Edited by Adam Cook
Editor's Note: We're kicking 2014 off with a bit of a format change in this here column. We'll be consistently posting separate, self-contained news posts in the Notebook, so we're taking out the news section here (not that some things won't be somewhat newsy) and making this more of a freewheeling zone of new/old bits of film criticism, images, videos, and whatever else we feel is "noteworthy" on any given week (which, to be honest, is in the spirit of the initial concept). Oh, and Happy New Year, everyone!
- Above: the official poster of the 64th Berlinale.
- After scrupulously rounding up every notable end-of-year list (and surely there is more yet to come!), David Hudson has published his personal list of 2013's ten best films. Of course, a myriad other lists keep pouring in:
- Boris Nelepo's Top 25
- Ben Sachs' Top 10
- La Furia Umana's Top 10 (to go along with their new issue, online now!)
- An incredible collection of best-ofs including lists by Nicole Brenez, Adrian Martin, and Jonathan Rosenabum.
- Above: Adrian Curry has posted the 10 most popular posters he shared this year over at his Movie Poster of the Day Tumblr.
- It's impossible to escape the debate and various takes on Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street—and since there's so much being said, here are a few relevant pieces deserving of your perusal:
- Here's Nick Pinkerton's take, the most exhaustive and persuasive of the bunch.
- The "Wild, Brilliant Wolf of Wall Street" by Richard Brody.
- What does the director himself have to say?
- For Hitfix, Kristopher Tapley interviews editor Thelma Schoonmaker about Wolf as well as her history of collaborating with Scorsese.
- Above: issue #57 0f Cinema Scope is now available in print & digital formats, with some content available online for free.
- For Screening the Past, Terence Blake writes on Alain Badiou's Cinema:
"In Cinema Badiou uses his philosophical meta-language in a freer, more fluid, more poetic style than in his more systematic works. Being, event, multiplicity, and truth are employed in a way not incompatible with his system but that resonates more widely. Herein lies the distinctive contribution of Cinema both to Badiou’s oeuvre and to contemporary thought. The book allows him to traverse various ideas and experiences of the cinema, and to elevate them to a poetic beauty and a synthetic power that move us both affectively and intellectually. If cinema is a 'metaphor for contemporary thought', and if we are contemporary with a movement towards 'philosophy as cinema', as Badiou concludes, then Badiou’s philosophy is itself a metaphor for that thought, a synthesis of diachrony and multiplicity which we may call 'cinematic pluralism'."
- Above: I have to admit I find the teaser for Matt Reeves' Dawn of the Planet of the Apes to be more convincing than I would have expected.
- For his blog, David Bordwell has put together "a sort of aggregate of chatty tailpieces to certain entries over the last year or so."
- For Film Comment, Jonathan Romney "sorts through the year in cinema to find the best, the overlooked, the best-overlooked, and the just plain weird."
- Above: via Cinephillia and Beyond, the making of Francis Ford Coppola's criminally underrated One From the Heart.
- And finally, Neil Bahadur closes out 2013 with images from Jean-Luc Godard's King Lear:
