Cutting to the chase this (American) holiday weekend to get to extra articles thanks to Miller, nikmarov, and scb0212!

Send articles throughout the week to ploughmanplods at gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion and Have a Happy Friday!

The big news is The AV Club returns from a long stay on the FAR’s shitlist with…

…a review of violent Indian thriller Kill from Ignatiy Vishnevetsky:

Throats are cut; fingers are crushed; knives, meat cleavers, hammers, and fists swing wildly. Bodies sustain unrealistic degrees of injury and keep going in pursuit of vengeance. (Can a human being really get hit with a lead pipe that many times and still get back up?) The one-word title doesn’t actually appear on screen until almost 45 minutes in, serving both as a punctuation to the blood and bodily harm that writer-director Nikhil Nagesh Bhat has served up to this point, and as a promise (to those of us who are already guiltily enjoying this stuff) that things will only get more gratuitous and sadistic from here. A promise on which, for the most part, Kill single-mindedly delivers.

…Jesse Hasenger running the Indiana Jones series (through the lens of a tale of an American Bond?):

Even more than the first Star Wars, a movie whose world-building and imagination makes it ever-so-slightly (and charmingly!) ragged, Raiders distills a certain type of cliffhanging adventure movie—only it’s a bigger, sleeker version that had previously only existed in the viewer’s imagination. How strange it is that a generation or two grew up actually just picturing Raiders, an actual movie Spielberg, Lucas, and their collaborators dreamed up, instead of an amalgamation. How strange, too, that in the first movie ever made about Indiana Jones, he casts an iconic shadow on the wall when he walks back into the bar owned by Marion (Karen Allen). So many action-adventure movies today arrive predigested, whether through IP-based lore or simply the soft, grayish craft of the films themselves; Spielberg’s camera makes Raiders stay thrillingly alive between the big action scenes as well as during them.

…and Nathan Rabin gives the My World of Flops treatment to Madame Web:

Johnson seems like someone who would roll her eyes derisively at the idea of seeing a movie with dialogue like “The spider-venom did have healing properties!” So, the idea of Johnson devoting months of her life to acting in a movie where she delivers lines like that represents a grand cosmic joke. Thankfully, Johnson is in on the joke, and her prickly intelligence and iron will make it apparent that she knows just how ridiculous the movie is and shares our disappointment and confusion.

Elsewhere in the world, Filmmaker Magazine’s Daniel Garber speaks to editors of true crime series about how they construct their material:

Some documentary series suffer for their lack of archival access. Not all footage can be licensed, due to budgetary constraints; some is free, pursuant to fair use, but only with the approval of the production’s legal team. The legal review, in [editor] Alice’s experience, generally “doesn’t happen until after a rough cut or two, maybe close to fine cut. So, you created this beautiful sequence, but all of a sudden, you have to find another way to tell the same story.” This often means even greater reliance on interview material, which is part of why filmmakers often record interviews with two or three cameras: Added coverage makes it possible to cut from one framing to another, lingering longer on an interviewee’s face without moving to other visuals.

A.S Hamrah reviews Emily Nussbaum’s new book about the history of reality TV for Bookforum and finds much to dispute:

I was reading Cue the Sun! the week Steve Albini died, so these digs of Nussbaum’s at our shared generation stood out in high relief. Though he was exactly the type of purist who annoys Nussbaum the most, I suspect almost anyone would get more joy from the music he produced than from watching old episodes of Survivor, that activity Nussbaum believes so many people are engaged in. Or from anything Bunim and Murray produced. It’s as clear as Zima who left the more lasting legacy, so I guess the question remains: What kind of people does Nussbaum mean? The finale of season forty-six of Survivor aired while I was writing this. Does anyone care who won it? Are all forty-six Survivor seasons worth one Pod, In Utero, Surfer Rosa, or Rid of Me? In the annals of culture, I think those are secure, while every episode of Survivor could be wiped by CBS tomorrow and probably not even Jeff Probst would care. He’s made his money. His legacy is not what you would call artistic. Reality TV is by nature ephemeral; in that light, celebrating it is futile.

Eileen Jones talks about a new biography of Elaine May at Jacobin:

But it’s the truncated film career that can make you feel very wistful for all the films she might’ve made if only she’d found the right situation in terms of producer support and oversight. May required an auteur’s creative control combined with sympathetic producer oversight in order to make sure that she wasn’t completely busting the budget by going too far with experimentation. May’s excesses in pursuit of the elusive effects she was trying to achieve, especially in performances, became notorious in the film industry. She famously shot more footage for Mikey and Nicky — a low-budget, modestly scaled, deliberately rough looking, powerfully unsettling film about a crisis in the lives of two small-time mob guys — than was shot for Gone with the Wind. She’d simply let the cameras run for hours on the improvisations of its two stars, John Cassavetes and Peter Falk. She once rebuked the cinematographer who turned the cameras off when he found them still running even after the two actors had already left the building. “But they might come back,” argued May.

And Jake Cole reviews Eephus, a potential new classic in the Solute-beloved genre of the baseball flick, for Slant:

Greg Tango’s cinematography highlights the amber foliage of New England in autumn and the faint sunlit glow of morning giving way to late afternoon. Numerous shots glance away from the field entirely to take in the cool blue of a cloudless sky or something as mundane as the parking lot. The film slowly maps out the surroundings to the point that the viewer might start to feel nostalgic for this soon-to-be demolished park and agree with one player who glibly huffs, “It’s a shame those pricks are building a school here.” Lund gives away a clue as to an unlikely inspiration for Eephus in an early radio announcement by one Branch Moreland, voiced by none other than documentary legend Frederick Wiseman, whose own mastery of patiently exploring an environment and its denizens can be felt in the film’s unhurried, lived-in pace.