New today on the site, the May issue (Obsession) begins!
"David Fincher's THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO represents an unexpected, pulpy, intimate fusing of art and artist at grand scale." -
@o_rinocoflow
(art by
@bturnerinfo
)
“I’ll tell you this, when I left this country in 1948 I left for one reason only...I didn’t care where I went...on the theory that nothing worse could happen to me there than had already happened to me here.”
-James Baldwin on The Dick Cavett Show, 1968
“He loved basketball & was good enough to be recruited to play college ball. But during his junior year, a boy on his team was shot & killed. Boseman coped w/ the tragedy by writing a play in response to the incident, which he called Crossroads & staged at his high school.”
"Tarkovsky drank a lot of vodka and...turned off the speaker in the restaurant & began to sing the theme of samurai from Seven Samurai at the top of his voice.
As if to rival him, I joined in. For I was at that moment very happy to find myself living on Earth."
—Akira Kurosawa
For this week's Sunday Twitter focus, we want to see the best examples of celebrities playing themselves within a fictional world. Share your favorite scenes with the hashtag
#TheyPlayedThemselves
and we'll RT our favorites throughout the day!
jeff bridges
-served in the coast guard reserve
-has been married to the same person since 1977 (“sticking with a marriage, that’s true grit man.”)
-takes photos on all his film sets
-released an ambient/spoken word record
-played a show w/ neko case
-is the best
If you start watching Phantom Thread at 3:14pm today and then watch it on repeat for the next 4 days and 8 hours, you will get to spend New Year’s Eve with Reynolds & Alma
#nevercursed
Writers! We know it’s really tough out there right now & also that a lot of you are looking for places to pitch. So: pitch us!
We’re raising our freelance rates effective immediately & accepting more off-theme submissions as well, provided they’re related to movies in some way.
anybody complaining about the lack of new movies to watch during the pandemic apparently has zero idea that there are literally thousands of great movies that have already been made just patiently waiting for you to finally watch them send tweet
Scarecrow (
@ScarecrowVideo
) is the best video store on the planet. And if you need further proof, how about this:
“The store has more than 132,000 titles, many of them not available on the internet, or anywhere else. ‘We will fight to the death to keep this open.’”
Cate Blanchett gets bonus points here, because she not only plays herself in Jim Jarmusch's COFFEE & CIGARETTES, but also plays her own (fictional) cousin, Shelly.
#TheyPlayedThemselves
#AndAlsoTheirCousin
“The Safdie brothers, they’re crazy. I saw them in Telluride at a dinner & it was like they were mugging me. They look like 2 bandits. They would come on the set of The Irishman & hang out. There’s still an aspect of me that has an affinity w/their ferocious manner, so to speak.”
Hey! For our Sunday Twitter Focus this week we’re looking at scene stealers—actors who show up in small roles and steal the show. Send us your favorite scene stealing moments & we’ll retweet some of our favorites throughout the day!
#SceneStealer
“What touched me the most deeply was that after the film came out, when people recognized me, their eyes opened wide and they said: ‘It's the guardian angel.’...In some way I became an angel, and who except me has experienced that in his lifetime?” - Bruno Ganz
Are people not realizing the oasis it is to be in a place where you’re not *allowed* to use your phone? Where you have permission to be unconnected from the world for two hours? How many places like that are even left anywhere any more?
A lot of people are defending their in-theater phone use by saying they get bored during long movies. I get that. But here's the thing — boredom is a part of life. Movie theaters are shared spaces. You aren't entitled to distract other people from the art because you're bored.
"I love editing. I think I like it more than any other phase of film making. If I wanted to be frivolous, I might say that everything that precedes editing is merely a way of producing film to edit."
-Stanley Kubrick
New today on the site: Ethan Warren's Grand Yuletide Theory that The Muppet Christmas Carol is the best adaptation of A Christmas Carol (with new art by
@brianna_ashby
!)
the female editors at BWDR have started compiling a list of their favorite films where women rage (bc, well, catharsis). please send in your recommendations & gifs so we can scream together
just your annual reminder that in the original screenplay for ETERNAL SUNSHINE, Joel & Clementine erase each other from their memories like 15 times throughout their lives & the final scene is this & it’s brutal
"It was, above all, the speed with which he [Mifune] expressed himself that was astounding. The ordinary Japanese actor might need ten feet of film to get across an impression; Mifune needed three feet."
—Akira Kurosawa, on Toshiro Mifune
"So I want you to watch this movie & think only about staging, how the shots are built and laid out, what the rules of movement are, what the cutting patterns are."
- Steven Soderbergh, on his silent (w/ music from Trent Reznor) B&W edit of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK
"I don't like the idea of 'understanding' a film. I don't believe rational understanding is an essential element in the reception of any work of art. Either a film has something to say to you or it hasn't. If you are moved by it, you don't need it explained to you."
- Fellini
"I am 77 years old and am convinced that my real work is just beginning. Let us hold out together for the sake of movies." - Akira Kurosawa, in a letter to Ingmar Bergman on his 70th birthday
Remember that one time when you loved a movie with all your heart, and then someone came along and told you it sucked so you changed your mind?
Yeah, us neither. Love what you love, watch what you want to watch. Your taste is *your* taste and you don’t have to defend it.
OK, people with
@letterboxd
accounts: your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to help us create the most obscure movie recommendations list ever. Instructions in the screenshot:
“When the kids are in shot, the camera is at their eye level. There isn’t a single moment on screen where we’re looking down on them. I wanted them to be big—kings and queens of their domain.”
-Sean Baker on THE FLORIDA PROJECT
Q: Do you like it when powerful women go toe to toe with you?
Paul Thomas Anderson: Who doesn’t? I’ve always dreamed that Myrna Loy is gonna come walking in the room and smack me across the face. [Laughs.] That’s my secret fantasy.
"Back in [the 1980s] if you were young & kinda cool, you wouldn't be embracing anything that was just so brazenly commercial. You know, like, that was a bad impulse. And now every person under 25 lines up to see AVENGERS or whatever."
-Richard Linklater
“If we look at A Ghost Story in this way, as a poem of a film in a world full of prose, it becomes necessary to talk about it in a different way, too. Not as something that needs to be wrestled to the ground, but instead as something to be experienced.”
Hulu - $6
Netflix - $12
HBO NOW - $15
Disney+ - $7
Prime - $9
CBS All Access - $6
iTunes rentals of Phantom Thread - $4,369
Apple TV+ - $5
Over $4,000 a month.
Cutting the cord was supposed to save us how much?
“[Acting] is a vocation, a hobby, a job. It's everything to me. I won't go as far as saying it's a religion but I think it's more fun than religion. It's —romance, and escape. And I've been escaping all my life. I love it.”
- Christopher Plummer
#RIP
"My favorite superhero trilogy of all time: BEFORE SUNRISE, BEFORE SUNSET, BEFORE MIDNIGHT. Harder to live for someone than to die for them."
—
@RealGDT
We had such a blast doing
#MovieYellows
a few weeks ago, so for this week’s sunday twitter focus we're going with a color again. Send us your best
#MovieGreens
& we'll retweet some of our favorites throughout the day!
If you want to write about movies, you should definitely...watch movies. There’s no shortcut, and if you don’t, it shows up in the work one way or another.