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Following the Currents: Jia Zhangke and Zhao Tao on Caught by the Tides
Zhao Tao and Li Zhubin in Caught by the Tides
With Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides sneak previewing in New York via Sideshow/Janus Films, we are unlocking our Spring, 2025 cover story, an interview with the director as well as lead Zhao Tao covering their collaboration on this film… Read more
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Disc Security: How to Care for Physical Media
There has been no shortage of articles recently regarding the premature death of physical media and, most specifically, physical home video. While vinyl LPs have had a well-publicized resurgence in recent years, with much ink spilled about Taylor Swift’s assistance in that area, the opposite could be said for Blu-ray, 4K UHD and DVD, all of which are currently active, disc-based, home video formats vying for consumer shelf space in the studio and the boutique marketplace. Physical media, in general, can feel nebulous; when speaking about it, both positively and negatively, it can be used to cover a swath of […]
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Out Ahead: The Anti-Convention of David Lynch’s Screenwriting
When I’ve taught screenwriting workshops I’ve been fond of reminding beginning screenwriters that Warner Brothers put David Lynch’s screenplay for Blue Velvet into turnaround in a day by with the terse comment, “The worst script ever submitted to us.” Presumably, the script was read by professionals. What had so offended them? What was so insufferable? Well, I tell my students, according to Robert McKee’s rules about a “well-made” object, the reader’s report was correct: The script is incompetent if you evaluate a script on how carefully and cleverly it adheres to how people expect stories to be told, or how much it adheres to the laudable values of plausibility, recognizability and […]
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From Shadows: What It Means to Love David Lynch
With David Lynch’s passing comes a reminder that, in the words of Thomas Aquinas, the “things that we love tell us what we are.” How simple, how direct, how naturally right this sounds on its face—yet scratch the surface and, whoa, you may find a huddle of rapacious black beetles tearing the hell out of each other. Explain that as a “thing that you love” to your grandmother—which I did, or tried to, during the summer break of my junior year at college, and would have had she not said almost to herself, during the Frank-ritualistically-raping-Dorothy scene, “I don’t know […]
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Deadly Outpost: Flying Lotus on Ash
With 2017’s Kuso, the first feature from polymath Steve Ellison (a.k.a. musician Flying Lotus, a.k.a. rapper Captain Murphy), a respectable claim is made to the title of history’s most disgusting commercially released film, with such amusements as vomit baths, sentient wart coitus and a large talking cockroach residing in the prolapsed anus of funk godhead George Clinton. Ellison’s comparatively dialed-back followup Ash restricts itself to a combustible head, giving Scanners a run for its money, faces that liquefy like so many crayons under a blowtorch and a malevolent amoeba extracted from a waking patient’s skull via robo-surgery—without anesthetic. Any maturation […]
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Editor’s Letter
One of my earliest memories is visiting my grandmother in the small town of De Soto, Wis. I remember being fixated on the appliance providing the air that supported her emphysema, a shiny, alien-like oxygen tank squatting in her living room. The lingering vision of that corner of midwestern space—it’s not indirect enough to be what Freud called a screen memory, an anodyne remembrance obscuring something more traumatic. But the fact that I emotionally, viscerally reacted to the news last August that David Lynch was housebound with that disease and on supplemental oxygen, indicates that maybe it did function that […]
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Frequent Flying: Location Shooting in 2025
Carson Lund understood choosing rural New England for his directorial debut, Eephus, would be an unorthodox experience, but he couldn’t have predicted that securing a dream location would find him pitching an intimate town meeting on a Tuesday night. Eephus takes place over the course of the last amateur “Fall ball” baseball game on an old field before a new school is built on the site. Using Google Earth satellite view and following up in-person if a field looked promising, Lund estimates he visited upwards of 100 baseball fields across New Hampshire, Vermont and Massachusetts. Often, he was disappointed to […]
