Toy Story + The Wire mashup
Woody = McNulty, Buzz = Stringer, and Mr. Potato Head = Bunk. (via stevey)
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kottke.org posts about Movies
Somewhere
Somewhere is an upcoming film from Sofia Coppola; here’s the trailer.
Writer/director Sofia Coppola reunites with the film company with which she made the Academy Award-winning hit “Lost in Translation.” Her new film is an intimate story set in contemporary Los Angeles; Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) is a bad-boy actor stumbling through a life of excess at the Chateau Marmont Hotel in Hollywood. With an unexpected visit from his 11-year-old daughter (Elle Fanning), Johnny is forced to look at the questions we must all confront.
As one of the few people who enjoyed Marie Antoinette, I’m of course looking forward to this. (via df)
Real-world Minority Report computer interface
John Underkoffler was one of the science advisors for Minority Report. After doing that, he helped build a computer with an interface very much like the ones in the movie…you know, where Tom Cruise flings stuff around on a screen with his hands. In this TED talk, Underkoffler demonstrates the system.
The whole thing is worth watching but skip to 5:20 (or even 6:30) if you want to see some crazy ass shit go down. (via lonelysandwich)
Guillermo Del Toro steps down as The Hobbit director
The news is a few days old but I just heard about it: Guillermo Del Toro will no longer be directing The Hobbit. Sounds like the movie was taking too long and he wanted to have time to work on other projects.
“Guillermo is co-writing the Hobbit screenplays with Philippa Boyens, Fran Walsh and myself, and happily our writing partnership will continue for several more months, until the scripts are fine tuned and polished” says Jackson. “New Line and Warner Bros will sit down with us this week, to ensure a smooth and uneventful transition, as we secure a new director for the Hobbit. We do not anticipate any delay or disruption to ongoing pre-production work”.
Obviously Jackson should just direct the damn thing.
Update: Hmm, I just heard from a small bird that Jackson is pretty much set to direct…just finalizing the deal with the studio. On the other hand, Jackson’s manager says that the director is committed to other directing projects. So I guess we’ll see what happens.
Riding on nuclear bombs
Slim Pickens riding a nuclear bomb out of the bay doors of his B-52 Bomber in Dr. Strangelove is an iconic cinematic scene. But the imagery of people riding on bombs has been used on comic book covers since the early 1940s:
That’s some mighty Pickensian hat wavin’ by Uncle Sam. (via oobject)
The Truman Show
The Truman Show delusion is how some psychiatrists are describing the condition of psychotic patients who believe they are filmed stars of reality TV programs.
Another patient traveled to New York City and showed up at a federal building in downtown Manhattan seeking asylum so he could get off his reality show, Dr. Gold said. The patient reported that he also came to New York to see if the Twin Towers were still standing, because he believed that seeing their destruction on Sept. 11 on television was part of his reality show. If they were still standing, he said, then he would know that the terrorist attack was all part of the script.
As for the movie itself, for all its popularity and critical success when released, it’s little-remembered today. And unfairly so; the “realness” about our increasingly mediated lives remains a hot topic of debate.
Duck You Sucker: An Intro to Spaghetti Westerns
Today’s entry in the A.V. Club’s Gateways to Geekery series is Spaghetti Westerns. Want to get into Spaghetti Westerns, but feeling a little sheepish (If God didn’t want them sheared, he wouldn’t have made them sheep) about not knowing where to start? Gateways to Geekery suggests A Fistful of Dollars.
It’s an adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s cynical samurai masterpiece Yojimbo, which was itself inspired by Dashiell Hammett’s noir classic Red Harvest. And thus, an American TV actor became a movie star playing a cowboy for an Italian director working in Spain looking to a Japanese interpretation of an American crime novel for inspiration. It really is a small world after all, or at least a world pop culture helped make smaller.
You might also be interested in the Gateways to Geekery take on David Foster Wallace.
(via oh yes, radishes)
Hardcore nudity in Babies documentary
Kids in Mind reviews movies with a finer tooth comb than G/PG/PG-13/etc. — it’s basically “won’t somebody please think of the children” for movies. Babies, the documentary that follows four infants through the first years of their lives, didn’t do so well in the Sex/Nudity department.
Children of various ages, from newborns to toddlers, are seen in various states of undress, including unobscured views of both male and female genitals.
This was filed under Violence/Gore:
An infant’s bare buttocks are seen with what appears to be fecal matter; a woman lifts up the child and in the process gets fecal matter on her leg, which she wipes off with a corncob. A stream of urine is seen coming from a baby and landing on a table.
The corncob scene will HAUNT YOUR DREAMS. The site’s two “perfect” scores are worth reading too: Crank: High Voltage and Halloween. (via lowindustrial)
They’re making a Dark Crystal sequel
It’s called Power of the Dark Crystal.
Set hundreds of years after the events of the first movie, when the world has once again fallen into darkness, “Power of the Dark Crystal” follows the adventures of a mysterious girl made of fire who, together with a Gelfling outcast, steals a shard of the legendary crystal in an attempt to reignite the dying sun that exists at the center of the planet.
It couldn’t possibly be better than the original:
Metropolis, the director’s cut
A complete copy of the classic film Metropolis has been found in Argentina.
Made at a time of hyperinflation in Germany, “Metropolis” offered a grandiose version — of a father and son fighting for the soul of a futuristic city — that nearly bankrupted the studio that commissioned it, UFA. After lukewarm reviews and initial box office results in Europe, Paramount Pictures, the American partner brought in toward the end of the shoot, took control of the film and made drastic excisions, arguing that Lang’s cut was too complicated and unwieldy for American audiences to understand.
Film Forum in NYC is showing the complete film starting tonight (through May 20).
The science of Avatar
James Cameron spoke about the science of Avatar at Caltech last month; Discovery has a summary.
“We tried to make it not completely fanciful,” Cameron told the crowd, which filled the auditorium. “If it was too outlandish, there would be a believability gap.” So while Pandora features floating mountains, that might not be so far-fetched, Cameron said, considering Earth has developed high-speed “bullet” trains that levitate on magnetic fields. Of course, the “reality-based” scenario did have its limits. “We figured that to actually lift mountains, the magnetic field would have to be strong enough to rip the hemoglobin out of your blood,” says Cameron. “But we decided not to go there.”
No word on whether he addressed the Na’vi’s lack of technological advancement.
Freakonomics documentary review
Indiewire has a review of the Freakonomics documentary that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival the other day.
Taking his central cue from Levitt’s conviction that “incentives matter,” executive producer Seth Gordon (“The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters”) directs several introductory segments featuring Levitt (the economist) and Dubner (the journalist) breaking down the book’s main assertions, aided by playful 2-D animation. The first of these sequences borrows from an early chapter in the source material, taking on self-interested real estate agents to explain the authors’ intention of parsing the motives behind many phenomena often taken for granted. While Gordon’s fluffy treatment of his chatty subjects suggests the potential for a “This American Life”-type television series, the individual short films embody their claims with a variety of methods.
Magnolia Pictures acquired the North American rights to the film so we should be seeing it in theaters later in the year.
Foursquare for movies
There are likely several “Foursquare for X” apps out there (and many more to come), but I thought Miso was pretty interesting. From Cinematical:
Instead of checking in to a location (though you can do that too, if you link your existing Foursquare account), you check in with what you’re watching. Miso keeps track of your check-ins and rewards you with badges relating to specific genres (and sub-genres) of film and television. Link your Twitter or Facebook, and suddenly, you’re posting what you’re watching with friends and seeing what movies they’re watching as well. Genius.
iPhone/iPad-only for now.
Seizure-inducing opening credit sequence
You aren’t going to believe the opening credit sequence for Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void (make sure you can hear the sound too):
Really well done but there’s a 95% chance you’ll hate this. Ok, more like 98%. Reminds me of the still-brilliant trailer for A Clockwork Orange…but what a difference the music makes. (thx, jim)
Tom Hanks doesn’t exist in Tom Hanks movies
Do movie actors exist in the worlds of the movies they star in?
You ever think about how in, like, a Tom Hanks movie, everyone lives in a reality in which there’s no such person as Tom Hanks? Because otherwise, people would be mistaking the main character for Tom Hanks all the time? So either Tom Hanks doesn’t exist in the world the movie takes place in, or he does exist but he looks like someone else?
Charlie Kaufman probably has a half-written screenplay about this stuffed in a drawer somewhere. (via jimray)
Update: Dozens reminded me that the “lookie loo with a bundle of joy” scheme in Ocean’s 12 involved the pregnant Tess Ocean character (played by Julia Roberts) looking like the movie star Julia Roberts. Several other people cited this scene in The Last Action Hero. And in Take Her, She’s Mine, character played by Jimmy Stewart is repeatedly mistaken for the famous actor, Jimmy Stewart. (thx, all)
Update: TV Tropes has many many examples of this phenomenon, which they call the Celebrity Paradox. (thx, joe)
David Lynch’s favorite filmmakers in 60 seconds
David Lynch likes a lot of different filmmakers. These are some of them:
(via @brainpicker)
Alice in televisual Wonderland
Hyperbole Machine reviews the various Alice in Wonderland films, cartoons, and TV shows.
Alice in Wonderland is one of the most adapted works in cinema, which is surprising, really, when you reflect on the fact that the book is pretty much unfilmable. There’s no real narrative thread besides ‘Alice is curious’ and the story is little more than a series of tableaux where Carroll can flex his surrealist prose. In light of the recent Burton riff on this very popular story, I thought I’d do a little historical trek through the numerous filmed versions of this famous novel. (No I haven’t seen the 1976 porn version so don’t expect a review).
FWIW, here’s a fairly SFW clip of that porno version.
Twitter predicts future box office
A study by researchers from HP’s Social Computing Lab shows that Twitter does very well in predicting the box office revenue for movies.
[Researchers] found that using only the rate at which movies are mentioned could successfully predict future revenues. But when the sentiment of the tweet was factored in (how favorable it was toward the new movie), the prediction was even more exact.
But as someone noted in the comments:
Works fine until people realize it works, then they start gaming it, and it stops working.
Unassuming long takes in movies
Jim Emerson collects eight of his favorite long takes that you might not have noticed before (no Touch of Evil, The Player, or Children of Men).
If you study all eight of these shots, you should learn enough to pass any film class.
Babies trailer
Babies is a documentary that follows the lives of four newborn babies for the first year of life…in Namibia, Mongolia, Japan, and San Francisco. (via clusterflock)
100 different versions of Avatar
To cover every possible screen and audio option out there, James Cameron produced over 100 different versions of Avatar for distribution to theaters.
In some cases, a single multiplex required different versions for different auditorium configurations. Creative decisions involving light levels also led to additional versions. 3D projection and glasses cut down the light the viewer sees, so “Avatar” also had separate color grades at different light levels, which are measured in foot lamberts. “If we had just sent out one version of the movie, it would have been very dark (in the larger theaters),” Barnett says. “We had a very big flow chart with all of the different steps, so we could send the right media to the right theater.”
NASA movie posters
For a number of their recent missions, NASA has designed movie-like posters. This one was pretty clearly influenced by Star Trek:
Americans don’t like movies with subtitles
Only nine foreign films have grossed more than $20 million in the US:
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Life Is Beautiful
Hero
Pan’s Labyrinth
Amelie
Jet Li’s Fearless
Il Postino
Like Water for Chocolate
La Cage aux Folles
And only 22 have made more than $10 million. There are some great great films on the full list. (via latimes)
The September Issue
I straight-up loved this movie. It’s a fascinating look at the creative process of a team with strong leadership operating at a very high level. The trailer is pretty misleading in this respect…the main story in the film has little to do with fashion and should be instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever worked with a bunch of people on a project. Others have made the comparison of Anna Wintour with Steve Jobs and it seems apt. At several points in the film, my thoughts drifted to Jobs and Apple; Wintour seems like the same sort of creative leader as Jobs.
Pre-order Avatar on Blu-ray
Avatar is already available for pre-order on Blu-ray (and DVD). Release date is April 22.
Marwencol
Marwencol is the name of fictional town built by Mark Hogancamp in his backyard in an attempt to cope with a near-fatal beating. Jeff Malmberg has made a documentary of the same name about Hogancamp’s fantasy world.
After being beaten into a brain-damaging coma by five men outside a bar, Mark built a 1/6th scale World War II-era town in his backyard. Mark populated the town he dubbed “Marwencol” with dolls representing his friends and family and created life-like photographs detailing the town’s many relationships and dramas. Playing in the town and photographing the action helped Mark to recover his hand-eye coordination and deal with the psychic wounds from the attack. Through his homemade therapy, Mark was able to begin the long journey back into the “real world”, both physically and emotionally — something he continues to struggle with today.
Some bits of the film are available on Vimeo. (thx, greg)
Best movie scenes
The Guardian asked several film directors to choose their favorite movie scenes. Ryan Fleck chose the chase scene from The French Connection and discovered that the 80+ mph chase was done through normal traffic with Hackman just driving like a crazy person.
I did a little bit of research about how they shot the scene. Phenomenal. Basically they just did it. There was no security blocking off other traffic, just Hackman in a car with a camera mounted on the front. They went crazy, lost their minds, and went for it. It was the kind of thing that you just would never get away with these days.
I don’t know if it’s my favorite or not, but the opening scene in The Matrix where the cops walk into a dusty old building to find Trinity working alone at a computer and then she flies up in the air and the camera circles around her as she kicks those cops’ asses, well, let’s just say I want to be that excited about seeing the rest of every single movie I watch. (via @brainpicker)
Update: The FC chase scene was actually done by stunt driver Bill Hickman. (thx, jason)
Philip K. Dick on Blade Runner
Philip K. Dick never got to see Blade Runner, Ridley Scott’s film adaptation of his book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, but he did catch a snippet of the film on TV a few months before he died and was over the moon about it.
I can only say that I did not know that a work of mine or a set of ideas of mine could be escalated into such stunning dimensions. My life and creative work are justified and completed by Blade Runner.
(via hodgman)
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