Blueprints: "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?"

This week on Blueprints, Jorge writes a letter to daddy.

Any screenwriting book, seminar, or four-year degree will tell you that screenwriting is all about showing, not telling. It should feel more like describing a house in a Craiglist ad than writing a novel. The script is being written so it can be shot, not read. However, just like any other “rule” in cinema, it’s made to be broken. In fact, those who break rules can sometimes transcend them.

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, the 1962 grand guignol classic, is best remembered for the bombastic performances of the two leads, and the drama that took place between them behind the scenes. But reading the script, it’s apparent that the story is charged with remarkable meaning, intention, and impulse. Often hidden in the lines that the audience is never going to read...

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Tribeca 2018: Mary Elizabeth Winstead stuns in "All About Nina"

by Jason Adams

If you hear a sliver of Margo Channing's famous warning echoing across All About Nina you should know it's not just because the title's a riff on that Bette Davis classic. It is indeed going to be a bumpy night, a series of them actually, for Nina (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and for everybody that comes into contact with her. Although there are interstitial daylight-breaks, Nina's life revolves around nights and the things that bump them. She's a comedian, and we know well by now how those lives are structured. Bump, bump, POW. Fasten them seat-belts, baby...

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April Foolish Predictions: Let's talk Cinematography!

by Nathaniel R

We didn't forget about the April Foolish Predictions. They just got all tangled up with Tribeca screenings, Cannes news, Avengers mania, and everything else going on in April. So herewith another prediction batch. First charts are now up for all of the visual categories, barring Costume Design which will get its own post tomorrow just because. 

Cinematography is always one of the most exciting contests as there are so many genuinely gifted DPs out there doing great work over and over again but only one Oscar to hand out each year. At the moment I'm wondering about the futures of these four DPs in particular...

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Doc Corner: William Friedkin's 'The Devil and Father Amorth'

By Glenn Dunks

It’s becoming more common for directors known for fictional narrative cinema to work in the documentary medium as well. Not all of them land as successfully as, say, Ava DuVernay who managed a Best Documentary nomination at the Oscars as her first nod, despite previous critically acclaimed narrative features including even a Best Picture nominee. Documentary is, after all, just another form of building a narrative. There’s no real reason why telling a story in that form ought to be any different to building one around real people and real locations.

The Devil and Father Armoth, now in limited release and available on digital platforms, isn't William Friedkin's first documentary. He's made short docs like 2007’s The Painter’s Voice, 1985’s Putting it Together: The Making of the Broadway Album for Barbra Streisand, and the feature-length Conversations with Fritz Lang. That latter example, a 1975 film, followed Friedkin’s one-two-three narrative punch of The Boys in the Band, The French Connection and The Exorcist.

The filmmaker and his subject

The Exorcist remains his most famous film and also lays the groundwork for The Devil and Father Amorth...

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Soundtracking: "The Virgin Suicides"

Chris looks at the music of Sofia Coppola's debut, now a part of The Criterion Collection.

Time has been kind to Sofia Coppola The Virgin Suicides, as effective a critique on the male gaze as anything else in the past twenty years. In Coppola’s gauzy vision of its central Lisbon sisters (as told by neighborhood boys) is a reflection of male idolatry that ignores the voice and emotional reality of real women. While the film is typically remembered for how it visually creates this perspective, it also uses music in interesting ways to subvert male self-serving worship.

The film is haunted by Air’s “Playground Love”, it’s most evocative and film-defining musical passage. It’s an apt song choice, one that tempts you into its pull like the tumble into a teenage crush, all jazzy hormones mired in lyrical thinness. And yet despite its temptation and seemingly feminine sway, its a starkly male brand of lust and the woman on the other end of its proclamations is never more than a vague idea. Naturally, it becomes the theme song to its young male obsession with the unknowable and unknown girls on the receiving end of empty crushes. Coppola sees and hears your  horniness and you willful ignorance, gentlemen, and the film sends out a subtle and cutting middle finger.

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