A Slate slideshow (with video) showing work
A Slate slideshow (with video) showing work from Brad Bird’s career, from his early tests to The Iron Giant to Ratatouille.
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In the battle of Steve Jobs (CEO
In the battle of Steve Jobs (CEO of Apple) vs. Steve Jobs (former CEO of Pixar and current Disney Board member), Steve Jobs (Apple) was the clear winner. Apple sold an estimated 500,000 iPhones this weekend — grossing somewhere between $250 million and $300 million — while Pixar’s Ratatouille grossed $47.2 million.
Update: Some more interesting iPhone statistics, including Apple’s stock price increase since the iPhone was announced ($32 billion increase in market cap) and that iPhone was mentioned in 1.25% of all blogs posts over the weekend. (thx, thor)
Update: Apple’s stock price went down this morning in heavy trading. I guess Wall Street wasn’t so over the moon for the iPhone?
Photos of a 7-11 set up as
Photos of a 7-11 set up as a Kwik-E-Mart to promote the Simpsons Movie. (thx, jon)
Ratatouille opens today and it’s got a
Ratatouille opens today and it’s got a score of 94 on Metacritic, which puts it in a tie for 6th place on the all-time list.
Live Free or Die Hard
Die Hard 4 might be the perfect summer entertainment. I couldn’t believe how much fun this movie was…we wanted to go again as soon as we got out.
Never mind Transformers, here’s a look at
Never mind Transformers, here’s a look at the possible summer blockbusters of 2008. Here are a couple more lists of 2008 movies: FirstShowing.net and Box Office Mojo.
NYC font fans rejoice…Helvetica (the movie)
NYC font fans rejoice…Helvetica (the movie) will be starting a run at the IFC Center on September 12. My short review of the film is here.
Artist Lou Romano is on fire. He
Artist Lou Romano is on fire. He did the cover for the June 25th New Yorker and he’s the voice for Linguini, the main human character in Ratatouille. Visit Romano’s blog.
The American Film Institute has refreshed their
The American Film Institute has refreshed their list of the top 100 movies…here’s a listing comparing the new list with the one from 1998. Godfather Part II at #32 is still a travesty.
Update: Roger Ebert weighs in on the list.
Manufactured Landscapes is a documentary about Edward
Manufactured Landscapes is a documentary about Edward Burtynsky and the photos that he’s taken in China of the Three Gorges Dam, factories, and other vast industrial projects. Trailer is here and it’s available on DVD at Amazon. (thx, scott)
Update: Manufactured Landscapes is playing in NYC at Film Forum starting tonight through July 3.
Patton Oswalt, who does of the voice
Patton Oswalt, who does of the voice of the main character in Ratatouille, shares some details to look for in the film. “Everything that Ian Holm, as the evil Skinner, does — especially his teetering-on-the-edge-of-insanity rant to his lawyer about that ‘rat’ that no one else sees but him. The animators I talked to had so much fun rendering his lines — ‘An animator’s dream’, according to one of the character design staff. Also, the animators used his toque like the shark’s fin in JAWS — you always see it moving closer among the stoves in the kitchen. Hilarious.” (thx, martin)
A look at the available details of
A look at the available details of Pixar’s next few films. We know about Ratatouille and Wall-E but there’s details about Up, Toy Story 3, and Pixar’s first live-action film (???).
Trailer for There Will Be Blood, the
Trailer for There Will Be Blood, the first movie from PT Anderson in I don’t know how long. The flick stars Daniel Day-Lewis and is adapted from Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil! (via crazymonk)
Ratatouille
With its latest film, Pixar manages to achieve something that few other big Hollywood films do these days: a convincing reality. The body language & emotions of the characters, the machinations of the kitchen, the sights and sounds of Paris, and the dice of the celery, Ratatouille gets it all right, down to the seemingly insignificant details. As we walked out of the movie, my wife, who has spent time cooking in restaurants (with Daniel Boulud, even), couldn’t stop talking about how well the movie captured the workings of the kitchen. To be sure, a G-rated kitchen but a true kitchen nonetheless.
I’m not quite sure how this is possible, but the people in Ratatouille acted more like real people than the actors in many recent live action movies (especially the rats), like they had realistic histories and motivations that governed their actions instead of feeling scripted and fake. The world of the movie felt as though it had existed before the opening credits and would continue after the curtain fell. Systems that have arisen through years, decades, centuries, millennia of careful evolution and interplay with one another were represented accurately and with care. In The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander writes of the quality without a name:
There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named. The search which we make for this quality, in our own lives, is the central search of a person, and the crux of any individual person’s story. It is the search for those moments and situations when we are most alive.
Pixar’s search for this quality in the making of Ratatouille is impressive. And in a way, necessary. In order to draw the audience into the film and make them forget that they’re watching animated characters in an animated world, the filmmakers need to get everything right. Motions too exaggerated, motivations glossed over, plot too uncoordinated, and the whole thing loses its sense of authenticity. People need to act like people, omelettes need to sag off of spatulas like omelettes, and the only woman chef in a haute cuisine French kitchen needs to behave accordingly.
This is an interesting state of affairs. In comparison, the live action movies have become the cartoons. Not all of them, but certainly many Hollywood movies have. Spidey 3, Transformers (I’m guessing), Die Hard 4 (guessing again), anything Eddie Murphy has made since the mid-80s, Wild Hogs, Blades of Glory, RV, etc. etc. I could go on and on. So what are we to make of a cartoon that seems more real than most live action movies? How about we stop thinking of them as cartoons or kids movies or animated films and start considering them as just plain movies? I’d put Pixar’s five best films — Toy Story 2, The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, Ratatouille, and let’s throw Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant in for good measure — among the best big budget films made in the last 10 years, no caveats required.
Oh, and I don’t want to give away the ending, but I will say that Ratatouille also has something to say about critics and criticism, a topic that’s currently under debate in foodie circles and has been discussed many times in different areas of the blogosphere. It almost seems as though the film’s message is aimed partially at bloggers, and for those that care to listen, that message is both encouraging and enlightening.
A teaser trailer for Wall-E, Pixar’s newest
A teaser trailer for Wall-E, Pixar’s newest movie, due out in summer 2008. That sounds like a heck of a lunch. (thx, scott)
Temporal anomalies in time travel movies, an
Temporal anomalies in time travel movies, an investigation of how time travel is represented in movies like Donnie Darko, 12 Monkeys, and Back to the Future. (via joshua)
The Pixar media machine is getting cranked
The Pixar media machine is getting cranked up for the release of Ratatouille…here’s another article about the movie in Time. By the way, if you’re organizing any sort of advanced screening in NYC, the proper procedure is to notify me immediately.
For Pixar, the making of Ratatouille included
For Pixar, the making of Ratatouille included some time in real kitchens and restaurants, complete with a stop at the French Laundry for some face-time with Thomas Keller.
A bunch of writers pick their favorite
A bunch of writers pick their favorite novel -> movie adaptations. (thx, david)
Wikigroaning: comparing sparse Wikipedia entries about high
Wikigroaning: comparing sparse Wikipedia entries about high culture topics with the more fleshed-out entries about low culture topics. For instance, compare the entries for Hammurabi, who wrote some of the world’s first legal codes, and Emperor Palpatine, who ruled the Empire in the Star Wars movies.
Four-part documentary about the making of Stanley
Four-part documentary about the making of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining: one, two, three, four. Shot by Kubrick’s daughter, Vivian.
Pirate myths uncovered: they never said “arrr”,
Pirate myths uncovered: they never said “arrr”, there was no plank walking, and no treasure maps. The “arrr” and the pirate accent “originated with Robert Newton, the actor who played Long John Silver in the movies and on TV through much of the 1950s”.
Pirates 3 not so bad?
Last week’s post about the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie hinted that I was having difficulty reconciling its summer blockbusterness (and all the suckiness that usual entails) and the feeling that there was something more to be discovered under the distracting explosions and swordplay. Ryland Walker Knight, writing at The House Next Door, says that Pirates trilogy is a film series worth watching seriously (emphasis mine):
The Caribbean world of Verbinski’s trilogy is, after the first film, one of constant shuffling, of tangential narrative ruptures: the world of the film, like the world we audience members live in, is chaotic. Of course, this Caribbean world is not the world we live in. In our world, there are no giant mythological squids or sea goddesses, but there are, however, pirates - and daily acts of piracy. And there are social dictums, social pacts, that we appropriate and reconstitute on an individual basis, to live with ourselves, to live with the world. The main thrust of this trilogy is that reckoning: How will we live in the world when our autonomous freedom is continually challenged?
It’s certainly not a stretch to make the connection between the autonomous freedom theme and the US government’s recent actions to limit freedoms in the name of fighting the “global war on terror”. The Onion AV Club’s Noel Murray didn’t read that much into it, but he did think it was more than just swashbuckling and gunnery:
No, I’d rather argue that Pirates is not junk. It may be a lousy movie — I’ll accept that argument, even if I more or less disagree — but it’s not just, as Nathan Lee writes in his Village Voice review, “a delivery system for two kinds of special effect: those created by computers, and those generated by Johnny Depp.” I believe that a genuine effort to delight — and not just subdue — has been made here. The movie contains the same kind of preoccupation with clockwork gags and bad guys accidentally doing good that’s been part of The Verbinski Method since Mouse Hunt. Like it or not, Pirates does have a brain, and a soul.
I almost want to go see it again, to watch it not as a blockbuster but as a film that might have a little something to say.
Another one of those lists you love
Another one of those lists you love to hate: the 25 best movies you’ve never seen. Putting the horrible Boondock Saints on the list is a major boner, especially just ahead of Peter Jackson’s pre-Rings gem Heavenly Creatures.
Hilarious interview with Ocean’s 13 stars George Clooney,
Hilarious interview with Ocean’s 13 stars George Clooney, Matt Damon, Ellen Barkin, and Brad Pitt.
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