Columns
-
Memorable Cinematic Moments of (Mostly) 2013
Out of the Furnace (Scott Cooper) On the surface, the scene is familiar, verging on the clichéd, and yet it’s made unfamiliar and strange though a sort of weird tension that develops around it. Rodney Baze (Casey Affleck), a troubled Iraq war veteran who chafes at working in the Braddock, Pennsylvania, steel mills like his father and brother (Christian Bale), has convinced John Petty (Willem Dafoe), a bookie who’s deep into debt with Harlan DeGroat (Woody Harrelson), to meet with DeGoat in the Ramapo Mountains area of New Jersey, where DeGroat runs a drug operation and fixes bare-knuckle fights in […]
-
Bad Metrics
Even if you don’t know baseball, you probably know the term “batting average” (or BA), which is widely used as the best measure of a batter’s prowess. Defined as the number of hits divided by the number of times at bat, it’s reported as a decimal number (i.e., .300 refers to the praiseworthy remark “batting 300”). The three all-time BA leaders are Ty Cobb (.366), Roger Hornsby (.358) and Joe Jackson (.356). But some baseball insiders have criticized the metric because it doesn’t account for the quality of those “at bats.” For many, it’s a shortsighted statistic that elides the […]
-
Misremembering Only God Forgives
Of all the transformations cinema has undergone since the rise of affordable home viewing in the 1970s, perhaps the most ephemeral, difficult to quantify is this strange result: the difficulty of falsely remembering movies. Whether it was mixing up and remembering out of order a series of shots, or conflating scenes from different movies that happened to star the same actor, or simply forgetting portions of a film, it was difficult to recall a film correctly, accurately. Which isn’t the same thing as not recalling a film truthfully. This became apparent after watching Only God Forgives recently on the big […]
-
The World Is Your Ouya
E3 is the big videogame industry show, where all the console makers and big publishers show their wares for the year to come. The big news this year was the next-generation consoles from Microsoft and Sony. It was a week of epilepsy-inducing noise and lights and people shouting at each other about AMD chips, Radeon graphics processors, dualshock controllers and how the latest versions of Warfare this or that will blow your mind. The news that caught my eye, however, happened in a parking lot across the street from E3. But let’s start at the beginning. In 1977, Atari set […]
-
Lessons Learned
Orson Welles is reputed to have said, “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.” In film school, these limitations are called assignments, and this issue’s Extra Curricular offers an assortment of assignments designed to ignite the creative process. They’re gathered from a group of screenwriters, animators and filmmakers who teach at schools across the country. Assignment #1: Look Hard Mary Sweeney, who teaches a course called “Dreams, the Brain and Storytelling” in the Screenwriting Division of the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, offers this simple but powerful writing assignment, which can be […]
-
A Business of Ignorance?
The impact of digital distribution on the indie film landscape has been vast. First, film titles began to inch up the alphabet toward the letter “A” to get noticed at the top of VOD listings. The latest development: Find a young TV star with a solid online fan base and you’re gold. “I’m seeing more and more films leveraging up-and-coming TV actors that have social media profiles,” says Erick Opeka, senior vice president of digital distribution at Cinedigm Entertainment. “Those audiences can’t wait to consume more product that features their favorite actors. The films come out of nowhere and storm […]
-
Turning the Tables
Nervous laughter fills the air as a box of surgical masks is passed. Everyone is instructed to take one and place it over their mouths. With masks in position, the group of 12 is quickly ushered into an elevator. After a few moments there is a jolt — the doors open and everyone slowly funnels out. The seventh floor of the New School has been transformed into a sci-fi world. Debris covers the ground, and strange sounds echo down the halls. A lone girl staggers forward, her face concealed by a long mane of black hair. With head hung down […]
-
Load & Play
THE HOUSE I LIVE IN Virgil – out now The definitive American documentary about the defining civil-rights issue of our time, Eugene Jarecki’s The House I Live In is a personal epic, a film that takes Jarecki’s relationship with an African-American family, the matriarch of whom used to be his house cleaner as a child, and uses it as a springboard to investigate the dark secret in the American heart that is our disastrous, 40-year-old drug war. Harrowing and sublime, The House I Live In is aided by a Greek-chorus-like narration from ex-crime reporter and The Wire auteur David Simon. […]
-
Super 8
James Turrell While a visit to James Turrell’s private, Arizona-based Roden Crater project remains on every art obsessive’s bucket list, the optical mysteries of this groundbreaking artist can be more easily viewed this summer in a monumental three-museum retrospective. Visit the Guggenheim in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the L.A. County Museum of Art to experience Turrell’s indescribable, light-based sculptures. Accidental Tech Podcast Developers, consumer tech geeks and, particularly, obsessive Mac fans, there’s a new podcast for you. Three developers and tech journalists (Marco Arment, Casey Liss and John Siracusa) who previously found their home on […]
-
The Kids from Kids, Savages, the Internet, Screenwriting, Soderbergh, Mellow Pages and More: Sunday Links
For Narratively, Carolyn Rothstein revisits the kids from Kids, 20 years later, in “Legends Never Die.” Chloe Sevigny and Rosario Dawson are stars, Justin Pierce and Harold Hunter have passed away, and the others are living their lives in diverse and at times unexpected ways. As her interviewees tell it, Kids was not just about people but a city: The kids say the film was accurate, except for the most fantastical stuff. There’s no denying they weren’t sober during filming. Even the scene with Javier Nunez, at fourteen, by far the youngest of the skate crew, and three other little […]
