Via TIFF, this is a nifty mash-up of Psycho‘s shower scene and its many ripoff/parodies — Jamie Lee Curtis, Bugs Bunny and Richard Pryor are among the many to intersect.

In this fairly typical Hitchcock interview from 1960, the director adjusts his tie and sits down for a brisk promotional session for Psycho, describing the plot with typical drollery and running through some of his greatest soundbite hits: the oft-told story about how he was imprisoned briefly as a child at his father’s request, qualifying his statement that actors should be treated like cattle (“You mean you want to make them larger cattle than they are?”), and whether he’s ever wanted to be an actor himself (“Nothing so low as that”).

This is kinda brilliant: a mashup by Steven Soderbergh of Hitchcock’s original Psycho and (now rendered in black and white) Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake from 1998. Soderbergh is retired from feature filmmaking, but his Cinemax miniseries The Knick is coming soon and, well, this is presumably something he just threw together in his spare time to stave off boredom!

Paranormal Activity 2 is not an avant-garde film, but only because no one has argued that it is. 1. The Importance of Framing The difference between commercial culture (pop culture) and the avant-garde is a matter of rhetorical framing. Jean-Luc Godard, for instance, created the conditions for the New Wave not only through his films, but through his words about his films, and about cinema in general. Confrontational, witty, manifesto-like, Godard framed the way people saw his films. Godard was an auteur of language, not just cinema. “A movie should have a beginning, a middle, and an end,” he famously […]

THE “PINK MUMMY” IN DIRECTOR NACHO VIGALONDO’S TIMECRIMES. COURTESY MAGNOLIA PICTURES. Nacho Vigalondo is part of an exciting new generation of Spanish filmmakers who are reinvigorating genre filmmaking with their creativity and invention. Born and raised in the insular town of Cabezón de la Sal, he grew up on 80s studio movies before discovering the work of cult directors like David Lynch and Peter Jackson, whose idiosyncratic visions inspired the teenage Vigalondo to eventually become a director himself. He studied Visual Communication at the University of the Basque Country, where he began making a series of playful and distinctive shorts […]