For his second Iconic Sans video, David Friedman tells us about an itinerant filmmaker who travelled the country from the 30s to the 50s making the same movie over and over again with different casts of local children.
Why would somebody remake a movie hundreds of times? Was he obsessed? Mad? Director Melton Barker was a traveling filmmaker (historians call him an “itinerant filmmaker”) who went town to town from the 1930s to the 1970s convincing everyday folks to pay him to be in his movie “The Kidnappers Foil” over and over and over. He used the same script each time, with an all local cast. It’s a fascinating bit of Americana and cinema history.
It’s a no-brainer: what if you handed over a visually rich sci-fi universe with slightly campy origins to a quirky auteur with an overwhelming aesthetic, just to see what you’d get? This short trailer imagines Wes Anderson at the helm of his very own Star Wars movie, complete with Bill Murray as Obi-Wan and Owen Wilson as Darth Vader (wow).
See also, from back in 2012, Conan O’Brien’s take on Wes Anderson’s Star Wars, A Life Galactic. I would totally watch either of these movies tbh.
Wow, I’d never seen these before today! For the 1999 MTV Movie Awards, Wes Anderson created three promo spots, each one a staged re-creation of a nominated movie in the style of the Hollywood-inspired plays in Rushmore (Serpico & the Vietnam War one). All three shorts (Armageddon, Out of Sight, The Truman Show) star Jason Schwartzman as Max Fisher, along with the rest of the Max Fischer Players. (via open culture)
The Fictional Brands Archive is a collection of fictional brands found in movies, TV shows, and video games — think Acme in Looney Tunes, Pixar’s Monsters, Inc., and Nakatomi Corporation from Die Hard. Very cool. But gotta say though, the dimming mouseover effect makes this more difficult to use than it needs to be… (via sidebar)
I have very high hopes for Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. It would be incredible if it lives up to them and the firsttwo teaser trailers are a good start.
Also, I love how completely and utterly thirrrrrrsty the video’s description is to establish the bona fides and pedigree of the movie’s cast and crew:
From Oscar-nominated writer/director Greta Gerwig (“Little Women,” “Lady Bird”) comes “Barbie,” starring Oscar-nominees Margot Robbie (“Bombshell,” “I, Tonya”) and Ryan Gosling (“La La Land,” “Half Nelson”) as Barbie and Ken, alongside America Ferrera (“End of Watch,” the “How to Train Your Dragon” films), Kate McKinnon (“Bombshell,” “Yesterday”), Michael Cera (“Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” “Juno”), Ariana Greenblatt (“Avengers: Infinity War,” “65”), Issa Rae (“The Photograph,” “Insecure”), Rhea Perlman (“I’ll See You in My Dreams,” “Matilda”), and Will Ferrell (the “Anchorman” films, “Talladega Nights”). The film also stars Ana Cruz Kayne (“Little Women”), Emma Mackey (“Emily,” “Sex Education”), Hari Nef (“Assassination Nation,” “Transparent”), Alexandra Shipp (the “X-Men” films), Kingsley Ben-Adir (“One Night in Miami,” “Peaky Blinders”), Simu Liu (“Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings”), Ncuti Gatwa (“Sex Education”), Scott Evans (“Grace and Frankie”), Jamie Demetriou (“Cruella”), Connor Swindells (“Sex Education,” “Emma.”), Sharon Rooney (“Dumbo,” “Jerk”), Nicola Coughlan (“Bridgerton,” “Derry Girls”), Ritu Arya (“The Umbrella Academy”), Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter Dua Lipa and Oscar-winner Helen Mirren (“The Queen”).
Gerwig directed “Barbie” from a screenplay by Gerwig & Oscar nominee Noah Baumbach (“Marriage Story,” “The Squid and the Whale”), based on Barbie by Mattel. The film’s producers are Oscar nominee David Heyman (“Marriage Story,” “Gravity”), Robbie, Tom Ackerley and Robbie Brenner, with Michael Sharp, Josey McNamara, Ynon Kreiz, Courtenay Valenti, Toby Emmerich and Cate Adams serving as executive producers.
Gerwig’s creative team behind the camera included Oscar-nominated director of photography Rodrigo Prieto (“The Irishman,” “Silence,” “Brokeback Mountain”), six-time Oscar-nominated production designer Sarah Greenwood (“Beauty and the Beast,” “Anna Karenina”), editor Nick Houy (“Little Women,” “Lady Bird”), Oscar-winning costume designer Jacqueline Durran (“Little Women,” “Anna Karenina”), visual effects supervisor Glen Pratt (“Paddington 2,” “Beauty and the Beast”), music supervisor George Drakoulias (“White Noise,” “Marriage Story”) and Oscar-winning composer Alexandre Desplat (“The Shape of Water,” “The Grand Budapest Hotel”).
Well this is some bizarre good fun — turns out that the campy goofiness of Star Wars and the campy seriousness of high fashion make for a pretty good combination.
You’ve probably seen the work of animation pioneer Max Fleischer; he made the old Popeye, Superman, Betty Boop, and Koko the Clown cartoons waaaay back in the early-to-mid 20th century. Films from back then are often not well-preserved, so when a copy is discovered in a film library or private collection, great care must be exercised in restoring the film for future generations to enjoy.
This video follows the restoration process of Fleischer’s 1924 Koko the Clown film Birthday, from scanning a 35mm print from 1930 to the digital retouching. The fully restored print doesn’t seem to be online anywhere, but you can see a couple of before-and-after comparisons here and here.
Insider has been doing a whole series of videos on how movie props are made (view the entire thing here) and I found this one on how prop makers rely on noiseless props to be particularly interesting. To cut down on distracting on-set noise (so dialogue can be heard, for instance), they swap racquetball balls for pool balls, silicon chunks for ice cubes, and paper bags made out of coffee filter material for real paper bags. So weird to watch those objects in action without their usual sounds. (thx, caroline)
The top two comments on YouTube sum this trailer for Asteroid City up pretty well: “Just when you don’t think it can get more Wes Anderson, it gets more Wes Anderson.” and “You know a Wes Anderson movie is a Wes Anderson movie, but you can’t really describe a Wes Anderson movie to someone who has never seen a Wes Anderson movie.” Here’s the synopsis:
The itinerary of a Junior Stargazer/Space Cadet convention (organized to bring together students and parents from across the country for fellowship and scholarly competition) is spectacularly disrupted by world-changing events.
Does it even matter to know this? At this point, you’re either throwing money at the screen after watching this trailer (*raises hand*) or you’re just not interested. For those in the former camp, Asteroid City opens in theaters on June 16.
I’d seen Titanic with a Cat but hadn’t realized there were a whole collection of videos featuring OwlKitty cleverly edited into them. I really like the Jurassic Park one embedded above. The licking! The purring! Fantastic, no notes.
You can check out a bunch of other movies featuring OwlKitty on YouTube (LOTR, Top Gun, Home Alone, John Wick, Mandalorian), including some behind-the-scenes of how they’re made. Here’s how they did the Jurassic Park one:
The power of at-home filmmaking software and equipment is just incredible.
Jean-Pierre Jeunet, director of the 2001 romantic comedy The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain, has recut his beloved movie into a cheeky short film that reveals that Amélie was actually a KGB spy.
Did no one ever wonder how a young waitress afforded such sophisticated decoration for a flat in Montmartre, one of Paris’s most expensive districts?
Do you want to sit in on a 30-minute cinematography masterclass with Roger Deakins as he talks about the process behind some of his most iconic films? We’re talking Sicario, The Shawshank Redemption, 1917, Fargo, Blade Runner 2049, and No Country for Old Men here. Of course you do. And when you’re done with that, you can listen to all of these other filmmakers and actors talking about their films.
This is a clever little promo from A24 for the rerelease of Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense, a concert film from 1984 featuring The Talking Heads — it, the promo, features David Byrne dropping into his dry cleaners to pick up an old, big suit. As for the film, it’s getting a 4K restoration and will be out sometime later this year.
“Stop Making Sense” stars core band members David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz and Jerry Harrison along with Bernie Worrell, Alex Weir, Steve Scales, Lynn Mabry and Edna Holt. The live performance was shot roughly 40 years ago over the course of three nights at Hollywood’s Pantages Theater in December of 1983. It features Talking Heads’ most memorable songs, including “Burning Down the House,” “Once in a Lifetime” and “This Must Be the Place.”
“There was a band. There was a concert,” the Talking Heads said in a statement. “This must be the movie!”
The legendary New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael loved the film, calling it “close to perfection” in this contemporary review:
The director, Jonathan Demme, offers us a continuous rock experience that keeps building, becoming ever more intense and euphoric. This has not been a year when American movies overflowed with happiness; there was some in Splash, and there’s quite a lot in All of Me — especially in its last, dancing minutes. Stop Making Sense is the only current movie that’s a dose of happiness from beginning to end. The lead singer, David Byrne, designed the stage lighting and the elegantly plain performance-art environments (three screens used for back-lit slide projections); there’s no glitter, no sleaze. The musicians aren’t trying to show us how hot they are; the women in the group aren’t there to show us some skin. Seeing the movie is like going to an austere orgy — which turns out to be just what you wanted.
I loved Everything Everywhere All at Once so much when I saw it in the theater last spring. It caught me in a low moment and swept me up in a protective embrace; it was magic. I was afraid this joyously weird movie would get lost in the Very Serious Film shuffle come awards time but I was beyond thrilled when I woke up this morning to the news that EEAAO swept the major categories for which it was nominated at the Oscars. Here are all the film’s wins from last night:
Best Picture - Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert, and Jonathan Wang, producers (acceptance speech).
Best Director - Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (acceptance speech).
The Oscars are this weekend and in this video, some of the nominees — Paul Mescal, Rian Johnson, Todd Field, Camille Friend (hairstylist for Wakanda Forever) — read rave reviews of their work from Letterboxd. Watch to the end — Ke Huy Quan’s letter, and his reaction to it, is especially wonderful.
Ten years ago, I met the founders of Letterboxd in New Zealand. The site was tiny then and had just gotten out of invitation-only mode. But they were enthusiastic and had a vision of making an online space for discussing and reviewing movies. It’s wonderful to see the site become such a key part of the film industry. (via @jasonsantamaria)
A beautiful scene from the 2014 Mauritanian film Timbuktu (which was recently included on Slate’s New Black Film Canon), in which young men under the rule of Islamic extremists quietly and defiantly play a forbidden football match with an imaginary ball. (thx, caroline)
Bill Neil is a movie trailer editor at Buddha Jones and in this video he guides us through a short history of movie trailers — from Dr. Strangelove in the 60s to Neil’s own Nope trailer — and gently picks them apart to show us how they work. I enjoyed hearing all of the vocabulary for the techniques that they use: rug pull, bumper, diegetic, rise, and signature sound (aka leitmotif).
The promise of 3D movies is that they are supposed to draw the viewer further into the world of the film — the all-important immersive experience. In this video, Evan Puschak argues persuasively that the 3D effect actually has the opposite effect, for four main reasons:
1. The different focus and convergence points.
2. The darkness of 3D movies
3. 3D glasses shrink the screen
4. 3D forces you to look at only what’s in focus
I’ve long disliked 3D movies so Puschak’s explanation makes me feel vindicated about my stance. I’ve only ever seen two of them that were any good: the original Avatar and Tron: Legacy. Tron in particular was one of my peak movie-going experiences: I saw it, nearly alone, in a 3D IMAX theater from the best seat in the house. When the lightcycle match started, the 3D effect brought the playing field right into the theater a few inches from my nose and I just gaped in wonder like a little kid for the rest of what is essentially a 125-minute Daft Punk music video (nothing wrong with that!). If all 3D movies were like that, sign me up! But otherwise, I’m gonna stick to 2D.
The Oscar voters haven’t always gotten their top picks right, but there’s no denying that this visual showcase of Best Cinematography winners from 1967-2021 contains some fantastic work. Just to call out a few of the films recognized: Bonnie and Clyde; Barry Lyndon; The Killing Fields; Schindler’s List; Titanic; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Master and Commander; There Will Be Blood; Inception; Blade Runner 2049; and Dune.
There’s an interesting shift in the winners (presaged by Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977); they move away from historical realism and towards fantasy, sci-fi, and the future: Crouching Tiger (2000) and Lord of the Rings (2001) and then, more definitively, Avatar (2009) and Inception (2010). But the shift is not by any means total: The Revenant (2015), Roma (2018), 1917 (2019), and Mank (2020) are all firmly in the realist realm.
A rule of thumb for me in evaluating what movies to watch with my limited free time these days: I will often go for something visually impressive or inventive over other options. So this short reel featuring the nominees for Best Visual Effects Oscar talking about scenes from their movies — All Quiet on the Western Front, Avatar: The Way of Water, The Batman, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Top Gun: Maverick — is right up my alley. (via @tvaziri)
Well, I was not expecting the next video game to be turned into an edgy drama (an 80s Cold War techno-thriller, no less) to be Tetris, but here we are.
Taron Egerton stars in a new Apple Original Film inspired by the true story of how one man risked his life to outsmart the KGB and turn Tetris into a worldwide sensation.
If you’d have told me that this trailer was a Saturday Night Live sketch from 6 years ago, I would have believed you — and as it is, the release date of March 31 gives me pause.1 But I’ll give it a shot.
I don’t actually think this is an April Fools joke — Apple doesn’t usually go in for such nonsense.↩
In the midst of the zaniness of Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the funniest things I have seen in a movie theater in years: Raccacoonie. (If you know, you know.) Inverse talked to a bunch of people involved with the film about how Raccacoonie came about and what the folks at Pixar thought about the riff on Ratatouille. First off, here’s the initial mention of Raccacoonie in the movie:
The initial idea came from stories that producer Jonathan Wang would tell about his father messing up the names of American movies:
I think it’s pretty common when you have parents who are speaking English as a second language: They butcher movie titles. [My dad] would call James Bond “double seven” instead of “double-O seven.” He would just mess up movie titles all the time. My favorite one he would say was “Outside Good People Shooting” — that one is Good Will Hunting.
Costume designer Shirley Kurata added:
Being an Asian American and having parents where English isn’t their native language, I was used to hearing my parents mispronounce things. I had this memory when I was really young and I saw this word and I didn’t know what it said. I asked my mom. She was like, “Pin-oh-shee-oh.” I think both of us just laughed because we realized she totally mispronounced Pinocchio.
What did the folks at Pixar think? Of course, they loved it — because it’s great.
I never even thought about whether or not we would get a call from Disney or if Pixar was going to be mad. We did a tour of the Pixar campus and got to hang out with [animator/director] Domee Shi, and she’s so great. We were like, “Have you guys talked about, uh… us ripping off Ratatouille?” Everyone loves it there, and it seemed like no one was really upset. That was the only thing we thought of: Are we going to get flagged for this? But lawyers cleared it; everyone cleared it.
It’s worth reading the whole thing — I hadn’t realized they got Randy Newman to do a song for it.
From comments made by Knives Out and Glass Onion director Rian Johnson, it doesn’t seem likely that a Benoit Blanc mystery movie with the Muppets or a Muppet movie with Benoit Blanc will ever happen. So, we’ll have to settle for this mashup of Blanc and The Great Muppet Caper made by Nerdist:
James Cameron is not one for half-measures. When making Titanic, he used every image and description of the ship he could lay his hands on to build accurate sets & models and financed 12 dives to the ship’s actual wreckage on the bottom of the ocean floor to gather footage to use in the film. For the mega-blockbuster’s 25th anniversary, Cameron has returned his attention to Titanic, to scientifically test the fan theory that there was enough room on the door for Jack at the end of Titanic (see the video above).
In order to reexamine Jack’s final moments, Cameron enlisted help from a team of scientists and two stunt people to test four different scenarios to examine whether two people could have shared the door.
“Jack and Rose are able to get on the raft, but now they’re both submerged in dangerous levels of freezing water,” Cameron explains as the stunt people prove it.
Meanwhile in another example, Cameron details, “Out of the water, violent shaking was helping him and projecting it out, he could’ve made it pretty long, like hours.”
If you can stand the forced-cheer morning show banter, there’s a bit more footage of Cameron and the testing from Good Morning America:
Cameron’s ultimate conclusion: “Jack might’ve lived, but there’s a lot of variables.”
From YouTuber poakwoods, a pair of criss-cross mashups of Star Wars and 2001: A Space Odyssey, but with their directors switched. When George Lucas takes the helm of 2001, you get a more crowd-pleasing and freewheeling movie while Stanley Kubrick’s Star Wars becomes more balletic and contemplative. Both are pitch-perfect.
It’s actually, specifically, about how movies these days look. That is, more flat, more fake, over-saturated, or else over-filtered, like an Instagram photo in 2012, but rendered in commercial-like high-def. This applies to prestige television, too. There are more green screens and sound stages, more CGI, more fixing-it-in-post. As these production tools have gotten slicker and cheaper and thus more widely abused, it’s not that everything looks obviously shitty or too good to feel true, it’s actually that most things look mid in the exact same way.
Yes, yes, 1000 times yes. This has been bugging me for years now — movies and TV shows are too blandly shiny these days (or is it shinily bland?) It’s easy to make everything look just so — and so filmmakers do, without the visual zip of a Wes Anderson or David Fincher. This comment from Reddit captures the vibe:
I actually think it looks too “perfect”. Everyone is lit perfectly and filmed digitally on raw and tweaked to perfection. It makes everything have a fake feeling to it. Commercials use the same cameras and color correction so everything looks the same. Every shot looks like it could be used in a stock photo and it looks completely soulless.
No film grain, no shadows on faces, and no wide shots. I have a theory that going from tungsten to led lightning added to this as well. Tungsten allows for more accurate color in camera but LEDs are cheaper, cooler, and more convenient. So the solution is to film on a nice digital camera and fix the color in post. However, this makes for less creativity on set and less use of shadows.
Green screens make it worse as they also require flatter lighting to work. Marvel films are very obviously mostly made in post and they all look very flat and not real. Even shitty low budget 90’s comedies look better and I think this can be attributed to the lighting.
Catherine Scorsese appeared in many of her son Martin’s films — Goodfellas, Taxi Driver, Mean Streets, Casino, etc. — and would often cook for the cast and crew.
Robert DeNiro said, “She made the best pizza I’ve ever eaten. I always wanted to serve it at TriBeCa Grill,” while Harvey Keitel said, “In my memory, Catherine was the epitome of a warm, loving Italian mother. She enjoyed watching me eat as much as I enjoyed eating her cooking.” And Pesci said, “Katie was one of the sweetest ladies I ever met. She was a true innocent. She never did anything bad; she never knew anything bad. In terms of her cooking, it’s a toss-up as to who’s a better cook, Katie or my mother.”
In 1974, Martin made a documentary about his parents called Italianamerican:
Over dinner at their New York apartment on Elizabeth Street, Martin engages his parents in a lively and candid discussion about their lives, discussing such topics as their upbringing, family, religion, marriage, their Italian ancestors, post-war life in Italy, and the hardships of poor Sicilian immigrants striving to succeed in America.
During the film, Catherine cooks meatballs and sauce for dinner and a bare-bones recipe appears in the ending credits (which you can see here with the rest of the film):
The Sauce:
Singe an onion & a pinch of garlic in oil. Throw in a piece of veal, a piece of beef, some pork sausage, & a lamb neck bone. Add a basil leaf.
When the meat is brown, take it out & put it on a plate. Put in a can of tomato paste & some water. Pass a can of packed whole tomatoes through a blender and pour it in. Let it boil. Add salt, pepper & a pinch of sugar. Let it cook for awhile. Throw the meat back in. Cook for 1 hour.
Now make the meatballs. Put a slice of bread, without crust, 2 eggs, & a drop of milk, into a bowl of ground veal & beef. Add salt, pepper, some cheese & a few spoons of sauce. Mix it with your hands. Roll them up, throw them in. Let it cook for another hour.
As you can see, the recipe is pretty vague on measurements, but Catherine published a cookbook of her recipes shortly before she died, Italianamerican: The Scorsese Family Cookbook. The book has long been out of print and seems to be an expensive collector’s item now, but some kind soul has republished the full meatballs and sauce recipe here.
The Art of the Title, Print magazine, Slashfilm, and Salon have each compiled their picks for the best film and TV opening title sequences for 2022. There’s quite a bit of overlap, with the opening titles for Severance (which I added to the Unskippable Intros Hall of Fame earlier this year), The White Lotus, Peacemaker, and Pachinko making multiple lists. I haven’t seen After Yang yet, but I love that title sequence. Always a fan of lots of creativity and expression packed into small times and spaces.
I know I’ve posted this before, but with the new Avatar movie out in theaters, it’s a good time to revisit the SNL sketch where Ryan Gosling is driven mad by the typeface choice for the movie’s logo.
I had forgotten about the title card at the end. Perfection.
There actually is one single person responsible for Avatar’s Papyrus-esque logo: Peter Stougaard. The former senior vice president of creative advertising for 20th Century Fox willingly takes credit for selecting and tweaking the movie’s much-maligned font, but he doesn’t mince words. “I didn’t aimlessly pick Papyrus,” he insists. “I chose it very strategically.”
I can’t believe they got it off of the cover of Cameron’s copy of the script. (thx, matt)
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