During the conference Xerxes sent a man of horseback to ascertain the strength of the Greek force and to observe what the troops were doing. He had heard before he left Thessaly that a small force was concentrated here, led by Lacedaemonians under Leonidas of the house of Heracles. The Persian rider approached the camp and took a thorough survey of all he could see — which was not, however, the whole Greek army; for the men on the further side of the wall which, after its reconstruction, was now guarded, were out of sight. He did, none the less, carefully observe the troops who were stationed on the outside of the wall. At that moment there happened to be the Spartans, and some of them were stripped for exercise, while others were combing their hair. The Persian spy watched them in astonishment; nevertheless he made sure of their numbers, and of everything else he needed to know, as accurately as he could, and then rode quietly off. No one attempted to catch him, or took the least notice of him.
Back in his own camp he told Xerxes what he had seen. Xerxes was bewildered; the truth; namely that the Spartans were preparing themselves to die and deal death with all their strength, was beyond his comprehension, and what they were doing seemed to him merely absurd. Accordingly he sent for Demaratus, the son of Ariston, who had come with the army, and questioned him about the spy’s report, in the hope of finding out what the behavior of the Spartans might mean. ‘Once before,’ Demartus said, ‘when we began our march against Greece, you heard me speak of these men. I told you then how I saw this enterprise would turn out, and you laughed at me. I strive for nothing, my lord, more earnestly than to observe the truth in your presence; so hear me once more. These men have some to fight us for possession of the pass, and for that struggle they are preparing. It is the custom of the Spartans to pay careful attention to their hair when they are about to risk their lives. But I assure you that if you can defeat these men and the rest of the Spartans who are still at home, there is no other people in the world who will dare to stand firm of lift a hand against you. You will now have to deal with the finest kingdom in Greece, and with the bravest men.
That’s from Book VII of Herodotus’ The Histories, translation by Aubrey de Selincourt. Why was none of this hair-combing business in the movie? That would have been great in slow motion.
Which reminds me. My other question about 300 is why the filmmakers, having wonderfully distilled and reduced the Hollywood action movie down to its fantastically violent essence, padded the remainder of the film with 45 minutes of the most boring slow-motion-filmed plot since Plutarch’s Watching Paint Dry? 300 would have benefitted greatly from a little worship at the altar of Jason Bourne: don’t stop the fucking action, ever.
Rating the critics: the Economist’s More Intelligent Life blog picks their favorite movie and book critics. They will be offering picks in more categories in the coming days. (via mr)
WH: And you have a great sense for the afterthought. The interview is finished, it’s over, and Errol is still sitting and expecting something. Then all of a sudden there comes an afterthought, and that’s the best of all.
EM: Yes, often.
WH: Very often, yes. And I have learned that, in a way, from you. Wait for the afterthought. Be patient. Don’t say, “Cut.” Just let them do it.
I don’t get out to the theater much these days, but I’m going to make an exception for Morris’ upcoming Standard Operating Procedure.
Mapping the idea of “life imitating art” onto Owen Wilson’s biography and Wes Anderson’s films reveals their startling convergence. As Anderson’s works increasingly addressed themes of depression, psychiatric treatment, and “hitting bottom,” so too did Wilson’s life chart a course towards collapse. Wilson’s characters in Anderson’s early films-the sublime geniuses born of commingling depression, emotion and creativity-gradually give way to caricatured objects of psychoanalytic explication.
They don’t make ‘em like they used to. Sort of. According to Wikipedia, there are seven different versions of Blade Runner, from a 113-minute workprint version shown to test audiences in early 1982 to the “Final Cut” supervised by director Ridley Scott and released in late 2007. I saw the latter version1 and with the exception of Rachael’s giant shoulder pads and the slower pacing, the whole thing seemed surprisingly contemporary (or not-too-dated at least). The film has aged well, like a fine wine.
[1] Which I watched in HD on a large TV…a fantastic way to view this beautifully cinematic film. I think this is what David Lynch is taking about when he says that you shouldn’t watch movies on a “fucking telephone”. ↩
Interview with Susan Bradley, who did some graphic design and designed a typeface for Pixar’s Ratatouille. I enjoyed her response when asked about “one thing everybody should do today”:
Something backwards or something analog you’d normally computerize.
The only one we have. Wow. There’s one teensy-weensy problem, though, that nobody seems to have noticed. One tiny little thing missing from the George Clooney is the World’s Biggest Movie Star storyline…nobody watches his movies.
On the other hand, Will Smith gets Oscar noms and gets people into the theater.
I like Tilda Swinton and all, but her performance in Michael Clayton receiving awards bugs me. She was the only prominent woman character in the movie and was the only character who was insecure, emotional, and tentative. None of the other main characters appeared unsure of themselves for even an instant, not even the crazy guy. In short, Swinton played a stereotypically weak woman in a sea of stereotypically strong men characters. Boooring. At least her character wasn’t just sexy and stupid…but is that progress?
(Warning, spoilers: One could also argue that Swinton’s takedown at the end of the film could be construed as a comment on the part of the filmmakers about the proper role of women in the executive workplace. But I wouldn’t go there.)
I love this little rant by Jeffrey Wells about people who don’t watch the “20 or 25 films that are somewhere between excellent, very good or good enough to watch and think about later” that are released every year.
Movies are not supposed to be pills that you take to feel better. They’re not travelling carnivals with elephants and jugglers. They’re supposed to be aesthetic journeys and emotional hikes that get us in touch with things that too many of us tend to push away (or anesthetize ourselves from) in our day to day. They’re supposed to be compressions and condensations that create indelible moments, insights and excavations into our collective soul. We’re only here for 80 or 90 years, we need to figure some stuff out before we pass on, and good movies are part of the learning-and-realizing process.
In the past few decades, individuals have experienced dramatic changes in some of the most established dimensions of human life: time, space, matter, and individuality. Working across several time zones, traveling with relative ease between satellite maps and nanoscale images, gleefully drowning in information, acting fast in order to preserve some slow downtime, people cope daily with dozens of changes in scale. Minds adapt and acquire enough elasticity to be able to synthesize such abundance. One of design’s most fundamental tasks is to stand between revolutions and life, and to help people deal with change.
I was surprised at how many of the show’s ideas and objects I’d seen or even featured on kottke.org already. But getting there first isn’t the point. The show was super-crowded and I didn’t have a lot of time to look around, but here are a couple of things that caught my eye.
Using eight of my favourite films from eight of my most admired directors including Sidney Lumet, Francis Ford Coppola and John Boorman, each film is processed through a Java program written with the processing environment. This small piece of software samples a movie every second and generates an 8 x 6 pixel image of the frame at that moment in time. It does this for the entire film, with each row representing one minute of film time.
a social occasion where tenants hire a musician or band to play and pass the hat to raise money to pay their rent. The rent party played a major role in the development of jazz and blues music.
Further reading suggests that rent parties started in Harlem in the 1910s as a way to offset rising rents.
Harlemites soon discovered that meeting these doubled, and sometimes tripled, rents was not so easy. They began to think of someway to meet their ever increasing deficits. Someone evidently got the idea of having a few friends in as paying party guests a few days before the landlord’s scheduled monthly visit. It was a happy; timely thought. The guests had a good time and entered wholeheartedly into the spirit of the party. Besides, it cost each individual very little, probably much less than he would have spent in some public amusement place. Besides, it was a cheap way to help a friend in need. It was such a good, easy way out of one’s difficulties that others decided to make use of it. Thus was the Harlem rent-party born….
The ebullient young man with the dazzling jazz style was a big hit at the Sherman Hotel. His nightly audience included men with wide lapels and bulging pockets. One evening Fats felt a revolver poked into his paunchy stomach. He found himself bullied into a black limousine, heard the driver ordered to East Cicero. Sweat pouring down his body, Fats foresaw a premature end to his career, but on arrival at a fancy saloon, he was merely pushed toward a piano and told to play. He played. Loudest in applause was a beefy man with an unmistakable scar: Al Capone was having a birthday, and he, Fats, was a present from “the boys”.
The party lasted three days. Fats exhausted himself and his repertoire, but with every request bills were stuffed into his pockets. He and Capone consumed vast quantities of food and drink. By the time the black limousine headed back to the Sherman, Fats had acquired severeal thousand dollars in cash and a decided taste for vintage champagne.
I was inspired to read about rent parties and Waller by this interview with Michel Gondry, director of Be Kind Rewind. Gondry says about his film:
It’s important in the story that there’s a parallel between what’s happening in the film and what happened in the past with rent parties, which were very real. Fats Waller became the great musician he was through those parties. When someone could not afford the rent for one month, they’d make a party. You’d bring a dollar, and there would be a piano contest all night long. People making their own entertainment, that’s exactly what it is.
Here’s Waller performing one of his most well-known pieces, Ain’t Misbehavin’.
1. The gross receipts have obviously gone up in the past 11 years.
2. The summers get much more blockbustery.
3. As time goes on, movies open bigger but don’t last nearly as long in the theater as they used to. There are also more movies to choose from in 2007 than in 1986.
4. For some exceptions to the normal pattern, check out My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Juno, Dances With Wolves, Platoon, and Million Dollar Baby. (via big picture)
Just a heads up to let you know that a liveblog of the Oscars is going to be starting here in a little bit. Follow along as I follow along, if you know what I mean (and I think you do).
7:44a, Feb 25th: The Oscars are over. 20% of the nominees won. The cat threw up on the rug and Ollie’s a bit fussy this morning. We’ll see you back here next year.
11:42p: Bedtime. Last update until tomorrow morning, when I assume the Oscar ceremony will finally be over.
11:06p: None of the stories on the front page of Digg refer to the Oscars. Unsurprising that they have their heads in the sand on such an important issue.
10:47p: BREAKING NEWS: The program on ESPN2 right now is not Fisting; it’s Fishing. Fishing. Also, 1363 unread items in my RSS reader.
10:28p: Fashion update. Just took off my shirt. It’s hot in here, it’s not just me.
10:08p: Battery life at 31% and dropping.
10:00p: Just checked the movie times at the theater two blocks from my apartment. Juno at 10:50, There Will Be Blood at 10:20, Atonement at 10:30, and No Country for Old Men at 10:15 & 10:55. Michael Clayton is on Movies OnDemand for $4.99 at any time.
9:32p: Is this a good time to go to the movies? Lots of empty seats at There Will Be Blood maybe?
9:07p: My liveblogging outfit this evening: jeans by Banana Republic, long sleeve tshirt by American Apparel, socks by Wal-Mart, boxer shorts by Muji.
8:55p: What else is on right now: The Mummy on Encore, Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Fox Movie Channel, Miller’s Crossing on Encore Action, The Departed on Cinemax, episode #8 of The Wire on HBO, the Masterpiece version of Pride and Prejudice on PBS, Bulls vs. Rockets on ESPN, Godfather II on AMC, and Born Into Brothels is just ending on IFC but Spanking the Monkey starts in 20 minutes.
8:43p: Non-ceremonial bulletin: I’ve turned on the comments.
An annotated list of the top ten cinematographic moments in film in 2007: part 1 and part 2.
The shot that stuck out in my head the very first time I saw the film spoke to me so deeply that I referenced it in my initial review: “A few years trickle by as Plainview adds onto his enterprise until finally, oil. A black-tarred hand reaches to the sky and suddenly you sense the influence of Stanley Kubrick on the film. Like the apes who discovered weaponry in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Plainview has come upon the object that will dictate America’s destiny for the next century and more.” I don’t thiink I could say it any better now.
I hate cynicism. I wipe it from me. I don’t like cynical people. I don’t like cynical movies. Cynicism is very easy. You don’t have to justify it. You don’t have to fight for it.
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