kottke.org posts about movies
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?
One of the most popular contestants in the four-and-a-half-year run of ‘America’s Next Top Model’ suffers from Asperger’s syndrome, a neurological disorder considered a form of autism. There’s a profile of her in today’s New York Times.
The database at the modeling agency Ugly NY is worth a browse, both as a showcase of an array of unique faces and as an overview of the varied ways in which people who fall outside the normal idea of beauty represent themselves commercially.
The tumblelog Ugly has a brief but positive review of the film “Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus” (2006), a highly fictionalized story of the photographer Arbus, known for her portraits of people on the fringes of society. This trailer is enough to entice me.
Ridley Scott and the company behind “The Devil Wears Prada” will bring the epic story of the Gucci dynasty to the screen. From Variety:
Just when Maurizio [Gucci] was on the verge of his greatest success — a daring fashion show debuting the clothes of newcomer Tom Ford — his penchant for accumulating enemies caught up with him; Maurizio was gunned down in front of his Milan apartment in 1995.
Plenty of potential for intrigue in the history of the House of Gucci in the 1970s and 80s, fleshed out by what is sure to be extravagant production design mixed with Scott’s highly-stylized aesthetic will make this an interesting project to look out for.
Previous big screen forays into the world of high fashion include this year’s vanity documentary “Lagerfeld Confidential” and the maligned Robert Altman romp “Prêt-à-Porter (1994).” (via The Tastemakers Society)
Over at Making Light, Avram Grumer has kicked off a fascinating discussion from yesterday’s Brawndo post here at kottke.org.
Avram notes that the introduction of a product to the real world based on one from the fictional world is nothing new, citing Holiday Inn hotel and Bubba Gump restaurant chains as examples. While he’s coined the term “tlönian” for this phenomenon, based on the Borges story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” a commenter suggests “defictionalization,” a Google search of which currently places the Making Light discussion as the #2 result, so I’m thinking it has staying power.
Other notable examples of defictionalization: the Red Swingline stapler from “Office Space” (1999) (another Mike Judge movie!), the Buzz Rickson’s MA-1, made in black only after William Gibson wrote it that way in “Pattern Recognition,” and of course, Spinal Tap.
A Tap-related Polymer Records t-shirt is available at Last Exit To Nowhere, where fine defictionalized goods are sold. I’d wear it just to channel Paul Schaffer’s Artie Fufkin as frequently as possible.
And to the snackfood and energy bar manufacturers out there: who among you has the temerity to sell me some Soylent Green?
Henry Abbott reviews a documentary called Quantum Hoops which documents the Caltech basketball team, winless for 21 years because all the players are walk-ons and subject to Caltech’s high admission standards.
What we are used to as college basketball is really basketball as a college major, or in many cases instead of college. Not basketball as an activity. The version at Caltech puts stuff like health, education, and love of the game first. I can’t speak for basketball, but I think a lot of colleges would be better off with that kind of athletic presence on campus. Maybe all the professional development of basketball players should take place somewhere else — somewhere that is not supposed to be about academics.
Almost a year late, Roger Ebert shares his top movies of 2006 with us.
Yes, I know it’s a year late, but a funny thing happened to me on the way to compiling a list of the best films of 2006. I checked into the hospital in late June 2006 and didn’t get out again until spring of 2007. For a long while, I just didn’t feel like watching movies. Then something revolved within me, and I was engaged in life again.
I’ve never met Ebert, but his love of movies resounds so emphatically from his writing that if he didn’t feel like watching them, he must have been closer than I thought to shuffling off the ol’ mortal coil. It’s nice to hear his enthusiasm again. (via crazymonk)
Early rave review for There Will Be Blood, the new PT Anderson/Daniel Day-Lewis film, calling it “maybe one of the best movies I’ve ever seen”.
Without revealing much of the plot (it’s probably better to go in cold), it’s a complex man’s simple story rendered hugely, horribly, and wonderfully in equal measure, and it’s revelatory as hell.
Video of Errol Morris talking with Philip Gourevitch about Abu Ghraib and Standard Operating Procedure at the 2007 New Yorker Festival. This was painful to watch at times — Morris speaks very deliberately — but worth leaving the audio on in the background. They showed a clip of the movie at the festival but it got cut from the video…rights issues, I imagine.
Jon Hicks has a nice slideshow of typography from the Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. (via waxy) Design Observer did a piece on the typography of Order of the Phoenix becoming its own character.
It is The Daily Prophet which emerges in this film as a secondary character, performing interstitial cameos made all the more exhilarating because the camera sweeps in and out, ricocheting off the page, magnifying and dramatizing a typographic vocabulary that combines a slightly mottled, letterpress-like display face with great portions of illegible calligraphy.
From the past weekend’s box office: the Coen brothers’ No Country For Old Men took in $3.1 million on 148 screens while Tom Cruise’s bombtacular Lions for Lambs took in $2.9 million on 2216 screens. Ouch.
David Gallagher dings Beowulf for using digital actors, resulting in an uncanny valley problem for the movie.
It’s impossible to watch “Beowulf” without sensing that the “actors” are being pushed around by invisible forces, not living and breathing on their own.
I noticed the same thing when I saw the trailer in the theater a few weeks ago. I’m stunned that the filmmakers thought it was OK that the whole thing seems soulless and constantly reminds people that, hey, this is fake, you’re watching a movie! It’s a real testament to Pixar that they’re able to stop short of the uncanny valley (they’re still obviously cartoons) and still imbue their characters with life and emotion (see Anton Ego’s revelation in Ratatouille).
Update: I forgot that Zemeckis and company did the creepy Polar Express as well.
In discussing a popular conspiracy theory film (Zeitgeist), David Galbraith coins a new acronym: FEBL for Fucking Entertaining Big Lie.
FEBL media usually means nothing and is patently false but incredibly seductive. It is the perfect scaffold to hang propaganda and acts like a bit-borne, pernicious narcotic. Although films like Zeitgeist are mildly entertaining, due to their unbelievable popularity (more than 5 Million people have watched it on YouTube), they must be taken seriously. I suspect they might actually be dangerous, and therefore, as someone who does not believe in censorship it is important to make fun of Zeitgeist as the tired piece of po-faced, visually illiterate, polemically challenged, pornographic bullshit that it is.
(thx, bbj)
Trailer for There Will Be Blood, the highly anticipated film from PT Anderson starring Daniel Day-Lewis.
Withnail and I, reunited.
An appreciation of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and William Shatner.
This Kirk is a melancholy man who feels older than he looks. “Gallavanting around the galaxy is a game for the young, Doctor,” he tells McCoy. His voice and gait confirm that his best days are behind him. En route to the Enterprise to conduct a training mission, he can hardly contain his disdain for his new job. “I hate inspections,” he tells his helmsman. He steps aboard his old starship a shadow of his warrior self, a sad figurehead trapped in a small world of his own making. Redemption is coming, but it will cost him.
Lagerfeld Confidential is a documentary film about Karl Lagerfeld, the first such film done with Lagerfeld’s authorization. It’s playing at Film Forum in NYC later this month.
A review of the script for Where the Wild Things Are, written by Dave Eggers and Spike Jonze (the script, not the review):
Where the Wild Things Are is filled with richly imagined psychological detail, and the screenplay for this live-action film simply becomes a longer and more moving version of what Maurice Sendak’s book has always been at heart: a book about a lonely boy leaving the emotional terrain of boyhood behind.
Second trailer for the could-be-amazing I’m Not There, a movie about Bob Dylan, starring Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Cate Blanchett, and three other actors as Bob Dylan. Not very related: would any of Christian Bale’s characters be any good in bed?
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