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.
10 years later, James Schamus and Ang Lee reflect on Brokeback Mountain at Variety:
You could sense the lack of excitement in Hollywood after the 847th trophy was picked up, and I could tell that a lot of folks felt there was a safe political narrative (with ‘Crash’). The day the Oscar ballots closed, I gathered everyone at the company in the Focus conference room, and gave a speech. I said, ‘Look we lost.’ I wanted everybody to be happy for the other guys. I was very proud of the Focus team and Ang that night. There was so much emotion and symbolism involved in that campaign.
Watch Jack Nicholson and Bob Rafelson discuss the diner scene in Five Easy Pieces, now on Criterion Blu-ray:
Playwright Annie Baker discusses her top 10 Criterion titles:
I’ve seen this movie more times than I can count. I think it’s the best movie about being a kid ever made. It’s a fairy tale and a nightmare and a totally believable portrayal of a Swedish family in Uppsala at the turn of the twentieth century, all at the same time. It has always reminded me of one of my favorite novels, Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. It’s also a movie about the weird magic of theater . . . Both the opening sequence and the reading from Strindberg at the end kill me. And the way Bergman shoots inanimate objects . . . The statues and the toy angels and the clocks and the puppets and the lamps . . . They’re all watching Alexander, the whole movie.
Watch a tribute to cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema:
At Medium, Pixar’s John Lasseter discusses technology and the evolution of storytelling:
It is such an exciting time to be a filmmaker.
I do not believe the notion that the cinema is dying or dead because it’s amazing what technology can do to the cinematic storytelling.
What’s great about film is it constantly reinvents itself. It started as a sheer novelty, those images moving on the screen.
Then it went and every step of the way a new technology started being added — sound, color.
What happens is the film grammar of storytelling evolves and changes as well. The technology goes directly with the evolution of the storytelling.
The way films look —it started with old 35mm motion picture cameras, to color with the three-strip Technicolor, to cameras that weighed hundreds of pounds and had to be on dollies and cranes — that was the film grammar of the day.