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.
On his official site, Steven Soderbergh discusses Josef von Sternberg:
A few words about Josef von Sternberg, who is worthy of attention for a number of reasons, first and foremost the string of insane and insanely beautiful movies he made with Marlene Dietrich between 1930 and 1935. That these movies got financed at all is still shocking to me, but I thank the cinema gods they did, because the results are unforgettable (the horses charging through the palace in THE SCARLETT EMPRESS? Literally illegal today, and that’s a good thing–it was clearly dangerous to animal and rider alike. But an awesome sequence). Of particular interest to me was the fact he often acted as his own cinematographer, which was so unusual at the time no one even knew to be pissed about it.
Watch a documentary on Martin Scorsese‘s debut Who’s That Knocking at My Door:
At Yahoo, Hugh Grant discusses the financial failure of Cloud Atlas:
”I thought [Cloud Atlas] was amazing. [The Wachowskis] are the bravest film-makers in the world, and I think it’s an amazing film…it’s frustrating to me. Every time I’ve done something outside the genre of light comedy, the film fails to find an audience at the box office. And, sadly, Cloud Atlas never really found the audience it deserved.”
At Film School Rejects, Scott Beggs wonders if we’re in a post-plot twist era:
Why do I need a spoiler warning when I’m about to argue that we’re currently enjoying an age without twists? Because I’ve been a ghost this whole time. But, seriously, that’s the kind of twist I want to examine for a moment. The Shyamalan Twist. The Turns-Out-It-Was-Man Twist. The kind of twist that makes you rethink everything that came before it. This is exactly the kind of plot twist that Gone Girl and a handful of other recent movies don’t have.