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.
Jafar Panahi‘s Golden Bear winner Taxi (our review) will hit theaters this fall via Kino Lorber.
Slate interviews Henry Hobson, who designed the Oscar title sequences this year:
With the Best Picture package, the goal is to tell a film’s story in a single frame. So last year it was the whip in the shape of a violin for 12 Years a Slave. This year it’s the American flag made of bullets tearing across the screen for American Sniper. And with Grand Budapest, it was the moustaches that really stood out for me. The time period, the characters they are portraying, it all comes together in the moustaches.
BFI‘s Jonathan Romney explores the subgenre of conceptual science-fiction:
The term ‘speculative fiction’ has sometimes been used in preference to plain old ‘science fiction’ by defenders of the genre who want it to be taken seriously – the usual term being too readily evocative, for non-adepts, of bug-eyed monsters and Leonard Nimoy’s ears.
‘Speculative fiction’ immediately suggests the preoccupation we usually associate with the form – speculation about the future, about new technologies ahead and their possible ramifications. But properly speculative fiction – which ideally, you’d expect most serious fiction to be – would also be speculative in the sense of being philosophical. Starting from scientific or technological premises, it would ask what it might mean to experience existence, or to be human (or alien, or an android), under certain physical or existential conditions.
Listen to Thom Yorke‘s score for the documentary UK Gold:
The Dissolve‘s Scott Tobias on the ruins and reckoning of 25th Hour:
It’s a fitting irony that two works of art strongly associated with September 11, 2001—Bruce Springsteen’s “My City Of Ruins” and Spike Lee’s 25th Hour—were conceived in 2000, then woven into the aftermath. Springsteen altered the lyrics to his song—which had originally referred to Asbury Park, New Jersey—but modified the phrasing for a performance at the America: A Tribute To Heroes benefit, where the lyrics “Rise up! Rise up!” turned into a clarion call; the track was later included on Springsteen’s 2002 album The Rising, which took 9/11 as its theme. Lee was in preproduction on 25th Hour, his devastating adaptation of David Benioff’s book, when 9/11 happened, and as one of the great New York filmmakers, he followed his instinct to include the disaster in a film that didn’t seem like it would accommodate it easily. Adding that particular spice to the dish threatened to overwhelm the film’s intimate tale of sin and regret, which largely stays within the narrow parameters of a convicted drug deader’s last night of freedom.