Edited by Adam Cook
News.
- Ray Harryhausen, the celebrated visual effects and stop motion artist, has passed away at the age of 92.
- As Martin Scorsese's Silence is finally going forward, we're looking forward to uncovering details on the production, and Variety has some big news on the subject: Andrew Garfield will be the film's lead and Issey Ogata (who you may recognize from Yi Yi) and Ken Watanabe are also joining the cast. Scorsese has also revealed that film will primarily be in Japanese.
Finds.
- Above: the first trailer for Edgar Wright's The World's End, the spiritual conclusion of sorts to the trilogy that includes Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz.
- Dennis Lim's (presumably) final piece for The New York Times: an interview with Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke about Before Midnight.
- In refutation to Quentin Tarantino's not-so-kind assessment of John Ford as a racist who perpetuated the "idea of Anglo-Saxon humanity compared to everybody else’s humanity," Film Comment's Kent Jones explores the context and content of Ford's and other Hollywood westerns.
- In his blog for The New Yorker, Richard Brody takes a look at Shane Black's Iron Man 3 and specifically at how he cleverly weaves Robert Downey Jr.'s real life persona into the film:
"Black has written a vigorous and sly text that anchors the story and the character of Iron Man in Downey’s own; his Iron Man is both bravado-swinging and traumatized, a master of the universe who has trouble crossing the street, a potentate of invulnerable violence who has seen too much—even in triumph—to remain whole. His public persona is subject to transformations and celebrations that are outside his control and above his formidable pay grade even as his mere person—the very source of his strength—endures the benign neglect of his heroic mantle."
- Above: "Dirty Old New York Subway", a work in progress by Jonathan Hertzberg composed of scenes from different films of the 70s and 80s:
"A mix of clips of the New York City subway system on film, mostly from the '70s and early '80s, when graffiti was a mainstay on train cars and everything underground was, for the most part, grittier and more worn than it is today."
- Last week we included a video of Steven Soderbergh's "State of Cinema" talk at the San Francisco International Film Festival. This week we have Ryland Walker Knight with commentary on the speech.
- For The White Review, Ricky D'Ambrose has a piece on "Haneke's Lessons":
"By turning nearly every noise, every trapping of a Paris recital hall or a Vienna train station into a potential impasse, the mind is left with nothing else to do but double back on itself, to struggle for a less clotted perspective on its own situation (this is why Haneke’s characters are so often heard monitoring themselves and assessing their behaviour: ‘Why am I doing this?’ ‘What are we doing?’ ‘What’s going on?’). But this persistent, nagging self-scrutiny furnishes nothing very useful or redemptive, no cut-rate solutions. The anguished paranoid stupour of a Haneke film is the upshot of its benighted style of scepticism; the Archimedean point, the promise of a more pacifying view, is apocryphal."
From the archives.
- Above: a trailer for Jason and the Argonauts, featuring Ray Harryhausen's pioneering handiwork.