Melissa McCarthy and the New Female Slapstick – McCarthy gets dirty, she gets horny, and, most important, she gets the shit kicked out of her. Her comedy doesn’t inhere in, say, an elegant sense of timing (cf. Wiig), but rather in her projection of an oversized resilience against unsettling and thereby hilarious obstacles (about which more anon), not to mention her ability to script whole scenes on the fly. Put simply, McCarthy calls the bluff that slapstick has always put forward where women are concerned: the threat of violence in a world free from consequences. “Straight to the moon!” Ralph Kramden famously used to threaten his wife Alice. By this logic, McCarthy is the Neil Armstrong of the genre.
Smile, Buster! by Farran Nehme – Buster had enjoyed himself for years, but his father’s drinking steadily worsened; keeping a straight face while being thrown around by an unpredictable alcoholic was no way to earn a living.
You See It Or You Don’t: CinemaScope, Panoramic Perception and the Cinephiliac Moment – Bazin and his disciples at Cahiers du cinéma lyrically welcomed the particular mise en scène that the widescreen format cultivated. Godard, Truffaut, Rivette and company signalled that the enlarged playing space eliminated the need for montage, ‘in which’, according to Bazin in 1954, ‘people have wanted wrongly to see the essence of cinema’. (6) Instead, Scope stimulated filmmakers to base their mise en scène on refined staging patterns and elaborate plan-séquences
Love & Sincerity: A Conversation with James Gray – You shouldn’t give the audience what it wants, you can’t. In some sense, it’s your job to infuriate the audience, to provoke them. Giving them what they want is cowardice. The whole point is to give the audience what it needs.
Polone: Why Studios Should Act Like Indies — Vulture – Without the resources to hire various “script doctors,” indies usually stick with the original writers all the way through the process, something that more often maintains the quality of a film rather than undermines it.
And somewhere in the midst of it all is Dave Chappelle’s home – Another evening, Brennan and I talk about what the ride of success felt like. He remembers hanging out at a club in Arizona where he and Chappelle were approached by a white fan who was loose with his use of the word nigger and who praised Chappelle for making it so funny. “It was awful,” Brennan recalls.
Netflix is a distribution service of reruns – Through this reliance on Netflix, I’ve seen a new television pantheon begin to take form: there’s what’s streaming on Netflix, and then there’s everything else.
Digitaalihullu-blogi käsittelee Suomessa dvdllä julkaistuja ”uteliaisuutta herättäviä” elokuvia – Digitaalihullu-blogi paikkaa havaitsemiaan aukkoja ja suosittelee suosikkejaan persoonallisen löytöretken hengessä. Nautiskelevasti omat mieltymykset edellä, ilman pinnistettyä yritystä kaikenkattavaan kartoitukseen. Kuluttajavalistus sekoittuu blogissa vapaamuotoisen elokuvapäiväkirjaan, jossa kriittiset huomiot, historiatiedot, anekdootit ja yleinen cinefilia saavat rönsyillä ilman kokoavaa metodia. Välillä syntyy esseetä, toisinaan arvostelu tai pikamainintoja. Myös puhe teknisistä ominaisuuksista on mahdollista, mutta vuosituhannen vaihteen dvd-arvostelujen hifipainotteisuus ei ole juttuni.
Mark Kermode: The best hatchet jobs are not only amusing, but lasting, and the more amusing they are, the longer they last – Whether or not you agree with any of these value judgments matters not a jot; what matters is that you remember them. I may love Hal Ashby's sublime black comedy Harold and Maude, but the only review of it I can remember is the one in which the critic from Variety described it as containing "all the fun and gaiety of a burning orphanage". Why? Because it's nasty – and funny. The best hatchet jobs are not only amusing, but lasting, and the more amusing they are, the longer they last. No surprise, then, that when Roger Ebert died in early 2013, it was his scathing put-downs rather than his ebullient praise of movies that were quoted in memoriam.
