The Playlist

How Marvel's Movie Risks Paid Off & How The Studio System Could Stand To Pay Attention To Them

By Drew Taylor
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May 1, 2013 11:00 AM
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39 Comments

Features

In Steven Soderbergh's state of cinema address earlier this week, he remarked that, "Art is a very elegant problem solving model." He went on to describe his ideal model for a studio: "I think if I were going to run a studio I’d just be gathering the best filmmakers I could find and sort of let them do their thing within certain economic parameters." Now, the point of his impassioned address, which included such other applicable witticisms as "it's about horses, not races," is about what the studios should be doing versus what they are doing. But there is a studio that has followed his exact advice and it's not one you would expect: it's Marvel Studios.

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Robert Downey Jr.'s Career In 7 Films

By Jessica Kiang
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April 30, 2013 1:02 PM
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3 Comments

Robert Downey Jr., essential performances

Features

"Big man in a suit of armor. Take that away then what are you?" asks Captain America (Chris Evans) in Joss Whedon's "The Avengers." "Genius billionaire playboy philanthropist," shoots back Tony Stark, in a quip that, delivered either of two ways, is only slightly more impressive than the actual truth. Because of course, outside the suit, and outside the Marvel films, Iron Man/Tony Stark is in fact, Robert Downey Jr, and he's one of the biggest movie stars on the planet.

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The Best And Brightest Of The 2013 Tribeca Film Festival

By The Playlist Staff
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April 29, 2013 2:17 PM
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3 Comments

The Best And Brightest Of The Tribeca Film Festival 2013

Festivals

And so we’ve reached the end of the Tribeca Film Festival. Known for its wide-ranging selection of films from all over the globe, they truly outdid themselves this year with a slate of diverse, boundary-pushing films that suggested that, outside of the most prestigious fests like New York, Cannes and Sundance, independent cinema was alive and well, flourishing in the fest’s eleventh year. We profiled twenty films at the start of the fest that might be worth discussion, and a number of those spotlight films didn't disappoint. But the excitement of the Tribeca Film Festival is that there's often greatness emerging from where you least expect it.

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The Most Anticipated Blockbusters Of The 2013 Summer Season

By Drew Taylor
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April 29, 2013 12:03 PM
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5 Comments

The Playlist's Most Anticipated Blockbusters Of The 2013 Summer Season

Features

Ah, summer. That time of year marked by long days, short skirts, and the application of sunscreen. It’s the season where even the most hardened cineaste can put aside their Criterion Collection discs, if only for a moment, and get excited about the jazzy, visual effects-driven blockbusters coming down the pike. The line between “summer” and “any other time of the year,” in terms of movies, keeps getting blurrier and blurrier, with big-budget studio fare like “Oz the Great and Powerful” and “Oblivion” coming out in the spring (we had a Michael Bay movie open in April, for crying out loud – before this it was questionable whether or not he even existed outside of June or July).

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SFIFF: Steven Soderbergh Says Art Of Cinema Is Under Attack From The Studios, Decries Profit Driven Decision Making

By Sean Gillane
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April 29, 2013 11:03 AM
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14 Comments

Features

Saturday afternoon at the San Francisco International Film Festival, Steven Soderbergh presented an audience his take on the current state of cinema. The State of Cinema Address is an annual event held at the festival that allows a speaker (not always a filmmaker, last year the festival saw author Jonathan Levine give his take on the subject) to lay down their thoughts on contemporary film. This year the San Francisco Film Society, the organization that runs the festival, was able to land the prolific Steven Soderbergh at a particularly interesting time in his career: the beginning of a hiatus from directing.

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The Essentials: Douglas Sirk

By The Playlist Staff
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April 26, 2013 2:33 PM
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5 Comments

Features

German filmmaker Douglas Sirk (né Hans Detlef Sierck) directed almost 40 films in a career that spanned three decades. A late bloomer known for grand, gorgeously expressive and emotional melodramas in the 1950s, he took a third of his career to hit full stride. The early movies were comedies, glossy adventure stories and war dramas. During his days working in Germany the director was heavily censored and when he escaped to the United States in 1937 he found himself stifled once again, “A director in Hollywood in my time couldn't do what he wanted to do,” he once said. 1942’s vengeful, vehemently anti-Nazi “Hitler's Madman” only really existed because it was seen as patriotic, and films Sirk made as late as 1952, like “Has Anyone Seen My Gal?” featuring his broad-shouldered go-to male muse Rock Hudson, were insubstantial trifles compared to his mature work. That film, lightweight comedy though it is, does still possess hints of commentary on class, status, money and the sickening desire for it all -- themes Sirk would explore, and quietly explode, in his best work.

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10 Essential Cinematic Antiheroes

By Jessica Kiang
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April 25, 2013 3:48 PM
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34 Comments

Features

30 years since its release, the undersung "The King of Comedy" seems finally to be edging into the sun, to take its deserved place as not just one of the finest, smartest and most daring Martin Scorsese movies, but one of the greatest American movie satires, period. It's an excoriating, often excruciating watch, boasting razor-sharp insights into the excesses of celebrity culture and the quest for fame, but it's also, most unforgettably, a character study of one Rupert Pupkin, delusional sociopath, shit-poor comedian and all-out creep. Pupkin, whom Robert De Niro doesn't so much inhabit as crawl into, is simply one of the most offputting creations ever committed to celluloid -- a dreadful squit of a man, talentless, self-aggrandizing, self-deceiving, pathetic -- and at the same time one of the most compelling.

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20 Wedding Movies To Say "I Do" To

By The Playlist Staff
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April 25, 2013 2:56 PM
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9 Comments

Features

This weekend, "The Big Wedding," a movie about a catastrophic wedding-gone-awry, opens everywhere. It comes stocked with a veritable three-course meal of big-time movie stars, including Robert De Niro, Diane Keaton, Robin Williams, Susan Sarandon, Amanda Seyfried and Katherine Heigl. While the movie, which was based on a 2006 French film, looks kind of dopey (a divorced couple has to pretend that they're still together for the sake of the young groom's staunchly Catholic mother), it was, at the very least, enough to get us thinking about our favorite wedding movies – and not just movies which end in dream nuptials, but the messy, heartbreaking, awkward, complicated emotions that often accompany what many feel is one of the single most important days of their lives.

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The Best Commercials & Music Videos Of Michael Bay

By The Playlist Staff
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April 23, 2013 12:00 PM
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3 Comments

Features

Michael Bay is an auteur. He's a director with a unique visual style all his own and a grasp of cinematic language (by the balls) unlike anyone else in the business. In fact, he may be the cinematic auteur who most accurately represents our day and age in the film industry. Notice the use of the word “may” in that last sentence-- all we’re sayin’ is, an argument could be made for the much maligned (in certain circles) director’s relevance within a current climate that prizes bombast and spectacle. And there’s no one else who does bombast and spectacle better than Michael Bay (no arguments there, thank you very much). And he does so with such a unique style there there is never any doubt that you’re watching a Michael Bay film. Sure, watching his films is more like shotgunning a light domestic brew straight to the brain rather than sipping a fine vintage wine, but isn’t there a time and place for shotgunning beers? For sheer orgasmic visuals, there is no equal to Bay in the business. Period.

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5 Overlooked Late-Period Jack Nicholson Performances

By The Playlist Staff
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April 22, 2013 12:00 PM
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9 Comments

Features

The accepted wisdom about Jack Nicholson has him comfortably ensconced in the pantheon of great actors whose careers came of age in the 1970s, and who have given us, between them (Nicholson, De Niro, Pacino, Streep, Hoffman et al) a ludicrously high proportion of cinema's most inarguable, evergreen classics. Nicholson alone scorched a trail through that decade, boasting 17 titles between "Easy Rider" (1969) and "The Shining" (1980), including further all-out masterpieces "Chinatown," "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," "Five Easy Pieces," "The Last Detail," and "Carnal Knowledge." The baseline we judge off when it comes to Nicholson is high indeed. And so it's hardly surprising that the accepted wisdom also has Nicholson on a graceful, but perceptible downward curve since then, with the high watermarks of his later career coming further apart, peppering the eighties, but popping up more sparsely in the nineties and noughties.

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