Authors — Noah Buschel
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Last Call for Heroes
I had a dream the other night, and all my filmmaking heroes were there. Young, full of vision, light in their eyes. A party at a swanky bar. Then last call was called. And the lights came up. And Orson Welles was drunk, huge, exhausted. And Nicholas Ray, with an eye patch, was chain smoking. And Hal Ashby was haggard, mumbling to himself in the corner about someone taking away his final cut. The horror stories of my heroes haunt me. What is it that happened to them? Did they bring it on themselves with youthful hubris and defiance? Were […]
by Noah Buschel on Jul 29, 2014 -
Without Frills
As a teenager going into a movie theater, I was looking for some true reflection of the absurd darkness that had come on seemingly overnight. I was looking for a place to rest my pimples from the light and to be told that others had survived similar such onslaughts. For some before me it was James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause. Molly Ringwald in all them John Hughes movies. Then it was Claire Danes on TV in My So Called Life. But for me, it was the actor Liza Weil in Whatever. I was 19, hadn’t graduated high school, […]
by Noah Buschel on May 29, 2014 -
Spell of the Cat People
I was watching TV late at night, in a motel room. Having been on the highway all day, I just wanted to get the speeding landscape out of my face and eyes. I searched through the channels for something that had some gravity to it. Something that would pour molasses all over the spinning tires in my mind. Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People had just started. Within a minute, it had blasted the day away, and rolled me like a black-and-white wave. Soft, hypnotic, thunderous. The movie came out of the TV, went into my head and then down into my […]
by Noah Buschel on Apr 18, 2014 -
Not Finding Vivian Maier
So you say you’re an artist, but you’re not publishing your stuff? You’re a photographer, but you’re not on Instagram? You’re a writer, but you’re not on Twitter? Well look out buddy, because that just won’t stand. There’s gonna be a documentary about you. I mean what kind of person doesn’t throw themselves at the feet of fame? What kinda weirdo does art for the sake of art and not public adoration? This is too baffling, too inscrutable, too foreign a concept. Not only are we gonna make a movie about you, but we’re also going to dredge up every […]
by Noah Buschel on Mar 31, 2014 -
Jake Gyllenhaal in Prisoners: The Shadow Knows
In Robert Bly’s examination of Jung’s concept of the shadow, Bly talks a lot about this thing called “the bag.” The bag is where, for the first 20 years of our lives, we hide the stuff we’re ashamed of. Or have been made to be ashamed of. Then we spend the rest of our lives trying to get those things out of the bag. Things like our emotions, our anger, our creativity, our vulnerability, our troublemaker, our defiance, our gut instinct, our spontaneous wildness. They’re in the bag a lot of the time. So, boys learn how to put their […]
by Noah Buschel on Jan 10, 2014 -
Anchorman 2: The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing (It’s not DiCaprio)
Anchorman 2 is the best movie of 2013. In a year when I often left the theater wondering what the hell the the critics were talking about (All Is Lost, American Hustle, 12 Years A Slave, Nebraska, Inside Llewyn Davis) here is a movie that is fun, deep, irreverent, and political. “Political” is the biggest surprise. Will Ferrell has made a career of not being political and not saying anything. He’s leaned towards the Jay Leno school of comedy a lot more than the Lenny Bruce school. Who else but Will Ferrell would come out with a comedy special on […]
by Noah Buschel on Dec 22, 2013 -
A Rash of Survival Films
Well, Tom Hanks survived the Somali pirates. Sandra Bullock’s flying around trying to survive outer space. And almost every other dramatic movie I see is about survival. About staying alive. And that’s not even getting into the survival action films, like Hunger Games. The poster for Gravity says Don’t Let Go. Which sums up the message of all these survival films. Don’t Let Go! Don’t Die! Hold On To Yourself! Or, as Brian Wilson sang on Pet Sounds, Hang On to Your Ego. What about a surrender movie? A movie about letting go? What would that be like? Maybe instead […]
by Noah Buschel on Oct 15, 2013 -
A Strange Baby in the Machine
After winning the Austin Film Festival, your producers tell you that you’ve gotten picked up for distribution by Tribeca Films. This is good news. Almost the best case scenario for a small art movie made with a $150,000 budget in 2013. Your weird little movie will get a limited theatrical release, coupled with a wide VOD online release. Great. But when the jig is up, and the wine has worn, the celebration turns back into reality. The next week, you get on a conference call with six distant voices from Tribeca. They’ll be the ones putting out your film. They […]
by Noah Buschel on Aug 23, 2013 -
Casio Keyboards, Primped Hair and Tom Cruise: Growing Up on ’80s Movies
The sound of Casio keyboards float out of a Gap on Broadway and I’m transported. It’s 2013. I’ll be 35-years-old soon. But for a moment I’m back in 1986. I don’t know who the singer is. It’s a boy who sounds like a girl, could be anyone in the ’80s. But it could only be from the ’80s. The strange canned ignorance of it. The willful naiveté. As if the whole world got together and said — let’s be POP. And any emotion, any art, any death, any clarity — we’ll process through that pop. The ’80s. The one decade […]
by Noah Buschel on Jun 13, 2013 -
Another Boxing Movie
When people ask me what I’m working on these days, and I tell them “a boxing movie,” most of the time I get an eye roll. Who wants to see another boxing movie? Boxing, a dinosaur of a sport that’s been bludgeoned to death by the movies already. Wasn’t The Fighter enough? Couldn’t you at least make it MMA modern? Does a movie camera need to ever enter the boxing ring again? After Raging Bull and Rocky and Million Dollar Baby and Fat City and Somebody Up There Likes Me? I guess my answer is yes. If there are no […]
by Noah Buschel on Mar 25, 2013
