“There was only one Saul Bass. He was a gentleman, a brilliant raconteur, a marvelous collaborator and, as I’ve said before, a truly great artist. And – let’s be honest – a giant.”
— Martin Scorsese
“Saul Bass wasn’t just an artist who contributed to the first several minutes of some of the greatest movies in history; in my opinion his body of work qualifies him as one of the best film makers of this, or any other time.”
— Steven Spielberg
“Bass fashioned title sequences into an art, creating in some cases, like Vertigo, a mini-film within a film. His graphic compositions in movement function as a prologue to the movie – setting the tone, providing the mood and foreshadowing the action.”
— Martin Scorsese
(Source: missavagardner)
FILMINISM: “MUD,” AND WHY IT’S SOMETIMES OKAY TO WRITE ONE-DIMENSIONAL FEMALE CHARACTERS
As other writers have noted, being a feminist and a pop culture critic sometimes requires a bit of mental gymnastics. How can I reconcile enjoying something like “Pain & Gain” unless I write it off as Michael Bay lampooning the American Dream and its ugly baggage (homophobia, sexism, and sizism, just to start with)? As I walked out of the screening, a publicist asked me what I thought. She called me out by name! I was caught! I couldn’t escape! So I blurted out what I thought. “I liked it, but I feel guilty for liking it,” is what I told her, more or less. There was nothing in it that lit a fire under my ass to really engage with it more than that, and it was a relief. Because frankly, if I was actively angry about all the things that make me mad and sad and disgusted in the world, I’d go crazy. I still don’t know how to feel about “Spring Breakers,” except that seeing James Franco fellate a gun makes me blush. (Two guns at once, actually – it’s a rather impressive show of gag reflex control.)
Just as I enjoy video games and consume other so-called “problematic” types of media, I don’t always demand that a movie I love must be a paradigm of, well, whatever utopian vision we’re all striving for. There are plenty of worthy works of art that don’t pass the Bechdel Test, or whose creators were particularly monstrous in their private lives. The artist leaks into his or her work, no doubt, but I’m not giving them a free pass on being a piece of crap just because I take pleasure in their art. Poorly written female characters are the work of lazy writers. Actually, that’s giving some of these writers more credit than they’re due; maybe they’re just emotionally stunted or something, but I don’t know because I’m not Todd Phillips’ therapist.
There are exceptions, though. Occasionally, a film’s point of view requires the sort of female characters that normally irk me as underdeveloped and wispy, but they succeed despite (or in some cases, because of) this. That’s the case with writer/director Jeff Nichols’ newest, and quite excellent movie, “Mud.”
but who are we, who are we to scoff of such things? - werner herzog.
mister lonely, harmony korine, 2007.
She wants revenge
Christy Lemire said that while watching the film, she “found it numbingly repetitive, even boring at times: an obvious juxtaposition of sex and violence, of dreamlike aesthetics within a nightmare scenario.” But she still gave Spring Breakers film a good review. “This is the rare movie that I actually found myself liking more the longer I spent away from it and the more I thought about it—mainly because I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.
—Oscar Wilde
(Source: missavagardner)
Most people assumed Annie Hall was the story of our relationship. My last name is Hall. Woody and I did share a significant romance, according to me, anyway. I did want to be a singer. I was insecure, and I did grope for words. After 35 years, does anybody care? What matters is Woody’s body of work. Annie Hall was his first love story. Love was the glue that held those witty vignettes together. However bittersweet, the message was clear: Love fades. Woody took a risk; he let the audience feel the sadness of goodbye in a funny movie.
Trailer for Reality. directed by Matteo Garrone.
to be release in NYC on March 15 and in Los Angeles on March 22.
Technicolor Process 1 (Additive System) - The Gulf Between (1917): A prism beam-splitter behind the camera lens exposed two consecutive frames of a single strip of black-and-white negative film simultaneously, one behind a red filter, the other behind a green filter.
Process 2 (Subtractive System) - Toll of the Sea (1922), The Phantom of the Opera (1925), The Black Pirate (1926): The frames exposed behind the green filter were printed on one strip of black-and-white film, and the frames exposed behind the red filter were printed on another strip. After development, each strip was toned to a color complementary to that of the filter—red for the green-filtered images, green for the red-filtered.
Process 3 - Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933): Every other frame of the camera negative was printed onto one strip of specially prepared gelatin film (or “matrix”) to create a red record, and the remaining frames were printed onto a second strip of blank film to create a green record.
Process 4 - The light passing through the camera lens was split into two beam paths by a prism block. Green light was recorded through a green filter on panchromatic film, while the other half of the light passed through a magenta filter and was recorded on bipack film stock with two strips running base to base. On this stock, the front film was sensitized to blue light only, backed by a red gelatin layer which acted as a light filter to the panchromatic film behind it.
