Read On is a regular feature in which The Dissolve’s staff recommends recent film pieces. Because there’s always someone writing something notable about the movies somewhere on the Internet.
Vulture’s Adam Sternbergh argues we should bring back the movie serial:
“Imagine if True Detective, which aired as eight one-hour episodes’ worth of cinema-quality entertainment, had instead been packaged as four two-hour installments of cinema-quality entertainment and released in theaters on the first Friday of every month. And imagine if, for the first three weeks after each release, the only place you could see the new installment was in a movie theater. After that, each installment would be released to VOD (Katzenberg’s proposed three-week theatrical window), so that people could watch it at home if they desired, in preparation for the release of the next installment in theaters. Sure, many people would wait the extra time just to watch each installment at home — just as some people DVRed True Detective and watched it at their leisure, or waited for the whole series to hit DVD or HBO Go.”
WonderingSound’s Glenn Kenny talks to Paul Thomas Anderson about the music of his films:
“For Paul Thomas Anderson, music is an almost constant part of his creative process, from the writing onward. I asked him the extent to which he has pieces of music in mind for a scene as he’s conceiving it. ‘It varies,’ he said. ‘Sometimes there’s a sense that there’s definitely going to be a song, and most of those sequences are pretty obvious. Like the firecracker scene in Boogie Nights: that’s gotta be built around something, because a character’s going to be singing along to it. So I had to know the rhythm of it early on. It’s often a matter of having a rhythm in my head that I carry around for a while. There was one that I sort of sang out to [composer] Jon Brion on Punch Drunk Love, a waltzy kind of pattern, in which I was timing something out and giving him a tempo. I’ll do that quite often.’”
The Guardian’s Luke Buckmaster interviews “the blind film critic”:
“The chatty American’s idea for his channel was borne out of frustration. As a film lover, he watched (for want of a better word) as film after film revealed its key plot moments using a visual language he has never been able to translate. A language that understandably left him hanging. ‘I thought it might be fun to review movies from a blind person’s perspective to show sighted people what that frustration is like,’ says Edison. ‘Some people say: “How can you even review a movie? You can’t even see it.”’ But a word to the wise, he says: ‘After 1928, they started putting dialogue in films. They’re not all silent any more! Before that, OK, yeah, I couldn’t review movies. But now I can and I love it.’”
Grantland’s Amos Barshad on how Paul Thomas Anderson ruined (and saved) Adam Sandler:
“But in the early 2000s, it was indubitably Anderson, not Ebert, speaking for the people. For a particular generation, Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore were VHS canon. The Waterboy and Big Daddy were second-wave hilarious. And the finely honed nostalgia of The Wedding Singer was the culmination. Robbie Hart — the movie’s slob with a heart of gold — was a thoroughly Sandler creation, only more so: more vulnerable, more loving, more deranged. Perhaps it was somewhere around the second stanza of Sandler’s seminal number ‘Kill Me, I Want to Die, Put a Bullet in My Head’ that PTA decided he might just have himself a leading man.”
Plus, the rest of today’s biz-ness:
-Andrew Garfield mgiht want to worry about his Spider-man gig
-The films of Force Majeure director Ruben Ostlund are getting a U.S. tour
-Warner Bros. is making a secret movie about Antarctica
-Stephen Colbert interviewed Smaug last night
-The Loft looks really creepy in this new trailer