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.
After Jonny Greenwood announced he’ll score There Will Be Blood live in London, it’s revealed today he’ll also becoming to the U.S. on September 19th and 20th at the United Palace Theater in Washington Heights in New York City.
At Filmmaker Magazine, Vadim Rizov on Under the Skin and the problem with the adjective “Kubrickian.”
Conflating a director’s entire style, ethos and thematic preoccupations with the introduction of a specific piece of technology is the kind of reductive association a suitably theory-minded scholar could have a field day with. A more meaningful definition of “Kubrickian” would be to consider his films as architectural projects: the enormous Overlook and the entirely fabricated New York City of Eyes Wide Shut are formidable concrete realizations of a universe created top-down. In that respect, Glazer couldn’t be less “Kubrickian”: Under The Skin floats through as-is Glasgow, mediated by a limited dose of entropy. (Johansson drove the van and had agency in deciding where to drive.)
At Pacific Standard, Jennifer Ouellette talks to neuroscientist Sergei Gepshtein about “a new visual vocabulary for cinema—one that relies much less on the cut, or perhaps even eliminates the cut altogether.”
Since the dawn of cinema, the cut has been one of the most powerful tools in a director’s kit. If we see a man walk through a door and turn his head to the right, and the scene immediately cuts to an image of an apple on a side table, our brain fills in the gap, and we understand that this man is looking at the apple.
See how Darren Aronofsky controlled the rain with an iPad on the set of Noah (via Rope of Silicon):
At Indiewire, Anthony Kaufman explores why U.S. audiences are abandoning foreign-language films:
Last month, Variety chief film critic Scott Foundas wrote an article that should be heartwarming for anyone heading to the Cannes Film Festival: “U.S. Audiences Are More Comfortable With Subtitles Than Ever.” Unfortunately, it’s not true: U.S. box office for the top five foreign-language films has declined by 61% in the last seven years.
At RogerEbert.com, Matt Zoller Seitz discusses his superhero movie problem:
I don’t hate superhero movies. Repeat: I do not hate superhero movies. They’re another genre in a medium that thrives on genre, one that’s as ritualized in its story beats as the western, the romantic comedy or the zombie picture. When competently done, superhero pictures can be fun, or at least intermittently diverting.
If you stop by Vilnius, Lithuania, you can see Clinic 212‘s tiny Grand Budapest Hotel:
