New Michael Moore movie
I’m not sure there’s any reason to watch the trailer for the as-yet-untitled Michael Moore documentary on the global economic meltdown; don’t we pretty much know where he stands at this point?
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kottke.org posts about Movies
Wall-E end credits
The Art of the Title Sequence takes a look at the excellent ending credits for Wall-E and interviews the gentlemen responsible.
Jim Capobianco’s end credits to Andrew Stanton’s “WALL-E” are essential; they are the actual ending of the film, a perfect and fantastically optimistic conclusion to a grand, if imperfect idea. Humanity’s past and future evolution viewed through unspooling schools of art. Frame after frame sinks in as you smile self-consciously. It isn’t supposed to be this good but there it is. This is art in its own right. Peter Gabriel and Thomas Newman’s song, “Down to Earth” indulges you with some incredibly thoughtful lyrics and, from the Stone Age to the Impressionists to the wonderful 8-bit pixel sprites, you are in the midst of something special.
(via quipsologies)
Trailer for Cold Souls
Cold Souls = Being John Malkovich - John Malkovich + Paul Giamatti. Sort of.
Update: Perhaps this could be a sequel?
2012 trailer
This movie just looks amazing. And horrible. A must-see trailer in HD if you like, as I do, watching the Earth being destroyed.
Update: And here’s a totally sweet trailer for 2012: It’s a Disaster. (thx, javier)
Arrested Development Documentary
Here’s the trailer for the Arrested Development Documentary.
The overall goal of the documentary is to provide awareness and education of this brilliant, witty and original comedy.
The architecture of Star Wars
The Architects’ Journal selected their top 10 structures from the Star Wars films.
Not quite a building, but the monumental quality of its form and its polygonal facades lend this Jawa Sandcrawler a building-like presence. These large treaded vehicles have inspired buildings from a Tunisian hotel to Rem Koolhaas’ Casa de Musica in Porto.
(thx, janelle)
50 Films You Can Wait to See After You’re Dead
Death to Smoochy
The Boondock Saints
The Karate Kid, Part III
Cool as Ice
Dice Rules
Basic Instinct 2
Gigli
SuperBabies: Baby Geniuses 2
From Justin to Kelly
The Hottie & the Nottie
Glitter
Car 54, Where Are You?
Son of the Mask
Leonard Part 6
Lady in the Water
Norbit
Swept Away
White Chicks
Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid
Spice World
Jaws 3-D
Bratz: The Movie
Troll 2
Howard the Duck
Battlefield Earth
The Postman
I Know Who Killed Me
Kazaam
Rambo III
Freddy Got Fingered
Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot
Striptease
Caddyshack II
The Adventures of Pluto Nash
Barb Wire
Ishtar
Bio-Dome
Jingle All the Way
Catwoman
Disaster Movie
Rocky V
BloodRayne
Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo
The Love Guru
Crossroads
Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2
The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas
It’s Pat!
Batman & Robin
Speed 2: Cruise Control
Aronofsky and Portman in Black Swan
When I first saw the headline, I thought “this is amazing…Darren Aronofsky’s directing a movie based on the book by Nassim Taleb and Natalie Portman’s gonna star in it!” The plot of the actual movie is only slightly less implausible:
“Swan” centers on a veteran ballerina (Portman) who finds herself locked in a competitive situation with a rival dancer, with the stakes and twists increasing as the dancers approach a big performance. But it’s unclear whether the rival is a supernatural apparition or if the protagonist is simply having delusions.
Hey, they’re making Blink and Moneyball into movies, why not The Black Swan?
Update: An additional important note about this film:
In this movie, Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis have sex. Yeah. You read that right. And not just nice sweet innocent sex either. We’re talking ecstasy-induced hungry aggressive angry sex.
Nail houses
Inspired by Carl Fredricksen’s house in Up, which was holding up construction of a massive building complex, deputydog uncovers some more such houses, which are actually called nail houses.
Another nail house is actually a nail church. Citicorp Center was built without corner columns to accommodate St. Peter’s Church, which occupied one corner of the block on which the skyscraper was built. The engineer who built Citicorp Center made a mistake related to the church’s accommodation and famously corrected it after the building was built.
Update: The original link is dead, but In Focus has collected 20+ photos of nail houses in China, where development is happening quickly.
Two thumbs up from Ebert
Roger Ebert shares a few of his “two thumbs up” reviews from the past few months. Among them are Up, Away We Go, The Hangover, and somewhat surprisingly, Knowing starring Nicholas Cage. Ebert was the only major critic that really liked the film.
Pixar’s princess
Two movies from now, after Toy Story 3 and Newt, Pixar is *finally* releasing a movie with a female main character. The only problem? She’s a princess.
I have nothing against princesses. I have nothing against movies with princesses. But don’t the Disney princesses pretty much have us covered? If we had to wait for your thirteenth movie for you to make one with a girl at the center, couldn’t you have chosen something — something — for her to be that could compete with plucky robots and adventurous space toys?
Disney’s princesses do have us covered.
Following shots
From Matt Zoller Seitz, Following: a collection of movie clips where the camera follows a character through their environment.
See also Seitz’s The Substance of Style series on Wes Anderson’s influences.
Update: See also The Explanation by Seitz, Cool Guys Don’t Look at Explosions, and Jad Abumrad’s selection of movie clips with great music. And a shot that should have been included in Following: the lovely opening to Birth. (thx, dan & matt)
Live Donkey Kong record attempt
Steve Weibe is trying to break Billy Mitchell’s Donkey Kong record live. As in right now! The pair’s exploits were chronicled in the documentary King of Kong. (via waxy)
Update: The score to beat is 1,050,200 points. (Oops, Wiebe just died as I was typing this. He’s got two guys left.) Wiebe owns the second highest score with 1,049,100 points.
Update: He just died again. He’s at ~370,000 with one guy left. Not looking good.
Update: Last guy. 457,000. Not looking good.
Update: He finally got it going but ended up short of the record with 923,400. Word is he’s got two more chances to break it today.
Update: No dice…didn’t break the score with any of his games.
Khaaan! Agaiiin!
While discussing this morning’s post about Khaaan! at the breakfast table with us, Ollie showed his growing dramatic range as an actor by reenacting the scene.
It’s no chicken dance, but it’s not bad.
100 movie lines in 200 seconds
Video of 100 of the best movie lines in 200 seconds…or what it would look like if SportsCenter put together a highlights package for popular movies.
On rebooting Star Trek
This post by Greg Hatcher contains two equally interesting parts:
1. A detailed examination of the Star Trek franchise which shows that the film by JJ Abrams is merely the latest in a long series of successful reboots.
2. A list of rules to follow to successfully reboot a franchise, whether it’s Star Trek or Bond or Batman.
Don’t abuse the audience goodwill. Remember, you sell the audience on your story based on certain expectations. Break that unspoken contract and you’re in trouble. No one bought a ticket for Spider-Man 3 thinking they were going to get a romance with musical comedy interludes, yet that’s what it felt like we got.
If you’re doing a new version of a beloved old property, that means you need to figure out what it was people liked and make damn sure it’s in there. That doesn’t mean you have to do it the same way every time, you just have to do it. James Bond movies have been retooled a number of times, but we never lose the license to kill, the exquisite stunt work, the Bond theme music, or the cool cars and hot girls. There’s about a million miles of difference between Moonraker and Casino Royale, but they’re both recognizably Bond movies and they were both successful, because they met the baseline audience expectation of what a James Bond movie would give them.
(via rebecca blood)
Chairs from The Incredibles
Jim Unwin collects virtual chairs, specifically the ones from the movie The Incredibles.
This is my dedication to the creative team behind Pixar’s movie The Incredibles. I loved the depth of the world, the buildings, the gadgets and most of all I loved the chairs.
(via swissmiss)
Visually abridged movies
Movies in Frames sums up movies in just four frames. I particularly liked the one for The Darjeeling Limited.
RunPee
RunPee is quite possibly the GREATEST MOVIE WEB SITE EVER. It tells you the best time to run to the bathroom during a movie and what happened while you were gone. Star Trek has four available times, the first of which starts when Captain Pike leaves the bridge for Nero’s ship.
Rules for time travelers
Sean Carroll lays out the rules for time travel for movies (but also more generally) based on our current understanding of physics.
1. Traveling into the future is easy. We travel into the future all the time, at a fixed rate: one second per second. Stick around, you’ll be in the future soon enough. You can even get there faster than usual, by decreasing the amount of time you experience elapsing with respect to the rest of the world — either by low-tech ways like freezing yourself, or by taking advantage of the laws of special relativity and zipping around near the speed of light. (Remember we’re talking about what is possible according to the laws of physics here, not what is plausible or technologically feasible.) It’s coming back that’s hard.
Sherlock Holmes trailer
The trailer, in HD, of Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes movie with Robert Downey Jr. (as Holmes) and Jude Law (as Watson).
You don’t have to be a Rockefeller to collect art
The trailer for Herb and Dorothy, about a pair of unlikely art collectors. From a 1997 article in the Austin Chronicle:
She was a librarian. Her husband was a postal worker. They lived on his salary and bought art with hers. Both are now retired. They have no children. “We bought art we could afford and that would fit into the apartment,” they say. Water from the fish tank once splashed a Warhol they owned. It later had to be restored.
Much of their collection has passed to the National Gallery of Art.
Star Trek lens flares
Did you notice all the lens flares in Star Trek? JJ Abrams’ rationale for them — he refers to them as “another actor” in the movie — is pretty interesting.
I love the idea that the future was so bright it couldn’t be contained in the frame. The flares weren’t just happening from on-camera light sources, they were happening off camera, and that was really the key to it. I want [to create] the sense that, just off camera, something spectacular is happening. There was always a sense of something, and also there is a really cool organic layer thats a quality of it.
Someone clever took some footage from the old series and added a bunch of lens flaring to make it look like the new film.
The result is supposed to be funny but I thought it also somewhat validated Abrams’ remarks above. (via snarkmarket & waxy)
Henry Jenkins and Snarkmarket also address my biggest problem with the movie, that the cadet-to-captain thing happened way too quickly to Kirk and his crew. Jenkins’ contention is that the new movie treats the Enterprise as a start-up company; Tim adds this gem of a line:
But it’s not academia; it’s the NBA. You give these kids the ball.
So, which NBA player is Kirk supposed to be? While not an exact comparison, I’m going to say that Kirk is Tony Parker to Spock’s Tim Duncan. And Scotty = Manu Ginobli?
Catfish noodling
Noodling is the practice of catching catfish by letting them latch onto your arm.
To begin, a noodler goes underwater to depths ranging from only a few feet to up to twenty feet, placing his hand inside a discovered catfish hole. If all goes as planned, the catfish will swim forward and latch onto the fisherman’s hand, usually as a defensive maneuver in order to try to escape the hole. If the fish is particularly large, the noodler can hook the head around its gills.
This video captures some noodling fishermen in action.
(via that’s how it happened)
Update: There’s a documentary on noodling called Okie Noodling. (thx to many)
Rwanda, fifteen years after genocide
Reading two-week-old 13-page New Yorker articles about Rwanda probably isn’t your favorite thing to do, but if you’re a subscriber, I’d urge you to check out Philip Gourevitch’s fascinating article about what’s been happening in Rwanda in the fifteen years since the genocide. It’s a complicated situation (boldface mine):
On the fifteenth anniversary of the genocide, Rwanda is one of the safest and most orderly countries in Africa. Since 1994, per-capita gross domestic prduct has nearly tripled, even as the population has increased by nearly twenty-five per cent, to more than ten million. There is national health insurance, and a steadily improving education system. […] Most of the prisoners accused or convicted of genocide have been released. The death penalty has been abolished. And Rwanda is the only nation where hundred of thousands of people who took part in mass murder live intermingled at every level of society with the families of their victims.
Like I said, complicated. This is the best thing I’ve read in the New Yorker in a long while.
Update: As We Forgive is a documentary film about the Rwandan reconciliation.
Can survivors truly forgive the killers who destroyed their families? Can the government expect this from its people? And can the church, which failed at moral leadership during the genocide, fit into the process of reconciliation today? In As We Forgive, director Laura Waters Hinson and narrator Mia Farrow explore these topics through the lives of four neighbors once caught in opposite tides of a genocidal bloodbath, and their extraordinary journey from death to life through forgiveness.
(thx, misty)
What actually happened in The Usual Suspects?
Brian Singer directed and Christopher McQuarrie wrote the screenplay for The Usual Suspects. [Spoilers to follow…1] After they finished the film, they realized that the two of them disagreed significantly on what exactly happened in the movie. Did Kint/Soze tell the truth or was his whole story a lie?
McQuarrie says only after finishing the film and preparing to do press interviews about it did he and Singer realize they both had completely different conceptions about the plot.
“I pulled Bryan aside the night before press began and I said, ‘We need to get our stories straight because people are starting to ask what happened and what didn’t,’ ” recalls McQuarrie. “And we got into the biggest argument we’ve ever had in our lives.”
He continues: “One of us believed that the story was all lies, peppered with little bits of the truth. And the other one believed it was all true, peppered with tiny, little lies. … We each thought we were making a movie that was completely different from what the other one thought.”
I always assumed that Verbal was telling the truth the whole time, in the cavalier the-truth-can’t-hurt-me manner of the movie master criminal. (thx, dave)
[1] What’s the statute of limitations on spoiler warnings? The Usual Suspects is fourteen years old; surely everyone who wanted to see it has seen it by now. ↩
Whatever Works trailer
Woody Allen + Larry David + the process for making a feature-length film - all but about 2 minutes of the footage = the trailer for Whatever Works.
An eccentric New Yorker played by Larry David abandons his upper class life to lead a more bohemian existence. He meets a young girl from the south and her family and no two people seem to get along in the entanglements that follow. This is a comedy also starring Ed Begley Jr., Patricia Clarkson, Conleth Hill, Michael McKean, Evan Rachel Wood, and a number of other amusing types.
Star Trek
[Note: spoilers.] Bones did it for me. As soon as he sat down next to Kirk on the shuttle, I was hooked. Loved Star Trek, wanted to go again as soon we got out.
J.J. Abrams did something kinda crazy with the film though. He took the entire Star Trek canon and tossed it out the window. Because of the whole time travel thing, the events that occurred in The Original Series, The Next Generation, Voyager, DS9, and the previous 10 movies will not happen. Which means that in terms of sequels to this film, the slate is pretty much clean for Abrams or whomever he passes it off to.
Well. Almost. Events in this alternate timeline unfold differently but the same. Even though the USS Kelvin was destroyed with Kirk’s father aboard, Kirk and the rest of the gang somehow all still end up on the Enterprise. But the destruction of an entire planet and 6 billion people should have a somewhat larger effect going forward.
Also worth noting is how the time travel in Trek compares with that on Lost, a show Abrams co-created and currently executive produces. On Lost (so far), the universe is deterministic: no matter who travels when, not much changes. Time travel can affect little details here and there, but the big events unfold the same way each time and every character remembers events unfolding in the same way, no matter when they are on the timeline. Star Trek’s universe is not that way; characters before time travel events remember events unfolding differently. According to the older Spock, the Romulan ship going back in time changed things. Kirk knew his dad, Vulcan wasn’t sucked into a black hole, etc.
On the excellent Bad Astronomy blog, Phil Plait doesn’t cover the time travel aspect of the film but reviews the rest of the science in the film.
And yeah, we do hear ships whoosh as they go to warp and all that, but that’s what we expect to hear, having evolved in an atmosphere which whooshes when things fly past us. I’d prefer that we hear nothing, but I accept that as a filmmaker’s prerogative to make the audience comfortable.
But I’ll add that for years I have complained about sounds in space, saying that done correctly, making things silent can add drama. That sentiment was proven here; the sudden silence as we leave the ship and fly into space with the doomed crewmember is really eerie and unsettling.
In the NY Times, David Hajdu tackles time travel of a different kind, arguing that the original Star Trek was not about science or the future; it was a nostalgic lens through which to view pop culture.
“Star Trek” was an early manifestation of our contemporary absorption with the pop culture of the past. The show’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, was a gifted hack writer for TV Westerns like “Have Gun, Will Travel” and cop shows like “Highway Patrol,” and “Star Trek,” though set in a nominally stylized future, was essentially a Western cop show. In fact, Roddenberry pitched the series to NBC as “Wagon Train” to the stars; and, as Captain Kirk noted in his log, the ship would venture out on “patrol,” cruising the galaxy like a city beat.
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