[Editor's note: While your Flavorwire editors take a much-needed holiday break, we're revisiting some of our most popular features of the year. This post was originally published May 23, 2011.] A few weeks back, we mentioned that list of Steven Soderbergh’s “cultural diet” (films viewed and books read and TV watched over the course of one year), noting that, in one week, he took in Raiders of the Lost Ark no less than three times — and that he carefully pointed out that each viewing was in black and white. In writing about that list, I said that this was something “we’re totally going to do now,” and last week, I did. Guess what? Soderbergh’s right. Raiders is way better in black and white.
That little experiment got me thinking about other modern movies that might play better in this decidedly less-than-modern format. There is, we can all agree, just something about black and white. In his wonderful 1989 essay “Why I Love Black and White,” Roger Ebert wrote: “There are basic aesthetic issues here. Colors have emotional resonance for us… Black and white movies present the deliberate absence of color. This makes them less realistic than color films (for the real world is in color). They are more dreamlike, more pure, composed of shapes and forms and movements and light and shadow. Color films can simply be illuminated. Black and white films have to be lighted. With color, you can throw light in everywhere, and the colors will help the viewer determine one shape from another, and the foreground from the background. With black and white, everything would tend toward a shapeless blur if it were not for meticulous attention to light and shadow, which can actually create a world in which the lighting indicates a hierarchy of moral values.”
Once I picked the movies that we thought would work for this experiment, I realized that trying to just describe them in a standard post wouldn’t work at all. So I’m doing something different with this post: I made a little video for each title, with clips transformed to black and white and commentary explaining why each one was selected. Check out Raiders and my other choices after the jump.
Jonathan Demme is known for his mastery of all sorts of movie genres, from thriller (Silence of the Lambs) to concert doc (Stop Making Sense, his Neil Young films) to emotionally wrenching drama (Philadelphia, Rachel Getting Married). And since many of his films have had political overtones, it’s not surprising to learn that he is fascinated by the Occupy movement. Demme has created a 15-minute short that documents daily life at Zuccotti Park — the drum circles, the dancing, the conversations between strangers, the menacing police presence, the young people sleeping among tarps, the signs, the passionate speakers, the news cameras. The filmmaker told Deadline that the video is “an informercial for Occupy Wall Street, a citizen’s response to something important… I have no agenda, but I’m an enthusiast and support this so passionately that in a tiny way I wanted to contribute.” Demme says he has at least one more Occupy short in the works.
Of particular note amongst this week’s new DVD and Blu-ray releases is Buried, Rodrigo Cortés’s tense, harrowing tale of a contractor, buried alive, trapped for the duration of the film in a 2’ x 7’ wood coffin. This is a risky formula for movie-making — not only must the filmmakers keep our interest in that confined space, but star Ryan Reynolds undertakes the considerable challenge of holding the audience’s attention, basically by himself, for 90+ minutes.
Earlier this week it was announced that Terry Gilliam, director of films such as Brazil and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, will helm the live stream of Arcade Fire’s August 5 show at Madison Square Garden as part of American Express’s Unstaged series. Luckily for us impatient types, Gilliam is not the first major filmmaker to use his cinematic eye to commit live rock ‘n’ roll performances to film. We’ve rounded up five of our favorite concert films by well-known directors after the jump. Check out our picks, and leave a comment with any that we missed.
According to the LA Times, Michael Jackson’s This Is It isn’t performing like a concert film. In the six days it has been in theaters, the doc has already grossed over $100 million worldwide, with its biggest numbers happening overseas. While concert movies’ ticket sales usually drop off after fans hit up the opening night, This Is It grossed more on Sunday than it did on any day since it debuted.
Perhaps this will lead more acts — other than Miley Cyrus and the JoBros — to reinvigorate the genre with theatrical releases. Animal Collective? The Dirty Projectors? Imagine if the Flaming Lips UFOs At The Zoo had gotten a run at the local cineplex. After the jump, five classics we think all concert films should take their cues from.
Unlike the most of the country, we decided to escape our own family drama with the big screen version, taking in Rachel Getting Married over the Thanksgiving weekend. The box office report indicates that everyone else caught Reese Witherspoon and Vince Vaughn in their new comedy Four Christmases, which grossed a healthy $46.7m over the five-day period. (Rounding out the top five was Twilight, $39.52m; Bolt, $36.01m; Quantum of Solace, $28.13m; and Australia, $20m.)
But back to Rachel Getting Married. We had read only positive reviews for the Jonathan Demme/Anne Hathaway vehicle. We had heard the Oscar buzz Hathaway has been generating for her daring crossover from popcorn princess to indie bad girl. Plus we’re big fans of Demme’s previous work, which includes flicks like Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia. It seemed like a no-brainer.
So why did we almost follow suit when over seven people got up and left our not-so-crowded theater?
