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Seven years after his directorial debut with the fantastic Synecdoche, New York comes Charlie Kaufman’s second movie as a director, a stop-motion animated film called Anomalisa. The film successfully raised funds on Kickstarter and will be out in select theaters in December.
Pablo Eyre took a number of movie posters featuring photography from their respective movies and replaced the photos with the actual scenes. I imagine this is what movie posters look like in Harry Potter.
(Something must be in the air lately. This video is similar to two other videos I’ve linked to recently: book covers in motion?and a comparison of movie posters and the scenes that inspired them.)
This is a charming short film on how a Foley artist would sound design a day in an ordinary life. Running hands through spaghetti noodles stands in for hair washing, a spray bottle sounds like rustling sheets, that sort of thing.
See also this fascinating short documentary about what a Foley artist does.
Rishi Kaneria examines the use of props in movies, from the sled in Citizen Kane to the oranges in The Godfather to the cardboard box in Se7en. A transcript is available here.
When used like this props become more than just objects. They become symbols. A symbol that represents a friendship. Or a marriage. Science. Or God.
A prop can be a symbol of reality. Or Illusion. Of the future. Or the past.
And the same prop can symbolize childhood in one film…but death in another. But death can also be symbolized like this. In the Godfather, Coppola associates death with something unexpected: oranges. This isn’t the kind of thing that’s in the foreground of filmmaking. But it’s there if you’re looking for it.
From Mapzen’s exploration of map projections other than the familiar (and often misleading) Mercator, an Inception-style view of Manhattan (or anywhere you want to point the map to…like Paris or London), inspired by Berg’s Here & There project (which I was a fan of, obviously).
From Candice Drouet, a short video with side-by-side comparisons of scenes from movies and the movie posters inspired by them.
In 1977, Herbert Yager interviewed designer and title sequence designer Saul Bass about his approach to designing opening title sequences for films such as North by Northwest, Vertigo, and Psycho.
I began as a graphic designer. As part of my work, I created film symbols for ad campaigns. I happened to be working on the symbols for Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones and The Man With The Golden Arm and at some point, Otto and I just looked at each other and said, “Why not make it move?”
It was as simple as that.
I had felt for some time that audience involvement with a film should begin with its first frame.
Until then, titles had tended to be lists of dull credits, mostly ignored, endured, or used as popcorn time.
There seemed to be a real opportunity to use titles in a new way — to actually create a climate for the story that was about to unfold.
No where in that excerpt did Bass or the interviewer reference Bass’ wife and collaborator Elaine Bass, who worked closely with him on almost all of their film projects. In recent years, there’s been a push to recontextualize their working relationship as a partnership. Elaine did start off working as his employee but clearly they worked as true collaborators for much of their careers.
From 2007, a 30-minute documentary on the making of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Includes interviews with Jack Nicholson, Steven Spielberg, and Sydney Pollack.
There are a few shots in here that are generic to many movies but many others have the feel of definite homage. See also this list of similarities from a couple of years ago.
The moment when Walt spots Jesse’s escaped hostage on the road is very reminiscent of the moment when Butch sees Marcellus. The scene where Walt chooses the weapon to kill someone looks exactly like the scene where Butch wonders what to use as he comes back to rescue Marcellus. In one scene Walt is forced to visit his home and there is a great chance someone is waiting there to kill him. Sounds familiar?
If you haven’t heard, today is the day to which Doc, Marty, and Jennifer travel forward in time in Back to the Future II.
Because of this and my love of cultural time travel, I thought I’d take the opportunity to point out that Michael J. Fox (aka Marty McFly) is nearly 8 years older now than Christopher Lloyd was when he played Doc Brown when Back to the Future was released in 1985. That’s heavy.
Quentin Tarantino is the type of writer/director who writes roles in movies with specific actors in mind. For Pulp Fiction, he wanted Harvey Keitel to play Winston Wolf, Tim Roth to play Pumpkin, and Ving Rhames to play Marcellus Wallace. But he also wanted Michael Madsen to play Vincent (with Travolta as a strong second choice), John Cusack to play Lance, Matt Dillon to play Butch, and Laurence Fishburne to play Jules. Another possibility for Jules was Eddie Murphy, and Tarantino also specified “No Rappers” for that role. Bruce Willis and Uma Thurman weren’t even listed for their respective roles. Gary Oldman, Nicholas Cage, Johnny Depp, and Alec Baldwin were considered for several roles but ultimately didn’t appear in the film.
Here’s the full list. (via open culture)
Trailer: watched. Tickets: bought. Luke Skywalker: still missing.
Lewis Bond takes a look at the work of master filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki and what sets him apart from other makers of animated movies, including his work’s realism and empathy.
With its straightforward plot and action sequences, Mad Max: Fury Road would make a pretty good 8-bit video game. (via devour)
50 unknown facts about Star Wars, many gleaned from How Star Wars Conquered the Universe. I’ve heard some of these before, but not many…the list doesn’t include low-hanging fruit like Harrison Ford’s carpentry.
Favorite facts: 1. Early on, Luke Skywalker’s nickname was “Wormy”. Wormy! 2. The actor who portrayed Vader, David Prowse, spoke his dialogue on set not knowing he would be dubbed over. Because of his West Country accent, the other cast members referred to Prowse as Darth Farmer.
Speaking of Harrison Ford’s carpentry, the new biography of Joan Didion has a good story about that time Didion and her husband John Dunne hired Ford to do some construction for them.
Off and on, for over six month, the Dunnes engaged a construction crew to expand the waterside deck, install waxed pine bookshelves, and lay terra-cotta floor tiles. The men tore out prefabricated plywood walls and pulled up “icky green” flooring. Harrison Ford headed the crew. “They were the most sophisticated people I knew,” Ford said. “I was the first thing they saw in the morning and the last thing they saw before cocktails.”
In Vegas, Dunne wrote, “[W]hat had started as a two-month job … [stretched] into its sixth month and the construction account was four thousand dollars overdrawn… I fired the contractor. ‘Jesus, man, I understand,’ he said. He was an out-of-work actor and his crew sniffed a lot of cocaine and when he left he unexpectedly gave me a soul-brother handshake, grabbing my thumb while I was left with an unimportant part of his little finger.” The next day, Dunne realized the only thing separating him and his family from the Pacific Ocean was a clear sheet of Pliofilm where the French doors were supposed to go. “I rehired the contractor,” he wrote. “‘Jesus, man, I understand,’ the contractor said.”
Much later, when Didion’s daughter was ill, Ford did the family a further service.
The following day, Didion flew from Teterboro to Los Angeles on Harrison Ford’s private plane, along with her friend Earl McGrath. Ford “happened to be in New York and heard about Q’s condition … and called to offer to take Joan,” said Sean Michael. “I find that to be a beautiful thing,” he said. “A man you hire to build cabinets, thirty years later is flying you in his private jet to your daughter’s hospital bedside.”
Jesus, man, I understand.
Update: Some of Ford’s comments from the book were taken from Carolyn Kellogg’s reporting on an awards festival.
As if to make up for her absence, a parade of stars was in attendance. Harrison Ford, who was prepared to present her the award, spoke somewhat extemporaneously instead. “I just want to tell you all how much her friendship has meant to me,” he said. Forty years ago, Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, were “The most sophisticated people I knew.”
Then a carpenter, Ford was hired by Didion and Dunne to build their beach house in Malibu. “I was the first thing they saw in the morning and the last thing they saw” — he paused — “before cocktails.”
Charlie Jane Anders of io9 has a great preview of Pixar’s upcoming film, The Good Dinosaur, including some juicy details on how the film was made. Because the film uses many big landscape shots, which would have been impossible to render in a timely fashion using their usual processes, the filmmakers needed to come up with another solution. They ended up using real topographical data and satellite images to render the landscapes.
Enter the U.S. Geographical Survey, which posts incredible amounts of topographical data to its website-including the height above sea level of all of the land features, and lots of satellite images. So Munier and his team tried downloading a lot of the USGS data and putting it into their computer, and then using that to “render” the real-life landscape. And it worked: They were able to take a classic Ansel Adams photograph of the Grand Tetons and duplicate it pretty closely using their computer-generated landscape. And with this data, they could point a digital “camera” anywhere, in a 360-degree rotation, and get an image.
Hail, Caesar! is the name of the Coen brothers’ new movie. It stars George Clooney as a movie star (what casting!) who is kidnapped during the shooting of a epic Roman gladiator picture called Hail, Caesar! This one looks fun. And with the exception of The Big Lebowski, the Coen’s fun movies are underrated,…I quite enjoyed both Intolerable Cruelty and Burn After Reading.
How many videos can we watch about the films of Stanley Kubrick? If you’re anything like me, the answer is never enough. This montage hinting at connections between his films is particularly well done.
Mashups are so ubiquitous and overdone that the bar for actually watching one is pretty high. But this one, no joke, might be the best visual movie mashup I’ve ever seen. Hell’s Club is a tour de force of film editing, seamlessly combining scenes from dozens of different films — Austin Powers, Cocktail, Star Wars, Terminator, Staying Alive, Boogie Nights — into one cohesive scene. Give it 30 seconds and you’ll watch the whole thing.
Update: The sequel is just as tight. Amazing what a little color can do to trick the brain.
HLN (which used to be CNN Headline News) needed someone to talk about Edward Snowden, US government whistleblower. They meant to invite a gentleman named John Hendren, a journalist for Al Jazeera, onto the show but instead invited funnyman Jon Hendren, who goes by the username of @fart on Twitter. Hendren, Jon used the opportunity to defend both Edward Snowden, briefly, and then sexy-but-misunderstood barber Edward Scissorhands.
Well, you know, to say he couldn’t harm someone, well, absolutely he could. But I think to cast him out, to make him invalid in society, simply because he has scissors for hands, I mean, that’s strange. People didn’t get scared until he started sculpting shrubs into dinosaur shapes and whatnot.
The best part is that anchor Yasmin Vossoughian just keeps on plowing right through her script like they’re not talking suddenly about a man with scissors for hands, deftly demonstrating what a farce these TV news “conversations” are. (via nymag)
Kent Jones has directed a documentary on the 1962 meeting where a young François Truffaut interviewed a seasoned Alfred Hitchcock about his films (the output of which was a beloved book). As the narration from the trailer says, “[Truffaut] wanted to free Hitchcock from his reputation as a light entertainer”, to which Peter Bogdanovich adds, “it conclusively changed people’s opinions about Hitchcock”.
In 1962 Hitchcock and Truffaut locked themselves away in Hollywood for a week to excavate the secrets behind the mise-en-scène in cinema. Based on the original recordings of this meeting — used to produce the mythical book Hitchcock/Truffaut — this film illustrates the greatest cinema lesson of all time and plummets us into the world of the creator of Psycho, The Birds, and Vertigo. Hitchcock’s incredibly modern art is elucidated and explained by today’s leading filmmakers: Martin Scorsese, David Fincher, Arnaud Desplechin, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Wes Anderson, James Gray, Olivier Assayas, Richard Linklater, Peter Bogdanovich and Paul Schrader.
Truffaut’s recontextualization of Hitchcock and his work reminds me of the point Matt Daniels recently made about younger generations deciding how work from older artists is remembered in his post about timeless music:
Biggie has three of the Top 10 hip-hop songs between 1986 and 1999. This is a strong signal that future generations will remember Biggie as the referent artist of 80s and 90s hip-hop. And there’s No Diggity at the top — perhaps it’s that glorious Dr. Dre verse.
Hip hop heads will lament the omission of Rakim, Public Enemy, or Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt. It’s a depressing reality that exists for every genre and generation: not every artist will be remembered. The incoming generation will control what’s relevant from the 90s and carried into the future, independent of quality and commercial success. For rock, that might be Blink-182. For electronica, that might be Sandstorm.
Take Star Wars as another example. I’ve had conversations recently with other parents whose young kids are really into the series. The way they experience Star Wars is different than my generation. We saw Episodes IV-VI in the theater, on VHS, and on DVD and then saw Episodes I-III in the theater accompanied by various degrees of disappointment and disregard. Elementary school-aged kids today might have watched the prequels first. They read the comics, play the video games, and watch the Clone Wars animated series. To many of them, the hero of the series is Anakin, not Luke.1 And Generation X, as much as we may hate that, there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.2 Unless… there is… another… (via subtraction)
Thanks to Anil or David for this insight…I can’t remember which one of you said it.↩
You know, the Anakin-as-the-true-hero view has its merits, despite how it was presented in the prequels. Anakin was a good kid who fell because he couldn’t handle the power given him but, in the end, was redeemed by the actions of his children. That’s a solid heroic narrative arc. And, glad you noticed, it ties neatly into what I’m trying to say about younger generations rehabbing older ones.↩
Before the Reagans cranked up the War on Drugs in the early 80s due to the massive influx of cocaine from Latin America, advertisements offering all kinds of coke paraphernalia could be found in magazines. The World’s Best Ever collected a bunch of ads offering spoons, mirrors, straws, knives, and the like for America’s coke sniffers.
I am an episode and a half into Narcos on Netflix. Pretty good (but not great) so far.1 (via adfreak)
They should have found a way to do it without the voiceover. Too much telling and not enough showing. (I have a thing about voiceovers. My first exposure to Blade Runner was Ridley Scott’s Director’s Cut, which omitted Deckard’s voiceover, and when I started watching the original version on TV a few months ago, I nearly threw the remote through the screen…so grating and entirely unnecessary.)↩
Photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand is known for his aerial photography of the Earth’s landscapes, but in his film Human, he blends his trademark overview style with simply shot interviews with people from all over the world.
Humans made its debut earlier this month and is available in its entirety on YouTube in three 90-minute parts; start here with part one. (via in focus, which is featuring several photos from the film)
In an interview with Slashfilm, Mad Max: Fury Road director George Miller stated that “the best version of this movie is black and white” and that the purest version of the film would also be silent (which it very nearly is anyway). Miller wanted to include the B&W version on the Blu-ray, but the studio decided to delay the release of that until a Super Special Ultra Gimme All Your Money Blu-ray Edition can be arranged at some later date. Until then (or, more probably, until Warner’s lawyers get around to taking it down), we have this fan-made edit of the film in B&W without dialogue. (via @SebastianNebel)
Update: Well, that was fun while it lasted. Good thing I totally didn’t grab a copy to watch later using a Chrome extension. (And before you ask, no I won’t.)
In the latest installment of Every Frame a Painting, Tony Zhou talks about the different techniques filmmakers use to make shoot locations like Vancouver (Zhou’s hometown) look like New York, India, Chicago, Shanghai, and San Francisco in the finished films.
With California in the midst of a particularly intense multi-year drought and 2015 looking to be the warmest year on record by a wide margin,1 Edward Burtynsky’s “Water” series of photographs is especially relevant.
Many of photos in the series are on display in Berkeley through February and are also available in book form.
Update: Burtynsky also collaborated on a documentary about water called Watermark. Here’s a trailer:
The film is available to watch on Amazon Instant and iTunes. (via @steveportigal)
I mean, look at this chart from the NOAA of the warmest years since 1880…2015 is a Lionel Messi-esque outlier. And Eric Holthaus says that with the strong El Niño, 2016 is forecast to be even hotter.↩
Gene Kogan used some neural network software written by Justin Johnson to transfer the style of paintings by 17 artists to a scene from Disney’s 1951 animated version of Alice in Wonderland. The artists include Sol Lewitt, Picasso, Munch, Georgia O’Keeffe, and van Gogh.
The effect works amazingly well, like if you took Alice in Wonderland and a MoMA catalog and put them in a blender. (via prosthetic knowledge)
The worlds in many of Quentin Tarantino’s movies are connected; here are ten of the biggest connections, including the Vega brothers, Red Apple cigarettes, and Big Kahuna Burger. Tarantino has even said that some of his movies are watchable within others…e.g. the characters in Pulp Fiction could have watched From Dusk Till Dawn in the theater.
Posted here purely for the sake of completeness, here is a supercut of every1 supercut, parody, analysis, and compilation of Wes Anderson and his movies, the whole twee ball of wax.
The aspect ratio of a movie can have a significant effect on how the scenes in the movie are perceived by the viewer. Changing the ratio during a movie (as in Interstellar, The Dark Knight Rises, etc.) can be an effective way to signal a thematic change.
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