Blueprints: "Hereditary"

This week, Jorge dives into how the setting and character introductions made this one of the most unsettling movies in years.

Horror films are far scarier when they are grounded by real fears. Sure, a ghost flying towards you or the sight of a little girl head’s spinning are objectively terrifying. But when a character's terror reflects the way we have felt at dire points, the horror movie seeps into our own lives, suddenly tangible. 

Hereditary is as much of a family melodrama as it is a horror film. Its scariness doesn’t rely on a supernatural force (although there is one), or on gory and violent imagery (though there’s definitely some of that). The horror taps into the dynamics and secrets of family life. It takes regular fraught human emotions and raises them to unbearable levels...

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Tweetweek: Bowing Down to Extra Divas

Tweet of the week... no, year. 

Sadly Marvel didn’t take my suggestion of a 30 min sequence in #AntManAndWasp where everyone shrinks down slightly smaller than Michelle Pfeiffer and bows their heads, refusing to look her in the eye because they’re not worthy.

— mat whitehead (@matwhi) July 4, 2018

After the jump the poor man's Johnny Depp, Mamma Mia Fallen Kingdom, Disney Princesses, actress kerfuffles, and a bit of politics because who can avoid it now...File the next two tweets under 'You learn new things every day!'...

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Netflix in July: Troy's Straight-Washing, Blue Valentine's Brilliance.

Time to play Streaming Roulette. Each month, to survey new streaming titles we freeze frame the films at random places with the scroll bar and whatever comes up first, that's what we share!

July is kind of a quiet month on Netflix but which of these films will you be streaming for the first time or as a rewatch? Which do you have strong feelings about. Please do tell us in the comments. Ready? Let's go...

ARE YOU CRAZY?!? IF I CAN'T PULL MY CHUTE, YOU'LL DIE TOO!

Get Smart (2008)
Despite being an Anne Hathaway disciple I have not seen this. Worth a watch? Anyone? 

Hey, can I ask you something else: What's the story of that girl that was in here a month ago? 

Blue Valentine (2010)
Ryan Gosling is visiting his grandma because he's a sweet soul. I especially love the editing here. The image cuts to this for the rest of the visiting grandma dialogue...

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Months of Meryl: Music of the Heart (1999)

John and Matthew are watching every single live-action film starring Meryl Streep. 

#27 — Roberta Guaspari, a real-life violinist and instructor who brought music education to the classrooms of Harlem.

MATTHEW:  One of the pitfalls that tends to come with occupying such a prominent position in the highly public realm of moviemaking is a gradual inability to disappear into the most straightforward of roles. I’m not talking about the magical acts of self-vanishing that allow Daniel Day-Lewis to seemingly become figures as disparate as Bill the Butcher and Abraham Lincoln nor the larger-than-life personas achieved through virtuosic, full-scale deglamorizations by the likes of Elizabeth Taylor and Charlize Theron, but rather the everyday characters who may achieve great things but whose lives are decisively rooted in reality, their appearances neither remarkable nor particularly conspicuous. No matter how hard a performer tries to shed her star persona and immerse herself in distinctly un-Hollywood settings, it is often up to us, the viewers, to forget everything we know about a star in order to actually believe her as, more or less, one of us...

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RIP to Two Titans of European Cinema

By Glenn Dunks

What a shock it was to hear over the last 24 hours of the deaths of both Robby Müller and Claude Lanzmann. These two icons of European cinema were 78 and 92 respectively and both gave so much to the universe and there are not enough hats to tip to their memories and their legacies.

Robby Müller was the Dutch-born cinematographer whose regular collaborations with the likes of Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch and Lars Von Trier were the stuff of legend. Who can forget those stunning tableaus of Breaking the Waves or his regular plays on black and white with Jarmusch as well as Sally Potter’s The Tango Lesson. I'm not as well versed on Jarmusch's films as others, but I gather Dead Man with Johnny Depp is the one worth gawking over the most.

And I know it’s become a little bit fashionable to roll one’s eyes at people going on about the virtues of celluloid over digital, but I guarantee you have never seen colours projected onto a screen quite like those twilight blues of Wenders’ Paris, Texas...

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