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.
Watch a new Rouge Louboutin commercial by David Lynch, who is now designing women’s sportswear:
At Film Freak Central, Walter Chaw discusses Ace in the Hole:
Ace in the Hole is full of bees. It’s the most scabrous, uncompromised work from Billy Wilder, who never made a movie that wasn’t kind of an asshole; and never made a movie that didn’t reflect the essential nihilism of his worldview. He’s a fascinating figure, Wilder–a director of obvious genius who has defied easy auteur classification not because he didn’t have his distinguishing characteristics (the outsider hero yearning for assimilation, for instance), but because his films are only queasily liked and then only at arm’s length. His stuff is poisonous. There’s a sense that reviewing him is like trying to dissect a facehugger: if you poke too insistently, you’ll release acid. You can point to Some Like it Hot as an exception, but I would respond that that film is about a notorious gangland massacre, repressed homosexuality, rape (kind of), chiselling, and the difficulties embedded in gender expectation and objectification. Wilder’s treatment of Marilyn Monroe there and in the earlier The Seven-Year Itch, and his later comments about Marilyn’s stupidity, her breasts, and his venal rationale for working with her twice, all feeds into the read that Ace in the Hole is close to autobiography. A curmudgeon with wit is an asshole by any other name. What would Wilder have done with his dream project, Schindler’s List? Like Ace in the Hole, I imagine it would have been more about a world that would endorse such atrocity than about the atrocity itself.
A complete John Waters retrospective is coming to Film Society at Lincoln Center in September.
At The Talk House, Joe Swanberg on the clumsy use of technology in Sex Tape:
Jay, Jason Segel’s character in the new film Sex Tape, apparently buys so many new models of iPads that he has gifted about 10 older models to friends, family and acquaintances (such as the mailman) over the years. Early in the film, he explains some convoluted system that requires him to have two iPads at a time for his massive music collection, but then we find out he bought this latest model because of its higher resolution screen. I wasn’t sure why he needed the fancy screen if he was just listening to music on the things, but it soon became clear that the filmmakers were bending over backwards to tell an analog story in a digital age.
Richard Ayoade has debuted the cover of his new book on film, coming later this year:
Now with added title pic.twitter.com/ggTcWdThFt
— richard ayoade (@RichardAyoade) July 24, 2014