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Pixar presents the adventures of Burn-E, a robot contemporary of Wall-E.
The events in Burn-E’s short film take place concurrent with those in the feature film.
Update: YouTube just took the video down at Pixar’s request. If you missed it, check it out here. (thx, jose)
Dark Days is a documentary released in 2000 about a group of homeless people living in an abandoned Manhattan railway tunnel.
When he relocated from London to Manhattan, Marc Singer was struck by the number of homeless people he had seen throughout the city. Singer had befriended a good number of New York’s homeless and later, after hearing of people living underground in abandoned tunnel systems, he met and became close to a group of people living in The Freedom Tunnel community stretching north from Penn Station past Harlem. After living with them for a number of months, he decided to create a documentary in order to help them financially. The film’s crew consisted of the subjects themselves, who rigged up makeshift lighting and steadicam dollies, and learned to use a 16mm camera with black & white Kodak film. Singer himself had never been a filmmaker before, and saw the production of Dark Days as a means of gaining better accommodation for the residents of the tunnel.
The entire film is available for viewing at Google Video. (via waxy)
New trailer for Pixar’s Up. I hope I’m wrong, but this seems like the first Pixar movie that won’t appeal to adults and kids at the same time.
Three collections of old Star Wars photos and illustrations: 1) a huge collection of classic Star Wars stills, set photos, etc., 2) a smaller collection of photos from the set of the first film, and 3) some early storyboards from the first movie, tentatively titled “The Star Wars”.
Movie posters that list all the product placements in the films. (via quips)
In a 1999 essay about The Sopranos written after its first season, Vincent Canby suggested that the show was an example of a relatively new form of television, the megamovie.
“Berlin Alexanderplatz,” “The Singing Detective” and “The Sopranos” are something more than mini-series. Packed with characters and events of Dickensian dimension and color, their time and place observed with satiric exactitude, each has the kind of cohesive dramatic arc that defines a work complete unto itself. No matter what they are labeled or what they become, they are not open-ended series, or even mini-series.
They are megamovies.
That is, they are films on a scale imagined by the big-thinking, obsessive, fatally unrealistic Erich von Stroheim when, in 1924, he shot “Greed,” virtually a page-by-page adaptation of Frank Norris’s Zola-esque novel, “McTeague.” Stroheim intended it to be an exemplar of cinematic realism.
Megamovies take television seriously as a medium. They have dramatic arcs that last longer than single episodes or seasons. Megamovies often explore themes and ideas relevant to contemporary society — there’s more going on than just the plot — without resorting to very special episodes. Repeat viewing and close scrutiny is rewarded with a deeper understanding of the material and its themes. They’re shot cinematically and utilize good actors. Plot details sprawl out over multiple episodes, with viewers sometimes having to wait weeks to fit what might have seemed a throwaway line into the larger narrative puzzle.
Episodes of these megamovies, Canby argued presciently, are best watched in bunches, so that the parts more easily make the whole in the viewer’s mind. For many, bingeing on entire seasons on DVD or downloaded via iTunes has become the preferred way to watch these shows. If stamina and non-televisual responsibilities weren’t an issue, it would be preferable to watch these shows in one sitting, as one does with a movie.
Since The Sopranos kick-started things in 1999, the megamovie has become a far more common occurrence on TV. Virginia Heffernan recently stated that the creators of nearly all hour-long dramatic series are aiming to make megamovies. I’ve collected a few examples of megamovies accompanied by their total running times below. The list is incomplete but represents several of the best-known and -appreciated megamovies out there.
The Sopranos, 81 hours 46 minutes
Lost*, 61 hours 59 minutes
Mad Men*, 18 hours 6 minutes
Six Feet Under 57 hours 45 minutes
Deadwood*, 36 hours
The Wire, 60 hours 45 minutes
The West Wing, 111 hours 56 minutes
For The West Wing, that’s 4 days and 16 hours of continuous watching. An asterisk marks megamovies that are as-yet incomplete. In the case of Deadwood, it’s as if the film projector broke about halfway through the movie, only no one got their money back and eveyone left the theater pissed.
Update: In his review of the third episode of Mad Men this season, Andrew Johnston talks about the two dominant forms of TV drama and how The Sopranos and Mad Men fit in. (thx, stephen)
Hulu has added Starship Troopers to the lineup. (Not available outside the US, sorry.)
Update: Perhaps those outside of the US would like to use something like this to watch movies and TV on Hulu? (thx, stewart)
Anytime is a good time for a well-cut movie trailer mashup: here’s The Dark Knight version of the Toy Story 2 trailer. (via buzzfeed)
Actress Kristin Scott Thomas made an interesting observation the other day while discussing foreign language films:
“People will now go to films with subtitles, you know,” she added. “They’re not afraid of them. It’s one of the upsides of text-messaging and e-mail.” She smiled. “Maybe the only good thing to come of it.”
The abundance of scrolling tickers on CNN, ESPN, and CNBC may be even more of a contributing factor…if in fact people are more willing to see films with subtitles. (via ben and alice)
Some of these don’t seem like such a good idea. (These are actual sequels being written/produced/considered/etc.)
Blade Runner 2
Pirates of the Caribbean 4
Beverly Hills Chihuahua
Cars 2
Toy Story 3
Ghostbusters 3
I Am Legend 2
Donnie Darko 2
Ok, Beverly Hills Chihuahua isn’t a sequel but rivals Blade Runner 2 for the worst idea on the list.
Slate has more on the restored Godfather films I told you about last week.
Luckily, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had a print of The Godfather that was in perfect condition. (This was the approved master print that Technicolor stored with the academy when the film was complete. It had never been shown in a theater.) So, when Harris & Co. did the digital color correction, they could use this print as a reference. They also worked side by side with Allen Daviau, a brilliant cinematographer who, in turn, consulted by phone with Willis himself. (Harris is a stickler for this sort of thing. When he restored Hitchcock’s Vertigo, he asked Jaguar to send him a color chip from the 1957 model of one of its cars — the same car that Kim Novak drove in the film — so that he could match the shade of green exactly.)
If you don’t want to buy/rent the films, Film Forum in New York is playing the restored films through next Tuesday with other theaters around the country to follow.
In preparation for a panel at the New Yorker Festival, Ben Greenman put together a list of the five scariest movies of all time. I’ve never seen a horror movie (unless Blair Witch Project counts) so Silence of the Lambs would be my top pick.
A list of actors who deserve better careers. Quentin Tarantino should do a film starring all of these actors and raise their boats like he did with John Travolta.
Five noted photographers choose films they’ve been influenced by. Blue Velvet appears on more than one list.
Gizmodo recently paid a visit to the headquarters of the Criterion Collection as they begin the process of releasing all their movies in HD on Blu-ray.
But with that huge uptick in resolution for the consumer, Criterion is faced with a lot of problems that they didn’t have when their masters were converted to standard definition for DVD. After all, they’re often dealing with old films, created before there was fancy low-grain filmstock and digital processing. And with the technology they have today, how much restoration and processing is too much?
Really, the mission of Criterion is “trying to replicate the original experience of seeing that movie when it was first released,” according to Phillips. While they certainly have the ability to process old films until they look like they were shot on a DV cam, that’s not the goal.
It’s difficult to know if Blu-ray will actually take off as a format, given the competition from other methods of obtaining HD media (iTunes store, HD cable, etc.). It might become a niche option like the Criterion Collection itself but a welcome one all the same. We watched The Darjeeling Limited the other night on the Starz HD channel on Time Warner Cable. It was 1080p but compressed enough that if you’re paying attention, you can see artifacts, especially with fast motion. But the worst part is that Starz didn’t bother to show the film in its original aspect ratio, which, with Wes Anderson movies, is more than half of the point! They chopped off the sides to fit a 2.39:1 film into 16:9. So for fans of films that deserve to be seen as the director intended, Criterion on Blu-ray might be the only option.
Roger Ebert recently got a question asking why he didn’t review Disaster Movie.
Q. Yo dude, u missed out on “Disaster Movie,” a hardcore laugh-ur-@zz-off movie! Y U not review this movie!? It was funny as #ell! Prolly the funniest movie of the summer! U never review these, wat up wit dat?
- S.J. Stanczak, ChicagoA. Hey, bro, I wuz buzier than $#i+, @d they never shoed it b4 hand. I peeped in the IMDb and saw it zoomed to #1 as the low$ie$t flic of all time, wit @ lame-@zz UZer Rating of 1.3. U liked it? Wat up wit dat?
Totally pwned. He’s not completely fluent, but Ebert should write all of his reviews in l33tspeak.
The three Godfather films have been restored, remastered, retouched, unscratched, and cleaned for release on Blu-ray and DVD.
By all accounts, the original negatives of the first two films were so torn up and dirty that they could no longer be run through standard film laboratory printing equipment, and so the only option became a digital, rather than a photochemical, restoration.
The final product, which the studio is calling “The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration,” combines bits and pieces of film recovered from innumerable sources, scanned at high resolution and then retouched frame by frame to remove dirt and scratches. The color was brought back to its original values by comparing it with first-generation release prints and by extensive consultation with Gordon Willis, who shot all three films, and Allen Daviau, a cinematographer (“E.T.”) who is also a leading historian of photographic technology.
The article goes on to say that the Blu-ray version is like a “pristine 35-millimeter print projected in perfect focus” in your living room. Must get Blu-ray player. Amazon has the Blu-ray version for a whopping 50% off the retail price…it’s almost the same price as the DVD version.
Update: The author of the Times piece has two before-and-after stills from the first film on his blog. Wow.
Question of the week over at the Onion AV Club: what movie have you rewatched the most times? My short list: Star Wars, Ocean’s 11, The Day After Tomorrow, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. I’ve also seen Zoolander a fair number of times but not as many as the others.
The trailer for Synecdoche, New York, the first film directed by Charlie Kaufman, who wrote Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. A.O. Scott liked it at Cannes. The film will be out in limited release (NY & LA?) on Oct 24. Say sih-NECK-duh-kee…kinda like Schenectady. (via crazymonk)
Update: I removed the embedded video…I didn’t know it came with all that extra cruft around it.
Update: The video is back, YouTube-style.
As someone who gets quite a lot of shit for his movie ratings, I quite enjoyed Roger Ebert’s explanation of how he decides how many stars to give a film and why his ratings are usually higher than those of other critics. I give this bit 4 out of 4 stars:
In the early days of my career I said I rated a movie according to its “generic expectations,” whatever that meant. It might translate like this: “The star ratings are relative, not absolute. If a director is clearly trying to make a particular kind of movie, and his audiences are looking for a particular kind of movie, part of my job is judging how close he came to achieving his purpose.” Of course that doesn’t necessarily mean I’d give four stars to the best possible chainsaw movie. In my mind, four stars and, for that matter, one star, are absolute, not relative. They move outside “generic expectations” and triumph or fail on their own.
His “I like to write as if I’m on an empty sea” line is happily filed away, to be used as liberally as possible.
Dignan’s 75-year plan from the movie Bottle Rocket.
E. Develop outside interests
a. Travel
b. Art
c. Science
(thx, tommy)
Ben Affleck’s status as a lightweight is hereby permanently suspended. This is a serious movie by a serious, thoughtful director. The film also fits into a theme that’s been developing around these parts lately related to switched identities: Switched at Birth, The Ghost of Bobby Dunbar, and Don Draper.
Short film: Blow Job by Andy Warhol. Mostly SFW…it’s just the face of the recipient. Here’s some info on the film.
When Andy Warhol decided to shoot Blow Job, he rang Charles Rydell and asked him to star in it, telling him that “all he’d have to do was lie back and then about five different boys would come in and keep on blowing him until he came,” but that the film would only show his face.
Charles agreed, but when he didn’t show up for the following Sunday afternoon shoot, Andy reached him at Jerome Hill’s suite at the Algonquin and screamed into the phone “Charles! Where are you?” Charles responded: “What do you mean, where am I? You know where I am - you called me,” and Andy the said “We’ve got the camera ready and the five boys are all here, everything’s set up!” Charles’s shocked reply was: “Are you crazy? I thought you were kidding. I’d never do that!”
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