Jason Bailey: Put Your Weight On It

Originally published on Flavorwire, 2/11/2016 The Silence of the Lambs , which hit theaters 25 years ago Sunday, was one of the most influential films in recent memory – you can see its bloody fingerprints on pretty much every serial killer thriller that followed, on film and television, good ( Seven, Zodiac ), bad ( Jennifer 8, Hannibal Rising ), and indifferent ( Copycat, The Bone Collector ). But much of its success was unpredicted, and unprecedented; it’s one of only three films to win the “Big Five” Academy Awards of Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor, and Best Actress, and despite the Academy’s notoriously short memory, that sweep came a full year after its theatrical release. (As the recent anniversary of  Taxi Driver  reminded us, there was once a time when studios would release serious movies for grown-ups year ‘round, rather than just in the  traffic-jammed fall .) What’s more, Anthony Hopkins won his Best Actor prize for less than 20 ...

 Originally published on Flavorwire, 2/7/14 The camera first finds the little fellow on the edge of the frame. A cop moves him along, and he wanders, quite accidentally, into the dead center, where he stands for a moment before turning around, presumably at the behest of the cameraman. And then, for the first time, he realizes he is on camera. He smiles, then immediately straightens up, doing his best to look distinguished, and spends the rest of the film “accidentally” walking into the camera’s view and pulling focus. The film, a modest split-reeler called “Kid Auto Races at Venice,” was released on February 7, 1914 by Keystone Film Company. The star was a new Keystone contract player trying out a new character. His name was Charles Chaplin. Though it was the first one released, there is some disagreement, among Chaplin scholars, as to whether “Kid Auto Races” was, in fact, the first film where Chaplin played his iconic “Little Tramp”; Chaplin himself (in his autobiography) and bi...

  Originally published on Flavorwire, 3/28/13 It’s tricky to talk to Derek Cianfrance about his new film  The Place Beyond the Pines , due to a series of bold narrative turnabouts that would fall squarely into the realm of “spoilers.” I explained my hesitancy to him in a recent telephone interview. “It’s challenging for reviewers,” he grants. “You can’t just go and spend two-thirds of your review describing plot – unless you hate the movie. The reviewers that hate the movie have no problem… they’re excited to go out there and crush it for people.” I don’t hate the movie, and I don’t want to crush it for people. Suffice it to say that it starts as one thing, and then unexpectedly becomes another, and then something else entirely. That seems a safe way to put it — and for Cianfrance to explain how he arrived at the picture’s unique “triptych” structure. For the director, it goes back to a viewing of Abel Gance’s  Napoléon  when he was in film school, some 20 years ago....

PARK CITY, UTAH: I was standing in line for some movie or another at Sundance 2020 when I got a cryptic email from my editor at Vulture : "Are you by any chance a Contagion  fan?" It seemed there was an uptick in digital rentals and purchases for Steven Soderbergh's 2011 pandemic thriller, connected to the increasingly worrisome reports of a novel coronavirus that was sweeping through China. I was, luckily, a  Contagion fan, so I set aside some time at that year's festival to sit at the kitchen table of the condo I was sharing with several other film critics to re-visit and write about Contagion . I took care of her edits at the Salt Lake City airport, and it was published on January 30, 2020.   Six weeks passed, and, well... while I remain a fan of Contagion , I am not a fan of contagions. On the eve of SXSW 2020, its organizers pulled the plug, and the rest of 2020's festivals followed suit, going virtual. And then many of 2021's as well. Sundance was supp...

  Originally published on Flavorwire - June 8, 2017 When his moment came, Ernest R. Dickerson was ready. As cinematographer for Spike Lee’s first six movies – including  She’s Gotta Have It, Do the Right Thing,  and  Malcolm X  – he had helped usher in a movement of films in the late 1980s and early 1990s by and about people of color, a movement Roger Ebert  dubbed , at its height, “The Black New Wave.”  She’s Gotta Have It  proved the storytellers were there;  Do the Right Thing, New Jack City,  and  Boyz N The Hood  proved the audience was too. So Dickerson took advantage of a (sadly brief) moment in which studios and financiers were willing to fund his transition from one of the best cinematographers in the game to a director in his own right. The result was  Juice   , a gritty story of crime, friendship, and betrayal in Harlem, which was an immediate theatrical success in January of 1992, and found a long afterlif...

  Originally published on Flavorwire, 11/7/16 Welcome to  “Second Glance,”  a bi-weekly column that spotlights an older film of note (thanks to an anniversary, a connection to a new release, or new disc or streaming availability) that was not as commercially or critically successful as it should’ve been. This week, in celebration of its 15th anniversary, we look at David Mamet’s witty and well-crafted  Heist , starring the great Gene Hackman.  2001 was a big year for the heist movie. That summer gave us the onscreen union of three generations of Method acting – Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, and Edward Norton – in the slick studio caper flick  The Score . That Christmas, an all-star cast of gorgeous movie stars gathered around newly minted Oscar winner Steven Soderbergh for a fabulously profitable remake of  Ocean’s Eleven . And in between, a smaller, nastier movie with the rather too generic title  Heist was all but ignored, in spite of its stell...

  Originally published on Flavorwire, 8/14/17 Welcome to  “Second Glance,”  a bi-weekly column that spotlights an older film of note (thanks to an anniversary, a connection to a new release, or new disc or streaming availability) that was not as commercially or critically successful as it should’ve been. This week, on the anniversary of its release, we look back at James Mangold’s all-star police corruption tale,  Cop Land. When James Mangold’s  Cop Land  was released to theaters twenty years ago this week, it came on a wave of expectation and hype that was all but impossible to meet. This was a big, prestige crime picture from Miramax, three years after  Pulp Fiction , and the similarities couldn’t have been clearer: it was the second film from a rising young director – James Mangold, in this case – boasting a big ensemble cast (including Harvey Keitel) led by a giant star of the ‘70s and ‘80s who was sorely in need of a career renaissance. The Travol...