June 18’s essential film writing / The Dissolve

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.

Vanity Fair has an excerpt from Caseen Gaines’ We Don’t Need Roads: The Making Of The Back To The Future Trilogy:
“However, even without trying, the filmmakers did make some accurate prognoses. For example, the residents of Hill Valley have thumb-pads that enable them to make quick payments, as Old Biff does after exiting the taxicab. In fact, thumbprint technology is completely integrated into Zemeckis and Gale’s future, with its uses including, but not limited to, the ability to unlock doors, just as it has become a popular means of punching in at workplace time clocks and unlocking telephones in recent years. ‘The big crime was going to be people’s fingers being cut off,’ the director told his team before filming. ‘People will cut off fingers, and they’ll run the tissue to the bank, the A.T.M., and get your money out.’ Much has been made of the film’s prophetic inclusion of videoconferencing, multi-channel television viewing, and flat screens. In Hill Valley’s future, cosmetic surgery has become easy and commonplace. Doc Brown’s face is made more youthful by visiting a ‘rejuvenation clinic,’ and careful observers will notice the presence of Bottoms Up, a breast-enhancement company, which advertises on the McFly television and can be seen in the background of some future scenes. There is instantaneous written correspondence, although the film inaccurately thought there would be an expansion of fax technology, which, of course, was superseded in the real world by e-mail and text messaging. In both the fictional and real 2015, televised advertising is virtually omniscient, like Goldie Wilson III’s hover conversion commercial that broadcasts over the square, and personally targeted ads are indeed part of everyday life now—just not often in the form of a large digital shark projecting from movie-theater marquees.”

Grantland’s Kevin Lincoln profiles Patrick Brice, who’s releasing The Overnight and Creep simultaneously:
“They shot [Creep] found-footage style in and around [Mark] Duplass’s vacation home so that they could do the entire movie just between the two of them. But it didn’t totally work — something was missing. Then Brice and Duplass showed the rough cut to Jason Blum, proprietor of Blumhouse Productions, which has become a major player in Hollywood with the success of Paranormal Activity and a coterie of cheaply made horror films. ‘He said, “You guys made a horror movie. Let’s make this more of a horror movie,” Brice says. ‘We knew we wanted to make something that was awkward, and we knew it was going to be in the found-footage genre, but I think we found an interesting tension — it’s a horror movie about uncomfortable silences.’ And that’s what stands out about Creep: the silences. Aaron is constantly waiting to respond to Josef and all of his strange requests, which grow stranger by the minute; in the hollow space of his trepidation, all of the viewer’s fears and anxieties grow unbridled. It’s the horror of unfamiliarity.”

Rolling Stone’s Tim Grierson talks to The Wolfpack’s Angulo brothers about how their lives have changed:
“For such sheltered young men, the last several months have been a rush for the Angulo brothers. Starting with the movie's premiere at Sundance in January, they've been adapting to the limelight, answering reporters' questions and doing photo shoots. Recently, they even appeared in a Vogue spread shot by fashion photographer Bruce Weber. ‘I said, “You can put them in Vogue, but they aren't wearing your guys' clothes. They're gonna wear what they're gonna wear,” Moselle says. “They're not models. What's so cool about them is that they create their own look. From the costumes to the props to the story, it's their thing.” As for Mukunda, he and his brothers have started a production company, Wolfpack Pictures, and he's currently finishing editing a project for Vice. He's excited for more people to see his story and proud of how the film turned out, even if it's meant that he and his brothers haven't been able to do many of their beloved reenactments lately. ‘We try when we can,’ he says. ‘We haven't had time because we're actually making movies for real now instead of re-creating others.’ ”

Little White Lies’ David Jenkins looks at cinema’s fascination with croquet:
“In his excellent, in-depth article Croquet in the Movies, James Hawkins attempts to frame the sport as a signifier of class and a byword for sophistication, particularly in the divergent social make-up of Americans and Europeans. ‘My working theory on the depiction of croquet on celluloid is connected with the class struggle. Americans aspire to social sophistication, and Brits aspire away from it. So John Prescott gets hounded for appearing middle class, but Brad Pitt is celebrated.’ This may explain why the sport is somewhat out of favour. It was used by the director Noah Baumbach in his film Margot at the Wedding, initially as a way to incite a dramatic family quarrel, but also a code for the family's bourgeois aspirations, firmly demarcating them from their gruff, lower-class neighbours. One interesting point which arises in Todd McCarthy's biography of Howard Hawks, The Grey Fox of Hollywood, is that its elite status derived from the simple fact that you needed to have a lot of money to be able to cultivate a piece of land so it was immaculately level and, thus, workable for the creation of a croquet court. A brief browse of celebrity lifestyle magazines suggest that most deluxe mansions now come with a croquet lawn as part of the package, an elegant extra trinket, a place to take tea, and not, we hazard, a place for a pursuit that Moss Hart described as, "a fascinating adult game, requiring skill, stamina and iron nerves.”

Plus, the rest of today’s biz-ness:

The Dissolve

June 18’s essential film writing

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