Orson Welles’ Unfinished Masterpiece, Fading to White, Cynical Journalism, and More

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Vanity Fair‘s Josh Karp on the epic story of Orson Welles‘ unfinished masterpiece:

The Other Side of the Wind was going to be Orson Welles’s comeback, perhaps even topping Citizen Kane—but to this day, it remains unfinished (though that may change soon). In an adaptation from a new book about the 45-year struggle to make the film, Josh Karp reveals why Welles’s last movie is the stuff of legend.

Watch a video montage on films that fade to white:

Flavorwire‘s Jason Bailey asks when film got so cynical about journalism:

The theatrical release of Rupert Goold’s True Story this Friday was set quite some time ago, announced even before the film’s premiere at the Sundance Film Festival back in January, so its timeliness is coincidental, but still remarkable. Based on the memoir of the same name, it tells the story of how New York Times reporter Mike Finkel (Jonah Hill) lost his job and credibility with a poorly reported cover story on child slavery on the Ivory Coast, and made an unlikely comeback by stumbling into the story of murderer Christian Longo (James Franco), who used Finkel’s name as an alias while on the run. It hits theaters in the midst of discussion and dissemination of the Columbia School of Journalism’s blistering review of Rolling Stone’s story “A Rape on Campus,” aptly described therein as “another shock to journalism’s credibility.” And True Story fits well within the current pattern of how movies portray that once lionized, now battered profession.

Movie Mezzanine‘s Noel Murray on the lure of the pan:

Within minutes of The Cobbler’s debut at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall, word started spreading that the movie could be an all-timer: a film so foul that it belongs in its own special category of crappy. By the time Thomas McCarthy’s latest feature made it to theaters and VOD this past March, it had become a perverse kind of essential viewing, and the subject of gobsmacked reviews and thinkpieces. Whenever critics and cinephiles stumble across a Cobbler-level catastrophe, they can follow one of two paths. One is to go the way of the doomsayer, making it his/her mission to tell everyone possible that this movie is unclean. The other way is to be more like the college roommate who passes a carton of sour milk around the apartment and says, “This is disgusting. Smell it.”

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