Using behind-the-scenes footage shot over the past decade, Magnus is a feature-length documentary about reigning world chess champion Magnus Carlsen.
From a young age Magnus Carlsen had aspirations of becoming a champion chess player. While many players seek out an intensely rigid environment to hone their skills, Magnus’ brilliance shines brightest when surrounded by his loving and supportive family. Through an extensive amount of archival footage and home movies, director Benjamin Ree reveals this young man’s unusual and rapid trajectory to the pinnacle of the chess world. This film allows the audience to not only peek inside this isolated community but also witness the maturation of a modern genius.
One of the things that a number of people commented on after seeing The Force Awakens (including me) was that the movie seemed to be a remix or an homage to the original Star Wars.
With The Force Awakens, JJ Abrams did the same thing, but instead of pulling from Flash Gordon and Kurosawa like Lucas did, he pulled from what he grew up with as a kid and in film school…Star Wars and Spielberg. In a way, The Force Awakens is a reboot of the original 1977 Star Wars, similar plot and all. And even if it isn’t a true reboot, it sure does rhyme.
Although some of the comparisons are a stretch, this video does a nice job highlighting the visual similarities of the two movies.
Related: Kenji Lopez-Alt took off his food nerd hat for a second and donned his Star Wars nerd hat with this piece at Medium: Rey is a Palpatine.
In this clip from Koyaanisqatsi, Andy Kelly replaced Philip Glass’ score with music from the Wii Shop Channel. As he notes, the movie doesn’t seem quite as haunting now. (via @daveg)
People seem to like this, but I don’t know…I’ve got a bad feeling about it. Batman in The Lego Movie was cool and all, but is it enough to hang an entire film around? Not that this question isn’t totally moot…in 10 years, every movie will feature Lego superheroes.
Update: And now there’s a second trailer? Already?
At this rate, we’ll be able to cut the whole movie together by the time it comes out next year, just from the trailers.
Update: The first full trailer is out and, sure, I’ll go see this with the kids when it opens.
(via Trailer Town which also has a few other Lego Batman trailers, so why don’t you go watch them there because Trailer Town is soooo coooool. Oh, oh, you’re leaving? You know what? Fine, go. That’s right go. If you like F’ING TRAILER TOWN SO MUCH, JUST FUC — [sorry, Jason has been invited into the cooldown room for awhile])
A quickfire look at scenes from 20 movies (Gravity, The Revenant, Planet of the Apes) that were done with the help of green screens and computer animation. What, no Carol?!
Virtually all climate scientists agree with Dr. Hansen and his co-authors that society is not moving fast enough to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, posing grave risks. The basic claim of the paper is that by burning fossil fuels at a prodigious pace and pouring heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, humanity is about to provoke an abrupt climate shift.
Non-linear systems, man. Gradually, then all at once.
In addition to the risk of “several meters” of sea level rise this century, which Hansen calls the most important finding, the final version of Hansen’s paper gives new emphasis to the possibility that the ocean’s heat circulation system may be in the process of shutting down. The circulation shutdown would precede the rapid increase in global sea levels. If the shutdown happens, simultaneous cooling of the waters near Greenland and Antarctica and warming in the tropics and midlatitudes could spawn frequent strong storms on the order of Hurricane Sandy or worse.
This is a fan edit of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace with all of the crappy bits removed and several other scenes reworked. Among the changes:
- Jar Jar is now a useful character instead of an annoying tag-along
- Queen Amidala’s voice is pitch-shifted back to her normal pitch
- Midichlorian references removed
- Anakin is edited to be a more deliberate hero instead of an accidental one
It is the assertion of The Walk of Life Project that the Dire Straits song Walk of Life is the perfect thing to play at the end of movies. I have watched more than a dozen of these and they are all great, but I picked Lost in Translation, There Will Be Blood, and Terminator 2 to embed here.
The Coen brothers’ Fargo was released 20 years ago and to celebrate, Cinefix has a video about seven things you (probably) didn’t know about Fargo. The movie, not the city. There are probably way more than seven things you don’t know about Fargo, North Dakota.
Fun fact: I was living in WI near the MN border when Fargo came out and remember all the Minnesotans complaining about the accents. While I won’t say the accents were entirely accurate, all you had to do was turn on the MN State hockey tournament on channel 9 and listen to the announcers for a few minutes to confirm that they weren’t all that far off. (See also the 2016 Minnesota State High School All Hockey Hair Team. Uff da.)
There are spoilers galore in Cinefix’s look at the best ever plot twists in movies, sorted into categories including It Was All a Dream, Not Dead, and Unexpectedly Bad.
From Duel in 1971 to this year’s The BFG, Steven Spielberg has made 30 feature-length movies. This short video features one iconic scene from each one in chronological order. Interesting to note that Spielberg has used Janusz Kamiński as his director of photography for every film since Schindler’s List, a film that marked a new phase of his career. 1
Some friends were playing a game recently: name your favorite Tom Cruise movie and your least favorite Tom Hanks movie.2 I thought it would be fun to play a similar game with Spielberg standing in for Hanks but I can’t really think of who the other director would be… Who is the directorial equivalent of Tom Cruise? Respected, huge box office, but is more sizzle than substance. Michael Bay? James Cameron? Roland Emmerich? One of these guys?
Schindler’s List also occurs almost exactly halfway between the beginning of his career and the present, both time-wise and in film count.↩
Magnolia and The ‘Burbs, respectively, although I could be talked into A Few Good Men or Eyes Wide Shut for Cruise and The Money Pit for Hanks.↩
Just by watching how characters are introduced in movies, you can learn who’s important, what someone is thinking, the film’s theme, or a character’s flaws.
Paul Feig is your director; Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones are your Ghostbusters; and NYC is the backdrop. I hope the movie is better than the trailer.
Update: A second trailer is out:
I love the concept, the cast, and the director. I want this to be good. But I’m just not feeling it from these trailers.
Not all of them are direct adaptations, but a number of the movies up for Oscars this year were based on books (or otherwise have book versions). We’ve already talked about The Revenant, The Martian, and The Big Short — collectively henceforth known, along with The Danish Girl, as The The Media1 — but I was unaware that Bridge of Spies and Carol were both based on books (Strangers on a Bridge and The Price of Salt, or Carol respectively). As for best picture winner Spotlight, the Boston Globe’s investigative team wrote a book about the events that inspired the movie, Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church.
Apologies to The The, whose lack of Googleability likely hasn’t helped their popularity.↩
Mad Max, Star Wars, and Ex Machina have gotten all the VX press this year, but the special effects in Carol are off the chain, yo! I had no idea Andy Serkis played Rooney Mara’s character in certain heavy VX scenes.
A quick three-minute look at how the same scenes were filmed in movies and their remakes. Includes scenes from Oldboy, Psycho, The Ring, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Cape Fear, Planet of the Apes, Carrie, and Solaris.
Loving Vincent is an upcoming feature-length film about Vincent van Gogh that is animated in an unusual way: using 12 oil paintings per second. They’ve trained dozens of painters — and are looking for more if you’re interested — in the style of van Gogh to illustrate every instant of the film. Here are some of the painters working on the movie:
In this installment of Every Frame a Painting, Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos examine how the Coen brothers shoot characters in their films close up with wide lenses to created empathy and comedy.
When the song that became Thriller was first considered for the album that also became Thriller, it was called Starlight and had totally different lyrics.
We need some starlight starlight sun
There ain’t no second chance we got to make it while we can
You need the starlight some starlight sun
I need you by my side you give me starlight starlight tonight yeah
Originally, when I did my Thriller demo, I called it Starlight. Quincy said to me, ‘You managed to come up with a title for the last album, see what you can do for this album.’ I said, ‘Oh great,’ so I went back to the hotel, wrote two or three hundred titles, and came up with the title ‘Midnight Man’. The next morning, I woke up, and I just said this word… Something in my head just said, this is the title. You could visualise it on the top of the Billboard charts. You could see the merchandising for this one word, how it jumped off the page as ‘Thriller’.
I just want a name, I want it so it can cut glass, you know, like razor sharp. When I close my eyes, I see this thing, a sign. I see this name in bright blue neon lights with a purple outline. And this name is so bright and so sharp that the sign — it just blows up because the name is so powerful … It says “Dirk Diggler.”
Thriller and Dirk Diggler. Both great names. (via @aaroncoleman0)
Spotlight (one of the key contenders in the Oscar race) is an excellent movie that tells the story of an endangered species in American life: a well-funded, local, investigative reporting team. My friends at Reveal go behind the scenes to provide the backstory on how Boston Globe reporters broke the story of the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal, and provide a look into the latest developments in what is, sadly, an ongoing story.
Howard Shore, composer of the orchestral score for The Lord of the Rings, uses leitmotif to help tell the story, in the form of recurring thematic musical phrases that accompany certain actions, places, or characters. For instance, there’s a Shire theme that plays when the hobbits are central to the action but which becomes less important as their physical distance from the Shire increases. Wagner famously used leitmotif in his Ring cycle and so did John Williams in Star Wars…Vader’s theme is a good example.1
This has me wondering: has anyone done a close “reading” of the music in The Force Awakens? I bet the placement of some of the musical themes give clues as to the Force sensitivity, parentage, and origin of some of the characters that we’re wondering about.↩
Peter Mayhew, who plays Chewbacca in Star Wars, is tweetingout photos of his original Star Wars script from March 1976. As you can see, it was originally called “The Adventures of Luke Starkiller as taken from the ‘Journal of the Whills’”. So catchy…why’d they change it, d’ya think?
From as far back as 1927, when the award was for “Best Engineering Effects”, here’s a list of all the films that have won an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. Among the winners were Alien (x2), Titanic, Star Wars (x3), Lord of the Rings (x3), Ben Hur, Benjamin Button, Gravity, and The Matrix.
Silicon Cowboys is an upcoming documentary about Compaq Computer, one of the first companies to challenge IBM with a compatible computer.
Launched in 1982 by three friends in a Houston diner, Compaq Computer set out to build a portable PC to take on IBM, the world’s most powerful tech company. Many had tried cloning the industry leader’s code, only to be trounced by IBM and its high-priced lawyers. SILICON COWBOYS explores the remarkable David vs. Goliath story, and eventual demise, of Compaq, an unlikely upstart who altered the future of computing and helped shape the world as we know it today. Directed by Oscar(R)-nominated director Jason Cohen, the film offers a fresh look at the explosive rise of the 1980’s PC industry and is a refreshing alternative to the familiar narratives of Jobs, Gates, and Zuckerberg.
Many reviews mention the similarity of the characters to Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, but the trio of managers from Texas Instruments who left to form Compaq in the early 80s are a much closer fit. The Compaq Portable was the first 100% IBM compatible computer produced.
In film and video, which way the characters move across the screen affects how the viewers think about those characters. Generally, left-to-right movement is viewed positively while movement the opposite way is viewed more negatively. In the video, they mention a piece Roger Ebert wrote on How to Read a Movie, which is worth a re-read even if you saw it here many years ago.
Huh. Hollywood has invented a new type of movie trailer: the “we just started filming and here’s 5 seconds of the film that’s basically the last 5 seconds of the previous film” trailer. And whaddya know, idiot bloggers will post it because Star Wars Rey Luke squeeeeeee!!
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