Coldplay tapped Spike Jonze & Mary Wigmore to direct the music video for a song called All My Love from their latest album and the pair decided to turn it into an early 99th birthday celebration of Dick Van Dyke. Van Dyke danced a bit, sung a bit, was swarmed by his family, and ruminated on nearing the end of his life:
I’m acutely aware that I could go any day now, but I don’t know why it doesn’t concern me. I’m not afraid of it. I have the feeling — totally against anything intellectual I have — that I’m gonna be alright.
The video is really quite moving — what a splendid human. Watch until the end, when Chris Martin composes a song on the spot for an absolutely delighted Van Dyke. (via @danielgray.com)
The original score for Spike Jonze’s 2013 movie Her, composed by Arcade Fire & Owen Pallett, will finally see a proper release next month. You can preorder on vinyl, cassette, or MP3. I’m assuming it will also be out on streaming services on its release date of March 19. I’ve been waiting years for this (even though it’s been available as a bootleg online this whole time).
Here’s the trailer for Beastie Boys Story, a feature-length documentary about the band directed by Spike Jonze. The film will debut in early April in IMAX theaters and be out on Apple+ later that month. From Rolling Stone:
The documentary is a live extension of 2018’s Beastie Boys Book, a memoir that paid tribute to Yauch, who died of cancer in 2012. “Looking back, it’s like, oh shit, that was crazy — how did we live through that?” Horovitz told Rolling Stone of the memoir. “And look at us now. We’re grown-ups. We have to think about mortgages. I gotta get dog food.”
Live portions of the documentary were taken from Horovitz and Diamond’s recent show at Kings Theatre in Brooklyn; it was all part of a live tour directed by Jonze that consisted of Q&A segments, readings, and guest moderators.
I would place some of the elements in Jonze’s depiction at around 2020, give or take a couple of years, such as the diffident and insulting videogame character he interacts with, and the pin-sized cameras that one can place like a freckle on one’s face. Other elements seem more like 2014, such as the flat-panel displays, notebooks and mobile devices.
Samantha herself I would place at 2029, when the leap to human-level AI would be reasonably believable. There are some incongruities, however. As I mentioned, a lot of the dramatic tension is provided by the fact that Theodore’s love interest does not have a body. But this is an unrealistic notion. It would be technically trivial in the future to provide her a virtual visual presence to match her virtual auditory presence, using, lens-mounted displays, for example, that display images onto Theodore’s retinas.
According to Jonze in interviews, Kurzweil’s work on the singularity was a definite influence on the movie.
According to Spike Jonze, there might not be an official release of the soundtrack for Her (performed by Arcade Fire), but the whole thing is somehow currently on the internet for your listening pleasure:
Update: Win Butler of Arcade Fire now says the Her soundtrack will be released in some form eventually.
Well, maybe. According to the LA Times, the pair are pitching a film around that Kaufman will write and Jonze will direct.
The pair are pitching a new movie. While the plot is being kept under tight wraps — it’s a pitch, so a script has yet to be written, and Kaufman movies are famously hard to describe in a few sentences anyway — two people familiar with the project said it has been making the rounds to independent financiers in recent weeks.
If it moves forward, the film would reunite the pair in the roles that vaulted them to fame for the first time since “Adaptation” in 2002.
THE THEME OF THIS PARTICULAR PROGRAM is “JOCKS vs. NERDS,” the culture war of our time, and a subject that you know I have been thinking about for some time now, and also talking about with the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.
IN THIS CASE, the “NERD” shall be played by me, John Hodgman, and the “JOCK” shall be played by the New York Jet, NICK MANGOLD, as I confront all of my deepest fears (humiliation/being punched/Nick Mangold) and attempted to learn from him the virtues of jock culture and the rules of football.
And YOU are invited: September 28th in NYC. Tickets are free and they have an unlimited supply because they are filming it in some sort of massive rocket ship hanger. All you Little Hobos (that’s what Hodgman calls all his fans) click through for details on how to get your tickets.
“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.
Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are might be in trouble. It was originally due out in October, got pushed back to fall 2009, and has now been taken off of the Warner Bros. release schedule. But not all is lost…here’s what Warner had to say about it:
We’ve given him more money and, even more importantly, more time for him to work on the film,” Horn said. “We’d like to find a common ground that represents Spike’s vision but still offers a film that really delivers for a broad-based audience. We obviously still have a challenge on our hands. But I wouldn’t call it a problem, simply a challenge. No one wants to turn this into a bland, sanitized studio movie. This is a very special piece of material and we’re just trying to get it right.
Where the Wild Things Are is filled with richly imagined psychological detail, and the screenplay for this live-action film simply becomes a longer and more moving version of what Maurice Sendak’s book has always been at heart: a book about a lonely boy leaving the emotional terrain of boyhood behind.
Bad news from McSweeney’s: their distributor filed for bankruptcy late last year and now they’re out $130,000:
As you may know, it’s been tough going for many independent publishers, McSweeney’s included, since our distributor filed for bankruptcy last December 29. We lost about $130,000 — actual earnings that were simply erased. Due to the intricacies of the settlement, the real hurt didn’t hit right away, but it’s hitting now. Like most small publishers, our business is basically a break-even proposition in the best of times, so there’s really no way to absorb a loss that big.
To try and make up the gap, they’re having a big sale and are also auctioning off some “rare items” like original art from Chris Ware, proofs from issues, signed copies of things, a painting by Dave Eggers of George W. Bush as a double amputee, and so on. In addition to Ware and Eggers, there’s stuff from David Byrne, Nick Hornsby, and Spike Jonze. I’ve long admired McSweeney’s for their editorial and business approach…it would be a shame to see them go out of business because of another company’s financial difficulties. So give them a hand by purchasing something, if you’d like.
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