Your handy one-stop-shop for film news, interviews, articles, and videos from the week that was.
While Joe Biden was being sworn as U.S. President at the tender age of 78, David Lynch was celebrating his 75th birthday the same way he marks any other day: reporting the Los Angeles weather.
Vancouver film critic Lawrence Garcia marked the occasion in more impressive fashion by unveiling this staggering 15,000-word long read on Twin Peaks: The Return that touches on “Chris Marker’s Vertigo reading, (Mabusean) destiny-machines and (Lynchian) dream factories, detective fiction, Michael Snow, Laurel & Hardy, video games, Beckett and ‘hidden literality,’ and, especially, the role of language in Lynch.”
Having already announced that Bong Joon-Ho would head their jury this year, the Venice Film Festival shared that they’d also be revamping their film sections. This includes the addition of Horizons Extra, which tantalizingly promises “works with no limits of genre, duration and destination.”
While picking up a lifetime achievement award at Venice last September, Tilda Swinton also made a fashion statement with her taste in ostentatious masks. This week it was announced that, having already re-teamed with Joanna Hogg on The Souvenir II, she’ll also be starring in the writer/director’s next feature, The Eternal Daughter.
Writing for Vox, Emily VanDerWerff offers “A close read of Promising Young Woman’s brilliant, divisive ending” and suggests that appreciation of the daring climax of Emerald Fennell’s debut feature hinges on viewing it through the proper genre lens. (As you may have guessed, this shouldn’t be read unless you’ve seen the film.)
Sean Durkin employed a decidedly different process for The Nest, his stunning sophomore feature which was one of the major casualties of 2020’s COVID-ravaged release schedule. In discussing his process with Filmmaker Magazine’s Evan Louison, Durkin shares, “A lot of the process is subtraction for me… I’ll pull back and pull back and pull back… But it’s about making sure I only have in what I need, and that there are certain things that need to be understood, so it’s a constant struggle of trying to say enough and having something feel natural.”
Finally, after watching Jesse Dylan’s Soros on VIFF Connect you can head over to Criterion’s The Current and read Dana Spiotta’s essay on Rolling Thunder Review: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese. Released as America begins a seismic transition, Spiotta’s article assesses, “The director curates the archival footage to make an argument about how the tensions of the American cultural moment are a crucial part of the story of Bob Dylan. The singer-songwriter’s own acts of self-invention and reinvention seem to work out American contradictions on the plane of music and performance.”
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