For his Photographs of Films project, Jason Shulman condenses entire movies into single photos using ultra-long exposures. Some of the resulting photos are just shape and color, but for films that use longer shots of static sets, you can make out some identifying features, as with the war room and Ripper’s office in the Dr. Strangelove still above. And the Dumbo still I could almost drop in as a new header image for kottke.org.
Quick reviews of some things I’ve read, seen, and heard in the past few weeks. Don’t take the letter grades too seriously (that’s just good life advice).
The Simpsons. Watched some old episodes w/ the kids. I can’t tell if they’re still any good or not because I can still recite most of the dialogue by heart. (A-)
DAMN. by Kendrick Lamar. I said I wanted to listen to this more and I have. Great. (A)
Citizen Jane. Watching this at a theater a short walk from the West Village and Washington Square Park was a powerful experience. (B+)
Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann. As good as everyone says. As a country we’ve never reckoned with what we did (and continue to do) to Native Americans and I doubt we ever will. (A-)
Pleasure by Feist. I had kinda forgotten about Feist but I will definitely remember this one. (B+)
S-Town. This didn’t go where you expected it to and it was all the better for it. Still, by the last two episodes, I’d run out of steam a little. (B+)
Nukes. Radiolab asks if there are any checks on the President ordering a nuclear strike and the answer is as terrifying as you might imagine. (B+)
True Love Waits by Christopher O’Riley & Radiohead. An old favorite. Good for when you’re feeling down. (B+)
Rules for a Knight by Ethan Hawke. Mindfulness Lite, not that that’s a bad thing. (B-)
Mad Men. Still plugging away at watching this all the way through a second time. The later seasons lack a little something but it’s still great overall. (A-)
Is This It by The Strokes. Great NYC terroir. This album is all mixed up with my first few months/years in the city. (A)
Lessons from the Screenplay takes a look at the opening scene from Inglourious Basterds and dissects what makes it so suspenseful. The scene, which is one of my all-time favorites, shows SS officer Hans Landa showing up unannounced at a French farmhouse and sitting down for what starts off as a little chat with a farmer, a Monsieur LaPadite. With just a calm conversation and gestures, Landa ratchets up the tension in the scene, paving the way for an explosive climax.
When considering the massive success of Star Wars, special effects and the Jospeh Campbell-inspired story always get their due. But the sound design of the film was just as important and revolutionary as the visual effects. From Darth Farmer’s overdubbing with James Earl Jones’ voice and the now-famous breathing noise (created using a SCUBA apparatus) to the lightsaber battles (the lightsaber noise comes from the hum of film projectors plus the buzz from a CRT TV set), the sounds added to the film hold everything together, creating the illusion of reality where none actually exists.
This is the first full-length trailer for Blade Runner 2049 and how the heck are we supposed to wait until October for this? My God, that cinematography. I WANT IT NOW! See also the teaser trailer from December.
Update: Another trailer. This is still looking pretty strong.
Cinefix has begun the monumental task of compiling a list of the best shots in film. They’ve got a list of more than 1000 potential clips to evaluate and rank, but in part one of their series, they focus on the best shots by size — “breaking down some of the best close ups, mediums, wide shots and extremes in film history”.
Their picks include Psycho for the extreme close up, The Godfather Part II for the wide shot, and Lawrence of Arabia for the extreme wide shot.
Update: Here are the other three videos in Cinefix’s series:
The most recent video by The Pop Culture Detective Agency explores a trope in TV and movies they call Born Sexy Yesterday.
It’s a science fiction convention in which the mind of a naive, yet highly skilled, girl is written into the body of a mature sexualized woman. Born Sexy Yesterday is about an unbalanced relationship, but it’s also very much connected to masculinity. The subtext of the trope is rooted in a deep seated male insecurity around experienced women and sexuality.
Note that Born Yesterday isn’t meant literally. Born Sexy Yesterday can be written literally but it doesn’t have to be. If media uses a “fish out of water” plot to frame an adult woman as an inexperience child then it fits the trope.
Examples of this trope can be seen in The Fifth Element, Forbidden Planet, Tron: Legacy, Splash, My Stepmother is an Alien, Japanese anime, and just about any episode of Star Trek where Kirk seduces an alien woman.
Evan Puschak looks at Reservoir Dogs 25 years after it was released and analyzes whether the film still holds up. I’m probably not giving anything away by saying his answer is “yes” (with a small caveat). I’ve probably watched that movie more than a dozen times, but I hadn’t seen it in 10-12 years before a viewing a few months ago. It is very much a first film, almost like a student film — it’s definitely no Pulp Fiction, but what is? — but all of the stuff that makes Tarantino Tarantino is very much in evidence.
I was way into Quentin Tarantino in the mid-90s. When I was designing my very first personal homepage, a large part of it was going to be a Tarantino fan page. There were already several QT fan pages on the web, but I thought I could do better. While I dropped the QT content and went in a slightly more creative direction with my page back then, I eventually ended up making that fan page after all.
Otaku Gang took more than a dozen tracks by Notorious B.I.G. and remixed them with music and sounds from Star Wars. The cantina band version of Party N’ Bullshit is kinda delightful. You can download the entire album (or just the instrumentals) here.
For the 45th anniversary of The Godfather’s release in movie theaters, the Tribeca Film Festival gathered director Francis Ford Coppola, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Diane Keaton, James Caan, Robert Duvall and Talia Shire for a back-to-back screening of The Godfather and The Godfather Part II followed by a panel discussion. Tomris Laffly highlighted some of the high points of the discussion.
“I found it a very emotional experience. I forgot a lot about the making of it,” said Francis Ford Coppola, who viewed the two films for the first time in many years. “This film could be made today, but it wouldn’t get a go ahead from a studio. The first film was made for about $6.5 million; the second was made for $11 or $12 million. They would never get a green light today,” he stated, briefly touching upon the dire state of the industry today. Diane Keaton, who said she watched the films on a computer quite recently, built on Coppola’s sentiments. “I hadn’t seen it in about 30 years. I couldn’t get over it,” she said. “It was so astonishing, Francis. It was so beautiful,” she continued. “And everybody is so great in it. Every choice you made was so authentically brilliant. I just kept crying, and that damn Talia. I am not kidding…. Everything was astonishing to me and I didn’t expect it.”
Every time I watch The Godfather, I’m struck by how much Pacino reminds me of Matthew Broderick in the first half of the movie. It’s gone by the end of the film and in every subsequent movie he made. Broderick, on the other hand, still seems very much the same, not so much the adult Ferris Bueller eventually became but more like a Ferris that never grew up at all.
For the past 33 years, The Criterion Collection has been “dedicated to gathering the greatest films from around the world and publishing them in editions that offer the highest technical quality and award-winning, original supplements” and includes films like The 400 Blows, Hoop Dreams, and Seven Samurai. One of the more unusual movies in the collection is Michael Bay’s Armageddon. You definitely won’t find many other films with a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 39% in there.
On the commentary track included on the Armageddon DVD, Ben Affleck goes off for a couple of minutes about the scene where Bruce Willis’ character argues for sending oil drillers into space rather than training astronauts to drill. It’s hilarious.
I asked Michael why it’s easier to train oil drillers to be astronauts than it was to train astronauts to become oil drillers. He told me to “shut shut shut the fuck up.” So that was the end of that talk. … See here’s where we demonstrate that because Bruce is gonna tell the guys that they did a bad job of building the drill tank. See, he’s a salt of the earth guy and the NASA nerdonauts don’t understand his salt of the earth ways, his rough and tumble ways. Like somehow they can build rocket ships but they don’t understand, like what makes a good tranny.
But Ben Affleck is far from finished with this movie. He recounts an argument wherein an incredulous Michael Bay asked him why he’d never learned how to pretend like he was floating in acting school. Affleck told him most acting training does not, in fact, include “weightless mime.”
A duo called Palette-Swap Ninja has produced a mashup of Star Wars and the entirety of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album. Each song on the album is paired chronologically with a scene from the movie:
Princess Leia’s Stolen Death Star Plans (Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band)
Luke Is In The Desert (Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds)
Being From The Spaceport Of Mos Eisley (Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite!)
Matte paintings are fake sets that-most of the times-used to be made with plexiglass and oil paint. The artists used oversized panels to create the necessary detail that the camera needed to fool the audiences when the film was projected over the large surface of the theater screen. The paintings were combined with live action filmed to match the perspective of the painting. If done well, the public would totally buy into the shot.
Robert Bechtle has nothing on these guys. Bonus painting: the warehouse scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark.
They had to use a painting because the filmmakers were unaware of Ikea at the time.
Plug your headphones into the bag, press play, and enjoy the Doritos packaged inside!
Their custom hashtag isn’t taking off the way that they had hoped (only 1 result on Twitter and 2 on Insta), but I have to admit, this is kinda cool…exactly the sort of weirdo product promotion that people would have gone bonkers for in the 80s.1 Engadget has a look at the bag and how it works:
The bags are sold out on Amazon (and I don’t think they were ever available anywhere else), but if you really want one, they are selling on eBay for anywhere from $50 to $500.
You might even say — wait for it (actually don’t, this is stupid and beneath us all) — that it’s all that and a bag of chips. (Told you.)↩
1984. I believe I last saw this movie in high school, which seems unlikely given the nudity. Or maybe we saw a censored version, in which case: lolololol. (B+)
Big Little Lies. I almost gave up on this after two episodes. I can watch TV characters do all sorts of horrible things to each other — lie, cheat, steal, betray, kill — but apparently epically bad parenting is my last straw. But. The final episode contains one of the best scenes I’ve ever watched on TV and was just fantastic all around. Was literally on the edge of my seat for the entire 60 minutes. (A-)
Future Sex. Among the least titillating books about sex you’ll ever read. (That’s a compliment.) (B+)
The Undoing Project. I was unsure about this one until about 1/3 through but persisted because it’s Michael Lewis. Fascinating in places and unexpectedly emotional. (B)
Mr. Bean. I have never seen my kids laugh quite as hard as they did watching Mr. Bean rush to the dentist office. My dad instilled in me an appreciation of British comedy and I guess I’m passing that on to my kids. They seem to get it, but not all kids do. They were so excited recently to show some friends The Ministry of Silly Walks sketch from Monty Python and the friends looked really really confused and didn’t laugh at all. Fawlty Towers is up soon. (B)
The Rules Do Not Apply. At one shocking, heartbreaking point in the book, time reels backwards. If you’ve read Ariel Levy’s Thanksgiving in Mongolia in the New Yorker, you know exactly what I’m talking about. (B+)
Tim Carmody’s Best of the Web series for kottke.org. I love getting to be a reader of the site sometimes, just like all of you. I always enjoy Tim’s residencies here, but this one made me clap my hands in joy and stomp my feet in a jealous rage. It’s not entirely fair that he does the site better than I do, but I’m glad he does. (A)
The final season of Girls. Not their best season, but I’m sad to see it go nonetheless. The ensemble is what made the show special, and they just weren’t together enough this season. The single episode “goodbyes” for each character felt forced. (Same reason why Arrested Development season 4 wasn’t up to scratch.) (B+)
Terror of the Zygons. I started watching old Doctor Whos with the kids and they love them. (B-)
Hedgehog Launch. Ancient iOS game…my phone might contain the last functioning install of it. I started playing it a few weeks ago and now I am addicted to it for absolutely no good reason. The game sucks: it’s tough and not that fun until a certain point and then it gets really easy to win. But I can’t stop playing it. It’s like a metaphor for something in my life I can’t quite figure out. Fuck this game. (F)
Damn. I need to listen to this more. So I shall. (B+)
Get Out. Really good but not great. I saw this weeks after everyone else and my expectations were too high. Kept waiting for it to slip into a slightly higher gear but it never did. Don’t @ me! (B+)
Cloud Atlas. I’ve seen this movie at least four times and I love it. (A-)
The Prestige. Hadn’t seen this since it came out. Holds up. Had totally forgotten about Bowie as Tesla. (A-)
Studio Ghibli has been making incredible animated movies since 1985. This video traces the history and the work of the studio and its principal director Hayao Miyazaki from his pre-Ghibli work (including Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind) all the way up to Miyazaki’s recent unretirement & involvement in Boro the Caterpillar.
The name Ghibli was given by Hayao Miyazaki from the Italian noun “ghibli”, based on the Libyan-Arabic name for the hot desert wind of that country, the idea being the studio would “blow a new wind through the anime industry”. It also refers to an Italian aircraft, the Caproni Ca.309 Ghibli.
I still remember seeing Princess Mononoke in the theater in 1999 (having no previous knowledge of Ghibli or Miyazaki) and being completely blown away by it. Made me a fan for life. (via film school rejects)
Errol Morris’s surprising new film is simplicity itself: a visit to the Cambridge, Massachusetts studio of his friend, the 20x24 Polaroid portrait photographer Elsa Dorfman, who specifies on her website that she likes her subjects “to wear clothes (and to bring toys, skis, books, tennis racquets, musical instruments, and particularly pets…).” As this charming, articulate, and calmly uncompromising woman takes us through her fifty-plus years of remarkable but fragile images of paying customers, commissioned subjects, family, and close friends (including the poet Allen Ginsberg), the sense of time passing grows more and more acute.
Next month is the 40th anniversary of the release of Star Wars and at Star Wars Celebration this year, there was a 40 Years of Star Wars panel with George Lucas, Mark Hamill, Billy Dee Williams, and Harrison Ford. At the end of the panel, after some personal thoughts from Lucas and the other panelists about Carrie Fisher, they played this video tribute to Fisher.
For awhile, I think Hollywood forgot that movies are supposed to be fun. This looks fun, like movies in the 80s were before the studios started fixating too much on boobs and bombs for teen boys, gritty reboots, and save-the-world movies.
From concept designer Ash Thorp, a reel of visual effects he worked on for Ghost in the Shell, from animation tests to completed effects featured in the film.
Early on in the film’s development, I met with Rupert to discuss some of the creative direction. He expressed his desire to paint the city with neon lights in a new form that he coined as “Solograms”, which are solid holograms. It is something in the realm of a particle system of light that can be moved and augmented in Z space. I loved the idea and instantly got to work building out concepts and ideas. Below you will see a mix of various style frames, concepts, and final production assets that made it into the film.
I saw this the other day and the effects are amazing; I wish the story could have been a little better.
When The Shining premiered in 1980 in NYC and LA, there was a short scene in a hospital between the shot of Jack Torrence frozen in the maze and the long zoomed-in shot of the framed photo. After the premieres, director Stanley Kubrick decided the scene didn’t work and had it cut from dozens of prints and destroyed.
It’s also important to note that this was likely not the exact scene that Kubrick shot; since the scene no longer exists, it’s impossible to know how exactly it played. Even the many people who saw the epilogue when The Shining was first released have varying recollections of the exact details. Clearly, the final text about the Overlook’s history was an idea omitted during the writing process.
In 2006, Davis Guggenheim directed An Inconvenient Truth, a documentary film about Al Gore’s fight to educate the world about climate change. It made nearly $50 million at the box office, won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature, and is credited for moving the conversation about climate change along (although not nearly fast enough, in my mind). This July, a followup documentary will be released: An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power. From a review in the LA Times:
Eleven Sundances later, Gore’s star wattage seemed entirely undimmed at Thursday evening’s premiere of “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power,” an awkwardly titled, stirringly crafted follow-up that measures the progress that has and hasn’t been made in the battle against global warming. Taking over for Davis Guggenheim, the directors Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk largely abandon the framing device of Gore’s lecture (which he and his international team of trainees continue to give regularly) in favor of a nimbler, more on-the-go approach.
Despite some updates on the continuing decline of the world’s glaciers and the link between climate change and the recent Zika virus outbreak, the focus this time is less on science than on politicking. Cohen and Shenk tag along with Gore on a globe-trotting mission to persuade various heads of state to invest in wind and solar energy, and reduce their reliance on fossil fuels — an effort that culminates on-screen with the signing of last year’s historic Paris climate accord.
Don’t pay too much attention to the letter grades, they’re super subjective. Oh, and don’t pay too much attention to the descriptions…also subjective. You know what, you should probably just skip this post and watch Planet Earth II instead. It’s objectively great.
What Happened, Miss Simone? Nina Simone is underrated. There are some spine-tingling live musical moments in this film. (B+)
The Three-Body Problem. Recommended by Barry. The first book is great, the next two are good but pretty depressing. (B+)
Moonlight. While this didn’t grab me as much as it did everyone else, the Academy got it right. (A-)
The Night Manager. I can see what Taylor Swift saw in Tom Hiddleston. (B+)
T2 Trainspotting. If you saw and loved the original, you should see this. It is somehow nostalgic and also not. (B)
Girls. The struggles of 20-something New Yorkers and the crises of 40-something males may not be the same, but they sure do rhyme. (B+)
Beauty and the Beast. Better than I expected, even for a musical about the Stockholm syndrome. (I mean, why didn’t the Beast let Belle go like waaaay sooner?) I never saw the original when I was a kid but somehow knew all the songs anyway? I even got a little teary at the end but perhaps that’s just because my emotional life is a puddly mess rn. (B)
Turing’s Cathedral. Raging Bull. Manchester by the Sea. I am increasingly bored by stories about white dudes. Look at the rest of this list. The best stuff, the things I liked the most, are stories about or stories told by women or people of color or non-Americans. (C)
Homo Deus. Still haven’t finished this, but I’m persisting because Sapiens was so good. Hard to escape the conclusion that the sequel is not quite so good. (B-)
Planet Earth II. This is the best thing I’ve seen in the last year. Just fucking watch it already. (A+)
More Life. Liking this more than Views. Drake’s non-albums are better than his albums. (B+)
Mad Men. My second time through. Better than I remember and I remember it being great. (A+)
The Crown. Expected Downton (soapy but fun) but was rewarded with great acting and writing. Claire Foy as Elizabeth and John Lithgow as Churchill were *kisses fingers*. (A)
“Awaken My Love”. I’m sorry, I just couldn’t figure this one out. (C-)
Logan. Producers are realizing they’ve stocked their superhero movies with great actors so maybe they should give them material worthy of their talents. (B+)
Abstract. Pretty good, but I agree with Rob Walker’s take. Niemann is closest to the way I work/think but I liked Bjarke’s episode the best…even though I’ve got some, er, issues with the guy. (B)
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. The script, not the play. I have now read all 8 of the Harry Potter books with my kids…it took more than 4 years. Very sad it’s over…it ended up being one of the most rewarding things I’ve done with them. (B+)
For movies based on historical events, getting the details right can be essential in convincing the audience they’re watching something meaningful and important, particularly if the real-world scenes are iconic. But often, historical happenings are changed to make scenes more cinematically effective. This video shows several historical events coupled with their cinematic recreations in films like Jackie, Into the Wild, JFK, Catch Me If You Can, and Selma.
From director Martin McDonagh, who is also responsible for In Bruges, comes Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri. Frances McDormand stars and even in the trailer, she is a force of nature. (No offense to Meryl Streep, but McDormand is a very strong candidate for the best actor or actress working today.) The red band trailer above is entertaining in its use of many of George Carlin’s seven dirty words but I prefer the more conventional trailer I saw in the theater the other day — which I cannot locate online for some reason — because, among other reasons, it contains more Peter Dinklage.
Citizen Jane: The Battle for the City is a documentary films about Jane Jacobs and her legendary battle against Robert Moses for the soul of New York City.
People have to insist on government trying things their way.
The film will be available in theaters and on-demand on April 21.
I’m a bit more than halfway through the audiobook of The Power Broker and Robert Moses is approaching the height of his influence. The power that Moses possessed in NYC almost cannot be overstated — I can’t think of any other single person who affected the “look and feel” of the city more than he did. I have heard the story many times, but I can’t wait to get the part with Jacobs, to hear in Caro’s words how this infinitely powerful man lost his grip on the city because of this remarkable woman and a group of concerned citizens. (via @daveg)
The ending of Rogue One — spoilers! — shows an unconvincing CG clone of Princess Leia receiving the plans for the Death Star just before her ship jumps into hyperspace. The beginning of Star Wars takes place just a few minutes (or hours?) after the final scene in Rogue One. Vader’s ship has caught the Rebel ship. He boards it and captures Leia, but not before she hands off the plans to R2-D2, who escapes to Tatooine with C-3PO. Watching them cut together like this, the whole narrative makes a lot more sense. BTW, on March 24, you’ll be able to watch both movies back-to-back in the comfort of your home when Rogue One is available for digital download.
Update: This video is even better…it includes a deleted scene from the original Star Wars inserted between the two movies. (You also get to hear Luke’s original nickname: “Wormy”.)
Artist Simon Birch and architect Paul Kember have recreated the famous bedroom from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey as part of a larger art project called The 14th Factory in the Lincoln Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. Weirdly, when Birch approached Kember about doing the project, Kember revealed that his uncles had worked on the actual set for Kubrick:
Birch showed the project’s architect, a guy named Paul Kember, a series of stills from the film hoping he’d be able to recreate it. Then Paul goes, and I’m paraphrasing here, “Oh, Si, didn’t I tell you? My uncle and great-uncle — you know, Tony and John? — were draughtsman on that movie, and they literally — literally! — worked on that exact room! Isn’t that bonkers?!”
From the Instagram evidence, it looks as though you can walk around the bedroom, sit on the furniture, lay on the bed, etc. This might almost be worth making a special trip to LA.
Cinefix lists the best movie dialogue of all time. This is an unorthodox list…not sure many would rate Aaron Sorkin’s movie about Steve Jobs so highly. I enjoyed the shout out to Primer for its realistic-seeming dialogue of the cofounders of a small startup dealing with terrific success.
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