I’m surprised Crash won the Best Picture Oscar last night, but Time’s Richard Corliss thinks it makes sense, given that the movie was about LA. I really liked Crash when I saw it back in June, so I’m not disappointed.
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Out of Sight
Or as I now like to call it, Ocean’s Ten. (Also, I like Don Cheadle a lot, but I just don’t find him plausible as either his nutball former boxer criminal role in Out of Sight or as the Cockney thief in Ocean’s Eleven/Twelve. Soderdude, find a better character for him in your next film.)
Quick interview with Nick Park about Wallace and Gromit. I’m testing an experimental Salon feature where if you click through to an article from kottke.org, you don’t have to apply for a Day Pass to read it…let’s see if it works.
Update: Didn’t quite work for me…clicking the link took me to Salon’s front page, not to the article. I clicked the back button and tried again and it worked the second time. Anyone else have a problem with it?
Update #2: Other people are having the same problem and Salon is looking into it.
The fashion industry doesn’t try to control its creativity the way that the music and film industries do. “The fashion world recognizes that creativity cannot be bridled and controlled and that obsessive quests to do so will only diminish its vitality. Other content industries would do well to heed this wisdom.”
Fun analysis of a moviegoer’s six years of ticket stubs. You can see the ticket prices rise over the years, but what’s really interesting is the correspondence between the ticket price and his opinion of the movie…he ended up paying more for the movies he really liked.
Pride and Prejudice
As far as I’m concerned, Will Ferrell et al., Jon Stewart, or the Farrelly brothers have nothing on Jane Austen when it comes to humor (or would that be humour?). And this latest film adaptation of Pride & Prejudice sticks closely to the book and strikes just the right tone. The book, of course, has lots more goodies in it, but as an abridged version the film couldn’t be better. Also, since it was published back in 1813, P&P is in the public domain and can be read online for free.
New trailer for A Scanner Darkly, Richard Linklater’s adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s novel. (via rw)
The Brokeback Mountain humor industry is in full swing these days, but I thought this one was pretty funny: Weekly Grocery Lists for Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist, Summer 1962. (via lia)
Syriana
In his review of Syriana, Ebert calls it a “hyperlink movie” [warning, some spoilers]:
A recent blog item coined a term like “hyperlink movie” to describe plots like this. (I would quote the exact term, but irony of ironies, I’ve lost the link.) The term describes movies in which the characters inhabit separate stories, but we gradually discover how those in one story are connected to those in another. “Syriana” was written and directed by Stephen Gaghan, who won an Oscar for best screenplay adaptation for “Traffic,” another hyperlink movie. A lot of Altman films like “Nashville” and “Short Cuts” use the technique. Also, recently, “Crash” and “Nine Lives.”
In a hyperlink movie the motives of one character may have to be reinterpreted after we meet another one. Consider the Matt Damon character. His family is invited to a party at the luxurious Spanish villa of the Gulf oil sheik whose sons are Nasir and Meshal. At the party, Damon’s son dies by accident. The sheik awards Damon’s firm a $100 million contract. “How much for my other son?” he asks. This is a brutal line of dialogue and creates a moment trembling with tension. Later, Damon’s wife (Amanda Peet) accuses him of trading on the life of his son. Well, he did take the deal. Should he have turned it down because his son died in an accident? What are Damon’s real motives, anyway?
The blog item Ebert is referring to could be Mark Bernstein’s post about Adaptation from January 2003:
Adaptation is strange, curious, improbable little film. It belongs in the all-time hypertext film festival. Interesting double-feature with Wonder Boys. Fascinating double-feature with Mullholland Drive. Ebert, like everyone else, loved it.
Mark also discusses the hypertext film festival in a post about Perfect Blue, which More Like This picks up on. As you can guess, I love hypertext films.
Update: In a review of Cape of Good Hope published subsequent to that of Syriana, Ebert reveals the source of the “hyperlink movie”:
The movie belongs to a genre that has been named “hyperlink cinema” by the critic Alissa Quart, in Film Comment. She suggests the structure was invented by Robert Altman, and Altman certainly brought it into modern times and made it particularly useful for showing interlocking stories in a world where lives seem to crash into each other heedlessly. “Crash,” indeed, is an example of the genre, as are Altman’s “The Player” and “Short Cuts,” and such films as “Traffic,” “Syriana,” “City of God,” “Amores Perros” and “Nine Lives.”
Quart’s article isn’t online, but here’s a bit of it:
In fact, Happy Endings could serve as proof for the currently fashionable theory that we shouldn’t worry that our web-based, video-game-loving culture is dumbing us down. Watching Happy Endings, you too can conclude, as some of our brightest young pundits have, that multi-task entertainment actually makes us sharper. If this is true, the new genre Happy Endings belongs to—hyperlink cinema—could be the most IQ-enhancing of all. Happy Endings, which Roos also scripted, joins his The Opposite of Sex (98) in the hyperlink canon, alongside the likes of Magnolia, Time Code, and, most recently, Crash (with a special mention for TV’s 24). Of them all, Happy Endings is best in show…The best thing about Happy Endings is that, like hyperlinking itself, it’s irremediably relativist. Information, character and action co-exist without hierarchy. And we are always one click away from a new life, a new story, and new meaning, all equally captivating but no better or worse than what we have just left behind.
Thanks for sending this along, Peter. Also, it occurs to me that Steven Johnson may have written about this at some point, perhaps in Everything Bad is Good for You.
Blockbuster films are getting more expensive and accounting for less of Hollywood’s box office take…is Hollywood’s emphasis on big movies nearing its end? I’ve always thought it was dumb that the movie industry put so many of its eggs in so few baskets. (ps. Chris Anderson’s Long Tail book is available for preorder on Amazon.)
In an age of media fragmentation, here are ten cultural events that are still shared collective experiences among US citizens, including the Super Bowl, Harry Potter, and The Da Vinci Code.
Millions
After recommendations from a couple of readers, I checked out Millions a couple of weeks ago. The film was directed by Danny Boyle, who did Trainspotting and 28 Days Later, and is a children’s film. You might think this odd, but as Ebert notes,
…[the filmmakers’] delight in the film is so manifest. But they are serious filmmakers who do not know how to talk down to an audience, and although “Millions” uses special effects and materializing saints, it’s a film about real ideas, real issues and real kids. It’s not sanitized brainless eye candy. Like all great family movies, it plays equally well for adults — maybe better, since we know how unusual it is.
Reminds me a bit of Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant. Both are kids movies that most parents didn’t take their kids to, but really should have because they have a substance and soul that most other kids movies lack. And they’re perfectly good films for adults as well. But relatively few saw either of them[1], which is a shame.
[1] The unremarkable Brewster’s Millions made more at the US box office than both Millions and The Iron Giant combined.
Now that Oscar season is in full-on in-your-face mode, check out this list of the critics’ favorite films for 2005. Love the info design on the summary at the bottom.
Some of the worst selling DVDs on Amazon. Looks like the Hammy the Hamster DVD series isn’t doing so well. See also books and music. (thx, josh)
An account of how Pixar came about that goes back a little further (Xerox PARC, circa 1973) than the one I linked to a few days ago.
Thoughts from behind the fourth wall
Things Meg said while we were watching Spiderman 2 the other day. She has a small problem with the suspension of disbelief sometimes.
- This is some sort of fake New York. Why would that pizza place be delivering 40 blocks away? And those pizzas are totally getting ruined the way he’s flinging them around like that.
- Why is he waiting for her across the street?
- This is a small New York City; everybody knows everybody else. She hooks up with the newspaper guy’s astronaut son all the way from that crappy house in the Bronx.
- What’s he doing? Don’t throw that suit away. He can’t afford to get a new one later. Just put it away in a drawer somewhere.
- He’s just going to stand there and do nothing? Lack of a superhero suit does not preclude good samaritanism.
- I love Aunt May’s cool mid-century modern furniture.
- You’d think that somebody would have called the fire department before now.
- Those are vanilla cake crumbs. That’s not chocolate cake. This movie is infuriating.
- If those falls were real, he’d be dead! Peter Parker’s an idiot.
- He’s got loser hair. And look at those arms! What, is he bench pressing Space Shuttles? You don’t need arms that big to be an astronaut.
- She has droopy boobs. What, they can’t afford to get her a bra?
- Ooh, a phony El. Now it’s like we’re in Chicago.
- Isn’t that a letter opener? Who keeps a dagger on their desk?
These are the times that try men’s souls.
In Meet the Fockers, the sign on a terminal at the O’Hare airport is typeset in Chicago, an old Macintosh system font. Har har. (via mark)
Four things
Caterina tagged me and it’s Friday, so what the hell?
Four jobs I’ve had:
1. Minimum wage worker, green bean canning factory
2. Tutor, in college physics
3. Web designer, for about 6 different companies
4. Blogger, kottke.org
Four movies I can watch over and over:
1. Ocean’s Eleven
2. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
3. The Day After Tomorrow
4. Finding Nemo
Four places I’ve lived:
1. Minneapolis
2. Rolla, MO
3. New York
4. San Francisco
Four TV shows I love:
1. Six Feet Under
2. Doctor Who (the original series)
3. Family Guy
4. Oh gosh, I dunno
Ten highly regarded and recommended TV shows that I’ve never watched a single minute of:[1]
1. 24
2. Lost
3. The Sopranos
4. Any reality TV show
5. Arrested Development
6. Battlestar Galactica
7. My Name is Earl
8. Deadwood
9. Desperate Housewives
10. The Wire
Four places I’ve vacationed:
1. Kauai, HI
2. Beijing
3. Paris
4. Rapid City, SD
Four of my favorite dishes:
1. Bologna sandwich
2. Soup dumplings
3. Cinnamon ice cream
4. Just about anything on a tasting menu
Four sites I visit daily:
1. google.com
2. flickr.com
3. robotwisdom.com
4. waxy.org
Four places I would rather be right now:
1. In a bathtub
2. On the beach
3. In space
4. Paris
Four bloggers I am tagging (but who won’t do it because they’re too old school…how’s that for a taunt?):
1. Meg Hourihan
2. Matt Haughey
3. Paul Bausch
4. Anil Dash
[1] I added this question because I was thinking about it the other day. I know, such a bad-ass rule-breaker.
Spanglish
Somewhere in Spanglish, there’s a damn good movie trying to get out. Not that I didn’t like it; Cloris Leachman was hilarious and Adam Sandler’s surreal performance simultaneously puzzled and impressed me…he seems to be turning into an actual actor. And the morality angle was solid. But there was something a little bit off about it, and I don’t think it was because I thought it was going to be a straight-up comedy.
A list of films that have the most Star Wars actors in a non-Star Wars film. Flash Gordon and Labyrinth each have 17 Star Wars actors in them. (via cd)
The delicate marketing of Brokeback Mountain. In Manhattan for example, analysis of the city’s various social microclimates was used to select the opening theaters to de-emphasize the art-house aspect of the film. (via dj)
The new Pixar overlords at Disney Animation wasted no time in cancelling Toy Story 3. “Sequels should only be made if there is a really great story that demands it, and should be the domain of those who created the original film.” Could this be the end of Disney’s straight-to-video animated crap-o-ramas?
Out and about
Some player names I observed while playing Fastr (a multiplayer game based on guessing tags for a selection of Flickr images) last night for about 15 minutes under my usual online nickname “jkottke”:
jkottkesucks
kottkesucks
jkottkesucksass
ihatekottke
yes no one likes kottke
For some reason, this reminds me of one of my favorite scenes from Being John Malkovich where he’s just popped out of his own head and onto the side of the New Jersey Turnpike and a passenger in a passing car says, “Hey Malkovich, think fast!” and pegs him in the head with a beer can.
In the spirit of the reimagined trailer for The Shining, here’s Brokeback Top Gun and Sleepless in Seattle.
Online tshirt commerce is so easy now; individuals can even offer a new tshirt design every single day. My favorite shirt of the day is this scarlet/Scarlett fiddle-dee-dee one from yesterday.
Some PT Anderson news: A Prairie Home Companion is out this summer; Anderson seems to have co-directed this with Robert Altman, but no one seems to know just who did what. And There Will Be Blood is Anderson’s newest solo project starring Daniel Day-Lewis and based on Oil! by Upton Sinclair.
Last 100 posts, part 6
[This is a semi-regular feature following up on stuff I’ve posted here recently.]
As expected, the Digg vs. Slashdot post got featured on Digg but not on Slashdot. In my analysis, I noted:
The Digg link happened late Saturday night in the US and the Slashdot link occurred midday on Sunday. Traffic to sites like Slashdot and Digg are typically lower during the weekend than during the weekday and also less late at night. So, Digg might be at somewhat of a disadvantage here and this is perhaps not an apples to apples comparison.
Several folks complained about this, some saying that it invalided the whole thing. The Digging of the DvS piece gives us another look at the Digg effect, from right in the middle of a weekday. Digg #2 was dugg 1441 times, got 98 comments, and sent around 10,200 people to kottke.org. By contrast, Digg #1 was dugg 1387 times, garnered 65 comments, and sent ~20,000 people to kottke.org. Digg #1 was actually more successful in driving traffic to kottke.org on a Saturday night than Digg #2 on a Thursday afternoon. Here’s a graph that compares the three events:
It’s hard to see the exact effect of Digg #2 on this graph (I forgot to grab a screenshot of the bandwidth graph when it happened, so all I have is the historical wide view), but it doesn’t stand out that much from what happened the previous day (each one of those “bumps” is a day) and didn’t have much of an effect beyond the initial spike. However, judging from the traffic that the individual Digg pages drove to kottke.org (Digg #1: 4525 people; Digg #2: 2668 people), it looks like the iPod feature was more interesting to the Digg audience than the Digg v. Slashdot post (which makes sense). So, still not exactly a fair comparison and raises more questions than provides answers.
The James Frey thread ended up with almost 950 comments before I shut it down because of redundancy and a lot of nastiness on the part of a few participants. The kottke.org record for most comments on a post is nearly 1800 on this post about The Matrix Reloaded (continued here)….that conversation, while nerdy, was a lot more civil.
After reading some of those comments and other things written about the controversy (but without having read the book), my take on Frey is that memories are subjective and readers need to cut authors some slack on that when writing memoirs. However, Frey stepped over the line in manufacturing situations that didn’t happen and deserves the backlashing he’s now receiving. My favorite observation on this whole deal was made by Stephen on a mailing list we’re both on. In a 2003 interview for The Observer, Frey said:
I don’t give a fuck what Jonathan Safran whatever-his-name or what David Foster Wallace does. I don’t give a fuck what any of those people do. I don’t hang out with them, I’m not friends with them, I’m not part of the literati…A book [Eggers’ AHBWOSG] that I thought was mediocre was being hailed as the best book written by the best writer of my generation. Fuck that. And fuck him and fuck anybody who says that. I don’t give a fuck what they think about me.
To Oprah on Larry King last week, Frey had this to say:
I admire you tremendously and thank you very much for your support. And, you know, it’s — I’m still incredibly honored to be associated with you, and I will for the rest of my life. Thank you.
The man knows who buttered his bread, that’s for sure. Oh, and The Onion’s take is good too. “Accounts of assault with a deadly weapon, narcotics possession, and incitement of riot actually happened during 2002 Grand Theft Auto session.”
Several folks picked up on the year in cities meme…check out the trackbacks on my post and on IceRocket for a bunch of other people’s lists.
Many didn’t realize that my letter to Apple Support was a joke. Sure, I had post-MacWorld gadget lust, but my new Powerbook is great, does everything I want, and I don’t really want the new one. Besides, everyone knows you don’t buy the first version of new Apple hardware…I’m waiting until they work all the kinks out. Here’s a not-so-positive review of the MacBook Pro announcement at Unsanity.
More chatter about the new corporate logos for Kodak, Intel, UPS, and AT&T.
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