The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
This is one of the most disturbing movies I’ve ever seen. If I had kids, I’d rather take them to see Scarface or Requiem for a Dream. Better: Lazy Sunday, aka The Chronic of Narnia.
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kottke.org posts about movies
The 12 best movie pitches ever. “Idea #3: Two
The 12 best movie pitches ever. “Idea #3: Two childhood friends who are in love with each other but don’t know it (also, they’re a man and a woman) have a contest over twenty years to see who can have the biggest divorce, but end up falling in love with a husband and wife divorce lawyer team” …so far so good… “and the divorce laywer team’s daughter has invisible powers and can see fat guys naked and the guy (not the divorce lawyer) has a pet pug and the pug drives a little motorcycle.” (via waxy)
Stephen Hawking is making an Imax 3D
Stephen Hawking is making an Imax 3D film about “cosmology and the meaning of existence”. The film “will be like Groundhog Day meets Star Trek”.
Photos from a visit to Pixar. “Whenever
Photos from a visit to Pixar. “Whenever they get an idea for a story and there is something that they aren’t sure they know how to do yet, instead of putting 250+ people on a project and spend millions on something that they are unsure of, they will put 30 people on it and have them to create a short to see if it can be done.”
Peter Sellers doing various English accents
During an interview in support of the premiere of Dr. Strangelove, an unheard interviewer expresses surprise at Peter Sellers’ use of an American accent and asks him to use an English one. Here’s a video of Sellers trying to find an accent to the interviewer’s liking:
What is that, nine different completely plausible accents in 45 seconds? I love actors who can do accents well. Sellers is my favorite, but I also like Aussie Rachel Griffiths playing Californian Brenda in Six Feet Under and Brits Idris Elba & Dominic West (drug dealer Stringer Bell and officer Jimmy McNulty on The Wire). American actors often seem to have problems doing accents although Gwyneth Paltrow does a nice posh Londoner. We saw The Departed this weekend (really good, BTW), which takes place in Boston, always an accent minefield for actors. Locally grown Mark Wahlberg and Matt Damon acquitted themselves quite well. The rest? Not so much. DiCaprio was alright, but the rest of the cast was tuning in and out like an old AM radio.
More on Doug Block’s new documentary film, 51
More on Doug Block’s new documentary film, 51 Birch Street. “‘But it wasn’t until later, when we were in the car, and I asked [my dad] “Do you miss Mom?” and he said no’ that Doug Block knew he was onto a movie.” Previous post.
Trailer for Christopher Guest’s new mockumentary film,
Trailer for Christopher Guest’s new mockumentary film, For Your Consideration. Yes, Parker Posey is present and accounted for. (via wdik)
Update: The movie’s MySpace page has a clip from the movie. (thx, sam)
Update: JJG noticed a certain theme that runs through Guest’s work.
Doug Block, who you may remember was
Doug Block, who you may remember was the director of Home Page (a documentary about online life circa 1997, featured Justin Hall), has a new documentary coming out called 51 Birch Street. The film is an examination of Block’s family begun after his mother died, his father quickly remarried, and Doug began to wonder how well he really knew them to begin with.
Update: David Hudson saw 51 Birch Street at SXSW and liked it.
The soundtrack for Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette
The soundtrack for Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette contains tracks by Aphex Twin, Siouxsie & The Banshees, Squarepusher, and The Strokes. Boy, people are either going to love or hate this movie.
Animated movies have an animal problem and
Animated movies have an animal problem and aren’t working as well as they used to at the box office. “There are all these people saying we are going to be the next Pixar. We say, ‘Who is your John Lasseter?’” The box office performance of the Wallace and Gromit movie is unfortunate…I’ve caught it a couple of times on cable and it’s really quite good.
Collection of x-rated movies posters from the 60
Collection of x-rated movies posters from the 60s and 70s. NSFW.
The Blind Side: The Movie
Variety is reporting that the movie rights for Michael Lewis’ The Blind Side have been purchased by Fox. Most of the article is behind a paywall, but here’s the relevant bit:
After interest from multiple buyers, which included New Line and Mandalay, the “Blind Side” deal closed for $200,000 against $1.5 million and also includes $250,000 in deferred compensation. Gil Netter will produce for Fox, which did not confirm the value of the deal.
Norton released the book yesterday, but Hollywood interest was sparked when the New York Times Magazine ran an excerpt in its Sept. 24 issue.
Story, which was titled “The Ballad of Big Mike,” centered on Michael Oher, a poor, undereducated 344-pound African-American teenager in Memphis, whose father was murdered and whose mother was a crack addict. Oher had been shuffled through the public school system, despite his 0.6 grade point average and missing weeks of classes each year. But his tremendous size and quickness attracted the interest of a wealthy white couple who took him in and groomed him both athletically and academically to become one of the top high school football prospects in the country.
I’m hoping against hope that if the movie ever gets made, the interesting class and racial issues the book raises aren’t completely steamrollered out of the story in favor of pure uplifting entertainment. (thx, jen)
Eyes on the Prize
I posted a link to this earlier, but after watching the first two hours earlier this evening, I must strongly caution against missing Eyes on the Prize on PBS this month. Using nothing more than archival film footage, on-camera interviews, period music, and a narrator’s voiceover, the stories of Emmitt Till, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the desegregation of southern schools riveted me to the couch like few viewing experiences have. As compelling as the history of the civil rights movement in America is, the production of the film deserves some of the credit for its power. To hear the stories of these momentous events told by the participants themselves, without embellishment, is quite extraordinary. From a media perspective, watching Eyes on the Prize gives me hope that we can survive the era of the crescendoing musical scores and 20-cuts-per-minute editing and still tell powerful, engaging stories without worrying about window dressing. I won’t soon forget the calm determination in the look and voice of Moses Wright or Mississippi governor Ross Barnett thundering away about segregation.
(For me, Eyes is also a nice companion piece to my twin obsessions of late, The Wire and The Blind Side, both of which deal with contemporary race relations in their own way. The PBS web site for the film lists dozens of resources for further exploration of the topic…does anyone have any specific recommendations for books about the civil rights movement? Lemme know.)
Update: Thanks for the recommendations, everyone…I posted a listing of them here.
Each week at Slate, writer Alex Kotlowitz
Each week at Slate, writer Alex Kotlowitz and Steve James (director of Hoop Dreams) dissect the week’s episode from the fourth season of The Wire. Warning: they are unabashed fans of the show. AOL recently interviewed The Wire creator David Simon. (via dj) Negro Please is posting fourth season episode synopsiseses summaries…here’s 4.2.
Update: Season four of The Wire scored a 98/100 on Metacritic, the highest score for a TV show on the site.
The trailer for 49 Up, the latest in
The trailer for 49 Up, the latest in a series of documentary films in which the same group of people (from varying socio-economic backgrounds) are interviewed every seven years. The first movie, Seven Up!, was released in 1964 when the participants were seven years old. “The premise of the film was taken from the Jesuit motto ‘Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.’”
Profile of Michel Gondry, director of the
Profile of Michel Gondry, director of the upcoming The Science of Sleep. An exhibition at the Jeffrey Deitch gallery in Manhattan accompanies the film’s opening. View some of Gondry’s short work (commercials, music videos) on YouTube.
A positive review of Idiocracy, Mike Judge’s “
A positive review of Idiocracy, Mike Judge’s “new” movie, a film that Fox has been loath to release and promote. One to look for on DVD, I guess.
The Wire season five wishlist
Season four of The Wire just started, but I’ve got a season five wishlist item to share. I’d love to see an entire season that flashes back to Stringer Bell and Avon Barksdale establishng their operation, say 5-6 years before the start of season one. Maybe we’d also get to see McNulty’s days in the Western with Bunny, Daniels’ dark days, Bubs getting hooked on the junk, some backstory on The Greek, a bit of the Sobotka clan, and more Omar (there’s never enough Omar). This isn’t unprecendented; The Godfather: Part II followed the first movie’s saga of an aging gangster and his three sons with a look at how Vito Corleone’s operation came to be. With the way they’ve handled The Wire so far, I think the show’s creators could pull off something similar in effect and acclaim.
(Now that I think about it, they’re sort of doing that this season anyway. Marlo is kind of a young Avon and in the young school kids, we get a look at drug dealers in the making. Not related at all, but the best line of the series so far is from Clay Davis in the second episode of the 4th season: “Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeiiiiiiiiiiiiit.” Laughed my ass off.)
George Lucas, having run out of Star
George Lucas, having run out of Star Wars movies he wants to make, continues to sell us the same movie we’ve seen 70 times in yet another format. Here’s the original theatrical version of Star Wars on DVD (in quaint Dolby 2.0!) so you can prove to your lesser nerd buddies that Han indeed shoots first. Empire and Jedi are also available.
Synecdoche, New York script
Jay Fernandez of the LA Times gets his hands on the screenplay for Charlie Kaufman’s new movie, Synecdoche, New York — which Charlie will also be directing (in the absence of Spike Jonze) — and loves it. “No one has ever written a screenplay like this. It’s questionable whether cinema is even capable of handling the thematic, tonal and narrative weight of a story this ambitious.” Incidentally, synecdoche.
Documentary on hacking: The Secret History of
Documentary on hacking: The Secret History of Hacking. Features Woz, Capt. Crunch, and Kevin Mitnick.
An interview with Steven Soderbergh: “The hardest
An interview with Steven Soderbergh: “The hardest thing in the world is to be good and clear when creating anything. It’s the hardest thing in the world. It’s really easy to be obscure and elliptical and so fucking hard to be good and clear. It breaks people. Because you don’t often get encouragement to do that, to be good and clear.”
Big movie stars may not have that
Big movie stars may not have that big of an effect on a movie’s profit as the film industry thinks. “Looking across a sample of more than 2,000 movies exhibited between 1985 and 1996, they found that only seven actors and actresses — Tom Hanks, Michelle Pfeiffer, Sandra Bullock, Jodie Foster, Jim Carrey, Barbra Streisand and Robin Williams — had a positive impact on the box office, mostly in the first few weeks of a film’s release.”
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