Watched for my appearance on 1999: THE PODCAST
• A fun discussion with Julia Sirmons and John Brooks about all things Soderbergh: his knives-out relationship with writer Lem Dobbs, his structural, formal, and casting-related experimentation, Ed Lachman's cinematography, Sarah Flack's editing, his later experimentation with digital formats, and all the usual in-the-weeds stuff.
Watched for my latest appearance on the terrific Nate Storring.
• We discuss it all: 'Scope, Dolly zooms, Bill Butler's specific shooting methods, marxist readings of canonical Hollywood classics, the decline and fall of THE SIMPSONS, and bringing kink back to filmmaking! All the stars are here!
Kino Kijow - 50th Anniversary Screening
• Long been meaning to see a film at Kijow in Krakow - an enormous midcentury modernist Soviet-era movie theatre and one of the most beautiful and distinctive cinema spaces I've ever been to - and so seeing HOLY GRAIL in an 828-seat auditorium with a bunch of Poles felt like a good move. The communist peasant jokes hit different in this context.
• Love seeing the bits where you can obviously tell that…
• A very specific refresher rewatch: we had a road trip to Lower Silesia planned, and so I couldn't stop myself from insisting that we cross the river into for a detour to Görlitz, where this was shot. Here's the whole self-indulgent thread with the results of my blitz through the various locations.
• Particularly striking: how little effort it takes to shoot Anderson-adjacent shots in this town. One of the very few film locations I’ve gone out of…
OPENING CREDITS:
Based on Albert S. Ruddy's experience of making the Godfather.
• One of the most unfocused, hagiographic, self-indulgent pieces of cinematic autofellatio I've ever seen. It's 600* minutes of unmitigated accidental cringe comedy. Five stars.
• There's just straight-up too much to talk about here. I don't even know where to begin.
• Matthew Goode's work as Robert Evans is actively fucking great. Maybe I'm overrating him here because he's thrown into relief against the catastrophic incompetence that…
• McQuarrie's scattered and capricious camera direction meets a cinematographer who is plainly not up to the task of wrangling his boss's whims into anything resembling a coherent aesthetic. I cannot begin to express how disastrously this impacts the editing: virtually every single dialogue scene bounces around coverage that doesn't fit together in the least, the thing is rife with showy camera placement gestures that signify absolutely nothing at all, close-ups are leaned on so heavily that they become meaningless…
