The soundtrack for David Fincher’s adaptation of Gone Girl is out and as with his last two films (The Social Network, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), the music is by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
Whenever the words “Reznor”, “Fincher”, “Atticus”, and “soundtrack” get into a sentence together, you know it’s good news for your earholes. (via @arainert)
ps. Speaking of Fincher, he spoke to Disney about directing a Star Wars movie and had an interesting take on the original trilogy:
I always thought of Star Wars as the story of two slaves [C-3PO and R2-D2] who go from owner to owner, witnessing their masters’ folly, the ultimate folly of man.
I somehow didn’t know or forgot that PT Anderson was doing a movie based on Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice. It turns out he totally is and here’s the first trailer:
So I want you to watch this movie and think only about staging, how the shots are built and laid out, what the rules of movement are, what the cutting patterns are. See if you can reproduce the thought process that resulted in these choices by asking yourself: why was each shot — whether short or long — held for that exact length of time and placed in that order? Sounds like fun, right? It actually is. To me. Oh, and I’ve removed all sound and color from the film, apart from a score designed to aid you in your quest to just study the visual staging aspect. Wait, WHAT? HOW COULD YOU DO THIS? Well, I’m not saying I’m like, ALLOWED to do this, I’m just saying this is what I do when I try to learn about staging, and this filmmaker forgot more about staging by the time he made his first feature than I know to this day (for example, no matter how fast the cuts come, you always know exactly where you are — that’s high level visual math shit).
The Shawshank Redemption came out 20 years ago and promptly bombed. Now it’s one of the most popular movies of all time. Here’s how it came to be made.
Filming on location is often something to be endured, and Shawshank’s schedule was particularly brutal: workdays were 15 to 18 hours, six days a week, over three humid months inside the former Ohio State Reformatory, in Mansfield, and on nearby constructed sets, which included the huge cellblock. “We were lucky to have Sundays off,” says Darabont.
A bakery in Mansfield now sells Bundt-cake replicas of the Gothic prison, which these days is a tourist attraction that draws Shawshank pilgrims. But in 1993 the defunct penitentiary-closed three years earlier for inhumane living conditions-“was a very bleak place,” according to Darabont. Robbins adds, “You could feel the pain. It was the pain of thousands of people.” The production employed former inmates who shared personal stories similar to those in Shawshank’s script, “in terms of the violence of the guards and throwing people off the top of cellblocks,” says Deakins.
Robbins remembers “going to that place inside for three months. It was never depressing, because Andy had this hope inside. But it was, at times, dark because of the situations that the character goes through.” Deakins confirms that working on the film was “a very intense situation. Sometimes the performances really affected me while I was shooting it.” The scene that gave Deakins “a tingle down the spine” is also Robbins’s favorite: the prisoners drinking beer on the sunny license-plate-factory roof. Coming more than a half an hour into the movie-and two years into Andy’s sentence-it’s the first bright spot in a film heretofore gray in palette and tone. Andy risks being thrown off the roof by Captain Hadley in order to procure a few “suds” for his fellow prisoners-a moment when the character shifts from victim to burgeoning legend. That Andy himself doesn’t drink is beside the point.
The scene was shot over a “hard, hard day,” says Freeman. “We were actually tarring that roof. And tar doesn’t stay hot and viscous long. It tends to dry and harden, so you’re really working. For the different setups you had to keep doing it over and over and over and over and over.”
I was one of the few who saw Shawshank in the theater (I watched at least two or three movies a week back in those days) and loved it immediately. (via @aaroncoleman0)
Amidala friendzones Anakin, Obi-Wan hunts for drugs, and Jango Fett pumps the bass in this hilarious Auralnauts reimagining of Star Wars: Attack of the Clones.
From actor Cary Elwes, who played the iconic role of Westley in The Princess Bride, comes a first-person account and behind-the-scenes look at the making of the cult classic film filled with never-before-told stories, exclusive photographs, and interviews with costars Robin Wright, Wallace Shawn, Billy Crystal, Christopher Guest, and Mandy Patinkin, as well as author and screenwriter William Goldman, producer Norman Lear, and director Rob Reiner.
The Princess Bride isn’t currently streaming on Netflix, but you can rent it from Amazon.
Chefs featured in the docu-series are: Ben Shewry (of Attica Restaurant in Melbourne, Australia), Magnus Nilsson (Fäviken in Järpen Sweden), Francis Mallmann (El Restaurante Patagonia Sur in Buenos Aires, Argentina), Niki Nakayama (N/Naka Restaurant in Los Angeles), Dan Barber (Blue Hill in New York City and Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Pocantico Hills, N.Y.) and Massimo Bottura (Osteria Francescana in Modena, Italy).
Sounds a lot like a Jiro Dreams series. Looking forward to it. (via @MattH)
Update: The trailer for this series, Chef’s Table, is now out:
That looks fantastic. Available on Netflix on April 26th.
“Oh God,” he groans, “Don’t even go there. Indiana Jones is not an archeologist.”
It’s not surprising that academics — hell bent on taking the fun out of everything — would hate our beloved and iconic movie version of them. But Canuto is no killjoy. His ironic tone and acerbic wit seem honed by long boring days in the sun. So I bite. I quickly learn that there’s a good reason why most every archeologist on Earth hates Indy. And that they might have a point. Because Jones isn’t an archeologist at all.
“That first scene, where he’s in the temple and he’s replacing that statue with a bag of sand — that’s what looters do,” Canuto says, grinning. “[The temple builders] are using these amazing mechanisms of engineering and all he wants to do is steal the stupid gold statue.”
Makes you wonder if Jones was one of the Raiders referred to in the title of the first movie. (via @riondotnu)
Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote her autobiography, Pioneer Girl, in the early 1930s. The book was deemed unsuitable for publication, but Wilder reworked her story into the successful Little House on the Prairie series for children.
It contains stories omitted from her novels, tales that Wilder herself felt “would not be appropriate” for children, such as her family’s sojourn in the town of Burr Oak, where she once saw a man became so drunk that, when he lit a cigar, the whisky fumes on his breath ignited and killed him instantly. In another recollection, a shopkeeper drags his wife around by her hair, pours kerosene on the floor of his house, and sets their bedroom on fire.
Wilder’s memoir also paints a different picture of her father, Charles Ingalls, known in the novels as Pa. Although the real man’s character is essentially the same as the version in the novels - affectionate, musical and restless to move on through America’s frontier - he is, said the book’s publisher, the South Dakota Historical Society Press, clearly “romanticised and idealised”. In Wilder’s autobiography, he is described sneaking his family out of town in the middle of the night after failing to negotiate the rent with the landlord, justifying the flit by calling the man a “rich old skinflint”.
Earlier this year, there was an open casting call for the role of Laura in a new movie version of Little House on the Prairie. Maybe the drunken self-immolation will make it into this one!
Update: Pioneer Girl has become an unlikely bestseller. The small press that published the book is doing a fifth printing and bookstores online and off can’t keep it in stock.
That a hardcover book of this heft and complexity — in addition to the side notes, there are scores of maps, illustrations and photographs — has been such a hit has surprised everyone, including the publisher. The South Dakota Historical Society Press is a seven-person operation based in Pierre. In the five months since the book’s release, it has been trying frantically to print more copies to keep up with demand (the first printing of 15,000 copies sold out in just a couple of weeks). “When people have to wait, they want it more,” says Nancy Tystad Koupal, director of the press.
That’s the somewhat unusual name of a feature-length documentary about world-class stone skippers. Here’s the trailer:
I love skipping stones. When I see flat water and flat rocks, I can’t not do it. They have to change that name though. They were likely going for “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” but really missed the mark. Oh, and they’re raising funds on Kickstarter to finish the film.
The zen art of stone skipping meets the competitive nature of mankind in this feature-length documentary. Set in the world of professional stone skipping, this film will examine the competitive nature of mankind. World Records will be tested, rivalries will fester, and a sport will rise from the ashes of obscurity.
A short appreciation of the Steadicam and its inventor, Garrett Brown. (Brown also invented the football SkyCam.) Features footage from Rocky, Return of the Jedi, and The Shining.
From Wikipedia:
The Steadicam was first used in the Best Picture-nominated Woody Guthrie biopic Bound for Glory (1976), debuting with a shot that compounded the Steadicam’s innovation: cinematographer Haskell Wexler had Brown start the shot on a fully elevated platform crane which jibbed down, and when it reached the ground, Brown stepped off and walked the camera through the set. This technically audacious and previously impossible shot created considerable interest in how it had been accomplished, and impressed the Academy enough for Wexler to win the Oscar for Best Cinematography that year. It was then used in extensive running and chase scenes on the streets of New York City in Marathon Man (1976), which was actually released two months before Bound for Glory. It landed a notable third credit in Avildsen’s Best Picture-winning Rocky (1976), where it was an integral part of the film’s Philadelphia street jogging/training sequences and the run up the Art Museum’s flight of stairs, as well as the fight scenes (where it can even be plainly seen in operation at the ringside during some wide shots of the final fight). Garrett Brown was the Steadicam operator on all of these.
The Shining (1980) pushed Brown’s innovations even further, when director Stanley Kubrick requested that the camera shoot from barely above the floor. This prompted the innovation of a “low mode” bracket to mount the top of a camera to the bottom of an inverted post, which substantially increased the creative angles of the system, which previously could not go much lower than the operator’s waist height. This low-mode concept remains the most important extension to the system since its inception.
Automata is a film directed by Gabe Ibáñez in which robots become sentient and…do something. Not sure what…I hope it’s not revolt and try to take over the world because zzzz… But this movie looks good so here’s hoping.
Jacq Vaucan, an insurance agent of ROC robotics corporation, routinely investigates the case of manipulating a robot. What he discovers will have profound consequences for the future of humanity.
Automata will be available in theaters and VOD on Oct 10. (via devour)
When Alex Belth was 25 years old, he worked with Joel and Ethan Coen on The Big Lebowski, first as a personal assistant and then as an assistant editor. He recently published a short Kindle book about the experience.
The Dudes Abide is the first behind-the-scenes account of the making of a Coen Brothers movie, and offers an intimate, first-hand narrative of the making of The Big Lebowski — including never-before-revealed details about the making of the film, and insight into the inner workings of the Coen Brothers’ genius.
Joel told Goodman about re-recording dialogue for the profanity-free television version of Fargo. They rewrote the line, “I’m fucking hungry now” to “I’m full of hungry now.”
“Why didn’t we write it like that originally?” said Joel. “It’s funnier.”
Goodman said, “Who else is coming on this show?” (In Los Angeles, movie people call a movie a “show.”)
There was Steve Buscemi as Donny, Julianne Moore as Maude, Jon Polito as Da Fino.
Joel said, “Our friend Luis, who was an assistant film editor on Hudsucker, will be playing the enraged Mexican.”
“Yeah, you’ll like Luis,” Ethan said in a creaky voice. “He makes a big statement.”
“Turturro is coming in to play the pederast,” Joel said. “He said he’d do his best F. Murray Abraham.”
The rise of instant messaging, and even more, the SMS, has added another layer of difficulty; I’m convinced that the reason so many TV characters have iPhones is not just that Hollywood thinks they’re cool, but also because the big crisp screen is so darn easy to read. Still, the cut to that little black metal rectangle is a narrative momentum killer. What’s a director trying to make a ripping good adventure yarn to do?
The solution is deceptively simple: instead of cutting to the character’s screen, Sherlock takes over the viewer’s screen.
And just today, a trailer for Jason Reitman’s Men, Women & Children, which movie seems to consist entirely of texting and social media interaction:
The Despecialized Edition is the years-long work of a diverse group of people who have taken elements from many different sources and created the ultimate version of the first Star Wars film. It has also been upgraded to display properly on high definition screens, with high-quality sounds and a near perfect image.
The latest Blu-Ray release of the film serves as the skeleton for this edition, but elements of the 2006 bonus DVD that included the unaltered version of the film was also used to remove special effects and edits that were added by Lucas.
The mixtape that Star-Lord carries around in Guardians of the Galaxy is of course available as an actual album (Amazon mp3, iTunes). The album isn’t on Spotify, but there is a playlist of all the songs.
As Slate notes, the movie merch album isn’t totally true to the movie as it includes two songs from Awesome Mix Vol. 2, but I will never complain of Marvin Gaye’s or the Jackson 5’s inclusion in anything.
Here’s the trailer for the third and final movie in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy:
The Hobbit was initially supposed to be just two films but Jackson decided to split the second film into two. From Wikipedia:
According to Jackson, the third film would contain the Battle of the Five Armies and make extensive use of the appendices that Tolkien wrote to expand the story of Middle-Earth (published in the back of The Return of the King).
The second movie was better than the first so I’m looking forward to this one. But then again, I’m totally in the tank for Jackson’s take on Middle Earth (I did the Weta Digital tour when I was in New Zealand) so I would see it even if the first two movies sucked.
So, a few months ago Quentin Tarantino scrapped plans to make what was supposed to be his next film, The Hateful Eight, after the script leaked. Which struck me as weird and petty, but Hollywood in general seems weird and petty to me. Turns out that Tarantino’s gonna do the movie after all.
During the Comic-Con panel, one of the audience members point blank asked Tarantino if he’ll be making the script as his next feature, following recent word that it could be heating back up again. Tarantino hemmed and hawed for a bit — before finally committing: “Yeah — We’re going to be doing The Hateful Eight.” So there you have it: The Hateful Eight will be the next Quentin Tarantino feature.
The photo at the top is the first official poster for the film.
Actor Robin Williams was found dead in his home today of an apparent suicide. He was 63. I have been thinking a lot about this scene from Dead Poets Society lately:
In this compelling memoir, his first wife, Jane Hawking, relates the inside story of their extraordinary marriage. As Stephen’s academic renown soared, his body was collapsing under the assaults of motor neurone disease. Jane’s candid account of trying to balance his 24-hour care with the needs of their growing family reveals the inner-strength of the author, while the self-evident character and achievements of her husband make for an incredible tale presented with unflinching honesty.
As promising as this looks, the Kanye in me needs to remind you that Errol Morris’ A Brief History of Time is the best film about Stephen Hawking of all time. OF ALL TIME.
Sight and Sound polled 340 critics and filmmakers in search of the world’s best documentary films. Here are their top 50. From the list, the top five:
A Man with a Movie Camera
Shoah
Sans soleil
Night and Fog
The Thin Blue Line
Unless you went to film school or are a big film nerd, you probably haven’t seen (or even heard of) the top choice, A Man with a Movie Camera. Roger Ebert reviewed the film several years ago as part of his Great Movies Collection.
Born in 1896 and coming of age during the Russian Revolution, Vertov considered himself a radical artist in a decade where modernism and surrealism were gaining stature in all the arts. He began by editing official newsreels, which he assembled into montages that must have appeared rather surprising to some audiences, and then started making his own films. He would invent an entirely new style. Perhaps he did. “It stands as a stinging indictment of almost every film made between its release in 1929 and the appearance of Godard’s ‘Breathless’ 30 years later,” the critic Neil Young wrote, “and Vertov’s dazzling picture seems, today, arguably the fresher of the two.” Godard is said to have introduced the “jump cut,” but Vertov’s film is entirely jump cuts.
If you’re curious, the film is available on YouTube in its entirety:
Physicist Andy Howell recently gave a talk about the science of Star Wars and wrote up a summary of it for Ain’t It Cool News. Topics covered include binary star systems, droids, the Death Star, and lightsabers:
Of course, we still don’t know how to make a lightsaber. One big problem is confining plasma (if that is even what it is), into some tube. But a bigger problem is the amount of energy required. We can actually calculate this from clues in the movies!
In Episode I, Qui-Gon jabs his lightsaber into a door, and melts part of it. That’s just basic physics! To melt something, you have to raise its temperature to the melting point, and you can calculate how much energy that takes using the specific heat capacity of a material.
Just moments ago, Toshio Suzuki, Studio Ghibli producer, announced on the TV show of the MBS Jounetsu Tairiku chain effectively as announced as sources close to the studio, Studio Ghibli will close and production studio anime, leaving himself only as a company that will manage its trademarks. As stated in the program’s producer, “the production department of anime will be dismantled,” which coincides with the data that we gave in our previous post on this decision had been taken from spring after the poor reception at the box office of Kaguya-hime no Monogatari.
Luckily those reports appear to be overblown and poorly translated. As Kotaku explains, Suzuki’s comments were much more speculative in nature:
Suzuki’s wording makes it sound like the studio is considering reorganization and regrouping. It could mean that Studio Ghibli decides it won’t make anime films anymore. Though it could mean they do keep making anime films. It could mean a lot of things!
Realize that, at the time of writing, no major Japanese newspaper is running this story. Nor did any morning TV shows. Had Studio Ghibli — a national treasure — definitively ceased production of films, it would be headline news around the country, as it would be important in both the entertainment and business worlds.
From This Must Be the Place, a lovely short profile of Old Town Music Hall in El Segundo, California. Old Town shows silent films with live musical accompaniment. Includes a brief tour of the inner workings of the theater’s wind-powered pipe organ from 1925.
The Imitation Game is a historical drama about Alan Turing, focusing on his efforts in breaking the Enigma code during WWII. Benedict Cumberbatch plays Alan Turing. Here’s a trailer:
This is a lie, but I got dozens of emails today asking, “Jason, what movie should I watch tonight?” Whoa, slow down everyone, I’ve got just the thing: Snowpiercer. It’s a Korean film from 2013 that’s just now trickling into the consciousness of the rest of the world (c.f. this Grantland piece). The film takes place entirely on a train carrying the last remaining humans speeding forever around a frozen Earth (caused by an overenthusiastic response to climate change) and director Bong Joon-ho takes full advantage of this confined and linear setting. Plus, Tilda Swinton as a Terry Gilliam-ified Maggie Thatcher is worth the price of admission alone.
Snowpiercer is out in ~350 theaters in the US, so if you’re not in a major metropolitan area, it might be a little hard to catch. But the movie is also available digitally at Amazon and iTunes.
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