ICYMI (9/22/17)
This week, Mike White's Brad's Status expands its national rollout and Battle of the Sexes opens in limited release; we covered both on the festival circuit. Happy Friday! More to come.
Check – Telluride 2017 Intro
by Walter Chaw
Things to do in Telluride:
- Go to the thrift store on the main street. There’s always something there–old festival gear, glass-framed posters, sweatshirts (because it’s never not colder here than you expect it to be). Especially go there at night after the trams stop running and you’re walking in the pitch black on the side of a mountain. I’ve done this without a flashlight and with a dead cell phone and it’s terrifying. Also, there’s no air. Also, there are bears.
Editor’s Note: On Our Twentieth Anniversary
Hello, we recently turned twenty. That means we've been around as long as "Gunsmoke" was. That means we're old enough to play Aunt May in the next Spider-Man reboot. That means if you started watching a Hobbit movie when we started it would just now be wrapping up. Of course, Hobbit movies didn't exist then; them's were halcyon days.
Echoes (5/5/17)
Radu Molasar rescues Eva Cuza in The Keep (1983, d. Michael Mann):
Walter Chaw’s Top “10” of 2016
by Walter Chaw There are conundrums presented by what I do now for a day job and this moonlight I won’t quit. Let me get at that by telling you an old, old story about filmmaker Peter Hedges that is sort of current again because he’s acting in a good film out this year called Little Sister. (His son, meanwhile, co-stars in Manchester by the Sea.) When I met Mr. Hedges, it was to interview him for Pieces of April. As per my usual process, I saw and reviewed the movie first, logging it with Bill before going to meet him. The idea behind this is that I never want my work to be coloured by any personal feelings I might develop for the artist over the course of a conversation–for good or for ill. It’s not that I don’t trust myself to be fair, it’s that I don’t know how knowing someone changes the environment in my head. I will be fair, but I’m not the same person before I meet someone and after. The world essentially changes when you meet someone.
Editor’s Choice: The Year in Blu-ray
by Bill Chambers The reason film and physical media are prematurely pronounced dead every few weeks is that the mainstream keeps narrowing, limiting the visible spectrum of both industries. Studios remain halfheartedly committed to Blu-ray Disc but, as this Top 10 list incidentally shows, it’s really become the domain of boutique labels restoring and annotating studio-neglected fare, capitalizing on streaming’s short-term memory and populist leanings while inspiring devotion among connoisseurs. Please note that I limited my selection process to titles I’ve personally audited and would endorse anyway, with or without frills. Some of these may be reviewed in full at a later date.
ICYMI (11/11/16)
Apologies for the radio silence this week. Honestly? No will. We have plenty of stuff on the horizon, though, and in the meantime here are links to our festival reviews of Arrival and Elle, which open in theatres today.
Goats Crossed, Bridge Closed
by Walter Chaw We've decided to get rid of our comments section here at FILM FREAK CENTRAL. We kept it for longer than we should have, I think. Our world isn't getting any better. It's getting a lot worse. I stopped engaging with our commenters a while ago. I've come back a couple of times in the last few years, but for the most part it's just been this thing that festers, this thing in the basement that gibbers to itself. I've asked friends to not tell me what's being written about me in there. I'm a lot happier not knowing.
The Emotional Weather Report
by Walter Chaw The road home is always shorter, so I find an excuse to stop on the way.
Elevation
by Walter Chaw Telluride rests in a valley on the Western side of Colorado. It sits at 8,750 feet. You have to cross Monarch Pass (elevation approximately 12,000 feet) to get there from where I live, a six-and-a-half hour drive away. If you’re doing it right, you walk everywhere in Telluride, taking the free gondola service over the longer stretches up and down the mountain, and feeling the sharp constriction in your chest when your body, even one acclimated to a mile above sea level, discovers there’s noticeably less oxygen to breathe at such great heights. I wonder if mild hypoxia has something to do with my euphoria while I’m here. I am the best version of myself at the Telluride Film Festival, even as the festival itself continues to subtly decline by inevitably becoming more beholden to middlebrow interests and tastes at the same pace it now sells out the highest level of ticket package they make available. Not the ones you can buy off the website, the ones you secure through $100,000 donations.
Hallways/Corridors/Aisles in Coen Brothers Movies: A Retrospective [UPDATED]
Blood Simple (1985)
DP Barry Sonnenfeld
Annual Professional Commentary on the Oscar Nominations (2016 edition)
by Bill Chambers
BEST PICTURE
The Big Short = sure
Bridge of Spies = um…
Brooklyn = yay
Mad Max: Fury Road = yay
The Martian = always nice to see a musical comedy get nominated
The Revenant = sometimes you eat the bear…
Room = whatevs
Spotlight = yay
Film Freak Central’s Best of ’15
by Walter Chaw 2015 was an interesting year for me.
Echoes (11/6/15)
Return to Oz (1985, d. Walter Murch): The Straight Story (1999, d. David Lynch): Note that there are other Disney movies that begin with the company's name over a starfield (The Black Hole, Toy Story 2), but given Lynch's history of paying tribute to The Wizard of Oz, these two seemed less of a coincidence.
Review Round-Up: 11/6/15
We haven't seen Spectre yet but at Telluride Walter Chaw did cover the prestigious Spotlight, which opens theatrically this weekend. His review.
The Rioting Pants: “Me and a Douche and a Bag”
by Bill Chambers Hey, folks: I debated long and hard about whether to post this here and I hope you'll forgive the self-indulgence. This is a recently-posted music video I animated and edited for The Rioting Pants, my brother's band; linking it because it's seasonally fitting, a kind of monster rally inspired by "Scooby-Doo" as well as those Hanna-Barbera videos that used to clog the gaps between Saturday-morning cartoons. It ain't up to the level of Pixar but it is entertaining, in my humble and biased opinion. Be sure to select the 1080p viewing option for the full HiDef experience--I worked…
Review Round-Up: 10/16/15
Opening nationally this week are Steve Jobs, about a guy named Steve who's given personalized tasks; and Suffragette, about a T-shirt campaign gone horribly wrong. In case you missed these reviews the first time around, Walter Chaw covered both at Telluride.
Review Round-Up: 10/16/15
In case you missed them, Walter Chaw has covered three of this weekend's biggest theatrical releases--the new Spielberg (Bridge of Spies), the new del Toro (Crimson Peak), and the new Give Brie Larson an Oscar (Room)--as well as the first major motion picture to debut on Netflix, Beasts of No Nation. Happy reading!
Weltschmerz
by Walter Chaw On my way back down on US 50 to 285 to C470 and I70 and home, I pulled off at someplace carved into the side of a mountain, a lagoon fortified all around with rock and shattered wood and sand. I let out a breath and wondered how long I'd held it. I listened to the lap of water and the air and the spaces inside my head. I took my shoes off. I waded a little way in and schools of fry shoaled away from my feet in black clouds. The water? Frigid. Snow run-off. I could see the white of it, dotting the peaks around me, even now in early September where, still five hours away, it was over 90° in the shade–the last gasps of Colorado's brutal Indian summer.