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.
Francis Ford Coppola will preside over the Marrakech Film Festival jury this December, Variety reports.
Martin Scorsese reflects on The Third Man at The Independent:
I saw The Third Man for the first time on television in New York, with commercial interruptions. I think I was about 15 years old, maybe 16. I saw Citizen Kane around the same period. I remember that I wanted to see the film on its first release, but was unable to do so, which created a mystique about the film. The theme was a radio hit, but my first viewing was on TV, around ’56 or ’57. But even with commercial breaks on a 16-inch screen, the power of the picture, the surprise, the entertainment, the film-making itself… a revelation. Expressive style, virtuosity – I became fixated, obsessed.
Watch a tribute to the films of Denis Villeneuve:
At Little White Lies, David Ehrlich pits Pixar against Studio Ghibli:
To dig a little bit deeper, it could be argued that Studio Ghibli tends to tell stories that happen to be animated, while Pixar tells stories that need to be. While Pixar has established their brand on the strength of movies about insects, talking fish, sentient toys, corporate monsters, and cars who have giant eyes for windshields, Ghibli has often located their work within a more recognisably human realm. As a result, the effects and ends of their animation tends to be more subtle: consider how The Tale of the Princess Kaguya revitalises an ancient piece of Japanese folklore by using charcoal and watercolour drawings in order to express a timeless sense of living myth.
Watch a 20-minute conversation with The Tribe‘s Yana Novikova:
At AV Club, Mike D’Angelo believes Quentin Tarantino was onto something when he took that shot at John Ford:
Let me confess that I empathize, at least to a degree. Unlike Tarantino, I don’t despise or even dislike Ford, who made plenty of films that are indisputably great. But I do find that his treatment of Native Americans gets in the way of my enjoyment, at times to a significant degree. (In Ford’s early pictures, they’re not even Indians—they’re Injuns.) Obviously, watching old movies requires a certain amount of flinching at the more overt racism of the past, and Ford is by no means the only offender; if you want to watch Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney perform an entire musical number in blackface, you can do that right now. But Ford’s scenes featuring Indians frequently aren’t just offensive by contemporary standards—they’re also tonally divorced from the rest of the movie in a destructive way. That’s even true of The Searchers, a masterpiece that I like and admire but have never quite been able to bring myself to love. Since I happen to have just watched 1939’s Drums Along The Mohawk, however, let me share the scene that abruptly yanked me out of that film, and see if I can articulate why it bothers me.