Dailies is a round-up of essential film writing, news bits, and other highlights from our colleagues across the Internet — and, occasionally, our own writers. If you’d like to submit a piece for consideration, get in touch with us in the comments below or on Twitter at @TheFilmStage.
Read Lena Dunham‘s essay on The Big Chill for The Criterion Collection:
These are your parents.
You are not yet born, or you are very young, and they are gathered for a weekend far away from you, in a house by the water.
If you don’t yet exist, they are considering you—you’re an inevitability they are not quite ready to accept. And if you’re already alive—chubby, dressed in patterned leggings and Velcro sneakers and a headband with knit fruits adorning it—they are trying to forget about you. Just for the weekend.
See a detailed visual breakdown of the opening Inglourious Basterds at Matt Scott Visuals:
At Vulture, Adam Sternbergh on the strange year of the posthumous performance:
Two thousand fourteen is only half over, yet the year in culture has already been dominated by people who are dead. I don’t mean people like Elvis and Shakespeare, whose work endures long after their passing; I mean people like Michael Jackson, who, five years in the grave, performed at the Billboard Music Awards in May. And Rick James, who’s been dead for a decade and who has a new memoir this year. And the great Philip Seymour Hoffman, who died in February and has a new movie out.
At Esquire, Luke Dittrich on the sequel to Passion of the Christ that never came to be:
Ten years ago, Benedict Fitzgerald’s screenplay helped turn The Passion of the Christ into the most successful independent movie ever made. Later, he wrote a follow-up script that he thought could be as big—and so did some drug dealers, money launderers, and kidnappers. Now, when biblical epics have once again become a thriving Hollywood business, this is the story of what happened to the mother of all sequels.
Listen to Bret Easton Ellis‘ podcast interview with Matthew Modine, discussing his experience working with Stanley Kubrick:
At Grantland, Bryan Curtis explores the darkness of Temple of Doom:
It’s strange when two filmmakers can hardly stand to look at one of their movies. Especially when that film was as lucrative — and, for me, as beautifully sinister — as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. So when I met George Lucas in December, in advance of the release of Red Tails, I asked why he and Steven Spielberg always seemed to be renouncing it.