(cache)Film School Rejects

American Gods is finally coming to television. Published in 2001, the book by Neil Gaiman is more than cinematic enough to warrant an adaptation, but it’s never made it to the screen until now.

And thank God for that.

Had it been made into a movie, the 700-odd page book would have had to be hacked up and reworked to fit into two hours. The atmosphere might have survived, but the story would have suffered. If it had been picked up by network television it might have had the time, but it would have lost a lot to the censors. Neil Gaiman writes children’s books, it’s true, but American Gods is not one of them.

If the first four episodes released to critics are anything to go on (and they ought to be, as they’re fully half the season), Starz is really giving the book the adaptation it deserves. The season’s eight 1-hour episodes are set to cover, according to Neil Gaiman, the first third of the plot. But the resulting pace is far from slow, instead giving the action room to play out as it should. There are no corners cut, no scenes or characters combined for the sake of efficiency.

And safe from the censorship rules of non-premium TV, it’s free to be exactly as bloody and profane and sexually charged as it ought to be.

This is a real boon for Executive Producer and Co-Showrunner Bryan Fuller, creator of NBC’s critically-acclaimed but ultimately cancelled Hannibal. (And if you ever want to read about Hannibal, I’m your man). Airing as part of the summer Thursday Night Lineup, Fuller’s previous show suffered from battles with the network and low ratings. And while it pushed the envelope as far as it could, it came up against obvious censorship walls.

American Gods, to put it simply, is Bryan Fuller unleashed. It’s not hard to imagine it as what Hannibal might have been, free from network constrictions. This is due in large part to the very similar atmosphere: the cast and production credits are a who’s who of Hannibal veterans.

The music in particular is like an old friend. Composed and supervised by Hannibal’s Brian Reitzell, it dances across the line between noise and music in a wonderfully effective way. It often lingers in the background as little more than a droning, coming forward out of nowhere every now and again with a discernible melody, its spareness making it all the more intense. After the melody fades, you find yourself listening more closely to the muted, hidden tones that are always present and letting on more than you know.

And then there’s the violence. Make no mistake — American Gods is bloody. (If you have made the mistake, the very first scene will set you straight). But while the violence is rampant, it’s delightfully stylized. When the blood flows, it’s not quite the consistency or color of blood. It’s a more vibrant red, almost pink. And it’s thinner, not so much flowing as splashing. It is, in a word, beautiful.

But while the violence is certainly elevated, the main reason it’s so striking is that the show as a whole is stunning to look at. The clouds alone are a feat, amassing as a constant reminder of the coming storm. They’re a lovely, concise demonstration of the show’s rare opportunity to be as surreal as it wants while remaining “realistic.”

Or at least realistic in a sense. American Gods takes place in our world — it’s just governed by laws we haven’t paid attention to before. And the surreal realism of the visuals intentionally destabilizes us and blurs our understanding of what we’re seeing. One scene in particular in episode 2 is a gorgeous, rolling transition between landscapes that both challenges and welcomes the viewer to accept it as “real.”

Another thing that’s handled well is the issue of race. It’s far from swept under the rug in the book, of course — the horrors of slavery are discussed frankly, and while Shadow is unsure of his heritage, he knows for certain that he’s not white.

But the show goes deeper. It could have stopped simply with representation: putting together a diverse cast of characters, knowingly naming its setting “America,” and calling it a day. Instead, these characters talk about the implications of their being together. Rather than declare itself colorblind (which might have been a tempting option), the show works the matter of race into the fabric of the script.

It doesn’t overdo it, but neither does it shy away. It’s a very good balance.

Ian McShane (Mr. Wednesday), Ricky Whittle (Shadow Moon)

The casting is superb, as well.

When I read American Gods years ago, I cast Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as Shadow and Tom Waits as Wednesday. They played the entire book out in my mind’s eye, and they both did a stellar job, Tom Waits in particular. It’s a real testament to Ian McShane, then, that he’s completely obliterated poor Mr. Waits and claimed the role for himself in the recesses of my brain.

He is Wednesday.

And while I love The Rock, I’m glad I’m watching Ricky Whittle instead. He can rage with the best of them, but what’s most striking is his subtlety, his silences when the absurdity gets to be too much.

(Should we worry that the two stars of American Gods are actually English? Considering the author of the book is, too, we can probably let it slide).

While the two leads are excellent, it’s the supporting gods who really come to life. And while they stay remarkably true to the book, they’ve been retouched just enough to come across as fresh. Orlando Jones as Mr. Nancy, in particular, is a little less laid back, a little angrier about race relations in America.

Technical Boy (Bruce Langley) has gotten the most serious update, and it’s pitch perfect. When American Gods was published in 2001, the internet was a completely different animal. It was the domain of the fedora wearers and basement dwellers in leetspeak t-shirts. Technical understanding was achingly uncool, the domain of a select un-elite.

But that was 16 years ago. Since then, the internet has become integral to our lives and the birthright of, well, anyone born since American Gods was published. For the young, technical fluency isn’t a curse — it’s a given. Any social ineptitude comes from the confidence of youth, not the awkwardness of geekdom. Technical Boy has clearly been written by someone who understands this difference, and he comes across as blessedly up-to-date, instead of the old-fashioned “hacker” or off-the-mark Sheldon Cooper he could have been.

It’s the sign of a sure and modern hand behind the show, and it’s very reassuring.

By the same token, however, Media (Gillian Anderson) telling Shadow that she is the future, while embodying Lucille Ball in a series of flat screen TVs, feels just a smidge out of date. People are still consuming media, sure, but the youth of today are torrenting it or streaming it with their parents’ cable logins, not buying expensive TVs. And they’re sure as hell not watching I Love Lucy.

Oh well. At least Anderson is excellent.

Ricky Whittle (Shadow Moon), Ian McShane (Mr Wednesday)

All in all, American Gods is in beyond capable hands. It’s visually stunning, superbly written and performed, and remarkably true to the source. If you haven’t read the book, please still watch it. You can share in Shadow’s disorientation and wonder as the world opens up around you and you see things as they really are.

And then you should read the book anyway.

American Gods premiers in the US this Sunday, April 30th, at 9 pm. You can watch it on television on Starz or download the Starz app to stream it online. Outside the US it will be available for streaming on Monday, May 1st, through Amazon Prime.

American Gods: What to Expect was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

04/26/17--10:05: Why Studios Need To Get Back In Touch With What Made Them In The First Place

The Fault Is Not In Our Stars, But In Ourselves.

I recently had a discussion with a friend, on a subject discussed quite a bit in recent years among cinephiles or movie geeks or whatever we people who prefer to spend our time in dark rooms watching shadows flicker on screens prefer to call ourselves. My friend, with the heavy sigh of the no longer young, asked “What the hell happened to movie stars?” and proceeded to run down a number of current Hollywood A-listers. I mostly listened and made occasional non-verbal “I’m listening” noises, because I didn’t agree but also didn’t have a fully-formed rebuttal at hand. Later, I remembered there was a movie with Tom Hanks, Emma Watson, and John Boyega coming out in a few days, about which I’d seen a total of three ads, and which I had to Google just now to remember it was called The Circle. At that point, an idea began to take shape: it’s not the stars’ fault, it’s the studios’.

Almost as soon as there was cinema, there were stars. In 1895, the Biograph Company was founded. The first American film studio, it had a two decade run of success, mostly producing short films. They had a policy of not crediting actors, lest those actors become so famous that they could demand extra wages, but this policy was thwarted through the popularity of Florence Lawrence, known initially only as the Biograph Girl, but whose charismatic screen presence nonetheless made her a star, anonymous to the public but still possessed of sufficient leverage to demand double Biograph’s standard pay. When her contract with Biograph expired, Carl Laemmle signed Lawrence to his new company (which would eventually become Universal Pictures) and staged a publicity stunt whose end result was the public revelation of Lawrence’s name, at a time when movie actors not also famous on the stage had no names.

In the following decades, movie studios adopted the practice of creating stars, taking raw talents, pretty faces, and nimble dancers and putting them through what amounted to movie star finishing school, often changing their names, and then signing them to exclusive contracts and casting them in carefully selected roles. (Some parts of this process were skipped in some cases, but the end result was the same: a studio-molded star.) The publicity departments of studios then carefully managed the images of their stars, making sure no inconvenient stories about this one being gay or that one being overly fond of heroin could take too firm a hold. This arrangement being overly favorable to the studios at the expense of actors’ creative and personal freedom, it eventually broke down, bringing an end to the classical era of the Hollywood studio system. (There’s a parallel story here about how this whole thing was only possible due to the economic state of the U.S. for these decades, better told by a better-read person than me; I can give you aesthetics, not so much academics.)

This is, to keep from getting lost down the various detours that presented themselves in the above historical recap, a story about marketing. The beginning, in the middle of the relative anarchy of 1970s Hollywood, of the blockbuster era proved to be the end of centering marketing solely around the stars. Norma Desmond’s line in Sunset Boulevard, “We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces!” was thirty years ahead of its time; the true devaluation of faces in the American cinema began with the elevation of special effects maximalism, which in another thirty years would fully become the dominant mode in commercial American filmmaking: from Avatar on, special effects, now made almost entirely in computers, had become the foundation of Hollywood movies, and the main focus of marketing.

Movie stars do still exist. One need only look to Bollywood, where the Three Khans era, commenced in the early 1990s, still flourishes. Every (well, seemingly every) Diwali, Shah Rukh Khan rules the box office. Every (again, seemingly ever) Eid, Salman Khan reigns. Whenever Aamir Khan is done being a perfectionist, his latest comes out and similarly dominates. The leading actresses need only first names: Aishwarya, Madhuri, Rani, Kareena (or Bebo), Priyanka, Deepika. Even there, as Bollywood studios look to expand their presence in the global market, and find their aesthetic and creative process drifting toward the Hollywood-set norm, the industry is facing a self-imposed star drought: the Three Khans are all in their 50s, but no young ascendants appear fully ready to take their place.

This, if you’ll hold my beer while I risk being reductive, is entirely the studios’ fault. The process of harnessing actors’ charisma and building a sustainable process by which casual moviegoers will see an ad and say “ah, there’s a new [name of actor] movie coming out this weekend, let’s go see it!” takes not only a great deal of effort and resources on the part of studios, it requires an infrastructure that simply no longer exists. While there’s no way to march back through the looking glass and re-establish the classical Hollywood system, because the world is simply not the same place it was sixty years ago, it would behoove the industry as a whole to figure out a way to better market their creative talent. It’s not enough to simply say, “here is an actor who was in another movie you liked.” The thing is to make the prospective audience care.

I propose what I admit might be a dumb idea, one borrowed from professional soccer: youth academies for actors, underwritten by the major studios, in which promising talents learn how to be stars. The reason this might be a dumb idea is that such a system could easily, through inertia, strip the students of their idiosyncrasies, and thereby diminish the brightness with which they shine. But, if it worked, it would be a way to raise interest in new faces. By this or whatever means, movie studios need to figure out some way to re-learn how to sell their stars. The whole reason we in the audience love them is, while they may be prettier, cooler, and more talented than we are, there still remains a human connection between us. Spectacle is fine. Humanity is what sustains art.

Why Studios Need To Get Back In Touch With What Made Them In The First Place was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

04/26/17--10:08: Forever and Ever and Ever: Uncanny Doubles in ‘The Shining’

Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 masterpiece is full of doubles, doppelgängers, and alter-egos.

Mirrors, ghosts, doppelgängers, reflective surfaces, repetitions, and perfectly symmetrical frames…these are just a few cinematic devices which Stanley Kubrick uses to create an uncanny atmosphere in his 1980 adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining. Sigmund Freud defines the term “uncanny” in his essay “‘The Uncanny’” as something which is familiar yet somehow frightening. The Shining tells the story of a family of three — Jack (Jack Nicholson), Danny (Danny Lloyd), and Wendy (Shelley Duvall) — whose lives are terrifyingly disrupted when they move into the Overlook Hotel for the winter. Family is, by definition, the most familial subject matter, and therefore it is all the more terrifying when one’s family members somehow seem different. The Shining is filled with uncanny doubles, where those who look or act familiar are mysteriously different, which provoke feelings of terror. Kubrick creates this uncanny atmosphere by meticulously crafting a story-world filled with doubles, doppelgängers, alter-egos, and mirrors.

Cinema is the perfect medium for dealing with themes of doubles and doppelgängers. First of all, it is a visual medium involving moving images, which allows for a unique visualization of its subject matter. Audiences can see, rather than just imagine, what characters, events, and places look like. Secondly, film cameras (or digital cameras) pick up immense amounts of detail, therefore filmmakers can insert small changes across shots that are just noticeable enough to be off-putting. Films are typically 90–120 minutes long — short enough that audiences are likely to notice these small changes, but long enough that audiences may not be able to tell exactly what has changed. Most importantly, film itself is a double of the world it represents onscreen. The actors appearing onscreen are doubles of their real-world equivalents. Audiences may sometimes get an uncanny feeling while watching films, because the actors are not real people present in the theater, but are merely their photographic doubles. This adds another layer of doubling to films which already deal with doubles and doppelgängers, such as The Shining.

Freud also notes that with doubling “there is a dividing, and interchanging of the self,” and this is especially true with actors portraying characters onscreen. They become another person — a double of themselves — when they act in films. One may recognize the actor onscreen, but the actor is not themself, because they are embodying a character, possibly with opposing traits to their public persona. This can be uncanny or jarring for audiences, because the actor may seem familiar, but they are somehow different since they are embodying someone else.

Doubling is also essential to Freud’s concept of the uncanny. Freud notes that characters in fiction are considered doubles when they are identical in appearance, and this doubling also frequently involves characters sharing mental processes — such as thoughts, emotions, and experiences — telepathically or otherwise. Characters’ identities come into question when they confront their doubles, and they may end up taking on their doubles’ identity, according to Freud’s observations. Freud also believes that uncanny feelings are aroused by constant recurrences of the same thing — for example, a repeated phrase (“all work and no play…”) — when the same character traits occur in multiple people, or when the same crimes are committed across multiple generations. Repetitions are especially uncanny in that the same situation may occur, but with certain details changed — the situation is familiar, but with enough differences to produce a feeling of fear or uncertainty.

Freud notes that the uncanny is frequently experienced in relation to death, dead bodies, and the return of the dead — for example, ghosts and spirits. The Shining is essentially a ghost story. Freud writes that ghosts and spirits produce an uncanny feeling because they are the return of what is thought to be dead and gone. Ghosts are also doubles of people who were once living. In The Shining, ghosts appear frequently and provoke uncanny feelings, especially because one cannot tell who is alive and who is dead in this film. At various points, each member of the Torrance family has an uncanny experience with ghosts.

At the beginning of the film, hotel manager Stuart Ullman (Barry Nelson) recounts the story of how the Overlook Hotel’s ex-caretaker, Charles Grady, murdered his wife and two daughters before committing suicide. It can then be concluded that when Danny has visions of two little girls in blue dresses, they are the ghosts of the Grady sisters (the beautiful and brilliant Lisa and Louise Burns). They are the ghosts who appear most frequently in The Shining: first when Danny has a vision in the bathroom while brushing his teeth, then when he plays darts in the Overlook’s “games room,” and later when he rides his tricycle through the hotel. These ghosts are particularly uncanny because they are not only doubles of their past (living) selves, but they are identical twins — doubles of each other. Margot Blankier writes in The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies that the uncanny visual iconography of the film is heightened by the shots of the twins, who appear to be perfect doubles of each other, despite hotel manager Stuart Ullman’s previous claim that they were two years apart.

The Grady sisters’ most terrifying appearance is when Danny encounters them standing at the end of the hotel corridor while he sits on his tricycle. Their ghostly voices echo as they invite Danny to “come play with us… forever and ever and ever…” and Danny has visions of their bloody bodies lying in the hallway where they currently stand. This sequence portrays images of the ghostly twins, as well as images of their violent and brutal deaths. The dualities of living/dead, ghosts/girls, and sister 1/sister 2 are so uncanny that all Danny can do is cover his eyes with his hands.

Blankier also writes that doubles come in the form of alter-egos in The Shining. Jack’s alter-ego(s) are ghostly and violent, whereas Danny’s protect him by giving him knowledge about unpleasant aspects or events in his life. Wendy tells the doctor in Colorado that Danny started talking to his imaginary friend “Tony” three years prior, when Jack accidentally dislocated Danny’s shoulder. Tony’s appearance is signaled onscreen by Danny speaking in a different, more high-pitched voice, and wagging his index figure in time with his speech. Tony is Danny’s double, and represents Freud’s “division of the self.”

Tony is particularly uncanny because he provides Danny with information which, by all natural laws, he has no way of knowing. For example, when Danny brushes his teeth in the Colorado apartment, Tony informs him that Jack has gotten the job at the Overlook and prompts visions of violent images in Danny’s mind — such as shots of the Grady twins, and blood rushing down the elevator corridor of the hotel. These images are so terrifying and inexplicable that Danny passes out in fear. Blankier writes that Danny surrenders to the hallucinatory demands of his double, who inserts horrifying images into his head. The framing of the scene portrays Danny looking at himself in the mirror, having a conversation with Tony, and alternating between his two voices. The way Kubrick frames Danny in the mirror highlights the fact that Tony is Danny’s double — he is the inverse image of Danny. Tony is Danny, but slightly altered and supernatural, creating an uncanny feeling.

Danny’s alter-ego is part of him, but Jack’s is externalized and ghostly. Blankier notes that Jack, similar to Danny, also experiences a dual nature within himself — he struggles between his murderous impulses and being a loving, supportive father and husband. Blankier also points out that Danny and Jack form an opposing pair in how they deal with the Overlook’s monstrous influence. Jack surrenders to the ghostly forces of the Overlook, but Danny displays incredible strength when he breaks free from the Overlook’s power and escapes with Wendy.

Blankier posits that Jack has more than one double: he has Lloyd the bartender (Joe Turkel) — his “evil guardian” — and Delbert Grady (Philip Stone), his alter-ego from the past. Thomas Allan Nelson writes in his book Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist’s Maze that Kubrick was fascinated by the idea that monsters exist in the shadow of one’s self, and he frequently used the device of physical and psychological doubles to display this. Once Jack is in the Overlook, it seems his shadow self starts to take over, represented by a number of uncanny doubles. Nelson notes that even Jack’s doubles seem to have doubles — Delbert Grady, the waiter/butler, is different from Charles Grady, the previous caretaker Ullman previously mentioned. There are two Grady sisters, and seemingly two Grady fathers — both of which are Jack’s doubles/alter-egos.

Jack’s doubles are uncanny because they appear onscreen despite having died many years ago. The Torrance’s are supposed to be the only people in the hotel, yet Lloyd and Grady appear, as well as a stream of party guests in the Gold Ballroom. Jack’s ghostly doubles are not identical to him in appearance, although they are similar — Lloyd wears a maroon jacket similar to Jack’s, and this costume choice, as well as the editing of the scene, gives the appearance that they are doubles. There are mirrors behind the bar in the Gold Room, and the scene is edited using shot-reverse-shot, making it look as though Jack is talking into a mirror. Later in the film when Jack encounters Delbert Grady, the men have a conversation in a striking red bathroom, which is edited in a very similar way.

Nelson writes that Grady is a more sinister version of Lloyd, because while they are similar in that they are both ghostly employees of the Overlook, Grady is sinister and violent, having “corrected” (murdered) his wife and children. The editing and set design of the red bathroom create a sense of the uncanny. Philip Kuberski notes in his article “Plumbing the Abyss: Stanley Kubrick’s Bathrooms” (yes, really) that Jack’s eyes frequently dart towards the long mirrors running along the side of the red bathroom, furthering the appearance that he is talking to himself. It is unnerving when Grady informs Jack that he has “always been” in the hotel, and claims that Jack has always been there, too — this recalls Jack’s earlier statement that he felt a strong sense of deja vu when he first entered the Overlook. This also recalls Freud’s statement that the uncanny includes repetitions of past crimes, names, and faces across generations with only slight changes.

Nelson notes that the film contains four bathrooms, each of which involve scenes of uncanny doubling. The bathroom at the Torrance’s Colorado apartment is where Danny speaks to Tony in the mirror, and the red bathroom is where Jack has his chilling conversation with Grady. There is also the bathroom in the Torrance’s Overlook apartment, which Jack first describes as “homey,” then later breaks into using an axe while trying to kill Danny and Wendy (“Heeeere’s Johnny!”). Perhaps the most uncanny location in the entire film is the green bathroom in room 237, where Jack and Danny each encounter the same ghostly and terrifying woman. Danny’s visit to room 237 is not visualized, but he tells Wendy he was strangled by a “crazy woman,” and there are bruises on his neck. Jack goes into the room to investigate, and when he approaches the bathroom, a nude young woman appears from behind the shower curtain. She approaches Jack seductively and he embraces her, but moments later he looks at the mirror behind her and she is actually a decomposing old woman.

This is another instance of ghostly doubling: there are two versions of the same woman in the bathroom, who is likely the ghost of someone who died in the Overlook. The doubling in this scene is once again highlighted by a mirror — Jack could not see the ghost’s alternate identity until he looked in the mirror. The ghosts in The Shining are uncanny in themselves, but even more terrifying due to the fact that they are frequently doubled: there are two Grady sisters, Delbert is a more menacing version of Lloyd, and the woman in room 237 has two different bodies.

Robert Kolker writes that the film also features many instances of symmetrical framing. He notes that each side of the frame is doubled and perfectly composed, and therefore any horrific event happening within the frame seems even more out of place and strange. The symmetrical shots are almost too perfect, which can be uncanny and off-putting in itself. Kolker cites the red bathroom as an example of a symmetrically framed scene, with its rows of white urinals and sinks lining either side of the wall and the long mirrors running along the wall. The bathroom is symmetrical, yet Jack and Grady discuss violent, murderous plans in the middle of the room, throwing the symmetry off balance and into uncanny space.

The same effect appears in Dick Hallorann’s (Scatman Crothers) Florida bedroom: the room is symmetrical with two portraits of nude women on either side of the room, and one lamp on either side of the television. Within this carefully composed image, Hallorann lies in bed and receives telepathic information from Danny, indicating that the Torrance’s are in terrible trouble. The perfectly composed image is thrown off balance, as something sinister and supernatural is taking place within it.

I have outlined a number of instances of doubling within The Shining, but I am sure that if one kept looking, there are even more examples. Not to mention, doubling is a persistent theme across Kubrick’s filmography — symmetry, doubles, and mirrors can be found in A Clockwork Orange, Eyes Wide Shut, Barry Lyndon, and Full Metal Jacket. Kubrick had a masterful understanding of how to utilize cinematic techniques to create meticulous images and terrifying atmospheres, particularly pertaining to the subject of doubles. The final image of The Shining shows Jack smiling out from a photograph taken in 1921 — one cannot be sure whether this is Jack himself, or one of his uncanny and ghostly doubles. There are no stable conclusions about the Overlook, but one thing is certain — doubles and doppelgängers are things of terror, as Freud once wrote.

Forever and Ever and Ever: Uncanny Doubles in ‘The Shining’ was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

04/26/17--10:09: Interview: ‘Buster’s Mal Heart’ Knows Which Finger We Give to Systems of Control

We chat with Sarah Adina Smith, writer and director, about the magic available to us today and “fortune cookie” wisdom.

The Sword of Damocles is an apology for those who rule us in the systems of control. Time is a butcher’s chop and existence is its block. What are we doing?!

The Shallow Pocket Project is going to Tribeca (in spirit)! We’ll be chatting with several independent filmmakers making the trek to New York for this year’s film festival. Stay tuned! Check out our last Tribeca chat with Jamie M. Dagg (Director of ‘Sweet Virginia’). Special thanks, as always, to In The Mouth of Dorkness, Brad Gullickson, and Darren Smith.

Sarah Adina Smith is a fucking brilliant madwoman. It hurt my brain talking with her. Honest to goodness, I am not being hyperbolic. She is so effortlessly purposeful and creative in her casual discussion of philosophy that it made me wish I was smarter. I’m not insecure. I’m very smart. I just want you to understand she radiates like a burning bush. She is a filmmaking prophet, exclaiming the nature of the universe.

Her latest film, Buster’s Mal Heart, starring Rami Malek and DJ Qualls, debuted last September at the Toronto International Film Festival. It screens today at Tribeca. And, on Friday, it gets a theatrical release. This is how she describes the movie:

“It’s a story of a spiritual fission catalyzed by a cry against the gods… a cry so loud that the fabric of spacetime caught on fucking fire. It’s a meditation on individual responsbility in a mechanistic universe. Whose fault is it that Jonah was born with a malformed heart? Who should stand trial, the insane man or the universe that gave birth to him?

This is from her director’s note in the press kit. Typically, that’s where a director puts out a brief essay that spits lightning through the spirit of their movie. It’s their pitch, a product designed to draw attention. Right? Okay. Well, this is just how Smith talks. She pours philosophy and poetry like water and all the while teases herself for her “fortune cookie wisdom”. She’s a gifted truth-teller, y’all.

What do you see? The Inversion is coming. God dammit. Do you hear me? The Inversion is coming!

“You are your own rad fucking camera.” — Sarah Adina Smith

The Midnight Swim (streaming on Netflix) is her first film, with a similar story wrapped up in its own cosmological experience. There, she explores motherhood and sisterhood as three half-sisters come together to mourn the passing of their mother, who died seeking the bottom of a lake known to be bottomless. If Smith has a singular idea she’s continuing to explore, it’s that there is a system to the universe. The Midnight Swim is about discovering that through motherhood and embracing a renewed turn in the machine. On the other end, Buster’s Mal Heart is about giving a giant middle finger to the machine. Because who asked to be born?

She’s playing with religion, science fiction, metaphysics, conspiracy theories, fantasy, and hardcore philosophy. She does an excellent job weaving all these styles of narrative and different tropes together into something that’s digestible if you’ll only engage and think about what you’re seeing. More than anything, that’s the impression I got from our conversation. She wants you to engage. The film isn’t some mystical tome of hippy-dippy nonsense read out in a breathless monotone like monks chanting on a sweltering day. Yes, Jonah (Rami Malek) has been torn, metaphysically, into two men. But, that man is struggling against things to which we can all relate.

He’s grinding, endlessly and without progress, for money in a service industry job. He, his wife, and young daughter live in his in-law’s house. He spends his nights at the hotel as a concierge and his days watching his daughter. Y’all, I’ve had that schedule. That shit is hard. Real hard. At one point, Jonah tells The Last Free Man (DJ Qualls) that he just wants to get some “traction.” And it’s the way he says “traction” that has me connect with it. Low, growly, as though a base, instinctive need had gone unsatisfied. Traction. I just need to get some traction.

Money is undeniably a system of control the man puts over you. It’s designed that way. The Last Free Man thinks so, at least. You grind and grind and grind and at the end of the grind you get a little coin. That coin isn’t enough to live off of, but it’s enough to make you think you could if only you could get just one more coin. And so you grind some more. Until tragedy. Then what?

A Sarah Adina Smith original, drawn during our interview.

“You just have to be a voyeur.” — Sarah Adina Smith

In this framework, Smith had this idea that she “wanted to stretch the soul as far as it will go.” I like the idea of that phrase. What does it mean to stretch a soul? And what could cleave one? We asked her about the creative inspirations for Buster’s. Clearly not one to prevaricate, she did some truth-telling. She shared she used to indulge in marijuana, but she reached a point where even a small amount was enough to send her into an uncomfortable psychological place which she did not care to visit. So, she swore it off. Now, you or I might just move on to other introspective efforts. Not Smith. She is engaged, all engines full steam ahead, y’all. She sought out ayuhuasca.

For those who don’t know, that’s a brew made out of a vine with psychedelic properties. The indigenous people in the Amazon basin consider it spiritual medicine. Basically, the idea is to take a draft and allow a spiritual awakening to the nature of the universe and your role in it to unfold.

From that trip, she conceived the idea of a man whose soul was stretched to the extreme in grief and outrage at the uncaring nature of the gods. Such as they may be. Why does grief stretch the soul? There is a fundamental friction to the universe. And that fault line grinds hard. Follow me on this. Existence implies and requires non-existence. Basically, memento mori, mother fuckers. We are small. Really small. We live on a small planet in a tiny part of a solar system. That system hurtles through space, a tiny part of a vast galaxy. All contained within an infinite universal system. The infinite machine. Our insignificant little sun will pop, and everything that has happened on this water-soaked rock will no longer matter. We don’t matter. And yet, we feel special, right? We feel our limited time here, with the people we love and care about, matters. That’s the fundamental friction of the universe. We matter because we care, but the universe which gave us existence does not even notice us. And at the height of grief, what will you do in the face of an indifferent creator?

“The direction I gave DJ was: you have the biggest dick in the world.” — Sarah Adina Smith

Jonah is torn. One runs off to sea, fleeing the consequences of his existence and refusing to confront them. Stuck aboard a rowboat with no oars, deep at see in permanently becalmed waters, he spends years adrift. The other goes all Twisted Sister. He’s gonna fight the powers that be. He hops from unoccupied winter home to unoccupied winter home, shouting to radio disc jockeys about how they’re all so condescending and that the Inversion is coming. Here’s the thing. You can’t live your life in twain. And that’s what makes it all so damn hard.

Rami Malek and DJ Qualls give perfect performances. Smith has written a masterpiece. A friend of mine said he’d heard her compared to Kubrick. And you know, I’m not saying she is. But, I’m saying I have a hard time arguing against the idea. Her visual storytelling is mindbogglingly good. She is making wholly originally, deeply compelling art. On her present course, yeah. I could see it. She is that good.

Seek out Buster’s Mal Heart and see it in a theater. It’s out this weekend. If you have a showing near you this weekend, go support independent film, my friends! And, check out our conversation. It’s the most fun, batshit crazy time I’ve had talking film-making. How does she react when one of us shares they were not on the wildly pro side of Buster? Radically. And! And! She does share how DJ Qualls came to be part of the team and why his character had to have the biggest dick. Click below (or here for iTunes).

CHATcast: Sarah Adina Smith-Director of Buster's Mal Heart

You must position yourself at the sphincter of the machine and throw yourself in before it opens!

Interview: ‘Buster’s Mal Heart’ Knows Which Finger We Give to Systems of Control was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

04/26/17--10:10: ‘Bad Boyz II Men in Black;’ Nuff Said

Oh yeah, it’s from the director of ’Kong: Skull Island’

I don’t mean to be hyperbolic, but today’s Short of the Day is one of the greatest things mine eyes have ever beheld. It comes from Jordan Vogt-Roberts who, besides having the raddest beard in all of Hollywood — sorry Joaquin — is also the director of two features you might have heard of: 2013’s Kings of Summer, and this year’s Kong: Skull Island.

But before he was conquering the box office, Vogt-Roberts was just another guy on Vimeo, albeit a ridiculously talented guy. And in one of his earlier works that became a Staff Pic sensation on the website, he combined two of my favorite things in the world — Bad Boys and Boyz II Men — with another thing I can tolerate, Men in Black, to create the short masterpiece Bad Boyz II Men in Black, essentially an action-packed, shoot-em-up music video which was made back in 2012 for the Comedy Central show Mash Up. And yes, that’s Nick Cannon. He’s hilarious.

If you dig any of the mentioned sources, those Call of Duty commercials with celebrities, or, you know, really awesome shit, you need to stop reading me and start watching Bad Boyz II Men In Black. Oh, and good luck getting the song out of your head. I’ve been walking around the office with “and they just might be a-lee-uhuhuns” in my head all day.

‘Bad Boyz II Men in Black;’ Nuff Said was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Sponsored Content

04/26/17--10:14: Cinema, AI, and Human Nature

Why being honest about AI stifles good storytelling.

Open any newspaper and you’ll find a profusion of articles and op-eds debating the future of artificial intelligence. Elon Musk is terrified of it. So is Jack Ma. Peter Thiel isn’t. The AI mania has even permeated the film world, which (the latest slew of “film is dead” articles warns us) will apparently not escape the automation boom. Of course, our public conversation about AI has long been tied to the cinema. As our own Sinead McCausland has pointed out, films have supplied the popular imagination with images and existential questions about AI since Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. But as AI gradually shifts from the realm of science fiction to that of reality, it’s worth examining the premises film has fed us about the technology, and asking whether they’ll serve us well in the coming decades.

Accuracy

There is a special circle in hell reserved for those who bemoan the “inaccuracy” of science fiction. A film should be judged on its own merits, one of which may be the effective suspension of disbelief, but scientific rigor need not be a criterion. Still, although we may not be looking for truths of physics at the movie theater, we do expect our films to tell the truth about the questions and dilemmas we face as a society. On this score, most AI films have roundly missed the point.

In the understandable effort to make AI cinematic, filmmakers have tended to incarnate AIs in human or humanoid bodies. Whether or not the films provide an explanation for why the AI takes a human form as opposed to, say, that of a desktop, the filmmakers’ decision to do so channels the philosophical thought process along specific lines. In nearly all of these films, the AIs prove more “human” than their inventors once suspected. Consider the emotional warmth of Samantha in Spike Jonze’s Her or the angry vindictiveness of HAL 9000 in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. What begins as cold, deferent machinery is revealed to possess the capacity for love, rage, and self-determination. As such the popular understanding about AI is that it will become morally salient to the degree that it becomes more and more human. The philosophical problem of AI, we’re told, is that if it becomes smart enough, it will begin to want the things that we want and feel the things that we feel.

But precisely the opposite is the case.

The real problem of AI is the same as the problem of representing it “accurately” onscreen; namely, its inhumanity. Those studying AI do not fear that it will suddenly develop human emotions and intentions, but rather that it will fail to relate to human emotions and intentions to such a degree that it will trample over them. As AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky has put it, “The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.” Seen in this way, telling the truth about AI is at cross purposes with telling a good story, because stories anthropomorphize reality. And AI is decidedly not human.

Intelligence and Intention

Much of the cinematic confusion about AI is born of a misconception concerning the relationship between intelligence and intention. As human beings, we experience both in the intermingled soup of conscious experience, but again, the tendency to draw parallels between humans and AI is misleading here. Intelligence, where AI is concerned, involves competence in solving a given problem, either in a narrow domain (like chess or translation) or a general one. So-called “General AI,” capable of solving problems across a variety of areas, is considered the holy grail of modern AI research. It’s also the type of intelligence we humans possess. BUT, and here is where geniuses from Kubrick to Steven Spielberg to Ridley Scott have become confused, this capacity need not relate to intention at all. An AI could theoretically become super-intelligent and never “desire” anything greater than, in the philosopher Nick Bostrom’s memorable example, to maximize the number of paperclips in the universe.

Consider the character of David (why are they always named David?) in Prometheus. Initially programmed to obey the desires of his designer, David soon grows tired of invidious comparisons with real humans and decides to take matters into his own hands by infecting Holloway with alien spawn. The implication is that an AI as intelligent as David could never be contained by the constraints of his programming. His intelligence would set him free and turn him against his captors. But the more plausible fear is that an AI like David would become so competent in achieving its goals that it would pursue instrumental strategies we humans could never anticipate. Here’s Bostrom’s description of the paperclip-maximizing AI:

“An AI, designed to manage production in a factory, is given the final goal of maximizing the manufacture of paperclips, and proceeds by converting first the Earth and then increasingly large chunks of the observable universe into paperclips…Unless the AI’s motivation system is of a special kind, or there are additional elements in its final goal that penalize strategies that have excessively wide-ranging effects on the world, there is no reason for the AI to cease activity upon achieving its goal.”

When it comes to AI, it’s not malice we fear, but competence.

Emotion, Consciousness, and Human Nature

At this point you may be wondering why the hell we would ever be so stupid as to build an AI with the goal of maximizing paperclips; indeed, this would be a monumentally foolish thing to do. But the problem of aligning the interests of AI with our own is not as simple as it might first appear. Humans are driven by a morass of mixed and conflicting emotions, cursed with reptilian anxieties and apish social tendencies. The problem of AI then becomes equally a problem of human nature. Why do we do what we do, and what should we do, given what we are like?

Most films about AI take a pre-scientific view of our nature, emphasizing our uniquely human essence and the divine origin of our emotions. Prometheus says as much explicitly, sending its heroes on a quest to discover their creators. Other films, like Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence and Scott’s Blade Runner, hand-wave in a similar direction, emphasizing the AI’s lack of a soul. This confused view of human nature is in part responsible for the aforementioned conflation of intelligence and intention, but the misconceptions run even deeper. Our view of ourselves — the one we represent in stories — doesn’t line up with the scientific picture. We have no “essence” and our emotions and intentions are just as mechanistic as the AI’s, albeit constrained by genetic rather than manmade programming. Some shows, like Westworld, have alluded to this fact while still tending to resist its full implications. The dramatic imperative to create willful protagonists with relatable emotions grates against the very nature of the subject matter.

Does this mean that we can’t tell stories at all? Of course not. Human beings are capable of an enormous range of conscious experience, and that experience is worth dignifying and reflecting in narrative form. But insofar as we want to tell honest stories about artificial intelligence, we’ll need to come to grips with some uncomfortable truths about its nature — and our own.

Cinema, AI, and Human Nature was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

04/26/17--10:17: We Are Groot (But Also Howard The Duck)

As we look back at what came before ‘Iron Man,’ we marvel at the miracle that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Earlier this week, the FSR team brainstormed the plot of Avengers 4 based on the idea that its mysterious subtitle was a potential spoiler for the still unseen Avengers: Infinity War. It was a fun exercise that briefly allowed me to nerd out over a few spandex epics penned by personal favorites, Brian Michael Bendis and Jonathan Hickman. The resulting conversation spawned some excitement, and a good heap of cynicism as well…or better yet, apathy. How much further can the Marvel Cinematic Universe expand? Will Thanos ever sit up from his chair, and prove he’s the big bad Mad Titan comic book fanboys claim him to be? Next week, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 will mark the 15th entry in Marvel’s unprecedented shared universe machine, and by the time we get to Avengers 4, we will have witnessed 21 total films from 2008 to 2019. Are we finally done with Tony Stark, and the rest of Stan Lee’s Merry Marvel Marching Society?

21 movies in 11 years is a crazy amount of sequels. I can understand how some feel swamped by the storm of super hero cinema that’s flooded the market, producing a seemingly impenetrable sludge of wannabe dreck. That initial wonderment of Nick Fury’s “Avenger’s initiative” pronouncement during the post-credits tag of Iron Man seems so damn long ago. The concept of Captain America, Thor, Hulk, Rocket Raccoon, Spider-Man, and Beta Ray Bill (fingers crossed, here’s hoping) may barely register to you as no more than a minor miracle of commercialism. But I assure you, this mega team-up is more than just Jesus’ face burnt into the top of a grilled cheese sandwich.

I have been reading comic books for almost 30 years. Being a movie maniac, and a child of the 80s, my first foray into the art form naturally occurred when I put my hands on Marvel Comics’ G.I. Joe #103 in August of 1990. The cover image of Storm Shadow crashing through a skylight with a death’s grip on his bow struck my child brain with a jolt stronger than anything I had previously experienced on the Saturday morning cartoon. Right then, right there, I discovered that the four-color art form (especially with a driving force like Larry Hama behind it) could deliver an experience equal to or greater than that found on the boob tube. Marvel’s Robocop 2 adaptation soon followed, and then came Erik Larsen’s The Amazing Spider-Man. Addiction was the only logical result.

When others start to roll their eyes at what our lord and savior, Kevin Feige has chiseled from a hunk of one-time refuse, I am dumbstruck. A well of maybe-misspent fanaticism boils to the surface, and sends me click-clacking to Twitter. The barrage of maxed-out 142 character tweets reveals a troubled, confused, irritated, saddened, and the emotionally disturbed personification of The Simpson’s socially stunted Comic Book Guy. Then, things get weird. From the fractured recesses of my brain, Michael Jackson’s Remember The Time begins to seep from my synapses.

“Do you remember
When we fell in love
We were so young and innocent then
Do you remember
How it all began
It just seemed like heaven so why did it end?”

See, I remember the time when all we got was Dolph Lundgren’s direct-to-video atrocity, The Punisher. And we mushed the boundaries of liking it into loving it because the options were few and far between, and Dolph’s Punisher at least came close enough to the source material to illicit a sense of comic book awe. The idea of a Marvel Cinematic Universe was impossible in the early 90s; all we had was the hope that in some fringe dimension somewhere, Lou Ferrigno’s Incredible Hulk successfully spun off a series with that embarrassing surfer Thor guest-star.

Directed by Mark Goldblatt (the man who edited some of your all-time favorite action films: The Terminator, First Blood Part II, Commando, The Last Boy Scout), The Punisher barely registers as a comic book movie. That’s ok. The costume is absent, but in its place is a thick layer of greasepaint slimed into every crevice of Dolph Lundgren’s body. The iconic skull emblem is reserved only for the butt of his knives, which he liberally jams into a variety of mobsters and yakuza henchmen. His Marvel sidekick, Micro is nowhere to be found, but he does have a Shakespearian-inclined homeless man who trails behind him in the city sewers. I could work with this, after all, there was no other choice.

The origin of Frank Castle remains intact. After his family was murdered in a mob hit, the presumed-dead police detective strikes out on his own to rid the land of criminals. Minus a few billion dollars, The Punisher keeps his sphere of influence localized around vengeance while a guy like Batman can spend his way to loftier heights of Justice. Strapped with a sufficient supply of hardware, The Punisher busts up a mob run casino, and discovers a child slave ring being operated by an encroaching yakuza force. If you squinted real hard, maybe these bargain basement ninjas could pass for Frank Miller’s The Hand.

While The Punisher may have hid its comic book roots in the guise of the action film, the previous Marvel movie outing had no pretenses. 1986’s Howard The Duck was the infamous brainchild of George Lucas. Sparked with the insanity to adapt Steve Gerber and Val Mayerik’s fowl satire after completing production on American Graffiti, Lucas was unable to find backers until he acquired all the money in the wake of Star Wars. With the trilogy completed, and the yes-men in place, Lucasfilm threw common sense to the wind with its unabashed adaptation.

Howard The Duck deeply bothered me when mom took me to see it in the theater. As Howard was yanked from Duckworld by overachieving Earthbound scientists, deprived of his alone time with Playduck magazine, and catapulted to our planet for a little zoophilia with Lea Thompson, I simply could not handle the implications of this level of animal husbandry. Turns out, not a lot of us could at the time. A catastrophic box office bomb, Howard The Duck graduated to the ranks of all-time Hollywood failures.

In retrospect, I love this freak of a film. Howard The Duck is a perverse, demented, abhorrent treasure. Steered by a broken moral compass, director Willard Huyck maintains much of the antagonism found in the original creation, but dresses it up with a little MTV. Tim Robbins as the janitor with delusions of intelligence excels in his creepy and utterly nerdy horndog. Jeffery Jones and his phallic tentacle tongue that thirsts for electricity is a nightmare put to celluloid, and he permanently scarred my psyche. It’s a big budget cultural whiff, only made possible by success run amuck. However, for those with warped sensibilities, or a fascination for the unwanted, Howard The Duck is as essential as anything found in the Criterion Collection.

It would be a looooong time before Hollywood would come close to erasing the financial/critical failures of Howard The Duck and The Punisher. Pathetic flounderings with Captain America, The Fantastic Four, and David Hasselhoff’s Nick Fury nearly buried the mainstream appeal of The House of Ideas. As such, fanboys like myself had to reconcile with whatever glimpses of comic book sincerity they could find. We settled for less, duped ourselves into defending the truly wretched. We did not know how good it could be…would be.

Blade arrived in 1998, and in 2000, Bryan Singer’s X-Men sealed the deal for the worldwide takeover of super hero sensibilities. There have been plenty of missteps since then (Daredevil, Spider-Man 3, Ghost Rider), and certainly not every entry in the MCU is golden (The Incredible Hulk, Thor: The Dark World), but having survived and enjoyed the trenches of the 1980s, I will never grow cynical towards Kevin Feige’s grand design.

The appearance of Seth Green’s Howard the Duck in the final seconds of James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy was more than a lark. It was a validation, an exclamation that even the weirder subbasements of our taste were acceptable in this new venture into popular domination. The brilliance of the MCU is its welcoming of even the weirdest of characters. Summer tent pole movies do not only need to be dressed in the slick, rubber armor of The Dark Knight. There’s room for a walking tree, and a perverted alcoholic duck. Ultimately, the true joys of the MCU come in the moments where oddball titans merely share shawarma together. The never-ending beam of light blasting down from the sky is cool and all, but not as fantastic as Groot’s inclusive “We are groot” embrace. We all just want a hug.

We Are Groot (But Also Howard The Duck) was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

04/26/17--11:19: 6 Filmmaking Tips from Maya Deren

We celebrate the experimental cinema legend for her centennial.

This Saturday is the 100th anniversary of Maya Deren’s birth, making it a time to honor the filmmaker, her work, and her significance and legacy within not just the arena of experimental cinema but film history in general. Regardless of the surreal, poetic content of her films, which include Meshes of the Afternoon (with husband Alexander Hammid) and At Land, she’s important as a pioneer and theorist of independent film. It’s mostly through the latter that we can find her filmmaking advice and lessons, all of them more than 50 years old but still relevant to aspiring cinema artists today. Here are six of the tips, collected from her writings, lectures, and interviews:

1. Amateur Filmmaking is for Lovers

If you’re looking for advice on breaking into Hollywood, Deren’s tips are not for you. She was a big proponent of “amateur” filmmaking, which is more than just another term for independent filmmaking as it’s not just against the business of cinema but also the idea of it being a collaborative art. In her posthumously published essay “Amateur Versus Professional” (Film Culture, 1965) she highlights how amateur filmmaking is for those who are passionate about cinema as an art form and who seek more freedom as artists in this medium:

The major obstacle for amateur filmmakers is their own sense of inferiority vis-a-vis professional productions. The very classification “amateur” has an apologetic ring. But that very word–from the Latin “amateur”–“lover” means one who does something for the love of the thing rather than for economic reasons or necessity. And this is the meaning from which the amateur filmmaker should take his clue. Instead of envying the script and dialogue writers, the trained actors, the elaborate staffs and sets, the enormous production budgets of the professional film, the amateur should make use of the one great advantage which all professionals envy him, namely, freedom–both artistic and physical.

Artistic freedom means that the amateur filmmaker is never forced to sacrifice visual drama and beauty to a stream of words, words, words, words, to the relentless activity and explanations of a plot, or to the display of a star or a sponsor’s product; nor is the amateur production expected to return profit on a huge investment by holding the attention of a massive and motley audience for 90 minutes.

2. You Are the Most Important Piece of Filmmaking Equipment

At the end of “Amateur Versus Professional,” Deren adds a tip suggesting why we literally don’t require collaborators, rather than just claiming its benefit to artistic freedom. She writes that besides the camera, all you need is yourself:

Improve your films not by adding more equipment and personnel but by using what you have to its fullest capacity. The most important part of your equipment is yourself: your mobile body, your imaginative mind, and your freedom to use both. Make sure you do use them.

3. “A Good Idea Merits Careful Enunciation”

In a letter to film archivist James Card in 1955 (published in the essential book “Essential Deren: Collected Writing on Film”), Deren recognizes how instrumental her second husband, Alexander Hammid, was in her education as a filmmaker, going on to criticize the problems of most young filmmakers of the time, how they could use such a great teacher and how they need to be less like the Marlon Brandos of film language:

My debt to [Hammid] for teaching me the mechanics of film expression, and, more than that, the principle of infinite pains, is enormous. I wish that all these young filmmakers would have the luck for a similar apprenticeship. As it is, when they revolt against the meaningless rhetoricians of film, they tend to throw out the baby with the bath water. They don’t bother to shape the lips and mouth carefully before letting the sound out, and ignore the fact that a good idea merits careful enunciation with the result that a good many of them sound, at best, like Marlon Brando… I mean, you just know he’s feelings things like crazy, but why doesn’t he take those marbles out of his mouth!

4. Patience is the Strength of Women Filmmakers

In an audio clip of Deren featured in the 2001 documentary In the Mirror of Maya Deren (watch it on Fandor or Amazon Prime), she makes a distinction between the strength of men and the strength of women as artists and expresses how the latter impacts her films. Here is the quote transcribed:

What I do in my films is very, I think, very distinctively, I think they are the films of a woman, and I think that their characteristic time quality is the time quality of a woman. I think that the strength of men is their great sense of immediacy. They are a “now” creature, and a woman has strength to wait, because she’s had to wait. She has to wait nine months for the concept of a child. Time is built into her body in the sense of becomingness. And she sees everything in terms of it being in the stage of becoming. She raises a child knowing not what it is at any moment but seeing always the person that it will become. Her whole life from her very beginning, it’s built into her a sense of becoming. Now in any time form, this is a very important sense. I think that my films, putting as much stress as they do, upon the constant metamorphosis, one image is always becoming another. It is what is happening that is important in my films, not what is at any moment. This is a woman’s time sense, and I think it happens more in my films than in almost anyone else’s.

You can hear her speak the words and others herself in the video below.

5. Be Your Own Cutter

It might be obvious that the truly independent, artistically free filmmaker needs to edit her own films. When Deren wrote “Creative Cutting,” published in MovieMakers magazine in 1947, the idea seems to have not been addressed much beforehand. She writes of its economical benefit at the start of the essay, which you should read in full:

It means he is in a position to shoot to cut. For, if he has the final, cut version of his film in mind, he can save footage by filming a room, for instance, from the one angle which would follow most logically from the previous shot, instead of shooting the same action from three different angles and then discarding two of them. More important, every detail of a shot — the direction of the light source, the rhythm and speed of the action, whether the person should enter the shot or should already be in the frame — can be meticulously designed to flow unbrokenly from the end of the previous shot, whether or not it has already been recorded. This complete control of one’s film, if consciously exercised, makes possible a compelling continuity in the final product.

Certainly, it must be obvious that a motion picture consists not of individual shots, however active, exciting or interesting they may be, but that, in the end, the attention is held by the way shots are put together, by the relationship established between them. If the function of the camera can be spoken of as the seeing, registering eye, then the function of cutting can be said to be that of the thinking, understanding mind. By this I am saying that the meaning, the connection between individually observed facts, is, in the making of the film, the creative responsibility of cutting.

6. “It’s a Terrible Pain to Be a Filmmaker”

As stated earlier, Deren believed that especially amateur filmmaking should be only for those who are truly passionate about this particular medium. In another audio clip, from a lecture, included in In the Mirror of Maya Deren, she says that anyone who can do anything else should:

It would be so much easier to be a painter or a writer. You don’t have to have equipment. You don’t have to do all the things. You’re not at the mercy of the laboratories. You’re not here and you’re not there. It’s a terrible pain to be a filmmaker, because you not only have the creative problems, but you have financial problems that they don’t have. You have technical problems that they don’t have. You have machines that are breaking down in a way that paintbrushes don’t break down. It’s just a terrible thing to be a filmmaker. And if you are a filmmaker, it’s because there is something in the sheer medium that seems to be able to make some sort of statement that you particularly want to make, and which no other medium to you seems capable of making in the same way.

What We’ve Learned

Deren was a true film artist and wrote on the distinction of cinema compared to other art forms and on its distinction as a calling compared to a profession. According to the poet-turned-filmmaker, you should only work in this medium if you can’t do anything else, and you should do it as independently as possible to maintain artistic freedom. You ought to learn the mechanics of film expression for the clearest of communication, and you need to edit your own films, because shooting them is only a small part of that expression. And according to her, women filmmakers have distinctly different strengths than men and should utilize and accept those strengths.

And now a video essay for Fandor by Kevin B. Lee:

6 Filmmaking Tips from Maya Deren was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

04/26/17--12:34: The Perfect Shots of ‘Vertigo’

This week’s Shot by Shot podcast tackles one of the greatest films of all-time.

We’re going all in for the latest episode of Shot by Shot, the official cinematography podcast of One Perfect Shot and Film School Rejects, in which myself and co-host Geoff Todd are talking about a film most consider to be one of the best ever made, and some consider the best ever made: Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece Vertigo, which was shot by Hitch’s most frequent collaborator, Oscar-winning cinematographer Robert Burks.

Vertigo is hands down Hitchcock’s most experimental film, and as a result it boasts the most innovative and nuanced cinematography of the director’s career, including the dolly zoom, a shot so synonymous with the film it was once primarily known as “the Vertigo shot.”

If this is your first listen to our show, the format’s simple: each week Geoff and I each pick a few shots from a certain film and discuss their effect and significance. Already we’ve done episodes on 2001: A Space Odyssey, Mad Max: Fury Road, Silence, Drive, and Shaun of the Dead, and next week we’re talking about the Coen Brothers’ Fargo, a film shot by the man I for one consider our greatest living cinematographer: Roger Deakins.

Be sure to give us a follow so you can be kept up to date on new episodes and shows. We’re on Twitter @OnePerfectPod and Facebook at facebook.com/oneperfectshot, and you can find your two hosts on Twitter as well: @TheGeoffTodd and @HPerryHorton.

And if you like what you hear — spoiler alert: you’re going to — be sure to subscribe in iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss a single episode of us or any of the other shows in our family of OnePerfectPodcasts.

Dig the ‘cast below, and below that a gallery of the shots featured in this week’s discussion.

The Perfect Shots of ‘Vertigo’ was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

04/26/17--12:39: ‘Titans’ and ‘Young Justice’ to Launch DC’s Streaming Service

Dick Grayson isn’t just part of the Teen Titans. He’s leading the Teen Titans.

Lately, we’ve been blessed with an overabundance of good comic news. First, 20th Century Fox releases dates for Deadpool 2, New Mutants, and Dark Phoenix. Now an interesting announcement from Warner Bros. Television and DC Entertainment.

Warner Bros. Television and DC Entertainment announced that they are launching a “digital streaming service” at an undisclosed time in 2018. They were obtuse on the details, but the gist is that this streaming service is an “immersive experience designed for the fans.” The service will host a live-action Teen Titans show called Titans and the third season of Young Justice: Outsiders.

Young Justice: Outsiders is the much demanded third season of the Cartoon Network show Young Justice. Young Justice was fantastic: it was spiritually faithful to its source material, beautifully animated, and well voice acted. Following Young Justice’s cancellation, fans campaigned to have Cartoon Network bring the show back. Much to fan surprise and delight, persistence paid off in 2016 when it was announced that Young Justice would return. The new season will premiere on the forthcoming streaming site. The show is produced by Sam Register (Teen Titans Go!) with Brad Vietti (Batman: Under the Red Hood), and Greg Weisman (Star Wars Rebels) also serving as producers. Phil Bourassa — lead character designer on Justice League Dark and the first two seasons of Young Justice — will act as the series’ art director.

Titans was originally developed than passed on by TNT in 2016. This streaming version will be written by Akiva Goldsman (Star Trek: Discovery), Geoff Johns (The Flash, Arrow), and Greg Berlanti (Arrow, The Flash, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, and Supergirl). Goldsman, Johns, Berlanti and Sarah Schechter are executive producing the series. The press release from DC Entertainment describes the series as follows:

In this action-packed series, Dick Grayson emerges from the shadows to become the leader of a fearless band of new heroes, including Starfire, Raven and many others. “Titans” is a dramatic, live-action adventure series that will explore and celebrate one of the most popular comic book teams ever.

For me, this reads as actual wish fulfillment. I’ve loved the DC television expanded universe since I watched Grant Gustin be endearingly dorky on The Flash and the binge worthy second season of Arrow. In fact, I personally credit Supergirl’s first season for enabling me to live through this past election cycle — though I was not too impressed with the pilot when I saw it at Comic Con in 2015. My personal feelings aside, this is a big announcement from the perspective of adding yet another television streaming power player, but also because this will be a Batman story sans Batman.

We need more Batfamily in our lives. While my personal favorite Robin is black sheep Jason Todd, Dick Grayson is second to me alone. He’s one of the most well known and popular characters in Batman comics. (Sorry Jason, the fans did condemn you to death once already. You shouldn’t be surprised.) Dick Grayson is a cornerstone character, whether as Nightwing or Robin.

Dick Grayson started out as the Dark Knight’s sidekick because Bob Kane and Bill Finger wanted a new young character to bring in younger readers. However, Dick’s popularity far surpassed the motivations for his birth. After all Dick was Batman’s partner in crimefighting for almost 30 years (That’s a long run!). So how does one make a sidekick?

You start with a tragic background, a well timed meeting, and a baseline of natural athletic ability. Much like Bruce Wayne, Dick’s origin story begins with the death of his parents. Dick and his parents were the trapeze troupe, The Flying Graysons. Mr. and Mrs. Grayson die in front of Dick while performing. It is revealed that Boss Zucco killed Dick’s parents by pouring acid on the trapeze lines as retaliation against the circus owner for skipping out on his mob debts. Endemic of Gotham’s insidious corruption, Dick is warned by Batman that no justice can befall him if he goes to the cops. Instead, little Dick Grayson will have to rely on Batman. Similar to the way Bruce Wayne came to rely on Batman to symbolically avenge his parent’s death. No one fights crime in a Batsuit or in yellow tights if they don’t have baggage. Batman and Robin start fighting crime together and the rest is history. However, Dick got so popular he eventually got his own baby Justice League. The teenage group of sidekicks is called the Teen Titans.

Dick Grayson’s popularity is a testament to the idea that there is so much more in the Batman mythos — outside of Batman — that is ripe for exploration. We don’t have to stay in the limited range of re-hashing Batman’s origin story and battling the Joker with philosophy and fists. There are more characters out there with their own stories to tell. With the announcement of the Batgirl movie, the Birds of Prey movie, and Titans it seems as though part of DC’s strategy moving forward is to explore those other stories.

‘Titans’ and ‘Young Justice’ to Launch DC’s Streaming Service was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Sponsored Content

04/28/17--08:54: A Condolence on Elm Street

How the Nightmare franchise kept things real even at its silliest.

A Nightmare on Elm Street is the franchise with possibly the steepest sequel cliff of any of its contemporaries. The first was a classic, the second was clumsy but interesting, and the third was arguably as good as the original, but then…4…5…and 6 happened. The problem was that Freddy Krueger — the once terrifying, murderous invader of dreams — had become in the later sequels a scenery-munching quip-machine who spent more time mugging to the camera and selling lunchboxes than bothering to be scary.

Freddy’s one-liners weren’t the only standard of the franchise however, and silly as they became, the other recurring element was remarkable for its attempt to ground the series in reality. A Nightmare on Elm Street, and its sequels, are gonzo for funeral scenes! The original 1984 installment, The Dream Warriors (which is the subject of this week’s Junkfood Cinema podcast, as well as The Dream Master (Part 4), A New Nightmare, and the remake all feature actions unfolding during or after a funeral.

Why is this remarkable? Think about the other heavy hitters — or more appropriately the heavy slashers — of the 80s. Neither the Friday the 13th nor the Halloween franchises bothered to commit to film the final remembrance of any of their innumerable victims. This was usually because these films were structured in such a way that by the time the first body was found, the final killing frenzy of the third act had begun in earnest. Hell, Jamie Lee Curtis dies off camera in the Halloween series with naught but a publicity still in one scene to remember her. And hilariously the only person we see buried in the Friday the 13th films is Jason himself, and we only see that because some fool digs up his remains in more than one installment.

It could be argued that Wes Craven wanted to scare audiences with the first Nightmare to a degree that would surpass the butchering habits of hockey-mask-clad forest dwellers so he decided to build tension and character to maximize the impact of his boogeyman’s killings. The nod to Psycho in the original Nightmare on Elm Street, a supposed protagonist being sliced up in the first act, would certainly support this argument. Honestly though, another contention could be that Craven wanted to give a concrete, real-world foundation to someone as supernatural as Freddy Krueger. This would explain the dark grey origin of Freddy, a child killer (/possible molester) who was burned alive by a mob of angry parents. It’s also interesting to consider in this context the newspaper article about a Cambodian refugee that was the inspiration for A Nightmare on Elm Street.

In the documentary Never Sleep Again, Craven details an article he read about a man who had escaped the Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime and the associated mass murder. This young man was being plagued by awful nightmares of the events, as one would imagine and one night, his host family heard him screaming in his sleep. By the time they got to his room, he was dead. In his closet, they found caffeine pills and a small coffee pot; so afraid was this man of his dreams that he had been doing all he could to stay awake.

Real world inspiration, morally complicated origin stories, and characters who weren’t just murder fodder? Even as a Voorhees fanatic, I have to admit these are the ingredients for a far more interesting horror film. The inclusion of funeral scenes in several Nightmare sequels (including Dream Warriors and New Nightmare, the only sequels with which Craven was involved), seems then a strategic device to remind both the characters and the audience that while Freddy lives in their nightmares, they live in the real world with real consequences to real violence and a finite amount of time on the Earth.

It should be noted that A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors is such a successful sequel largely thanks to the script by director Chuck Russell and the now legendary Frank Darabont, based on a story by Craven. Russell and Darabont are writers who are fascinated with the idea of finding the heart inherent in any given situation no matter how sensational or supernatural. The combination of that heart and Craven’s grounded approach to the fantastical — along with some of the best characters the franchise has ever seen — give rise to the genuine discussion of whether Dream Warriors or the original Nightmare is the best of the franchise. Dream Master (Part 4), Dream Child (Part 5), and Freddy’s Dead (Part 6) are what really should have been buried, dearly beloved, but we’re not gathered here today to talk about that.

For more musings on Dream Warriors, including roughly five straight minutes of that amazing Dokken title song, give a listen to this week’s Junkfood Cinema Podcast. Brian and Cargill continue through their One Junky Summer series exploring the best, the most insane, and the junkiest flicks of the summer of 1987.

As a special treat, anyone who backs JFC on Patreon will have access to weekly bonus episodes covering an additional cult movie, a new movie in theaters, or a mailbag episode devoted to your submitted questions! During Summer of 87, there will be an entirely separate Summer of 77 miniseries just for Patrons! Have a couple bucks to throw in the hat, we’ll reward you!

On This Week’s Show:

Appetizers [0:00–4:36]
The Main Course[4:37–57:41]
The Junkfood Pairing[57:42–1:02:23]

Want to check out this week’s movie AND support the show, rent/buy it from Amazon via our link!

A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors

Follow the Show:

And please check out our new sponsor Fun Size Horror, a free online platform for original and user submitted horror shorts.

A Condolence on Elm Street was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

04/30/17--11:01: ‘American Gods,’ a ‘Batman’ Documentary Plus More TV You Must See This Week

It’s been a long time coming, but American Gods is finally here, closing out a month that’s been filled with exciting new shows. With May, though, comes the return of a science program that ought to interest movie fans (Breakthrough) and a new feature documentary that ought to interest comic book fans (Batman & Bill). Plus we’ve finally got a new season of Sense8 and new episodes of some of the greatest TV series, Better Call Saul and Fargo, plus the penultimate chapter of Riverdale’s first season.

To help you keep track of the most important programs over the next seven days, here’s our guide to everything worth watching, whether it’s on broadcast, cable, or streaming for April 30–May 1:

SUNDAY

American Gods (Starz, 9pm)

Neil Gaiman’s 2001 novel hits the small screen from the showrunning team of Bryan Fuller (Hannibal) and screenwriter Michael Green (Logan), and it’s “the adaptation it deserves.” Kicking off the eight-episode first season tonight with an installment entitled “The Bone Orchard,” director David Slade (The Twilight Saga: Eclipse) gives us the meeting of Shadow Moon (Ricky Whittle), just out of prison, and Mr. Wednesday (Ian McShane), aka Odin, an Old God for whom Shadow will become employed as a bodyguard.

Also on Sunday:
The Circus S2E7 (Showtime, 8pm)
The White Princess: episode 3 (Starz, 8pm)
Guerrilla: episode 3 (Showtime, 9pm)
LA 92: doc debut (National Geographic, 9pm)
The Leftovers S3E3: “Crazy Whitefella Thinking” (HBO, 9pm)
The Last Man on Earth S3E16: “The Big Day” (Fox, 9:30pm)
American Crime S3E8: season finale (ABC, 10pm)
Billions S2E11: “Golden Frog Time” (Showtime, 10pm)
Elementary S5E21: “Fly Into a Rage, Make a Bad Landing” (CBS, 10pm)
Silicon Valley S4E2: “Terms of Service” (HBO, 10pm)
Veep S6E2: “Library” (HBO, 10:30pm)

MONDAY

Better Call Saul (AMC, 10pm)

Anyone who somehow was a fan of Breaking Bad but still hasn’t given Better Call Saul full attention needs to finally fix that. With the ongoing involvement of Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) and the heating up of a drug kingpin rivalry between him and Hector Salamanca (Mark Margolis), there’s a lot of familiar drama and action to go along with the latest dilemma for Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk), who now faces disbarment thanks to his brother’s lesson-teaching scheme. This is still the best prequel ever created.

Also on Monday:
Gotham S3E16: “Heroes Rise: These Delicate and Dark Obsessions” (Fox, 8pm)
Supergirl S2E19: “Alex” (CW, 8pm)
Jane the Virgin S3E17: “Chapter Sixty-One” (CW, 9pm)
Angie Tribeca S3E4: “Turn Me On, Geils” (TBS, 10:30pm)

TUESDAY

Breakthrough (National Geographic, 10pm)

The second season of Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’s science documentary series begins with a Mike Colter-narrated episode called “Addiction: A Psychedelic Cure?” that shares a look at the radical and quite controversial research into the use of psychedelic drugs like LSD as therapeutic treatment of addiction. As is usually the case with this series, the episode is directed by a notable filmmaker: David Lowery (Ain’t Them Bodies Saints). Other installments of this season are helmed by Shane Carruth and Ana Lily Amirpour, while future narrators include J.K. Simmons, Chris Pine, Aaron Eckhart, and Barry Pepper.

Also on Tuesday:
Brooklyn Nine-Nine S4E16: “Moo Moo” (Fox, 8pm)
Great News S1E3: “Chuck Pierce is Blind” (NBC, 8pm)
Genius S1E2: “Chapter Two” (National Geographic, 9pm)
The Americans S5E9: “IHOP” (FX, 10pm)

WEDNESDAY

Fargo (FX, 10pm)

The third episode of the third season is a bit of a one-off focused on Carrie Coon’s character, Gloria, as she heads to Hollywood to learn about her murdered step-father’s secret past. As you can see in the above image, one of the guest stars is Ray Wise. Rob McElhenney also shows up, marking the second It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia star to make an appearance. The The highlights of the episode, titled “The Law of Non-Contradiction,” also include a flashback storyline starring Thomas Mann (Me and Earl and the Dying Girl) and A Serious Man’s Fred Melamed that brings Fargo back to the 1970s for a subplot that’s like Barton Fink by way of Kurt Vonnegut.

Also on Wednesday:
The Handmaid’s Tale S1E4 (Hulu)
Archer: Dreamland S8E5: “Sleepers Awake” (FXX, 10pm)
Gomorrah: 135-minute new episode (Sundance, 10pm)

THURSDAY

Riverdale (CW, 9pm)

The thing we’ve all been waiting for, the reveal of Jason Blossom’s killer, has been promised with this second-to-last episode of the first season. Jughead’s dad (Skeet Ulrich) was arrested for the murder in last week’s installment of the Archie Comics-based teen drama, but the mystery continues as a frame-up seems to be in play. Meanwhile, Jughead (Cole Sprouse) is also conflicted over the way all his friends went behind his back, even if it was with good intentions. The classic movie title borrowed for the episode title is “Anatomy of a Murder.”

Also on Thursday
Scandal S6E13: “The Box” (ABC, 9pm)
The Amazing Race S29E7: “Have Fun and Get It Done” (CBS, 10pm)

FRIDAY

Sense8 (Netflix)

This week’s most noteworthy Netflix debut is the second season of this series created by the Wachowskis and J. Michael Straczynski. It’s been almost two years since the first season arrived all at once, and now, following last December’s Christmas special tiding them over, fans finally get 10 more episodes. Season 2, most episodes of which are directed by Lana Wachowski (Lilly Wachowski has departed the series), begin to answer some of the questions raised by Season 1, as we learn more about sensates.

Also on Friday:
Handsome: A Netflix Murder Mystery: movie debut (Netflix)
The Last Kingdom: Season 2 debut (Netflix)
The Mars Generation: doc debut (Netflix)
RuPaul’s Drag Race S9E7 (VH1, 8pm)

SATURDAY

Batman & Bill (Hulu)

Learn about the long-uncredited co-creator of Batman in this feature documentary about Bill Finger. How much he was responsible for the character, initially conceived by Bob Kane, why he went so long without his due recognition, and how he finally began receiving credit two years ago for movies, TV series, and more involving the Dark Knight, the Joker, Robin, and other iconic comic book figures, are sure to be explored. Directors Don Argott and Sheena M. Joyce have experience with stories about struggles over artistic works, having respectively helmed and produced the essential 2009 feature The Art of the Steal, among other great docs.

Also on Saturday:
Doctor Who S10E4: “Knock Knock” (BBC America, 9pm)
Class S1E4: “Co-Owner of a Lonely Heart” (BBC America, 10pm)

‘American Gods,’ a ‘Batman’ Documentary Plus More TV You Must See This Week was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

05/01/17--08:14: Faithful and Dazzling: ‘American Gods’ Explores The Bone Orchard

‘American Gods’ comes out swinging with a faithful and dazzling adaptation.

American Gods is finally here. It premiered last night with “The Bone Orchard,” a first episode that’s both visually stunning and artfully written. Let’s take a look at it.

But first, a little clarification. In one of the stranger moments of my life, I got called out last week by Orlando Jones (of MADtv, Sleepy Hollow and, of course, American Gods) for blowing past any mention of Michael Green in my preview article.

Im a lil pissed off u didn't give @andmichaelgreen @BryanFuller partner any credit but as u say "I'm less laid back & angrier" #Trollando https://t.co/km4qzMTdrL
— @TheOrlandoJones

Michael Green is fully half of the creative force behind American Gods, the Executive Producer and co-showrunner to Bryan Fuller’s Executive Producer and co-showrunner. Orlando Jones was right — I got a little too hyped about Bryan Fuller. (To his infinite credit, Michael Green himself chimed in and was extremely gracious about the whole thing).

Now, on to the show.

The opening scene establishes the mood beautifully. The show has promised two things: America and gods. Right off the bat we get a little bit of both in conflict with each other. It’s simple and it’s concise.

The scene follows a group of Vikings, the “first” people to come to America. But of course they’re not the first, and they never make it past the beach they land on.

This is our America. It’s certainly not an empty land waiting to be filled. It’s not a peaceful melting pot either.

And then there are the gods. In order to worship, our Vikings stab themselves in the eye, burn a man alive, and finally have a battle royale. The gods we’re dealing with aren’t nice — they don’t love us and they don’t want to make us feel good. This is a violent world with violent rules.

These rules carry well into the present day. Shadow’s beloved wife dies cheating on him, and he’s released from prison a few days early. As a prison guard tells him, it’s like a good news/bad news joke. Just like getting a favorable wind after extreme bloodshed, Shadow gets his freedom in exchange for losing his wife in more ways than one.

But just because the world of American Gods is cruel doesn’t mean its inhabitants take it lying down. The rage and grief of Betty Gilpin’s Audrey, whose husband died while being fellated by Laura, is much more visceral than it is in the book. Gilpin is excellent, portraying an out-of-it mix of anger and grief that vacillates very realistically between focused and lost.

Ricky Whittle (Shadow Moon), Audrey (Betty Gilpin)

For what it’s worth, I plan to mention the book when I see something notable that the show has done differently. I won’t, however, dole out spoilers or highlight any foreshadowing, though lord knows it’s there. We’re here to enjoy the show as it comes, not to prove how many pages we’ve read.

Except just this once.

Because there’s a very interesting piece of foreshadowing at play in the first episode, and its treatment is a beautiful example of the kind of intricacies this show seems to be dealing in. It would be a shame not to discuss it, so I’ll be as delicate as I can.

I’m talking about the noose imagery.

Suffice it to say that later in the story, something will happen sometime that is at least somewhat noose related. (Everyone who’s read the book can nod knowingly now). The first episode has several instances of noose imagery that are all, importantly, not in the book. They’ve been fabricated for the show particularly for the sake of foreshadowing. And within that foreshadowing, we see a special kind of interplay.

The final scene is of course the most vivid, as Shadow is almost lynched by a mob of Technical Boy’s faceless minions. But is it really meant to be a lynching? The minions look, for all the world, like the Clockwork Orange droogs.

Could this just be some regular ultra-violence?

It doesn’t look like it. When we first meet Shadow in the prison yard, a group of white supremacists threaten him with a noose. One of them repeats the threat the next day. It’s an environment with undeniable racial connotations, and it’s the episode’s matching bookend to the lynching at the end.

Jonathan Tucker (LowKey Lyesmith), Ricky Whittle (Shadow Moon)

But the noose also makes an appearance in Shadow’s dream during his last night in prison as he walks through the Bone Orchard, a setting that repeats in his dreams later and seems consigned firmly to the magical realm of the show.

The result is a fascinating mixture of Wednesday’s fantastical America of magic and Shadow’s realistic America of racism. It’s a small but masterful doubling of worlds that you don’t see in the book, and a way for the show to engage with the realities of America while showing us a distinct un-reality.

And it’s all told in the visual language of a later event. Nothing here appears by chance.

This bridging of perception is repeated, in a slightly different way, in the moment Shadow shares with Laura the night before she dies. As Shadow lies awake, the wall of the prison breaks apart to reveal Laura tucked into bed at an angle perpendicular to his. Neither of them bat an eye, simply saying goodnight and drifting off to sleep. It’s a moment of premium cable surrealism that’s so classic it’s starting to border on passé.

And it’s probably the only instance of it we’ll see in the entire show.

I mentioned last week that American Gods is in the delicious position of being able to be as extravagant as it wants with its visuals while at the same time demanding belief from its audience. When you see something happen, you know that there’s magic behind it and you know that it’s true.

Except this early in the show, Shadow and Laura’s world doesn’t have magic in it. They’re a normal husband and wife who miss each other, and while Shadow can imagine all he wants that he’s talking to Laura through the wall of his cell, we all know it’s not actually happening.

So why show it?

Because it sets up our expectations for the kind of experience we’re getting into. If we approach the rest of the episode looking for surreal symbolism, the sudden shift to surreal realism will be all the more jarring. This same jarringness allows us to empathize with Shadow more.

As Shadow’s world gets stranger, neither he nor we are sure if we should believe in what we’re seeing. He has the luxury (or maybe handicap) of not knowing that he’s in a tv show. We do. And this addition of the clearly not-true, right in the beginning when we’re learning the rules of this universe, gives us as a jaded audience our own chance at real disorientation when things get weird.

And things do get weird. One of the most memorable scenes from the book is the night with Bilquis (here played by Yetide Badaki) who eats her sexual partners whole, and not with her mouth. It’s a vivid and shocking scene that comes in the second chapter, establishing very early the tone of the book and the habits of its gods. It comes early here for the same reasons, probably, but also as a counterpoint to symbolic nature of Shadow and Laura’s interaction.

It gives us one of the most hard-to-believe events and tells us to believe it.

And it is believable. A scene that was always destined to be hard to film, it balances CGI with suggestion for a result that’s effective but has a surprisingly light touch. We’re seeing a man swallowed whole by a vagina — no bones about it. But while too much or too little information might have been campy or confusing, the line the scene manages to walk is effective and remarkably true to the book.

“The Bone Orchard” doesn’t just establish American Gods as top-notch fantasy. It proclaims it as top-notch fantasy that understands the discourse that exists around it, and it engages with that discourse. It works both with and against our expectations in ways so subtle they’re easy to miss. And it sets the stage of a darn good story to boot.

Next week, when the story gets rolling a little more, the show will really shine.

Faithful and Dazzling: ‘American Gods’ Explores The Bone Orchard was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

05/01/17--09:30: Is There Such a Thing as a Spoiler-Proof Movie?

According to James Gunn, knowing a spoiler or two isn’t such a big deal.

At the end of this week, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 will hit theaters and we’ll all know all the secrets that await the adventures of Star-Lord and friends. Even before that, we’ve already begun to see some of the film’s surprises make their way onto the internet. We’re not here to spoil them for you in a newsletter (we’re not savages), but we are here to pass along a message from the film’s director, James Gunn. Taking to Facebook, Gunn promises that knowing some of the film’s reveals won’t ruin the experience:

“So, if you’ve accidentally heard about a surprise in Vol. 2, worry not — you will still be able to heartily enjoy the film. Not only because spoilers don’t matter, but because we’ve created a movie where the story, humor, visuals, music, and emotion don’t rely on surprises even if they did, and that you’ll have a blast whether or not you know a spoiler or two before going in.”

It begs the question: can a really well-told story be spoiled? There are experiences that can be spoiler-proof. Take Game of Thrones as the ultimate example. Book readers knew plenty of things going in. Others easily found this information on the internet. Is it still one of the most successful and critically regarded pop culture properties of all-time? Yes. That said, saying “spoilers don’t matter” isn’t a one size fits all solution. We’re all sensitive to spoilers in our own way. Just know that if you’ve learned things about the further adventures of the Guardians of the Galaxy, you’re probably okay. According to the film’s director. We trust that guy.

The End is Near for This Newsletter

We’re making some changes on Film School Rejects. You’ll learn more about those later this week. For now, know that our daily newsletter via Medium’s days are numbered. But that doesn’t mean we won’t be reaching our followers every day. We’ll still have a newsletter, but it won’t be tied to Medium. The best way to stay up to date, sign up via the form below:

We’re Not Publishing, But We Are Podding

If you follow the site regularly, you’ll notice that we aren’t publishing anything at the moment — save for our American Gods recap, because obviously — that’s part of all the changes we’re making behind the scenes. Still, just because we’re not publishing articles doesn’t mean that we won’t be all up in your feeds with pop culture opinions. If you haven’t already, get subscribed to the One Perfect Pod podcast channel. This week, we’re reviewing Sleight with Vox.com’s Alissa Wilkinson, the One Perfect Shot crew is breaking down the perfect shots of Fargo, and The Big Idea is tackling the state of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (and superhero movie fandom) with a guest to be named later.

Subscribe to One Perfect Pod on iTunes here.

You can also follow One Perfect Pod on Soundcloud.

Or just search “One Perfect Pod” in your favorite podcast app. (Ours is Overcast for iOS).

Is There Such a Thing as a Spoiler-Proof Movie? was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

05/02/17--09:11: 5 Highlights from ‘The Godfather’ 45th Anniversary Reunion

A legendary line-up of speakers retold iconic behind-the-scenes stories and shared mutual, little-known memories.

Photo: Tomris Laffly / Film School Rejects

The 2017 edition of Tribeca Film Festival came to a close on Saturday with an epic affair, which was kicked off with one of the greatest opening lines spoken in any American film ever: “I believe in America.”

The historic event that wrapped up the festival’s massively-scaled and star-studded 16th year was the back-to-back screenings of The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, followed by a panel discussion moderated by filmmaker Taylor Hackford. After a 7+- hour screening marathon with one intermission, writer-director Francis Ford Coppola took the stage, joined by his cast-members Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Diane Keaton, James Caan, Robert Duvall and Talia Shire. Even Marlon Brando was there in spirit, with his portrait positioned over the living room-like setting where the conversation took place. To the cinephiles that filled the sold-out event in New York City’s 6000-seater Radio City Music Hall, Saturday’s 45th anniversary screening and panel discussion was an offer that couldn’t be refused.

“I found it a very emotional experience. I forgot a lot about the making of it,” said Francis Ford Coppola, who viewed the two films for the first time in many years. “This film could be made today, but it wouldn’t get a go ahead from a studio. The first film was made for about $6.5 million; the second was made for $11 or $12 million. They would never get a green light today,” he stated, briefly touching upon the dire state of the industry today. Diane Keaton, who said she watched the films on a computer quite recently, built on Coppola’s sentiments. “I hadn’t seen it in about 30 years. I couldn’t get over it,” she said. “It was so astonishing, Francis. It was so beautiful,” she continued. “And everybody is so great in it. Every choice you made was so authentically brilliant. I just kept crying, and that damn Talia. I am not kidding…. Everything was astonishing to me and I didn’t expect it.” Still puzzled about the fact that she got the part, Keaton said, “I read recently that Francis gave me the part because he thought I was eccentric. He wasn’t wrong.”

On my end, rediscovering these two monumental classics together on a massive screen was nothing short of miraculous. I concluded once more that the baptism sequence at the end of the first film, during which Michael Corleone dually acquires his title as “The Godfather”, is bone-chillingly flawless with layers of sounds (an organ, a baby’s cries and gun shots) adding up to one of the prime examples of intercutting in cinema. I also remembered how much of a go-to gold standard The Godfather has been for many filmmakers. To my astonishment, I only needed to look back at the previous night’s 25th Year Anniversary reunion screening of Reservoir Dogs at Tribeca. Can anyone deny that Quentin Tarantino’s opening scene set around a diner table carries visible stylistic traces of the scene in The Godfather, where Vito Corleone meets with the heads of the five families, with the camera circling around them?

In more ways than one, it was an unparalleled night in New York. Sure, many of the The Godfather stories, from troubles in casting to an almost-fired Al Pacino, are written about extensively. But it was still a treat to hear it from the very people who lived them.

Here are 5 highlights:

1. The cat in the opening scene was the studio cat…it wasn’t Brando’s.

Yes, this is the “I believe in America” scene that opens The Godfather, where an undertaker approaches Vito Corleone (Brando) on the day of his daughter’s wedding to ask him for a favor. Vito patiently listens with a comfortable, purring cat on his lap. Coppola said one doesn’t talk to Marlon Brando about acting stuff, but just gives cues, such as “louder” or “not so loud”. “He is the kind of actor who wants to hear where the camera frame is going to be and he proceeds,” Coppola said. “Or you could [give] props to him. So I put that cat in his hand. That was the studio cat and [it took] only one take. I picked it up and put it [on his lap.] Brando had a wonderful way with children and animals. He was very comfortable with them and they were comfortable with him.” Hackford added, based on what he read on this story, that all Paramount people could hear while watching the dailies of the scene was the cat purring. “You believe it’s Brando’s cat,” he noted.

2. The casting process was a battle, during which Al Pacino was almost fired.

For starters, the studio execs were never convinced with Coppola in the director’s chair, and there was an instance where he heard he would lose his post. Similarly, they weren’t sold on Brando. Coppola recalls, “They said to me, if Marlon will do it for nothing, and if he’ll put up a million-dollar bond that he won’t cause trouble during production, you can have him.” And he said yes. But with Pacino, who was a non-established actor mostly known for his stage work by then, the process was more complex. But Coppola was adamant to cast him; he just kept seeing his face for the role and wouldn’t back down. Pacino did many screen tests, and even during the early days of shooting, he was on thin ice with the studio. But Coppola’s foresight came to the rescue during the time Pacino wasn’t necessarily nailing the role. “You did one of the most wonderful things and said, “I prepared some of the takes you’ve done, and they’re at Paramount.” You remember?,” said Pacino, turning over to Coppola. “I looked at it in this room by myself, sitting and thinking, “This isn’t very good, whatever it is.” In my mind with Michael, I was going for the end of the movie, which makes him somewhat enigmatic. But early on, he is someone you don’t pay attention to too much. But when the transition comes, you’d go “wow — where did that come from?” That was my hope. But I knew I was on the wrong track. And then [Coppola] did the most brilliant thing anyone could do and he actually changed the schedule. He took the [Virgil] Sollozzo scene where Michael shoots him and the Captain, and he put it upfront. It wasn’t scheduled for that day. But the studio was done with me; I was gone. And he showed them the Sollozzo scene and they kept me. Without Francis, where would I be?”

3. Robert De Niro approached playing young Vito scientifically.

“To get someone to play the Brando role as a young man was daunting,” Coppola said within regards to the casting process of The Godfather Part II. “But I didn’t think of it as Brando. I thought [Bobby] could play the Vito Corleone character the way Brando created him. He could be the younger Vito without ever going through Brando. He isn’t necessarily a Brando-lookalike. But he could capture what Vito Corleone would have been like as a young man.” De Niro, who indicated he was honored that Coppola asked him to take on the part, recalled going to The Paramount Studios in the Gulf and Western Building at Columbus Circle with Associate Producer Gray Frederickson. “I went to the screening room, took a tape recorder and filmed the scenes Brando was in. I played them over and over for myself as I was working on it. But it was great. I looked at it in a scientific way. I had to find spots where I could do stuff to imitate what he was doing and I enjoyed it.” De Niro’s method clearly paid off. As Hackford reminded the audience, “The Godfather is the only time in history where two actors won the Academy Award for playing the same character in two different films.”

4. We owe one of the best scenes of The Godfather Part II to Talia Shire.

As the sister of Coppola, Talia Shire’s casting as Connie was a touchy subject. She actually had to beg for an audition from her brother who was opposed to her casting. For the longest time, Coppola couldn’t see Shire as the “homely Italian girl” described in the book (which he had quibbles with); he pictured someone entirely different. But she auditioned and did get the part eventually (as well as a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for Part II). As it was revealed in passing during the panel, it was Shire who came up with the idea of Kay’s terminated pregnancy, which was supposed to be a miscarriage. It is a key scene in the second film that establishes Kay’s determination and bravery against Michael, and it is in there all thanks to Talia Shire.

5. There is more to The Godfather wedding scene than what we see on screen.

There are of course set stories, as there are in any film. But what Duvall recalls is unlike any other. “During the wedding scene, we were all mooning each other. And Brando took it quite seriously,” he playfully said. “He gave it a world championship belt. So he went for his belt and I went for my belt. But Coppola warned them: “There are women and children here, you can’t do that.” But they did. “And when we mooned,” Duvall continued, “some woman turned to me and said “Mr. Duvall, you’re fine.” Then she turned to her friend and said “but did you catch those balls on that Brando?””

5 Highlights from ‘The Godfather’ 45th Anniversary Reunion was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Sponsored Content

05/07/17--10:38: ‘Master of None’ Returns, ‘I Love Dick’ Debuts, Plus More TV You Must See This Week

Another one of our favorite shows is back this week, as the whole of Master of None’s Season 2 hits Netflix, and one of the most hopeful new series of the year, Amazon’s I Love Dick, makes its leap from pilot to full first season the same day. There’s also the end of the first season of Riverdale, more Fargo and Better Call Saul, a must-see installment of Saturday Night Live, reason to check out the new sitcom Great News, and why we’re paying attention to the MTV Movie Awards this year.

To help you keep track of the most important programs over the next seven days, here’s our guide to everything worth watching, whether it’s on broadcast, cable, or streaming for May 7–13 (all times Eastern):