The Cinephile’s Lounge: Week 33

Hello fellow cinephiles!

It’s been a while since our last Cinephile’s Lounge! It’s my fault: I’ve been very busy, we’ve accepted a big bunch of new contributors (yay!) and I’ve been working hard on some of the back-end features of this website, which left very little time for writing. Moreover, my brother was visiting here for the first time since I moved to Australia, which was super exciting, and I just loved spending time with him. You can’t blame me!

Anyway! It’s almost weekend again. Let’s imaginarily head to another fabulous cinema! This is the Louis Hartlooper Complex – one of the three arthouse cinemas of my hometown, Utrecht, The Netherlands. It looks stern from the outside: it was a police station in the distant past. However, the interior is very retro and super cozy. Not only do they play great (non-blockbuster) movies, they have a café and restaurant, too, where I loved to spend time.

In the past few weeks I watched quite a few enjoyable movies: The Raid, The Raid: Berandal, Lucy the magnificent Locke… And I actually started watching Gone With The Wind yesterday, I guess because the mood struck me. It’s a four hour long movie, if you didn’t know. It’s a little daunting – I don’t have that kind of time, so I decided to chop it up a bit, and watch an hour, or one and a half, at a time. I’m approaching it like a mini-series, I suppose! But so far it has been very enjoyable, it’s so Cinderella, it’s making me giggle in delight.

I’ve also watched the first season of Vikings in the past few weeks – which was one of the most beautifully shot series I’ve seen, lately. Stunning vistas, awe-inspiring cinematography. Furthermore, I’ve been following Guillermo Del Toro‘s The Strain -I was a bit hesitant at first, but with the last 2-3 episodes, they’ve truly won me over. I can’t wait for the next episode. Steven Soderbergh‘s TV show The Knick (featuring Clive Owen!) is also on my to-watch list, but I haven’t gotten to it yet.

Tomorrow, on Saturday, it’ll be the first time I’m on a film set, myself. As you may have read in my little bio at the bottom of the page, I’m currently serving as a production assistant to the production of a short film. So far I’ve only been a part of the screen tests, which, according to the director, are very boring – for a first-timer like me it’s highly fascinating. I’m really excited about tomorrow – we’re shooting in a dingy motel room and on the prop list it says gun, so clearly, it’s really real filmmaking!

So what’s up in your corner of the world? What did you watch, lately? Any plans for the weekend?

And, as always, I’ll share a few articles I enjoyed reading recently:

• What A Murder Professor Learned From Watching Every Execution Scene In American Film (ThinkProgress)
• Knocked Out: Have romantic comedies become obsolete? (Grantland)
• The Golden Age Of Film Heroines Is Near (CinemaAxis)
• Jaws: A Visual Essay on Why Continuity Doesn’t Matter (And So It Begins)
• Quentin Tarantino’s ‘The Hateful Eight’ Trailer Debuts With ‘Sin City 2,’ Will Not Be Online (that’s some very interesting marketing – Slashfilm)
• Not only Robin WIlliams passed away this week, Lauren Bacall did, too – Lauren Bacall’s 6 Best Performances (IndieWire)
• How Badly Will Sin City: A Dame to Kill ForAffect Its Effects Studio? (another very interesting article on the struggles of SFX studios – io9)
• The Millennial Gen-Her-ation: Thoughts on Her and its meaning meaning for millenials (Stop Drop Ro)

Finally: please share photos from your favorite cinema, too, so we can feature it in our Cinephile’s Lounge – I’d love to see where it is you go to the cinema.

Cheers and happy weekend!

(top image source: The Raid – Celluloid Nightmares)