The cinetrix has had a powerful thing for Tilda Swinton for ages now. How could any right-thinking person not? Jesus, that face.
To this day I lament missing--by a mere week--the actress's 1995 appearance inside a vitrine at the Serpentine Gallery as part of a collaboration with Cornelia Parker called The Maybe. Talk about sating one's scopophilia: a slumbering Swinton under glass. For a week. Sigh.
So you can imagine my delight when I learned my powerful cine crush recently delivered a State of Cinema address during the San Francisco International Film Festival. And she's every bit as canny and plain-spoken and principled as you hope she might be. Here's a sliver of the goodness, a gorgeous reverie/rant composed as a letter to her eight-year-old son. [God. Imagine being Swinton's child. The mind staggers and reaches out to steady itself].
Can I be alone in my longing for inarticulacy, for a cinema that refuses to join all the dots? For an arrhythmia in gesture, for a dissonance in shape? For the context of cinematic frame, a frame that in the end only cinema can provide, for the full view, the long shot, the space between, the gaps, the pause, the lull, the grace of living.
The figurative cinema's awkward and rather unsavory relationship with its fruity old aunt, the theater, to her vanities, her moues, her beautifully constructed and perennially eloquent speechifying, her cast iron, corset-like structures, her melodramatic texture and her histrionic rhythms. How tiresome it is; it always has been. How studied. The idea of absolute articulacy, prefect timing, a vapid elegance of gesture, an unblinking, unthinking face. What a blessed waste of a good clear screen, a dark room and the possibility of an unwatched profile, a tree, a hill, a donkey.
How I long for documentary, in resistance. For unpowdered faces and unmeasured tread. For the emotionally undemonstrative family scene. For a struggle for unreachable words. For the open or even unhappy ending? The occasionally dropped shoe off the heel, the jiggle to readjust, the occasionally cracked egg, the mess of milk spilled. The concept of loss for words. For a State of Cinema -- as the state of grace that it affords us -- in which nothing much happens, but all things are possible -- even articulacy, even failure, even mess.
You can read the whole thing here.
Sometimes, Hollywood depictions look different from
reality on purpose. Filmmakers must sidestep delicate trademark issues
when setting a scene. Prominently showing an AOL email screen or Google
search page, for example, requires approval from the companies, so some
production designers create a variation that avoids the red tape. Other
times, filmmakers exaggerate the look of money transfers or Web
searches with full-screen blinking graphics and sound effects, while
removing extraneous details, so that viewers don't miss them in
important scenes. 
