kottke.org posts about movies
From his review of Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, a fictionalized account of a Columbine-like school shooting, here’s Roger Ebert on the media’s behavior while reporting these kinds of events.
Let me tell you a story. The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. “Wouldn’t you say,” she asked, “that killings like this are influenced by violent movies?” No, I said, I wouldn’t say that. “But what about ‘Basketball Diaries’?” she asked. “Doesn’t that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun?” The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office (it grossed only $2.5 million), and it’s unlikely the Columbine killers saw it.
The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. “Events like this,” I said, “if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn’t have messed with me. I’ll go out in a blaze of glory.”
In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of “explaining” them. I commended the policy at the Sun-Times, where our editor said the paper would no longer feature school killings on Page 1. The reporter thanked me and turned off the camera. Of course the interview was never used. They found plenty of talking heads to condemn violent movies, and everybody was happy.
So this is the new trailer for the new Superman movie (Man of Steel), which should not be confused with the old trailer for the new Superman movie or with a trailer from the old new Superman movie or with a trailer from the old Superman movie.
What I am confused about is whether this trailer is any good. On one hand, it seems really really good but also really crappy at the same time. Tell me what to feel, Superman!
Here’s the “official teaser” trailer for J.J. Abrams’ Trek reboot, Star Trek into Darkness.
Benedict Cumberbatch plays the villain…maybe Khan or maybe someone else. I just hope there’s more to this than explosions and yelling.
Just the other day, the news broke that Primer’s Shane Carruth had made a new movie and it was premiering at Sundance in January. Now there’s a teaser trailer.
Well holy shit. In October I wrote that Shane Carruth, the director of the excellent Primer, was working on a new film called A Topiary. It seems like that one’s on the shelf for a bit because Carruth is debuting a film at Sundance called Upstream Color. Slashfilm has some details.
A man and woman are drawn together, entangled in the life cycle of an ageless organism. Identity becomes an illusion as they struggle to assemble the loose fragments of wrecked lives.
I am totally there. (via @aaroncoleman0)
Filmmaker Robert Weide asks Woody Allen 12 questions that he’s never been asked before.
I am surprised that he would choose sporting events over movies, but as he says, he’s seen ‘em all at this point. Weide directed the excellent documentary on Allen, which is available on DVD or streaming at Amazon. (via viewsource)
Dave Itzkoff went to interview Bill Murray for the NY Times on the occasion of the release of his new film, Hyde Park on Hudson, in which Murray plays Franklin D. Roosevelt. Itzkoff was expecting just a normal interview but, due to a scheduling problem, ended up accompanying Murray on stage at an evening appearance and continued the interview in front of members of the Screen Actors Guild.
Mr. Murray, having changed his shirt but still in the blue shorts, leaves the hotel and boards a chauffeured S.U.V., where the conversation continues.
Q. It sounds as if you also wanted to convey Roosevelt’s voice as much as his physical presence.
A. We had a discussion about it, and we agreed that you don’t want to do an impression. You want to get it in you, and then you want to play — [The car is suddenly cut off by another vehicle.] That person was insane. [To his driver] Well-avoided, Mustafa. But you can bump her now. She’s got it coming.
In 2004, Liam Callanan published a book called The Cloud Atlas that takes place in Alaska near the end of World War II. Also in 2004, David Mitchell published a book called Cloud Atlas that is told in six stories that unfold, Matryoshka-like, over a period of 200 years. Mitchell’s book was recently adapted into a blockbuster film of the same name by the Wachowskis & Tom Tykwer and starring Tom Hanks & Halle Berry, but Callanan has been affected by the movie as well.
1. My website, cloudatlas.com, was hacked by Russians and blacklisted by Google.
2. My novel, The Cloud Atlas, zoomed to a triple-digit Amazon ranking without my having to email-as I did back when my novel was first published-a single parent, aunt, cousin, neighbor, classmate, ex-girlfriend, former teacher or current student and beg them to buy the book instead of “waiting until the library gets a copy,” as a friend promised he would.
3. Instead, I get a lot of email, from loads more readers than I used to.
4. Including one at 12:14 a.m. this week from someone who had accidentally checked my book out of the library, and was still reading it.
Callanan’s experience aside, I am bummed that Cloud Atlas (the film) did not do better at the box office. It was daring, engaging, and inventive. Not everyone’s cup of tea certainly, but not as weird/challenging as everyone thought it might be. (via the awl: weekend companion)
Since Capturing the Friedmans came out in 2003, the filmmakers have been quietly working to prove the innocence of one of the films subjects, interviewing the sexual abuse victims of then 18-year-old Jesse Friedman. What they have found may point to Friedman’s innocence.
One of those affected by the case was Arline Epstein, the mother of a child who had attended group therapy along with children who had testified against Jesse. Earlier this year, Arline’s son Michael told her that, as a young boy, he had lied to his therapist about being sexually abused. In her testimony, which was featured at Sunday’s event, Arline talks about revisiting a file of notes she had kept during the case and finding one that mentioned that during the first round of questioning of the children by police, none of them said they had been abused.
Arline and Michael Epstein are two of the witnesses featured in the video reel of new testimony compiled by Jarecki and Smerling, and both were at Sunday’s event. Friedman was overwhelmed by the warm welcome he received from someone, who, as he put it, “for 25 years thought that I’d raped her son.”
The evidence the filmmakers have compiled is available on a web site they have set up. (via @DavidGrann)
Finally, the answer to the question “what if Wes Anderson directed Star Wars”.
From the March 1979 issue of The Atlantic, a profile of George Lucas, who at the time was only two years removed from creating a cultural movement.
Star Wars was manufactured. When a competent corporation prepares a new product, it does market research. George Lucas did precisely that. When he says that the film was written for toys (“I love them, I’m really into that”), he also means he had merchandising in mind, all the sideshow goods that go with a really successful film. He thought of T-shirts and transfers, records, models, kits, and dolls. His enthusiasm for the comic strips was real and unforced; he had a gallery selling comic-book art in New York.
From the start, Lucas was determined to control the selling of the film, and of its by-products. “Normally you just sign a standard contract with a studio,” he says, “but we wanted merchandising, sequels, all those things. I didn’t ask for another $1 million — just the merchandising rights. And Fox thought that was a fair trade.” Lucasfilm Ltd., the production company George Lucas set up in July 1971, “already had a merchandising department as big as Twentieth Century-Fox has. And it was better. When I was doing the film deal, I had already hired the guy to handle that stuff.”
This article is like a time capsule of how the movie business used to work. Empire Strikes Back was a year away from release and there was no specific mention of it in the article. Star Wars opened in only 25 theaters and made only $9 million in the first two months. Those numbers don’t quite match those from Box Office Mojo but they are close enough, especially when you note that the film’s biggest grossing weekend was 43 weeks after the initial release.
Lucas, if you hadn’t heard, is donating the majority of the $4 billion he got from Disney for Lucasfilm to various charitable foundations.
I’ve been offline for two days and Aaron already posted this (and had the information relayed to me via land line into my power-less house) but this is just too, like, wow to pass up. Disney is buying Lucasfilm for $4 billion.
Under the deal, Disney will acquire ownership of Lucasfilm, a leader in entertainment, innovation and technology, including its massively popular and “evergreen” Star Wars franchise and its operating businesses in live action film production, consumer products, animation, visual effects, and audio post production. Disney will also acquire the substantial portfolio of cutting-edge entertainment technologies that have kept audiences enthralled for many years. Lucasfilm, headquartered in San Francisco, operates under the names Lucasfilm Ltd., LucasArts, Industrial Light & Magic, and Skywalker Sound, and the present intent is for Lucasfilm employees to remain in their current locations.
And they’re gonna release a 7th Star Wars film:
Ms. Kennedy will serve as executive producer on new Star Wars feature films, with George Lucas serving as creative consultant. Star Wars Episode 7 is targeted for release in 2015, with more feature films expected to continue the Star Wars saga and grow the franchise well into the future.
Crazy. A non-Lucas non-prequel Star Wars film will hopefully be pretty great, but the purchase price is puzzling. Only $4 billion?
A letter from the chairman of the Committee on Promotion and Tenure at Marshall College outlines the many reasons why they have denied Henry “Indiana” Jones Jr. tenure at the school.
Though the committee may have overstepped the boundaries of its evaluation, I find it pertinent to note that Dr. Jones has been romantically linked to countless women of questionable character, an attribute very unbecoming of a Marshall College professor. One of these women was identified as a notorious nightclub singer whose heart he attempted to extract with his hands, and whom he then tried, and failed, to lower into a lake of magma. Another was a Nazi scholar he was seen courting just last year who, I’m told, plummeted into a fathomless abyss at Dr. Jones’s hand. And, of course, no one can forget the slow decline and eventual death of Professor Abner Ravenwood after Dr. Jones’s affair with Abner’s underage daughter was made public, forcing her to emigrate to Nepal to escape the debacle.
(via df)
I’ve never seen a better audition tape than this improvised scene by Henry Thomas for the part of Elliott in E.T.
The tears were inspired by thoughts of his dead dog. And the final line from Spielberg is gold. (via @Colossal)
The AV Club has compiled a list of the 50 best films of the 1990s, which decade, when you look at this list, is starting to feel like a bit of a film golden age compared to now. Here’s part one, part two, and part three.
Few talk about the ’90s as a filmmaking renaissance on par with the late ’60s and early ’70s, but for many of the film critics at The A.V. Club, it was the decade when we were coming of age as cinephiles and writers, and we remember it with considerable affection. Those ’70s warhorses like Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman posted some of the strongest work of their careers, and an exciting new generation of filmmakers — Quentin Tarantino, Joel and Ethan Coen, Wong Kar-Wai, Olivier Assayas, David Fincher, and Wes Anderson among them — were staking out territory of their own.
I’ve seen 35 of the 50 films and some of my favorites are Election, Eyes Wide Shut, Fargo, Groundhog Day, Boogie Nights, Being John Malkovich, Rushmore, Reservoir Dogs, Dazed and Confused, and Pulp Fiction. Some films I’m surprised didn’t make the list: Iron Giant, Three Kings, Babe: Pig in the City, and The Insider.
Sukiyabashi Jiro is a 3-star Michelin restaurant in Tokyo that many say serves the best sushi in the world. The chef/owner, 86-year-old Jiro Ono, was the subject of last year’s excellent Jiro Dreams of Sushi documentary film.
Adam Goldberg of A Life Worth Eating ate at Sukiyabashi Jiro yesterday. The meal was 21 courses, about US$380 per person (according the web site, excluding drinks), and lasted only 19 minutes. That’s more than a course a minute and, Goldberg estimates, around $20 per person per minute. And apparently totally worth it.
Goldberg has photos of each course up on Flickr and his site has a write-up of his 2009 meal.
Three slices of tuna came next, akami, chu-toro, and oo-toro increasing from lean, to medium fatty, to extremely fatty cuts. The akami (lean toro) was the most tender slice of tuna I’ve ever tasted that did not contain noticeable marbelization. The tuna was marinated in soy sauce for several minutes before service, perhaps contributing to this unique texture. The medium fatty tuna had an interesting mix of crunch and fat, while the fatty tuna just completely melted in my mouth. My friend with whom I shared this meal began to tear (I kid you not).
Lest you think Goldberg’s meal was an anomaly, this is a typical meal at Sukiyabashi Jiro. Dave Arnold wrote about his experience earlier this year:
The sushi courses came out at a rate of one per minute. 19 courses in 19 minutes. No ordering, no real talking — just making sushi and eating sushi. After the sushi is done you are motioned to leave the sushi bar and sit at a booth where you are served your melon. We took that melon at a leisurely 10 minute pace, leaving us with a bill of over $300 per person for just under 30 minutes time. Nastassia and Mark thought the pace was absurd and unpleasant. They felt obliged to keep up with Jiro’s pace. I didn’t feel obliged, but kept up anyway. I didn’t mind the speed. I could have easily eaten even faster, but I’m an inhuman eating machine — or so I’m told. At the end of the meal, Jiro went outside the restaurant and stood guard at the entrance, waiting to bid us formal adieu. This made Nastassia even more nervous about rushing to get out. Not me. At over 10 dollars a minute I have no problem letting an 86 year old man stand and wait for me to finish my melon if he wants to.
(via ★kathryn)
Primer is one of my favorite films. Director Shane Carruth famously made it for just $7,000 and the film found release in 2004, winning the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance that year. Carruth has been fairly quiet since then but he seems to be working on a new film called A Topiary. From a 2010 article on io9:
The website for now is just a place mark as financing has yet to be completed. I’m cautiously optimistic that this can happen soon and couldn’t be happier with the filmmakers that have committed to the project so far.
But it’s been more than two years since then so I am somewhat less than cautiously optimistic. :( In the meantine, Carruth worked on some effects for the time travel sequences in Looper.
Speaking of Koyaanisqatsi, the Criterion Collection is releasing Godfrey Reggio’s Qatsi trilogy on Blu-ray in December. It’s the first time that the Qatsis will be available in HD in the US.
ps. Criterion is also releasing Blu-ray editions of Brazil and Following, which is Christopher Nolan’s first feature-length film.
The final song from Koyaanisqatsi, remade in 8-bit audio (aka chiptune).
Philip Glass works pretty well in chiptune.
Two sequences from Dr. Strangelove done in Lego: Muffley’s call to Kissoff on the hotline in the war room and Dr. Strangelove’s increasingly erratic presentation of his plan to preserve humanity in a mine shaft.
This is really well done. (via bb)
FX is developing a TV show “loosely based” on the Coen brothers’ Fargo.
Joel and Ethan Coen are bringing one of their signatures movies to television. FX has closed a deal to develop Fargo, an hourlong project loosely based on the Coen brothers’ 1996 comedic crime drama. The Coens will serve as executive producers on the project, which will be written/executive produced by The Unusuals and My Generation creator Noah Hawley.
(via @fimoculous)
The entire run1 of James Bond films are available in a Blu-ray box set for $150. The DVD version is $100.
[1] Well, not the entire run. Not included are Never Say Never Again (an independently produced Bond film starring Sean Connery 12 years removed from his last Bond outing) and Casino Royale (a Bond satire starring David Niven, Woody Allen, and Peter Sellers). ↩
The trailer was supposed to go up later in the morning but here it is a little early.
If it gets pulled down, I’ll find another link.
Update: Apple has the trailer up now.
Archaeologist Marc Azéma thinks that Stone Age artists may have fashioned their cave paintings in such a way as to suggest movement, crude movies that came to life as the flickering light from a fire danced on the walls.
Not only that, Paleolithic artists may have also have invented the thaumatrope thousands of years before the Victorians in the 1800s.
Consisting of a card or disk with different designs on either side, the device demonstrates the persistence of vision: When the card or disk is twirled, the designs appear to blend into one.
Rivère discovered that Paleolithic artists used similar optical toys well in advance of their 19th-century descendants.
The artist examined Magdalenian bone discs — objects found in the Pyrenees, the north of Spain and the Dordogne, which measure about 1.5 inches in diameter.
Often pierced in their center, the discs have been generally interpreted as buttons or pendants.
“Given that some are decorated on both sides with animals shown in different positions, we realized that another type of use, relating to sequential animation, was possible,” the researchers said.
They mentioned one of the most convincing cases, a bone disc found in 1868 in the Dordogne. On one side, the disc features a standing doe or a chamois. On the other side, the animal is lying down.
Azéma and Rivère discovered if a string was threaded through the central hole and then stretched tight to make the disc rotate about its lateral axis, the result was a superimposition of the two pictures on the retina.
Incredible that moviemaking is tens of thousands of years old instead of just a couple hundred.
Flavorwire has a quick look at some noted directors (Kubrick, Wes Anderson, Fincher) and the typefaces that they often used. (via @curiousoctopus)
Jonny Greenwood’s soundtrack for P.T. Anderson’s new film, The Master, came out yesterday. It’s available on MP3 from Amazon ($11) and directly from Nonesuch in MP3 and other formats ($12+). Greenwood previously did the soundtrack for Anderson’s There Will Be Blood.
I can’t find any other information about this online or anywhere else, but tucked away in a fall arts preview in today’s NY Times is the juicy news that MoMA has picked a date for their screening of Christian Marclay’s 24-hour movie, The Clock. The show will open on Dec 21 and run through Jan 21. It sounds like the screening will happen in the contemporary galleries and won’t show continuously except on weekends and New Year’s Eve. Which is lame. Just keep the damn thing running the whole month…get Bloomberg to write a check or something.
Anyway, probably best to check this out on the early side during the holiday season because it’ll turn into a shitshow later on.
David Fincher has always started his movies right: with interesting opening title sequences.
The Art of the Title recently interviewed the director about his interest in title sequences.
The sequence for Se7en did very important non-narrative things; in the original script there was a title sequence that had Morgan Freeman buying a house out in the middle of nowhere and then travelling back on a train. He was making his way back to the unnamed city from the unnamed suburban sprawl, and that’s where the title was supposed to be — “insert title sequence here” — but we didn’t have the money to do that. We also lacked the feeling of John Doe, the villain, who just appeared 90 minutes into the movie. It was oddly problematic, you just needed a sense of what these guys were up against.
Kyle Cooper, the designer of the title sequence, came to me and said, “You know, you have these amazing books that you spent tens of thousands of dollars to make for the John Doe interior props. I’d like to see them featured.” And I said, “Well, that would be neat, but that’s kind of a 2D glimpse. Figure out a way for it to involve John Doe, to show that somewhere across town somebody is working on some really evil shit. I don’t want it to be just flipping through pages, as beautiful as they are.” So Kyle came up with a great storyboard, and then we got Angus Wall and Harris Savides — Harris to shoot it and Angus to cut it — and the rest, as they say, is internet history.
I don’t believe in decorative titles — neato for the sake of being neato. I want to make sure you’re going to get some bang for your buck. Titles should be engaging in a character way, it has to help set the scene, and you can do that elaborately or you can do it minimally.
(via devour)
Wes Anderson likes overhead shots, Quentin Tarantino prefers to peer up from below, Darren Aronofsky uses sharp sounds, and Stanley Kubrick often uses one-point perspective.
Aleksandar Hemon scored a rare chance to profile the publicity-averse Wachowskis as they prepare to unleash Cloud Atlas onto the world.
I first met the Wachowskis in December, 2009, when they were in the midst of their struggle to find financing for “Cloud Atlas.” Uncomfortable with being idle while they waited, they were also developing “Cobalt Neural 9,” a project that had grown out of their frustration with the Bush Presidency and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Curious about how the early aughts would be perceived in the future, the Wachowskis imagined a documentary film made eight decades from now, looking back at the country’s plunge into imperial self-delusion. In order to write a script for “Cobalt Neural 9,” the Wachowskis were filming interviews with people, from Arianna Huffington to Cornel West, who they thought might be able to help them elucidate their concerns. I was invited to participate and was costumed to look as if I were speaking in 2090. Dressed like a Bosnian Isaac Hayes (with sparkling lights attached to my skull, a psychedelic shirt, and a New Age pendant), I ranted about the malignant idiocy of the Bush regime. Lana sat next to the camera, asking most of the questions, while Andy was somewhere beyond the lights, his voice occasionally booming from the void.
Usually, I experience an erosion of confidence around famous people-an inescapable conviction that they know more than I do, because the world is somehow more available to them. But I got along splendidly with the Wachowskis. Seemingly untouched by Hollywood, they did not project the jadedness that is a common symptom of stardom. Lana was one of the best-read people I’d ever met; Andy had a wry sense of humor; they were both devout Bulls fans. We also shared a militant belief in the art of narration and a passionate love for Chicago.
Eventually, I asked them to consider letting me write about the making of “Cloud Atlas.” They talked it over and decided to do it. By then, they’d sent the script to every major studio, after Warner Bros. had declined to exercise its option. Everyone passed. “Cloud Atlas” seemed too challenging, too complex. The Wachowskis reminded Warner Bros. that “The Matrix” had also been deemed too demanding, and that it had taken them nearly three years to get the green light on it. But the best the studio could do for “Cloud Atlas” was to keep open the possibility of buying the North American distribution rights, payment for which would cover a portion of the projected budget.
I read the book while on vacation and after rewatching the trailer, I am beyond excited for this movie. Still don’t understand how it’s not 14 hours long, but hey.
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