 2018, but anyone who pre-enrolls now will get early access to the class.
While you wait, you can also take Werner Herzog’s own course on filmmaking (also offered through MasterClass). Or explore Scorsese’s lists of recommended films that we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture. Find them in the Relateds right below.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
Note: MasterClass is one of our partners. So if you sign up for a course, it benefits not just you and MasterClass. It benefits Open Culture too. So consider it win-win-win.
It surprised everyone, even die-hard fans, when Wes Anderson announced that he would not just adapt Roald Dahl’s children’s bookFantastic Mr. Fox for the screen, but do it with stop-motion animation. But after we’d all given it a bit of thought, it made sense: Anderson’s films and Dahl’s stories do share a certain sense of inventive humor, and stepping away from live action would finally allow the director of such detail-oriented pictures as Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou fuller control over the visuals. Eight years later, we find Anderson overseeing another team of animators to tell another, even more fantastical-looking story, this one set not in an England of the past but a Japan of the future.
There, according to the project’s newly released trailer, “canine saturation has reached epic proportions. An outbreak of dog flu rips through the city of Megasaki. Mayor Kobayashi issues emergency orders calling for a hasty quarantine. Trash Island becomes an exile colony: the Isle of Dogs.” Equals in furriness, if not attire, to Fantastic Mr. Fox’s woodland friends and voiced by the likes of Jeff Goldblum, Scarlet Johansson, Tilda Swinton, and of course Bill Murray (in a cast also including Japanese performers like Ken Watanabe, Mari Natsuki, and Yoko Ono — yes, that Yoko Ono), the canines of various colors and sizes forcibly relocated to the bleak titular setting must band together into a kind of ragtag family.
Anderson must find himself very much at home in this thematic territory by now. It would also have suited the towering figure in Japanese film to whom Isle of Dogs pays tribute. Although Anderson has cited the 1960s and 70s stop-animation holiday specials of Rankin/Bass like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and The Little Drummer Boy — all produced, incidentally, in Japan — as one inspiration, he also said on an ArteTV Q&A earlier this year that “the new film is really less influenced by stop-motion movies than it is by Akira Kurosawa.” Perhaps he envisioned Atari Kobayashi, the boy who journeys to Trash Island to retrieve his lost companion, as a twelve-year-old version of one of Kurosawa’s lone heroes.
And perhaps it owes to Kurosawa that the setting — at least from what the trailer reveals — combines elements of an imagined future with the look and feel of Japan’s rapidly developing mid-20th century, a period that has long fascinated Anderson in its European incarnations but one captured crisply in Kurosawa’s homeland in crime movies like High and Low and The Bad Sleep Well. Anderson has made little to no reference to the Land of the Rising Sun before, but his interest makes sense: no land better understands what Anderson has expressed more vividly with every project, the richness of the aesthetic mixture of the past and future that always surrounds us. And from what I could tell on my last visit there, its dog situation remains blessedly under control — for now.
The opening Voight-Kampff test that turns explosive, the flight over the high-rise rooftops and past the tower-side video geisha of 2019 Los Angeles, Roy Batty’s dying monologue on the rainy rooftop, Deckard picking up Gaff’s origami unicorn: like any other movie meriting classic status, Blade Runnerless possesses memorable scenes than comprises nothing but memorable scenes. Fans have, of course, argued for their favorites, and if you have one yourself you can now compare your judgment against that of the film’s director Ridley Scott, who talks about which Blade Runner scene he holds in highest esteem in the new video from Wired above.
Scott picks the scene when Deckard, Harrison Ford’s hunter of the artificial human beings known as replicants, visits the offices of the colossal Tyrell Corporation that invented them and interviews an immaculately put-together young lady, almost a vision out of film noir, named Rachael.
But that’s no lady — that’s a replicant, at least according to the Voight-Kampff gear he breaks out and sets up for the procedure. “To Rick Deckard, it’s just a job,” says Scott. “He appears to be oblivious to the beauty and is unimpressed by what he sees. At the end of it, he says, ‘How can it now know what it is?’ He calls her ‘it.’ So obviously she’s a race apart.”
But how to signal that to the audience, showing without telling? Scott speaks of modeling Rachael after Hedy Lamarr, the Austrian-born star from the golden age of Hollywood “who had a severity which was spectacular.” Still working at a time in cinema when “digital doesn’t have a word,” he wanted a way to differentiate replicants from humans by putting an unusual “light in their eyes” (he references the leopard in the beginning of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey). Special effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull (who’d also worked on 2011) came up with a camera-mounted half-mirror that would, just often enough, tilt to make a “golden light” reflect off the retinas of Rachael and the other replicants. Scott’s verdict: “Genius.”
Many of us would say the same about most other aspects of Blade Runner as well. But as with any artistically rich film, nobody, not even the director, has the final say about it. Scott may have an unambiguous attitude about the best part of Blade Runner, but then, he also has an unambiguous answer to the story’s central question of whether not just Rachael but Deckard himself is a replicant. Will Denis Villeneuve’s soon upcoming sequel Blade Runner 2049 honor, ignore, or work around that answer? More to the point, will it, in the fullness of time, contribute as much to our collective memory as did the original? Only one test, of the kind that happens in the movie theater, will reveal that to us.
How did the Black List get started? Not the Hollywood blacklist that ruined the careers of countless directors, actors and actresses during the 1940s and 1950s. No, we mean the Black List, created by Franklin Leonard in 2005, which has allowed more than 300 scripts, once stuck in Hollywood purgatory, to get turned into feature films–films like Slumdog Millionaire, The King’s Speech, Argo and Spotlight. This all started when Leonard created a simple survey, asking nearly 100 movies executives to name their favorite scripts that had not yet been made as feature films. The new Vox video above tells the rest of the story.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
Just as we wouldn’t expect David Lynch to deliver a traditional movie, nor should we expect him to deliver a traditional commencement address. “I did an interview with the Des Moines Register and said that this would be a strange commencement speech,” the creator of Eraserhead, Mulholland Drive, and (with Mark Frost) Twin Peaks tells the 2016 graduating class of the Maharishi University of Management by way of opening not a speech but an on-stage question-and-answer session. The questions came from select students who want to know things like how he sees the world looking in ten years, what makes a good leader, and what makes a meaningful life.
One also wants to know how to “reconcile a job or career with our dharma or purpose.” To that question, the very first, Lynch can respond with only one word: “Wow.” But then, he had to have expected that question from a student at MUM, an institution established to provide something called “Consciousness-Based education” under which you don’t just gain knowledge but “your awareness expands, improving your ability to absorb knowledge and see the big picture.”
Integral to all this is Transcendental Meditation, the technique developed by MUM founder (and guru to the likes of the Beatles and the Beach Boys) Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and which Lynch himself has practiced since 1973.
Even if you have no interest in Lynch’s memories of the Maharishi (a possible subject of a future movie of his, he implies), or in meditation of any kind, Lynch still dispenses a fair few pieces of valuable advice during these twenty minutes. “I always equate ideas sort of like fish — we don’t make the fish, we catch the fish,” he says in response to one student who asks about how he falls in love with the ideas out of which his projects develop. “You fall in love with an idea and for me it may just be a fragment of a whole thing like a script, or a whole film, but this little fragment is so thrilling and you fall in love.” And “once you get one fragment, it’s like bait on a hook to catch more fragments.”
More concretely, another student asks Lynch to go back to his time at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (which draws a “Whoa” from Lynch) and consider whether he’d make all the same decisions again. “I was very lucky,” he says of avoiding the drugs in vogue at the time because of the warnings of his friends. “They were all taking them, but for some reason they warned me against it. So I guess I dodged a bullet.” But he does admit to, after his daily meditation practice, never failing to imbibe one consciousness-altering substance: coffee. And when an aspiring filmmaker asks for the “one thing that you learned on one of your film sets that then became a life lesson,” Lynch reveals something perhaps even more important to him than always getting his coffee: “Always have final cut.”
The first rule of Horsing Around Club is: You do not talk about Horsing Around Club. ― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club for Kids
Retooling a popular show, film, or comic to feature younger versions of the characters, their personalities and relationships virtually unchanged, can be a serious, if cynical source of income for the original creators.
Perhaps because spin-off babies are designed to gently ensnare a new and younger audience, and Palahniuk, whose 2002 novel Lullaby hinged on a nursery rhyme that kills children in their cribs, is unlikely to file down the dark, twisted edges that have won him a cult following.
The same spirit of mischief drives Fight Club for Kids, which mercifully will not be hitting the children’s section of your local bookstore in time for the upcoming holiday season (or ever).
Much like Tyler Durden, Palahniuk’s most infamous creation, this title is but a figment, existing only in the above video, where it is read by its putative author.
If you think Samuel L. Jackson’s narration of Go the F**k to Sleep—which can actually be purchased in book form—represents the height of adult readers running off the rails, you ain’t heard nothing yet:
The horseplay would go on until it was done
And everyone who did it would always have fun
Especially the Boy Who Had No Name
Who once just, like, beat this dude, who was actually Jared Leto in the movie, which was so fuckin’ cool and intense, and he’s just pummeling this guy and of course, being Jared Leto, he was essentially a model, but when our guy is done with him, he’s just this purple, bloated, chewed up bubblegum-looking motherfucker covered in blood, head to toe!
(The second rule of Horsing Around Club is: You DO NOT TALK ABOUT HORSING AROUND CLUB!)
Find more printable Chuck Palahniuk coloring pages here.
Few filmmakers have ever figured out how to make a motion picture about an already larger-than-life personality, and personalities haven’t come much larger in recent history than Freddie Mercury’s. Talk of a movie about the Queen frontman, who died in 1991, has gone on for years: Dexter Fletcher came up as a potential director, and for the role of Mercury both Ben Wishaw and Sacha Baron Cohen have at different times been attached. But now the film has entered production, having found a director in Bryan Singer, he of the X‑Men franchise, and a star in Rami Malek, best known as the lead in the television series Mr. Robot.
But can Malek — or indeed anyone currently living — convince as Mercury? The first piece of evidence has surfaced in the form of the clip at the top of the post, shot on set as the cast recreates Queen’s 1985 comeback performance at Live Aid. The band “seemed to intuit right from the start the importance of the day, though they were very nervous backstage.
But once onstage they completely own it, even more so Freddie Mercury who rises to the occasion as a front man and as a singer, giving one of his best performances,” writes Ted Mills of the real concert video, which we featured just this past May here on Open Culture. The show opens by going straight into“Bohemian Rhapsody,” Queen’s signature eight-minute rock opera, which gives the new movie its working title.
Even going by just a minute and a half of footage, shot shakily, in low resolution, and at a distance, it must be said that Malek does look to make an uncanny Mercury, right down to that distinctive jog onto the stage at Wembley Stadium. In the Late Show with Stephen Colbert clip just above, Malek talks about his experience watching the surviving members of Queen watch his performance as Mercury for the first time — and at the iconic Abbey Road Studios, no less. “How did they take you?” Colbert asks. “They took me,” Malek responds, leaving us to wait until December of next year to judge for ourselves how he brings their beloved lead singer back to life — and whether, by whatever combination of training and technological wizardry, the film gets it right down to that one-of-a-kind voice.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.