kottke.org posts about movies
In just a few days (Dec 5), the entirety of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill duology will be released in theaters as one four-hour-long film. Here’s the trailer:
Watch video on YouTube.
Quentin Tarantino’s KILL BILL: THE WHOLE BLOODY AFFAIR unites Volume 1 and Volume 2 into a single, unrated epic—presented exactly as he intended, complete with a new, never-before-seen anime sequence.
And there will be an intermission. I haven’t seen KB in awhile and am looking forward to this.
Oh, and QT has a Kill Bill collab with Fortnite? Apparently in the original script, there was a scene where Yuki Yubari (Gogo Yubari’s twin sister) tries to get revenge on Kiddo, but it was cut because the director deemed it “too much to chew” for one shoot. Using Unreal Engine 5, Fortnite characters, and a motion-captured Uma Thurman, Tarantino has finally made the scene a reality. You can find it in the game or watch it on YouTube:
Watch video on YouTube.
Watch video on YouTube.
I am not generally a fan of rom-coms so I didn’t think I was going to post Evan Puschak’s newest video, but he’s so good at them. Puschak argues that rom-coms are compelling because they reflect the modern challenge of finding meaning as individuals.
In the modern day, we live in a world without a cosmic moral order, a framework of meaning to which everyone automatically subscribes. We had one for a while. But round about the year 1700, give or take a century, that framework started cracking, fragmenting, losing its authority, and the burden of finding meaning shifted onto individuals. We all became desperate seekers in a confusing and disjointed world.
It’s no coincidence that this shift roughly coincides with the emergence of the novel as a form of storytelling. In a profoundly new way, the novel concerned itself with individuals, ordinary individuals — their internal motivations, their inner lives, their ability to overcome obstacles to achieve a goal. Novels both reflected and shaped the way modern people saw their identities as narratives; as stories with a beginning, middle, and end; as quests for meaning.
And if that’s not interesting to you, turn down the sound and enjoy the kinetic pleasure of watching people — Tom Cruise, Meg Ryan, Dustin Hoffman, Renée Zellweger, Hugh Grant — sprinting in a great 4-minute supercut.
On tour for the 35th anniversary of Home Alone, Macaulay Culkin said his kids love the movie, but don’t know he’s Kevin. They’re only three and four years old, so this makes sense, but it’s still hilarious.
And while they will even get excited when they see the young character in montages on Disney+, where the film is available to stream, Culkin said, “They have no idea that I’m Kevin.” “They’re only three and four years old,” continued the actor, adding that he wants “to keep up that illusion as long as possible.”
But also, did you know Angels With Dirty Souls isn’t a real movie? I didn’t.
Since we’re here, how about a Home Alone oral history from 10 years ago?
Mark Radcliffe
Chris wanted to do snow dressing as part of the background of the movie. Budgetwise, we couldn’t really afford it. On the second day of shooting, we had a blizzard. From then on, we pretty much had to bring in snow machines after it started to melt and match it for the rest of the movie. I remember that whenever the snow melted, we were spraying ice, and then they had problems with ice. The next thing, they were literally laying bags of ice to try and create snow.
James Giovannetti Jr., second assistant director
We had refrigerated semitrucks of shaved ice coming to the set. There must’ve been about 15 guys dumping tons of ice in the yard every day. We may have even got water in the house, because when it started melting, it started seeping into the basement.
Jacolyn Bucksbaum
The morning when Catherine O’Hara pulls up and finally gets home, it was gorgeous, real snow. The biggest snowstorm in years, and it was Valentine’s Day. Mother Nature really helped us out with that one.
There are actually quite a few Home Alone oral histories.
And most importantly, in my opinion, please read this thread about Die Hard vs Home Alone from two people with “philosophy” in their bio which includes the line, “The damned in hell are not more powerful for the fact that the fires do not consume them; it is part and parcel of their torment.”
I wonder if they could make Home Alone again now or does the ubiquity of cell phones preclude a lot of the dramatic tension the film relies on?
This is the trailer for an HBO documentary called Thoughts and Prayers about “the impact of the $3 billion active shooter preparedness industry on schools and communities across America”.
Watch video on YouTube.
It’s tough to watch, as is this clip from the film in which a girl describes a bag of supplies that she carries in her backpack in case there’s a school shooting.
From David Ehrlich’s review in IndieWire:
Bulletproof desks that students can flip over at the first sign of trouble. A robot dog the size of a Pomeranian that jumps and yaps at the sight of an intruder. Inflatable body armor light enough for a first grader to blow up and hide behind. These are just a few of the more sensible products that are on display in the opening moments of Zackary Canepari and Jessica Dimmock’s utterly damning “Thoughts & Prayers” — the least farcical selection of props that contribute to America’s burgeoning active shooter defense industry, which now grosses more than three billion dollars per year.
Of course, that’s a small price to pay for the laughably transparent illusion that we’re taking any meaningful steps toward protecting our kids from being slaughtered in their classrooms. In a crumbling empire where common sense has been eroded by ideology, and the political will to solve a problem can’t hope to compete with the ghoulish impulse to profit from it, creating a new business sector might just be the only kind of healing that the richest country on Earth can afford.
It is totally and utterly and completely sickening that we choose to live this way in America.
Konnichiwa! I’m back from Japan and finally getting over my jetlag, which took much longer than I expected. Here’s a list of all the things I’ve been reading, watching, listening to, and experiencing over the past few months.1 Let us know what movies, books, art, TV, music, etc. you’ve been enjoying in the comments below!
Deacon King Kong by James McBride. This was my first time reading anything by McBride and maybe I have a new favorite author? I love everything about this story and the way he tells it. (A+)
The Da Vinci Code. One of my go-to comfort movies. “Scientific” art history detective story? Yes, please. (A)
Watch video on YouTube.
One Battle After Another. Great. Especially Sean Penn. And it reminded me of a Wes Anderson movie for some reason? Like one that he would have made had he followed the Bottle Rocket path instead of the Rushmore Path. (A+)
Meredith Dairy Marinated Sheep & Goat Cheese. All cheese is delicious, but this one particularly so. (A)
Fantastic Four. It was ok? Aside from a few things, I’m having trouble getting excited about post-Infinity Saga Marvel. There was just a special alchemy about that whole arc that is proving impossible to reproduce. (B)
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. Fantastic right from the first page. Sharp writing about social mores, reminded me of Middlemarch & Price and Prejudice in that respect. One of my all-time favorites, I think. (A+)
The Gilded Age (season three). Still enjoying the hell out of this show. Total suspension of disbelief is a must. (A-)
Mission: Impossible. I haven’t seen this in maybe 20 years and I guess it holds up? Not my favorite of the series though. (B+)
Watch video on YouTube.
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Great spy thriller. Gary Oldman is fantastic in this. Cold War? Spies? Britain? I will pretty much watch as many of this type of movie as you can make. (A)
Leaving America. This is a 12-part podcast on the logistics, benefits, and challenges of leaving the United States. Oh, no reason. (B+)
The Fellowship of the Ring (and TT & ROTK) by J.R.R. Tolkien. It’s been a while since I’ve read The Lord of the Rings books and wow, are they long. There’s entirely too much “and they travelled from here to there” logistics that drag on over several pages and descriptions of hilltops & ancient landmarks that you only hear about once. But Andy Serkis narrating the audiobook? So good. (A-)
The Lord of the Rings trilogy. After each audiobook, I watched the extended version of the corresponding film. My general feeling after 65+ hours of audiobook and 12+ hours of movie is that the books are too long and the movies too short. An 18-hour mini-series — perhaps three seasons of six episodes each? — seems like the sweet spot. (A)
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (season three). Maybe didn’t enjoy this quite as much as the previous two season, but I love spending time with these people and look forward to doing more of that when season four drops. (B+)
Jaws. Got to see this in the theater when they released it for the 50th anniversary. Spielberg had such a strong style right from the jump. (A-)
Paradise. Just fine. But I feel like there are better apocalyptic shows out there. (B)
Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale. It was so nice to head to the theater to nestle myself into the low-stakes world of Downton Abbey for 2 hours. (B+)
Watch video on YouTube.
Daft Punk Fortnite. Love anything with Daft Punk. (A)
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride. Right after finishing Deacon King Kong, I did something I almost never do: started in on a different book from the same author. Loved this one too. (A+)
Tron: Ares. It was a loud NIN music video on a huge screen, what’s not to like? Jared Leto was fine, but there were probably better casting options here that the audience would have been more excited about. And the direction could have been stronger…Gillian Anderson and Greta Lee were both surprisingly meh. (B+)
Watch video on YouTube.
Tron: Ares soundtrack. Better than the movie. (A-)
Total Recall. First time! Maybe a little too Verhoeven/B-movie for me. (C+)
Cars. I’ve seen this movie several times and what I noticed this time around is how incredibly expressive the cars are. You can just tell they worked very hard on that aspect of the animation. (A-)
Shopkeeping by Peter Miller. This was recommended from a couple of different vectors — pretty sure one was Robin Sloan. Lots of resonance to my work here and how I think about it (and want to think about it). (A-)
Japan. Absolutely loved it. (A+)
Iyoshi Cola. Craft colas are often disappointing, but this one was absolutely delicious. Wish I could get it in the States for less than $14 a can. (A)
teamLab Borderless. Some of this was too “built for Instagram” but a couple of the rooms (the one where it felt like the whole room was moving & the cathedralish one with the light strings) were great. (A-)
The Sumida Hokusai Museum. Had to make the pilgrimage here. (A-)
In Praise of Shadows by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki. Read this book about Japanese aesthetics while visiting Japan — it provided an interesting context. (B+)
Hokusai at Creative Museum Tokyo. Fantastic show…there were hundreds and hundreds of prints and drawings that showed his evolution and influence. (A+)
Okunoin Cemetery. Had one of the strongest senses of place I have ever experienced. (A)
Konbini. The Japanese convenience stores really are as appealing as you’ve heard. (A-)
Awakening Your Ikigai by Ken Mogi. Perhaps a little over-simplifying when it comes to Japanese culture, but I appreciated the message of having a purpose. (B)
Sho-Chan Okonomiyaki. When I got to Hiroshima, I knew I had to try their version of okonomiyaki, so I went to Okonomimura, a multi-story building crammed with okonomiyaki restaurants. I picked one and had one of the most surprising meals of my trip. So good. (A)
Blue Planet Sky. I spent a lot of time sitting in this room by James Turrell. (A)
Kanazawa Phonograph Museum. Lovely little museum, and a good opportunity to observe how successful inventions move from technology to culture/fashion/commerce. (A)
Princess Mononoke. I saw this in the theater on my last full day in Tokyo; they recently released a 4K remaster. Absolutely breathtaking. (A+)
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Redford and Newman are both total smokeshows in this. And I’d forgotten how goofy this movie is. (B+)
Watch video on YouTube.
A House of Dynamite. A very tough watch, but I thought this was fantastic as a tour of some of the different kinds of people who hold the fate of every single person on the planet in their hands every damn day. They’re tired, stressed, distracted, at cross-purposes with themselves, set in their ways, more celebs than leaders, and mediocre. And none of them have ever seen Dr. Strangelove? (A)
Past installments of my media diet are available here. What good things have you watched, read, or listened to lately?
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Vanity Fair sat down with Harrison Ford and asked him to identify which of his lines he’d said in which movie, mostly as a way of getting him to talk about his career. A few observations:
- I love that they trolled him with The Star Wars Holiday Special…and he knew the line! “I’ve never seen it, which explains it. But I was there, though.”
- Harrison Ford was in Apocalypse Now? And George Lucas, when he saw the film (post-Star Wars), didn’t recognize Ford?
- On Blade Runner: “I like any cut without the narration.”
The story he tells about his first role with lines, in a film called Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round, is a good one.
Variety has done a bunch of these videos with actors & directors like Kate Winslet, Greta Gerwig, Carol Burnett, Jeffrey Wright, and Gary Oldman.
As part of the fascist war on “woke”, tens of thousands of books have been pulled from the shelves of libraries around the country over the past few years. On the front line are the nation’s librarians, “first responders in the fight for democracy and our First Amendment rights”. The Librarians is a documentary film about this latest wave of censorship & persecution of librarians; here’s the trailer:
Watch video on YouTube.
From a review on RogerEbert.com:
“The Librarians” is a documentary about the hysterical, unfounded, personal, and sometimes violent attacks on librarians. It is also about their unwavering commitment to making facts, literature, and inspiration available to anyone.
And:
The film has some indelibly searing moments, linking these efforts to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare, to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels’ burning books by Jewish authors, and to the Twilight Zone episode “The Obsolete Man,” with Burgess Meredith as a librarian sentenced to death. There is a quote from President Eisenhower: “Don’t think you’re going to conceal faults by concealing evidence they ever existed. Read every book.”
The Librarians is out in theaters now but not very widely, so you’ll have to check the list of screenings on their web site.
Watch video on YouTube.
In an interview lasting for more than an hour, classicist Mary Beard shares her knowledge & experience about how the picture of Rome we might have in our heads, inherited from Hollywood movies like Gladiator, is incomplete (and just plain wrong in some cases) and what the reality was, gleaned from Roman sources.
We’ve inherited the history of Ancient Rome through movies, ruins, and shallow stories. The truth is far messier, says classicist Mary Beard. The hidden side of Roman life that screens rarely capture is chaotic; crowded streets teeming with Romans whose everyday lives were shaped by social hierarchies and familial obligations.
Mary Beard unpacks what archaeology, literature, and even shoes tell us about the Romans’ daily lives. From the role of slaves in dressing elites to the rowdy crowds at chariot races, she shows how we’ve underestimated their complexity.
(via open culture)
Here’s the trailer for The Age of Audio, a feature-length documentary about the invention and popularization of podcasting, from Adam Curry to Ronald Young Jr.
Watch video on YouTube.
I ran across this movie via a clip on Instagram that explains how the word “podcast” came to be; here’s the same clip from YouTube:
Watch video on YouTube.
Every time there’s a new technology, it always has to be named the dumbest thing.
Whoever came up with the name podcasting, like what a dumbass name.
It’s so funny cuz the podcast community gets very heated about these issues.
Whoever invented the word podcast, I’m going to punch him in the throat.
See also blogging. 🫠
Watch video on YouTube.
In his most recent video, Evan Puschak takes a close look at Marlon Brando’s face and gestures in a scene from On the Waterfront to explain how Brando changed film forever.
And this is what makes Brando a genius: when his eyes betray his words. His voice says, “What do you really care?” But his eyes say, “Please care. Please show me that you care.”
Welp, time to watch On the Waterfront, I guess.
Watch video on YouTube.
Listening to Ethan Hawke talk about his career for 30 minutes is a treat. He starts with Explorers (which I loved as a kid) and continues with Dead Poets Society, Before Sunrise, Boyhood, and First Reformed. Good Lord Bird is on the list as well…I’m making my way through the book right now and I’ll be eager to check out the miniseries after I’m finished.
I wish they would have included Gattaca but you have to stop somewhere otherwise the dang thing’s gonna be an hour long.
Watch video on YouTube.
It’s not often that a movie trailer makes you cry — but this one might.1
Come See Me in the Good Light is a documentary film about poets Andrea Gibson and Megan Falley facing a cancer diagnosis that took Gibson’s life earlier this year.
This is the beginning of a nightmare, I thought. But stay with me, y’all, because my story is one about happiness, being easier to find, once we realize we do not have forever to find it.
Falley’s letter published just after Gibson’s death will give you a sense of the spirit of the film & the two humans at the center of it:
A couple years ago, Andrea said, “Whenever I leave this world, whether it’s sixty years from now, I wouldn’t want anyone to say I lost some battle. I’ll be a winner that day.”
Whatever beast of emotion bucks or whimpers through you right now, I hope you can hold that line beside it: Andrea didn’t lose anything. If you had been here in our home during the three days of their dying — if you’d seen dozens of friends drift in to help, to say goodbye, to say thank you, to kiss their perfect face, if you’d felt the love that floored every hospice nurse — you would have agreed. Andrea won.
The film is set to premiere Nov 14 on Apple TV.
Watch video on YouTube.
From director Kathryn Bigelow comes A House of Dynamite (trailer), starring Rebecca Ferguson, Idris Elba, and Greta Lee.
When a single, unattributed missile is launched at the United States, a race begins to determine who is responsible and how to respond.
A House of Dynamite is out in theaters right now and will be on Netflix in a couple of weeks.
Watch video on YouTube.
If you were one of those people who loved watching DVD extras, you’ll enjoy the hell out of ILM visual effects artist Todd Vaziri breaking down some of the special effects that he and his team have worked on, including Rogue One, The Force Awakens, and Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. Introducing the video on his site, Vaziri writes:
My goal was to highlight the artistic process of visual effects. Movies like the ones I highlight in the video are crafted by hundreds of artists, technicians and production folks, all working together to achieve the vision of the director. I’m so proud to have worked with such amazing crews over the years.
Many of the effects he highlights aren’t the obvious ones — monsters, digital Leia, lightsaber battles — but rather effects that you’d never notice — indeed effects that you shouldn’t notice because they are designed to be seamless. Like a “dust poof” from a slingshot shot — it registers and helps sell the scene, but you’d never think, “oh, that’s an effect”.
The whole thing is fascinating — and the rope thing is genius.
I thought this piece from Isaac Butler examining how Daniel Day-Lewis goes about his acting work was really interesting.
I have always been haunted in some way by Day-Lewis. He is clearly among the greatest living screen actors, with a career that includes several performances that no one else could have accomplished at his level. But from when I quit acting through to when I wrote my own book on The Method, until now, I have always wondered whether the brilliance he is capable of requires the lengths to which he drives himself. As his techniques have been adopted by a whole generation of self-serious actors both good (Christian Bale) and not (Jared Leto), I have also come to wonder if the legends are even true. It turns out that the answers to both questions are far more complicated than I thought.
As someone who used to write quite a bit about relaxed concentration, I was especially interested in this bit:
Another reason, the one I find most persuasive, is that if you are able to live as fully as possible in the imagined reality of the character, you enter a flow state where you stop thinking and start doing and being. Day-Lewis struggles most in interviews to answer questions that require what he terms “objectifying,” or thinking outside of the headspace of the character. When he is on set, he wants to never be objective, to never interrupt the process of being and doing in order to think. When asked once about specific physical gestures he made in There Will Be Blood, he replied, “my decision-making process has to happen in such a way that I’m absolutely unaware of it, otherwise I’m objectifying a situation that demands something different.” When asked about the meaning of Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York, he said he can’t answer the question, because “there was no conscious intention to show him as one way or another.”
This state of pure being is the actor’s equivalent of when great athletes are “in the zone,” or the trance that a jazz improviser enters when they’re really cooking. The name for it is a Russian word, perezhivanie, which means experiencing.
Watch video on YouTube.
In 1969, Fred Rogers appeared before the Senate to argue against cutting federal funding for public broadcasting. During his testimony, Rogers recited a song from his show, What Do You Do with the Mad That You Feel? In this short video, Jon Lefkovitz accompanies Mister Rogers’ words with some music and short scenes from movies like Moonlight, The 400 Blows, Do the Right Thing, Lady Bird, 2001, and Return of the Jedi.
Watch video on YouTube.
In his latest video essay, Thomas Flight praises the comfort film and shares some examples (The Big Lebowski, Perfect Days, Mon Oncle, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Moonrise Kingdom) from a few different types.
We want high stakes to make things interesting. But if you’re constantly being bombarded by conflict in your real life or the other media you’re consuming, it might be nice to spend some time with a story that takes a step back from high-stakes conflict as the primary narrative driving force.
I don’t know about you, but I am watching, reading, and listening to a looot of comfort media lately. (And by “lately”, I mean the past 8-10 years. 🫠) I felt this bit deeply:
There’s a point at which we can become trapped in chronic nervous system distress because of the media we’re consuming. Our brains are hardwired to scan our environment for potential dangers or problems. The media you consume can then end up releasing cortisol, raising your blood pressure, elevating your heart rate, inducing stress. And when we have access to this media in our pockets all the time, it means that places in our lives that may have typically been felt as a safe haven in the past, like maybe our living room or our bedroom, are now often the places where we’re really intensely and intimately consuming some of the most distressing media that we ever consume.
What are your favorite comfort movies? Any non-obvious ones? (E.g. I watch disaster movies as comfort films. The Day After Tomorrow, 2012, The Core, Deep Impact.)
Watch video on YouTube.
In his latest video, Evan Puschak looks at the differences between Edith Wharton’s novel The Age of Innocence and Martin Scorsese’s 1993 film adaptation.
In every adaptation across artistic mediums, there is a loss. You lose something of the original, something vital. But hopefully you gain something too, ideally something that the new medium is uniquely good at expressing.
I’ve been thinking about the pros and cons of adaptation as I make my way through the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy on audiobook. I’ve been watching each of the movies after finishing the corresponding book, so I’m getting a really good sense how the books differ from the film adaptations. Some hardcore Tolkien fans were critical of some of Peter Jackson’s choices (leaving out Tom Bombadil for instance) but as the 20-hour+ audiobooks attest, you can’t leave everything in — and there are long sections where the books’ narrative drags like a rusty muffler.
Watch video on YouTube.
Even after reading a couple of reviews and watching the trailer, it’s difficult to understand what the Austrian film Little, Big, and Far is actually about. So here’s the official synopsis:
Austrian astronomer Karl is at a crossroads in his life and work. He finds his physicist wife growing distant and his job being reshaped by environmental crises as thoughts about science, fascism, and his grandson’s future spin above his head. After attending a conference in Greece, Karl decides not to return home and heads for a small island in hopes of finding a dark enough sky to reconnect with the stars. Abandoned at a remote mountain trail, he ascends and waits for darkness to fall.
Watch video on YouTube.
Disney dropped the trailer for The Mandalorian and Grogu today, a feature-length film that will debut in theaters in May 2026. As this Star Wars Explained breakdown, er, explains, that the trailer was going to come out earlier but:
Word on the street is that it was supposed to come out this past Friday, but Disney was and is in the middle of some hot water. Acting like cowards in the face of authoritarianism will do that, especially when one of the franchises you own {shows footage of Andor} is about the exact opposite.
Last week, Disney made the decision to pull Jimmy Kimmel Live from the schedule because of threats from the Trump regime, prompting protests. Kimmel returns to the air tomorrow night:
“Last Wednesday, we made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country. It is a decision we made because we felt some of the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive,” the company said in a statement. “We have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy, and after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show on Tuesday.”
Christian Marclay debuted his 24-hour film The Clock 15 years ago. The film is made up of thousands of clips from movies and TV shows that show timepieces or otherwise make reference to the time of day. I’ve seen chunks of it in a few museums & galleries and it’s wonderful.
Using this extraordinary minute-by-minute timeline of nearly all the scenes that make up The Clock, one person is attempting to reverse engineer the entire film. It’s not The Clock, but it’s A Clock. Here are a couple of excerpts:
Says the creator:
So, when I stumbled upon this Fandom Wiki, where the mysterious user ElevenFiftyNine had seemingly started the task of listing all the movies in The Clock, I couldn’t help myself; I started remaking the whole thing from scratch.
So, since I can’t really say this is The Clock, it is my best attempt at making a Clock, by following the excellent effort by ElevenFiftyNine.
A ten-minute excerpt is free on the website but you need to join the Patreon to watch the entire work-in-progress. According to their most recent update, the film is finished but the final version isn’t online quite yet; October 15th is the release date.
BTW, here’s the creator’s definition of “finished”:
I spoke some months ago about what 100% means for this project, and it is not that it is a fully perfect copy of Marclay’s work. The information available online is incomplete, and new information might appear in the future. For now, 100% means that all available information, is in a Clock.
And incredibly, they have never actually seen The Clock in person:
Unfortunately I have never had a chance to see The Clock, as it is only visible when exhibited at a museum. This is increasingly a rare occurrence, and even then, apparently the queues when it is on show, are monstrous. Never mind that it might be anywhere in the world!
Aside from the clips, I haven’t watched any of this yet, but it is a very tempting alternative to waiting for a rare showing somewhere I happen to be.
Artist and poet Marcus Merritt draws objects from films — the TV above is from E.T. and the payphone is from Terminator 2.
I very much dig the spare illustration style here. (via waxy)
I haven’t watched it yet, but I have seen so many recommendations for this gonzo birdwatching documentary called Listers over the past few days that I wanted to share it with you.
Two brothers travel across the United States in a used minivan on a mission to find as many bird species as they can in a single year.
Yeah, not your typical birdwatching fare…the vibe of the brothers’ quest is more like a surf or skate video. Here’s the trailer:
Watch video on YouTube.
And the whole 2-hour movie is available on YouTube as well:
Watch video on YouTube.
I’ve hoping to make some time to watch it this weekend; it looks great. The two brothers have also released a companion book, Field Guide of All the Birds We Found One Year in the United States.
Watch video on YouTube.
The trailer for Wake Up Dead Man, the new Knives Out movie; looks like another great prestige caper.
Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) returns for his most dangerous case yet in the third and darkest chapter of Rian Johnson’s murder mystery opus. Starring Daniel Craig, Josh O’Connor, Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, Mila Kunis, Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, Cailee Spaeny, Daryl McCormack, and Thomas Haden Church.
It’s coming out in “select theaters” on Nov 26 before its debut on Netflix Dec 12.
Watch video on YouTube.
Whoa, I have not watched this documentary in a loooong time — very interesting to watch in the future this company helped to create, for good and very, very bad.
Code Rush is a documentary following the lives of a group of Netscape engineers in Silicon Valley. It covers Netscape’s last year as an independent company, from their announcement of the Mozilla open source project until their acquisition by AOL. It particularly focuses on the last minute rush to make the Mozilla source code ready for release by the deadline of March 31 1998, and the impact on the engineers’ lives and families as they attempt to save the company from ruin.
Interviews in the movie include Ellen Ullman, Kara Swisher, Jamie Zawinski, Jim Barksdale, Marc Andreessen, and Brendan Eich. (via robin sloan)
This is the trailer for a documentary celebrating the life and work of actor & comedian John Candy.
Watch video on YouTube.
I loved John Candy; how could you not? Uncle Buck was my favorite of his movies. I can’t believe he died more than 20 years ago already. (via craig mod)
Watch video on YouTube.
For her newest film, director Chloé Zhao (Nomadland) has adapted Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel Hamnet; both book and movie are about William Shakespeare and his wife in the aftermath of the death of their 11-year-old son, Hamnet. Paul Mescal stars as William Shakespeare and Jessie Buckley as his wife Agnes. Here’s the trailer.
The film recently premiered at the Telluride Film Festival and the reviews are very good.
Premiering at the Telluride Film Festival ahead of a November theatrical release, Hamnet is devastating, maybe the most emotionally shattering movie I’ve seen in years. The book was overwhelming, too, and going into a film about the death of a child, one naturally prepares to shed some tears. Still, I did not really expect to cry this much. That’s not just because of the tragic weight of the material, but because the picture reimagines the poetic act of creating Hamlet. Shakespeare’s play sits on the highest shelf, fixed by the dust from centuries of acclaim. It is about as unimpeachable as a work of art can be. And yet, here is a movie that dares to explore its inception. The attempt itself is noble, and maybe a little brazen; that it succeeds feels downright supernatural.
The film premieres in the US on Nov 27 with a nationwide release on Dec 12.
Now showing at the Brooklyn Museum (through April 2026) and the ICA in Boston (until Spet 1, 2025) is Christian Marclay’s Doors. Like his masterpiece The Clock, Doors is a film montage, this time of people in movies opening and closing doors.
In Doors (2022), Marclay stitches together hundreds of short film clips featuring the opening and closing of doors. More than a decade in the making, the moving image collage draws from nearly all genres of narrative cinema ranging from French New Wave to Hollywood blockbusters. Carefully edited by Marclay, the visual narrative follows actors entering new spaces, with each door marking an editing point and transitioning between films and soundscapes. The work suggests a labyrinthine journey where protagonists get lost and found again. Marclay describes the video as sculptural – a “mental architecture that the viewer might or might not follow and get lost in.”
The film is 54 minutes long but runs in a continuous loop. These videos feature some footage from the film; this one shows five minutes and this one four minutes:
Watch video on YouTube.
Watch video on YouTube.
Here’s Marclay on the process of making the video:
It’s quite difficult to find scenes in cinema showing an actor entering a space and then going into another space. I needed two doors: The actor enters one space and then leaves through another door — so it’s one room to the next room to the next room to the next room, and every time a different actor in a different film. It’s a strange choreography to edit. The door has to be opened in a similar way and at the same speed to make it believable. If someone is running and then you see them peek slowly through the door on the other side, it doesn’t look realistic. I also had to match the motion of pulling or pushing the door. To make things even more complicated, that door is hinged on one side and that has to match, the hinge and the door handle. If done well, the viewer gets sucked in and fooled by these editing tricks. So you see an actor in color in the ’80s entering a black-and-white film from the ’50s, and you know it’s not the same actor, but your mind wants to believe that it is. The trick is to create a flow, an illusion of continuity.
Doors brings to mind Christopher Nolan’s Inception (“a mental architecture that the viewer might or might not follow and get lost in”) and the doorway effect (“The doorway effect or location updating effect is a replicable psychological phenomenon characterized by short-term memory loss when passing through a doorway or moving from one location to another.”)
P.S. The Clock is showing at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, starting at the end of November and running through Jan 18, 2026.
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