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From Tony Zhou comes another episode of Every Frame a Painting. In it, he uses Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder to explore ensemble staging, how movies can direct an audience’s onscreen attention when many people are on the screen at the same time, and why a director would want to do that.
Jordan Hanzon made an edit of Inside Out showing only the “outside” parts of the film…so, none of the stuff with Joy, Sadness, Anger, etc. I bet Pixar had an internal cut like this just to make sure the outside stuff hung together independent of the inside. (via devour1)
I love Devour. They find great videos and curate their selection well. But they never credit their sources. More than a dozen times in recent months, I’ll post a video to kottke.org and it’ll show up on Devour within 30 minutes or so. (How do I know they’re taking from me and not the place I originally found them? Because I often don’t post stuff right away because of my scheduling, pacing, etc.) Anyway, it’s not just me…they take stuff from Colossal and other places as well. It sucks. I’ve complained to them on Twitter and nothing changed. For the past few months, I’ve been using a tit-for-tat approach and not crediting Devour for finding a video on their site. Since it’s the new year, I’m giving them another chance. Come on, Devour, stop being a leech and credit your sources!↩
Radiohead were commissioned to write the theme song for Spectre, the newest James Bond movie. The movie’s producers decided to go in a different musical direction, so the band recently put the rejected song up on Soundcloud. Enjoy. (via df)
Update: They took the full version down from Soundcloud but it’s up on Spotify.
Of Oz the Wizard is the entire Wizard of Oz movie presented in alphabetical order by dialogue. So it starts with all the scenes where Dorothy and the gang say “a”, “aaiee”, “along”, and proceeds through “you’re” and “zipper”. Even the words on each of the title cards are sorted alphabetically.
(I feel like I’ve posted this before — or something like it — but I can’t find it in the archives. Anyone?)
Update: Ah yes, I was thinking of this alphabetized version of Star Wars (which I’ve seen before but somehow never posted):
Another example is Thomson & Craighead’s The Time Machine. Matt Bucy, the creator of Of Oz the Wizard, seems to have pioneered this technique (the Vimeo page indicates it was completed in April 2004) but didn’t post the video online until a few days ago. (via @Mister_Milligan, @sannahahn)
How can Han Solo talk to and understand any alien he meets? Why is he such a gifted pilot? In this short piece from 2008, Tim Carmody answers those questions and more: Han Solo Has the Force.
Luke and Vader (especially young Anakin) are remarkable, inventive pilots, as is Lando, but Han blows them all away. In one scene after another in Empire, Han is able to perform feats that Artoo or Threepio say are mathematically near-impossible. He does this in a ship that has a remarkable warp-speed computer but which appears singularly unsuited for close-quarters maneuvers. Finally, he gets the drop on Vader in Episode IV, and while Vader may have been distracted by his sensations re: Luke, this is still evidence that we are dealing with a very special pilot.
And there’s further evidence from The Force Awakens (slight spoilers!): he shoots a stormtrooper with a blaster without looking. As I recall, it wasn’t a look-away, like this Cristiano pass or this Jordan assist, it was more like he could actually see the stormtrooper behind him. (Of course, Cristiano and Jordan might also be Force-sensitive, but that’s another post.)
A behind-the-scenes photo from “2001: A Space Odyssey” from Coudal’s treasure trove of “Stuff About Stanley Kubrick.”
Charlie Kaufman, who wrote “Being John Malkovitch” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and wrote and directed “Synecdoche, New York,” talks about his latest writing/now co-directing project, “Anomalisa,” which is “a stop-motion animated dark comedy about a depressed customer-service expert who falls in love on a business trip”:
Is it weird for me to say that Anomalisa contains the most realistic sex scene I’ve ever seen in a movie? Given that it’s happening between puppets?
It’s not weird. Almost everybody we speak to feels that way. We worked really hard on that scene. It took six months to shoot. We were very aware of people coming into it thinking it was going to be like Team America, that it was going to be a joke, and we didn’t want it to be [like that]. We knew there would probably be some laughing at first because it’s puppet sex. We weren’t opposed to that, but what we found is that there is the occasional laugh at that point out of nervousness, but then people get really quiet.
There’s also an interview with co-director Duke Johnson that starts, “‘There were a lot of penises,’ says Duke Johnson. ‘They break very easily because they’re tiny.’”
Katherine Waterston has been cast to star in “Alien: Covenant,” the sequel to “Prometheus” to be directed by Ridley Scott. Waterston starred in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Inherent Vice” and is the daughter of actor Sam Waterston.
So what’s the storyline?
Specific plot details are being closely guarded, but it is believed to follow the crew of the colony ship Covenant, bound for a remote planet, who discover what they believe is an uncharted paradise. But in fact it’s a dark, dangerous world whose the only inhabitant is David (Michael Fassbender), the “synthetic” and survivor of the doomed Prometheus expedition.
1. There are SPOILERS in this post. If you have not seen the movie, do not continue reading. I’ve only read one other review of the movie, so much of this may be stated elsewhere (and better) by others.
2. Overall, I enjoyed the movie. But thinking back to The Phantom Menace, I also enjoyed that quite a bit in the same spine-tingling way. But this movie is way better than the prequels were.
3. The cast was excellent and the casting progressive. I love that the two new protagonists are a black man and a woman. “Why are you grabbing my hand?”
4. Carrie Fisher’s voice has changed a lot. It suited her character.
5. By far the best part of the movie at the showing I went to didn’t appear on screen. I went to a matinee at 11am and the audience was mostly adults…probably 98% over the age of 30. When Rey uses the Force to persuade the Stormtrooper to release her, a little kid’s voice from the front row echoed out loudly across the entire theater: “Jedi mind trick”. The place exploded in laughter. A perfect comedic moment.
6. How many times are they going to keep making the same movie though? The plots of A New Hope, Return of the Jedi, and The Force Awakens are more or less the same: a small band of resistance fighters going up against an evil superpower headed by two practitioners in the Dark Side discover a weakness in the enemy’s planet-sized superweapon and destroy it with some X-wing fighters in the nick of time. Also: stolen plans in a droid, a young orphan discovering the ways of the Force, a trench run by a gifted young pilot to blow up the superweapon, a bailing-out of the X-wing fighters by the crew of the Millennium Falcon, sons/students striking down their fathers/masters, and so on. Is this part of the reason that Empire Strikes Back is considered the best of the series, because it’s different?
7. When Lucas made the first trilogy (and when he and Spielberg made Raiders of the Lost Ark), he constructed it from a bunch of different sources from when he was a kid and in film school. 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.
8. Aside: when is the Empire/First Order going to learn not to put all of their eggs in one basket? Their superweapon strategy has failed three times now. They always seem to know where the rebels are hiding, they possess overwhelming force…why don’t they just defeat them through conventional means?
9. More synchronicity. When I watched the original Star Wars as an adult, one of the things I noticed is what a relatively minor character Vader is in the Empire when compared to his importance to the story and his increased power & responsibility in Empire and Jedi. He’s not in command, he’s not really part of the military at all, and the military leaders aren’t all that impressed with The Force. It’s almost almost like he’s the Emperor’s personal assistant. Kylo Ren’s role in The Force Awakens is similar…he’s not in charge (General Hux is), he’s not really part of the military (although he commands troops), and according to Snoke, Ren hasn’t even completed his training. (What was Vader’s excuse, then? He presumably completed his training long before the events of A New Hope…what was taking him so long to gain power?)
10. The scene at the very end bugged me. Having discovered the whereabouts of Luke Skywalker, the last of the Jedi, the Resistance sends Ren, Chewy, and R2 to see what’s up? I get the symbolism and all, but wouldn’t Leia be interested in seeing her brother again? Or more persuasive in getting him to come out of retirement?
11. We’re going to hear more about Rey’s parentage, right? She’s Luke’s daughter or something? (I’m guessing not. Waaay too obvious, even for Star Wars.)
12. Speaking of parentage, why is Snoke so big? So we’re not wondering if Rey is Snoke’s granddaughter or something? Or is it that Snoke’s hologram is big and he’s normal sized? (Wookiepedia says Snoke is 7 feet tall but doesn’t cite a source.)
13. If you liked this movie, you have to give the proper credit to George Lucas for allowing it to exist. He could have sat on this series until after his death and beyond. But he didn’t. He sold the whole shebang to Disney and trusted Kathleen Kennedy to make more movies.
14. Ok, Kennedy. Now I want to see Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars. Wes Anderson’s Star Wars. Miranda July’s Star Wars. Seriously, do this. (I do not want to see Kevin Smith’s Star Wars. That one you can keep.)
15. All theaters should have assigned seating. I got the exact two seats I wanted (two months ahead of time) and showed up to the theater about 10 minutes before showtime, sat down, and the lights went down soon after. So much less stress than getting there 45 minutes (or 2 hours) beforehand and playing Are These Seats Taken? with strangers.
Update: 16. Does Han’s death scene reference the cantina scene w/ Greedo in Episode IV? He and Ren are both holding the lightsaber. Ren tells Han he needs to do something but doesn’t know if he can go through with it. Ren asks Han to help. The lightsaber activates and Han dies. Does Han activate the lightsaber, thereby causing his death? In other words, does Han shoot first? (Bonus update: I just saw the movie again and I don’t think Han activates the lightsaber. He looks too surprised and Ren definitely thrusts the saber into him.)
Update: 17. In his belated review, Chris Blattman notes the remarkable agreement on the lack of spoilers on social media:
Humanity’s tacit agreement to abide by a no-spoilers-on-social-media rule was one of the greatest acts of social cooperation I have witnessed. And we used it up to keep you from learning Han Solo is killed.
Star Wars Minus Star Wars is a video essay on the original film that doesn’t use a single shot, sound, or snippet of music from the original movie. Instead, it strings together scenes and sounds from movies that influenced George Lucas in making the film and also from movies that have been influenced by Star Wars.
It’s impossible to overstate the impact of Star Wars. Its arrival in theaters on May 25th 1977 marked the end of one chapter in film history and the beginning of another. It’s a hinge on which film history swings. Upon its release, critic Pauline Kael derided the film as “an assemblage of spare parts-it has no emotional grip… an epic without a dream” Twenty years after its release critic Roger Ebert remarked that the film “colonized our imaginations, and it is hard to stand back and see it simply as a motion picture, because it has so completely become part of our memories.”
They’re both right. Star Wars succeeded because of its roots in film history and mythology, and its influence over generations of filmmakers can be felt in countless works that came after it. For better or worse, Star Wars engulfs the past and future of moviemaking.
That was super-fun to watch. See also Where did Star Wars come from? and Paul’s Boutique Minus Paul’s Boutique. (via @tonyszhou, who calls it “the best Star Wars video essay ever”)
Update: This might be even more impressive. John D’Amico made a full-length shot-for-shot remake of Star Wars using material that influenced (or may have influenced) Lucas in making the film. Very cool.
(thx, jim)
The most teasing of teaser trailers is out for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the Harry Potter prequel that everyone insists isn’t a prequel. Out November 2016. (via trailer town)
Update: Toooootally a prequel…Dumbledore gets name-dropped in this one:
Update: The full trailer has been released:
For the past few years, Russian director Ilya Khrzhanovsky has been working on a film called Dau about Soviet physicist Lev Landau. Well, sort of. Khrzhanovsky had a huge set built in Ukraine containing a version of a mid-20th century Soviet research institute. For two years, he filmed hundreds of volunteers living on the set as though they were Soviet scientists.
Participants were required to live in period costume (the on-set tailor updated the fashions of the moment as required), to eat period food in period packaging, paid for in Soviet roubles, and to renounce all anachronisms, physical and verbal. No mobile phones, no internet, no laptops; no mention of the state of Israel before the on-set calendar reached 1948. News was supposed to be provided exclusively by the fully staffed on-set newspaper and the on-set radio station. Women were forbidden to wear modern tampons: Soviet-model cloth versions were made available.
When journalist Michael Idov visited the set in 2011 for GQ, even he had to be in character.
ROSENBERG: That’s when Khrzhanovsky appeared. Wearing strangely outdated clothing and spectacles, the director looked sort of like a young Albert Einstein. He would be giving Michael a personal tour of the set, but first Michael would have to be processed.
IDOV: Because you were not supposed to admit that the film shoot was in fact a film shoot. Instead, everyone was operating under the notion that it’s the ’50s. That day it was 1952. So I needed to be made into a 1952 version of myself. They took away my clothes. They gave me a new haircut with, like, temples shaved off and gave me an incredibly itchy period suit - including the underwear.
The one thing I was allowed to keep was my watch. I had a vintage watch from 1959 and after a pretty intense discussion they decided it was OK to let me keep this watch from the future.
ROSENBERG: Then Khrzhanovsky instructed Michael to give his freshly minted Soviet passport to a man guarding an otherwise nondescript hallway.
Makes me think of the play staged by Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character in Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York. (via @philgyford)
Am I crazy or does this 70s crime comedy starring Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling actually look good? I mean, it likely won’t be that good, but entertaining this pleasant fiction will make us happy until next May, when we’ll know for sure. FYI: this is a “red band” trailer, so NSFW and all that.
Here’s the teaser trailer for the Spielberg-directed adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The BFG. Hmm. (via the slick new trailer town)
Update: The full trailer has dropped.
I was about to say something about how Spielberg rarely directs animated films but BFG isn’t actually animated. Or is it? CG has gotten so good and blockbusters so reliant on special effects that it’s hard to tell what’s real. I mean, superhero movies are so laden with special effects that they might as well be considered animated. They’re all basically Who Framed Roger Rabbit? but done so seamlessly that you can’t tell Toontown from the real world.
One of the things I look forward to at the end of each year is David Ehrlich’s video compilation of his favorite films of the year. 2015’s installment does not disappoint.
Today, the NY Times is running an editorial by Dr. Bennet Omalu called Don’t Let Kids Play Football. Omalu was the first to publish research on CTE in football players.
If a child who plays football is subjected to advanced radiological and neurocognitive studies during the season and several months after the season, there can be evidence of brain damage at the cellular level of brain functioning, even if there were no documented concussions or reported symptoms. If that child continues to play over many seasons, these cellular injuries accumulate to cause irreversible brain damage, which we know now by the name Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, or C.T.E., a disease that I first diagnosed in 2002.
Depending on the severity of the condition, the child now has a risk of manifesting symptoms of C.T.E. like major depression, memory loss, suicidal thought and actions, loss of intelligence as well as dementia later in life. C.T.E. has also been linked to drug and alcohol abuse as the child enters his 20s, 30s and 40s.
The story of Omalu, his research, and its suppression by the NFL is the subject of Concussion, a movie starring Will Smith that comes out on Christmas Day, as well as a book version written by Jeanne Marie Laskas.
Update: Dr. James Hamblin shares the findings of a new paper on how repeated head trauma can affect the brains of kids as young as 8.
In the journal Radiology today, an imaging study shows that players ages 8 to 13 who have had no concussion symptoms still show changes associated with traumatic brain injury.
Christopher Whitlow, chief of neuroradiology at Wake Forest School of Medicine, wanted to see how head impact affects developing brains. His team studied male football players between ages 8 and 13 over the course of a season, recording “head impact data” using a Head Impact Telemetry System to measure force, which was correlated with video of games and practices.
“DVD extras” is a phrase that’s rapidly receding in the pop cultural rearview mirror, but YouTube is chock full1 of them for many popular movies and shows. Here are a few behind-the-scenes looks at Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel.
Bonus video: how to make a Courtesan au Chocolat from Mendl’s:
“Chock full” is another antique phrase, although I bet people will still be using “chock full” long after “DVD extras”.↩
With the new Star Wars movie only a couple weeks away, fans and Star Wars scholars have gone into hyperdrive1 spinning alternate theories about what the series of movies are all about. The most popular such theory attempts to rehabilitate the worst character in the prequels, Jar Jar Binks. Because maybe he’s the most powerful Sith Lord in the galaxy? Who uses drunken fighting like Jackie Chan?
Another theorist asserts that the prequels were secretly brilliant because of a little-discussed over-arching theme related to the Jedi Code and the corruption of the Jedi.
But my personal favorite theory suggests that the past and future Star Wars movies are about ridding the galaxy of a bacterial plague carried by the Jedi.
I don’t know what Midi-chlorians actually are. They might be something like symbiotic/parasitic bacteria or archaea, they might be organelles that live inside a cell, they might even be coherent chunks of molecular code…machines living inside the very DNA of their hosts.
What I do know is what they can do. They manipulate their hosts, they control them and eventually take them over. Eventually, they force them to fight while releasing as much dark energy as they can possibly manage, because that’s how they continue their life cycle.
Being force sensitive just means you’re more heavily infested and more easily manipulated.
Update: The Radicalization of Luke Skywalker suggests that the first three Star Wars films about Luke Skywalker becoming a terrorist.
A more focused study, however, is needed to truly understand that the Star Wars films are actually the story of the radicalization of Luke Skywalker. From introducing him to us in A New Hope (as a simple farm boy gazing into the Tatooine sunset), to his eventual transformation into the radicalized insurgent of Return of the Jedi (as one who sets his own father’s corpse on fire and celebrates the successful bombing of the Death Star), each film in the original trilogy is another step in Luke’s descent into terrorism. By carefully looking for the same signs governments and scholars use to detect radicalization, we can witness Luke’s dark journey into religious fundamentalism and extremism happen before our very eyes.
Cue the Millennium Falcon’s hyperdrive malfunction noise…↩
In this video about the making of The Hobbit movies, members of the film crew, including director Peter Jackson, admit that they didn’t really have a good idea of what was going to happen in the movies until they were on the set filming and that they made a lot of it up as they went along.
The above clip is from a behind-the-scenes video on the Battle of the Five Armies Blu-ray, and it features Peter Jackson, Andy Serkis, and other production personnel confessing that due to the director changeover — del Toro left the project after nearly two years of pre-production — Jackson hit the ground running but was never able to hit the reset button to get time to establish his own vision. In comparison, he spent years prepping the original Lord of the Rings trilogy, and on the Hobbit things got so bad that when they started shooting the titular Battle of Five Armies itself they were essentially just shooting B-roll: footage of people in costumes waving around swords, without any cohesive plan for how the sequence would actually play out. (A choice Jackson quote: “I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.”)
No idea why they would release a video like this which pretty much admits that the movies weren’t as good as they should have been. I mean, they still made a crap-ton of money at the box office (a combined $3 billion worldwide), so happy ending for them anyway I guess?
George Lucas says he had nothing to do with The Force Awakens and furthermore that the movie was not done the way he would have done it.
“The issue was ultimately, they looked at the stories and they said, ‘We want to make something for the fans,’” Lucas said. “People don’t actually realize it’s actually a soap opera and it’s all about family problems — it’s not about spaceships. So they decided they didn’t want to use those stories, they decided they were going to do their own thing so I decided, ‘fine…. I’ll go my way and I let them go their way.’”
Soooooooooooooooo, if Star Wars is a family story, why did you make it about spaceships and special effects?
Perhaps inspired by the long time scale filmmaking of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, John Malkovich and Robert Rodriguez have teamed up to make a movie that won’t be released until 2115. Why? As a promotion for luxury brand Louis XIII Cognac, which is also aged 100 years. According to io9, Louis XIII is sending out 1000 tickets to people whose descendants will be able to see a screening of the film 100 years from now.
I wonder how serious they are about this? To what extent have they futureproofed their media? The io9 piece says the movie is “preserved on film stock”…is that and an old movie projector sufficient? Have they consulted with MoMA or Danny Hillis?
For the latest installment of Every Frame a Painting, Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos examine the artistry and thought silent film master Buster Keaton put into the physical comedy in his movies. I used to watch all sorts of old movies with my dad (Chaplin, Keaton, Laurel & Hardy) and had forgotten how good Keaton was. If you’re anything like me in wanting to head down a Keaton rabbit hole, they recommend starting with the first short film he directed and released, One Week.
See also Studs Terkel’s 1960 interview with Keaton, a video showing Keaton’s use of symmetry and center framing (Wes Anderson, Kubrick), Every Frame a Painting episode on Jackie Chan, and The Ultimate Buster Keaton Collection, a 14-disc Blu-ray box set.
Noma: My Perfect Storm is a feature-length documentary about chef René Redzepi and his Copenhagen restaurant Noma, which is currently ranked #3 in the world.
How did Redzepi manage to revolutionize the entire world of gastronomy, inventing the alphabet and vocabulary that would infuse newfound pedigree to Nordic cuisine and establish a new edible world while radically changing the image of the modern chef? His story has the feel of a classic fairy tale: the ugly duckling transformed into a majestic swan, who now reigns over the realm of modern gourmet cuisine.
The film is out Dec 18 in theaters, on Amazon, iTunes, etc.
Stiller. Wilson. Cruz. Ferrell. Cumberbatch. Wiig. Bieber? If this is even half the goofy fun of the first one, I will be happy.
Someone on Twitter said this is the best piece about the upcoming Star Wars movie, and I think he’s right. But it’s not so much about Star Wars specifically as it is about how Hollywood studios are trying to build infinite series of movies.
These new movies won’t just be sequels. That’s not the way the transnational entertainment business works anymore. Forget finite sequences; now it’s about infinite series. […] Everywhere, studio suits are recruiting creatives who can weave characters and story lines into decades-spanning tapestries of prequels, side-quels, TV shows, games, toys, and so on. Brand awareness goes through the roof; audiences get a steady, soothing mainline drip of familiar characters.
Forget the business implications for a moment, though. The shared universe represents something rare in Hollywood: a new idea. It evolved from the narrative techniques not of auteur or blockbuster films but of comic books and TV, and porting that model over isn’t easy. It needs different kinds of writers and directors and a different way of looking at the structure of storytelling itself. Marvel prototyped the process; Lucasfilm is trying to industrialize it.
Harry Potter could be a great infinite series, but it’ll be interesting to see if Rowling is interested in heading in that direction. Ditto Middle-earth and Tolkien.
The teaser trailer for Pixar’s sequel to Finding Nemo is out. I’m excited for this one. Nemo was my favorite Pixar movie for a long while, until Wall-E came out. (via devour)
This is a Japanese trailer for The Force Awakens. It’s similar to the most recent trailer released in the US, but it contains a bunch of new footage. Still no Luke. (via @gavinpurcell)
From a 2005 post on Marginal Revolution by Tyler Cowen, an alternate take on the Star Wars movies positing that while the Jedi aren’t the bad guys, they are also not to be trusted.
1. The Jedi and Jedi-in-training sell out like crazy. Even the evil Count Dooku was once a Jedi knight.
2. What do the Jedi Council want anyway? The Anakin critique of the Jedi Council rings somewhat true (this is from the new movie, alas I cannot say more, but the argument could be strengthened by citing the relevant detail). Aren’t they a kind of out-of-control Supreme Court, not even requiring Senate approval (with or without filibuster), and heavily armed at that? As I understand it, they vote each other into the office, have license to kill, and seek to control galactic affairs. Talk about unaccountable power used toward secret and mysterious ends.
See also Darth Jar Jar and Luke Skywalker, Sith Lord. I also wanted to link to a video I saw within the past year that suggests that instead of a rebel leader, Princess Leia is a petulant child whose father, Vader, is attempting to bring to heel. Ring a bell? The internet is so choked with crackpot theories about Star Wars that it’s impossible to search for one in particular. (And now this post is part of the problem.)
Update: Aaah, yes, the Auralnauts. (via @peteashton & @Lemur_Lad)
Details about Shane Carruth’s new film have been scarce, but there are a few things to share. First off, here’s what The Modern Ocean is about:
The storyline revolves around vengeance and the fierce competition for valuable shipping routes and priceless materials that converge in a spectacular battle on the rolling decks of behemoth cargo ships.
“This epic tale, fraught with danger and intrigue, takes us from the ancient trading houses of Algeria to the darkest depths of the ocean floor.”
Carruth expanded on his ideas for the film in an interview with Motherboard a few months ago. He’s also got himself some stars for the film: Anne Hathaway, Keanu Reeves, Daniel Radcliffe, and Jeff Goldblum are gonna be in it.
So, let me get this straight. Has Carruth somehow taken the idea of the long zoom, combined it with Marc Levinson’s book on shipping containers and supply chain pieces like I, Pencil, What Coke Contains, and How to Make a $1500 Sandwich, and made all that into a high-seas adventure movie starring Keanu Reeves and Anne Hathaway or is that just me reading way too much into what I want the movie to be? (via @von_hutchins)
Have you noticed that non-mainstream films are increasingly being produced/financed/released through Amazon, HBO, and Netflix and not the big studios? The latest example is Spike Lee’s new joint, Chi-raq. Set among the gang violence in modern-day Chicago, the film is an adaptation of an ancient Greek play by Aristophanes called Lysistrata.
Originally performed in classical Athens in 411 BC, it is a comic account of one woman’s extraordinary mission to end the Peloponnesian War. Lysistrata persuades the women of Greece to withhold sexual privileges from their husbands and lovers as a means of forcing the men to negotiate peace — a strategy, however, that inflames the battle between the sexes. The play is notable for being an early exposé of sexual relations in a male-dominated society.
Even with all the big names attached — Lee, Angela Bassett, Jennifer Hudson, Samuel L. Jackson, Wesley Snipes, John Cusack — I wonder if a movie with a predominantly African-American cast, strong women characters, and based on an Aristophanes play would get greenlit at a major studio these days.
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