kottke.org posts about movies
If you’ve already seen King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, I’d suggest reading Jason Scott’s pair of posts about the movie. In The King of Wrong, Scott suggests that the filmmakers left out crucial details and fudged others in order to make the actual events fit the story they were trying to tell.
What I’m saying here is that a good percentage of what makes the documentary “good” are made up conflicts, inaccurate reporting, smoothed-over narratives that are meant to make you root for one side or hate the other, when in fact reality doesn’t hold up to these allegations. The whole point of the narrative is that Steve is wronged, denied his rightful place in the record books because of internal machinations. But he had the championship for 3 years! He had played Billy one-on-one. Billy was not on this campaign to cut Steve off at the knees at every turn so to humiliate him and dismiss him, to his own aggrandizement.
In a follow-up post, Scott elaborates on his poor opinion of the film, drawing upon his experience making a documentary about another nerd subculture, the BBS.
Is Billy Mitchell “real”? I have no doubt that he says things that are over the top. I have no question that he goes off the rails on certain subjects. I also know that if you interview people for hours on end, at various days, you will get some pretty crazy stuff. How you choose to deal with that stuff is a little bit of who you are as an interviewer and editor and director. There’s no question you can “filter for crazy”, or “filter for nice”, or filter for whatever the hell you wish to. I never claim that Billy’s not capable of throwing out whoppers. I’m saying that when you lace his words with an implication of malice, of cheating, of lying to stay on top, then you are moving into caricature and needless trashing of a real person to achieve your goals. Chasing Ghosts has Billy Mitchell and a whole other range of players, and gives you the story without turning the whole experience of video games, and arcades, into a petty small-minded pissing match.
Scott nearly comes off as holier-than-thou about the standards that documentary filmmakers should be held to, but he clearly put his money where his mouth is when filming his BBS documentary. After a rough interview with Thom Henderson, a controversial figure in the compression software community, which interview caused Henderson to recall, with pain, a particularly difficult period in his life, Scott offered him the chance to edit it out of the movie…and something else too:
But you know, when I put together the ARC-ZIP episode (later renamed COMPRESSION) and sent it to him to see, I told him flat out. “If you’re not comfortable with this, if you don’t like it, let me know and it won’t go in.” He wrote back and said he and his wife were fine with it. I then told him I was giving him irrevocable, permanent rights to the film such that he could distribute and copy and even sell it however he pleased. He’s the only other person besides myself with any rights to my films. He has it for download from his site to this day.
I enjoyed King of Kong, but reading that some of the movie’s tension was manufactured sure takes the polish off of it for me.
Update: The Onion AV Club has an interview with Billy Mitchell about the movie and his take on it.
I invited [Steve Wiebe] to the Classic Gaming Expo, 2004. I invited him there, and I went up to speak onstage, as I do at each expo there. When I went up and spoke onstage, I called him to the stage, in order to honor him. I unveiled the poster in his honor, honoring his accomplishments. I did that in 2004. He was onstage with me. And I’m sorry to tell you that you can’t see that, ‘cause they forgot to put that in the movie.
The first trailer for Indiana Jones and the Unfortunately Titled Movie Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is available…in HD even.
Do We Really Want Another Black President After The Events Of Deep Impact?
Related: the latest episode of This American Life leads with a fascinating piece about how the funny happens at The Onion. In a lovely paradox, it turns out that the process of making funny things isn’t all that amusing…the sound of silence following the recitation of a funny possible headline in the writers’ room is deep and unnerving. (thx, marshall)
Usually the combination of “Hollywood” and “Oscars” is enough to scare me off a story, but this short examination of how good actors become movie stars was pretty interesting. Of his sudden stardom, Jack Nicholson said:
I remember when that happened to me. I’d been working for 12 years, and then the part in “Easy Rider” changed my life. Very few people have ever had the experience where they sit back and say, “I am a movie star.” I knew it at the first showing of “Easy Rider” at the Cannes Film Festival by how the audience reacted to the movie. A lot of people would say, “I know I’m a movie star, but, oh, I wonder what’s going to happen…” I knew it then: I was a movie star. And it was great.
The story is part of the recent NY Times Magazine package on the breakthrough movie stars of 2008. The photographs of the chosen stars by Ryan McGinley are notable as well for “their attempt to wrestle the Hollywood photoshoot beast away from its recent hyper-produced overwrought incarnation”.
Did you know that Paris Hilton has a movie out? Yeah, no one else cares either. The Hottie & the Nottie opened this weekend and took in only $230 per screen.
That means that, based on an $8 average ticket price, 29 paying customers showed up at each location over the 3-day [weekend]. In a country that seems fascinated with Paris Hilton, only 3,219 unlucky Americans will have been suckered into seeing Hottie by Monday morning.
Emphasis mine.
The milkshake line from There Will Be Blood came from a transcript that PT Anderson found of the 1924 congressional hearings over the Teapot Dome scandal.
Anderson concedes that he’s puzzled by the phenomenon — particularly because the lines came straight from a transcript he found of the 1924 congressional hearings over the Teapot Dome scandal, in which Sen. Albert Fall was convicted of accepting bribes for oil-drilling rights to public lands in Wyoming and California.
In explaining oil drainage, Fall’s “way of describing it was to say ‘Sir, if you have a milkshake and I have a milkshake and my straw reaches across the room, I’ll end up drinking your milkshake,’ ” Anderson says. “I just took this insane concept and used it.”
(via observations on film)
New extended trailer for Pixar’s Wall-E that reveals a bit more of the story and a new character.
Update: The trailer is offline. Awaiting the official release.
I enjoy movies based on real-life events because of the post-movie Google/Wikipedia binge. You start at the Wikipedia page for the movie in question and work your way out from there. In this case, I read about convicted spy Robert Hanssen and the agent who helped catch him, Eric O’Neill, who has his own web site and a wife who’s prettier than the actress who plays her in the film, surely a rarity. The most interesting aspect of such research is the differences between the real-life events and the filmed narrative. It’s fun to think about why those changes were made and how it made the narrative better or worse.
Slideshow of lobby cards from a collection assembled by late screenwriter Leonard Schrader. Here’s a companion article about the collection’s discovery.
Screenwriter Leonard Schrader’s secret collection consisted of lobby cards, which were used to promote films in movie theaters from the silent era through the 1960s. Typically issued as a set of eight sequential 11”-by-14” mini-posters depicting scenes from a film, they pre-dated trailers as a promotional device. They were low tech even by 20s standards, but in a black-and-white era, they made up for it with their flashy graphics, riotous colors, and over-the-top salesmanship.
Much more about lobby cards and Schrader’s collection here.
Jamie Zawinski reckons that Bill Murray re-lived February 2nd for at least 4 years in Groundhog Day.
Update: The screenwriter for Groundhog Day says that Phil Conners’ day lasted “about ten years”. (via waxy)
Which actors would play the designers in Graphic Design: The Movie? Maybe Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Michael Bierut, Massimo Vignelli played by Sean Connery (Connery won’t do the Italian accent though), and Julie Christie as Paula Scher.
Guillermo del Toro, director of the acclaimed Pan’s Labyrinth (and the meh Hellboy), is set to direct the two Hobbit movies for Peter Jackson and New Line.
Just purchased: Jonny Greenwood’s There Will Be Blood soundtrack on the recommendation of Alex Ross in the New Yorker.
Greenwood is better understood as a composer who has crossed over into rock. Trained as a violist, he worked seriously at writing music in his youth, and had just embarked on studies at Oxford Brookes University when, in 1991, Radiohead was signed by the EMI record label. He dropped out of college to join the band on tour.
All but a few of the title sequences of Woody Allen’s films are set in one typeface: white Windsor on a black background.
The NY Times gets all nostalgic about VHS and the upcoming releases of Be Kind Rewind and Son of Rambow.
The generation that came of age in the ’80s, as the VCR was becoming a staple, is especially prone to VHS nostalgia, a manifestation of the broader retro culture that has accounted for untold hours of programming on VH1.
In December, Adam Lisagor wrote a similar piece on VHS nostalgia and the movies for kottke.org:
But for a generation of filmmakers who cut their filmmaker teeth by shooting with the family camcorder and editing with two VCRs, there is a logical fixation with the object of the plastic and magnetic 1/2” VHS videocassette and the visual artifacts of its recorded image.
Pixar’s Toy Story 3 will be produced in 3-D. I like Pixar a lot but 3-D has never been anything but a gimmick, so I don’t know. TS3 will be out in June 2010. (2010! We’ll go together in my hovercar!)
The Oscar nominations are out. Surprises include Juno for Best Picture and Cate Blanchett for Best Actress for Elizabeth: The Golden Age, a movie that received mixed reviews at best. And I’m thinking that Daniel Day-Lewis is pretty much a lock for Best Actor, no?
Update: Most of the Oscar nominated animated shorts are available online.
Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, a 1977 film that was selected as one of the 100 essential films of all time by the National Society of Film Critics but was just recently released in theaters, will be shown on TCM today at 8pm and early tomorrow morning at 12:30am. Set your DVRs for this one. (big thx, max)
The I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE!!! scene from There Will Be Blood. If you haven’t seen the movie, don’t watch this…it’s from a scene near the end. (P.S. DRAINAGE!!!)
New York-based films at Sundance include “The Wackness,” otherwise known as “eww, that movie where Mary-Kate Olsen makes out with Ben Kingsley.”
Is it too early to feel nostalgia for the 1990s? Apparently not. “As the world starts to move faster, you can do period pieces of times closer to the present,” said Jonathan Levine, the director-writer of an adolescent coming-of-age story set against the Giuliani era in New York….To transform the city to its less gentrified self, the filmmakers threw more garbage on the street, sprayed some more graffiti, painted a mural to Kurt Cobain and obtained a “Forrest Gump” bus poster.
Well I’m pretty sure the 90s were characterized by a feeling of already-arrived auto-nostalgia, but.
Whoops! I’m a bad blogger, sorry to skip out. Had to go see the new Will Ferrell movie (“Semi-Pro”) this morning, which means, well, don’t ever let your freelance writer friends claim they have a rough life. Yeah, poor me, I had to go to a funny movie on a Friday morning instead of filling out TPS reports. I’d rarely say anything about a movie this far in advance (it opens February 29) so as not to totally enrage the movie’s publicists, so, in short: freakin’ hilarious. Made me love Will Ferrell all over again. (My Ferrell top five performances, in case anyone ever needs to know, in order: Stranger Than Fiction, The Producers, Anchorman, Zoolander, Talladega Nights.) And I don’t even usually like the current strain of all-boy, comedy-star, period-shtick set-up movies mostly because, well, I like actual live women in my movies.
My movie-going pal Sara Vilkomerson agrees about the difficulties of “Cloverfield”:
After seeing I am Legend, with the haunted empty Manhattan streets, and the rabid virus-mutated zombies, and the German Shepherd, etc., you might think you’d be prepared to watch Cloverfield.
And you’d think wrong!
And the Times review is brutal.
I’ve turned my T.V. on just one time in 2008. I rarely miss it at all, except for a very few moments when it’s like missing heroin. (Some relief coming: eight episodes of “Lost,” beginning January 31; ten episodes of “Battlestar Galactica” coming in March.) Yesterday for a job I was talking with two bigwigs, an actor and an actor-director; they said they were both in a weird state of both crunch and inactivity because of both the Writer’s Guild strike and the maybe-upcoming Screen Actor’s Guild strike, which I had totally forgotten about. (That 120,000+ member union may strike in June, over the same issues—profit from new media—that sent the Writers Guild out more than two months ago.) That’s when I realized: I can’t take a world without actors! Sure, they’re not as useful as deli owners or baristas to my life. But I like looking at them! Maybe it’ll be averted: The Directors Guild is close-ish to a settlement, which might be a template for the writers, which might be sort of a template for the actors. In any event, I asked the nice Oscar-winning lady what sort of things she liked about working: “I have health insurance, that’s enough,” she said. Mm, I should get a union then! Some health insurance sounds good right about now.
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