kottke.org posts about Movies
An amazingly dense infographic of box office revenues for all movies since 1986. It’s a little confusing at first because the vertical scale is basically irrelevant, but once you get the hang of things, it’s fun to just scroll through the years. Interesting stuff to look out for:
1. The gross receipts have obviously gone up in the past 11 years.
2. The summers get much more blockbustery.
3. As time goes on, movies open bigger but don’t last nearly as long in the theater as they used to. There are also more movies to choose from in 2007 than in 1986.
4. For some exceptions to the normal pattern, check out My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Juno, Dances With Wolves, Platoon, and Million Dollar Baby. (via big picture)
Just a heads up to let you know that a liveblog of the Oscars is going to be starting here in a little bit. Follow along as I follow along, if you know what I mean (and I think you do).
7:44a, Feb 25th: The Oscars are over. 20% of the nominees won. The cat threw up on the rug and Ollie’s a bit fussy this morning. We’ll see you back here next year.
11:42p: Bedtime. Last update until tomorrow morning, when I assume the Oscar ceremony will finally be over.
11:06p: None of the stories on the front page of Digg refer to the Oscars. Unsurprising that they have their heads in the sand on such an important issue.
10:47p: BREAKING NEWS: The program on ESPN2 right now is not Fisting; it’s Fishing. Fishing. Also, 1363 unread items in my RSS reader.
10:28p: Fashion update. Just took off my shirt. It’s hot in here, it’s not just me.
10:08p: Battery life at 31% and dropping.
10:00p: Just checked the movie times at the theater two blocks from my apartment. Juno at 10:50, There Will Be Blood at 10:20, Atonement at 10:30, and No Country for Old Men at 10:15 & 10:55. Michael Clayton is on Movies OnDemand for $4.99 at any time.
9:32p: Is this a good time to go to the movies? Lots of empty seats at There Will Be Blood maybe?
9:07p: My liveblogging outfit this evening: jeans by Banana Republic, long sleeve tshirt by American Apparel, socks by Wal-Mart, boxer shorts by Muji.
8:55p: What else is on right now: The Mummy on Encore, Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Fox Movie Channel, Miller’s Crossing on Encore Action, The Departed on Cinemax, episode #8 of The Wire on HBO, the Masterpiece version of Pride and Prejudice on PBS, Bulls vs. Rockets on ESPN, Godfather II on AMC, and Born Into Brothels is just ending on IFC but Spanking the Monkey starts in 20 minutes.
8:43p: Non-ceremonial bulletin: I’ve turned on the comments.
8:34p: I’m told that the ceremony has started.
7:58p: The Oscars have not started yet.
Trailer for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull redone in the style of a circa-1980s movie trailer.
If adventure has a name, it must be: Indiana Jones.
An annotated list of the top ten cinematographic moments in film in 2007: part 1 and part 2.
The shot that stuck out in my head the very first time I saw the film spoke to me so deeply that I referenced it in my initial review: “A few years trickle by as Plainview adds onto his enterprise until finally, oil. A black-tarred hand reaches to the sky and suddenly you sense the influence of Stanley Kubrick on the film. Like the apes who discovered weaponry in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Plainview has come upon the object that will dictate America’s destiny for the next century and more.” I don’t thiink I could say it any better now.
(via house next door)
Interview with Michel Gondry on his new movie, Be Kind Rewind.
I hate cynicism. I wipe it from me. I don’t like cynical people. I don’t like cynical movies. Cynicism is very easy. You don’t have to justify it. You don’t have to fight for it.
Gondry also did a hilarious remake of the film’s original trailer.
Update: Maybe Gondry got the premise for the movie from an old Nickelodeon show called Amanda, Please! Or not.
If you’ve already seen King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, I’d suggest reading Jason Scott’s pair of posts about the movie. In The King of Wrong, Scott suggests that the filmmakers left out crucial details and fudged others in order to make the actual events fit the story they were trying to tell.
What I’m saying here is that a good percentage of what makes the documentary “good” are made up conflicts, inaccurate reporting, smoothed-over narratives that are meant to make you root for one side or hate the other, when in fact reality doesn’t hold up to these allegations. The whole point of the narrative is that Steve is wronged, denied his rightful place in the record books because of internal machinations. But he had the championship for 3 years! He had played Billy one-on-one. Billy was not on this campaign to cut Steve off at the knees at every turn so to humiliate him and dismiss him, to his own aggrandizement.
In a follow-up post, Scott elaborates on his poor opinion of the film, drawing upon his experience making a documentary about another nerd subculture, the BBS.
Is Billy Mitchell “real”? I have no doubt that he says things that are over the top. I have no question that he goes off the rails on certain subjects. I also know that if you interview people for hours on end, at various days, you will get some pretty crazy stuff. How you choose to deal with that stuff is a little bit of who you are as an interviewer and editor and director. There’s no question you can “filter for crazy”, or “filter for nice”, or filter for whatever the hell you wish to. I never claim that Billy’s not capable of throwing out whoppers. I’m saying that when you lace his words with an implication of malice, of cheating, of lying to stay on top, then you are moving into caricature and needless trashing of a real person to achieve your goals. Chasing Ghosts has Billy Mitchell and a whole other range of players, and gives you the story without turning the whole experience of video games, and arcades, into a petty small-minded pissing match.
Scott nearly comes off as holier-than-thou about the standards that documentary filmmakers should be held to, but he clearly put his money where his mouth is when filming his BBS documentary. After a rough interview with Thom Henderson, a controversial figure in the compression software community, which interview caused Henderson to recall, with pain, a particularly difficult period in his life, Scott offered him the chance to edit it out of the movie…and something else too:
But you know, when I put together the ARC-ZIP episode (later renamed COMPRESSION) and sent it to him to see, I told him flat out. “If you’re not comfortable with this, if you don’t like it, let me know and it won’t go in.” He wrote back and said he and his wife were fine with it. I then told him I was giving him irrevocable, permanent rights to the film such that he could distribute and copy and even sell it however he pleased. He’s the only other person besides myself with any rights to my films. He has it for download from his site to this day.
I enjoyed King of Kong, but reading that some of the movie’s tension was manufactured sure takes the polish off of it for me.
Update: The Onion AV Club has an interview with Billy Mitchell about the movie and his take on it.
I invited [Steve Wiebe] to the Classic Gaming Expo, 2004. I invited him there, and I went up to speak onstage, as I do at each expo there. When I went up and spoke onstage, I called him to the stage, in order to honor him. I unveiled the poster in his honor, honoring his accomplishments. I did that in 2004. He was onstage with me. And I’m sorry to tell you that you can’t see that, ‘cause they forgot to put that in the movie.
The first trailer for Indiana Jones and the Unfortunately Titled Movie Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is available…in HD even.
Do We Really Want Another Black President After The Events Of Deep Impact?
Related: the latest episode of This American Life leads with a fascinating piece about how the funny happens at The Onion. In a lovely paradox, it turns out that the process of making funny things isn’t all that amusing…the sound of silence following the recitation of a funny possible headline in the writers’ room is deep and unnerving. (thx, marshall)
Usually the combination of “Hollywood” and “Oscars” is enough to scare me off a story, but this short examination of how good actors become movie stars was pretty interesting. Of his sudden stardom, Jack Nicholson said:
I remember when that happened to me. I’d been working for 12 years, and then the part in “Easy Rider” changed my life. Very few people have ever had the experience where they sit back and say, “I am a movie star.” I knew it at the first showing of “Easy Rider” at the Cannes Film Festival by how the audience reacted to the movie. A lot of people would say, “I know I’m a movie star, but, oh, I wonder what’s going to happen…” I knew it then: I was a movie star. And it was great.
The story is part of the recent NY Times Magazine package on the breakthrough movie stars of 2008. The photographs of the chosen stars by Ryan McGinley are notable as well for “their attempt to wrestle the Hollywood photoshoot beast away from its recent hyper-produced overwrought incarnation”.
Did you know that Paris Hilton has a movie out? Yeah, no one else cares either. The Hottie & the Nottie opened this weekend and took in only $230 per screen.
That means that, based on an $8 average ticket price, 29 paying customers showed up at each location over the 3-day [weekend]. In a country that seems fascinated with Paris Hilton, only 3,219 unlucky Americans will have been suckered into seeing Hottie by Monday morning.
Emphasis mine.
The milkshake line from There Will Be Blood came from a transcript that PT Anderson found of the 1924 congressional hearings over the Teapot Dome scandal.
Anderson concedes that he’s puzzled by the phenomenon — particularly because the lines came straight from a transcript he found of the 1924 congressional hearings over the Teapot Dome scandal, in which Sen. Albert Fall was convicted of accepting bribes for oil-drilling rights to public lands in Wyoming and California.
In explaining oil drainage, Fall’s “way of describing it was to say ‘Sir, if you have a milkshake and I have a milkshake and my straw reaches across the room, I’ll end up drinking your milkshake,’ ” Anderson says. “I just took this insane concept and used it.”
(via observations on film)
New extended trailer for Pixar’s Wall-E that reveals a bit more of the story and a new character.
Update: The trailer is offline. Awaiting the official release.
I enjoy movies based on real-life events because of the post-movie Google/Wikipedia binge. You start at the Wikipedia page for the movie in question and work your way out from there. In this case, I read about convicted spy Robert Hanssen and the agent who helped catch him, Eric O’Neill, who has his own web site and a wife who’s prettier than the actress who plays her in the film, surely a rarity. The most interesting aspect of such research is the differences between the real-life events and the filmed narrative. It’s fun to think about why those changes were made and how it made the narrative better or worse.
Slideshow of lobby cards from a collection assembled by late screenwriter Leonard Schrader. Here’s a companion article about the collection’s discovery.
Screenwriter Leonard Schrader’s secret collection consisted of lobby cards, which were used to promote films in movie theaters from the silent era through the 1960s. Typically issued as a set of eight sequential 11”-by-14” mini-posters depicting scenes from a film, they pre-dated trailers as a promotional device. They were low tech even by 20s standards, but in a black-and-white era, they made up for it with their flashy graphics, riotous colors, and over-the-top salesmanship.
Much more about lobby cards and Schrader’s collection here.
Jamie Zawinski reckons that Bill Murray re-lived February 2nd for at least 4 years in Groundhog Day.
Update: The screenwriter for Groundhog Day says that Phil Conners’ day lasted “about ten years”. (via waxy)
Which actors would play the designers in Graphic Design: The Movie? Maybe Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Michael Bierut, Massimo Vignelli played by Sean Connery (Connery won’t do the Italian accent though), and Julie Christie as Paula Scher.
Guillermo del Toro, director of the acclaimed Pan’s Labyrinth (and the meh Hellboy), is set to direct the two Hobbit movies for Peter Jackson and New Line.
Just purchased: Jonny Greenwood’s There Will Be Blood soundtrack on the recommendation of Alex Ross in the New Yorker.
Greenwood is better understood as a composer who has crossed over into rock. Trained as a violist, he worked seriously at writing music in his youth, and had just embarked on studies at Oxford Brookes University when, in 1991, Radiohead was signed by the EMI record label. He dropped out of college to join the band on tour.
All but a few of the title sequences of Woody Allen’s films are set in one typeface: white Windsor on a black background.
The NY Times gets all nostalgic about VHS and the upcoming releases of Be Kind Rewind and Son of Rambow.
The generation that came of age in the ’80s, as the VCR was becoming a staple, is especially prone to VHS nostalgia, a manifestation of the broader retro culture that has accounted for untold hours of programming on VH1.
In December, Adam Lisagor wrote a similar piece on VHS nostalgia and the movies for kottke.org:
But for a generation of filmmakers who cut their filmmaker teeth by shooting with the family camcorder and editing with two VCRs, there is a logical fixation with the object of the plastic and magnetic 1/2” VHS videocassette and the visual artifacts of its recorded image.
Pixar’s Toy Story 3 will be produced in 3-D. I like Pixar a lot but 3-D has never been anything but a gimmick, so I don’t know. TS3 will be out in June 2010. (2010! We’ll go together in my hovercar!)
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