Hello, Tuesday
You'll find enclosed, a film fest, a planet, and a music video...
Checking in…
Thank you to everyone who listened to the first episode of my podcast ‘What Was That About’ last Tuesday! Last week’s episode focused on Jurassic Park. Today’s episode is all about Ocean’s Eleven! I hope to see you there.
It’s been a busy week: between film festival screenings, music video meetings, a friend’s party, a live play, and an improv comedy performance, I’ve been spread pretty thin the last several days. Hopefully I can grab a rest day somewhere in the coming week and climb back on that old horse called screenwriting.
Part of my business has resulted in a definite downturn in the frequency of updates to my film history series, which I am looking forward to getting back to work on. I’ve managed to sneak a few 1940s films into my free time (which you’ll see in the Movies Watched List below), but with a whole decade of noir, romance, and golden age goodness ahead of me, I’m eager to get back to my home cinema setup.
As always, thanks for reading, hope you’re well!
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Songs That Should Be In Movies
Every week, I highlight one track from my behemoth Spotify Playlist.
Gustav Holst’s The Planets Suite is an orchestral masterpiece. There is perhaps no other piece of classical composition which has been quite so influential on the art of cinema soundtracks. Composing legend John Williams (record holder for most Oscar nominations) borrows selectively from Holst in his Star Wars scores, and you can hear traces of Holst’s Mercury in Zimmer’s Gladiator orchestrations as well.
As a listening experience, the entire suite (which runs about one hour and eight minutes), is by far the definitive way to hear each piece. But on an individual level, I love Jupiter most. From beginning to end, this is a transcendent piece of music, with depth, life, bombast and delicacy all rolled into one.
You can follow the full playlist here.
The Movies Watched List
I watch a lot of movies. A LOT. Here’s the highlights from the past week:
This week I watched…
The Philadelphia Story (1940) This movie is one long gorgeous quarrel. Hepburn, Stewart and Grant seemed to be battling for the entire runtime to see who could be the most disarming. Fabulously funny script, beautifully understated photography, touching and emotionally mature romance. Stewart in the moonlight spinning boyish magic with that classic drawl, Grant weaponizing his wry clipped demeanor to charming effect, and Katherine, Katherine, Katherine, commander of the silver screen. Just marvelous. ★★★★1/2
The Thing (1982) It’s a crying shame it took me this long to witness Carpenter’s haunting masterpiece. If I had seen this five years ago, I would have had time to fully assimilate it into my personality. ★★★★1/2
The Blind Sea (2024) All a surf doc needs to do to please a crowd is have a likeable lead and some gorgeous ocean footage. ‘The Blind Sea’ features both, but not much more. Can’t really sustain its most interesting storylines for more than a sequence, Editing was inconsistent, and it should probably have captions for more scenes. But the film does have some very touching things to say about disability awareness and advocacy in an age of diversity and inclusion being threatened across the world. ★★★
His Girl Friday Breaking news: the two most annoying people you’ve ever met deserve each other. Rip-roaring non-stop 3am writing-sprint of a movie so over-caffeinated it risks losing the audience every thirty seconds yet somehow never does. Rosalind Russell is ELECTRIC and I mean ELECTRIC as Hildy Johnson, and Cary Grant is perhaps the only actor who could make a despicable scumbag like Walter Burns enjoyable to watch, let alone root for. The mayhem builds beautifully and the spitfire dialogue is unmatched. ★★★★1/2
Ball of Fire (1941) Delightful screwball from veteran Hawks with the lovely Barbara Stanwyck playing off a deadpan Gary Cooper. Flexing some gangster muscles unseen since Scarface, Hawks plays danger with a lighter edge, never losing the ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ sensibility that underpins this wonderful comedy. Cooper’s bumbling professor is very charming, and the supporting cast more than measures up to the challenge. Memorable and sweet, if a little unremarkable next to the likes of ‘Bringing Up Baby’ or ‘His Girl Friday.’ It’s not Hawks’s fault that his filmography’s this damn good. ★★★1/2
For more of Elliot’s film reviews, follow him on Letterboxd.
The Ant-Bullies
The adventures and exploits of some ne’er-do-well 20-somethings.
The hometown Film Festival is back this year, and my friends and I had a lot of fun screening a music video as part of the annual showcase— this one for a track called The Thought of Me which we shot last year. It was a blast to see it with a crowd of people, and afterwards we had a Q&A in which some great questions were asked. I’ll try to relay some of them here for those of you who might be curious.
Q: How did you get the idea for the magazine?
A: It really came out of the song; fashion models are a specific kind of public figure, in that they are intentionally enigmatic. They are meant to be a blank slate on which we project ourselves. Any infatuation with a fashion model therefore, is purely material or imagined. This made such a magazine model the perfect subject for a music video called ‘The Thought of Me.’
Q: What were the visual influences?
A: Gillian Flynn’s novel Gone Girl and its wonderfully demented film adaptation from David Fincher. The story of Gone Girl focuses intimately on the ways in which we love and are loved, and how we invent idealized versions of our lovers as objects for our own obsession.
Q: How and where did you shoot it?
A: In our hometown. Everything was shot locally, in Scotty’s living room, and in the surrounding neighborhoods on the central coast. The clothes Citizen wears were items plucked from our own closets— no new items were purchased for the music video. Additionally, Scotty managed to sneak in some iPhone footage (hopefully unnoticed); both the macro shots of the paper tearing and the wide-angle stuff inside the sports car were shot on the Blackmagic App for iPhone.
Q: Where can you see more of our stuff?
A: You can follow @citizen_theartist on Instagram, and listen on Spotify. For more music videos, subscribe to the Citizen the Artist YouTube channel!
For more Ant-Bullies, subscribe to Under the Paperweight and get weekly stories!
And that’s it! Thanks so much for reading Under the Paperweight, I’m glad you’re here. Please consider subscribing if you haven’t already, and I’ll see you soon. ♥
that’s super cool with the film festival! epic congrats for the team! i thought the mv was so creatively done when i first watched it last year :D
BLACKMAGIC MENTION!!!!