Edited by Adam Cook
- Above: Martha Stephens and Alex Ross Perry, two of the exciting talents featured in the Sundance Film Festival's "Trading Cards" series. Speaking of Perry, a new batch of images from his forthcoming film, Listen Up Philip, have been released (via Entertainment Weekly):
- Richard Linklater's 12-years-in-the-making Boyhood is slated to debut at Sundance:
"Filmed over short periods from 2002 to 2013, "Boyhood" is a groundbreaking cinematic experience covering 12 years in the life of a family involving a divorced couple (Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette). At the center is their son Mason (Ellar Coltrane), who with his sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater), are taken on an emotional and transcendent journey through the years, from childhood to adulthood. The experimental production has largely been shrouded in secrecy as Linklater has returned to it each summer."
- Above: Martin Scorsese interviews Wong Kar-wai.
- Occasioned by The Wolf of Wall Street, David Bordwell has made available a (revised) chapter, “Three Dimensions of Film Narrative”, from his book Poetics of Cinema, and has written an accompanying guide using Scorsese's film as a case study:
"Narrative, at least in film, isn’t best understood as an act of communication from an author-like entity to a reader-like one. Why do I say that? How can film not be communication? Answer, too brief: What most people call communication I call converging inferences."
- Above: via DCB, J.M.W. Turner’s The Artist and his Admirers (1827) and Mike Leigh’s forthcoming film, Mr. Turner.
- The lineup for the 43rd edition of New Directors/New Films has been unveiled by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and The Museum of Modern Art. Among the selections are Abdellah Taïa's Salvation Army and Vivian Qu's Trap Street.
- Above: there's more than meets the eye in The Wolf of Wall Street.
- Those lucky enough to be in San Francisco can visit "an exhibition of twenty-one photo images from the films of Nathaniel Dorsky" at the Gallery Paule Anglim.
- Above: Source Code in TV and Films.
- Hou Hsiao-hsien's The Assassin has wrapped and is expected to premiere in Cannes.
- Via Film.com, an outstanding conversation between Calum Marsh and Abel Ferrara:
"Marsh: Do you care about reviews?
Ferrara: Yeah I f**king care about ‘em! But when you go back it’s like the worst reviews are the funniest ones. I mean, a review’s gonna reflect the person who wrote it. There are a few great ones, whatever. The writing of cinema is always gonna be, man. The movie begins in the written form, it starts as scripts and it’s written words. Of course it’s gonna come back as writing, ya dig? It’s gonna come back in a written way. Writing criticism of films always counts. But it’s the same thing for the movie, man, if you don’t dig the movie leave. You can’t expect it’s gonna be the same for everybody. If you’re gonna write — I mean, talking about Godard, man, these guys were my first exposure to like serious cinema writing, critical writing, and those guys only wrote about films they loved. None of this ‘this is too long, this is too short’, all that bullshit. They wrote about the things they loved. That criticism survives. The other stuff is so colloquial, so colonial almost, so brokered and so minor. American film journalism back in the day . . . well, I mean, you can read Molly Haskell or you can read, you know, Manohla Dargis. I don’t wanna name names but maybe you too, I don’t know, I’ll read some of your stuff. But the point is there are some enlightened cats. Write about what you love, write the s**t out of it."
- Above: Wes Anderson and Jude Law on the set of The Grand Budapest Hotel, from a new batch of images from and behind-the-scenes of the film.