Dailies is a round-up of essential film writing, news bits, and other highlights from our colleagues across the Internet — and, occasionally, our own writers. If you’d like to submit a piece for consideration, get in touch with us in the comments below or on Twitter at @TheFilmStage.
Cinema Guild has released all of their supplemental essays online. Below is Cyril Neyrat on Leviathan:
The first impression upon encountering the visual and auditory splendor of Leviathan is of something radically new. After its initial screening in Locarno, many in the press said they had never seen anything like it before. Which is true, but also deceptive: a film like this rises up from the depths of cinema history, surfacing at the intersection of two traditions. Its greatness is due precisely to that rare achievement of coming to terms with a legacy through the most innovative of experiments. At its surface, Leviathan stuns us with the power of the totally unprecedented, but it moves us with the feeling of something familiar coming up from the depths of time.
Indie producer Ted Hope will launch a six-part video series titled Reinvent Hollywood on May 28th. See the intro video below:
At Film Comment, Donald Wilson writes on the great flood of new films:
In January, New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis wrote an article headlined “As Indies Explode, an Appeal for Sanity” bemoaning the increasing number of films hitting theaters, which her employer, due to a blanket policy, decrees should be reviewed. By her count, some 900 films received reviews in the paper in 2013, a jump of 75 from the year before (something like 7,500 more minutes of movie that had to be covered—over five straight days’ worth of films).
Watch a video essay connecting Shane Carruth‘s Upstream Color and Henry David Thoreau‘s Walden:
Sundance Institute has selected its 13 projects for its annual Directors and Screenwriters Labs.
The Dissolve‘s Matt Singer on why movies aren’t math:
What is the worst movie ever made? According to IMDb, the Internet’s most popular and trusted movie database, it’s Gunday, a recent and relatively obscure Bollywood movie starring Ranveer Singh, Arjun Kapoor, and Irrfan Khan. But on Rotten Tomatoes, Gunday actually has a perfect 100% approval rating from five critics, including Rachel Saltz of The New York Times, who calls it “preposterous… but rarely dull.” Nonetheless, Gunday currently ranks dead last among the IMDb’s 235,000 titles with a 1.4 rating. The next-closest stinker, the Paris Hilton vehicle The Hottie & The Nottie, holds a relatively robust 1.8. The despicable Ed, starring Friends’ Matt Le Blanc as a crummy minor leaguer whose career is inexplicably revitalized with the help of a baseball-playing monkey, somehow earned a fairly healthy 2.5.
Watch a video essay on the spirals and symmetry of Darren Aronofsky’s films:
The poster for Ron Mann‘s upcoming documentary Altman, designed by Midnight Marauder.
