Late Spring Reading, Listening, and Viewing
In the race between the variants and the vaccines, the variants have the upper hand at the moment. Festival organizers, though, are clearly counting on the astonishingly rapid pace of vaccinations to turn things around. Tribeca plans to celebrate its twentieth edition with in-person screenings and live events over twelve days in June, while the Museum of Modern Art and Film at Lincoln Center will be offering the option of in-person screenings during its fiftieth anniversary edition of New Directors/New Films from April 28 through May 13. But virtual screenings will also be available through May 8.
- This past weekend saw the fortieth anniversary of Michael Mann’s debut feature, Thief, featuring James Caan as Frank, a safe cracker who takes on that one last job. For Consequence of Sound, Adam Carston, Andrew Buss, and Michael Roffman have spoken with Caan and James Belushi, who plays Frank’s friend and associate, to put together an oral history of the film the interviewers call “a boiling point for ’70s crime thrillers and a fever dream of the ’80s to come.” Bill Simmons, Sean Fennessey, and Chris Ryan discuss Thief at the Ringer and eleven contributors to the New York Times each write up a favorite moment from Mann’s filmography.
- One of the wildest reads of the week has to be Joshua Hunt’s profile for Vulture of Randall Emmett, a producer whose credits “include more than 110 movies, which have grossed in excess of $1.2 billion, most of them bad enough to require a category all their own.” Emmett specializes in “geezer teasers,” the sort of “cheap paint-by-numbers action flicks” featuring Bruce Willis, John Travolta, Nicolas Cage, Sylvester Stallone, or Steven Seagal on the poster and in the trailer even though they might show up for less than ten minutes in the actual movie. Hard to believe as it may be, Martin Scorsese’s Silence (2016) probably would not have been made without Randall Emmett, who launched his career in Hollywood as a “hard-partying hanger-on who helped inspire the character Turtle on HBO’s Entourage.”
- This week has given us not only a new issue of Film-Philosophy but also a new publication. The first issue of Caligari features Devika Girish’s interview with John Akomfrah, thoughts on the long take from Jia Zhangke, and Amy Heller on why she and fellow Milestone Films cofounder Dennis Doros “like to fuck with the canon.” But the biggest surprise is the return of the “nonsectarian left, feminist, anti-racist and anti-imperialist” journal Jump Cut, which has been publishing since 1974. The new sixtieth issue is the first since 2019. “I know that readers wonder how long Jump Cut will keep going,” writes Julia Lesage, the sole surviving founding editor. “I do, too.” But she’s “just turning eighty-two and in good health and compos mentis. So, I want to go on as long as possible with putting it out.” The new issue, “one of our best,” features “groundbreaking special sections on pedagogy during the pandemic, contemporary media activism, and queer TV.”
- Adam Curtis’s six-episode series Can’t Get You out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World premiered online in mid-February, and it’s still very much a hot topic. Talking to Curtis for the April issue of Sight & Sound, Nick Bradshaw notes that he hasn’t “seen a TV series offer so much dizzying food for thought while enjoying its freedom to disorient us since Twin Peaks: The Return (2017).” But for Hannah McGill, also writing in S&S, “Curtis practices journalism absent the qualities that give it credibility: specificity, precision, corroboration, consistency.” On the Politics Theory Other podcast, Owen Hatherley, Juliet Jacques, and Alberto Toscano talk about the split verdict on Curtis on the political left, while Film Comment’s Clinton Krute and Devika Girish discuss Curtis’s aesthetic strategies with programmer Dan Sullivan and Harper’s web editor Violet Lucca. Meantime, the top ten in the new Artforum comes from Curtis himself.