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.
Watch over 100 films from Georges Méliès, born on this day in 1861:
At Grantland, Molly Lambert on Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Los Angeles:
Three of Paul Thomas Anderson’s first four movies take place in the San Fernando Valley, where he and I both grew up. This alone probably made me a mark for PTA fandom, as no other director has ever portrayed the Valley as Anderson does: lovingly. The Valley’s reputation in Los Angeles is a bit like New Jersey’s in New York. People in Los Angeles proper are known to hate on the Valley for being 10 degrees hotter, for its supposed lack of culture, for being far away (mostly psychologically). But if you’ve grown up there, you find that those hang-ups are irrelevant. The Valley is its own creature, part of Los Angeles but also a world of its own. Suburban sprawl means lots of space for riding bikes, green city parks, big backyards with avocado trees and swimming pools. It includes a diverse cross-section of industrial zones, rich neighborhoods littered with tacky McMansions, and ranch land right out of the Old West.
Watch the art from Criterion Designs come to life:
At Film Comment, Lankester Merrin on the differences between the Dying of the Light theatrical and director’s cut versions:
As one who has seen both versions of Dying, I can report that in neither edit is Schrader’s latest a masterpiece, while in both it is an efficient and mostly effective B-grade thriller rooted in a distinctly Schraderian sense of guilt and moral anguish, and featuring a very fine performance by Cage. Compared to two of the most famous hatchet jobs in cinema history—the “short” versions of Heaven’s Gate and Once Upon a Time in America—you could even argue that Schrader has gotten off easy, with no major alterations to his narrative structure or the running time. And yet, and yet, and yet…