“I’ve been trying to make ‘70s movies my whole career,” Payne said on a visit to New York in October. “Good, human, character-based stories.” Thinking back on the celebrated films of that period, from “Five Easy Pieces” to “Breaking Away,” he said, “I grew up being taught they were commercial American movies.” They were “literate, human, interesting, ambiguous, disturbing — if they have sentimental effects, said effects are earned, not forced.”
Rhodes’ fall from grace forecasts the firing of media personality Tucker Carlson in the wake of a lawsuit
that revealed how false faced he was. That’s how prescient “A Face in the Crowd” is.
That same instant old Punk started for home. He covered the entire journey of three days as only Indian blood could have covered it. The terror of a whole race drove him. He knew what it all meant. Défago had “seen the Wendigo.”
Fighting the apocalypse is a timeworn movie trope.
But in an era of environmental catastrophe,
some filmmakers are creating more down-to-earth heroes.
Despite my attitude during the shoot – which was a kind of strange, focused madness – nobody ever complained. They all knew it was dangerous and their reactions, for the most part, are real. I didn’t have to tell them to be afraid – they were terrified. It was actually the actors behind the wheel [of the trucks] most of the time. They were driving during the bridge crossing. If they had put their foot on the gas unintentionally, it really could have been a disaster. It was not as tightly-controlled as you would have to do a sequence like that today. There was a lot left to chance, and fortunately, nobody get injured at all.
Take a look at the life and career of actor Boris Karloff and Karloff’s participation
in the creation of The Screen Actor’s Guild in 1933.
These are the laughers that have stood the all-important test of time, from the brilliant silliness of of the Marx Brothers to the unrepentant juvenilia of Jim Carrey, the rapid-fire joke-a-thons of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker to the scabrous political satires of Armando Iannucci. These are the movies that inspired intense guffaws the moment they first hit theatres and are still doing so generations later, and which we’re fairly confident will keep cracking up audiences another century from now. Or maybe not. What we are sure of is that no matter your sense of humour – silly or sophisticated, light or dark, surreal or broad – you’ll find it represented here.
Fame, greed, capitalism, exploitation, war, racism, and of course a white picket fence;
all are pillars of the “American Dream.” One of the greatest lies ever sold.
These are their stories. Unspooling all July long at NITEHAWK, Brooklyn.
TV’s streaming model is broken. It’s also not going away.
For Hollywood, figuring that out will be a horror show.
Just like Cronenberg was saying almost 20 years earlier, Assayas is saying that our access to extreme violence at the click of a button is slowly rotting us away, and the access to this content is not coincidental, but rather something fought for and made accessible for the interests of those who can profit off it.