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NEWS
Ido Lupino's The Hitch-Hiker (1953).
- The United States Library of Congress has announced a significant update to their free screening platform, National Screening Room, with hundreds of films—ranging from historic documents of turn-of-century American life to Ida Lupino's The Hitch-Hiker.
- At this point we're well documented admirers of Paul W.S. Anderson's cinema, which is why we were thrilled to hear that Tony Jaa, Ron Perlman, and T.I. have joined Milla Jovovich in the cast for his latest video game adaptation: Capcom's Monster Hunter.
- The Chinese-Taiwanese annual Golden Horse awards have announced this year's nominations, which include Zhang Yimou's Shadow, Hu Bo's An Elephant Sitting Still, Bi Gan's A Long Day's Journey Into Night, and Pema Tseden's Jinpa, amongst many others.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- One of the longest running, most compelling American film narratives continues with Steven Caple Jr.'s follow up to 2015's beloved Creed. Here's the 2nd trailer...
- The first tender duet from A Star is Born's soundtrack has been released in the form of a music video culled from the film itself. Kelley Dong recently wrote about the film and its "disarming beauty."
- One of our favorite experimental animators, Jodie Mack, had an uncanny exhibition of her textile cinema in New York's Times Square last month. The following Facebook video thankfully gives an impression of the exhibition, alongside an interview with Mack and the curators.
- Adam McKay (Step Brothers, The Big Short) looks to return to farcical political filmmaking with this hilarious, sometimes uncanny, trailer for what looks to be a portrait of former American Vice President, Dick Cheney (played by Christian Bale!).
- Rian Johnson directs Sissy Spacek and David Strathairn in LCD Soundsystem's latest music video, which follows the couple as they build a mysterious teleportation machine. Johnson has uploaded behind-the-scenes photographs on his Twitter, where he also states that the film is the "first time I’ve totally edited something on my own since (I think) Brick."
RECOMMENDED READING
- Ahead of the Netflix release of Orson Welles's The Other Side of The Wind, Alex Ross of The New Yorker details the "rescuing" of the long-buried project. For the latest issue of Cinema Scope, Phil Coldiron has penned a rich review of the film, describing it as one of "reckless momentum, a speeding towards catastrophe."
- For feminist film journal Another Gaze, critic Chelsea Phillips-Carr reviews Alex Ross Perry's Her Smell, a film shrouded in "judgemental misogyny."
- Wesley Morris of The New York Times Magazine confronts the increasing overlapping of art and social justice, and the "zealous police work" of righting art's problematic wrongs: "It can be hard to tell when we’re consuming art and when we’re conducting H.R."
- In a post on the VRV blog, Aurora V. examines the role and influence of "misunderstanding" Robert Bresson, as evident in the works of American punk artists Dennis Cooper, Patti Smith and Richard Hell.
- A still-crucial article from last year: Writer Kate Hagen of the Black List shares a number of findings regarding the excess of sexual violence in spec screenplays, which "give us some insight into what writers believe the market wants."
- For Sabzian, Adrian Martin outlines and reflects upon Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma, and "the very essence of Godardian melancholia, the wellspring of its urgency and pathos: this sense that cinema will die with him."
- An academic paper by media researcher Morten Bay argues that the controversial online response to Rian Johnson's Star Wars: The Last Jedi is comprised of a significant number of "deliberate, organized political influence measures disguised as fan arguments," and that some of these users also "appear to be Russian trolls."
- Josh Karp of Esquire provides an account of the tumultuous making of Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie, another nearly lost film, now restored for a November 18 release: "What had been a challenging movie to begin with [...] had become something akin to a piece of abstract art."
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- A further glimpse into the world of Luca Guadagnino's forthcoming Suspiria remake is here in the form of a second musical piece from Thom Yorke's original soundtrack.
- The latest episode of the graphic design podcast The Poster Boys—co-hosted by Sam Smith, whose work we've featured before—is an interview with designer Akiko Stehrenberger, whose Funny Games poster was deemed the "best movie poster of the decade" by our poster columnist Adrian Curry.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- Willow Catelyn Maclay writes on how Hitchcock's Marnie "is one of the only films in existence to try and create what a traumatic trigger response would look like in cinematic language."3
- Jason Wood takes a very promising survey of contemporary British independent cinema.
- For her film soundtracks column Scores on Screen, Clare Nina Norelli delves into Ryuichi Sakamoto's "icily-detached and ominous" theme for Alejandro González Iñárritu's The Revenant. (For more Sakamoto, watch his hour-long conversation about his work, moderated by Iranian artist Shirin Neshat.)
- Filmmaker Bill Morrison is interviewed about his film Dawson City: Frozen Time, and discusses the process of retrieving "a collection of water-damaged silent reels found buried in the Yukon ice."
EXTRAS AND RE-DISCOVERIES
- A delightful scene from the 1965 New York World's Fair, an event that introduced many to once-exclusive screen technology.
This footage of people seeing themselves in a color TV monitor for the first time is great. RCA Pavilion at the 1965 World's Fair. pic.twitter.com/T20mNeCUQm
— Christian Hendricks (@chrhend) September 26, 2018
- Japan has dropped a robot, Rover-1B, on the asteroid Ryugu. It is proving to be quite the automated auteur, producing photographs and even videos in what must be the furthest executed shooting location from Earth ever?
Rover-1B succeeded in shooting a movie on Ryugu’s surface! The movie has 15 frames captured on September 23, 2018 from 10:34 - 11:48 JST. Enjoy ‘standing’ on the surface of this asteroid! [6/6] pic.twitter.com/57avmjvdVa
— HAYABUSA2@JAXA (@haya2e_jaxa) September 27, 2018