Since we’re both single and roughly the same age, it was hard for me not to treat our interview as a sort of date. Surprisingly, Chris did the same, asking all about me, my family, my job, my most recent relationship. And from ten minutes into that first interview, when he reached across the table to punctuate a joke by putting his hand on top of mine, Chris kept up frequent hand holding and lower-back touching, palm kissing and knee squeezing. He’s an attractive movie star, no complaints. I also didn’t know how much I was supposed to respond; when I did, it sometimes felt a little like hitting on the bartender or misconstruing the bartender’s professional fliirting for something more. I wanted to think it was genuine, or that part of it was, because I liked him right away.
Is this the part of a celebrity profile where I go into how blue the star’s eyes are? Because they are very blue.
A bunch of theaters in NYC (and around the US I would assume) are showing the extended edition of Fellowship of the Ring at 7pm tonight.
The event will include a personal introduction from director Peter Jackson captured from the set of his current film and “Lord of the Rings” prequel “The Hobbit,” immediately followed by the feature presentation.
The same thing will happen with Two Towers on June 21 and Return of the King on June 28. Can’t believe Fellowship came out 10 years ago already.
Taking ratings data from Rotten Tomatoes, Slate made a neat little toy called the Hollywood Career-O-Matic that tracks the movie ratings of actors and directors since 1985.
Most Improved: Josh Brolin, Dakota Fanning, and Ken Loach. If the average Hollywood career is a slow decline into mediocrity, an actor or director whose films actually improve deserves special recognition. Among actors with at least 20 films in the Rotten Tomatoes database since 1985, Brolin has seen the greatest increase in average rating from the first half of his career to the second half — an improvement of 28.4 percentage points. Despite Brolin’s early appearance in The Goonies (63 percent), the first half of his career was marred by abominations like The Mod Squad (4 percent), and Hollow Man (27 percent). His later transition into gems like No Country for Old Men (95 percent), Milk (94 percent), and True Grit (96 percent) is a tale of redemption that not even Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (54 percent) could derail. The most improved actress is Fanning, with a 20.1-point increase from such duds as I Am Sam (34 percent) to critical darlings like Coraline (89 percent). Among directors, the award goes to Ken Loach, the British filmmaker whose reviews went from great in the first half of his career (80 percent) to stunning in the second half (88.1 percent).
For actors it would be interesting to see a similar analysis of box office gross and especially a weighted analysis that takes both critical acclaim and box office gross into account…the RT ratings for many actors are all over the place as they bounce from crappy big gross/paycheck blockbusters to lower grossing/paying critical darlings.
He is also said to be such a fan of Zoolander, the 2001 send-up of the fashion world, that colleagues say he watches it regularly and likes to quote it. Ben Stiller, the star of the film, once dressed up in character and recorded him a special birthday video message.
Last month, Steven Soderbergh’s list of what he’s been watching and reading told us that the director watched Raiders of the Lost Ark in black & white three times in one week, presumably to emphasize the film’s structure and cinematography. Flavorwire’s Jason Bailey wondered what other films might be better in black & white and compiled a list of ten, with video examples and commentary of each. Included are Raiders, Fargo, and A Christmas Story.
The next day we shot the fight around the plane. Harrison and Roach squared up to each other and Harrison threw a punch. “That’s great. Moving on,” said Steven. Now as a stunt co-ordinator my job is to make sure that, on film, those punches look like they’ve connected. I was standing looking right over the lens of the camera and in my opinion it was a miss. Now I was stuck between a rock and a hard place because Steven had called it good, but I thought I’d better say something. “Excuse me sir, that was actually a miss.” He went, “Oh, you again.” I said, “Yeah, sorry, it was a miss.” Steven paused briefly. “Well, I thought it was a hit.” I said, “No, I was actually looking over the lens and it was a miss, I think.” Finally Steven said, “OK, we’ll do it again.” After that take was completed Steven, sarcastically almost, turned to me and said, “How was that?” I went, “That was good. That was a hit.” And we carried on and created a great fight routine. Three days later we were all watching dailies when the shot that I’d said was a miss came on screen. Steven had printed it. The old heart started to go, but sure enough it was a miss and Steven, who was right in front of me, turned round and said, “Good call Vic.” I couldn’t do much wrong after that, it was great.
Theory: Robert Zemeckis intentionally made Back to the Future not as a contemporary film set in the present but as a period piece set in 1985.
Back To The Future is both undeniably timeless (its place in pop culture is beyond question) and incredibly dated (it’s very much a product of its time). Interestingly, it’s a period piece made in 1985 that depicts 1985 as an era as distant-seeming as its version of 1955. Of course, when Back To The Future was first released, 1985 just looked like “now.” It’s entirely possible that director Robert Zemeckis and co-writer Bob Gale referenced Ronald Reagan and Eddie Van Halen and dressed Fox’s Marty McFly up in a denim jacket and Calvin Klein underwear because they wanted Back To The Future to exist in the same universe as The Breakfast Club, Girls Just Want To Have Fun, and other teen films from 1985. But I’m going to give them way more credit than they probably deserve. I think Zemeckis and Gale knew all the timely accoutrements signifying “the present” in Back To The Future would inevitably look like 1985 within just a couple of years; in fact, they were banking on it. Zemeckis and Gale were trying to create an archetypical representation of 1985 just like they did for 1955, with its soda fountains, social repression, and subjugated black people. In this way, Back To The Future only gets better the further we get from the ’80s. Everything that defines Marty McFly-how he walks, talks, acts, and dresses-acts as instantly recognizable shorthand for the year he comes from.
Following on from the Kill Bill section of episode 2 of Everything is a Remix, this video contains what feels like an exhaustive look at the movies that Tarantino referenced in Kill Bill.
Produced by Peter Jackson and directed by Steven Spielberg, it looks like an all-CGI adventure. I got sort of a Polar Express vibe from the trailer though, which is not encouraging.
In this version, Tracy Flick tries to buy a car from Mr McAllister.
I bought a box of old VHS tapes at the Farmers Market in Wilmington, DE for $5 on Mothers Day. I had no idea that this working print was included in the box when I purchased it.
According to Indiewire, Waltz’s character “joins up with former slave Django to save his wife from an evil plantation owner.” According to Deadline, Django will reunite Tarantino with Pulp Fiction producer Stacey Sher, and the movie will begin production as soon as this summer or fall.
Christoph Waltz, who was excellent in Inglourious Basterds, and perhaps Will Smith, who was excellent in the Parents Just Don’t Understand video, will star.
For those of you who are still confused about what happened to whom and in whose mind, here’s a 1-minute silent explanation of Inception using only the OS X Finder.
It’s the 70th anniversary of Orson Welles’s masterpiece Citizen Kane:
Audacity and genius his trademark, and with a third medium to conquer and transform, Welles didn’t think small. With the Mercury players in tow, he enlisted veteran satirist and screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz. Together they crafted a story that began with the death of an enigmatic protagonist, and explored his life through flashbacks told from multiple points of view. As questions are answered, questions are raised. The script ultimately compares a man’s life to a jigsaw puzzle missing pieces, and thus impossible to solve. The writers very loosely based the title character of Charles Foster Kane on William Randolph Hearst, thus incurring the newspaper titan’s wrath. Welles, Mercury, RKO, and the studio heads endured journalistic scandalmongering, and the film eventually earned a blacklist. Welles would later remark, “If Hearst isn’t rightfully careful, I’m going to make a film that’s really based on his life.”
By coincidence, as related by Welles in his autobiography, he once found himself alone in an elevator with Hearst. It was the night of Citizen Kane’s San Francisco premiere, and Welles invited him to the opening. “He didn’t answer. And as he was getting off at his floor, I said, ‘Charles Foster Kane would have accepted.’”
Everybody talks about the movie’s formal innovations, but I wish the content would get more love. As A.O. Scott says, “Citizen Kane shows Welles to be a master of genre. It’s a newspaper comedy, a domestic melodrama, a gothic romance, and a historical epic.” Pauline Kael said Kane was “more fun than any great movie I can think of.”
Citizen Kane is The Beatles of movies, not just because of its universal influence and acclaim, or because it really does live up to the historical hype, but because on top of its arty aspirations, what it really wants to do is entertain the hell out of you.
Also, if you’re watching it carefully, the movie’s self-reflexiveness hides and reveals a devastating history of media. You’ve got CFK, accidental heir to a fortune based on “oil wells, gold mines, shipping, and real estate,” who trades it all for a communications empire: newspapers, radio stations, paper mills, opera houses, and grocery stores, only to be pushed to the margins after a failed political run in favor of the next generation: magazines and movies, the trade of the newsreel producers who try to track down the labyrinthine origin of “Rosebud.”
The whole movie’s about trying to invent something from nothing, about pretenses to real value, and how that whole house of cards tumbles apart. Eventually you’ve just got a giant room, where you can’t tell the art from the jigsaw puzzles, the childhood heirlooms from the tchotchke snowglobes. Everything propping up value disintegrates. (That’s what Kane figures out at the end, by the way, not that he misses his sled or his mom.)
As Borges wrote, it’s a metaphysical detective story that leads us to a labyrinth with no center. All that’s left is paper, just kindling for the fire.
After yesterday’s post on Ghostbusters (“Don’t cross the streams”), I got hit with a few follow-ups worth following up:
When I said 1984 was arguably “the biggest/most important year in modern cinematic comedy,” I meant mostly because of the ridiculous amount of money comedies made that year and how those surprise blockbusters affected how comedies were made afterwards.
Still when you add This Is Spinal Tap, which also came out in 1984 but didn’t make very much money, you really could make a case that it really could be the best/most influential year for movie comedies.
I particularly like Simmons’s note about college basketball (maybe even more relevant today):
College hoops meant something in ‘84. You stayed home on Monday nights to watch the Big East. You knew the players because they had been around for years. And since guys stuck around, you could follow Ewing and Georgetown, Hakeem and Phi Slamma Jamma, Mullin and St. John’s, Pearl and Syracuse, MJ at UNC … these were like pro teams on a smaller scale. I’m telling you, a Georgetown-St. John’s game in the middle of February was an event. These moments aren’t even possibilities anymore. They’re gone.
My favorite document of 1984 (sports or otherwise) is undoubtedly Sparky Anderson’s Bless You Boys, his running diary/memoir of the Detroit Tigers’ amazing season that year. It’s about baseball, but so many other things — life, death, perspective. I wrote about it last year for The Idler when Sparky Anderson passed away.
One last “what if?” note from Simmons:
Rolling Stone was offered the chance to buy MTV, and Sports Illustrated was offered the chance to buy ESPN. Both magazines decided against it.
John Candy was the first choice for the part of Sigourney Weaver’s dweeby neighbor Louis. Candy was interested, but he wanted his character to speak with a German accent and own several large dogs.
Neither were Ernie Hudson or Bill Murray. Dan Aykroyd wrote Peter Venkman for John Belushi, then rewrote it for Murray after Belushi died. I can’t even imagine how that would have worked.
(Actually, I don’t know if I can easily substitute any other actor for Bill Murray in any of his roles. That might be an imaginative blind spot for me.)
Likewise Paul Reubens (pre-Pee Wee Herman) was originally slated to play the demonic Gozer, as a straight-laced architect in a business suit.
As for Ernie Hudson’s Winston:
Eddie Murphy was offered the part of Winston Zeddemore, which was intended to be a much larger character at the time. The plan was for Zeddemore to have been hired as a Ghostbuster much earlier in the movie, and in the scene at the hotel, he would have been the one covered in green slime by the ghost Slimer, instead of Bill Murray.
Murphy’s reaction to getting slimed would have been priceless, but going for the lead in Beverly Hills Cop rather than teaming up with Aykroyd again was a great call. It probably all worked out for the best.
In fact, between Ghostbusters, Beverly Hills Cop, and Sixteen Candles, you could make a case that 1984 was the biggest/most important year in modern cinematic comedy. Even Police Academy, Gremlins, Splash, and Romancing the Stone were huge that year, even though I don’t like those movies so much.
Judd actually has this whole thing they do with side-by-side screenings at two theaters right next door to each other and do a “P” version, which is a polished version, which is the one we think is close to what we want to have be our final cut. And then another one called the “E” version, the extended version, which is the dumping ground for everything we think might work, or we wanted to try, or we’re just curious if it’s gonna work. And out of all of those screenings, you’ll always get about five or 10 new things that you didn’t think were ever gonna work that go through the roof and you plug ‘em into the polished one…
We’ll always keep in a couple of jokes, just for ourselves. Then you go, “Okay, if it doesn’t work, whatever. This is kinda for us.” But none of us are brave enough to wait that long to see if it works because you want to have something that you know is clicking with an audience.
A lot of filmmakers will hate hearing that. To them, that feels very hacky, But the audience are the ones that are going to come and pay the money and they’re the ones who are going tell their friends if it’s good or not. I didn’t get in the business, and Judd didn’t get in the business, to make stuff that nobody sees. I’ve made a career making stuff that nobody sees, so anything that I can do to help make something that people are going to enjoy and want to see over and over again, then I’m there.
Feig also has an interesting take on the continued love for Freaks and Geeks: in 2000, when the show was cancelled, cancellation for a single show was pretty much total death. If there weren’t enough episodes for syndication, it would only linger on through word of mouth and the occasional samizdat VHS tape.
[Feig:] The British model, which I’ve always thought was great, is that you do a TV show and then they sell it. Then you can buy it at the video stores forever, so it never went away. But American TV used to be if you had a show and it got cancelled, then it never existed.
DVDs changed the culture. It’s not really a “cult hit” in the same way if you can just Netflix the entire run. Now, single-season shows like Freaks and Geeks can be sold and rewatched and lent out, and play out for their fans over and over again like long, favorite movies. And they don’t need their A/V teacher to have a copy of the film reel to do it.
We’ve just seen about two billion people watch a royal family at work, you know? And so I would say that it is Shakespearean, but it’s also global, I suppose. That we’re interested in what goes on in the corridors of power whether it’s the White House or whether it’s Buckingham Palace. And so Shakespeare was interested in the lives of the medieval royal families, but he also raided the Roman myths and the Greek myths for the same purpose. And I think Stan Lee went to the myths that Shakespeare hadn’t used. You know, [they both] recognized that they contain briefly told, very condensed stories that I think are very universal in their application.
I think the connection, if there is one, is that the stakes are high. So in something like Henry IV or Henry V, where the young prince is a reckless man who falls into bad company: could that prince be the king? [In Thor], our flawed hero who must earn the right to be king, but I think what’s key is the stakes. There it’s Europe and England in power and here it’s the universe. It’s when that family has problems everybody else is affected, so if Thor throws a fit and is yelling at his father and is banished, suddenly the worlds are unstable. And what it means is if the actors take those stakes seriously it is passionate and it is, you know, very intense. And I suppose that kind of a observation of ordinary human - although they’re gods - frailties in people in positions of power is an obsession of great storytellers including Shakespeare and including the Marvel universe.
Thor’s story — especially early on — really is a lot like Prince Hal’s, now that I think of it. Guy’s even got his own Falstaff: dude is named Volstagg, which now seems almost too on-the nose.
Finally, have you seen Branagh’s Henry V?
Guy knows how to make old-school battle cinematically work.
On the subject of the lighting in this film, Dr. Simek, you made an observation, which is that the light tends to be in motion …
JAN SIMEK
The light never rests. Every time he changes the picture, it goes through a light sweep. The film is clearly concerned with how the moving light causes the images themselves to change. This is not inaccurate at all. The original impression that this artwork made was in some ways dictated by how it got lit by the people who made it, with torchlight.
HERZOG
What we did was very simple: we walked with the light, so that the source of light would make the shadows move slightly, like curtains of darkness rising. Or, for example, a fade-out would be done by just physically removing the light. So it was never a purely technical thing; it was always something human, as if somebody with torchlight were just leaving or coming in.
When you try to imagine how these images looked for Paleolithic people, in the flickering shadows, the animals must have been moving, must have had a strange life in them.
I was also struck by Herzog’s reaction to Sullivan’s observation that Cave of Forgotten Dreams largely departs from the heroic-discovery mode common to movies about cave explorers:
I’m suspicious of that notion of adventure. It belongs to earlier centuries, and somehow fizzled away with, let’s say, the exploration of the North and South Poles, which was only a media ego trip, unhealthy and unwise, on the part of some individuals. The Polar explorations were a huge mistake of the human race, an indication that the twentieth century was a mistake in its entirety. They are one of the indicators.
While researching a story I wrote not too long ago about spaceflight and radio communications, I was surprised at how central the polar expeditions were to that story:
In 1929, Richard E. Byrd made history — not for reaching the South Pole, but for bringing on his Antarctic expedition 24 radio transmitters, 31 receivers, five radio engineers, three airplanes and an aerial camera. Unlike Ernest Shackleton’s trans-Antarctic expedition, who 15 years earlier spent 17 months fighting for their lives after being trapped in the polar ice, Byrd’s team was able to stay in constant communication with each other and with the outside world. It was the beginning of modern technology-aided exploration, and arguably the model for human spaceflight.
Also, I think Werner Herzog may be the only living human being who is still allowed to say things like “the twentieth century was a mistake in its entirety” in semi-casual conversation. The rest of us lack the prerequisite voice, record of achievements, and enormous balls.
Stanley Kubrick’s unfinished Napoleon project was supposed to be (in Kubrick’s words) “the greatest film ever made.” At the meticulous-yet-epic scale Kubrick imagined it — think 30,000 real troops (from Romanian and Lithuanian Cold-War-armies) in authentic costume on location as extras for the battle scenes — it was unfilmable.
So instead of the film, we have Kubrick’s gigantic preproduction archive of notes and drawings and photographs, which (on top of the complete screenplay and drafts for the movie) is one of the largest scholarship-grade Napoleonic archives in the world.
Two years ago, Taschen put out a ten-volume de luxe edition of this material that cost $1500, which was by all accounts definitely awesome, but so expensive and unwieldy I don’t think even Kubrick superfan John Gruber bought it.
The book, in a deliberate echo of the film, is rough around the edges. Rather than providing a seamless, synthesized account of Kubrick’s vision, the editor, Alison Castle, has focused on the raw materials: the photographs, clippings, letters, and notes that Kubrick kept in binders and a huge, library-style card catalog. There are interviews with Kubrick, and a complete draft of the screenplay, with many marked-up pages from earlier drafts. Here and there you’ll find introductory essays by Kubrick experts, or a historian’s response to Kubrick’s screenplay — but the emphasis is on the small gestures, as in the collection of underlined passages and marginal notes that Castle compiles from Kubrick’s personal library of books about the emperor. A special ‘key card’ included with the book gives you access to a huge online library of images.
While I was wondering how/if we’d remember Kubrick differently if the Napoleon movie had come together, I came across this snappy transition from Kubrick’s Wikipedia page:
After 2001, Kubrick initially attempted to make a film about the life of Napoleon Bonaparte. When financing fell through, Kubrick went looking for a project that he could film quickly on a small budget. He eventually settled on A Clockwork Orange (1971).
If there was a Star Wars version of Coachella, some of the bands playing at the festival would be called Kessel Run DMC, Guided by Millions of Voices That Suddenly Cried Out in Terror and Were Suddenly Silenced, and C-3PO Speedwagon.
The visionary director of Grizzly Man leads us on an unforgettable journey 32,000 years back in time to explore the earliest known images made by human hands. Discovered in 1994, France’s Chauvet caves contain the rarest of the world’s historic treasures, restricted to only a handful of researchers. Granted once-in-a-lifetime access and filming in 3D, Herzog captures the beauty of a truly awe-inspiring place, while musing in his inimitable fashion about its original inhabitants, the birth of art and the curious people surrounding the caves today.
Stanley Kubrick’s first feature-length film was called Fear and Desire and copies of it are hard to come by these days — very few prints exist and it is unavailable on DVD or even VHS. But there’s a copy available on Google Video, billed as “the most uncut print” available.
And what I kept telling everybody is that HBO does it in one take and they don’t know what’s going to happen and they never miss a thing. We have the luxury of showing them what we’re going to do in the morning before we shoot it and doing it over and over and over again. So why do you need 20 days? For what? To jerk each other off? To touch up your makeup? To go in the trailer and take a nap?
We’re not talking about putting the camera in there and saying, “OK, we’re going to do a stunt punch here.” No, we’re going in there and beat the shit out of each other and we’re going to make it real.
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