Dailies is a round-up of essential film writing, news bits, and other highlights from across the Internet. If you’d like to submit a piece for consideration, get in touch with us in the comments below or on Twitter at @TheFilmStage.
If you track down the stolen ruby slippers from Wizard of Oz, you’ll get $1 million, according to The Washington Post:
Nearly 10 years ago, someone stole the famous “Wizard of Oz” ruby slippers from the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minn. There’s surely no place like home when these shoes worth millions of dollars are, according to local rumor, stuffed in some basement closet or lost down a deep mine pit. Now, one wealthy “Oz” fan is willing to give $1 million to the person who can identify the location of the slippers and the name of the perpetrator.
Watch a 30-minute conversation with the director and cast of Tangerine:
After reading our interview with Tarsem Singh, check out his five favorite films on Rotten Tomatoes:
It is the greatest film in the english language ever made between the two Godfathers. Almost drove him bankrupt, but there you go. It is the greatest thriller of all time. If ever you’re talking about a character to which — how to get you biting your nails without any slaps or gunshots going off, that movie’s it. It’s just so terrifyingly correct. I’m not really a [Michaelangelo] Antonioni fan or any of those; Blow Up and all that never did it for me. But The Conversation, somehow, whoa. And I kind of find Mamet the same way. I know everybody holds correctly Hitchcock, you know, as high as you can, but I find Mamet delivers more shock and awe to me, and twists in a correct way than I ever found with Hitchcock. But of course we’re watching Hitchcock movies when 20 things have copied his films and they’ve become cliché at a particular point. The Conversation holds up like that for me.
Movie Mezzanine‘s Daniel Carlson on the bright but uncertain future of film criticism:
Film reviews are tricky things. As a critic, you have to explain enough of what happens in a movie to give readers an idea of what to expect, but that plot description has to be balanced with analysis unless you want to wind up with a flat recap. You have to reveal enough of the story to provide supporting evidence for your critical arguments, but also withhold genuine twists and spoilers so that viewers aren’t robbed of the experience of seeing the film themselves. You’re writing something that serves as a consumer guide—a chance for the reader to learn if a movie’s worth the price of admission—while also working as a critical reading of a film that examines deeper meaning, reads into aesthetics, and places the work in a broader artistic and historical context. You serve many masters. So what do we want from film criticism? Where are we going? And what are we going to find when we get there? When even an outlet as passionate and laden with talent as The Dissolve can find itself out of business, what are we to do?
Watch Jason Schwartzman, Adam Scott, and more discuss The Overnight:
Little White Lies‘ David Ehrlich talks to Frederick Wiseman, who is seeking Kickstarter funds for his documentary In Jackson Heights:
It’s almost as hard to fathom cinema without Frederick Wiseman as it is to fathom Frederick Wiseman without the cinema. The 85-year-old iconoclast has been on this planet since the dawn of the sound era, and his name has been synonymous with invaluable and illuminating “observational” documentaries for almost as long. Gifted with rare patience and an inimitably perceptive eye, the blunt Bostonian (now a well-settled ex-pat in France) has spent the better part of his life shrinking massive institutions like high schools, mental institutions, and even an entire New England town to the size of a movie screen. Now in his sixth decade of filmmaking and just as prolific as ever – 2013‘s At Berkeley and last year’s National Gallery are as monumental as any of the works that established his style – Wiseman has clearly become an institution unto himself (though he would no doubt blanch at such a description, both out of modesty and also a candid distaste for such stale prettification).