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Entertainment Weekly found someone who had never seen any of the Star Wars movies and sat him down to watch all six of them in order. His verdict? “I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t sucked into this Galaxy Far, Far Away.”
Paddy Johnson wrote a nice feature on Teri Horton’s $5 thrift store Jackson Pollock and the movie about her struggle to authenticate and sell the painting. Johnson also published part of her interview with Horton on Art Fag City.
Discussion of movies where the main character dies at the end. Caution, all sorts of possible spoilers.
The NY Times asks a bunch of comedians: Which five comedies would you want to take with you if you were stranded alone on a desert island? My list: Dr. Strangelove, Zoolander, Office Space, Election, and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.
Trailer for The Simpsons Movie. At this point, is there any reason to believe that this is going to be any good? (via fimonculosusis (sp?))
According to Michael Madsen, Quentin Tarantino is thinking about making a sequel to Pulp Fiction/Reservoir Dogs that focuses on the Vega Bros.
Five great fight scenes from movies. I’m not a connoisseur of movie fight scenes, so I don’t have much to add to this list, but I’m glad Jackie Chan made the cut.
Trailer for Office Space reimagined as a thriller. (via cyn-c)
Errol Morris’ next film will be about Abu Gharaib.
Students, enter Apple’s Insomnia Film Festival, where you’ll have 24 hours to make a 3-minute film. (thx, undulattice)
Wired profile of Darren Aronofsky and his new film, The Fountain, which will finally be coming out on November 22. The special effects in the film are non-CGI: “No matter how good CGI looks at first, it dates quickly. But 2001 really holds up. So I set the ridiculous goal of making a film that would reinvent space without using CGI.” Trailer is here.
Alan Smithee is an official pseudonym used for directorial credit when directors don’t want their name associated with a movie because “the film had been wrestled from his or her creative control”. As you can see from Mr. Smithee’s IMDB profile, he’s a fairly prolific director.
Netflix, the online DVD rental company, recently released a bunch of their ratings data with the offer of a $1 million prize to anyone who could use that data to make a better movie recommendation system. On the forum for the prize, someone noted that the top 5 most frequently rated movies on Netflix were not particularly popular or critically acclaimed (via fakeisthenewreal):
1. Miss Congeniality
2. Independence Day
3. The Patriot
4. The Day After Tomorrow
5. Pirates of the Caribbean
That led another forum participant to analyze the data and he found some interesting things. The most intriguing result is a list of the movies that Netflix users either really love or really hate:
1. The Royal Tenenbaums
2. Lost in Translation
3. Pearl Harbor
4. Miss Congeniality
5. Napoleon Dynamite
6. Fahrenheit 9/11
7. The Patriot
8. The Day After Tomorrow
9. Sister Act
10. Armageddon
11. Kill Bill: Vol. 1
12. Independence Day
13. Sweet Home Alabama
14. Titanic
15. Gone in 60 Seconds
16. Twister
17. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
18. Con Air
19. The Fast and the Furious
20. Dirty Dancing
21. Troy
22. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
23. The Passion of the Christ
24. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
25. Pretty Woman
So what makes these movies so contentious? Generalizing slightly (*cough*), the list is populated with three basic kinds of movies:
Misunderstood masterpieces / cult favorites (Royal Tenenbaums, Kill Bill, Eternal Sunshine)
Action movies (Pearl Harbor, Armageddon, Fast and the Furious)
Chick flicks (Sister Act, Sweet Home Alabama, Miss Congeniality)
The thing that all those kinds of movies have in common is that if you’re outside of the intended audience for a particular movie, you probably won’t get it. That means that if you hear about a movie that’s highly recommended within a certain group and you’re not in that group, you’re likely to hate it. In some ways, these are movies intended for a narrow audience, were highly regarded within that audience, tried to cross over into wider appeal, and really didn’t make it.
Titanic is really the only outlier on the list…massively popular among several different groups of people and critically well-regarded as well. But I know quite a few people who absolutely hate this movie — the usual complaints are a) chick flick, b) James Cameron’s heavy-handedness, and c) reaction to the huge success of what is perceived to be a marginally entertaining, middling quality film.
BTW, here are the movies on that list that fit into my “love it” category:
The Royal Tenenbaums
Lost in Translation
Napoleon Dynamite
The Day After Tomorrow
Kill Bill: Vol. 1
Titanic
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
The following is a great 2004 BBC documentary about Tetris, the man who created it, and the lengths that several companies went to in order to procure the rights to distribute it. Tetris - From Russia With Love:
Alexey Pazhitnov, a computer programmer from Moscow, created Tetris in 1985 but as the Soviet Union was Communist and all, the state owned the game and any rights to it. Who procured the rights from whom on the other side of the Iron Curtain became the basis of legal wranglings and lawsuits; the Atari/Nintendo battle over Tetris wasn’t settled until 1993. There’s an abbreviated version of the story, but the documentary is a lot more fun. A rare copy of the Tengen version of Tetris, which was pulled from the shelves due to legal troubles, is available on eBay for around $50.
Five great movie monologues. #1 is Merkin Muffley talking to Dmitri on the phone in Dr. Strangelove…one of my favorite scenes of any movie ever.
Malcolm Gladwell writes about a group of people trying to predict movie hits. As Andy notes, “the problem with their technique is coming up with every possible meaningful variable”.
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.
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 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 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.”
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