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Inspired by my Apollo 11 broadcast, the folks behind Me and Orson Welles (dir. by Richard Linklater) have arranged for a “live” broadcast of Welles’ War of the Worlds 71 years after it originally aired. The broadcast begins on Oct 30 at 8pm EST. (thx, jake)
T to B: The Olsen twins (photographer unknown), Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967 by Diane Arbus, the Grady twins from The Shining by Stanley Kubrick. (via hysterical paroxysm)
A long and meaty conversation about the work of Errol Morris.
The thing is, truth is always at the center of Morris’ films, as you’d expect of a documentary filmmaker, but he also acknowledges that truth is a complicated thing; he’s always toying with questions of truth and fiction. Morris’ films aren’t about The Truth; they’re about our personal, private truths, as well as the lies and rationalizations we create for our actions. So fiction and lies and manipulation are also at the center of Morris’ films. Fiction is as much the spine of his work as truth.
A short video about the making of Fantastic Mr. Fox.
In it, you can see a brief glimpse of one of the emailed videos that Wes Anderson sent his London-based crew from Paris.
As well, for reference, the director would send short films of himself enacting certain scenes. “It’s kind of embarrassing,” Anderson said, laughing. “For most of these things, the performance is just a few seconds. Somebody hearing a noise and looking at their watch. The simplest way to relate how to do it is to make these little movies.”
The making of video is from a site called, uh, Making Of, which was co-founded by Natalie Portman and contains a bunch of interesting stuff: a bunch of on-the-set stuff from A Serious Man, Where the Wild Things Are, The Lovely Bones, etc., director interviews from the likes of Aronofsky, Neill Blomkamp, Michel Gondry, Mira Nair, etc., and all sorts of other stuff. (via @akstanwyck)
After doing the script, working with the actors, and supervise the set design, Wes Anderson directed Fantastic Mr. Fox over email. He also didn’t want to use many contemporary stop-motion animation techniques. Both of these decisions ruffled some feathers.
“It’s not the most pleasant thing to force somebody to do it the way they don’t want to do it,” Anderson said. “In Tristan’s case, what I was telling him was, ‘You can’t use the techniques that you’ve learned to use. I’m going to make your life more difficult by demanding a certain approach.’
“The simple reality is,” Anderson continued, “the movie would not be the way I wanted it if I just did it the way people were accustomed to doing it. I realized this is an opportunity to do something nobody’s ever seen before. I want to see it. I don’t want afterward to say, ‘I could have gone further with this.’”
(via @WaitingCasually)
This will be old news for some, but I totally missed that Universal is making a fourth Bourne movie with Matt Damon.
Though the series is based on the Robert Ludlum novels, the new film won’t be based on a Ludlum title, but rather an original story.
Too soon for that title? Anyway, Hitfix takes an early look at the Oscar contenders for 2010. Among them, Clint Eastwood’s Invictus, Star Trek, Where the Wild Things Are, Malick’s The Tree of Life, The Road, Amelia, and The Lovely Bones.
The Informant (Steven Soderbergh, Matt Damon) is out in theaters now. I had no idea it was based on a true story…a genuinely crazy true story of corporate price fixing, FBI informants, and an eager-to-please executive. Kurt Eichenwald wrote a series of article about the case for The New York Times, which he fashioned into a book. This American Life devoted an entire hour to this story back in 2000…it’s a fascinating listen.
We hear from Kurt Eichenwald, whose book The Informant is about the price fixing conspiracy at the food company ADM, Archer Daniels Midland, and the executive who cooperated with the FBI in recording over 250 hours of secret video and audio tapes, probably the most remarkable videotapes ever made of an American company in the middle of a criminal act.
Two books by North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il are available at Amazon: Kim Jong Il on the Art of Opera and On the Art of the Cinema. From the preface of the latter:
The cinema is now one of the main objects on which efforts should be concentrated in order to conduct the revolution in art and literature. The cinema occupies an important place in the overall development of art and literature. As such it is a powerful ideological weapon for the revolution and construction. Therefore, concentrating efforts on the cinema, making breakthroughs and following up success in all areas of art and literature is the basic principle that we must adhere to in revolutionizing art and literature.
Here’s more information about Dear Leader’s cinematic and operatic interests.
On the Art of Opera describes how Kim and his dad, the late Great Leader Kim Il Sung, discovered the husk of a tired art form and gave it a much-needed shot of North Korean communism. Any impartial observer would agree that Kim’s aesthetic prescriptions are every bit as crowd-pleasing as his economic policies.
“In conventional operas,” Kim writes, “the personalities of the characters were abstract, their acting clumsy, and the flow of the drama tedious, because the singers were forced to sing unnaturally and their acting was neglected.” Furthermore, until the arrival of the Kims, “no one interwove dance and story very closely.”
And now? “The ‘Sea of Blood’-style opera,” he observes, “has opened up a new phase in dramaturgy.” In case you’ve been living in a cave, Sea of Blood is North Korea’s longest-running production, the Cats of Pyongyang. It has been staged 1,500 times, according to the official Korea News Service, which calls it an “immortal classical masterpiece.” Kim claims to have revamped the form by chucking the aria out the window and replacing all solo performance with a cunning Kim innovation: the pangchang, a more satisfying off-stage chorus representing groupthink.
Sam Arbesman highlights the use of mathematics in movies, including game theory (The Dark Knight), epidemiology (zombie movies), and balance theory (Reservoir Dogs).
If you and someone else hate the same third person, but like each other, balance theory says you’re golden — all three can persist without changing their opinions. On the other hand, if all three of you despise the others, it’s an unstable triad, as well as a wildly common plot point for crime movies. While there are numerous resolutions — one person changes his preference toward another, a relationship tie is cut — another route back to stability, albeit a messy one, is the gunning down of at least one person.
Arbesman has some videos and stills on his web site from the movies mentioned in the article as well as the relevant mathematical materials.
Spike Jonze gets the NYT Magazine treatment this weekend with a piece on his career and Where the Wild Things Are.
“It’s in the visual language of, like, some sort of fantasy film, and it is a fantasy film to some degree,” he acknowledged, “but the tone of it is its own tone. We wanted it all to feel true to a 9-year-old and not have some big movie speech where a 9-year-old is suddenly reciting the wisdom of the sage.” He hadn’t set out to make a children’s movie, he said, so much as to accurately depict childhood. “Everything we did, all the decisions that we made, were to try to capture the feeling of what it is to be 9.”
It’s difficult to draw a conclusion from this article other than Wild Things is going to bomb but be really good.
A wonderfully concise video tour of how special effects in film have evolved since 1900.
All you really need to know about this movie is that it’s called The Men Who Stare at Goats.
P.S. Jeff Bridges.
P.P.S. George Clooney.
With the announcement of releasing Avatar only in 3-D, James Cameron was supposed to cram 3-D down the throats of theater owners, movie goers, and everyone else. Except that didn’t quite happen and Avatar is being released in 2-D as well. Kristin Thompson sees other cracks in the plan for 3-D’s future domination of cinema.
One of the main arguments always rolled out in favor of conversion is that theaters can charge more for 3-D screenings. Proportionately, theaters that show a film in 3-D will take in more at the box-office because they charge in the range of $3 more per ticket than do theaters offering the same title in a flat version.
But what happens when, say, half the films playing at any given time in a city are in 3-D? Will moviegoers decide that the $3 isn’t really worth it? Even now, would they pay $3 extra to see The Proposal or Julie & Julia in 3-D? The kinds of films that seem as if they call out for 3-D are far from being the only kinds people want to see. Films like these already make money on their own, unassisted by fancy technology.
Thompson briefly mentions Pixar as well, saying that they don’t seem too keen on 3-D (or at least not as keen as Cameron or Katzenberg). But the zeal with which the 3-D-ness of Up was promoted was tacky and not at all typical of Pixar, a company that spent the last twenty years insisting that their films were not about the technology but about the same things that the makers of live action films were concerned with…real moviemaking stuff. To trumpet this 3-D technology that doesn’t enhance films in anything other than a superficial sense seems like a step backwards for them.
Related to yesterday’s post about the evolution of the modern blockbuster movie, a list of the most popular movies from 1984 (according to IMDB). Among them:
Beverly Hills Cop
Ghostbusters
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Gremlins
The Karate Kid
Police Academy
Footloose
Purple Rain
Amadeus
Revenge of the Nerds
Red Dawn
The Terminator
The Killing Fields
A Nightmare on Elm Street
Sixteen Candles
Once Upon a Time in America
This Is Spinal Tap
Top Secret!
That’s a pretty good year. My God, the pop culture references.
Matt Zoller Seitz and Aaron Aradillas recently completed a five-part video series on the evolution of the summer blockbuster movie focused on the summers of 1984 and 1989.
Part 1: “The origins of MTV editing and post-Boomer cynicism. Also starring Ronald Reagan, John Hughes, semi-gratuitous T&A, synth-pop videos, The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, and Prince.”
Part 2: “Steven Spielberg’s society of the spectacle, the rise of sadism and cynicism in the blockbuster movie, and the influence of the PG-13 rating. Also starring Indiana Jones, Red Dawn, and gremlins. Lots and lots of gremlins.”
Part 3: “A lickety-split recap of the second Reagan term, and begin the Bush years with the rise of hip-hop, Field of Dreams, Do the Right Thing, and the American indie film opting out and breaking out with sex, lies and videotape.”
Part 4: “We watch feel-good sequels ape the spirit of ‘84 while the heroes of Lethal Weapon II and The Abyss flip out, and the unprecedented Batman taps into the decayed American city.”
Part 5: “The New Sincerity, as rediscovered in the hallowed teen-movie triumvirate of Heathers, Dead Poets Society and Say Anything, released within three months of each other twenty years ago.”
Some of the clips are NSFW.
This video features a number of directors talking about the difference between viewing films in widescreen vs. pan and scan. Martin Scorsese:
[Converting to pan & scan] is, technically, re-directing the movie.
Update: Thoughts from David Lynch about pan and scan taken from a 1997 interview:
I would like to see everything done letterboxed and with great sound. I’m not too interested in doing the commentary, you know, like a lot of people do. But in some strange way I kind of like pan-and-scan. Because you see things. It is a compromise, and in a couple of things you really say, “Why am I doing it?” But it’s just an interesting thing that happens- another composition. It’s not so bad, but I wish really that people could see the thing in a theater and that laserdiscs and videos didn’t exist. Because on the big screen with the sound, you become inside the film, and that’s the beauty of cinema. And it never happens on video, and it doesn’t happen on laserdisc, either.
(thx, bill)
The Cove has been getting great reviews: four stars from Ebert (who calls it “a certain Oscar nominee”) and a score of 82 on Metacritic. A quick synopsis from Wikipedia followed by the trailer:
The Cove is a 2009 documentary film documenting the annual killing of more than 2,500 dolphins in a cove at Taiji, Wakayama in Japan. The film was directed by former National Geographic photographer Louis Psihoyos, and was filmed secretly during 2007 using underwater microphones and high-definition cameras disguised as rocks.
Dave Eggers has written a young adult novel called The Wild Things that is based loosely on Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are and the screenplay he co-wrote with Spike Jonze for the movie version. The New Yorker published an excerpt of the book this week.
Max left the room and found Gary lying on the couch in his work clothes, his frog eyes closed, his chin entirely receded into his neck. Max gritted his teeth and let out a low, simmering growl.
Gary opened his eyes and rubbed them.
“Uh, hey, Max. I’m baggin’ a few after-work Z’s. How goes it?”
Max looked at the floor. This was one of Gary’s typical questions: Another day, huh? How goes it? No play for the playa, right? None of his questions had answers. Gary never seemed to say anything that meant anything at all.
“Cool suit,” Gary said. “Maybe I’ll get me one of those. What are you, like a rabbit or something?”
Eggers explains how the idea for the book came about in an associated interview.
But while I was working on the book, it was funny, because I started going in new directions, different from any of the screenplay versions, pushing it into some territory that was personal to me. So in a way the movie is more Spike’s version of Maurice’s book, and this novel is more my version.
Here’s the latest trailer for the movie.
To sum up: children’s book, movie, young adult book. Oh, and a movie soundtrack.
Some plot summaries of movies and TV shows that might make you feel uncomfortable. Among my favorites:
THE GOONIES: Physically abused, retarded man finds love with overweight preteen.
THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST: Mel Gibson fulfills fantasy of showing a Jew beaten to a bloody pulp and killed on-screen.
TITANIC: Crazy old widow disregards lifelong memories of husband, children, and grandchildren in favor of that one time she fucked a bum.
STAR WARS: Religious extremist terrorists destroy government installation, killing thousands.
LORD OF THE RINGS: Midget destroys stolen property.
DOCTOR WHO: Elderly man serially abducts young women.
BOOGIE NIGHTS: Deformed boy goaded into life of crime.
(via the browser)
The trailer for Extract, the latest film from Mike Judge (Office Space, the underrated Idiocracy).
From ComingSoon:
In “Extract,” writer/director Mike Judge returns to the fertile territory of the American workplace, rotating his perspective away from the white collar cubicle warriors of “Office Space” and towards a blue collar boss — a small business owner — who employs an odd cast of losers, loners and misfits in his flavor extract factory.
Matt Zoller Seitz has put together a selection of scenes from Quentin Tarantino’s movies to illustrate what Seitz calls “the filmmaker’s Socrates-in-a-dive-bar mindset” with regard to dialogue.
Tarantino doesn’t just explore language’s capacity to reveal and conceal motives and personality, he shows how people pick words and phrases (consciously or subconsciously) in order to define themselves and others, and describe the reality they inhabit (or would like to inhabit). Even low-key and seemingly unimportant exchanges are as carefully choreographed as boxing matches. Clever flurries of interrogatory jabs are often blocked by witty responses; the course of conflict can be shifted by deft rhetorical footwork that re-frames the terms of debate.
Can you resist reading an article that starts off with an anecdote this interesting? I couldn’t.
The playwright David Mamet and the theatre director Gregory Mosher affirm that some years ago, late one night in the bar of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Chicago, this happened:
Ricky Jay, who is perhaps the most gifted sleight-of-hand artist alive, was performing magic with a deck of cards. Also present was a friend of Mamet and Mosher’s named Christ Nogulich, the director of food and beverage at the hotel. After twenty minutes of disbelief-suspending manipulations, Jay spread the deck face up on the bar counter and asked Nogulich to concentrate on a specific card but not to reveal it. Jay then assembled the deck face down, shuffled, cut it into two piles, and asked Nogulich to point to one of the piles and name his card.
“Three of clubs,” Nogulich said, and he was then instructed to turn over the top card.
He turned over the three of clubs.
Mosher, in what could be interpreted as a passive-aggressive act, quietly announced, “Ricky, you know, I also concentrated on a card.”
After an interval of silence, Jay said, “That’s interesting, Gregory, but I only do this for one person at a time.”
Mosher persisted: “Well, Ricky, I really was thinking of a card.”
Jay paused, frowned, stared at Mosher, and said, “This is a distinct change of procedure.” A longer pause. “All right-what was the card?”
“Two of spades.”
Jay nodded, and gestured toward the other pile, and Mosher turned over its top card.
The deuce of spades.
A small riot ensued.
That’s from a 1993 profile of Ricky Jay, who is probably more well known now for his acting (Magnolia, Boogie Nights, Deadwood, The Spanish Prisoner, The Prestige) than his magic scholarship. Check out a couple of Jay’s tricks on YouTube: Four Queens and Sword of Vengence. (via df)
Steven Soderbergh on the new pan-and-scan: the cropping of 2.40:1 films to fit the HD TV screen.
Television operators, the people who buy and produce things for people to watch on TV, are taking the position that films photographed in the 2.40:1 ratio should be blown up or chopped up to fit a 16:9 (1.78:1) ratio. They are taking the position that the viewers of television do not like watching 2.40 films letterboxed to fit their 16:9 screens, and that a film insisting on this is worth significantly less — or even nothing — to them.
He has particular contempt for AMC and HBO:
[HBO wants] everything pan/scanned. On the Ocean’s films I had to get somebody VERY HIGH UP WITH WAY BETTER SHIT TO DO to call them and make an exception. Their influence means they could make this problem go away single-handedly, but since they won’t, they get to be the poster child for stupidity. Not that they’re uninterested in hypocrisy too; while their PR caters to the most adventurous TV watchers, their actions indicate they think their viewers are very, very afraid of anything actually different.
I watched The Darjeeling Limited on Starz a few months ago. This is a movie where the wider aspect ratio is almost another character and the knuckleheads at Starz chopped the hell out of it. Blech.
Quentin Tarantino talks about his 20 favorite movies that have been made since he became a director.
Here’s the full list in handy text form:
Battle Royale
Anything Else
Audition
Blade
Boogie Nights
Dazed & Confused
Dogville
Fight Club
Fridays
The Host
The Insider
Joint Security Area
Lost In Translation
The Matrix
Memories of Murder
Police Story 3
Shaun of the Dead
Speed
Team America
Unbreakable
Harrison Ford is concerned about his family. Like in every movie he’s ever been in. (via cyn-c)
Life lessons from Ferris Bueller, from the boyhood friend of John Hughes who provided some inspiration for Ferris.
For one of those Chicago adventures, we secretly borrowed a car almost as ridiculously conspicuous as the 1961 Ferrari 250 GT in the movie: my dad’s purple Cadillac El Dorado (yes, purple). Put an extra 113 miles on the odometer. Hoping to erase that telltale mileage, we raised the back on a pair of jacks and ran the car in reverse. The Caddy did not fly backward into a ravine, as in the film. What it did do is quickly take off a clean 10,000 miles. Oops. (Yes, you bet he noticed.)
This is going to be beautiful in 1080p: pre-order Star Trek on Blu-ray (DVD too).
The Iron Giant came out ten years ago and Scott Thill has a nice appreciation of the still-underrated film at Wired.
Warner Bros. didn’t know what to do with a movie about a killer robot who becomes a pacifist with the help of a patriotic kid in love with comics like Superman, the ultimate alien benevolent (and the Iron Giant’s eventual role model). “When we showed the executives the movie, they didn’t get it,” Iron Giant screenwriter Tim McCanlies said in 2003. One possible reason: The movie has no clearly defined protagonist or antagonist, a must for popcorn entertainment. “Let’s just have paranoia be the enemy,” McCanlies remembers Bird saying, “not the combined armies of the superpowers.” The Iron Giant’s domestic box office gross of $23 million didn’t come close to recouping the movie’s production budget, which reportedly hit $70 million.
As I’ve written before, 1999 was a great year for movies and The Iron Giant was one of my favorites. If you haven’t seen it, it’s only $6 on Amazon.
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