Settle for Nothing Less In:

• doc inspirations
• boxing noirs
• tech troubles
• mail innovations
• Mifune!

Thanks for the goods sent this week by scb0212 and Miller. Send articles throughout the next week to ploughmanplods [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion, and Have a Happy Friday!

At Filmmaker Magazine, Vadim Rizov interviews Lance Oppenheim and Daniel Garber about working with the subjects in their new doc Spermworld, how much they let them in on the process and some targeted advertising to The Solute among his artistic cues:

[Oppenheim]: I bought [on-camera participant] Steve Transcendental Cinema by Paul Schrader, and we would watch movies from there together. I gave him my Criterion Channel login, and I showed him Paterson. With Rachel, the sequences that we use during the movie of their voice memos, their messages [which act as voiceover narration], we’re trying to borrow from the lyrical poetry sequences in Paterson. Dan and I watch movies and talk about music and how we want this film to feel; those kinds of conversations also happen with the people in the movie. And a lot of the time, when Dan’s editing a sequence and I return after being gone for several weeks, I’ll show them: “Here’s what we did—it’s not the final result yet, but just so you get the picture.” Because over the years of making a movie like this, it’s easy for everyone to forget sometimes: Well, what are we doing? Why are we doing this? How is this all going to come together?

In tribute to the recently departed Louis Gossett, Jr., Scott Tobias revisits the 1992 boxing noir curiosity Diggstown:

Released to middling reviews and anemic returns, Diggstown seemed to gain momentum on video and television as an unpretentious pugilistic entertainment like The Sting, a twisty affair with ace con men working to scheme each other out of a fortune. But that “momentum” could be strictly anecdotal on my part, a cult limited to a small handful of appreciators in Athens who half-watched it while dubbing $5 pornography rentals on their second VCR. Yet it’s pleasant to think about the film as a scrappy comeback for everyone involved, including its director Michael Ritchie, who’d been in a steep decline since his ‘70s heyday, and character actors like Gossett, who’d had hits in the mid-‘80s with Enemy Mine and Iron Eagle, but had squandered the years afterwards on Iron Eagle sequels and dogs like The Principal and The Punisher. It’s the type of film that encourages rooting interests.

At Criterion, Moeko Fujii marks Toshiro Mifune’s centennial by celebrating the whole person – starting with the rear end:

My education on Toshiro Mifune began, naturally, with his ass. As a teen, I’d prematurely decided that one could be a Kurosawa girl or an Ozu girl—Kurosawa’s films were all about the butt and legs, Ozu’s the neck and eyes—but you couldn’t be both at once. I dismissed Kurosawa’s movies as too sweaty, a parade of testosterone with far too many swords. I preferred, I said, to be slayed by delicacy, urban irony, women: Hideko Takamine’s flushed glances, Setsuko Hara’s hands hiding her face. I lasted until college. One winter break, during a bout of flu, I let Toshiro Mifune wander into my life—he turned his back to me and said, “abayo”—and I felt myself changed. Most people, I realize, do not fever-dream about the curvature and twitch of Mifune’s ass—lashed by sheets of rain—after binging Kurosawa’s greatest hits. But I know that I am not the first to feel called upon to write about it (Pauline Kael, also a fan: “No actor can do more with his knees and his behind than Mifune”), or to have stared at it, head tilted, thinking: is that . . . butt-acting?

For Ars Technica, Dan Goodin runs down a near-miss with a malware attack years in the making that would have been one of the largest supply chain disruptions in history:

On Friday, a lone Microsoft developer rocked the world when he revealed a backdoor had been intentionally planted in xz Utils, an open source data compression utility available on almost all installations of Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. The person or people behind this project likely spent years on it. They were likely very close to seeing the backdoor update merged into Debian and Red Hat, the two biggest distributions of Linux, when an eagle-eyed software developer spotted something fishy.

The National‘s Alvin Cabral looks back on “technology’s greatest prank” – the emergence of Gmail on April Fool’s Day 20 years ago:

Google wasn’t new to busting out April Fool’s jokes: before the Gmail “prank”, it tricked users with mind-reading MentalPlex responses and said well-fed pigeons were running its search engine operations . In subsequent years, they announced home internet services through your toilet with its “patented GFlush system”, made us believe the Moon’s surface was made of cheese and unveiled a dating service in which they called founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page “Stanford PhD wannabes “. But Gmail was all too real, purportedly inspired by one – a single – Google user complaining about the “poor quality of existing email services” and born “millions of M&Ms later”.