kottke.org posts about movies
New prints in the Dorothy shop: these really cool Hollywood Star Charts, available in Golden Age and Modern Day editions.
The Modern Day version of our Hollywood Star Chart features constellations named after some of the most culturally significant films to have appeared on the silver screen since 1960 - present day. The stars that make up the clusters are the Hollywood stars that appeared in them.
The chart is based on the night sky over New York on June 16th 1960 — the date of the first showing of Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’ at the DeMille Theater. With its new approach to storytelling, characterisation and violence it is seen as a key movie in the start of the post-classical era of Hollywood.
The 108 films featured include those chosen for preservation in the US National Film Registry due to their cultural, historical, or aesthetic significance; Academy Award winners; and a few personal favourites. Films include Easy Rider, Bonnie and Clyde, The Exorcist, The Godfather, Chinatown, Star Wars, Pulp Fiction and Avatar.
You may remember Dorothy from their movie name maps.
Here are a few clips from Christian Marclay’s The Clock that have been surreptitiously filmed and uploaded to YouTube and Vimeo.
The clips are crappy bootlegs that cut off part of the screen, but I still totally get sucked in after 30 seconds of each clip.
An extensive examination of the evolution of the Star Wars logo, which went through too many iterations to count.
..Though the poster contained no painted imagery, it did introduce a new logo to the campaign, one that had been designed originally for the cover of a Fox brochure sent to theater owners….Suzy Rice, who had just been hired as an art director, remembers the job well. She recalls that the design directive given by Lucas was that the logo should look “very fascist.”
“I’d been reading a book the night before the meeting with George Lucas,” she says, “a book about German type design and the historical origins of some of the popular typefaces used today — how they developed into what we see and use in the present.” After Lucas described the kind of visual element he was seeking, “I returned to the office and used what I reckoned to be the most ‘fascist’ typeface I could think of: Helvetica Black.”
(via df)
Executive produced by Errol Morris and Werner Herzog, The Act of Killing is a documentary directed by Joshua Oppenheimer about a group of Indonesian mass murderers.
In The Act of Killing, Anwar and his friends agree to tell us the story of the killings. But their idea of being in a movie is not to provide testimony for a documentary: they want to star in the kind of films they most love from their days scalping tickets at the cinemas. We seize this opportunity to expose how a regime that was founded on crimes against humanity, yet has never been held accountable, would project itself into history.
And so we challenge Anwar and his friends to develop fiction scenes about their experience of the killings, adapted to their favorite film genres — gangster, western, musical. They write the scripts. They play themselves. And they play their victims.
Wow. (via @aaroncoleman0)
Update: It expires today, but The Act of Killing is available to watch for free on PBS. After today, try Amazon.
Of course the watches worn by the characters in Fantastic Mr. Fox are going to be classic 70s and 80s timepieces.
From XKCD, a chart of the memes that various star systems are just hearing from the Earth’s light-speed communications.
This is the meme version of Contact’s opening credits scene, which is one of my favorites:
There are a lot of outdoor movies showing in NYC this summer: here’s a listing of the whats, wheres, and whens. Movies include The Goonies, Jaws, Duck Soup, Moonrise Kingdom, Grease, and Blade Runner.
A nice short analysis by filmmaker Steven Benedict of the themes expressed and techniques used by Steven Spielberg in his films.
Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures is a documentary released in 2001 about Stanley Kubrick. Narrated by Tom Cruise, the film was directed by his long-time assistant Jan Harlan and features interviews of many actors from Kubrick’s films as well as other noted directors like Spielberg and Scorsese. The entire thing is available on YouTube:
You can also rent/buy on Amazon or rent/buy on iTunes.
At the recent San Francisco Internation Film Festival, Steven Soderbergh gave a keynote about the current state of cinema. It is worth reading if you enjoy movies or are engaged in any sort of creative work.
But before we talk about movies we should talk about art in general, if that’s possible. Given all the incredible suffering in the world I wonder, what is art for, really? If the collected works of Shakespeare can’t prevent genocide then really, what is it for? Shouldn’t we be spending the time and resources alleviating suffering and helping other people instead of going to the movies and plays and art installations? When we did Ocean’s Thirteen the casino set used $60,000 of electricity every week. How do you justify that? Do you justify that by saying, the people who could’ve had that electricity are going to watch the movie for two hours and be entertained - except they probably can’t, because they don’t have any electricity, because we used it. Then I think, what about all the resources spent on all the pieces of entertainment? What about the carbon footprint of getting me here? Then I think, why are you even thinking that way and worrying about how many miles per gallon my car gets, when we have NASCAR, and monster truck pulls on TV? So what I finally decided was, art is simply inevitable. It was on the wall of a cave in France 30,000 years ago, and it’s because we are a species that’s driven by narrative. Art is storytelling, and we need to tell stories to pass along ideas and information, and to try and make sense out of all this chaos. And sometimes when you get a really good artist and a compelling story, you can almost achieve that thing that’s impossible which is entering the consciousness of another human being - literally seeing the world the way they see it. Then, if you have a really good piece of art and a really good artist, you are altered in some way, and so the experience is transformative and in the minute you’re experiencing that piece of art, you’re not alone. You’re connected to the arts. So I feel like that can’t be too bad.
Update: If you prefer to watch the speech, have at it:
(via @MikeShefferNJ)
Caroline Rothstein on how Kids came about and what happened to the young actors who starred in the film.
Two decades after a low-budget film turned Washington Square skaters into international celebrities, the kids from Kids struggle with lost lives, distant friendships, and the fine art of growing up.
The Hangover Part III is out later in the month and the Hollywood Reporter has an oral history of the making of the first two movies.
HELMS: I was always the nervous Nelly about those jokes. Zach was going to get arrested for the baby thing.
PHILLIPS: Jerking the baby off at Caesars.
GALIFIANAKIS: I did it first with the doll that was just sitting there while we were setting up the shot. I showed Todd, and he goes, “Let’s go ask the parents if we can do that.” (Laughter.) I’m like, “No.”
PHILLIPS: I waited for the [baby’s] mom to go upstairs because the mom was a little bit more not into stuff like that. I go to the dad: “It would be funny if Zach pretends to do this. Would you have a problem with that?” And he literally goes: “[My wife is] going to be gone for a half-hour. Can you do it in the next half-hour?”
COOPER: “Can you jerk my kid off in a half-hour?” (Laughter.)
Steven Spielberg is doing a sequel to Lincoln called Obama and he got Daniel Day-Lewis to play the lead. I knew Day-Lewis was good, but this is bonkers.
Caught The Central Park Five on PBS last night and it’s one of those films that puts you into rage-against-the-machine mode.
The Central Park Five, a new film from award-winning filmmaker Ken Burns, tells the story of the five black and Latino teenagers from Harlem who were wrongly convicted of raping a white woman in New York City’s Central Park in 1989. The film chronicles The Central Park Jogger case, for the first time from the perspective of these five teenagers whose lives were upended by this miscarriage of justice.
The entire film is available to watch on the PBS web site. Tonight, there’s a TimesTalk in NYC featuring Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, Times columnist Jim Dwyer, and all five of the exonerated men; the talk will be broadcast live on the web here.
Deceptive Practice is a documentary about Ricky Jay which features, among other things, a shaggy-haired Jay playing Three-card Monte with Steve Martin on an 80s chat show.
Jay is a fascinating guy, as this 1993 New Yorker profile of him by Mark Singer demonstrates.
Ricky Jay, who is perhaps the most gifted sleight-of-hand artist alive, was performing magic with a deck of cards. Also present was a friend of Mamet and Mosher’s named Christ Nogulich, the director of food and beverage at the hotel. After twenty minutes of disbelief-suspending manipulations, Jay spread the deck face up on the bar counter and asked Nogulich to concentrate on a specific card but not to reveal it. Jay then assembled the deck face down, shuffled, cut it into two piles, and asked Nogulich to point to one of the piles and name his card.
“Three of clubs,” Nogulich said, and he was then instructed to turn over the top card.
He turned over the three of clubs.
Mosher, in what could be interpreted as a passive-aggressive act, quietly announced, “Ricky, you know, I also concentrated on a card.”
After an interval of silence, Jay said, “That’s interesting, Gregory, but I only do this for one person at a time.”
Mosher persisted: “Well, Ricky, I really was thinking of a card.”
Jay paused, frowned, stared at Mosher, and said, “This is a distinct change of procedure.” A longer pause. “All right-what was the card?”
“Two of spades.”
Jay nodded, and gestured toward the other pile, and Mosher turned over its top card.
The deuce of spades.
A small riot ensued.
Anyway, the film is coming out next week in NYC. (via @aaroncoleman0)
Oh hello, what’s this? M83 did the soundtrack to Oblivion, the new sci-fi movie where Tom Cruise plays Wall-E? That will do quite nicely. Here it is on iTunes, Amazon, or Rdio.
In an interview last month with Esquire’s Eric Spitznagel, Michel Gondry talked about his newest movie, The We and the I, and about how time travel is depressing.
ES: In your real life. If you, Michel Gondry, found a time machine and could go anywhere, to any period in history, where would you take it?
MG: I would travel back a few years ago and fix some screw-up I did.
ES: A personal or professional screw-up?
MG: In my personal life.
ES: Can you be more specific?
MG: I would come back and say yes to a girl. That’s all. Actually, I find the whole idea of traveling back in time to be profoundly depressing.
ES: Really? Why so?
MG: Because I know the future. Living in the past, it would feel weird to know what’s going to happen next. You couldn’t escape it. That future’s already in your head. You know it doesn’t get better.
ES: You’d rather not know about the future?
MG: The future is about hope. If you travel from the present to the past, you don’t have that hope anymore. You know how everything turns out.
ES: There are no surprises.
MG: No surprises, exactly! To me, that just sounds so… depressing.
Earlier today, I linked to a post by Roger Ebert announcing his leave of presence. The Chicago Sun-Times has announced that Ebert died today at 70.
Ebert, 70, who reviewed movies for the Chicago Sun-Times for 46 years and on TV for 31 years, and who was without question the nation’s most prominent and influential film critic, died Thursday in Chicago. He had been in poor health over the past decade, battling cancers of the thyroid and salivary gland.
He lost part of his lower jaw in 2006, and with it the ability to speak or eat, a calamity that would have driven other men from the public eye. But Ebert refused to hide, instead forging what became a new chapter in his career, an extraordinary chronicle of his devastating illness that won him a new generation of admirers. “No point in denying it,” he wrote, analyzing his medical struggles with characteristic courage, candor and wit, a view that was never tinged with bitterness or self-pity.
Always technically savvy - he was an early investor in Google - Ebert let the Internet be his voice. His rogerebert.com had millions of fans, and he received a special achievement award as the 2010 “Person of the Year” from the Webby Awards, which noted that “his online journal has raised the bar for the level of poignancy, thoughtfulness and critique one can achieve on the Web.” His Twitter feeds had 827,000 followers.
Ebert was both widely popular and professionally respected. He not only won a Pulitzer Prize - the first film critic to do so - but his name was added to the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2005, among the movie stars he wrote about so well for so long. His reviews were syndicated in hundreds of newspapers worldwide.
Rest in peace, Roger. And fuck cancer.
Sad news from Chicago: Roger Ebert’s cancer has returned and he’s taking what he calls a “leave of presence” to focus on recovery and a few different projects.
What in the world is a leave of presence? It means I am not going away. My intent is to continue to write selected reviews but to leave the rest to a talented team of writers handpicked and greatly admired by me. What’s more, I’ll be able at last to do what I’ve always fantasized about doing: reviewing only the movies I want to review.
At the same time, I am re-launching the new and improved Rogerebert.com and taking ownership of the site under a separate entity, Ebert Digital, run by me, my beloved wife, Chaz, and our brilliant friend, Josh Golden of Table XI. Stepping away from the day-to-day grind will enable me to continue as a film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, and roll out other projects under the Ebert brand in the coming year.
Love that first sentence. Get well soon, Roger.
Streaming music service Rdio (which I have been enjoying the hell out of for the past couple months1) is launching a streaming video service called Vdio.
The first thing you’ll notice about Vdio is that it’s designed to solve the “what to watch” problem. It’s not just that we’ve got amazing content, but that the experience is now geared to get you from searching to watching faster. We’re introducing the notion of Sets — playlists for TV shows and movies — so anyone can make and share lists of their favorites, making it easier than ever to discover new stuff. Or, you can just check out what your friends are watching in the moment and jump in. Beyond that, Vdio has the beautiful design and social features that people love about Rdio, with plenty more to come.
I haven’t played with it too much, but it looks like it’s not an all-you-can-eat service like Rdio…you buy/rent movies and TV shows just like iTunes, Amazon, etc.
[1] And that’s actually a huge understatement. I ignored streaming music services like Rdio and Spotify when they came out, opting for the familiarity of iTunes, but Rdio has completely reignited my love of music over the past two months. Should write a whole post about this at some point. ↩
Caught a rerun of an episode of This American Life on reruns the other day. The first segment is about a movie I’d never heard about before, The Beaver Trilogy. I don’t want to spoil it too much (the Wikipedia page contains spoilers as well) but the first part of the film features documentary footage of a kid from Beaver, Utah doing impressions and putting on a talent show. The second and third parts are recreations of that footage featuring, well, just listen to the story or watch the first two parts of the movie for yourself (one, two). (thx, @eventi)
Leigh Singer gathered more than 50 clips from movies that break the fourth wall (where the characters acknowledge they’re in a movie).
Sadly my favorite broken fourth wall moment didn’t make the list: Billy Ray Valentine in Trading Places getting a commodities lesson from the Dukes. (via zupped)
Update: Ah, and all is right with the universe again as Trading Places makes it into Singer’s second compilation of fourth wall breaks.
Anderson has finished filming his next movie, The Grand Budapest Hotel, with the likes of Tilda Swinton, Jude Law, Bill Murray, and Owen Wilson. Screen Daily has some plot details:
The Grand Budapest Hotel tells of a legendary concierge at a famous European hotel between the wars and his friendship with a young employee who becomes his trusted protégé. The story involves the theft and recovery of a priceless Renaissance painting, the battle for an enormous family fortune and the slow and then sudden upheavals that transformed Europe during the first half of the 20th century.
Wow. In 1978, George Lucus gathered together Steven Spielberg and screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan to go over ideas for a film Lucas had wanted to make about a swashbuckling archeologist, i.e. Raiders of the Lost Ark. Their sessions were recorded and there’s a transcript available online.
Lucas - Now, several aspects that we’ve discussed before: The image of him which is the strongest image is the “Treasure Of Sierra Madre” outfit, which is the khaki pants, he’s got the leather jacket, that sort of felt hat, and the pistol and holster with a World War One sort of flap over it. He’s going into the jungle carrying his gun. The other thing we’ve added to him, which may be fun, is a bull whip. That’s really his trade mark. That’s really what he’s good at. He has a pistol, and he’s probably very good at that, but at the same time he happens to be very good with a bull whip. It’s really more of a hobby than anything else. Maybe he came from Montana, someplace, and he… There are freaks who love bull whips. They just do it all the time. It’s a device that hasn’t been used in a long time.
Spielberg - You can knock somebody’s belt off and the guys pants fall down.
Lucas - You can swing over things, you can…there are so many things you can do with it. I thought he carried it rolled up. It’s like a Samurai sword. He carries it back there and you don’t even notice it. That way it’s not in the way or anything. It’s just there whenever he wants it.
Spielberg - At some point in the movie he must use it to get a girl back who’s walking out of the room. Wrap her up and she twirls as he pulls her back. She spins into his arms. You have to use it for more things than just saving himself.
Lucas - We’ll have to work that part out. In a way it’s important that it be a dangerous weapon. It looks sort of like a snake that’s coiled up behind him, and any time it strikes it’s a real threat.
Kasdan - Except there has to be that moment when he’s alone with a can of beer and he just whips it to him.
Patrick Radden Keefe at the New Yorker read through the whole thing and has some highlights and general thoughts.
Over the intervening decades of enormous wealth and success, both Lucas and Spielberg have carefully tended their public images, so there is a voyeuristic thrill to seeing them converse in so unguarded a manner. As the screenwriters Craig Mazin and John August pointed out recently on the Scriptnotes podcast, one delight of reading the transcript is watching Spielberg throw out bad ideas, and then noting how Lucas gently shuts him down. Spielberg, who had sought to direct a Bond movie-and, astonishingly, been rejected-thought that their hero should be an avid gambler. Lucas replied that perhaps they shouldn’t overload him with attributes. (Lucas himself had briefly entertained, then mercifully set aside, the notion that his archaeologist might also be a practitioner of kung fu.) There’s a good reason we seldom get to spy on these conversations: really good spitballing, like improv comedy, requires a high degree of social disinhibition. So the writers’ room, like a therapist’s office, must remain inviolable.
(via @jcn)
Hands On a Hardbody, a 1997 documentary about contestants vying to win a brand-new pickup truck, is now available in digital format for $10 (remastered and DRM-free, no less).
In S.R. Bindler’s 1997 cult classic, Hands On a Hardbody, two dozen small-town Texans compete for a brand-new “Hardbody” pickup truck at a local car dealership. The event is a contest of endurance and sleep-deprivation — whoever can remain standing the longest with one hand on the truck will get to drive it home. Capturing several days of lunacy, laughter, struggle and heartbreak, Hands On a Hardbody is more than a documentary about winning a truck. It is a remarkable study of competition, camaraderie, faith and determination-the ultimate human drama.
For an extra $5, you get 90 minutes of bonus material. The film has been unavailable in any format for years. I still have an original DVD in my squirreled-away DVD collection…it’s one of my favorite documentaries. (via @gavinpurcell)
Starting on April 4, Upstream Color begins its run at IFC in New York. Star/director Shane Carruth will be in attendance for post-screening Q&As for several of the shows.
Linus Edwards proposes building a museum comprised of exacting recreations of famous sets from movies.
Thinking about the specifics of this museum, the sets would either be actual sets from the movie (if they still existed), or meticulously recreated sets. The recreated sets would have to be very exacting, and basically made to look indistinguishable from the real thing. I realize that even if you had an actual set, many of them are missing things, like ceilings or fourth walls. Those pieces would all be recreated to match the rest of the set and create an entire room. The key would be every room you enter would be a complete 360 degree environment, and you would feel as if you actually were in the movie.
I imagine a person walking from set to set, at one moment in a 40s noir movie, and the next in an 80s comedy. It would be a surreal place to visit, as you would enter into these various worlds you’ve spent your entire life watching. Each room’s set would be lighted to match exactly how it looked on film, and there would be ambient sound playing in the background matched to the reality of the place. So a set of a New York City apartment would have genuine street sounds, while a set of a space ship might have the hum of the ship’s engine. All the sounds will be taken directly from the movie if at all possible.
Some of Edwards’ proposed sets include the 7 1/2 floor office from Being John Malkovich, Ferris’ bedroom from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Vito Corleone’s office from The Godfather.
This is a clip from Samsara, a 2011 film directed by Ron Fricke, who was the director of photography for Koyaanisqatsi. The chicken picker machine hoovering up chickens and depositing them into drawers is one of the most dystopian things I’ve ever seen.
The whole film doesn’t look this depressing, but this short clip really gives full visual meaning to the mass production of food. (via @colossal)
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