#Las Vegas Film Critics Society

[thejewofkansas]

Awards Season 2024-25: Awards Round-Up 12/16 + Critics' Choice Award Nominations

Another week, another eight groups to process. I could wait until late on the 16th and add in the multiple groups announcing that day – but I’ll save them for the 23rd. This week’s contestants are: African-American Film Critics Association (AAFCA) Boston Online Film Critics Association (BOFCA) Chicago Film Critics Association (CFCA) Las Vegas Film Critics Society (LVFCS) Phoenix Critics…

[awardswatcherik]

2024 Las Vegas Film Critics Society (LVFCS) Winners: 'Dune: Part Two' Leads with 6

[silvyysthings]

DUNE: PART TWO' has won 6 categories at the Las Vegas Film Critics Society.

• Best Picture

• Best Director

• Best Cinematography

• Film Editing

• Best Score

• Best Visual Effects

[immortals-malec]

at the las vegas film critics society kit has been nominated for his work in the wild robot under the best youth male- performance!!!

[notearsnora]

Las Vegas Film Critics Society 2024 Nominations:

Best Picture: Wicked

Best Actress: Cynthia Erivo

Best Supporting Actress: Ariana Grande-Butera

Best Director: Jon M. Chu

Best Costume Design: Wicked

Best Art Direction: Wicked

Best Visual Effects: Wicked

Best Ensemble: Wicked

Full:

[world-cinema-research]

Week 2 Blog Post by Grant Montoya

À bout de soufflé (Breathless) 1960

Breathless is a critically acclaimed New-Wave French film that was released in 1960. The impact it had on the filmmaking world was monumental; its many hallmarks include experimental cinematography methods, abrasive humor, stylized visuals, and the introduction of jump-cuts to name a few. It influenced the way Hollywood would produce movies in the coming decade. Roger Ebert is even credited with stating that “Modern movies begin here, with Jean-Luc Godard's "Breathless" in 1960.” 

Jean-Luc Godard was the director of the film who received substantial help in post-production from another director by the name of Jean-Pierre Melville. The movie had an estimated budget of $90,000 and had earnings of about $590,112. The movie didn’t have a big launch, but soon after people recognized its brilliance. Despite this being the first feature film of Godard’s career, the focus was to make something different. The 400 Blows (1959) directed by François Truffaut came out a year before Godard’s. These two films are usually regarded as the “best” of the French New Wave era.

As mentioned, film buffs' favorite critic Roger Ebert has made it known that this is one of the most important movies of all time. continuing his quote from earlier:

"It is dutifully repeated that Godard's technique of "jump cuts" is the great breakthrough, but startling as they were, they were actually an afterthought, and what is most revolutionary about the movie is its headlong pacing, its cool detachment, its dismissal of authority, and the way its narcissistic young heroes are obsessed with themselves and oblivious to the larger society." - Roger Ebert

Although I have only viewed the film once, I wholeheartedly agree with his words here. I may be wrong, but I feel that the movie could be considered slightly postmodernist because it recognizes itself by means of self-referentiality and relativism. I think this is what Ebert was hinting at here.

At the time of this film's production, France was enduring an economic recession from the devastating effects of World War II. According to freelance writer Ted Mills,

"Although there wasn’t a lot of money floating around, there was still enough to make short films[...]The film was shot on a handheld camera, by Raoul Cotard, who had used such a camera in the war for newsreels[...]Godard turned his brain inside-out, like emptying a bag across a table: all his cultural obsessions, not just in cinema, but in writers, philosophers, music, and more, all came out." - Ted Mills

It seems like this turbulent time was beneficial for Godard. Perhaps the ordeal of the war invigorated him, or the lack of funds available gave him an excuse to truly unleash his artistic spirit because nothing was really at stake.

Trying to put this film in place as conventional or unconventional is a difficult task. It could be considered unconventional in its production, for sure. $90,000 isn't much of a budget at all for that time period and the actors weren't too well known before the making.

On the other hand, many of the creative choices might be too much for a general audience to digest. Within the first 5 minutes of the film, there is some crass, self-spoken humor from Belmondo's character which makes one think of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

"Little girls hitchhiking!

I'll charge a kiss per mile.

The short one's not bad. Nice thighs.

Yeah, but the other one...

Oh, hell, they're both dogs."

Our protagonist here lacks inhibition throughout the entire movie. It is hard to understand his goals, aspirations, or motives. There is hardly anything for the audience to latch onto besides the doom that awaits him. Very against the grain.

Quote #1

Michel Poiccard : "Why won't you sleep with me?"

Patricia Franchini: "Because I'm trying to find out what it is that I like about you."

These two lines of dialogue from our two main characters aren't anything extraordinary, but because of their simplicity, we are reminded of the motives between these two and their dynamic for most of the movie. Michel is portrayed as a crook who lives in the now; a hedonist who doesn't understand what it means to love. Meanwhile, Patricia is entertained by this swooner but can't seem to understand what Michel's true intentions are or what kind of a man he is.

Quote #2

Michel Poiccard: "If you don't like the sea... or the mountains... or the big city... then get stuffed!"

I could have chosen any one of Michel's many quips for the spot of this quote. Aside from the hit and run on the policeman at the beginning of the film, Michel's commentary is really what keeps the movie chugging along. It's blunt, funny, and very surprising to see in a film as old as this one.

Image #1 depicts Jean Seberg's character (Patricia Franchini) gazing into the camera, and this shot appears many times throughout the movie. I think this full-face capture is great directing because it burns the actor/character's features into your mind and it offers an intimate way for the audience to connect with the characters. Apparently, this was a time when Godard and other filmmakers focused on the craft of raw cinematography, more so than the pieces of what makes a movie emotionally captivating (plot, dialogue, scores, etc.)

Image #2 is taken from the apartment scene, a part of the movie that drags on for about 24 minutes where Michel rambles on and Patricia continues prying. This is perhaps the most creative choice the director made in this movie, and it sort of works for it. The still reflects the playful nature of two people who hardly know each other, and stresses the fact that these two aren't fornicating in a setting where it would seem inevitable.

[yesthatssadirichardslove]

Suzanne Somers, of ‘Three’s Company,’ dies at 76

LOS ANGELES

Suzanne Somers, the effervescent blonde actor known for playing Chrissy Snow on the television show ��Three’s Company” as well as her business endeavors, has died. She was 76.

Somers had breast cancer for over 23 years and died Sunday morning, her family said in a statement provided by her longtime publicist, R. Couri Hay. Her husband Alan Hamel, her son Bruce and other immediate family were with her in Palm Springs, California.

“Her family was gathered to celebrate her 77th birthday on October 16th,” the statement read. “Instead, they will celebrate her extraordinary life, and want to thank her millions of fans and followers who loved her dearly.”

In July, Somers shared on Instagram that her breast cancer had returned.

“Like any cancer patient, when you get that dreaded, ‘It’s back’ you get a pit in your stomach. Then I put on my battle gear and go to war," she told Entertainment Tonight at the time. "This is familiar battleground for me and I’m very tough.”

She was first diagnosed in 2000, and also had skin cancer. She faced some backlash for her reliance on what she's described as a chemical-free and organic lifestyle to combat the cancers. She argued against the use of chemotherapy, in books and on platforms like “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” which drew criticism from the American Cancer Society.

Somers was born in 1946 in San Bruno, California, to a gardener father and a medical secretary mother. She began acting in the late 1960s, playing the blonde driving the white Thunderbird in George Lucas’s 1973 film “American Graffiti.” Her only line was mouthing the words “I love you” to Richard Dreyfuss’s character.

At her audition, Lucas just asked her if she could drive. She later said that moment “changed her life forever.”

Somers would later stage a one-woman Broadway show entitled “The Blonde in the Thunderbird,” which drew largely scathing reviews.

She appeared in many television shows in the 1970s, including “The Rockford Files,” “Magnum Force” and “The Six Million Dollar Man,” but her most famous part came with “Three’s Company,” which aired on ABC from 1977 to 1984 — though her participation ended in 1981.

On “Three’s Company,” she was the ditzy blonde opposite John Ritter and Joyce DeWitt in the roommate comedy. In 1980, after four seasons, she asked for a raise from $30,000 an episode to $150,000 an episode, which would have been comparable to what Ritter was getting paid. Hamel, a former television producer, had encouraged the ask.

“The show’s response was, ‘Who do you think you are?’” Somers told People in 2020. “They said, ‘John Ritter is the star.’”

She was soon fired and her character was replaced by two different roommates for the remaining years the show aired. It also led to a rift with her co-stars; They didn’t speak for many years. Somers did reconcile with Ritter before his death, and then with DeWitt on her online talk show.

But Somers took the break as an opportunity to pursue new avenues, including a Las Vegas act, writing books, hosting a talk show and becoming an entrepreneur. In the 1990s, she also became the spokesperson for the “Thighmaster.”

Somers returned to network television in the 1990s, most famously on “Step by Step,” which aired on ABC’s youth-targeted TGIF lineup. The network also aired a biopic of her life, starring her, called “Keeping Secrets.”

[byneddiedingo]

Knight of Cups (Terrence Malick, 2015)

Cast: Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, Brian Dennehy, Antonio Banderas, Frieda Pinto, Wes Bentley, Isabel Lucas, Teresa Palmer, Imogen Poots, Ben Kingsley (voice). Screenplay: Terrence Malick. Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki. Production design: Jack Fisk. Film editing: A.J. Edwards, Keith Fraase, Geoffrey Richman, Mark Yoshikawa. Music: Hanan Townshend.

Two films kept coming to mind as I watched Terrence Malick's Knight of Cups: Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960) and Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror (1975). Fellini's film because the journey of Malick's protagonist, Rick (Christian Bale), through the decadence of Hollywood and Las Vegas echoes that of Marcello's (Marcello Mastroianni) explorations of Rome. Tarkovsky's because Malick's exploration of Rick's life exhibits a similar steadfast refusal to adhere to a strict linear narrative. Most of us go to movies to have stories told to us. Our lives are a web of stories, told to us by history and religion and science and society, and most explicitly by art. We tend to prefer the old linear progression of storytelling: beginning, middle, end, or the familiar five-act structure of situation, complication, crisis, struggle, and resolution. But artists tend to get weary of the straightforward approach; they like to mix things up, to find new ways of storytelling. The modernist novelists like Joyce and Woolf and Faulkner eschewed linearity, and filmmakers have tried to take a similar course. They have the advantage of working with images as well as words. So Malick, like Tarkovsky and Fellini and others, experiments with editing and montage to meld images with language and gesture to probe the psychological depths of human character and experience. The problem with experimentation is that experiments fail more often than they succeed. Some think that Knight of Cups is a successful experiment, but most critics and much of the film's audience seem to disagree, to judge from, for example, a 5.6 rating on IMDb. Knight of Cups spent two years in post-production and there are four credited film editors, which suggests that Malick over-reached himself. For me, what was lost in the process of making the film was a clarity of vision. Granted, the lives of human beings are messy, loose-ended things, but what do we depend on artists to do but try to make sense of them. I think Malick lost sight of his protagonist, Rick, in trying to interpret his life and loves through the film's odd amalgamation of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and the Major Arcana of the tarot pack and then overlaying it with a collage of images provided by Emmanuel Lubezki's camera. We glimpse Rick through filters, grasping for moments that will resolve into something substantial about him, his problems with his family and with women. And for all the casting of fine actors like Bale and Cate Blanchett and Natalie Portman, the production negates their attempts to create characters. In fact, their starriness works against them: Instead of being drawn into the character of Rick or Nancy or Elizabeth, we're removed from them by the familiarity of the actor playing them. I understand what admirers of the film like Matt Zoller Seitz are saying when they proclaim, "The sheer freedom of it is intoxicating if you meet the film on its own level, and accept that it's unfinished, open-ended, by design, because it's at least partly concerned with the impossibility of imposing meaningful order on experience, whether through religion, occult symbolism, mass-produced images and stories, or family lore." But I wonder if that's enough to make an experiment successful. I came away from Knight of Cups knowing nothing more about its characters than I did before I met them.

[denimbex1986]

'...The industry tends to anoint a presumed Oscar juggernaut. On one hand, the Globes might further cement a “Barbenheimer” Oscar battle by awarding Greta Gerwig’s toy-doll comedy and Christopher Nolan’s atomic bomb creation drama best picture in their respective categories. And although the group divides best picture and the lead acting performances by genre, the two blockbusters are set to face off in three races: director, screenplay and supporting actor (Robert Downey Jr. and Ryan Gosling). Nolan is poised to take directing honors, while “Barbie” could land prizes for its screenplay and Gosling...

Although this season has felt like Nolan’s to lose, Scorsese just might be the spoiler in the Globes’ directing derby with “Killers of the Flower Moon.” His track record here is strong, with three previous wins for “Gangs of New York” (2002), “The Departed” (2006) and “Hugo” (2011).

Meanwhile, in the lead acting races, a consensus hasn’t emerged from the awards chatter. Bradley Cooper’s transformation into conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein in “Maestro” has received raves from critics; so, too, co-star Carey Mulligan’s sparkling turn as Bernstein’s wife, Felicia Montealegre. However, aside from Cooper’s win at the Las Vegas Film Critics Society Awards, neither has landed any precursors. They might form a “package deal” on voters’ final ballots, but a safer bet is sticking with the two performers leading in critics’ prizes: Cillian Murphy of “Oppenheimer” and Lily Gladstone of “Flower Moon.”

Regarding the new category for box office and cinematic achievement, I’ve long believed it was “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” set to duke it out...'

[thejewofkansas]

Awards Season 2023-24: Awards Round-Up 12/18

One week till Christmas. Two weeks till New Year’s. Five weeks and a day till the Oscar nominations. And here we have 14 critics’ groups who’ve announced their winners, not – hopefully – out of a desire to predict the outcome, but some of the trends here are pretty hard to dismiss. Here’s who we have (ordered alphabetically by their acronym): Boston Online Film Critics Association…

[awardswatcherik]

2024 Las Vegas Film Critics Society (LVFCS) Nominations

[justinsentertainmentcorner]

Lindsey Bahr at AP, via NewsNation Now:

Suzanne Somers, the effervescent blonde actor known for playing Chrissy Snow on the television show “Three’s Company” and who became an entrepreneur and New York Times best-selling author, has died. She was 76. Somers had breast cancer for over 23 years and died Sunday morning, her family said in a statement provided by her longtime publicist, R. Couri Hay. Her husband Alan Hamel, her son Bruce and other immediate family were with her in Palm Springs, California. “Her family was gathered to celebrate her 77th birthday on October 16th,” the statement read. “Instead, they will celebrate her extraordinary life, and want to thank her millions of fans and followers who loved her dearly.” In July, Somers shared on Instagram that her breast cancer had returned. “Like any cancer patient, when you get that dreaded, ‘It’s back’ you get a pit in your stomach. Then I put on my battle gear and go to war,” she told Entertainment Tonight at the time. “This is familiar battleground for me and I’m very tough.”

She was first diagnosed in 2000, and had previously battled skin cancer. Somers faced some backlash for her reliance on what she’s described as a chemical-free and organic lifestyle to combat the cancers. She argued against the use of chemotherapy, in books and on platforms like “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” which drew criticism from the American Cancer Society. Somers was born in 1946 in San Bruno, California, to a gardener father and a medical secretary mother. Her childhood, she’d later say, was tumultuous. Her father was an alcoholic, and abusive. She married young, at 19, to Bruce Somers, after becoming pregnant with her son Bruce. The couple divorced three years later and she began modeling for “The Anniversary Game” to support herself. It was during this time that she met Hamel, who she married in 1977. She began acting in the late 1960s, earning her first credit in the Steve McQueen film “Bullitt.” But the spotlight really hit when she was cast as the blonde driving the white Thunderbird in George Lucas’s 1973 film “American Graffiti.” Her only line was mouthing the words “I love you” to Richard Dreyfuss’s character. At her audition, Lucas just asked her if she could drive. She later said that moment “changed her life forever.”

[...] In 1980, after four seasons, she said she asked for a raise from $30,000 an episode to $150,000 an episode, which she described as comparable to what Ritter was getting paid. Hamel, a former television producer, had encouraged the ask. “The show’s response was, ‘Who do you think you are?’” Somers told People in 2020. “They said, ‘John Ritter is the star.’” She was promptly phased out and soon fired; Her character was replaced by two different roommates for the remaining years the show aired. It also led to a rift with her co-stars; They didn’t speak for many years. Somers did reconcile with Ritter before his death, and then with DeWitt on her online talk show. But Somers took the break as an opportunity to pursue new avenues, including a Las Vegas act, hosting a talk show and becoming an entrepreneur. In the 1990s, she also became the spokesperson for the “ThighMaster.” The decade also saw her return to network television in the 1990s, most famously on “Step by Step,” which aired on ABC’s youth-targeted TGIF lineup. The network also aired a biopic of her life, starring her, called “Keeping Secrets.”

Suzanne Somers, who starred in Three's Company and Step By Step, died at 76. Somers was phased out and then fired from Three's Company for asking for a pay raise to be paid comparable to John Ritter.

[xtruss]

Cultural Comment: Fifty Years of “Learning From Las Vegas”

The cool appraisal of Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi’s revolutionary book has a lot to inspire the architects of today.

— By Christopher Hawthorne | January 27, 2023

On the morning of January 10, 1969, thirteen graduate students gathered inside Yale’s Art and Architecture Building to give their final presentations in a studio led by the married architects Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi. The students had spent the previous semester studying the urban design of Las Vegas, including a ten-day visit to the city during which they sketched hotel façades, measured nighttime illumination levels on the Strip, and crashed the opening gala for the Circus Circus Casino while wearing thrift-shop formal wear.

The agenda for the day stretched for more than eleven hours, with presentations on each of the studio’s dozen research categories, several short films (one of them shot from a helicopter borrowed from Howard Hughes), and breaks for lunch and dinner. The experts who assembled to discuss the results—the jury, in art- and architecture-school parlance—included the prominent Yale architectural historian Vincent Scully (whose son, Daniel, was a student in the studio) and the writer Tom Wolfe, whose 1964 Esquire essay “Las Vegas (What?) Las Vegas (Can’t Hear You! Too Noisy) Las Vegas!!!!” was an inspiration for Scott Brown and Venturi.

The following week, Venturi wrote a letter of thanks to some of the jurors, alluding to some of the raised eyebrows that he and Scott Brown encountered while bringing a close study of billboards and casino layouts into the architectural academy: “We think it went well in general,” he told them, “but I am still a little unbelieving that some people can’t understand we just wanted to look at Las Vegas in a dead-pan way which is also a poetic way of long standing.”

The book that emerged from this research, “Learning from Las Vegas,” published by M.I.T. Press in the fall of 1972 and credited to Scott Brown, Venturi, and their teaching assistant Steven Izenour, turned fifty last year. While it remains among the four or five most influential books on twentieth-century American urban form—alongside Jane Jacobs’s “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” (1961), Rem Koolhaas’s “Delirious New York” (1978), and Mike Davis’s “City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles” (1990)—it has also never quite outrun the critique that Venturi identified in that letter, a criticism that begins with suspicion of the idea that Las Vegas could ever be a subject worthy of serious architectural study.

The Times review of “Learning from Las Vegas,” by Roger Jellinek, carried the following headline: “In Praise (!) of Las Vegas.” Certainly, the conventional wisdom by that point saw Las Vegas and cities like it—and urban sprawl generally—as a scourge. (The Times had used a nearly identical headline, “In Praise (!) of Los Angeles,” less than a year earlier, for Jellinek’s review of Reyner Banham’s “Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies.”) The architect and critic Peter Blake’s widely read 1964 book, “God’s Own Junkyard: The Planned Deterioration of America's Landscape,” saw evidence in the postwar commercial strip, with its jumble of gas stations and drive-ins, of “the decline, fall and subsequent disintegration of urban civilization in the United States.” The German philosopher Theodor Adorno made a similar argument (in similarly apocalyptic prose) in an essay called “The Schema of Mass Culture”: “The neon sentences which hang over our cities and outshine the natural light of the night with their own are comets presaging the natural disaster of society, its frozen death.”

Scott Brown and Venturi were certainly comfortable staking out a contrarian position; it was then, and long remained, their go-to move. “Learning from Las Vegas” prompted just the kind of polarized reaction they were aiming for. It dominated discussion within architectural circles and won praise from younger critics, like Paul Goldberger, who wrote in the Times that “the Venturis,” as they were sometimes called in those days, had, by giving Las Vegas so much attention, “infuriated other architects, fascinated students and made themselves perhaps the most controversial figures in American architecture today.” The book also reached an audience of general-interest readers, for whom it explained changes in American cities which were increasingly difficult to ignore but hadn’t yet been framed in such an engaging way. The book’s first run of two thousand copies quickly sold out, and it has stayed in print ever since.

But did “Learning from Las Vegas”—and the Yale studio that inspired it—really set out to praise the architecture and urbanism of the Strip? Or was it meant instead as a cautionary tale about sprawl, a phenomenon that could be seen at its “purest and most intense,” as the authors put it, in Las Vegas? The answer is both—and neither. What struck me when I went back to reread the book is how deliberately it works to collapse the distance, and therefore the distinction, between enthusiasm and skepticism, and ultimately between documentation and critique. Above all, “Learning from Las Vegas” argues for a curious and open-minded anti-utopianism, for understanding cities as they are rather than how planners wish they might be—and then using that knowledge, systematically and patiently won, as the basis for new architecture. “Learning from the existing landscape is a way of being revolutionary for an architect,” the authors wrote. “Not the obvious way, which is to tear down Paris and begin again, as Le Corbusier suggested in the 1920s, but another, more tolerant way; that is, to question how we look at things.”

Robert Venturi à la Magritte on the Las Vegas Strip, 1966.Photograph by Denise Scott Brown / Courtesy Venturi, Scott Brown, and Associates, Inc.

Scott Brown and Venturi first visited Las Vegas together in November of 1966, a year before they were married. The trip was her idea. A young widow from South Africa, Scott Brown had begun teaching at U.C.L.A.’s new School of Architecture and Urban Planning after earning a master’s degree from and serving on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, where she and Venturi met. At first, she thought that Los Angeles might make the most useful laboratory for studying the emerging urbanism of car-centric cities—for employing the analytical method that she self-deprecatingly called “town watching”—before realizing that Las Vegas offered a petri dish of more manageable size. “We rode around from casino to casino, dazed by the desert sun and dazzled by the signs, both loving and hating what we saw,” she recalled. “We were jolted clear out of our aesthetic skins.”

As is often the case when architects travel—especially architects who write—the jolt wasn’t simply a reaction to what they saw. It was also an electrifying realization that what they were seeing might be material, fodder for a potent follow-up to Venturi’s influential first book, “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture.” (That book, published in 1966, argued that modern architecture, by stripping away references to earlier landmarks or design movements, had drained new buildings of nuance and verve in favor of “prim dreams of pure order.” It also looked ahead to some of the preoccupations of the Yale studio by asking, in a reference to the American city-making of the era, “Is not Main Street almost all right?”) What if the pair mined their ambivalence about Las Vegas, that feeling of “both loving and hating what we saw,” for insights about the state of the postwar American city?

The trip formed the basis for a 1968 Architectural Forum essay by Scott Brown and Venturi, titled “A Significance for A&P Parking Lots, or Learning from Las Vegas,” which gave rise to the studio and a formal book proposal. Scott Brown later suggested that “Learning from Las Vegas” wasn’t really about Las Vegas but instead about the broader “symbolism of architectural form,” and there is something to that notion. The book is preoccupied with the ways in which vernacular architecture in Las Vegas and places like it had begun to respond to the dominance of the car—and with how travelling by car through cities affects our understanding of speed, distance, and the information conveyed by signs of all kinds. “Is the sign the building or is the building the sign?” the authors ask. “These relationships, and combinations between signs and buildings, between architecture and symbolism, between form and meaning, between driver and the roadside are deeply relevant to architecture today and have been discussed at length by several writers. But they have not been studied in detail or as an overall system.”

Most architecture students over the years have read the shorter second edition of the book, a paperback published in 1977, but the 1972 large-format hardcover version is the livelier and more revealing document, if also the more contentious editorial product. It is divided into three parts. The first largely reproduces the Architectural Forum essay and includes a close study of the Strip’s architecture, signage, and street furniture. The second provides an analysis of how trends visible in Las Vegas relate to larger developments in architecture and urbanism. This section is anchored by a tribute to “ugly and ordinary” architecture, including a now famous distinction between buildings that are “ducks,” which is to say, commercial structures that take the shape of what they’re selling—a Mexican-food shop in Los Angeles resembling a giant tamale, for example—and those that are “decorated sheds,” or expediently made buildings that gain energy from signage and ornament. In short, the duck is a symbol; the decorated shed applies symbols to a more conventional architectural frame.

Many late-modern buildings, in Venturi and Scott Brown’s view, had become by the nineteen-sixties a species of duck, their flat roofs and spare geometry existing primarily to advertise their architectural loyalties—to sell stale International Style tamales, as it were. (As Ada Louise Huxtable put it in reviewing “Learning from Las Vegas” for The New York Review of Books, “The modern building has rejected decoration only to become one big decorative object in itself.”) Scott Brown and Venturi much preferred the decorated shed, in no small part because of the high-low frisson produced when sophisticated architects mixed straightforward design choices with ironic and over-scaled ones, as they themselves would do for the rest of their career.

The final third of the book is made up of a survey of design projects in the office of Venturi and Rauch (as their firm was then known), from 1965 to 1971. This section, whose advertorial tone will be familiar to regular readers of architecture monographs, was removed for the second edition. That edition also introduced an entirely different approach to graphic design. Scott Brown and Venturi clashed from the start with the head designer at M.I.T. Press, Muriel Cooper, who worked in the so-called Swiss style and had overseen a mammoth 1969 survey of the Bauhaus by Hans Wingler.

Much of Cooper’s design for the first edition of “Learning from Las Vegas” follows the modernist playbook to a T, with sans-serif typefaces, an unyielding five-column grid, and oceans of white space in which both text and undersized images swim. As Scott Brown later put it, “That our argument against Late Modern was couched in Late Modern graphics conveyed, to say the least, a mixed message—‘one irony too far,’ I said. We argued mightily with Muriel.”

At the same time, perhaps overcompensating for her reputation, Cooper also proposed an initial cover design, later modified, which included a bubble-wrap slip cover and was crowded with large text, busy to the point of being shouty. For Scott Brown and Venturi, this choice was altogether too much on the nose. “The cover as designed is absolutely unacceptable: leaving out questions of good or bad design, it is inappropriate,” they wrote, in a letter to Michael Connelly, the M.I.T. Press editorial director. “This is a serious study with a serious text and deserves a dignified conventional image. The shock must come from the contents inside the book.”

As Aron Vinegar notes in his excellent 2008 history, “I Am a Monument: On Learning from Las Vegas,” “Scott Brown was convinced that Cooper had given them a ‘Duck.’ Cooper was sure that that was what they wanted all along.” Scott Brown and Venturi persuaded Connelly to let them design the second edition themselves. Among other changes, this “small, cheap, readable” edition, in Scott Brown’s words, added a subtitle (“The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form”) and featured a serif typeface, Baskerville, along with a discreet, even boring, cover. It also saw a bigger role, or at least more prominent credit, for Scott Brown: it included a preface signed only by her, and it removed the first edition’s “Note on Authorship and Attribution,” which had carried just Venturi’s name.

Roger Conover, the longtime executive editor for art and architecture at M.I.T. Press, hoped for years to reprint the first edition, which had remained something of a cult favorite among graphic designers. Scott Brown and Venturi always refused. This changed in 2015, when Conover, nearing retirement, approached Scott Brown to make one final try, not only promising her the chance to write the introduction for what is now known as “the facsimile edition” but also to give her, as he put it, “the last word in the case of any editorial differences.” (Venturi’s health was fading by this point; he died in 2018.) She agreed, settling some scores with Muriel Cooper in an essay that she titled “The Tyranny of the Template: The Graphic Design of the First Edition of Learning from Las Vegas.”

Venturi’s use of the word “dead-pan” in his letter to the Yale jurors—“we just wanted to look at Las Vegas in a dead-pan way which is also a poetic way of long standing”—was perhaps the most significant clue about what he and Scott Brown expected from the book’s design: something that was coolly above the fray (even while admiring so much about the fray), that didn’t try quite so hard or bear the signs of coming from any theoretical camp. This also reveals something important about their sources of inspiration. The Los Angeles artist Ed Ruscha, in particular, had by the mid-nineteen-sixties established an attentive but ostensibly nonjudgmental approach to photographing urban landscapes, including gas stations and apartment buildings, that Scott Brown would later refer to as “deadpanning.” The title of Ruscha’s best-known book, “Every Building on the Sunset Strip,” from 1966, is itself part of this approach, suggesting that by including “every building” he is not choosing or critiquing, just documenting.

Members of the Learning from Las Vegas Studio in front of the Stardust, 1968.Photograph courtesy Venturi, Scott Brown, and Associates, Inc.

When the students in the Yale course travelled west to Las Vegas, they stopped off first in Los Angeles and visited Ruscha’s studio, where they would have had a chance to learn how he captured his images of Sunset Boulevard by attaching a 35-mm. camera to the hood of his Ford. (They also spent a day at Disneyland.) A photo montage in “Learning from Las Vegas” is labelled “The Ed Ruscha elevation,” and one of the short firms produced for the Yale studio was called “Deadpan Las Vegas (or Three Projector Deadpan).”

“He was very sweet,” Scott Brown told me over the phone, of the visit to Ruscha’s studio. “The students did what they did best—they brought a case of beer and drank it together.”

Several other artists had been mining a similar vein for nearly a decade. Bernd and Hilla Becher began photographing the abandoned industrial buildings of Germany’s Ruhr region in the late nineteen-fifties, presenting them in a detached black-and-white style, and later shot the steel mills of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, using the same technique. The actor and photographer Dennis Hopper took a well-known photo of a Standard Oil gas station in Los Angeles from inside a car, in the early sixties. In 1964, Donald Appleyard, Kevin Lynch and John R. Myer published “The View from the Road,” a book meant as a primer for the design of the rapidly expanding American highway network. The Los Angeles architect Frank Gehry first gained wide attention with a 1965 Melrose Avenue live-work studio for the graphic designer Lou Danziger, which was wrapped in plain stucco, aping the banal architecture around it.

It was not as though these artists and architects suddenly lost their powers of judgment. But if “deadpanning” was a pose, it was a strategic and timely one. The most direct way for up-and-coming designers to separate themselves from the modernist generation was to reject the idea of heroic gestures, of remaking cities from the ground up. As Hilar Stadler and Martino Stierli write in the introduction to “Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown,” “Venturi and Scott Brown’s approach was revolutionary precisely in its renunciation of the rhetoric of revolution in favor of focusing architectural thought and action on the here and now. . . . It is this insistence on the city as it actually is that is the lasting legacy of Learning from Las Vegas.”

Yet that legacy, in certain respects, is fading, even as Scott Brown herself, and the work that she did before teaming up with Venturi, has become the focus of new scholarship. (A symposium on her career and teaching methods, pegged to a new book of essays edited by Frida Grahn, will be held at the Yale School of Architecture on February 8th.) “Learning from Las Vegas” now finds itself, perhaps more so than at any time since its publication, out of step with the current tenor of architectural practice and criticism. According to Izzy Kornblatt, who is in the first year of a Ph.D. program in architectural history and theory at Yale, students now tend to know the book “only for its title and for the distinction it makes between ‘ducks’ and ‘decorated sheds.’ ” And it is precisely the book’s nonjudgmental framing, what younger architects might call its passivity, that is responsible for this attitude, particularly when it comes to the effects of unconstrained capitalism on city-making. Activism—in particular efforts to take on the climate crisis, racial inequities and exploitative labor practices—has returned to the fore in the profession, and for good reason. “To tear down Paris and begin again” is not so far, in spirit, from the current mood, even if the political goals of many young architects are quite different from those of the right-leaning Le Corbusier. An approach that begins with close observation and ends with highly literate if occasionally self-satisfied commentary on that observation—the Scott Brown and Venturi method—seems ill-equipped, these days, to change the world in all the depressingly vast ways that it needs changing. What good is town watching when the town is on fire?

This is not a new critique. The architectural historian and theorist Manfredo Tafuri dismissed Scott Brown and Venturi for what he called their “facile ironies.” Yet those twenty-first-century readers tempted to brush off “Learning from Las Vegas” as a neutral travelogue risk missing the real power of its analysis—and the ways in which its approach might make today’s architecture of activism and political urgency sharper and more effective. We forget it now, perhaps because the effort was so entirely successful, but the book’s larger goals went far beyond understanding the quickly growing cities of the American West. Scott Brown and Venturi also wanted to accelerate a changing of the guard in architecture. In that sense, the smoke screen of non-judgment allowed them to plausibly claim a kind of “Who, me?” innocence as they worked to make room for their own generation to start running things.

After all, their frustration wasn’t with the revolutionary nature of the modernist project so much as with how it had grown stagnant and pleased with itself. As they write in the acknowledgments of “Learning from Las Vegas,” “Since we have criticized Modern architecture, it is proper here to state our intensive admiration of its early period when its founders, sensitive to their own times, proclaimed the right revolution. Our argument lies mainly with the irrelevant and distorted prolongation of that old revolution today.”

It would be going too far to claim that “Learning Las Vegas” was organized fundamentally as a kind of Trojan horse, sneaking anti-establishment ideas (about, for example, all the ways that modernism and its leading practitioners had reached a dead end) into the academy in the guise of mere empiricism, of diagrams and measurement. But the book’s seeming impartiality does serve to disguise its cunning. The young architects of today, who have their own designs on upheaval—even if their goals are more urgent or politically ambitious than Scott Brown and Venturi’s—could learn a thing or two from the strategy that the couple and their students perfected a half century ago, not so much storming the barricades as walking calmly and determinedly around them, flashing a camera or sketch pad as a kind of all-access pass. The “right revolution” this time around, whether it’s founded on climate activism or an architecture of racial or economic justice, will only benefit from that kind of savvy. In more direct terms, some of the most exploitative and environmentally suspect examples of recent urban planning—see the recent World Cup host Qatar, for starters—still haven’t received anything near the level of analysis that “Learning from Las Vegas” brought to the Nevada desert. ♦

[notearsnora]

Las Vegas Film Critics Society 2024 Awards:

Best Costume Design: Wicked (Paul Tazewell)

Best Family Film: Wicked

Full:

[brian-in-finance]

The Las Vegas Film Critics Society (LVFCS) have announced their nominations representing the best in film for 2021. The winners will be announced tomorrow on December 13th 2021. �� Next Best Picture

Best Picture

Belfast

CODA

Licorice Pizza

tick, tick… BOOM!

West Side Story

Best Supporting Actor

Ciarán Hinds – Belfast

Jared Leto – House of Gucci

Troy Kotsur – CODA

J.K. Simmons – Being the Ricardos

Kodi Smit-McPhee – The Power of the Dog

Best Supporting Actress

Caitríona Balfe – Belfast

Ariana DeBose – West Side Story

Ann Dowd – Mass

Kirsten Dunst – The Power of the Dog

Ruth Negga – Passing

Best Screenplay (Original)

Being the Ricardos

Belfast

Don't Look Up

Licorice Pizza

Pig

Best Film Editing

Belfast

Dune

The Power of the Dog

tick, tick… BOOM!

West Side Story

Best Song

"Down to Joy" – Belfast

"Every Letter" – Cyrano

“Dos Oruguitas” – Encanto

"Be Alive" – King Richard

"No Time to Die" – No Time to Die

Best Male Youth in Film

Gregory Diaz IV – In the Heights

Jude Hill – Belfast

Noah Jupe – A Quiet Place II

Woody Norman – C'mon C'mon

Charlie Shotwell – John and the Hole

Remember when two of Caitríona’s on-screen sons were nominated for a Best Male Youth in Film award?

[yes-svetlana-world]

by bones and all news

@bonesandallnews

Congratulations to Dave Kajganich for winning best adapted screenplay by The Las Vegas Film Critics Society (LVFCS) #BonesAndAll

@BonesAndAllFilm