Links & Looks. January 13, 2023
Optimistic Lance Hammer; John Carpenter's happy birthday; two hours with Tsai Ming-liang; M3GAN; the origins of binge; Charlie Kaufman flashback; thinkers thinking film; more Avatar 2, White Noise
What’s playing in Chicago this week? Lots of repertory and revival, a crazy amount that suggests the health and vitality of the past that movies had. Love Living; Otto, no; Corsage, bold. A snippet of Charlie Kaufman talk from Synecdoche, New York’s release. “Talking Screens” here.
Exclamation points for M3GAN here: “With slick surfaces and simmering subtext, sardonic japes like anticipating the reaction to another toy being a ‘shit tsunami’ and the joy of anticipating ‘the moment when we kick Hasbro in the dick,’ M3GAN has its own sweetly weird lilt.”
Promoting his debut feature, Ballast, in 2008, DIRECTOR LANCE HAMMER HOLDS OPTIMISM FOR THE FUTURE OF FILM.
Discoursing on long movies versus epic movies versus miniseries: “Distraction, immersion, distraction: since I started reviewing movies, the first professional rule: when you sit down and the lights go down, your ass is sat. (Then again, in the local private screening room, the washrooms are almost as close as they would be in the average Chicago apartment.) A former colleague, who calls himself a "reformed film critic," took it farther: he used to keep his eyes fixed to the screen, never breaking the line-of-sight. He took copious notes in a composition notebook, and I remember so many times seeing him raise that page into his field of vision, where he had mastered the binocular art of watching his loops pour onto the page in reflected light while also hypnotized by the twenty-four frames-per-second. That's learned behavior; mine is holding a thumb on a page that I never look down at during the movie, only afterwards, when I hope to be able to decipher the blocky scrawl.
Olivier Assayas’ latest version of Irma Vep, eight hours.
The champion that most watchers know, of course, is a little under eighty-six hours, which is also three days, fourteen hours, the eighty-six episodes across six seasons of "The Sopranos." (And for what it's worth, 3,508 "fucks" are given.) But what defines the ideal shape, form, scale for any given narrative, short, long, leaving you wanting, leaving you walloped? We all have our limits, even without pen in hand. More here.
Forty-five seconds of JOHN CARPENTER playing his eager skinflint character.
TWO HOURS WITH TSAI MING-LIANG, guest on October 3, 2022 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Visiting Artists Program.
TED HOPE HOPES FOR FILM: “Film is a cultural industry—thus combining art with commerce. Both aspects are necessary to focus on and enhance for success. Film is a cultural industry of abundance. There is more than enough to satisfy anyone for their entire lifetime. To entice audience engagement, distinction and urgency must be displayed. Film is generally a customer experience of access. We have been groomed to believe we can get anything anywhere at anytime and that is a positive attribute. Satisfying this or denying it is a choice to be considered.”
Avatar: The Way Of Water continues to have its way as Disney savors purported break-even.
Photo: Netflix.
Production designer Jess Gonchor gives a whiff of WHERE ALL THAT MONEY WENT ON WHITE NOISE in an interview with Jordan Rieff at the Los Angeles Times.
“The supermarket was bigger than the train crash… There were people working six months on printing labels on cans and wrapping current cans with older labels and graphics, and getting our hands on period registers and checkout stands.”
Baumbach was not certain the floor of his set was right for his dancers.
“It was a floor that had grout lines in it, like ceramic tiles. And the grout line was so minuscule, but I could tell that it bothered him. It wasn’t that it was bumpy, but it was how it affected the actors… At the last minute, we had to get this buffed white linoleum and put it in in like three days. We brought it in from all over the country. It was a nightmare, but we did it.”