Dailies is a round-up of essential film writing, news bits, and other highlights from across the Internet. If you’d like to submit a piece for consideration, get in touch with us in the comments below or on Twitter at @TheFilmStage.
Denis Villeneuve will begin production on the Amy Adams-led Story Of Your Life in May, Variety reports.
At The Dissolve, Scott Tobias revisits The Wolf of Wall Street one year later:
The Wolf Of Wall Street came out in 2013 amid a glut of year-end awards contenders, and it was harder to appreciate it then than now. What seemed at the time like a hard-to-digest three hours of nonstop indulgence and hedonism—comparisons made to Fellini Satyricon weren’t far off—now is revealed as a more deftly constructed film than many contended. To a certain degree, the film is a bunch of Belfort’s crazy anecdotes strung together, but Scorsese, Winter, and Schoonmaker consistently build bridges between one section of the film and the next. A story about Belfort and his bros violently shaking down his butler for throwing an orgy and stealing some money gearshifts smoothly into an explanation of the “rat holes” where they hide their cash, and their methods for tucking millions away in a Swiss bank. The Lemmon-714 story isn’t an isolated bit of business, either, but a multi-layered signal of the beginning of the end, like a 12-minute compression of the frantic final act of GoodFellas. It’s one of Scorsese’s richest efforts, and based on the four or five times I’ve seen it since, one of his most compulsively watchable.
At Forbes, Scott Mendelson on the lack of cultural footprint left by Avatar five years later:
Today is the fifth anniversary of the theatrical release of James Cameron’s 3D action spectacular. Avatar earned rave reviews, went on to become by-far the highest-grossing movie of all time, and won several Oscars. It absolutely almost immediately vanished from the popular zeitgeist leaving almost no pop culture impact to speak of. It did not inspire a passionate following, or a deluge of multimedia spin-offs that has kept the brand alive over the last five years. Few today will even admit to liking it, and its overall effect on the culture at large is basically non-existent. It came, it crushed all long-term box office records, and it vanished almost without a trace.
Watch a one-hour conversation with Bong Joon-ho on Snowpiercer:
At Playboy, Matt Patches searches for Martin Brest:
Gone gone. A decade without a detectable mention. No brief respite-to-comeback arc, no hired-gun job to show off his talents, no anniversary Q&As to bask in the glow of past successes, no “Produced By” credits to keep his name in front-end credits, no prestige television work. Despite earning the trust of Murphy, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Brad Pitt, and Ben Affleck, the already-intermittent director never bounced back. Brest went “full Salinger” — a task that, in the info-heavy age of the Internet, is on par with Buddhist vows of silence. The man who nuanced action-comedy for the modern age ceased making movies.
At The Talkhouse, Zach Clark (White Reindeer) discusses Big Eyes:
All art is a put-on. The difference between someone who paints the walls of their living room red and someone who paints a large canvas the exact same color and hangs it in a gallery is that the second person has the audacity to call himself an “artist.” That’s basically all it takes. It’s art because the artist says it is, and all artists are self-appointed. Onto this already slippery slope walk Walter and Margaret Keane, the husband and wife who popularized the mass production of paintings, which Margaret executed and Walter claimed as his own. The artistic merits of the Keanes’ big-eyed waif paintings are debatable in and of themselves, initially presented as art before they were written off as kitsch and then reappraised as kitschy art, or arty kitsch. Oh, postmodernism! I’ve had multiple Keanes hanging in my apartments over the years — which is more than I can say about Picasso, or Van Gogh, or really any other artist. And I’ve been reading about Big Eyes, Tim Burton’s biopic of the Keane’s marriage and legal battles, for as long as news has been published about it. And during that time, I’ve been cautiously curtailing my optimism.