Interview with Annie Proulx about writing Brokeback Mountain. Just read the short story yesterday afternoon and it was wonderful. (via pb)
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kottke.org posts about movies
A list of a favorite movie moments from 2005. I need to get out to way more movies this year.
Edward Jay Epstein examines where it all went wrong for Blockbuster Video. Blockbuster had an opportunity to have rental pricing for DVDs like they did with video, but they turned the deal down and the studios priced DVDs for retail instead and have been minting money with that scheme ever since.
Some fans of The Matrix films went to Sydney and photographed various locations that were in the first film. Photoset on Flickr.
Spike Jonze’s film adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are had been shelved, but Warner Bros has revived it. Jonze wrote the screenplay with Dave Eggers. (via rw)
White Noises
I was 15 minutes into White Noise (starring Michael Keaton) before I stopped, Googled it, and realized that it wasn’t the White Noise based on the Don DeLillo novel, which novel I’ve never read and which movie isn’t even out yet. The Michael Keaton-ness of it should have tipped me off sooner, but a man communicating with his dead wife through the TV…that sounds like DeLillo could have written it, doesn’t it?
What business are movie theaters in? The fast-food business, the advertising business, or the movie exhibition business? All three, but they take the movie exhibition business the least seriously.
2005 favorites
If you’re like me, you’re waiting patiently for that day in early January when you can go more than 10 minutes without seeing a reference to some best of 2005 list. If you’re also like me, you love lists so much that you can’t get enough of them. So, with apologies to that first part of me, here’s a final 2005 lists from me: a few movies, weblogs, books, and musical selections that I enjoyed this past year (in no particular order).
Music (not necessarily released in 2005)
Ladytron, Witching Hour. This one grew on me a lot.
Kelly Clarkson, Since U Been Gone.
Fischerspooner, Odyssey.
Bloc Party, Silent Alarm.
Royksopp, The Understanding.
Diplo, Megatroid Mix. (download)
Boards of Canada, Campfire Headphase.
Mark Mothersbaugh (and others), The Life Aquatic soundtrack.
Stars, Set Yourself on Fire.
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah.
Kanye West, Gold Digger.
Sigur Ros, Takk.
BBC Philharmonic, Beethoven’s Symphonies.
Two disappointments: Franz Ferdinand, You Could Have It So Much Better and Broken Social Scene by the band of the same name. I enjoyed Franz’s debut album and You Forgot It in People so much, but the follow-ups fell flat for me. Still trying though…
Movies (not necessarily released in 2005)
Primer.
Garden State.
Crash.
Revenge of the Sith.
Sideways.
Million Dollar Baby.
Deliverance.
Cinderella Man.
King Kong.
Didn’t see a lot of movies this year, unfortunately.
Books
Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami.
The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen.
Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson.
Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace.
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke.
The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan.
Pieces for the Left Hand, J. Robert Lennon.
Freakonomics, Steven Levitt, Stephen Dubner.
I read a ton of non-fiction but always enjoy the small amount of fiction I do read more.
Favorite weblogs. Compare with last year’s list.
Waxy. Despite a year-end Yahoo! slowdown/hangover, still one of the absolute best.
Collision Detection. Enthusiasm about technology without the irrational exuberance or Web 2.0ness of other tech/tech culture blogs.
del.icio.us inbox. Not technically a blog, but I love this ever-fresh flow of my friends’ favorites.
Robotwisdom. The original weblog was back this year after a 1.5 year hiatus. Jorn still has it.
The Morning News. Also not technically a blog, but TMN has been delivering high quality content on a daily basis for a long time now.
Flickr friends. Still the most fun on the web.
Cynical-C. Can’t remember where or when I found this one, but almost every single thing on there is something I’m interested in.
Scripting News. I skim most of his opinion stuff, disagree with 90% of the rest of what I do read, but Dave has his finger on the pulse of the part of the web I care most about. He gets links so quickly sometimes that I think he’s actually part RSS aggregator. “He’s more machine than man now.” “No, there is still good in him…”
Boing Boing. There’s stuff I don’t care about here, but the best of BB is really good.
3 Quarks Daily. The most accessible smart weblog out there.
Marginal Revolution. Quirky economics. Interesting everyday.
Goldenfiddle. I dislike celebrity gossip, but gf makes it seem interesting somehow. Damn you!
Youngna. Rationally exuberant.
You may notice that there are few “pro” blogs on this list. The best stuff out there is still being generated by interested, enthusiastic amateurs. When you’re producing media for a profit, there’s a certain vitality that’s lost, I think…a loss I’ve been struggling with on kottke.org for the past few months. kottke.org was on last year’s list but doesn’t appear this year…here’s hoping for a better year for the site in 2006.
Alright, alright, that Chronic of Narnia SNL rap thing is as funny as you think it is because you’ve already seen it, so stop reading and watch it again, would you?
NY Times movie critics A.O. Scott, Manohla Dargis, and Stephen Holden offer lists of their favorite films of 2005. Dargis asks, “was this a good year for the movies or what?”
Ebert’s best movies of 2005. Crash tops the list, which was probably my favorite from 2005 as well.
Crap-looking trailer for Mel Gibson’s new film, Apocalypto. The Mel Gibson-ness of this clip is overwhelming.
John Lasseter at MoMA
MoMA just opened their show about Pixar last week and on Friday, we went to a presentation by John Lasseter, head creative guy at the company. Interesting talk, although I’d heard some of it in various places before, most notably in this interview with him on WNYC. Two quick highlights:
- Lasseter showed colorscripts from Pixar’s films (which can be viewed in the exhibition). A colorscript is a storyboarding technique that Pixar developed to “visually describe the emotional content of an entire story through color and lighting”. They are compact enough that the entire story fits on a single sheet and if you’re familar enough with the films, you can follow along with the story pretty well. But mostly it’s just for illustrating the mood of the film. Very cool technique (that could certainly be adopted for web design and branding projects).
- Near the end of the talk he showed a 2-3 minute clip of Cars, prefacing it with an announcement that it had never before been shown outside of Pixar.[1] Some of the CGI wasn’t completely finished, but it was certainly enough to get the gist. When the first preview trailer for Cars was released, I was skeptical; it just didn’t look like it was going to be that good. Based on the clip Lasseter showed and some of his other comments, I’m happy to report that I was wrong to be so skeptical and am very much looking forward to its release in 2006.
At 15 minutes long, the Q&A session at the end of his talk was too short. The MoMA audience is sufficiently interesting and Lasseter was so quick on his feet and willing to share his views that 30 to 40 minutes of Q&A would have been great.
[1] For you Pixar completists and AICN folks out there, the clip showed Lightning McQueen leaving a race track on the back of a flat-bed truck, bound for a big race in California. As the truck drives across the US, you see the criss-crossing expressways of the city stretch out into the long straight freeways of the American west, the roads literally cutting into the beautiful scenery. A cover of Tom Cochran’s Life is a Highway plays as the truck drives. The world of the movie features only cars, no humans…the cars are driving themselves.
King Kong gets a slow start at the box office. This is kind of amazing to me…except for the length, Kong is almost a perfect movie for audiences to go see in the theater.
Top 10 nitpicked movies of all time. Titanic and Jurassic Park top the list.
King Kong
[Warning: there’s some spoilers in here.]
I don’t really know what to make of Peter Jackson’s King Kong. On the one hand, it’s a fantastic movie, a huge blockbuster, chock full of amazing special effects[1]. And not just that but an engaging plot, good acting, and a meaning beyond what’s happening on the screen. But Kong is also very cheesy, like Michael Bay-grade cheesy. Cheesy but not schlocky, which leads me to believe it’s intentional on Jackson’s part, an homage to the original Kong and other 30s swashbuckler romance adventure pics. In that respect, Kong is like Star Wars, a corny film that works because it’s supposed to be a space opera, not a serious dramatic film.
The other thing I was thinking of while watching the film was how easy it is to be cynical about this film. At its core, Kong is a love story between an ape and a woman…how can you not make fun of that? Some of the special effects sequences are probably over-long and implausible. The 30s-style moviemaking is ripe for snark. But judging from the reaction of the NYC audience I saw it with, Jackson made it work[2]. Just before Kong runs amok at the end of the film, a character remarks that Carl Denham (Jack Black) destroys the things he loves. There are many possible lessons contained in that statement, but perhaps the one Peter Jackson had most in mind was its application to the cynicsm of Hollywood filmmaking. His last four films have been hugely merchandised, expensive to make, and made him rich, but when you watch them it’s clear that Jackson really really loves 30s movies, fantasy, filmmaking, Tolkien’s books, and King Kong…and he celebrates the things he loves. As long as Jackson stays true to what he loves, I’m willing to cut him some slack and resist the contemporary urge to be cynical about everything and let him entertain me.
[1] The 30s New York scenery was awesome but a little disctacting for me…I was often too busy trying spot local landmarks to follow the human/ape action onscreen. And the Empire State Building; it’s amazing how much taller it was than all the other buildings in Midtown at the time.
[2] With a couple of exceptions. When the pond slugs (or whatever they were) and the giant insects were descending on our heros after a solid 1/2 hour of being chased by several other kinds of animals, I (and some others in the audience) just had to laugh…it was just so absurd.
Top 10 (somehow expressed in 11 items) revolutionary special effects movies of all time. Twister? Where’s Titanic?
Trailer for Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, complete with indie rock soundtrack. Juxapositionally delicious!
The New Yorker has posted online Brokeback Mountain, the 1997 short story by Annie Proulx on which the Jake Gyllenylnllynyyllhaal / Heath Ledger / Ang Lee film is based.
The Economist asks “will computer-animated humans ever look realistic on screen?” but with nary a mention of the uncanny valley.
How It Should Have Ended, alternate endings to some movies, including Star Wars, Seven, and Saving Private Ryan.
Director’s commentary for Primer
Keeping up with all of the extras they include these days on DVDs is exhausting, to say nothing of watching all the movies themselves. But I made a point of listening to the director’s commentary for Primer and was not disappointed. If there’s a Shane Carruth fan club, sign me up. Case in point: for the single special effect in the film, he filmed a scene with a DV camera, uploaded the footage onto his computer, added the effect digitally, dumped the modified video onto tape, filmed the video playing on a camcorder screen with the film camera, and made the whole thing look like it was supposed to be done that way because he didn’t have the money to do it any other way. It’s all about constraints…which ties into the main message of the movie as well.
Also, Carruth confirmed my feeling that Primer really isn’t a sci-fi film…what’s happening with the characters emotionally is the focus of the film.
McLibel
McLibel is the story of two Londoners fighting a libel lawsuit that the McDonald’s hamburger people brought against them in English court. Without access to legal aid and being fairly broke, they defended themselves against McDonald’s phalanx of lawyers for two and a half years before the judge delivered a verdict that they had libelled McDonald’s, but also that McDonald’s had done some pretty bad things as well. Worth a watch as a companion to Super Size Me or Fast Food Nation. More information on the case is available here and here.
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