Cinema Talk

MOOSE LAKE, MN—Filled with dread at the thought of the upcoming relationship milestone, Erika Moreau, 30, told reporters Thursday she is nervous for dinner this evening, when her boyfriend will finally meet the person she turns into around her parents. “I just don’t know how he’s going to react—she’s a lot to take, you know?” Moreau said of the difficult, obstinate woman she is powerless to avoid becoming when in the same room as one of her parents. “This is a really big step, and I hope she doesn’t scare Trevor off. It’s tough, because my last relationship actually ended not long after my ex met her. She’s just so unpredictable. She’ll fly off the handle over the tiniest things or start giving you the silent treatment for no reason. Ugh. I really hope she doesn’t get too drunk this time.” At press time, sources confirmed Moreau and her boyfriend were stunned into silence after the suddenly irate woman interrupted dinner to scream, “I’m an adult, goddammit—don’t talk to me like I’m stupid!”

Netflix

The first week of the month is a busy one for Netflix this December. The streaming platform is churning out a slew of original films, including the Southern-fried Dumplin’ (starring Jennifer Aniston) and Andy Serkis’ dark Jungle Book remake. If full-length features aren’t your thing, The Ranch is back for another round, and a new documentary about social media influencers might find a place in your queue. Of course, it can be tough to keep up with all of the new content the streaming service is putting out, so we’re bringing you a round-up of what’s new to Netflix and what’s departing this week of December 7th.

Dumplin’ (film streaming 12/7)

Willowdean “Dumplin” Dickson (Danielle Macdonald) is the titular star of this comedy that’s been plunged into a deep-fryer and emerged as a dark comedy about the societal pressures of conventional beauty and the tug-and-pull of complicated mother-daughter relationships. Dumplin’ is a curvy, confident heroine, the daughter of a beautiful mother who runs beauty pageants for the fun of it (Jennifer Aniston giving just the right amount of Southern-snark). When Dumplin’ decides to enter a pageant to show the judges, and her mother, that she can win and that beauty shouldn’t conform to their standards, she ends up turning the world of feather boas and press-on nails and hairspray on its head.

Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle (film streaming 12/7)

Andy Serkis is giving us a decidedly darker twist on a childhood favorite with his live-action, motion-capture reimagining of The Jungle Book. The bones of the story are the same: Mowgli, a young orphan, is raised by a pack of wolves, taught survival by a panther named Bagheera (Christian Bale), and offered friendship by a lazy, good-natured bear named Baloo (Serkis). Shere Khan (Benedict Cumberbatch) has it out for the young man-cub, which causes conflict amongst Mowgli’s protectors and forces the boy to prove himself to his pack or join the human village nearby. What’s different from the iteration Warner Bros. produced last year is Serkis’ desire to soak each of these characters in blood to give a grittier version of the story. Does it work? You be the judge.

The American Meme (documentary streaming 12/7)

This latest Netflix documentary focuses on a fascinating, if not completely bizarre, topic: Social media influencers. We’ve all heard of them. They’re the people getting millions for broadcasting ads to their Instagram followings, but this film takes us behind-the-scenes of that job. And it is a full-time job. Paris Hilton, Josh Ostrovsky (aka The Fat Jewish), Brittany Furlan, and Kirill Bichutsky allow cameras to follow them as they grow their social media empires with famous faces like DJ Khaled, Hailey Baldwin, and Emily Ratajkowski popping up along the way. If being Insta-famous is your goal in life, take notes.

Here’s a full list of what’s been added in the last week:

Avail. 12/1/2018

8 Mile

Astro Boy

Battle

Bride of Chucky

Christine

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

Crossroads: One Two Jaga (NETFLIX FILM)

Friday

Friday After Next

Hellboy

Man vs Wild with Sunny Leone: Season 1

Meet Joe Black

Memories of the Alhambra (Streaming Every Saturday) (NETFLIX ORIGINAL)

My Bloody Valentine

Next Friday

Reindeer Games

Seven Pounds

Shaun of the Dead

Terminator Salvation

The Big Lebowski

The Great British Baking Show: Masterclass: Season 5 Masterclasses

The Last Dragon

The Man Who Knew Too Little

Avail. 12/2/2018

The Lobster

Avail. 12/3/2018

Blue Planet II: Season 1

Hero Mask (NETFLIX ORIGINAL)

The Sound of Your Heart: Reboot Season 2 (NETFLIX ORIGINAL)

Avail. 12/4/2018

District 9

Avail. 12/6/2018

Happy!: Season 1

Avail. 12/7/2018

5 Star Christmas (NETFLIX FILM)

Bad Blood (NETFLIX ORIGINAL)

Dogs of Berlin (NETFLIX ORIGINAL)

Dumplin’ (NETFLIX ORIGINAL)

Free Rein: The Twelve Neighs of Christmas (NETFLIX ORIGINAL)

Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle (NETFLIX ORIGINAL)

Nailed It! Holiday! (NETFLIX ORIGINAL)

Neo Yokio: Pink Christmas (NETFLIX ORIGINAL)

Pine Gap (NETFLIX ORIGINAL)

ReMastered: Who Killed Jam Master Jay? (NETFLIX ORIGINAL)

Super Monsters and the Wish Star (NETFLIX ORIGINAL)

The American Meme (NETFLIX ORIGINAL)

The Hook Up Plan (Plan Coeur) (NETFLIX ORIGINAL)

The Ranch: Part 6 (NETFLIX ORIGINAL)

And here’s what’s leaving next week, so it’s your last chance:

Leaving 12/10/18:

Battle Royale

Battle Royale 2

Teeth

Menswear Dog is a shiba inu living in NYC with a panache for all things style. His interests include never washing his selvage denim, lurking around Soho for someone to notice his steez, and sniffing fine bitches. For true fans there’s also a book on Amazon.

But c'mon guys. And by guys I mean Reps. French Hill, Steve Womack, Bruce Westerman and Rick Crawford and Sens. Tom Cotton and John Boozman. Where are the congratulatory news releases on a development you've encouraged for years by your votes and your political campaigns? Or better yet, where's a fix that authorizes the health insurance mandate and cleans up other obstacles the Republican Party has planted to universal health insurance coverage? It's the time of year for goodwill toward all, right? Poll after poll has said the American people are now solidly in favor of continuing the Affordable Care Act, which has dramatically redced the number of uninsured in America and preserved vital health services as a result.

Sen. Joyce Elliott offered a good idea for Arkansas legislators.

“Today’s decision is an unfortunate step backward for our health system that is contrary to overwhelming public sentiment to preserve pre-existing condition protections and other policies that have extended health insurance coverage to millions of Americans,” said AMA president Barbara L. McAneny, M.D. “It will destabilize health insurance coverage by rolling back federal policy to 2009. No one wants to go back to the days of 20 percent of the population uninsured and fewer patient protections, but this decision will move us in that direction.”

Did the GOP really mean it when they said they wanted to protect people with pre-existing conditions?

Update: her partying done Rutledge weighs in with what has proved an empty promise from the GOP for years:

“Attorney General Leslie Rutledge  U.S. District Court Judge Reed O’Connor of Texas for agreeing with Arkansas, as part of a 20-state coalition, that the Affordable Care Act and its individual mandate are unconstitutional.

“The ruling is a big win for Arkansans,” said Attorney General Rutledge. “Without the individual mandate in place, Obamacare cannot be upheld and is unconstitutional. Now, it is time for Congress to increase options, lower costs and protect those with pre-existing conditions."

TORONTO (Reuters) - Melissa McCarthy turns away from comedy in “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” transforming into a dowdy, cranky woman with disheveled hair and dull, shapeless clothes.

McCarthy, best known for raunchy 2011 comedy “Bridesmaids” and her “Saturday Night Live” impersonations of former White House spokesman Sean Spicer, plays Lee Israel, a crusty biographer-turned-literary forger.

“One of my favorite things is finding the character, the wardrobe, the make up, the hair,” McCarthy told reporters on the red carpet at the Toronto Film Festival on Saturday.

“It’s so much a part of what people are, and I think especially for Lee. I kept saying, she’s always cocooning herself and it’s our body armor,” she said.

The movie is based on Israel’s autobiography. It recounts her move into forging letters from famous authors and actors to make money after failing to sell her own books.

“Lee was in some ways bigger than life, so challenging and brilliant and incredibly funny and talented but also very difficult and prickly and unapologetic,” McCarthy said.

The role has brought McCarthy some of the best reviews of her career.

Asked how she felt about the reaction, the actress told Reuters, “I think it’s really exciting. It’s a little bit like having a baby.”

Slideshow (4 Images)

24 Frames (2017)

Kristin here:

David and I started this blog way back in 2006 largely as a way to offer teachers who use Film Art: An Introduction supplementary material that might tie in with the book. It immediately became something more informal, as we wrote about topics that interested us and events in our lives, like campus visits by filmmakers and festivals we attended. Few of the entries actually relate explicitly to the content of Film Art, and yet many of them might be relevant.

Every year shortly before the autumn semester begins, we offer this list of suggestions of posts that might be useful in classes, either as assignments or recommendations. Those who aren’t teaching or being taught might find the following round-up a handy way of catching up with entries they might have missed. After all, we are pushing 900 posts, and despite our excellent search engine and many categories of tags, a little guidance through this flood of texts and images might be useful to some.

This list starts after last August’s post. For past lists, see 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017.

This year for the first time I’ll be including the video pieces that our collaborator Jeff Smith and we have since November, 2016, been posting monthly on the Criterion Channel of the streaming service FilmStruck. In them we briefly discuss (most run around 10 to 14 minutes) topics relating to movies streaming on FilmStruck. For teachers whose school subscribes to FilmStruck there is the possibility of showing them in classes. The series of videos is also called “Observations on Film Art,” because it was in a way conceived as an extension of this blog, though it’s more closely keyed to topics discussed in Film Art. As of now there are 21 videos available, with more in the can. I won’t put in a link for each individual entry, but you can find a complete index of our videos here. Since I didn’t include our early entries in my 2017 round-up, I’ll do so here.

As always, I’ll go chapter by chapter, with a few items at the end that don’t fit in but might be useful.

Chapter 3 Narrative Form

David writes on the persistence of classical Hollywood storytelling in contemporary films: “Everything new is old again: Stories from 2017.”

In FilmStruck #5, I look at the effects of using a child as one of the main point-of-view figures in Victor Erice’s masterpiece: “The Spirit of the Beehive–A Child’s Point of View”

In FilmStruck #13, I deal with “Flashbacks in The Phantom Carriage.”

FilmStruck #14 features David discussing classical narrative structure in “Girl Shy—Harold Lloyd Meets Classical Hollywood.” His blog entry, “The Boy’s life: Harold Lloyd’s GIRL SHY on the Criterion Channel” elaborates on Lloyd’s move from simple slapstick into classical filmmaking in his early features. (It could also be used in relation to acting in Chapter 4.)

In FilmStruck #17, David examines “Narrative Symmetry in Chungking Express.”

Chapter 4 The Shot: Mise-en-Scene

In choosing films for our FilmStruck videos, we try occasionally to highlight little-known titles that deserve a lot more attention. In FilmStruck #16 I looks at the unusual lighting in Raymond Bernard’s early 1930s classic: “The Darkness of War in Wooden Crosses.”

FilmStruck #3: Abbas Kiarostami is noted for his expressive use of landscapes. I examine that aspect of his style in Where Is My Friend’s Home? and The Taste of Cherry: “Abbas Kiarostami–The Character of Landscape, the Landscape of Character.”

Teachers often request more on acting. Performances are difficult to analyze, but being able to use multiple clips helps lot. David has taken advantage of that three times so far.

In FilmStruck #4, “The Restrain of L’avventura,” he looks at how staging helps create the enigmatic quality of Antonionni’s narrative.

In FilmStruck #7, I deal with Renoir’s complex orchestration of action in depth: “Staging in The Rules of the Game.”

FilmStruck #10, features David on details of acting: “Performance in Brute Force.”

In Filmstruck #18, David analyses performance style: “Staging and Performance in Ivan the Terrible Part II.” He expands on it in “Eisenstein makes a scene: IVAN THE TERRIBLE Part 2 on the Criterion Channel.”

FilmStruck #19, by me, examines the narrative functions of “Color Motifs in Black Narcissus.”

Chapter 5 The Shot: Cinematography

A basic function of cinematography is framing–choosing a camera setup, deciding what to include or exclude from the shot. David discusses Lubitsch’s cunning play with framing in Rosita and Lady Windermere’s Fan in “Lubitsch redoes Lubitsch.”

In FilmStruck #6, Jeff shows how cinematography creates parallelism: “Camera Movement in Three Colors: Red.”

In FilmStruck 21 Jeff looks at a very different use of the camera: “The Restless Cinematography of Breaking the Waves.”

Chapter 6 The Relation of Shot to Shot: Editing

David on multiple-camera shooting and its effects on editing in an early Frank Capra sound film: “The quietest talkie: THE DONOVAN AFFAIR (1929).”

In Filmstruck #2, David discusses Kurosawa’s fast cutting in “Quicker Than the Eye—Editing in Sanjuro Sugata.”

In FilmStruck #20 Jeff lays out “Continuity Editing in The Devil and Daniel Webster.” He follows up on it with a blog entry: “FilmStruck goes to THE DEVIL”,

Chapter  7 Sound in the Cinema

In 2017, we were lucky enough to see the premiere of the restored print of Ernst Lubitsch’s Rosita (1923) at the Venice International Film Festival in 2017. My entry “Lubitsch and Pickford, finally together again,” gives some sense of the complexities of reconstructing the original musical score for the film.

In FilmStruck #1, Jeff Smith discusses “Musical Motifs in Foreign Correspondent.”

Filmstruck #8 features Jeff explaining Chabrol’s use of “Offscreen Sound in La cérémonie.”

In FilmStruck #11, I discuss Fritz Lang’s extraordinary facility with the new sound technology in his first talkie: “Mastering a New Medium—Sound in M.”

Chapter 8 Summary: Style and Film Form

David analyzes narrative patterning and lighting Casablanca in “You must remember this, even though I sort of didn’t.”

In FilmStruck #10, Jeff examines how Fassbender’s style helps accentuate social divisions: “The Stripped-Down Style of Ali Fear Eats the Soul.”

Chapter 9 Film Genres

David tackles a subset of the crime genre in “One last big job: How heist movies tell their stories.”

He also discusses a subset of the thriller genre in “The eyewitness plot and the drama of doubt.”

FilmStruck #9 has David exploring Chaplin’s departures from the conventions of his familiar comedies of the past to get serious in Monsieur Verdoux: “Chaplin’s Comedy of Murders.” He followed up with a blog entry, “MONSIEUR VERDOUX: Lethal Lothario.”

In Filmstruck entry #15, “Genre Play in The Player,” Jeff discusses the conventions of two genres, the crime thriller and movies about Hollywood filmmaking, in Robert Altman’s film. He elaborates on his analysis in his blog entry, “Who got played?”

Chapter 10 Documentary, Experimental, and Animated Films

I analyse Bill Morrison’s documentary on the history of Dawson City, where a cache of lost silent films was discovered, in “Bill Morrison’s lyrical tale of loss, destruction and (sometimes) recovery.”

David takes a close look at Abbas Kiarostami’s experimental final film in “Barely moving pictures: Kiarostami’s 24 FRAMES.”

Chapter 11 Film Criticism: Sample Analyses

We blogged from the Venice International Film Festival last year, offering analyses of some of the films we saw. These are much shorter than the ones in Chapter 11, but they show how even a brief report (of the type students might be assigned to write) can go beyond description and quick evaluation.

The first entry deals with the world premieres of The Shape of Water and Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri and is based on single viewings. The second was based on two viewings of Argentine director Lucretia Martel’s marvelous and complex Zama. The third covers films by three major Asian directors: Kore-eda Hirokazu, John Woo, and Takeshi Kitano.

Chapter 12 Historical Changes in Film Art: Conventions and Choices, Traditions and Trends

My usual list of the ten best films of 90 years ago deals with great classics from 1927, some famous, some not so much so.

David discusses stylistic conventions and inventions in some rare 1910s American films in “Something familiar, something peculiar, something for everyone: The 1910s tonight.”

I give a rundown on the restoration of a silent Hollywood classic long available only in a truncated version: The Lost World (1925).

In teaching modern Hollywood and especially superhero blockbusters like Thor Ragnarok, my “Taika Waititi: The very model of a modern movie-maker” might prove useful.

Etc.

If you’re planning to show a film by Damien Chazelle in your class, for whatever chapter,  David provides a run-down of his career and comments on his feature films in “New colors to sing: Damien Chazelle on films and filmmaking.” This complements entries from last year on La La Land: “How LA LA LAND is made” and “Singin’ in the sun,” a guest post featuring discussion by Kelley Conway, Eric Dienstfrey, and Amanda McQueen.

Our blog is not just of use for Film Art, of course. It contains a lot about film history that could be useful in teaching with our other textbook. In particular, this past year saw the publication of David’s Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Hollywood Storytelling. His entry “REINVENTING HOLLYWOOD: Out of the past” discusses how it was written, and several entries, recent and older, bear on the book’s arguments. See the category “1940s Hollywood.”

Finally, we don’t deal with Virtual Reality artworks in Film Art, but if you include it in your class or are just interested in the subject, our entry “Venice 2017: Sensory Saturday; or what puts the Virtual in VR” might be of interest. It reports on four VR pieces shown at the Venice International Film Festival, the first major film festival to include VR and award prizes.

Monsieur Verdoux (1947)

Last Modified: Sunday | August 19, 2018 @ 08:44    open printable version

This entry was posted on Sunday | August 19, 2018 at 8:44 am and is filed under 1940s Hollywood, Actors: Lloyd, Directors: Capra, Directors: Chazelle, Directors: Hitchcock, Directors: Kiarostami, Directors: Kieslowski, Directors: Kurosawa Akira, Directors: Lang, Directors: Lloyd, Harold, Directors: Lubitsch, Directors: Martel, Directors: Stahl, Directors: von Trier, Directors: Waititi, Directors: Wong Kar-wai, Documentary film, Festivale: Venice, Film comments, Film technique: Cinematography, Film technique: Editing, Film technique: Performance, Film technique: Sound, Film technique: Staging, Narrative strategies, Silent film, Virtual Reality. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Please enable cookies.

We can see you're using Adblocker. Block everybody else, but we thought we were friends. Please click Yes below to whitelist us, so we can keep doing our best to show you half-naked ladies and funny Internet memes. It's what any friend would do.