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Watch: The 2016 Oscar for Best Actress: One Critic’s Approach

https://vimeo.com/152119318

How *do* you determine who should win an award as grandiose as "Best Actress"? Do you flip a coin? Do you murmur an incantation? Is there someone you’re supposed to call, or possibly a helpline? Because surely the process by which the Academy makes these choices is anything but rational. What’s the lay-viewer, or even the not-so-lay-viewer, to do? Kevin B. Lee, in this video essay for Fandor (one of an ongoing series), has taken a quasi-mathematical approach to the choice for Best Actress, looking at the amount of time Cate Blanchett, Saoirse Ronan, Jennifer Lawrence, Brie Larson, and Charlotte Rampling spend on screen, in minutes and hours, and then evaluating how effectively that time is spent. Sort of an equation, sort of… not. Which is about as practical an approach to the decision as I could imagine. Take a look.

Watch: David Fincher’s Close-Ups Are the Keys to His Work

David Fincher is, in one sense, what would happen if Joseph Cornell, H.P. Lovecraft, and Alfred Hitchcock teamed up to make vast, rambling, quietly explosive epics. Watching one of Fincher’s films is less like following a story than entering a fully imagined world. This aspect of the experience of his work is most evident in his use of close-ups–in these shots, the camera is not so much bearing down as peering in. In frequent Press Play contributor Jacob T. Swinney’s latest video, he takes a close look at these close looks, and the result is every bit as fun as watching a Fincher movie.

Watch: Terrence Malick’s Best Nature Shots in 3 Transformative Minutes

Terrence Malick isn’t so much a filmmaker as a poet. Rather than relying on traditional narrative framework (especially in his later films), Malick relies on nature to create visual poems on celluloid. Blindly picking a random frame from Malick’s modest filmography, there is a rather high chance of a close-up of a plant or a wide landscape free of humans. This is because nature itself is a character in a Malick film–sometimes even more so than the human characters. There is a reason why Malick often chooses to cut to a blowing leaf or a low-angle shot of tall trees during moments of poignancy. In a way, these images express something that more traditional misty-eyed close-ups of professional actors simply cannot. We learn more from lingering on a stream than we do from dialogue. The swaying tree tells us more about a character’s past than flashbacks can. Rays of sunlight through a rain-forest canopy put the entire film in perspective. While these elements may be simple, they seem to be something only Malick can pull off successfully. Many filmmakers are inspired by them and even more copy them, but only Malick can create in this way. His imagery possesses a certain level of truth due to the fact that he himself finds stories in nature. Here is a look at some of Malick’s best shots of his favorite storyteller, nature.

Jacob T. Swinney is an industrious film editor and filmmaker, as well as a recent graduate of Salisbury University.

Watch: Martin Scorsese Embodies a Clash Between Neo-Realism and Postmodernism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwM1jNVkMtU

The Film Theorists have hit on something crucial about Martin Scorsese in their newest video essay, which is that his movies rely on the tension between the everyday, the grit, the grim, the signs of humanity at its worst, and an ongoing desire to transcend that element through cinematic technique. In ‘Goodfellas,’ we see the humble upbringings of the titular thugs contrasted with outsized violence, outsized dreams, outsized immorality. In ‘Raging Bull,’ we see the simplicity and primacy of boxing itself re-cast with outrageous camera angles, distended perspectives, drip-slow motion. And on and on. The makers of the video describe this tension in terms of the director’s lineage, his roots in the neorealism of Rossellini and Fellini, and the explosion that occurred when the director discovered these paradigms could be subverted–but the tension could be more integral than that, perhaps something within Scorsese himself that, like many geniuses before him, is able to maintain two contrasting ideas in mind at the same time.

Watch: How the Patton Oswalt Vehicle ‘Big Fan’ Critiques Celebrity Culture

As Scout Tafoya points out in his 25th installment in the "Unloved" series of video essays on under-discussed films for RogerEbert.com, we live in a culture in which fandom is often mistaken for cultural awareness, in which celebrities are like kings surrounded by flailing, worshipful peasants. Patton Oswalt’s New York Giants-worshipping Paul Aufiero in 2009’s ‘Big Fan‘ would seem to be a natural product of this sort of national impulse, the tortured, embarrassing result of a world in which following greatness might be considered a step towards achieving greatness of one’s own, when in fact, an entirely different set of activities is required. As in this film, our attempts at getting closer to those we idolize are rendered even more painful when the results of our labors are not what we were expecting. Oswalt’s work in Robert D. Siegel’s film was riveting, like a well-acted car crash; Tafoya, as always, walks us through that crash, shows us the parts, assesses the damage, and shows us how this car crash is probably the best car crash we could possibly watch.

Watch: For Stanley Kubrick, Color Was an Instrument

If you accept that all art is manipulation, which you should, then it should be no stretch to conclude that artists in different disciplines have tools with which they effect that manipulation. One of Stanley Kubrick’s numerous tools, one of the implements with which he managed to transport viewers, was color. The colors have an effect. We may not be able to put into word what the effect is, for instance, of seeing the hallway of the Overlook Hotel in a river of blood in ‘The Shining,’ just as we cannot say what the effect of watching a blue-lit and perturbed Tom Cruise in ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ looking down at his sleeping wife might be. Can we say that red is the color of violence? And blue the color of foreboding? Perhaps. But we could just as easily say many other things. Marc Anthony Figueras has put together a rapidfire compilation of Kubrick’s strummings on the instrument of color, and you should take a look, at the very least to explore the effect of these dazzling onslaughts on your mind.

Watch: Steven Soderbergh’s ‘Sex, Lies, and Videotape’: The Director’s Hand

It makes complete sense that Steven Soderbergh, who started with ‘Sex, Lies, and Videotape’ would go on to direct such elaborate productions as ‘Kafka’ or ‘The Knick’: if you look closely at the director’s debut, you discover that it’s a highly determined film, down to its last nail. Shaun Higgins gives the film a very careful look in his most recent video essay (the first of a projected series): the editing, the dialogue, the camera angles, everything, down to the characters’ appreciation of ice tea, are given careful scrutiny here. The film made a remarkably strong impression ion me when I first saw it, and watching this piece has helped me to understand why.

Watch: Pixar’s Best Nods to Movie History

Even if you’re an avowed Pixar skeptic, as I am, this new video compilation by Jorge Luengo on Pixar’s movie allusions will turn your head. The reality is that what will save Pixar, in the end, is its smarts and cleverness; its visual sheen really couldn’t, unless you’ve got android DNA. Pixar films are frisky, and self-aware; their virtues show when they quote "The Shining," or "Vertigo," or "Mission: Impossible," and demonstrate that their reach expands beyond the bounds of what technological virtuosity alone can offer. Watch this, and you’ll be reminded of what it means to have fun at the movies.

Watch: Michael Mann’s ‘Collateral’ and Sam Mendes’ ‘Skyfall’: How to Build a Scene

For a scene to be truly suspenseful, one must have a sense of the director’s omniscience. What this means is that the viewer must be made to feel on top of, inside, outside, behind, beneath, all over a scene from its beginning to its end, each hairpin plot turn a twist in the viewer’s gut, each moment of respite a breeze on the viewer’s brow. In comparing two key scenes from Michael Mann’s ‘Collateral’ and Sam Mendes’ ‘Skyfall,’ Michael Mclennan shows us how the two directors and cinematographers Dion Beebe and Roger Deakins have placed us inside and outside of the action onscreen simultaneously.

Watch: ‘The Wizard of Oz’, As You Most Definitely Have Not Seen It Before

There are many questions that could be asked about Matt Bucy’s video, which presents us with ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ in its entirety… in alphabetical order. The first question might be, "What do you mean by alphabetical order?" What I mean is that every word in the film, from a to z, has been sorted into an alphabetical list; repeats, such as the word "do," "did," or "can," are presented in clumps. The piece is a little alarming, but also funny, and telling. It raises questions such as "How long did it take?" or "Was it difficult?" or "Do you worry that you might have missed a word?" The one question it inspires which you should nevertheless not ask is this: why?