1. Robin (when younger)
2. Mister Fantastic
3. Cyclops
4. Daredevil (it wasn’t his fault)
5. That’s actually it. There should be no other options.
Contributed by: Sumeet
The Sights
The Historian: Three Debut Films – Scorsese, Spielberg, & Malick
By Spencer. Sometimes a film is less important for what it is, and more important for what it signals to come. Thanks to Turner Classic Movies, I recently had the opportunity to see the debut films of three of my favorite directors: Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Terrence Malick. What struck me is how, even in the formative moments when these auteurs were still learning their way around a camera much less a set or an editing room, you can still see the unmistakable signature they would each imprint on their future body of work. Continue reading
The Critic: Tom Hardy in Locke
By Spencer. One of the more surprising (and satisfying) parts of growing up is that shift that happens when you realize you now enjoy the talking scenes in movies more than the ones where shit blows up. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then you might want to skip Locke, the new one-man movie from director/writer Steven Knight and star Tom Hardy. Because while shit definitely blows up, it’s only in the dialogue and in the vivid emotions that Hardy and Knight squeeze out of one late night drive between Birmingham and London.
Locke is like no movie you’ve ever seen. Ever. If you’ve been missing the days of intelligent films for adults, make time on your summer movie calendar for something different, something … real. Continue reading
The Theorist: Is Game Of Thrones Rewriting Film History?
By Spencer. If you’re interested in film history and like the idea of a college-level survey course on the topic – without any of the homework or exams – let me suggest Mark Cousins’s 15-part documentary series, The Story Of Film: An Odyssey (also available for streaming on Netflix, I believe).
Starting with the earliest silent pictures of the Lumiere brothers and Georges Melies and moving all the way through the digital film era of today, The Story Of Film: An Odyssey does a remarkable job pointing out all the little innovations over the years that, to the more casual moviegoer, are hiding in plain sight. I learned the very basics of composition – how cuts were first used to let the viewer know that two scenes in different places are connected by story; how close-ups and deep focus shots change our sense of scope; how directors actually had to learn over time such seemingly obvious concepts as orienting their shots so that two people speaking to each other in close-up are, you know, facing each other – and I earned my first introduction to such historically-groundbreaking (and often forgotten) films as Battleship Potemkin, Sunrise, The Bicycle Thieves, The Third Man, and Breathless. I learned about the technical innovations that gave rise to Citizen Kane’s tremendous reputation, the shift from fantasy to gritty realism that took place in the 70s with films like The French Connection or Chinatown or The Last Picture Show, and the criminally uncelebrated contributions of the film industries of China, Russia, India, Japan, South America, Poland, and Africa. And for the first time, I started to get my head wrapped what filmmaking represents as a single historical project: a universal language evolving piecemeal through the collective influence of generations of innovators, speaking to each other from every corner of the globe.
Which brings me to Game Of Thrones. Continue reading
The Editor: Welcome To Shadows & Noise
The picture you see above you was taken on the isle of Lunga, about an hour off the western coast of Scotland; it’s the closest I’ve ever come to the feeling of standing at the edge of the world. What this has to do with music and movies – the two subject matters of this site – may not be obvious. But just as a map is defined by its boundaries, so too is art. It’s only at the edges where we can get a sense of the whole; where we can stand at the horizon, turn back and look inward, and appreciate just how far we’ve come. And at the edges of film and music, there are shadows and noise.
I’ve been a consumer of pop culture my whole life, and yet it is only now in my thirties that I think I’m beginning to understand it. For most of our history, our work was what defined us, but in the past couple of generations a shift occurred – now it’s our entertainments that do. The line separating mere diversion from art is so blurry that it’s no longer worth recognizing.
And so it is that an album like Radiohead’s Kid A or a movie like There Will Be Blood, for all of their overbearing ambition to mean something, are still a form of fun to us. Better yet, it’s also true (and I will fight to the death anyone who insists otherwise) that there’s a deeper merit hiding under much of what is dismissed as disposable pop fluff – from the music of Foo Fighters and Lana Del Rey and Jay-Z to movies as diverse as Swingers, The Avengers, Silver Linings Playbook, The Empire Strikes Back, or even the Fast & Furious series.
So if this blog has a mission statement, it is this: to serve as a conversation space about music and film that takes seriously both the fringe and the mainstream of our two greatest art forms. To engage equally both the experimental and the lowbrow. To be pretentious at times, and also to flip the finger at that sort of thing. To start at the edges, but to never stay there so long that we lose sight of the whole.
This site is a passing of the torch of sorts, jumping off where my good friend Antony’s earlier site, After The Radio, left off. I hope that some of the contributors to that site will stop by S&N from time to time to offer their voices, for I have truly enjoyed the conversation we have had over the past three years. And by expanding the scope beyond music and into film, too, I hope that we can have an even broader conversation about how our pop culture consumption shapes us, entertains us, makes us feel and gives us purpose – in short, how it connects us. Both to each other and to ourselves.
So read. Comment. Contribute. Consume. Engage. Because by doing so, you help it all mean just a little bit more.
Shadows & Noise 