Well, this is the last post that will appear on the old flog.dayforknight.com. I’ve been in the extremely long process of finishing a complete redesign on the main dayforknight.com, and I’ve rolled all of the flog into that. There have even been a couple of clandestine posts I’ve already made for a little carrot to get you over there.
So go on – head on over there, check it out and tell me what an amazing job Kat Ayer did building the site.
My friend and I refer to the phenomenon as The USA Movie (after the cable channel, not the country). It’s the movie that you can drop into at any point, watch for a few minutes, and drop out of without regret. Jessica Grose describes the idea here, but I feel that she relies a little heavily on comedy. For me, the greatest USA Movies lean a little more towards action (this is likely a gender thing). The friend who helped me christen the term considers the Thomas Jane version of The Punisher to be the apex of the genre. I’m more partial to The Rundown (and if I haven’t gushed to you about the brilliance of Christopher Walken’s tooth fairy monologue, that’s pretty much worth the price of admission right there).
Even more interesting, though, are the movies that are actually improved by being watched in bite-sized chunks. I hated Mars Attacks! when I saw it in the theater. I’ve been told that might be because my expectations were out of line with the source material, but whatever the reason, I really despised it. But one afternoon I happened to catch it on TV and decided to give it another chance. For about 20 minutes, it was surprisingly enjoyable And then, just as it began to be unbearable, I had to go out to meet a friend. It was remarkable. Can anyone think of any other examples of movies that get better if you watch them in segments (as opposed, for example, to a movie that would get better if you just stopped watching before some disastrous last scene)?
While the quality can be wildly divergent, I kind of love Fake Criterions. Which is what makes this post from yesterday so awesome.
But honestly, I’m really bummed about losing Criterion through Netflix Watch Instantly. I use it constantly, and I’m unlikely to sign up for Hulu+ unless it adds a really staggering amount of functionality. I’ll obviously still have the chance to get the disk versions sent to me, but there’s a total “welcome to the future” aspect of being able to pull up the greatest cinematic classics at the push of a button.
I had somewhat higher hopes for this article on movie titles, but as someone who has always struggled with titles for my projects (and especially names of characters), it’s fascinating to get a glimpse into the negotiations that take a film from a working title to a release title.
If only career counseling were always this useful.
Also, I promise I’m going to get back to writing more interesting posts, rather than just linking to some cool images and videos. I haven’t had as much opportunity to watch new movies, so I’m a bit behind on my queue, but I’m hoping to finish up some relatively large projects and get back to watching and posting verrrrrrrry soon.
h/t: @sound_on_sight
Not exactly a hard target, but this film school thesis generator is good for a chuckle.
At some point, I’ll get around to posting my thesis from college, so we can all gain a deeper understanding of the aestheticization of violence in post-Hayes Code Hollywood. You know, one of these days.
h/t: @sound_on_sight
In the abstract, I think something like this is really amazing. In practice, I’m still not 100% sure that the experience of it would be entirely satisfying. The immersive reality it creates seems like a truly new way of telling a story, but the story itself feels less complete. Maybe it’s my autocratic storytelling nature, but doesn’t the narrative become so ambiguous as to stop being a narrative at some point? And at that point, what are you really creating?
How I Learned to Start a Pandemic from Turnstyle Video on Vimeo.
I don’t always get a chance to flog about all of the movies I watch. I usually start charting out what I’m going to say in my head right after the credits roll, even practicing a turn of phrase here and there, but the time frequently gets away from me. Since I prefer not to write about movies unless they’re pretty fresh in my mind, that means that I skip a good number of what I’ve watched.
The King’s Speech was going to be one of those. I saw it just before the new year started, and I had some definite thoughts about it, but I thought I’d missed my window.
Then this happened, and I couldn’t let it pass without comment.
Let me start at the beginning: the film has a great script (historical inaccuracies notwithstanding), and Colin Firth deserves all the accolades coming his way. But either I really missed something, or the whole world has just gone crazy. I thought Tom Hooper’s direction so terrible as to be practically Brechtian. Each new shot drew such attention to itself that I found myself having trouble focusing on anything else. At one point, I thought felt like I was hearing some kind of metronomic click with each edit. The single best assessment of the film that I’ve read came from Armond White, who wrote “each scene in The King’s Speech is so poorly staged that its ineptitude sometimes borders on the avant-garde.”
What I couldn’t figure out is why. There didn’t seem to be any kind of neo-Sirkian “commentary” going on (not that, as mentioned, I’m really convinced of the extent of that commentary). Maybe he was trying to point up the inauthenticity of such shameless Oscar-baiting — because whether or not you liked the movie, it’s inarguably the kind of “quality” film that gets released in the weeks before Oscar season — but if so, that’s getting extremely meta. To be fair, I haven’t seen any of Hooper’s other work, but running down the catalogue doesn’t exactly give one the sense of a postmodern bomb-thrower. As near as I can tell, there’s no motivation for making his film so distracting on its own terms. And without one, the direction just feels sloppy, accidental or bizarrely mismatched to the rest of the film.
All of which just brings me back to the inescapable conclusion that the whole world has to have gone crazy.
You can’t actually see all of these right now since the site has kind of gone down (thanks eager internet users), but it’s definitely worth checking out some of The Shiznit’s honest one-sheets for best picture nominees here at BuzzFeed.
h/t: Matt Jennings
I’ve mentioned my dislike for 3d on two separate occasions, but it’s nice to have scientific FACT on my side.
One thing that you have to read down to realize is that Walter Murch edited Captain EO, which is, obviously, the best 3d movie ever. And if he says it’s not possible, it’s not. I will, however, hold out hope for holographic movies, because that’s just plain rad.
