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NEWS
Citizen Kane.
- After an extended sojourn from filmmaking with canceled productions and the Netflix show Mindhunter, David Fincher has finally locked his next film. Derived from a screenplay written by his father (!), it concerns Citizen Kane's co-writer Herman Mankiewicz, to be played by Gary Oldman and photographed in black and white (!!!).
- Greta Gerwig will be co-writing a live-action Barbie—yes, the Barbie—movie with Noah Baumbach. The film will star Margot Robbie as the titular doll.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- The long-awaited trailer for Inventing the Future, by Isiah Medina—whose films Semi-Auto Colours, 88:88, and Idizwadidiz previously screened on MUBI. The film is an adaptation of Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams.
- The Museum of Modern Art launches its first "online film exhibition highlighting NYC shorts from the collection" with a series of films from the East Village that confront gender, the body, and performance.
- A brutal, yet undoubtably evocative trailer for Rob Zombie's 3 From Hell, the conclusion to a trilogy which started almost twenty years ago with House of 1000 Corpses.
- Speaking of horror in cinema, John Carpenter dives into his career, the obstacles and essence of genre, and much more in this charming video interview conducted in his own home.
- Hats off to Cohen Media Group for releasing this triumphant restoration of Jacques Rivette's under-known, beautiful diptych rendition of Joan of Arc's crusade.
- GKIDS's upcoming Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles depicts the rocky production of Luis Buñuel's Las Hurdes: Land Without Bread.
- The mesmerizing first trailer for Lupin The Third: The First, a CG-adaptation of the hit detective anime series. Directed by Takashi Yamazaki, the film offers plenty of spinning stunts and slapstick humor.
- The media distribution collective Vernac Media has digitally released Nuotama Bodomo's 2014 short Afronauts, about the Zambia Space Academy, ahead of its development into a feature film.
- KimStim has released a trailer for Nikolaus Geyrhalter's Earth, which investigates the effects of large-scale mining on climate change.
RECOMMENDED READING
Lulu Wang for SSENSE.
- In an interview with Ssense, Lulu Wang (The Farewell) considers what it means to choose specifics over stereotypes amidst the changing definition of Asian-Americans in cinema.
- From Indiewire comes the upsetting revelation that Andrea Arnold's work as director on the set of the second season of HBO's Big Little Lies was overridden by showrunner David E. Kelley and executive producer Jean-Marc Vallée.
- Vancouver filmmakers Will Ross and Devan Scott detail their lengthy process "fixing" Sergio Leone's The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly and restoring it to Leone's original vision.
Top Gun (1986)
- Critic J. Hoberman discusses his new book, Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan, which looks back at the "media-driven moment" of the 1980s, leading into the rise of Steven Spielberg, Top Gun, and Rambo: First Blood Part II.
- New York filmmaker, writer, and video archivist Gina Telaroli reflects on cinema past-present-future by way of her experiences at this year's Nitrate Picture Show.
"I’m not sure when precisely it hit me—maybe it was as I examined, by hand, the intricacies of the 20th Century Fox logo [...] on a strip of nitrate film stock—but hit me it did, like a ton of bricks, that the first 50 or so years of cinema, save the occasional special screening and site specific film festival, are actually lost forever."
- The Seventh Art has started publishing translations of French New Wave filmmaker Luc Moullet’s book of essays, Piges Choisies (From Griffith to Ellroy).
- Jonah Weiner's analysis of the latest in streaming platforms (Netflix, HBO, Hulu, and Amazon) argues that competition has "[ushered] out the age of 'prestige TV' and [ushered] in an age of anything goes."
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- One HEAT Minute, a podcast examining Michael Mann's Heat, concludes with a guest appearance from the filmmaker himself.
- Elena Gorfinkel, whose book Lewd Looks explores sexploitation films in the 1960s, discusses spectatorship and cinephilia, as well as the work of filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh in the latest episode of The Cinephiliacs.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- Carlos Valladares reflects on the films of Jim Jarmusch, the ludlow drifter.
- Ali Abbasi's Border is having its exclusive online premiere on MUBI in the United Kingdom from July 12 – August 10, 2019. In a conversation with Savina Petkova, the filmmaker discusses fairytales and adaptations. Petkova's review further examines the film as an unclassifiable fable of otherness.
- To coincide with MUBI's retrospective, "Juliette Binoche: The Woman with a Thousand Faces" (showing July 14 – September 23, 2019 in the UK), Beatrice Loayza provides an overview of the beguiling career of the most celebrated contemporary French actresses.
- Carlos Reygadas's Our Time is MUBI GO's Film of the Week of July 12, 2019. For the series Moviegoing Memories, Reygadas tells us about The Goat Horn, the one film he would most like to see on the big screen.
EXTRAS
- Though not drawn to scale, Andrew DeGraff's "Cinemaps" provide detailed diagrams for navigating the terrain of movies, from Star Wars to North By Northwest.
- For whatever reason, Cecelia Condit's 1983 horror short, Possibly in Michigan, has become quite popular among the young users of the video-sharing app TikTok, who've recorded themselves lip-syncing to Condit's macabre tune. Select works from Condit's filmography can be found here.
teens on TikTok are lipsynching to Cecelia Condit’s 1983 video art piece POSSIBLY IN MICHIGAN!!!!!!!!! pic.twitter.com/ksB1cTDXs9
- — Chris Osborn (@Chris_Osborn) July 13, 2019
- From TV transmissions, mission control footage, photographs, data, the new website "Apollo 11 in Real Time" beautifully arranges the historical mission material of the moon landing into an interactive experience.