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.
New York Film Festival have confirmed it’ll hold the world premiere of Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Inherent Vice, saying it’s “a wildly funny, deeply soulful, richly detailed, and altogether stunning movie.”
David Bordwell looks at Wes Anderson as an auteur:
“An auteur is not a brand,” argues Richard Brody. Not always, I’d suggest; but it can happen. And it’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Wes Anderson has found a way to make films that project a unique sensibility while also fitting fairly smoothly into the modern American industry. He has his detractors (“I detest these films,” a friend tells me), but there’s no arguing with his distinctiveness. The Grand Budapest Hotel is perhaps the most vivid example of Andersonian whimsy as signature style.
In any case, before summer’s end I want to look at the auteurish aspects of another Anderson film. Whether you admire him, abominate him, or have mixed feelings, I think that studying this film can show us some interesting things about authorship in today’s film culture.
At Vulture, Bilge Ebiri interviews Bernardo Bertolucci:
“New York has always embraced me,” Bernardo Bertolucci reflects. The 73-year-old director is on the phone from Rome, talking about a visit he made to the city in December 2010 for a comprehensive Museum of Modern Art retrospective of his work. It was there that Bertolucci emerged from what seemed to be years of seclusion and depression and allowed the world to see him as he was – a man confined to a wheelchair, the result of several operations to deal with years of crippling back pain. “That was the first time I appeared in a wheelchair in public,” he says.
Watch a video on the Coens‘ men of constant sorrow:
At RogerEbert.com, Scout Tafoya looks back at Michael Mann‘s The Insider:
When Marie Brenner published her article “The Man Who Knew Too Much”, in Vanity Fair in 1996, she had the American public’s full attention. Here was an insight into the mind of Jeffrey Wigand, the man whose life had become public property over the course of a few years. Why? Because he had done the unthinkable; he’d blown the whistle on big tobacco. CBS had come under fire for trying to air an interview with Wigand shot for the news program “60 Minutes” in which he revealed that Thomas Sandefur, the head of Brown & Williamson, one of the seven largest tobacco companies in the country, had lied under oath when he swore that nicotine was not addictive. B&W had fought back, trying to bring both Wigand and the network down and it almost worked. Reading Brenner’s article, you certainly get a sense of the tremendous weight on Wigand’s shoulders and the struggles of a few people to see that he was not buried by the scandal that B&W orchestrated. It seemed inevitable that someone would try to dramatize it. What was missing was the sense that anyone involved was particularly heroic, something writer Eric Roth and writer/director Michael Mann would change when they turned the story into the 1999 film “The Insider,” which turns 15 this year. They saw in the struggle a story of burdened men taking on a swaggering, unfeeling villain with nothing to lose. In essence they saw an archetypal conflict not unlike the kind that used to fill the movies of Howard Hawks.