Trailer for Grindhouse, a film consisting of
Trailer for Grindhouse, a film consisting of two separate movies, one by Robert Rodriguez and the other by Quentin Tarantino.
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kottke.org posts about movies
Quentin Tarantino talks about his success in
Quentin Tarantino talks about his success in the movie business. The bit about just doing something and not having to ask permission is great: “Here’s the thing: they can write a mean letter, they can write a mean memo, but these guys don’t have any real fight in them. If you’re an artist, as opposed to a careerist, and your movie is more important to you than a career in this town, they can never beat you. You have a loaded gun, and you know you’ve got what it takes to put it in their faces and blow their heads off.”
Why do we feel suspense, surprise, or
Why do we feel suspense, surprise, or delight when watching a movie we’ve seen before? “But later you watch Notorious a second time. Strangely, you feel suspense, moment by moment, all over again. You know perfectly well how things will turn out, so how can there be uncertainty? How can you feel suspense on the second, or twenty-second viewing?”
Idiocracy
This is a movie that looks like a home run but ends up being a mishit single just over the shortstop into shallow left field. The concept is fantastic — that of a future world populated by brand-driven idiots — and the satire in that direction is solid, but the plot is weak and acts like an anchor on the rest of the movie. Not the great followup to Office Space that everyone was expecting for Mike Judge, but still worth a look for the concept and the graphic design.
BLDGBLOG is teaming up with Materials &
BLDGBLOG is teaming up with Materials & Applications to curate an architectural film festival. “The obvious caveat is that your film has to be about architecture, landscape, and/or the built environment - or, at least, it has to involve architecture, landscape, and/or the built environment, and in a way that isn’t just backdrop. Even more specifically, we’d love to show a whole bunch of architectural machinima, site animations, project fly-throughs, or other cinematic spaces.” Entry deadline in April 6.
Mark Pilgrim’s The Dogs of Flickr posters
Mark Pilgrim’s The Dogs of Flickr posters illustrate the problem of sourcing and giving credit in the remix age….the credits take up much more room than the work itself. Imagine if he had to get permission for all that and you’ve got some idea of how difficult it is to make documentary films these days. See also: the ending credits for The Return of the King (full story).
Dan Hill, who coincidentally is the director
Dan Hill, who coincidentally is the director of web and broadcast at the aforementioned Monocle, has a thoughtful post about Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, a documentary film that follows Zinedine Zidane through an entire soccer match.
A 666 tribute to David Fincher featuring video
A 666 tribute to David Fincher featuring video of 6 of his commercials, 6 of his music videos, and 6 of his movies.
Zodiac the first all-digital feature film?
In doing some research in anticipation of seeing Zodiac sometime this weekend, I came across the following tidbit:
[Zodiac is] believed to be the first full-length studio feature film shot and produced entirely as data from start to finish, with no physical media involved beyond backing up all raw imagery to 500 vaulted LTO data tapes during postproduction.
This sounds wrong to me, but I can’t think of what movie might have been both filmed and cut digitally before this one. Do Pixar’s animated features count? Surely there’s no film involved there. Does Soderbergh shoot & edit his big studio stuff digitally? The Coens edited Intolerable Cruelty digitally with Final Cut Pro but shot it on film. Maybe some of the newer action films…Superman Returns, King Kong, Batman Begins? I know there are some obsessive film-savvy kottke.org readers out there, can you shed any light on this?
Update: According to this feature on Apple’s web site, Kerry Conran shot and edited Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow digitally.
The graphic design of the futuristic world
The graphic design of the futuristic world depicted in Mike Judge’s Idiocracy. I love the signage that doesn’t fit on the hospital. (via do)
David Denby talks about films with “disordered
David Denby talks about films with “disordered narratives”, with a special focus on the films of Guillermo Arriaga and Alejandro González Iñárritu: Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and Babel. Many of the films he mentioned are what Alissa Quart, Mark Bernstein, and Roger Ebert refer to as “hyperlink cinema” or “hypertext films”…too bad Denby didn’t use that term in his piece.
This video has so much goodness in
This video has so much goodness in it: a short Bollywood-esque production featuring Daleks and the Tardis and then Kevin Smith arriving at an event flanked by a bunch of Stormtroopers, Boba Fett, and Anakin Skywalker. “Stormtroopers, keep it tight, we gotta move.” I wonder if he always travels that way and if so, does he fly business class while the Stormtroopers are stuck in coach? (I assume Boba Fett has miles and can upgrade most of the time.)
Update: I really like the idea that the Stormtroopers, after the fall of the Empire in Return of the Jedi, are this giant unemployed workforce who occasionally find work chauffeuring Kevin Smith about.
Interviewer: Ok, tell me about your past work experience.
Stormtrooper: Most recently, I flanked Kevin Smith.
Good. What else?
Um, I was in the room when Lord Vader choked an Admiral.
Wow! Right next to Vader?
Well, no. He choked him over the video screen and I was in the room with the Admiral. But it was still pretty cool.
Oh.
A commercial for the iPhone aired during
A commercial for the iPhone aired during the Oscars last night. Rick Silva noticed that it was a lot like artist Christian Marclay’s 1995 piece Telephones (the relevant clip starts at 3:40) and, to a lesser extent, Matthias Mueller’s film, Home Stories. Nice detective work!
Update: Here’s a list of all the actors in the iPhone commercial (except one).
Update: The missing “French Woman” is Audrey Tautou from Amelie. (thx to several folks who wrote in)
Video montage of classic movie photos taken by Magnum photographers.
Video montage of classic movie photos taken by Magnum photographers.
Why the backlash for Little Miss Sunshine? “
Why the backlash for Little Miss Sunshine? “The critics have a point, which they sometimes make with noticeable bitterness, that many independent films are stale and mannered. But for some of these films, this critical dismissal is a strange fate: to be faulted for pretense, preciosity, and stylistic calculation when their real achievement is to reintroduce an enjoyable sort of broad humor into American cinema.”
A peek into David Fincher’s uncompromising filmmaking
A peek into David Fincher’s uncompromising filmmaking process on the eve of the release of his new film, Zodiac. Jake Gyllenhaal: “David knows what he wants, and he’s very clear about what he wants, and he’s very, very, very smart. But sometimes we’d do a lot of takes, and he’d turn, and he would say, because he had a computer there, ‘Delete the last 10 takes.’ And as an actor that’s very hard to hear.”
Lots of Buster Keaton movies on YouTube
Lots of Buster Keaton movies on YouTube and Google Video.
Update: Lots more Buster Keaton films at Internet Archive. (thx, nick)
Good actors that got paid a lot
Good actors that got paid a lot of money to appear in crappy movies. Buster Keaton was in Beach Blanket Bingo?
Interview with Stephen Frears about his film,
Interview with Stephen Frears about his film, The Queen. “Do you think, then, that some of the power of the monarchy derives from its privacy and secrecy, and that as it modernizes — as the people are demanding that it do — it will actually lose some of that power?”
Cate Blanchett’s relaxed concentration
One of my favorite actresses is Cate Blanchett, but I don’t know much about her. A profile of Blanchett from last week’s New Yorker (not online) filled in the blanks nicely:
What Blanchett hides from her directors and her audience she also hides from herself. “I do like to preserve the mystique of the thing, for myself as much as anyone else,” she has said. Over the years, she has repeatedly dodged autobiographical questions by claiming, “I’ve sort of forgotten my childhood.” These ellipses in conversation help Blanchett to trick herself out of self-consciousness. “I’m not interested in the character I am in myself,” she told James Lipton on the television series “Inside the Actors Studio.” “Any connection I have to my characters will be subliminal and subconscious.”
Her approach to acting sounds similar to the idea of relaxed concentration in sports, like the practicing of free throw shooting until you can do it automatically without having to focus on shooting and can instead just focus on being focused while shooting. The author of Blanchett’s profile, John Lahr, wrote a piece on stage fright for the magazine a few months ago that deals with the same theme. British actor and comedian Stephen Fry describes how he seized up after reading a review of a performance in the Financial Times:
The impact of the review was, Fry says, “phenomenal.” He describes the sense of acute self-consciousness and loss of confidence that followed as “stage dread,” a sort of “paradigm shift.” He says, “It’s not ‘Look at me - I’m flying.’ It’s ‘Look at me - I might fall.’ It would be like playing a game of chess where you’re constantly regretting the moves you’ve already played rather than looking at the ones you’re going to play.” Fry could not mobilize his defenses; unable to shore himself up, he took himself away.
To me, the battle with the self is one of the most interesting aspects of watching performance, whether it’s sports, ballet, live music, movies, or someone giving a talk at a conference.
Miami Vice
Count me among those that scoffed when I heard a movie was being made of the Miami Vice TV series. The lesson: don’t doubt Michael Mann. Not to mention Vice’s director of photography, Dion Beebe. The movie was gorgeous and had the most distinct and tight sense of style I’ve seen in quite some time. Wish I’d seen it on the big screen.
Teaser trailer for Oceans 13. Looks like #13 is Andy Garcia.
Teaser trailer for Oceans 13. Looks like #13 is Andy Garcia.
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