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Is Spiderman 3 the most expensive movie ever made? “With marketing and promotion factored in, the total price tag will approach half a billion dollars — positioning Spider-Man 3 as the most expensive movie of all time.”
The international trailer for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I am officially as hooked on Harry as everyone else.
Update: And here’s the US trailer…slightly different footage.
The long-term success of films isn’t always determined by how they did at the box office. Traffic made $124 million at the box office in 2000 while Requiem for a Dream made only $3.6 million ($9.50 of which was mine), but Requiem gets rented 33 percent more from Netflix than Traffic. ‘It’s almost impossible to go onto someone’s MySpace page now and not find a reference to [the Coen brothers’] “The Big Lebowski” or [Terry Gilliam’s] “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”’ - two movies that caused barely a ripple in the theaters.”
What kind of art is film? High art? Mass art? Photographic art? Narrative art?
It’s been awhile since I’ve done one of these. Here are some updates on some of the topics, links, ideas, posts, people, etc. that have appeared on kottke.org recently:
Two counterexamples to the assertion that cities != organisms or ecosystems: cancer and coral reefs. (thx, neville and david)
In pointing to the story about Ken Thompson’s C compiler back door, I forgot to note that the backdoor was theoretical, not real. But it could have easily been implemented, which was Thompson’s whole point. A transcript of his original talk is available on the ACM web site. (thx, eric)
ChangeThis has a “manifesto” by Nassim Taleb about his black swan idea. But reader Jean-Paul says that Taleb’s idea is not that new or unique. In particular, he mentions Alain Badiou’s Being and Event, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze. (thx, paul & jean-paul)
When I linked The Onion’s ‘Most E-Mailed’ List Tearing New York Times’ Newsroom Apart, I said “I’d rather read a real article on the effect the most popular lists have on the decisions made by the editorial staff at the Times, the New Yorker, and other such publications”. American Journalism Review published one such story last summer, as did the Chicago Tribune’s Hypertext blog and the LA Times (abstract only). (thx, gene & adam)
Related to Kate Spicer’s attempt to slim down to a size zero in 6 weeks: Female Body Shape in the 20th Century. (thx, energy fiend)
Got the following query from a reader:
are those twitter updates on your blog updated automatically when you update your twitter? if so, how did you do it?
A couple of weeks ago, I added my Twitter updates and recent music (via last.fm) into the front page flow (they’re not in the RSS feed, for now). Check out the front page and scroll down a bit if you want to check them out. The Twitter post is updated three times a week (MWF) and includes my previous four Twitter posts. I use cron to grab the RSS file from Twitter, some PHP to get the recent posts, and some more PHP to stick it into the flow. The last.fm post works much the same way, although it’s only updated once a week and needs a splash of something to liven it up a bit.
The guy who played Spaulding in Caddyshack is a real estate broker in the Boston area. (thx, ivan)
Two reading recommendations regarding the Jonestown documentary: a story by Tim Cahill in A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg and Seductive Poison by former People’s Temple member Deborah Layton. (thx, garret and andrea)
In case someone in the back didn’t hear it, this map is not from Dungeons and Dragons but from Zork/Dungeon. (via a surprising amount of people in a short period of time)
When reading about how low NYC’s greenhouse gas emissions are relative to the rest of the US, keep in mind the area surrounding NYC (kottke.org link). “Think of Manhattan as a place which outsources its pollution, simply because land there is so valuable.” (thx, bob)
NPR did a report on the Nickelback potential self-plagiarism. (thx, roman)
After posting about the web site for Miranda July’s new book, several people reminded me that Jeff Bridges’ site has a similar lo-fi, hand-drawn, narrative-driven feel.
In the wake of linking to the IMDB page for Back to the Future trivia, several people reminded me of the Back to the Future timeline, which I linked to back in December. A true Wikipedia gem.
I’m ashamed to say I’m still hooked on DesktopTD. The problem is that the creator of the game keeps updating the damn thing, adding new challenges just as you’ve finally convinced yourself that you’ve wrung all of the stimulation out of the game. As Robin notes, it’s a brilliant strategy, the continual incremental sequel. Version 1.21 introduced a 10K gold fun mode…you get 10,000 gold pieces at the beginning to build a maze. Try building one where you can send all 50 levels at the same time and not lose any lives. Fun, indeed.
Regarding the low wattage color palette, reader Jonathan notes that you should use that palette in conjunction with a print stylesheet that optimizes the colors for printing so that you’re not wasting a lot of ink on those dark background colors. He also sent along an OS X trick I’d never seen before: to invert the colors on your monitor, press ctrl-option-cmd-8. (thx, jonathan)
Dorothea Lange’s iconic Migrant Mother photograph was modified for publication…a thumb was removed from the lower right hand corner of the photo. Joerg Colberg wonders if that case could inform our opinions about more recent cases of photo alteration.
In reviewing all of this, the following seem related in an interesting way: Nickelback’s self-plagiarism, continual incremental sequels, digital photo alteration, Tarantino and Rodriquez’s Grindhouse, and the recent appropriation of SimpleBits’ logo by LogoMaid.
Not quite sure what this indicates, but I found this statistic interesting: “Among moviegoers who see an average of 10.5 films in theaters each year, 46% of them are Netflix subscribers and 68% have a home theater. Among those who see just 7.1 movies in theaters each year, 16% subscribe to Netflix and 16% have home theaters.”
Digital filmmaking may be responsible for a new type of acting where actors and directors don’t need to worry so much about getting the shot *right this instant* while expensive film is rolling through the camera but can instead find the right performance out of many. “Digital removes those constraints. There’s no such thing as rehearsal. You can shoot anything you want. You don’t have to say ‘cut.’ You don’t have to say ‘action.’” Definitely a parallel here to how digital camera changed photography.
The Back to the Future IMDB page sure has a lot of trivia. And I have a feeling that’s not even the half of it.
Even though I wasn’t that familiar with the whole Jim Jones/Jonestown story, I felt like they rushed through the early parts of the story…might have worked better at 2 hours than at 90 minutes. The ending is great, a well-paced mix of personal narrative, photography, audio, and video from the last fateful day of over 900 people. After the movie ended, I was trying to imagine what would happen if Jonestown (or to a lesser extent, the Branch Davidian thing or Heaven’s Gate) occurred today. Religious cult leader brainwashes all these people and then kills 900 of them in the South American jungle, including a United States Congressman? CNN, et. al. would got nuts for a start…I don’t know if 72 pt. type on their homepage would be enough. The blogosphere would probably go supernova as well.
The American Experience site has more information about Jones and the film. Check your local listings as well…you might be able to catch the film on PBS sometime in the next week or so.
The two-fer Tarantino/Rodriguez movie Grindhouse is going to be broken into two films for release overseas and possibly in the US. “There have been reports that many film-goers have been confused by the movie’s structure - mistakenly assuming that there was only one film on offer and leaving the cinema en-masse after the Rodriguez section.”
Miranda July, who you might remember from her film Me and You and Everyone We Know, has a book coming out in May, a collection of stories called No One Belongs Here More Than You. The book has a web site that’s one of the most effective and creative I’ve seen in a long time. Here’s a screenshot of one of my favorite pages, just to give you a taste:
The really intriguing thing about the site is that it breaks pretty much every rule that contemporary web designers have for effective site design. The site is a linear progression of images, essentially 30 splash pages one right after another. It doesn’t have any navigation except for forward/back buttons; you can’t just jump to whatever page you want. July barely mentions anything about the book and only then near the end of the 30 pages. There’s no text…it’s all images, which means that the site will be all but invisible to search engines. No web designer worth her salt would ever recommend building a site like this to a client.
Yet it works because the story pulls you along so well; July’s using the site’s narrative to sell a book that is, presumably, chock full of the same sort of narrative. If you think the site sucks and quickly click away, chances are you’re not going to like the book either…it’s the perfect self-selection mechanism. The No One Belongs Here More Than You site is a lesson for web designers: the point is not to make sites that follow all the rules but to make sites that will best accomplish the primary objectives of the site.
A video from the Children of Men DVD that shows how they did some of the long takes in the film. The rig they built on the car and the roving camera are amazing.
On the occasion of Helvetica’s NYC premiere tonight, Michael Bierut remembers a time when no one knew anything about type or fonts except for designers and typesetters. “[Today] we live in a world where any person in any cubicle in the world can pick between Arial and Trebuchet and Chalkboard whenever they want, risk free, copyfitting tables be damned, and where a film about a typeface actually stands a chance of enjoying some small measure of popular success.”
An examination of the interaction between humans and computers in science fiction movies. Includes examples from The Matrix, Metropolis, Futurama, Minority Report, and Star Trek. (via bb)
Roger Ebert’s been out of commission for the past few months due to cancer surgery, but he’s eager to return to his normal duties. “I still love writing about the movies. Forty years is not enough.”
Ted Z at Big Screen Little Screen got his mitts on a copy of a script for Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited from May 2006. “I have serious reservations regarding how far Wes Anderson can take this twee-filmmaking before the rut is too worn to dig himself out.”
Killer of Sheep, a 1977 student film by Charles Burnett, is on the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry and was selected as one of the 100 essential films of all time by the National Society of Film Critics but has never been shown in theaters because of music rights clearance issues. This year, the film is finally being released in theaters (it’s showing at IFC Center in NYC through April 12) and will be available on DVD in the fall. Watch the trailer and read a bit more about it in the NY Times.
The review of the Criterion DVD of Rushmore I posted yesterday mentioned a NY Times article written by Wes Anderson about him screening Rushmore for legendary film critic Pauline Kael. The original is behind the Times paywall, but a Clusterflock commenter posted a copy. After reading it, I don’t get the hostility that other film critics directed at Anderson because of it.
Thoughtful review of the Criterion version of Rushmore. “Anderson also serves as a convenient target for people who don’t like people who like movies by Wes Anderson. […] When you get past the extraneous bullshit surrounding Anderson’s films, the crux of disagreements about him reminds me of disagreements over David Foster Wallace (or Dave Eggers, or Thomas Pynchon, or even Vladimir Nabokov). It comes down to this: Are Anderson’s stylistic tricks and distracting plot elements smoke and mirrors, or do they bring something unique to the stories he’s telling? In the case of Rushmore, I think the answer has to be the latter.” I get the feeling you could learn a lot about film by reading Matthew’s reviews of the Criterion Collection.
Artist Christian Marclay says that Apple contacted him about using his short film Telephones for their iPhone commercial. He refused and they went ahead and made the commercial using the same idea with different footage. Says Marclay, “the way they dealt with the whole thing is pretty sleazy”. TouchExplode gets credit for spotting the reference. (via df)
Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez pick their 10 favorite movie posters.
Incubus is a 1965 horror film that was filmed in Esperanto and starred William Shatner. What more could you want, really?
Harry Potter movie franchise in potential jeopardy: Emma Watson reportedly refuses to play Hermione Granger for the final two films. Paging Emmy Rossum. (Emma, Emmy, Emma, Emmy, Emma, Emmy, Emma…)
Update on The Darjeeling Limited, Wes Anderson’s new film starring Anderson regulars Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, and Jason Schwartzman. Apparently this article confirms the rumors that Bill Murray is in the film. (via goldenfiddle)
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