strike zone links
---"Form is not just an academic side dish to the main course of content. We critics of film and TV have a duty to help viewers understand how form and and content interact, and how content is expressed through form. The film or TV critic who refuses to write about form in any serious way abdicates that duty, and abets visual illiteracy." --Matt Zoller Seitz
---True Detective
---"Where to find film work"
---Leigh Brackett's screenplay for Altman's The Long Goodbye
---"Men have the advantage of a much longer shelf life not defined by their looks: as they age into masculine authority in their forties and the decades beyond, still making love to scads of constantly replenished sweet ingénues in their twenties and thirties, women age out, with few exceptions. Sixtyish character actress Meryl Streep remains eminently bankable because she’s an Oscar perennial. But she is also an anomaly.
Foreign countries nurture far more world-class women directors—New Zealand’s Campion, Denmark’s Susanne Bier, Poland’s Agnieszka Holland, and France’s Agnès Varda and Anne Fontaine, to name just a handful—but their films command relatively small budgets. More men move on from film schools to direct films than do women, who tend to wind up in lower-budget indie and television production. Many talented women serve the visions of their male bosses, as did the late production designer and producer Polly Platt, with Peter Bogdanovich and James L. Brooks.
In Hollywood, the barriers remain incredibly high for women hoping to direct, unlike the music or publishing industries where it’s relatively easy for exploitable talent to show what it can do. Men are permitted a few mistakes, where women are not. Movie stars Barbra Streisand and Angelina Jolie did not earn much respect for their directing on Yentl and In the Land of Blood and Honey, respectively. The list is long of women who have directed one or two films. Women directors with bona fide big-budget movie careers like Ron Howard or Barry Levinson? Rare." --Anne Thompson
---"A good director, says Farber, is always 'seeking the idea in the visual world of action and movement, which is the more suitable, and so more emotionally vital, manner for the movies.'"
---Wes Anderson Centered
---trailers for Jupiter Ascending, Hercules, X-Men: Days of Future Past, and Begin Again
---filmmaking tips from Lars Von Trier
---"I probably am the most uniquely American director in the world. Me and Clint Eastwood. And that's the truth." --Harmony Korine
---The Motion Picture Camera: Past, Present and Future
---les Cahiers du Cinema on screen
---21 cinematographers share their favorite shots
---"I'm not letting critics off the hook. You're a critic because you should be able to spot it. You know, you're not a critic just for your opinion. My elevator man has got an opinion. Theoretically, you know movies enough technically so that you can recognize what lenses are being used, so that you can recognize a color palette. The color palette in The Verdict is wonderful and so carefully worked out. You know the color blue appears only once in that movie? I couldn't get the sky out of the shot. And I looked for a way to change the lens, but I needed that lens for another reason. But that kind of control on a movie is what my work is about." --Sidney Lumet
---who stole my ads?
---3 reasons: Persona
---the animations of Monty Python's Flying Circus
---Anne Helen Petersen on leaving academia for Buzzfeed
---a history of the anthology film by Calum Marsh
---"If Gregor occasionally hits a wedding party and makes another family even more miserable than his own, the US government’s all-but-explicit explanation will be that guilt is never to be doubted. There is no word more frequently misused than “kafkaesque,” but it is hard to think of a more appropriate word for much of the language that the United States used to justify the War on Terror. According to The New York Times, for example, the US government 'in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants […] unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.' In other words, they are guilty for the most kafkaesque reason of all: because they are being punished. They can only save themselves by way of their own destruction, which sounds like just the sort of miniscule and pointless hope that would send a Kafka character madly scurrying about (if that Kafka character were on the wrong side of the monitor). So let’s hope for Gregor’s sake that he would be on the right side of the monitor: a non-person in a non-place control room somewhere in the United States." --David Burr Gerrard
---Jason Schwartzman auditions for Rushmore
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