Your Favorite Scary Movie: The Oral History of ‘Scream’

It’s hard to imagine now that the franchise has been spilling gallons of fake blood for a quarter-century—Paramount Home Entertainment recently released a remastered anniversary edition on 4K Ultra HD, and the fifthinstallment of the franchise will hit theaters in January—but there was a time when no one wanted to direct Scream. At first, even Wes Craven passed. Several times. The man behind horror classics like A Nightmare on Elm Street and The Last House on the Left was tired of being confined to the genre that he’d mastered. Yet the pull of Williamson’s script eventually turned out to be too much to resist, and with its elements at his fingertips, Craven reinvented big-screen horror.

The complete article

Alan Siegel — The Ringer

Image source

How Hollywood’s toxic (and worsening) addiction to franchises changed movies forever in 2014

And that leaves aside the movies that aren’t getting made — the original scripts or adaptations of novels that make it into development and then go nowhere, with apologies and sighs from the people who bought them, unless a very big studio feels like doing a very big favor for a very big star, director, or producer. People who believe in the primacy of the marketplace will tell you that this winnowing process is a Darwinian, survival-of-the-fittest thing. It’s not, but even if it were, are we really supposed to cheer creative decisions that are based on nothing more than a nervous determination to avoid extinction? Yes, some good movies get through, but many that once would have now don’t, won’t, can’t. And a generation of midlevel executives that in the not-too-distant past would have been trained to develop and champion them now knows that doing so isn’t the way to move up in the ranks; these days, you make your bones by showing you can maximize the potential monetization of a preexisting brand or reawaken a dormant one. Stand-alone, non-repeatable hits are nice, but only in an outside-the-system way; they’re for people who don’t know how to think big.

The complete article

Mark Harris — Grantland

Image source

The Keanu Reeves Phenomenon

Though Ted has become an enduring favorite, Variety recognized Reeves’ charm, but wasn’t entirely sold when the film opened in 1989. “Not since Sean Penn’s send-up of an airhead California high-schooler in ‘Fast Times at Ridgemont High’ has the screen seen young characters as witlessly appealing as this pic’s Bill and Ted,” Variety’s reviewer wrote. “Keanu Reeves, with his beguilingly blank face and loose-limbed, happy-go-lucky physical vocabulary, and Alex Winter, with his golden curls, gleefully good vibes and ‘bodacious’ vocabulary, propel this adventure as far as they can.”

The complete article

Tim Gray — Variety

Image source

One of the most delightful fantasies ever put on film

This 1940 movie is one of the great entertainments. It lifts up the heart. An early Technicolor movie, it employs colors gladly and with boldness, using costumes to introduce a rainbow. It has adventure, romance, song, a Miklos Rozsa score that one critic said is “a symphony accompanied by a movie.” It had several directors; as producer, Alexander Korda leaped from one horse to another in midstream. But it maintains a consistent spirit, and that spirit is one of headlong joy in storytelling.

The complete article

Roger Ebert

Image source

The Royals & Their Fictions

Morgan similarly oversteps in his account of the breakdown of the marriage of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer. The heir to the throne is shown surrendering to the charms of a teenager 13 years his junior at a vulnerable moment—following the murder in 1979 of his grand-uncle, Lord Louis Mountbatten, in an IRA bombing. This much rings true, but then The Crown has the prince abandoning his bride and relying on his lover, Camilla Parker-Bowles, immediately following the wedding. “There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded,” Princess Diana said famously in a 1995 BBC interview—and the show doubles down on that take. The messy reality that a woman chosen for her virginity—her suitability as future queen, in the traditional view of the role—would prove incompatible with an older man who had very different interests, is pushed aside for a simpler story: A young, well-intentioned beauty is shamefully used by a selfish, over-entitled stuffed shirt.

The complete article

Clare McHugh — Commentary

Image source

How John Wilson Made the Quirkiest, Most Transcendent Show on Television

That’s probably because Wilson’s face has yet to appear on his own show. Viewers merely hear his narration — voice nasal, tone deadly dry — and catch glimpses of him in mirrors as he wanders around New York City with a camera, interacting with everyday people. Episodes like How to Put Up Scaffolding, How to Cover Your Furniture, and How to Make the Perfect Risotto begin with Wilson attempting to learn something practical. But each time the effort spirals into hilarious, sometimes poignant, and impossible-to-predict chaos, taking him everywhere from the home of a nude foreskin enthusiast to a beach resort in Cancun packed with college students on spring break.

The complete article

Andy Greene — Rolling Stone

Image source

The D-I-Y Origins of Night of the Living Dead

When 27-year-old George A. Romero set out to shoot his first feature, Night of the Living Dead, he had a little over $100,000 to his name and a cast of unknowns. So he got creative. For locations, he staked out abandoned buildings, reasoning that no one would care if a zombie ripped a hole in the wall. For photography, he chose 35 mm black-and-white film, hoping it would smooth over some of the ad-hoc production’s rougher edges. The blood would be Bosco’s chocolate syrup and the guts would be ham, donated from a local butcher shop.

The complete article

Kristin Hunt — JSTOR Daily

Image source

Here’s What Critics Are Saying About Tenet

A new movie related post after a long time.

“Don’t try to understand it, feel it,” a cryptic scientist (Clémence Poésy) counsels the Protagonist early on, and whether Nolan intends it or not, this feels like solid advice for the viewer too. “Tenet” is not in itself that difficult to understand: It’s more convoluted than it is complex, wider than it is deep, and there’s more linearity to its form than you might guess, though it offers some elegantly executed structural figure-eights along the way.

The complete article

Marissa Martinelli — Slate

Image source

A Horse’s Remorse

Most radically, there was the show’s obsessive circling around its accumulated past, whose visual summary might be the whiteboards in one of the final episodes (“Sunk Cost and All That”) on which BoJack, together with Todd, Diane, and Princess Carolyn, tries to list all his many crimes and misdemeanors. That kind of unruly frame-breaking isn’t necessarily something you might associate with poignancy or sincerity. But it was this continued backtracking attention to its own making that finally allowed BoJack Horseman to end up showing that cartoon might be the most truthful model of our landscape. A person, you might conclude, is also an outline infested by other selves, a vehicle for mournful self-criticism and recomposition. We’re all fantastical now, it seemed to argue, in the multicolored digital light.

The complete article

Adam Thirlwell — The New York Review of Books

Image source

25 Movies and the Magazine Stories That Inspired Them

adaptation._film

Given that most of us are in home, here is a list of movies made from magazine stories.

Adaptation (2002)

Based on Orchid Fever by Susan Orlean (The New Yorker, 1995)

Generally speaking, orchids seem to drive people crazy. The people who love orchids love them madly, but the passion for orchids is not necessarily a passion for beauty. Something about the form of an orchid makes it seem almost more like a creature than a flower. Many orchids are strange-looking, and others have bizarre shapes and jarring color combinations, and all orchids are rather ugly when they aren’t in flower. Laroche told me that many species are so plain that when he shows them to people they invariably ask him what they will look like when they bloom, and he has to explain that they already are blooming. Orchids have adapted to almost every environment on earth. They can be mutated, crossbred, and cloned. They can take the form of complex architectural structures or of garish, glamorous, luscious flowers. Not surprisingly, orchids have all sorts of sexual associations; few other flowers are as plainly erotic in appearance or effect. Even other creatures find orchids alluring. Some orchids are shaped exactly like the insect that pollinates them; the insect is drawn inside thinking it has found its mate.

The complete article

Longreads — Catherine Cusick

Image source