Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Jay-Z's great taste in directors continues with the Safdie brothers, who both lent a deft hand for the "Marcy Me" video, which feels like a thematic addendum to their own film Good Time.
- Ava Duvernay (Selma) also directed this star-studded epic music video for Jay-Z's "Family Feud".
- Who doesn't love pulp movie maestro Samuel Fuller? In the event of their active retrospective of his work, the Cinémathèque française provides this ecstatic montage of a few of his finest films.
RECOMMENDED READING
- Perhaps you missed Sarah Nicole Prickett's incisive recaps of Twin Peaks: The Return for Artforum? If that's the case, you can catch up here. Prickett has shared her final take on Episode 18 and the series overall, and it was well worth the wait.
- From Alejandro G. Iñárritu to Jia Zhangke—the January/February edition of Film Comment is here, with many pieces available to read online.
- At CNN, Francesca Street interviews Craig Deman regarding his beguiling series of photographs (see a stunning one above) of abandoned drive-in cinemas.
- Our favorite collection of year-end lists is now live at Senses of Cinema, which has gathered a remarkable range of contributors and films.
- Conversely to that collection of great films, Reverse Shot offers its incendiary takes on the worst movies of the year.
- For Filmmaker Magazine, Farran Smith Nehme interviews Mark Bridges about the many complexities and thematics behind the design of Phantom Thread's astonishing costumes:
We looked at a lot of people from this period, and Woodcock becomes an amalgam of them, including some fine artists that aren’t necessarily dressmakers. Charles James was more of an architect. I think some of his personal problems might be what Woodcock is, as opposed to that incredibly cantilevered construction, almost trying too hard, that James would do. Whereas the ease of Balenciaga was always like some kind of feat of magic, there’s a kind of practical, frankly British aspect to what Woodcock does. It’s earthbound a little bit, as opposed of some of his French contemporaries. I think it’s just a collage of people that comes out as a unique individual, drawing on some of the DNA of people who were around at the time.
- Christoph Hochhäusler, whose great film The City Below recently played on MUBI, has started a new blog compiling an arresting selection of film posters.
- Kristen Yoonsoo Kim has started a new column at Vice entitled "Reel Women," which is to extensively focus on women in film in various forms. First up is a lovely consideration of Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret.
- That's Janusz Kaminski, above, speaking on his iconoclastic career working with Steven Spielberg, in an all too rare conversation with likeminded accomplished cinematographers Hoyte Van Hoytema, Rachel Morrison, Dan Laustsen, & Robert Elswit for the Hollywood Reporter.
Even after 27, 25 years [working together], you don't want to give too much information because then you subject yourself to being questioned. And sometimes I don't really have an answer. It just feels right. We actually do not have conversations. He does his thing, I do my thing. And somehow we both see this movie the same way. I hate to say that we're only as good as the directors, but to some degree, we're only as good as the filmmakers we're working for.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- Our annual critics' poll is in its 10th edition, where we ask our contributors to make Fantasy Double Features of films (new and old) they saw in 2017.
- We've launched a multi-tiered tribute to the one and only Jerry Lewis as both a performer and a director. The collection is guest edited by Christopher Small.
- Who says television can't be cinema? After his brilliant recaps of Twin Peaks: The Return, Keith Uhlich has returned to the Notebook to follow and dig into the new season of The X-Files.
EXTRAS
- We never realized we needed Michael Shannon covering Iggy Pop in our lives until now.
- Academy Award winner Barry Jenkins offers an enlightening and hilarious consideration of the 1999 Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant romantic comedy Notting Hill on Twitter...while flying in an airplane:
In other news, the woman next to me is watching NOTTING HILL. A few choice folks will get the irony of this happening on my last flight of this sojourn. Also... Julia Roberts is STUNNING in this film. And holy shit Lester Freamon is in this?!
— Barry Jenkins (@BarryJenkins)