haywire

Dailies is a round-up of essential film writing, news bits, videos, 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.

Vulture‘s Bilge Ebiri on the 25 best cold-open action scenes in history:

The idea of starting a movie with an action scene right off the bat was not so common once upon a time; it’s been perfected by the Bond movies over the years, though its roots reach far earlier than that. Along the way, with the popularity of Bond, as well as Star Wars and Indiana Jones, these opening action scenes – sometimes pre-credits, sometimes post-, sometimes with a bit of context, sometimes with pretty much none — have become practically de rigueur among a certain type of film. So we decided to look back at this trend via the most notable opening action scenes from over the years. Somehow we did it while limiting ourselves to just three Bond entries.

Watch Kiva Reardon‘s video essay on Gina Carano and Michael Fassbender‘s fight scene in Haywire:

RogerEbert.com‘s Max Winter on the poetic logic of David Lynch‘s Mulholland Dr.:

Of all the criticisms that are leveled at David Lynch, perhaps the most persistent is that you simply can’t “get” his movies, that there’s no coherent through-line, that each scene out-“WTF’s” the other. This is true, to a certain extent: there is no American director more in touch with the human subconscious than Lynch, no one who reaches more deeply into the imagination for imagery and symbology. Wacky he is, in spades. And “Mulholland Dr.,” a discombobulating tale of two actresses searching for their identities in different ways in Hollywood, newly released in Blu-ray by the Criterion Collection, does little to chip away at this reputation. And yet, times two: how firmly grounded is this reputation? And, why is it that we say we can’t “understand” his work?

Watch a 30-minute talk with Sicario editor Joe Walker:



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