Due to blinking, viewers of a 2.5 hour-long film like the latest Harry Potter will have their eyes shut for up to 15 minutes. But researchers have found that movie goers synchronize their blinks:
The synchronised blinks occurred at “non-critical” points during the silent movie — at the conclusion of an action sequence or when the main character had disappeared from view. “We all commonly find implicit breaks for blinking while viewing a video story,” Nakano says.
In In the Blink of an Eye, film editor Walter Murch wrote about the blink as a natural place to cut between scenes, a marker of the boundary between two ideas.
Strange Maps has a map of What’s On Earth Tonight, basically a TV Guide for the Milky Way. The map is not that big yet because TV signals have only been sent out from Earth since the late 1920s.
The first tv images of World War II are about to hit Aldebaran star system, 65 light years [ly] away. If there’s anybody out there alive and with eyes to see it, the barrage of actual and dramatised footage of WW2 will keep them shocked and/or entertained for decades to come. Which is just as well, for they’ll have to wait quite a few years to catch the first episodes of such seminal series as The Twilight Zone and Bonanza (both 1959), just about now hitting the (putative) extraterrestrial biological entities of the Mu Arae area (appr. 50 ly). The Cosby Show, Miami Vice and Night Court (all 1984) should be all the rage on Fomalhaut (25 ly). Meanwhile, the sentient, tv-watching creatures near Alpha Centauri (4.4 ly), our closest extrasolar star, are just recovering from the infamous “wardrobe malfunction” during Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake’s halftime show during the 2004 Superbowl.
I didn’t know The Fantastic Mr. Fox, directed by Wes Anderson, was scheduled to come out so soon…IMDB says it’ll be out on November 13 of this year. Here’s a screenshot:
It’s a stop-motion animation film based on a story by Roald Dahl. The main character is voiced by George Clooney, with Michael Gambon, Meryl Streep, Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Willem Dafoe, Jason Schwartzman, Adrien Brody, Anjelica Huston, Brian Cox, Roman Coppola, Jarvis Cocker, and Mario Batali providing some of the other voices. According to Wikipedia, a trailer will be out on July 31.
Several times in Last Year at Marienbad, the characters play a game called Nim. The gameplay is simple: a) players take turns removing objects from rows, b) they can remove as many objects as they want from a single row in one turn, and c) the player who removes the last object loses. The strategy is somewhat more difficult to understand, even though the player who goes first and follows the optimal strategy will always win. Although somewhat less glamourous than the film version, a Flash version of Nim is available to play.
The September Issue is the much-anticipated documentary that follows Anna Wintour and her staff at Vogue through the process of creating the magazine’s September issue, AKA the world’s thickest magazine issue.
An apt demonstration that an editor/curator’s main job is saying no to almost everything.
Let’s take a look at who’s still alive here. Brad Pitt: yes. Aaron Sorkin: yes. Steven Soderbergh: no. Expected soon: Michael Bay, Alan Ball, Sam Mendes, McG, and M Night Shamalamadingdong. (thx, david)
The world of the movie is one in which everyone tells the truth all the time…until Gervais invents lying. It also stars every other Hollywood actor and comic in the world, including Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman, Patrick Stewart, Jeffrey Tambor, Tina Fey, Christopher Guest, Rob Lowe, Louis C.K., and John Hodgman. (You know it’s quite an august list when you have to stick “and John Hodgman” on the end of it.)
The Great Ghostbusters Campaign must start today. Here. Starting with this inarguable, scientific fact: Ghostbusters is still the most successful comedy film of all time, with a 1984 box-office return of $229.2 million. But this, of course, in turn, makes it the most successful film OF ALL TIME, FULL STOP — given that comedy is the supreme genre, and rules over every other format, such as “serious”, “foreign” or “black and white”.
IFC lists the 50 greatest trailers of all time. Trailers are like episodes for Law & Order for me — ten minutes after viewing and I can’t remember a thing about them — so I don’t really have any favorites, but this list seems like a solid collection.
Robert McNamara, former Secretary of Defense during a large portion of the Vietnam War, died early today at 93. Errol Morris’ documentary on McNamara, The Fog of War, is well worth checking out if you haven’t seen it.
Errol Morris, Werner Herzog and over 30 of today’s top documentary filmmakers provide an in-depth look at non-fiction filmmaking and the steps to making a documentary. These masters of the craft reflect upon the nature of documentary as a form of storytelling and offer insight into their approach to the ‘truth.’
Accounts from more than a dozen people involved with the film, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid damaging professional relationships, described a process in which the heady rush toward production was halted by a studio suddenly confronted by plans for something artier and more complex than bargained for.
Sony was probably looking for something more BIG RED TEXTish.
Once upon a time, Luke | Kirk | Neo | Harry was living a miserable life. Feeling disconnected from his friends and family, he dreams about how his life could be different. One day, he is greeted by Obi Wan | Captain Pike | Trinity | Hagrid and told that his life is not what it seems, and that due to some circumstances surrounding his birth | birth | birth | infancy he was meant for something greater.
Pay phones ring for no reason, and they don’t stop. Dead relatives call their families in the middle of the night. People, horrifically, even call themselves— but it’s the person they used to be, phoning out of the blue, warning them about future misdirection.
Every once in a while, though, something genuinely bad happens: someone answers the phone… and they go a little crazy.
Thing is — spoiler alert — halfway through the film, the Ghostbusters realize that NYNEX isn’t a phone system at all: it’s the embedded nervous system of an angel — a fallen angel — and all those phone calls and dial-up modems in college dorm rooms and public pay phones are actually connected into the fiber-optic anatomy of a vast, ethereal organism that preceded the architectural build-up of Manhattan.
Manhattan came afterwards, that is: NYNEX was here first.
Update: It’s not quite a statistical analysis, but a couple of folks have guessed at the impact. First, from Tyler Cowen:
With five entries there are usually only two or maybe three real contenders. Strategic voting is present but manageable. There can be split votes across a particular actor or genre. With ten entries it is much harder to tell which picture will win. Counterintuitively, it might be harder for “odd” pictures to be nominated because they might end up winning. Popular movies like The Dark Knight will win more often because it will be hard not to nominate them (it didn’t even receive a nomination).
With more Best Picture slots open, studios and indies alike could be pushing harder to get their movies seen. What does that mean to you, the home viewer? It might — just might — mean that some smaller movies get longer runs in the big city arthouses, and even end up finding their way into the hinterlands. Everyone knocks the taste of the Academy (and often with good reason), but it’s not like everything that gets nominated is dowdy and self-serious and simplified. And it’s certainly true that plenty of excellent movies contend for the honor of contending each season. More of those excellent-but-low-priority movies may put up more than just a token campaign, and as a result, the average movie fan may become more aware of them, and may even get to see them.
In all about 300 films were eligible for awards in 2008. Were that to hold going forward, roughly one of every 30 films would become a best-picture nominee.
The trailer for Ponyo, the latest animated feature film from Hayao Miyazaki (Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, etc.). The film opened in Japan last year and made more than $150 million at the box office. The American version is dubbed and I don’t know if a subtitled version will made it to theaters in the US or not. There was a theatrical release of a subtitled Mononoke but that was a long time ago.
Jim Capobianco’s end credits to Andrew Stanton’s “WALL-E” are essential; they are the actual ending of the film, a perfect and fantastically optimistic conclusion to a grand, if imperfect idea. Humanity’s past and future evolution viewed through unspooling schools of art. Frame after frame sinks in as you smile self-consciously. It isn’t supposed to be this good but there it is. This is art in its own right. Peter Gabriel and Thomas Newman’s song, “Down to Earth” indulges you with some incredibly thoughtful lyrics and, from the Stone Age to the Impressionists to the wonderful 8-bit pixel sprites, you are in the midst of something special.
Not quite a building, but the monumental quality of its form and its polygonal facades lend this Jawa Sandcrawler a building-like presence. These large treaded vehicles have inspired buildings from a Tunisian hotel to Rem Koolhaas’ Casa de Musica in Porto.
Death to Smoochy
The Boondock Saints
The Karate Kid, Part III
Cool as Ice
Dice Rules
Basic Instinct 2
Gigli
SuperBabies: Baby Geniuses 2
From Justin to Kelly
The Hottie & the Nottie
Glitter
Car 54, Where Are You?
Son of the Mask
Leonard Part 6
Lady in the Water
Norbit
Swept Away
White Chicks
Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid
Spice World
Jaws 3-D
Bratz: The Movie
Troll 2
Howard the Duck
Battlefield Earth
The Postman
I Know Who Killed Me
Kazaam
Rambo III
Freddy Got Fingered
Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot
Striptease
Caddyshack II
The Adventures of Pluto Nash
Barb Wire
Ishtar
Bio-Dome
Jingle All the Way
Catwoman
Disaster Movie
Rocky V
BloodRayne
Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo
The Love Guru
Crossroads
Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2
The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas
It’s Pat!
Batman & Robin
Speed 2: Cruise Control
When I first saw the headline, I thought “this is amazing…Darren Aronofsky’s directing a movie based on the book by Nassim Taleb and Natalie Portman’s gonna star in it!” The plot of the actual movie is only slightly less implausible:
“Swan” centers on a veteran ballerina (Portman) who finds herself locked in a competitive situation with a rival dancer, with the stakes and twists increasing as the dancers approach a big performance. But it’s unclear whether the rival is a supernatural apparition or if the protagonist is simply having delusions.
In this movie, Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis have sex. Yeah. You read that right. And not just nice sweet innocent sex either. We’re talking ecstasy-induced hungry aggressive angry sex.
Another nail house is actually a nail church. Citicorp Center was built without corner columns to accommodate St. Peter’s Church, which occupied one corner of the block on which the skyscraper was built. The engineer who built Citicorp Center made a mistake related to the church’s accommodation and famously corrected it after the building was built.
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