Errol Morris’ next film will be about Abu Gharaib.
Errol Morris’ next film will be about Abu Gharaib.
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kottke.org posts about movies
Students, enter Apple’s Insomnia Film Festival, where
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
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
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.
Love it or hate it movies
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 story of Tetris
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
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
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”.
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.
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.
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