Edited by Adam Cook
- Above: a new digital anthology on Hong Kong Cinema is available online from Film Comment. The Summer issue of the magazine is out now too. Also relevant: Tony Leung is set to star in Wong Kar-Wai's next film.
- "Gas food lodging: The best job in the world has its downside": in an unusual blog entry, David Bordwell expounds on "the indignities of film festivals."
- It's still months away from release, but we're dying of anticipation for Michael Mann's Cyber. The LA Times has a brief report from Bejiing, featuring some words from the director himself.
- Above: speaking of films we can't wait to see, here's the new trailer for David Fincher's Gone Girl.
- One from last week that slipped through its Noteworthy is Laura Legge's magnificent ode to subtitles for 3:AM Magazine, "long Pause, romantic music, silence".
- Our pal Girish Shambu has another batch of essential links—and additionally offers some thoughts on "On Video Essays, Cinephilia and Affect":
"Is there a special, cinephilic, affective charge that the critic/scholar derives from making video essays? And, correspondingly, that the viewer derives from watching them? What accounts for the allure, the pull, of the video essay both for maker and viewer?"
- Above: glorious... The entire Criterion Collection.
- An interview with the eloquent Steven Soderbergh is always a must read:
"ESQUIRE: Do you believe that people in your field can affect change through their work? It's not like Traffic did anything in those regards. "It takes one asshole to ruin the whole thing.
SODERBERGH: And I knew it wouldn't. I knew it would generate a conversation for like three months and I said to everybody at the time, "You can make this movie every five years." I don't think it changes. What it does, potentially, it starts a conversation. And I do believe this: Artists' livelihood is based on observation and interaction, I do believe they pick up on vibrations that are early. And they go, "Hey, I'm feeling something that's not yet agreed upon." That I do believe. I'm concerned about what's going on in the world comes back to... talk about the Internet again. I think we're in desperate need of another enlightenment. We need to evolve to another level, very soon, or we're going to be fucked. En masse, we all need to step up. The last enlightenment happened because of the printing press. The Internet is that, potentially. Potentially. I have some very real ideas that I'm working on with some very interesting, possibly crazy people, about how to address this, how to use the technology that's available to bring about some collective step forward, soon."
- Above: "What is Bayhem?", Tony Zhou's video essay on Michael Bay.
- In a web exclusive piece for Sight & Sound, Michael Pattison writes on the John McGrath retrospective that played the 68th Edinburgh International Film Festival:
"The question of Scottish independence for McGrath wasn’t merely a case of national pride. As noted in John Brown’s Body, the Scottish working classes have historically had more in common with the English proletariat than with their own bourgeoisie."
- The Cineteca Bologna is uploading videos of Q&As and discussions from Il Cinema Ritrovato.
- Above: via Cinephilia and Beyond, one of Michael Ploog's amazing storyboards for John Carpenter's The Thing. Click here to find a storyboard to film comparison.