Behind The Camera with Steve Kim

As the title suggests, this entry will mainly consist of me entertaining a few thoughts on a tentative sequel to Richard Linklater's Before Midnight , Before Twilight . It's very possible that this sequel will never happen. And it's also possible that it won't be titled Before Twilight . But given how Richard Linklater and Ethan Hawke have been floating around some ideas, I'd like to believe it's not too distant a possibility. Instead of focusing on the directorial execution in a film, which is what I've been doing here, I'll stick to the script for a change. Screenplays are less exciting to break down and feel (at least in my opinion) because words are first thought and then felt whereas images are felt instantaneously with no adulteration. But it'd still be fun to speculate on a "plot" and write out a scene or two that flesh out that speculation. Put another way, let's take a close look at what happened in Before Midn...

This past Christmas Eve, I left off with Truffaut's Jules et Jim  and promised to cover Jean-Luc Godard's Vivre Sa Vie . It's a bit overdue but now that I've temporarily forfeited some of my plans (goodbye Cannes 2019), I have a lot of time on my hands.  As a sidenote, I was so despondent during the month of January that I was crying a river during sleep every night. It wouldn't have been a problem but I have electrically heated pillows. So every night, I was constantly electrocuting myself. Getting back on topic... Jean-Luc Godard is perhaps my favorite director of all time and definitely my favorite French director above Truffaut and Bresson. In fact so much so that I was tempted to fill out all of the five recommendations from Godard's filmography. But that would have been a bit boring.  As I mentioned in Part I, Godard, like Antonioni, paints with the camera. His most recent work -- Goodbye to Language -- shows that even in his eighties, he can still ...

Picking up where we last left off...  2.  Fran ç ois  Truffaut's Jules et Jim In 1973, Jean-Luc Godard accused Truffaut of having made a dishonest film -- Day for Night  -- and attacked his inability to make genuine films. As close as they had been, these two giants of French cinema would never speak again. (Truffaut died in 1984 and Godard turned 87 earlier this month.) Stanley Kubrick, perhaps the most influential American auteur of all time, regarded Truffaut as being one tier below Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, and David Lean.  But I'm not here to assess let alone rank any of my heroes. To me, they all reside at the very top pantheon of filmmakers.  I bring up Godard and Kubrick's assessment of the French auteur because their assessment illuminates the difference between the two types of directorial genius. The first runs with intuition and calibrates it with intellect. The second has their intellect at the helm with their intuition a...

Doctors hate them! They're still as beautiful as ever in their fifties! See these pictures!!! 1. Michelangelo Antonioni's La Notte  (1961) 2.  Fran ç ois  Truffaut's Jules et Jim  (1962) 3. Jean-Luc Godard's Vivre sa vie: Film en douze tableaux  (1962)   4. Ingmar Bergman's Tystnaden (1963) 5. Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) Now I know they all sound kind of dry with the titles being in Italian, French, or Swedish. But they're actually extremely touching and gripping. Just bear with me as I try to convince you why they'll be worth your time.  I don't believe any form of art to be timeless as far as popular appeal goes. An overwhelming majority of my generation -- Millennials -- hasn't even heard of Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, or Buddy Holly. There's nothing wrong with that although it's quite saddening. Each generation has its own unique sensibilities. A piece of art that resonates with one genera...

"Memory is a wonderful thing if you don't have to deal with the past." - Before Sunset "I assure you, that guy you vaguely remember, the sweet romantic one that you met on a train? That is me." - Before Midnight "I don't want to live a boring life where two people own each other, where two people are institutionalized in a box that others created because that is a bunch of stifling bullshit!" - Before Midnight Before Midnight Richard Linklater isn't the most ostentatious auteur of his generation. His camera movements aren't as alluring as Alejandro  Iñárritu's  nor are they as defiant as David Fincher's. However, Linklater's lack of "style" doesn't make him any less of an auteur. In fact, despite his "low-key" style, Linklater is a formidable talent behind the camera that frankly hasn't gotten the recognition that he deserves. Today we'll look at Before Sunset and Before Midnight . Th...

There's what you know you know, what you know you don't know, and what you don't know you don't know. And as human beings, we all sport pretty gargantuan ignorance of our own ignorance -- what we don't know we don't know. Then there's the desire the masses possess to be cultured and have refined taste in art.  Combine the two and you get a cult of high art: a group of people, without acute judgement, dismissing certain types of art as "mindless entertainment for the tasteless" and worshiping certain types of art that they deem intellectual and sophisticated enough.  But are there really such things as high art and low art? And if they do exist, does enjoying "low art" have to be such a shameful experience that we have to label certain movies as "guilty pleasures?"  I personally believe certain films do  lend themselves to unequivocal claims of artistic superiority. For example, Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal  artis...