Jason Bailey: Put Your Weight On It

  Originally published on Flavorwire, 6/23/16 Roger Ebert’s  original review  of  The King of Comedy  is a useful tool for understanding exactly how indifferently Martin Scorsese’s comedy/drama was received upon its release – coming as it does from one of the director’s earliest and loudest boosters, and even  he  can’t figure out what to make of it. Calling it “one of the most arid, painful, wounded movies I’ve ever seen,” Ebert describes the film as “an agonizing portrait of lonely, angry people with their emotions all tightly bottled up. This is a movie that seems ready to explode — but somehow it never does.” And this was one of the  kinder  notices; Pauline Kael insisted, “It’s so – deliberately – quiet and empty that it doesn’t provide even the dumb, mind-rotting diversion that can half amuse audiences at ordinary bad movies.” And yet, like antihero Rupert Pupkin in a waiting room,  The King of Comedy  refuses to go away. A bo...

Originally published on Flavorwire, 8/21/13 It began as a throwaway joke during the promotional tour for  Hot Fuzz , the second film directed by Edgar Wright, produced by Nira Park, starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, and written by Wright and Pegg. Cornetto ice cream was a prop in both  Hot Fuzz  and  Shaun of the Dead , and ( according to Wright ), “someone pointed out the Cornetto connection, and asked if we were going to make a trilogy. And I said yes, it’s going to be like Kieslowski’s  Three Colors , but three flavors. So it was a silly joke in an interview that got recycled and repeated.” And thus we have the third film of the “Cornetto trilogy,”  The World’s End , which finds estranged friends Pegg and Frost (along with three of their mates) going on a pub crawl in their hometown in the midst of — well, that much is a bit of a spoiler. I talked to Pegg and Frost about those spoilers, the genesis of the story, and their place within the canon of grea...

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....