cinephile links

---Daisies

---"Instead of amassing the soul-crushing mountain of student loan debt that you will incur over four years spent learning film theory and practice, why not just take one-half of a semester's tuition and buy a prosumer camera, Final Cut Pro, and – this last bit is key – every single Robert Rodriguez DVD/Blu-ray you can? Study them. Listen to his director's commentaries. Absorb at a molecular level the lessons and advice he offers in his `Ten Minute Film School' videos. Note his remarkable progression as a filmmaker: from 1992's now-iconic El Mariachi to the forthcoming Machete Kills, and from his recent creation of the Quickdraw production and animation facilities to the planned 2014 launch of his Latino-oriented Comcast network El Rey. Watch everything he has done, study everything he has crafted, then do it again. And then go do it yourself."

---Stop Making Sense

---The Avengers blooper reel and a deleted scene

---David Bordwell considers Christopher Nolan's formal innovations

---prohibition-era style

---Errol Morris' Team Spirit

---"The sensualists are bored with dramatic housekeeping. They’re interested in sensations and emotions, occurrences and memories of occurrences. If their films could be said to have a literary voice, it would fall somewhere between third person and first — perhaps as close to first person as the film can get without having the camera directly represent what a character sees.

Yet at the same time sensualist directors have a respect for privacy and mystery. They are attuned to tiny fluctuations in mood (the character’s and the scene’s). But they’d rather drink lye than tell you what a character is thinking or feeling – or, God forbid, have a character tell you what he’s thinking or feeling. The point is to inspire associations, realizations, epiphanies — not in the character, although that sometimes happens, but in the moviegoer.

You can tell by watching the sensualists’ films, with their startling cuts, lyrical transitions, off-kilter compositions and judicious use of slow motion as emotional italics, that they believe we experience life not as dramatic arcs or plot points or in-the-moment revelations, but as moments that cohere and define themselves in hindsight — as markers that don’t seem like markers when they happen."  --Matt Zoller Seitz

---"I don't know how much movies should entertain.  I'm interested in movies that scar." --David Fincher

---Kubrick // One-Point Perspective

---Here I Come, a supercut

---Andrew Haigh's top Criterion faves

---"Along with many of his contemporaries, Bangs concluded that if `authority' was not to be trusted—and clearly, it wasn’t—then whatever `authority' detested must be O.K., or probably great."

---Glenn Kenny speculates about The Seven Year Itch

---footage from the set of The Exorcist

---The problem is us. Cinephiles. All it takes to correct the poll, to correct cinephelia as a whole, is a willingness to operate from a place of absolute personal honesty. We need to open ourselves up to the possibility that what other cinephiles deemed great in 1952 doesn't look so great to us 60 years later, or as great as what has come after it (and the reverse, too, of course). We need to ditch this notion of over-praising movies we `respect,' which is almost always code for `I didn't like it as much as I think I'm supposed to, but I'm not about to look like an idiot by saying so,' and let our heart and our gut guide us. Too many cinephiles that I know feel passionately about too many recent movies, funny movies and completely accessible movies to make me think that the Sight & Sound list is the best reflection of which movies cause even the nerdiest of film nerds to exclaim, `This is . . . great!' And if I'm wrong about that, we cinephiles have only ourselves to blame, because then it's clear we're spending far too much time talking about all the wrong movies."  --Jason Bellamy

---Three Reasons: Quadrophenia and Umberto D.

---Tony Scott's short films

---trailers for Passion, The Girl, Sightseers, The Hole, Lawless, and The Master

---"As Zobel, the writer and director of Compliance, notes, most people are too busy with their lives to find the time or energy to scrutinize prevailing orthodoxies and the authorities propagating them. When the institutions that are in a position to provide those checks fail to do that, those orthodoxies and authorities thrive without opposition or challenge, no matter how false and corrupted they may be.

As much as anything else, this is the institutional failure that explains the debacles of the last decade. There is virtually no counter-weight to the human desire to follow and obey authority because the institutions designed to provide that counter-weight – media outlets, academia, courts – do the opposite: they are the most faithful servants of those centers of authority." --Glenn Greenwald

---lastly, "I still don't have a theory about the monkey that whispers `Judy.' We're not going to talk about Judy at all. We're going to leave her out of this."