Dailies is a round-up of essential film writing, news bits, videos, 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.
Netflix’s Ted Sarandos talks with Deadline about the success of Beasts of No Nation:
It is worth sharing that this movie, in North America alone, has over 3 million views already. Which I think is a bigger audience than any specialty film could ever hope for in its first two weeks of release, and maybe for its entire run. And we’re just starting. We are just thrilled with the total audience reach of this film, not just in North America but the world. In the first week of release, Beasts Of No Nation was the most watched movie on Netflix, in every country we operate in. Even Japan, and I’m only calling out Japan because most specialty films don’t do very much of their box office outside the U.S. at all, let alone in Japan. Studios have trouble opening those movies in Japan. This was No. 1 in really diverse places in the world — Japan, Brazil, Mexico, places where these films typically never even open. It’s been incredibly gratifying to see these audiences respond to this film.
Watch a video essay on the power of props in cinema:
Friend of the site, Vuka Lungulov-Klotz, has Kickstarted a short film titled Still Liam:
Still Liam is a short film about Liam, a closeted trans man stuck inside a women’s body. The film attempts to express what it feels like to live life misrepresented by your own body. Throughout out it we will see Liam the way the world sees him, as a woman, but we will also get to experience him the way he experiences himself, as a man, and see how these two worlds interwind and collide with each other. There will be two actors playing the role of Liam, one female and the other male, in order to accurately portray Liam’s gender dysphoria and the changes he undergoes on a daily basis.
Watch a video essay on the first and final frames in a film:
Rolling Stone‘s David Ehrlich on why Ravenous is the greatest cannibal Western comedy ever made:
It may be hard to believe now, but once upon a time — call it the late Nineties — a major movie studio sunk $12 million into a comedic western about 19th century soldiers who believed eating other humans endow folks with superhuman strength and the ability to recover from life-threatening injuries. When shooting on the film crashed to a halt after three weeks of interference and executive micromanaging, one of the suits at at 20th Century Fox hit upon an idea: fire director Milcho Manchevski — the Macedonian art house sensation whose devastating wartime romance Before the Rain was nominated for an Oscar — and replace him with Raja Gosnell, whose only feature credit to date was Home Alone 3.