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It’s called Power of the Dark Crystal.
Set hundreds of years after the events of the first movie, when the world has once again fallen into darkness, “Power of the Dark Crystal” follows the adventures of a mysterious girl made of fire who, together with a Gelfling outcast, steals a shard of the legendary crystal in an attempt to reignite the dying sun that exists at the center of the planet.
It couldn’t possibly be better than the original:
A complete copy of the classic film Metropolis has been found in Argentina.
Made at a time of hyperinflation in Germany, “Metropolis” offered a grandiose version — of a father and son fighting for the soul of a futuristic city — that nearly bankrupted the studio that commissioned it, UFA. After lukewarm reviews and initial box office results in Europe, Paramount Pictures, the American partner brought in toward the end of the shoot, took control of the film and made drastic excisions, arguing that Lang’s cut was too complicated and unwieldy for American audiences to understand.
Film Forum in NYC is showing the complete film starting tonight (through May 20).
James Cameron spoke about the science of Avatar at Caltech last month; Discovery has a summary.
“We tried to make it not completely fanciful,” Cameron told the crowd, which filled the auditorium. “If it was too outlandish, there would be a believability gap.” So while Pandora features floating mountains, that might not be so far-fetched, Cameron said, considering Earth has developed high-speed “bullet” trains that levitate on magnetic fields. Of course, the “reality-based” scenario did have its limits. “We figured that to actually lift mountains, the magnetic field would have to be strong enough to rip the hemoglobin out of your blood,” says Cameron. “But we decided not to go there.”
No word on whether he addressed the Na’vi’s lack of technological advancement.
Indiewire has a review of the Freakonomics documentary that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival the other day.
Taking his central cue from Levitt’s conviction that “incentives matter,” executive producer Seth Gordon (“The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters”) directs several introductory segments featuring Levitt (the economist) and Dubner (the journalist) breaking down the book’s main assertions, aided by playful 2-D animation. The first of these sequences borrows from an early chapter in the source material, taking on self-interested real estate agents to explain the authors’ intention of parsing the motives behind many phenomena often taken for granted. While Gordon’s fluffy treatment of his chatty subjects suggests the potential for a “This American Life”-type television series, the individual short films embody their claims with a variety of methods.
Magnolia Pictures acquired the North American rights to the film so we should be seeing it in theaters later in the year.
There are likely several “Foursquare for X” apps out there (and many more to come), but I thought Miso was pretty interesting. From Cinematical:
Instead of checking in to a location (though you can do that too, if you link your existing Foursquare account), you check in with what you’re watching. Miso keeps track of your check-ins and rewards you with badges relating to specific genres (and sub-genres) of film and television. Link your Twitter or Facebook, and suddenly, you’re posting what you’re watching with friends and seeing what movies they’re watching as well. Genius.
iPhone/iPad-only for now.
You aren’t going to believe the opening credit sequence for Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void (make sure you can hear the sound too):
Really well done but there’s a 95% chance you’ll hate this. Ok, more like 98%. Reminds me of the still-brilliant trailer for A Clockwork Orange…but what a difference the music makes. (thx, jim)
Do movie actors exist in the worlds of the movies they star in?
You ever think about how in, like, a Tom Hanks movie, everyone lives in a reality in which there’s no such person as Tom Hanks? Because otherwise, people would be mistaking the main character for Tom Hanks all the time? So either Tom Hanks doesn’t exist in the world the movie takes place in, or he does exist but he looks like someone else?
Charlie Kaufman probably has a half-written screenplay about this stuffed in a drawer somewhere. (via jimray)
Update: Dozens reminded me that the “lookie loo with a bundle of joy” scheme in Ocean’s 12 involved the pregnant Tess Ocean character (played by Julia Roberts) looking like the movie star Julia Roberts. Several other people cited this scene in The Last Action Hero. And in Take Her, She’s Mine, character played by Jimmy Stewart is repeatedly mistaken for the famous actor, Jimmy Stewart. (thx, all)
Update: TV Tropes has many many examples of this phenomenon, which they call the Celebrity Paradox. (thx, joe)
David Lynch likes a lot of different filmmakers. These are some of them:
(via @brainpicker)
Hyperbole Machine reviews the various Alice in Wonderland films, cartoons, and TV shows.
Alice in Wonderland is one of the most adapted works in cinema, which is surprising, really, when you reflect on the fact that the book is pretty much unfilmable. There’s no real narrative thread besides ‘Alice is curious’ and the story is little more than a series of tableaux where Carroll can flex his surrealist prose. In light of the recent Burton riff on this very popular story, I thought I’d do a little historical trek through the numerous filmed versions of this famous novel. (No I haven’t seen the 1976 porn version so don’t expect a review).
FWIW, here’s a fairly SFW clip of that porno version.
A study by researchers from HP’s Social Computing Lab shows that Twitter does very well in predicting the box office revenue for movies.
[Researchers] found that using only the rate at which movies are mentioned could successfully predict future revenues. But when the sentiment of the tweet was factored in (how favorable it was toward the new movie), the prediction was even more exact.
But as someone noted in the comments:
Works fine until people realize it works, then they start gaming it, and it stops working.
Jim Emerson collects eight of his favorite long takes that you might not have noticed before (no Touch of Evil, The Player, or Children of Men).
If you study all eight of these shots, you should learn enough to pass any film class.
Babies is a documentary that follows the lives of four newborn babies for the first year of life…in Namibia, Mongolia, Japan, and San Francisco. (via clusterflock)
To cover every possible screen and audio option out there, James Cameron produced over 100 different versions of Avatar for distribution to theaters.
In some cases, a single multiplex required different versions for different auditorium configurations. Creative decisions involving light levels also led to additional versions. 3D projection and glasses cut down the light the viewer sees, so “Avatar” also had separate color grades at different light levels, which are measured in foot lamberts. “If we had just sent out one version of the movie, it would have been very dark (in the larger theaters),” Barnett says. “We had a very big flow chart with all of the different steps, so we could send the right media to the right theater.”
For a number of their recent missions, NASA has designed movie-like posters. This one was pretty clearly influenced by Star Trek:
Only nine foreign films have grossed more than $20 million in the US:
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Life Is Beautiful
Hero
Pan’s Labyrinth
Amelie
Jet Li’s Fearless
Il Postino
Like Water for Chocolate
La Cage aux Folles
And only 22 have made more than $10 million. There are some great great films on the full list. (via latimes)
I straight-up loved this movie. It’s a fascinating look at the creative process of a team with strong leadership operating at a very high level. The trailer is pretty misleading in this respect…the main story in the film has little to do with fashion and should be instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever worked with a bunch of people on a project. Others have made the comparison of Anna Wintour with Steve Jobs and it seems apt. At several points in the film, my thoughts drifted to Jobs and Apple; Wintour seems like the same sort of creative leader as Jobs.
Avatar is already available for pre-order on Blu-ray (and DVD). Release date is April 22.
Marwencol is the name of fictional town built by Mark Hogancamp in his backyard in an attempt to cope with a near-fatal beating. Jeff Malmberg has made a documentary of the same name about Hogancamp’s fantasy world.
After being beaten into a brain-damaging coma by five men outside a bar, Mark built a 1/6th scale World War II-era town in his backyard. Mark populated the town he dubbed “Marwencol” with dolls representing his friends and family and created life-like photographs detailing the town’s many relationships and dramas. Playing in the town and photographing the action helped Mark to recover his hand-eye coordination and deal with the psychic wounds from the attack. Through his homemade therapy, Mark was able to begin the long journey back into the “real world”, both physically and emotionally — something he continues to struggle with today.
Some bits of the film are available on Vimeo. (thx, greg)
The Guardian asked several film directors to choose their favorite movie scenes. Ryan Fleck chose the chase scene from The French Connection and discovered that the 80+ mph chase was done through normal traffic with Hackman just driving like a crazy person.
I did a little bit of research about how they shot the scene. Phenomenal. Basically they just did it. There was no security blocking off other traffic, just Hackman in a car with a camera mounted on the front. They went crazy, lost their minds, and went for it. It was the kind of thing that you just would never get away with these days.
I don’t know if it’s my favorite or not, but the opening scene in The Matrix where the cops walk into a dusty old building to find Trinity working alone at a computer and then she flies up in the air and the camera circles around her as she kicks those cops’ asses, well, let’s just say I want to be that excited about seeing the rest of every single movie I watch. (via @brainpicker)
Update: The FC chase scene was actually done by stunt driver Bill Hickman. (thx, jason)
Philip K. Dick never got to see Blade Runner, Ridley Scott’s film adaptation of his book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, but he did catch a snippet of the film on TV a few months before he died and was over the moon about it.
I can only say that I did not know that a work of mine or a set of ideas of mine could be escalated into such stunning dimensions. My life and creative work are justified and completed by Blade Runner.
(via hodgman)
After analyzing dozens of Hollywood films, a team of researchers has found evidence that the visual rhythm of movies at the shot level matches a pattern called the 1/f fluctuation, the same pattern that is found in dozens of natually occurring phenomena, including the length of the human attention span.
These results suggest that Hollywood film has become increasingly clustered in packets of shots of similar length. For example, action sequences are typically a cluster of relatively short shots, whereas dialogue sequences (with alternating shots and reverse-shots focused sequentially on the speakers) are likely to be a cluster of longer shots. In this manner and others, film editors and directors have incrementally increased their control over the visual momentum of their narratives, making the relations among shot lengths more coherent over a 70-year span.
Modern action movies are particularly adept at matching the audience’s attention span in this manner. The full paper is available here.
Information visualization of some well-known movie quotes. A picture is, how you say, worth a thousand words:
Posters featuring accurate movie titles for some 2010 Oscar nominees.
Up —> Suck It Dreamworks
Inglourious Basterds —> Inaccurate Trailer
Blind Side —> White Lady Saves the Day
One of the films up for the Best Animated Short Oscar is called Logorama. It’s a Pulp Fiction-inspired ditty composed almost entirely of inventively used corporate logos. A screenshot is instructive in illustrating what I’m talking about:
This is a nearly perfect outsiders view of the US. Watch the whole thing here.
I don’t know what took me so long, but I finally tracked down the soundtracks for both Moon and Sunshine…hiding in plain sight on iTunes. They are both great in their entirety. If you just want a taste, at least get Welcome to Lunar Industries from Moon and Sunshine (Adagio in D Minor) from Sunshine.
Update: Forgot to add that the Sunshine soundtrack is only available through iTunes and the Moon soundtrack is available in the US as an expensive import (and not on Amazon’s mp3 site or anything like that) so your best bet is iTunes there as well.
The September Issue director R.J. Cutler sums up what he learned about business from Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue and subject of his film.
I work in the film business, where schmoozing is an art form, lunch hour lasts from 12:30 until 3, and every meeting takes an hour whether there’s an hour’s worth of business or not. Not so at Vogue, where meetings are long if they go more than seven minutes and everyone knows to show up on time, prepared and ready to dive in. In Anna’s world, meetings often start a few minutes before they’re scheduled. If you arrive five minutes late, chances are you’ll have missed it entirely. Imagine the hours of time that are saved every day by not wasting so much of it in meetings.
The very phrase strikes fear into my heart. I loved the original but this can’t possibly be any good, can it?
Showing at MoMA next month, a documentary based on the NY Times’ relentless and intrepid street photographer Bill Cunningham. From the press release:
The opening night feature of this year’s New Directors/New Films is the world premiere of Bill Cunningham New York (USA, 2010) on Wednesday, March 24, at 7:00 p.m. at MoMA. Director Richard Press’ documentary is a heartfelt and honest film about the inimitable New York Times photographer, who has for decades lovingly captured the unexpected trends, events, and people of Manhattan for the Styles section of the newspaper. The film shows Cunningham, an octogenarian, riding his Schwinn bicycle to cover benefits, galas, and fashion shows around Manhattan, and illustrates how his camera has captured the looks that have defined generations.
I couldn’t really find any other information online about this film. They should at least get a trailer up on YouTube or something.
Update: No trailer yet, but there’s a web site for the film with screening info, etc.
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