kottke.org posts about movies
The Iron Giant has been remastered and burnished with a pair of extra scenes for a re-release in US theaters scheduled for the end of September.
Warner Bros. and Fathom Events are teaming up to bring The Iron Giant back to life. The beloved 1999 animated film is being remastered and augmented with new footage, and it’s coming to select American theatres as what the studio’s calling the “Signature Edition” on September 30th. There’ll also be an encore presentation in select theatres a few days later on October 4th.
The movie earned a respectable $23 million at the box office and critical acclaim, but failed to recoup its $70 million production budget. After reading a bunch of positive reviews, including one from my cinematic divining rod Roger Ebert, I was one of the brave few souls to see The Iron Giant in the theater. Hope to catch it again in September. (via @anildash)
Bummer, film site The Dissolve has shut down. They burned bright for a short time.
For the past two years-well, two years this Friday — it’s been our pleasure to put up this site, a site founded on and driven by a love for movies, alongside a company with passion and talent for creating thoughtful, important work. Sadly, because of the various challenges inherent in launching a freestanding website in a crowded publishing environment, financial and otherwise, today is the last day we will be doing that. We’ve had this opportunity thanks to Pitchfork, which has been incredibly supportive of our vision. We couldn’t have asked for a better partner.
I’ve linked to a few of their things over the past few months, and the quality was always high. Tony Zhou has collected a few of his favorite pieces from the site.
Color palettes derived from Wes Anderson movies.
Disney is proceeding at full steam in delivering more Star Wars to your eyeballs. Today they announced that Christopher Miller and Phil Lord, the duo behind The Lego Movie, will direct a movie about a young Han Solo.
The screenplay is written by Lawrence Kasdan and Jon Kasdan. The story focuses on how young Han Solo became the smuggler, thief, and scoundrel whom Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi first encountered in the cantina at Mos Eisley.
Release date is May 2018. As Princess Leia once said, “Disney, I hope you know what you’re doing.”
Books loom large in Wes Anderson’s movies. Several of his films open with opening books and Fantastic Mr. Fox is based on an actual book. Here’s a nicely edited selection of bookish moments from Anderson’s films.
In the work of Wes Anderson, books and art in general have a strong connection with memory. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) begins with a homonymous book, as does Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009). The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) begins and ends with a book. Moonrise Kingdom (2012) ends with a painting of a place which no longer exists. These movies have a clear message: books preserve stories, for they exist within them and live on through them.
Saul Bass designed the opening sequences for dozens of films, including North by Northwest, Psycho, West Side Story, and Goodfellas. Here’s a look at some of his best work:
(via art of the title)
I Am Chris Farley is a feature length documentary on the comedian and movie star. Here’s a trailer:
The film is out in theaters on July 31 and will be available as a digital download in August. (via buzzfeed)
Update: I caught I Am Chris Farley the other day on Spike TV and it was great. Worth seeking out. (FYI, it’s on Amazon Instant.) Ian Crouch has a review of the movie for the New Yorker.
A new documentary, “I Am Chris Farley,” which d’ebuts Monday night on Spike TV, frames the sketch as an unqualified triumph, the moment when Farley became a national star. But in the book “The Chris Farley Show,” a rich and illuminating oral history compiled, in 2008, by Tanner Colby and Farley’s older brother, Tom, it is the source of controversy among those who were there. Jim Downey, who wrote the sketch, insisted that Farley’s dancing ability elevated it, so that the audience was celebrating his audacious performance rather than merely mocking his appearance. People were laughing with Farley, not at him-that distinction being one of the essential tensions of Farley’s career. Bob Odenkirk, though, who was a writer on the show, recalled the entire thing as “weak bullshit,” and said that Farley “never should have done it.” Chris Rock, a cast member at the time, viewed it as a dangerous turning point for Farley. “That was a weird moment in Chris’s life,” he said. “As funny as that sketch was, and as many accolades as he got for it, it’s one of the things that killed him. It really is. Something happened right then.”
“Success through failure, calm through embracing anxiety…” This book sounds perfect for me. The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman.
Self-help books don’t seem to work. Few of the many advantages of modern life seem capable of lifting our collective mood. Wealth — even if you can get it — doesn’t necessarily lead to happiness. Romance, family life, and work often bring as much stress as joy. We can’t even agree on what “happiness” means. So are we engaged in a futile pursuit? Or are we just going about it the wrong way?
Looking both east and west, in bulletins from the past and from far afield, Oliver Burkeman introduces us to an unusual group of people who share a single, surprising way of thinking about life. Whether experimental psychologists, terrorism experts, Buddhists, hardheaded business consultants, Greek philosophers, or modern-day gurus, they argue that in our personal lives, and in society at large, it’s our constant effort to be happy that is making us miserable. And that there is an alternative path to happiness and success that involves embracing failure, pessimism, insecurity, and uncertainty — the very things we spend our lives trying to avoid. Thought-provoking, counterintuitive, and ultimately uplifting, The Antidote is the intelligent person’s guide to understanding the much-misunderstood idea of happiness.
I learned about the book from Tyler Cowen, who notes:
[Burkeman] is one of the best non-fiction essay writers, and he remains oddly underrated in the United States. It is no mistake to simply buy his books sight unseen. I think of this book as “happiness for grumps.”
Given Cowen’s recent review of Inside Out, I wonder if [slight spoilers ahoy!] he noticed the similarity of Joy’s a-ha moment w/r/t to Sadness at the end of the film to the book’s “alternative path to happiness and success that involves embracing failure, pessimism, insecurity, and uncertainty”. Mmmm, zeitgeisty!
Inside the Making of Dr. Strangelove is a 45-minute behind-the-scenes documentary about Stanley Kubrick’s kooky masterpiece (and one of my two favorite movies).1
And speaking of Kubrick, director Marc Forster is making a trilogy of films based on Kubrick’s script for The Downslope, a movie about the Civil War. *tents fingers* Interesting…
Brown Bunny, Cannibal Holocaust, The 120 Days of Sodom, and The Last Temptation of Christ… they are among the most controversial movies of all time.
Perhaps a little NSFW. (via devour)
TheTake identifies products and places in movies so you can purchase or visit. For instance, there are dozens of products listed from Jurassic World…you can even play the trailer and product matches will pop up. (via @pieratt)
Tim Grierson and Will Leitch did a pretty good job in this list of All 15 Pixar Movies, Ranked From Worst to Best.
We went back-and-forth on the top two here, but we ultimately had to go with [Wall-E], the most original and ambitious of all the Pixar movies. The first half-hour, which basically tells the story of the destruction of the planet and the devolution of the human race without a single line of dialogue, is total perfection: It’s almost Kubrickian in its attention to detail and perspective, though it never feels cold or ungenerous.
Piece-of-shit Cars 2 is rightly parked at the bottom of the heap, Wall-E is obviously #1, and they correctly acknowledged Up as overrated. I would have rated the original Toy Story lower and Ratatouille higher, but overall: well done.
Actual zookeepers taking photos of themselves doing Chris Pratt’s Jurassic World velociraptor taming move is a thing. Here’s the original:
And the imitators:
Found them here and here. If you find others, send them along!
Update: Laurel sent this one in from the California Academy of Sciences:
Update: Several more zookeepers being awesome via @ohmygoat1, @susiethefivetoedsloth, @parrotman_jon, and @kati_speer.
Update: Ok, a few more via @MrDABailey, The Minnesota Zoo, The Georgia Aquarium, and Reddit.
Update: One last photo brings this meme to a fitting close. This is Chris Pratt himself, taming some children during a recent visit to a local children’s hospital.
(via @alexcarvalho)
Update: Ok, ok, one more and then that’s it, America needs to move on. Here’s the Dinosaur Curator of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History taming some actual dinosaurs, long-dead though they may be:
(via @thanland)
All six films1 from the Star Wars series played at the same time, superimposed on top of each other.
Watch this while you can…I imagine it’ll get taken down in a few hours/days.
Derelict is a feature-length black & white film that splices about an hour of Alien and 90 minutes of Prometheus together into a single narrative.
‘Derelict’ is an editing project for academic purposes. ‘Prometheus’ wasn’t exactly an Alien prequel, but this treats it as such by intercutting the events of Alien with Prometheus in a dual narrative structure. The goal was to assemble the material to emphasize the strengths of Prometheus as well as its ties to Alien.
(via ★interesting)
The Program is an upcoming film about the rise and fall of Lance Armstrong directed by Stephen Frears (The Queen, High Fidelity). It’s based on David Walsh’s book, Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit of Lance Armstrong.
Amy is a documentary film about the life and career of singer Amy Winehouse. The director is Asif Kapadia, who also directed the excellent Senna, one of my favorite documentaries from the past few years. Here’s the trailer:
The film studio behind the movie, A24, has been making some interesting films: Ex Machina, Bling Ring, Obvious Child, A Most Violent Year, The End of the Tour, Spring Breakers, Under the Skin, etc.
As a kid, Michael M collected a notebook full of information related to Jurassic Park, as if he worked in the computing department of InGen, the company that built the park.
The dossier is fairly thick and contains numerous completely made-up documents like dinosaur tooth records, DNA diagrams, and correspondence between myself, my imaginary colleagues and some of my friends from school whom I’d somehow managed to rope into my delusions.
Broadly, the dossier consists of the impossibly dull minutiae of park admin leading up to the events of the movie. I essentially gave myself a boring office job in my spare time outside of school. If nothing else, it’s a fascinating insight into the mind of the type of pubescent idiot who never had a sun tan.
Love this. I definitely did stuff like this when I was a kid, but not nearly as elaborate. (via @robinsloan)
Filmmaker John Walter is making a film called The Earth Moves about Einstein on the Beach, the 1976 opera composed Philip Glass and directed by Robert Wilson. Walter and his team are soliciting funds to complete the film on Kickstarter.
In 2011, the original creators of Einstein on the Beach brought the opera to life again for what will most likely be its last presentation in their lifetime. Einstein on the Beach is an opera like no other. Telling its story requires a documentary like no other.
We completed shooting and editing The Earth Moves and we are all working very hard to finish the film for upcoming film festivals this fall. Now we need your support to fulfill the costs of color correction, media licensing, and sound mixing. Time is of the essence and every contribution helps our mission to complete this film.
Any additional support beyond the goal will go towards expanding the distribution of the film through educational markets and independent theaters nationally.
Steven Spielberg is directing Tom Hanks in Bridge of Spies, a movie about the negotiation to release U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers from Soviet custody. Here’s the trailer:
The script was punched up by none other than the Coen brothers.
I have not read the book it’s based on, but the movie version of The Martian, starring Matt Damon and directed by Ridley Scott, looks quite promising:
I am going to have to science the shit out of this.
Apollo 13 with a touch of Interstellar…I can do that.
Update: A second trailer has been released:
And I have since read the book, which was good. But it will make a better movie.
This is an interesting theory about the Harry Potter series: the whole thing is about a mentally ill young boy (Harry) who is institutionalized by his parents (the Dursleys) in a mental institution (Hogwarts) and the contents of the books are Harry’s fantasy.
In the Harry Potter series, his parents are famous wizards, who were famous in all the world for their unparalleled love for the boy Harry, which set the whole series in motion, killing them and leaving the boy a scarred orphan. (This is a fantasy, crafted as the direct opposite of the way in which children usually end up scarred — through abuse and neglect.)
If we interpret the story as Harry’s fantasy, then the Dursleys are Harry’s real parents, and the Potters are imaginary. The Durselys either can’t cope with the increasingly-delusional boy living with them, or perhaps they are merely abusive, and it’s the abuse that’s making him delusional. In any event, the parent-figures constantly mistreat him, favor the brother, and inflict endless cruelty and humiliation on him. One day, Harry snaps, and Dudley (who is really Harry’s brother) is severely injured, in a way requiring repeated hospital treatments. (In the delusion, Harry imagines that a pig’s tail is magically grown from Dudley’s buttocks.) As a result of this incident, Harry is taken away to a “special school.”
Tony Zhou of Every Frame a Painting looks at the use of production design in movies. Specifically chairs. Chairs can tell you something about the world the film is set in, the characters who use them, or a specific situation.
Gen X was never supposed to get older. But a pair of recent essays by Tim Carmody and Choire Sicha show that the second third Greatest Generation is not immune to pivoting one’s emotional startup when midlife approaches. In The Iceman List, Carmody reevaluates 80s movie heroes and finds the more traditionally Reagan-esque characters might have had a point.
But today, in the 2010s, Top Gun is a treat. It’s as clean and shiny as a new dime. The cliches that later action films overloaded with world-building and backstory here present themselves unadorned, in all their purity. Cruise is just so charming, brimming with so much energy, it doesn’t matter that he doesn’t really know how to act yet. A bunch of Navy aviators singing Righteous Brothers in the bar looks like fun. Now that pilots, airmen, and aviators can serve in the US military openly without anyone asking who they sleep with, it’s super that Iceman and Slider might be gay. And guess what?
Maverick is kind of a jerk. Iceman is totally right about him. In fact, Iceman is right about almost everything. We didn’t notice this in the 1980s because everything about how the film is constructed tells us to sympathize with Maverick and hate Iceman’s guts.
My God, we’ve become Ed Rooney. We are eating it. (Well, Ferris was a dick.) Sicha started smoking as a teenager in the 80s but after quitting recently, desires to “make a senior citizen’s arrest” of his younger smoldering self, the Iceman to the Tom Cruise of his youth.
It’s like KonMari, except easy, because the only things you throw out are your cigarettes and your entire sense of self.
My friend Emily said she was happy for me, but wistful, too. The last smoker quitting seemed like another kind of gentrification. Now I’m gone, too, along with the gas stations and all the stores that aren’t 7-Eleven. But the emotional rent was just too high.
Quitting smoking is the khakis of existence. Quitting smoking is the Chipotle on St. Marks Place. I am totally not cool. I may as well be someone’s stupid Brooklyn dad. My hair is its natural color. Most days I’m just wearing whatever. I do yoga endlessly. What am I now?
I can feel this gentrification of the self coming in my life. As someone who watched TV and used the internet 23 hours out of every day for the past 30 years, I’m wary of how much screen time my kids get. All that TV in my youth probably wasn’t a good idea and the internet these days isn’t what it used to be, right? In a talk at XOXO last year, Hank Green said:
You have no obligation to your former self. He is dumber than you and doesn’t exist.
Ok! Pivot I will. Get off my lawn, younger self!
From The Flintstones to Band of Outsiders to Miller’s Crossing, here’s a look at some of the films referenced in Quentin Tarantino’s movies.
(via devour)
The Tribe is set at a Ukrainian high school for the deaf. The film employs no subtitles or voiceovers; all communication is sign language and non-verbal acting. Here’s the trailer…somewhat paradoxically, you’ll want to use headphones or turn the sound up.
Winner of multiple 2014 Cannes Film Festival Awards (including the coveted Critics’ Week Grand Prix), Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s The Tribe is an undeniably original and intense feature debut set in the insular world of a Ukrainian high school for the deaf. The Tribe unfolds through the non-verbal acting and sign language from a cast of deaf, non-professional actors — with no need for subtitles or voice over — resulting in a unique, never-before-experienced cinematic event that engages the audience on a new sensory level.
(thx, paul)
If you take Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel and mix in elements of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, the result is pretty good.
(via devour)
I saw Mad Max: Fury Road yesterday (enjoyed it) but have a few questions.
1. With gasoline in such short supply, I’m surprised the various groups in the movie didn’t take more advantage of solar power to generate energy for electric vehicles and such. Sunshine is obviously abundant in post-apocalyptic Australia and from the looks of what was scavenged from before the nuclear war and the ingenuity on display in getting what they found to function, they should have been able to find even rudimentary solar cells and get them to work.
2. Speaking of energy scarcity, I wonder if the troop-pumping-up and opponent-intimidating function of the flamethrowing guitar player was worth all of the fuel spewed out of the end of his instrument and energy consumed by the incredible number of speakers on his rig.
3. The roads in the movie were in remarkable shape, aside from the swampland. Who was responsible for their upkeep? Even dirt roads need maintenance or they develop potholes and washboarding. And for what reason were they kept in such good condition outside of the Citadel/Gas Town/Bullet Farm area? Aside from Furiosa’s Rig, the chase party, and two smallish motorcycle gangs, I saw no other vehicular traffic on the roads…and who would have been semi-regularly traveling out past the canyon anyway? To where? For what?
4. What was the political and economic arrangement between the Citadel, Gas Town, and the Bullet Farm? Did the Citadel trade their water and crops for gas and bullets? Or was Immortan Joe, as the defender of the lone source of abundant fresh water in the region, the defacto leader of all three groups? The People Eater and Bullet Farmer certainly came a’running when Joe needed help retrieving his wives. There were obviously other sources of water in the region — how else did the biker gangs survive? — so you’d think that Gas Town and the Bullet Farm could have teamed up to squeeze Joe into giving them a better deal or even overthrowing him. Point is, there seemed to be a surprising lack of political friction between the three groups, which seems odd in an environment of scarcity.
5. Surely land was plentiful enough that large solar stills could have generated enough fresh water for people to live on without having to rely on the Citadel for it.
Update: Reddit has a go at answering some of these questions. (via @pavel_lishin)
Turns out, if you take Junkie XL’s soundtrack to Mad Max: Fury Road and pair it with a train chase scene from Buster Keaton’s silent film masterpiece The General, it works pretty well.
“The more people think you’re really great, the bigger the fear of being a fraud is.” That’s the most resonant line for me from the first trailer for The End of the Tour, the story of a five-day interview between reporter David Lipsky and David Foster Wallace that takes place in 1996, just after Infinite Jest came out.
The movie is based on a book Lipsky published called Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, which I read and thought was great.1 Jesse Eisenberg plays Lipsky and Jason Segel does as much justice to Wallace as one could hope for, I think. I am cautiously optimistic that this movie might actually be decent or even good. (via @jcormier)
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