kottke.org posts about movies
Once again, Steven Soderbergh kept track of every book, TV show, movie, play, and short story he read or watched in 2014. A sampling: Girls, True Detective, Gone Girl, 2001 (3 times), Dr. Strangelove, Olive Kitteridge, My Struggle: Book One, Boardwalk Empire, and his black & white version of Raiders of the Lost Ark (twice).
Here are his lists for 2013 (House of Cards, Koyaanisqatsi), 2012 (This is Spinal Tap, The Lady in the Lake), 2011 (Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Senna), 2010 (Mad Men, Where Good Ideas Come From), and 2009 (Breaking Bad, Slap Shot). (via @khoi)
From Mike Hale in the NY Times, a short appreciation of Hayao Miyazaki, among the best filmmakers of his generation.
Even at its high end, in the works of the Pixar studio or the director Henry Selick, the American children’s movie (a category that these days is pretty much congruent with the animated feature film) approaches its young viewers in a different and less rewarding way. There is always a sense of the filmmakers looking across a divide at their audience, trying with various degrees of grace or desperation to create an entertainment for them, to figure out what will keep those allegedly hyperdistracted children from losing interest.
Mr. Miyazaki cares deeply about that young audience, but you get the feeling that he doesn’t waste any time trying to guess what it wants. Like other great directors of films for and about children — Carroll Ballard (“The Black Stallion”) Steven Spielberg (“E.T.”), Alfonso Cuaron (“A Little Princess” and “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban”) — he inhabits the child’s point of view and directly communicates her joys, her trepidations and, perhaps most important, her endless curiosity.
From the excellent Art of the Title (which had a great year), the top 10 title sequences of 2014. So awesome to see Halt and Catch Fire take the top spot. And Too Many Cooks!
The end credits for The Boxtrolls, a stop motion animation film by Laika, is a clever time lapse sequence showing the work that goes into moving the characters. You can tell how long it takes by how often the animator’s outfit changes.
Christopher Jobson of Colossal writes:
I first saw Boxtrolls in the theater last September with my son, and this single scene caused a more vocal response from the audience than any other moment in the entire movie. People were literally gasping, myself included.
The Boxtrolls is already available for purchase on Amazon…might have to watch this with the kids soon.
Hiro teaching Baymax how to fist bump in Big Hero 6.
Update: Jason Porath smartly speculates that Big Hero 6’s fist bump scene was a social media snack sized moment inserted into the movie for marketing purposes, which is part of a larger industry trend.
I don’t have a good word to describe this phenomenon, so I’m going to term it “hashgags.” This is a joke in an animated movie, usually input at the behest of marketing forces, that is used to sell the movie. It’s usually inserted late into production and test screened to within an inch of its life. Some are used repeatedly, some are one-offs that do well with trailers. And it is crippling the entire industry.
From Every Frame a Painting, an appreciation of Jackie Chan and his particular and excellent brand of action comedy.
I love old Jackie Chan movies. When I lived in Minneapolis, a theater there showed them on Saturday nights, late. Drunken Master II is a particular favorite…the final fight scene is AMAZING. The part about how the camera never moves and shoots wide-angle during his scenes is why action in contemporary Hollywood films leaves me yawning.
When I first saw it during the magical movie year of 1999, Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke completely blew me away. Now that it’s (finally!) out on Blu-ray1, I can’t wait to see it again. Bonus: the ability to watch in the original Japanese with English subtitles.
From Mallory Ortberg, some reviews of children’s movies penned by objectivist Ayn Rand.
“Mary Poppins”
A woman takes a job with a wealthy family without asking for money in exchange for her services. An absurd premise. Later, her employer leaves a lucrative career in banking in order to play a children’s game. -No stars.
During the production of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick commissioned well-known film score composer Alex North to do the score for the film. North had previously done scores for A Streetcar Named Desire, Spartacus, Cleopatra, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and later received an honorary Oscar for his lifetime of work. As production progressed, Kubrick began to feel that the temporary music he used to edit the film was more appropriate. From an interview with Kubrick by Michel Ciment:
However good our best film composers may be, they are not a Beethoven, a Mozart or a Brahms. Why use music which is less good when there is such a multitude of great orchestral music available from the past and from our own time? When you’re editing a film, it’s very helpful to be able to try out different pieces of music to see how they work with the scene. This is not at all an uncommon practice. Well, with a little more care and thought, these temporary music tracks can become the final score. When I had completed the editing of 2001: A Space Odyssey, I had laid in temporary music tracks for almost all of the music which was eventually used in the film. Then, in the normal way, I engaged the services of a distinguished film composer to write the score. Although he and I went over the picture very carefully, and he listened to these temporary tracks (Strauss, Ligeti, Khatchaturian) and agreed that they worked fine and would serve as a guide to the musical objectives of each sequence he, nevertheless, wrote and recorded a score which could not have been more alien to the music we had listened to, and much more serious than that, a score which, in my opinion, was completely inadequate for the film.
And so the temporary music became the iconic score we know today. For comparison, the embedded video shows how North’s original score would have sounded over the opening credits and initial scene.
Selections from North’s original score were later released publicly. Here’s a 38-minute album on Spotify:
Kubrick was absolutely right to ditch North’s score…it’s perfectly fine music but totally wrong for the movie, not to mention it sounds totally dated today. The classical score gives the film a timeless quality, adding to the film’s appeal and reputation more than 45 years later. (via @UnlikelyWorlds)
Update: Two additional facets to this story. North first learned that Kubrick ditched his score at the NYC premiere of the film; he was reportedly (and understandably) “devastated”. And even when Kubrick was artistically satisfied with the music he chose, negotiations to procure the rights weren’t necessarily smooth.
2) Kubrick’s associates did obtain licenses from Ligeti’s publishers and from record and radio companies, although they were not forthcoming about the pivotal role assigned to the music in the film; 3) Ligeti learned about the use of his music not from his publishers but from members of the Bavarian Radio Chorus; 4) he attended a showing of the film with stopwatch in hand, furiously scribbling down timings — thirty-two minutes in all;
Kubrick was undoubtably of the “shoot first, ask questions later” school of negotiation. (via @timrosenberg)
The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness is a documentary which presents a year in the life of Studio Ghibli and its famed director, Hayao Miyazaki. The year in question was a particularly interesting one during which Miyazaki announced his retirement. The trailer:
Granted near-unfettered access to the notoriously insular Studio Ghibli, director Mami Sunada follows the three men who are the lifeblood of Ghibli — the eminent director Hayao Miyazaki, the producer Toshio Suzuki, and the elusive and influential “other director” Isao Takahata — over the course of a year as the studio rushes to complete two films, Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises and Takahata’s The Tale of The Princess Kaguya. The result is a rare “fly on the wall” glimpse of the inner workings of one of the world’s most celebrated animation studios, and an insight into the dreams, passion and singular dedication of these remarkable creators.
(via @garymross)
Update: The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness is now available for rent/buy on Amazon and iTunes.
Somehow I didn’t know that Zoolander (which Terrence Malick and I both love and Roger Ebert hated) began as a short clip Ben Stiller did for the 1996 VH1 Fashion Awards.
(via the dissolve)
The soundtrack for PT Anderson’s Inherent Vice is now on Spotify, well all except for one song. The album is even more partially on Rdio. For the whole thing, you’ll have to head to Amazon.
The fifth track, Spooks, is a variation of a Radiohead song that’s never been officially released. (via @naserca)
Legal scholar Cass Sunstein presents his annual list of the movies that best showcased behavioral economics for 2014.
Best actor: In 1986, behavioral scientists Daniel Kahneman and Dale Miller developed “norm theory,” which suggests that humans engage in a lot of counterfactual thinking: We evaluate our experiences by asking about what might have happened instead. If you miss a train by two minutes, you’re likely to be more upset than if you miss it by an hour, and if you finish second in some competition, you might well be less happy than if you had come in third.
“Edge of Tomorrow” spends every one of its 113 minutes on norm theory. It’s all about counterfactuals — how small differences in people’s actions produce big changes, at least for those privileged to relive life again (and again, and again). Tom Cruise doesn’t get many awards these days, or a lot of respect, and we’re a bit terrified to say this — but imagine how terrible we’d feel if we didn’t: The Top Gun wins the Becon.
(via @tylercowen)
Finally, courtesy of the Auralnauts, we get the Terminator trailer that we deserve. Time travel is hilarious.
I wish we could send you back with pants, but the technology just isn’t there yet. So as soon as you hit the ground, you’re going to want to find some pants. I know you can do it…because you already did it.
Like the old wives’ tale says, if you want to fix the future, just keep sending Terminators back in time. (via @mouser_nerdbot)
Adrian Curry selects his favorites for the best movie posters of 2014. This one, for Gabe Polsky’s Red Army, caught my eye:
See also the best poster lists from Empire, Entertainment Weekly, and Indiewire. (via subtraction)
Woo! New Terrence Malick film! Knight of Cups stars Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, and Natalie Portman with cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki, who also did Children of Men, Gravity, Birdman, and Malick’s The Tree of Life. Here’s the trailer:
The Tree of Life *wrecked* me.
Every once in awhile on the site, I’ll use the phrase “in my wheelhouse”, meaning something that is particularly interesting to me. Well, Grantland’s long oral history of the making of Boogie Nights is so in my wheelhouse that I might be the captain.
When [Anderson] set out to film Boogie Nights, it was with a resolve bordering on arrogance. Compromise wasn’t part of the plan. Still, after an intense production and postproduction period — one in which the director had to manage a cranky, confused Burt Reynolds and an untested, rapping underwear model named Mark Wahlberg — Anderson was forced once again to fight studio heads for his cut of the film.
But Anderson’s vision prevailed this time. Nearly 20 years later, Boogie Nights endures. For its beautiful portrait of nontraditional families; for Reynolds and Wahlberg, the surrogate father and son, who were never better; for Philip Seymour Hoffman, squeezing into character and breaking hearts; for its prodigy director sticking to his guns and nailing it; for John C. Reilly’s hot-tub poetry; for Roller Girl. Is everybody ready? This is the making and near unmaking of Boogie Nights.
Man, I love that movie. But think on this: Leonardo DiCaprio as Dirk Diggler, Drew Barrymore as Roller Girl, and Bill Murray as Jack Horner.
A tribute to outer space in movies, featuring clips from Gravity, The Fountain, Alien, Star Wars, Solaris, Sunshine, Guardians of the Galaxy, and more.
Music is from Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack for Interstellar, which I was initially lukewarm on but have been listening to consistently over the past week or so. (via devour)
SWAPI is a new web service will use a RESTful interface to return JSON about the “Planets, Spaceships, Vehicles, People, Films and Species” from all six of the Star Wars movies. This API would be really useful if Disney would have done as Matt Webb suggested and turned Star Wars into a genre rather than a franchise.
Imagine, imagine if Disney had said: Star Wars isn’t a franchise, it’s a genre.
The legendary galaxy, a long time ago, far far away, is well understood: What’s true is what’s in the Holocron continuity database.
Open the Holocron. Show everyone what’s in it. Let it become history.
Then let anyone make movies and books that share the Star Wars world. Not like all those other franchises that argue about what’s canon and what’s not… rise above it, become a new shared set of conventions, formulas, history and myth, just like the western but for the 21st century.
My friend David suggested something similar with Harry Potter a few years ago…open it up and let any director take a shot at making Potter movies. Open source franchises.
Worth a listen: a 30-minute BBC Radio show on 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Francine journeys through time and space to uncover the mysteries of this 1968 classic. Searching for the mind of H.A.L. and lost alien worlds among the delights of the Stanley Kubrick Archive at London’s University of the Arts. Joining Francine on her voyage of discovery are 2001 chronicler Piers Bizony, former urbane spaceman Keir Dullea and the woman who built the moon! Other voices include production designer Harry Lange, make-up genius Stuart Freeborn, editor Ray Lovejoy, all now so much stardust, as well as those of lead ape ‘Moonwatcher’ (Dan Richter) & Stargate deviser Douglas Trumbull.
From the August 4, 1926 issue of The New Republic, here’s an essay about film by author Virginia Woolf, published the year before the release of the first talkie.
People say that the savage no longer exists in us, that we are at the fag-end of civilization, that everything has been said already, and that it is too late to be ambitious. But these philosophers have presumably forgotten the movies. They have never seen the savages of the twentieth century watching the pictures. They have never sat themselves in front of the screen and thought how, for all the clothes on their backs and the carpets at their feet, no great distance separates them from those bright-eyed, naked men who knocked two bars of iron together and heard in that clangor a foretaste of the music of Mozart.
The bars in this case, of course, are so highly wrought and so covered over with accretions of alien matter that it is extremely difficult to hear anything distinctly. All is hubble-bubble, swarm and chaos. We are peering over the edge of a cauldron in which fragments of all shapes and savors seem to simmer; now and again some vast form heaves itself up, and seems about to haul itself out of chaos. Yet, at first sight, the art of the cinema seems simple, even stupid. There is the King shaking hands with a football team; there is Sir Thomas Lipton’s yacht; there is Jack Horner winning the Grand National. The eye licks it all up instantaneously, and the brain, agreeably titillated, settles down to watch things happening without bestirring itself to think.
I am still very much looking forward to the Shaun the Sheep movie, but the first official trailer is not inspiring much confidence:
Yeesh. That makes it look like The Smurfs movie or something. Movie company marketing departments don’t seem to know what to do with quirky stuff like Shaun or Wallace & Gromit. Has an Aardman movie ever had a good trailer? (via digg)
What if George Lucas was making the new Star Wars movie instead of JJ Abrams? This recut trailer offers a glimpse of the cheesy CG madness.
So so good.
Here it is, the very first look at JJ Abrams’ new Star Wars movie.
Not ashamed to say I felt chills down my spine when the music kicked in. Please please please let this not suck.
Update: From the teaser, it’s a little early to tell whether Abrams is following these four rules to make Star Wars great again (1. The setting is the frontier. 2. The future is old. 3. The Force is mysterious. 4. Star Wars isn’t cute.) but there are hints of 1&2 in there…they’re still driving those old rust-bucket X-Wings and wearing beat-up helmets.
In his recent book, How Star Wars Conquered the Universe, Chris Taylor tells the story of how avant garde cinema fan George Lucas built one of the biggest movie franchises ever.
How did a few notes scribbled on a legal pad in 1973 by George Lucas, a man who hated writing, turn into a four billion dollar franchise that has quite literally transformed the way we think about entertainment, merchandizing, politics, and even religion? A cultural touchstone and cinematic classic, Star Wars has a cosmic appeal that no other movie franchise has been able to replicate. From Jedi-themed weddings and international storm-trooper legions, to impassioned debates over the digitization of the three Star Wars prequels, to the shockwaves that continue to reverberate from Disney’s purchase of the beloved franchise in 2012, the series hasn’t stopped inspiring and inciting viewers for almost forty years. Yet surprisingly little is known about its history, its impact — or where it’s headed next.
(via mr)
Jessica Hische and Font Bureau have teamed up to offer the typeface Hische designed for Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom. Meet Tilda (great name). Art of the Title interviewed Hische about the typeface last year.
A look at the sound design of Interstellar, including some of the cool rigs they built to record sounds for the movie, including a truck driving through a corn field, sand hitting the outside of a car, and robots walking.
(via devour)
I have not seen the movie yet (Alan Turing biopic starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley) but the Alexandre Desplat soundtrack is worth a listen.
Also available on Spotify or Amazon.
Whoa, how did I miss this? Steve Carell, check. Channing Tatum, check. Mark Ruffalo, check. Based on a true story, check. Positive reviews, check.
Currently on the to-do list: watch every single movie produced by Annapurna Pictures, a production and distribution company founded by Megan Ellison, who is Oracle founder Larry Ellison’s daughter. Look at this list of directors they’re working with: Kathryn Bigelow, Paul Thomas Anderson, Spike Jonze, David O. Russell, Richard Linklater.
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