kottke.org posts about movies
Gelf Magazine, curators of always-entertaining Blurb Racket, list their picks for the worst blurbs used by movie advertisements in 2007. For instance, in reference to Live Free or Die Hard, film critic Jack Mathews actually said “the action in this fast-paced, hysterically overproduced and surprisingly entertaining film is as realistic as a Road Runner cartoon” but was quoted by 20th Century Fox as saying that the movie was “hysterically … entertaining”.
Daniel Day-Lewis is flat-out amazing in this film; I can’t think of when I’ve seen a better performance. But with this movie and No Country For Old Men, both of which top many people’s lists of the best movies of 2007, I found them really good but not great. Not sure why. Maybe I’ll have better luck with Juno or The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
Hilariously bad knockoffs of Pixar’s Ratatouille and Cars called Ratatoing and The Little Cars. (via waxy)
Movie trailer for Untraceable, which features a serial killer who live-broadcasts his murders online so that his victims are killed faster as more people visit the site. From the looks of it, the movie features every single bad computer-related movie cliche all in one neat package. Either that or it’s a clever metaphor for what the web is doing to our culture. (via fimoculous)
Why have I not looked at the Wikipedia page for Ocean’s Eleven before now? Best part is the description of the crazy names for the cons referenced in the movie.
Off the top of my head, I’d say you’re looking at a Boesky, a Jim Brown, a Miss Daisy, two Jethros and a Leon Spinks, not to mention the biggest Ella Fitzgerald ever.
Sadly, the page for Ocean’s Twelve has no corresponding list, save for a description of the Lookie-Loo with a Bundle of Joy.
An annotated list of movies due out in 2008. I didn’t know that Darren Aronofsky was working on a new movie…about a boxer and starring Brad Pitt and Mark Wahlberg, no less.
Director File has put out its list of Ten Best Music Videos of 2007. Of particular note on the list is a sweet and heartwarming video for The Bees “Listening Man” directed by Dominic Leung.
Leung began his career as a part of hammer & tongs, the creative team behind many influential music videos as well as the movies Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, on which he acted as 2nd unit director and title sequence director, and the upcoming Son of Rambow, which he edited. (via antville)
I enjoyed reading the AV Club’s The Year in Film 2007. Their hands-down best of the year was No Country For Old Men. (BTW, the term “hands-down” comes from horse racing.)
Looks like there will indeed be a Hobbit film and Peter Jackson is in (although not as director, at least not yet). The deal includes another film to be made that takes place between the end of The Hobbit but before LOTR. (via crazymonk)
Update: The NY Times says that Jackson will not direct as he is already booked for the period in question.
Pixar has released a new trailer for Wall-E (HD version available). I want this movie and a robot now please.
The “lost intro” to Star Wars, a scene featuring Luke pining for adventure on Tatooine. I’m glad it got lost. (via cyn-c)
The opening title sequence of The Kingdom is a nice 3.5 minute overview of the relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia.
The Goodie Bag podcast has an entertaining little video on Trajan, the font used ubiquitously in movie credits and posters:
Like indoor plumbing and toga parties, Trajan hails from Rome. Matter of fact, you can find almost 2,000-year-old inscriptions on Trajan’s column, where they have totally off-the-leash keggers on Saturdays… Russell Crowe has co-starred with Trajan three times now.
This reminds me of Red is Not Funny, J. Tyler Helms’ illustration of the wide use of bold red letters in distinctly unfunny comedies. (via cameron hunt)
What did Bill Murray whisper into Scarlett Johansson’s ear at the end of Lost in Translation? Someone did a bit of audio analysis and posted their findings as a video. (via avenues)
Anhedonia is a 90-min film that uses the audio from Annie Hall and stock video footage from Getty; here’s an 11-min excerpt. (thx, katerina)
A lengthy list of self-references and in-jokes in Pixar’s movies, including the infamous Pizza Planet delivery truck. Mit pictures. (thx, x amount)
IAC’s Manhattan headquarters has an absolutely massive video wall in the lobby. ITP professor Daniel Shiffman took his class over to play around with it, projecting hundreds of frames of Run Lola Run on the wall at the same time in sequence. You can see the scene cuts racing along the wall, demonstrating the franticness of the movie.
Two more movies on my horizon, both about outsiders in the music business:
- The trailer for Young @ Heart that nearly brought me to tears last night can’t yet be found online, and the clip available at Channel4, where the film originally aired in the UK is a bit dry. Instead, you’ll find info on the film and two great clips at The Documentary Blog, including a heart-wrenching performance of the Young @ Heart chorus of elderly people (average age 80) performing Coldplay, part of a repertoire including The Clash, The Ramones, and Sonic Youth.
- Great World of Sound is an Altmanesque comedy about two normal southern guys who get caught up in a record industry talent scout scheme. The trailer at Apple looks promising.
Update: Young @ Heart trailer can now be found here.
Most avid readers will speak to an emotional attachment to books through associations of the senses - the roughness of the page, the smell of ink and glue - when describing a love of reading. Filmmakers and connoisseurs of film will cite an obsession with the physical properties of the celluloid through which movies are projected.
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.
Two movies will be released in the next months which hold the VHS aesthetic dear. One is Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind in which two video store clerks decide to deal with a store full of accidentally erased tapes by remaking the classic movies in their own, VHS homebrew fashion.
The other paean to VHS is Son of Rambow, Garth Jennings’ film which was the darling of Sundance this year. The title is that of the homebrewed movie that two little boys make after discovering and being mindblown by a bootleg copy of Rambo: First Blood on VHS.
Trailer for Be Kind Rewind.
No trailer yet for Son of Rambow, but a review from The New York Times.
This begs the question: with Super-8 and VHS all but a distant memory, with MiniDV on the way to extinction, what formats will the future filmmakers obsess over and what artifacts will they attempt to reproduce for nostalgia as they grow up and the formats of their youth are phased out?
Now that the trippy stills have whetted your appetite, feast your eyes on the trailer for Speed Racer, in freaking HD no less. The race courses remind me of those in Mario Kart: Double Dash, particularly Rainbow Road, Dry Dry Desert, and especially Wario Colosseum. (thx, askedrelic)
Tucked in among The Kinks, The Velvet Underground and Belle & Sebastian, the track behind the animated opening title sequence for the new movie Juno is All I Want is You by the children’s folk musician Barry Louis Polisar. It’s as inspired a choice for this enjoyable little movie as PT Anderson’s inclusion on the Punch Drunk Love soundtrack of He Needs Me (iTunes link), Olive Oyl’s love song from Robert Altman’s 1980 adaptation of Popeye.
Polisar was a favorite of mine as a kid. In particular, the 1978 album Naughty Songs for Boys and Girls was my undisputed favorite record. Featuring the classics Don’t Put Your Finger Up Your Nose and Never Cook Your Sister in a Frying Pan, the album has never gone out of print. Give the tracks a listen on iTunes and if you have kids, this will give them lots of laughs and teach them to rebell against their parents.
The New York Times has a review of Juno here. Amazon link to Naughty Songs for Boys and Girls here.
Update: My favorite funnyblogger Todd Levin chimes in on the Juno soundtrack at tremble.com.
These newly released stills from the upcoming ‘Speed Racer’ movie do a lot to lend credence to star Susan Sarandon’s claim back in August that the Wachowskis’ entirely unique vision for the film required the development of new, unprecedented technology and visual effects trickery. Her summary of the film’s thematic elements: “It’s all about cheating and betting and how things are fixed and everything else, but it’s also about family values and pancakes are love.”
At the time it was just a whimsical sound bite, but these new images make me head-splittingly happy, enough to buy all the way in to the pancake love. (thx joseph)
Update: Greg over at greg.org poses the question: Why does the media refuse to grant Lana (né Larry) Wachowski her right to the feminine pronoun?
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