Goodbye to the great Jean-Luc Godard; Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt raise hell in Damien Chazelle’s Babylon trailer; Ti West goes triple X. All in today’s Rundown.
The Emmys: Were last night. Congratulations to all the winners.
What’s It Like to Play Steven Spielberg’s Dad? A heavy cloak, says Paul Dano.
Triple X: With the X prequel Pearl just days away, director Ti West just announced a third film in the franchise. Pearl follows one of two characters Mia Goth played in X, and MaXXXine will follow the other, as she journeys to Los Angeles in search of stardom.
Once Upon a Time in… Well, You Know: Here’s the new trailer for Damien Chazelle’s Babylon, the second period Hollywood-set movie to star Brat Pitt and Margot Robbie. This one looks like it runs hot.
Jean-Luc Godard: One of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time has died. Jean-Luc Godard, a critic-turned-director who expanded the French New Wave movement with the breezy, soulful, relentless Breathless in 1960, was 91. His other films included the wildly entertaining, gloriously messy Masculin-Feminin and the dark road-trip deconstruction Weekend. In the early 1960s, he and actress Anna Karina were married collaborators: She appeared in eight films he directed. He kept making films almost to the end, announcing last year that he would retire after two or three more. His later work, including The Image Book, were uninterested in narrative coherence, focusing more on experimentation and challenging audiences. Godard’s death was reported by French newspaper Liberation, which didn’t give a cause of death. If you haven’t watched any Jean-Luc Godard films, especially 1960s films, set aside some time to surrender to them.
‘All You Need to Make a Movie is a Girl and a Gun’: Is a wonderful quote often attributed to Jean-Luc Godard, though he notes that when he said it, he was quoting D.W. Griffith. Here’s a wonderful Cine-Tourist essay about the quote, and how Pauline Kael is partly responsible for people thinking Godard said it first. (The essay notes that the title of Kael’s essay collection Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, later the title of Shane Black’s 2005 directorial debut, says “more or less the same thing that Griffith had, if more graphically.”
More: Godard first shared the “girl and a gun quote’ while describing his 1964 film Bande à part. (Quentin Tarantino later adopted that film’s title as the name of his production company A Band Apart.)
Here’s Something Godard Definitely Did Say: “Photography is truth, and cinema is truth 24 times per second.”
Congratulations: To the documentary winners at the Indie Street Film Festival in Red Bank, New Jersey, where I was one of the narrative jurors. (Here are the narrative winners.) And the documentary winners are:
Best Doc Feature: Sirens, about young women outside Beirut with dreams of heavy metal stardom, directed by Rita Baghdadi.
Main image: Margot Robbie in the Babylon trailer.
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