Skip to content

Tag: steven soderbergh

Something for the Weekend

Excitingly Wrong — An interview with Peter Mendelsund at Porter Square Books:

I am always interested by anything graphical that strikes me as (this is difficult to put into words) excitingly wrong. There is a cool-factor to certain images that lie just on this side of disagreeable…pictorial effects that make me think “this will bother a lot of unimaginative people.” Whenever I see something like that, a piece of art or graphic design that has that special kind of wrongness about it, I think “I need to do something like this myself.” Attendant to this is always the feeling of “in the future, this will be done a lot.” In other words, today’s ugly is tomorrow’s beautiful.

Lurking Menace — Ostensibly reviewing David Bowie Is, the catalogue for the current V & A exhibition, and Bowie’s new album, The Next Day, Ian Buruma looks back at the performer’s career at the NYRB:

[Bowie] drew his inspiration from anything that happened to catch his fancy: Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin of the 1930s, Hollywood divas of the 1940s, Kabuki theater, William Burroughs, English mummers, Jean Cocteau, Andy Warhol, French chansons, Buñuel’s surrealism, and Stanley Kubrick’s movies, especially A Clockwork Orange, whose mixture of high culture, science fiction, and lurking menace suited Bowie to the ground. Artists and filmmakers have often created interesting results by refining popular culture into high art. Bowie did the opposite: he would, as he once explained in an interview, plunder high art and take it down to the street; that was his brand of rock-and-roll theater.

This Movie is About Hope — Film Comment has a transcript of Steven Soderbergh’s San Francisco International Film Festival ‘State of Cinema Address’:

 The simplest way that I can describe it is that a movie is something you see, and cinema is something that’s made. It has nothing to do with the captured medium, it doesn’t have anything to do with where the screen is, if it’s in your bedroom, your iPad, it doesn’t even really have to be a movie. It could be a commercial, it could be something on YouTube. Cinema is a specificity of vision. It’s an approach in which everything matters. It’s the polar opposite of generic or arbitrary and the result is as unique as a signature or a fingerprint. It isn’t made by a committee, and it isn’t made by a company, and it isn’t made by the audience. It means that if this filmmaker didn’t do it, it either wouldn’t exist at all, or it wouldn’t exist in anything like this form.

Read the whole thing. It reminded me of William Goldman’s famous comment about Hollywood in Adventures in the Screen Trade: “nobody knows anything.”

See also: At the New York Times film critic A. O. Scott looks at Soderbergh’s ‘Twitter narrativeGlue.

And finally…

Just to the Right of Karl Marx — At the Financial Times, Julia Hobsbawn remembers her father, the historian Eric Hobsbawn:

The cemetery plot, situated as my husband Alaric wryly pointed out later “just to the right of Karl Marx”, had been freshly dug…  My mum Marlene had bought the plot in an expensive and expansive act of love several years earlier. She is 81 and was my father’s unsung muse for 50 years, dealing constantly with demands on his time from students, publishers, editors and broadcasters while acting as his general reader…

My dad was pleased knowing that he would end up there. Highgate Cemetery’s east wing is full of iconoclasts from the intelligentsia. I can picture him, glasses pushed up over his high forehead, peering longsightedly at the guide produced by the Friends of Highgate Cemetery Trust about its history, hoovering up the text and filleting it for us in an exact and pithy way. “Ah yes,” he might say, energised like a freshly charged battery by what he had just read, “you see what is really interesting about this is…”

Comments closed