James Doohan, who played Scotty on Star Trek, passed away today aged 85.
Advertise here with Carbon Ads
This site is made possible by member support. 💞
Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
Beloved by 86.47% of the web.
kottke.org posts about movies
The BBC is running a series this week on “digital citizens”: “people whose creativity has been transformed in the digital age”. The blogging feature is on Dooce; there’s also one about podcasting and digital filmmaking.
Another take on why movie theater revenues are declining. The ads suck, the movies suck, ringing cell phones suck, and you can watch your Netflix at home on your widescreen TV. Again, no mention of piracy.
Pi, God, and apartment supercomputers
The New Yorker recently ran a feature on how a couple of mathematicians helped The Met photograph a part of The Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries. That same week, they ran from their extensive archives a 1992 profile of the same mathematicians, brothers David and Gregory Chudnovsky. The Chudnovskys were then engaged in calculating as many digits of pi as they could using a homemade supercomputer housed in their Manhattan apartment. There’s some speculation that director Darren Aronfsky based his 1998 film, Pi, on the Chudnovskys and after reading the above article, there’s little doubt that’s exactly what he did:
They wonder whether the digits contain a hidden rule, an as yet unseen architecture, close to the mind of God. A subtle and fantastic order may appear in the digits of pi way out there somewhere; no one knows. No one has ever proved, for example, that pi does not turn into nothing but nines and zeros, spattered to infinity in some peculiar arrangement. If we were to explore the digits of pi far enough, they might resolve into a breathtaking numerical pattern, as knotty as “The Book of Kells,” and it might mean something. It might be a small but interesting message from God, hidden in the crypt of the circle, awaiting notice by a mathematician.
The Chudnovsky article also reminds me of Contact by Carl Sagan in which pi is prominently featured as well.
According to Wolfram Research’s Mathworld, the current world record for the calculation of digits in pi is 1241100000000 digits, held by Japanese computer scientists Kanada, Ushio and Kuroda. Kanada is named in the article as the Chudnovskys main competitor at the time.
(Oh, and as for patterns hidden in pi, we’ve already found one. It’s called the circle. Just because humans discovered circles first and pi later shouldn’t mean that the latter is derived from the former.)
A list of films ordered by uses of the work fuck. A movie called Nil By Mouth has 470 uses; that’s 3.67 uses per minute.
Twelve Sequels to Dances With Wolves That, Due to Monetary Constraints, Were Never Produced. “Runs Into at Safeway and Has Some Explaining to Do to Wolves”.
Harry Potter and Willy Wonka are going head to head this weekend. Something tells me that Harry’s gonna win.
40 things that only happen in the movies. “All beds have special L-shaped sheets that reach to armpit level on a woman but only up to the waist of the man lying beside her.”
The CollegeHumor guys get a movie deal with Paramount. Casting ideas? Freddie Prinze Jr. as Zach Klein, Jake Gyllenhaal as Ricky Van Veen?
Is anyone in Hollywood making movies we’ll actually watch in 50 years?. And who are the actors and actresses doing so?
My God, it’s full of stars…
For reasons which are kind of interesting in a weird way (but won’t get into right now[1]), I’ve changed the movie ratings around these parts from a 100-point scale to a 5-star scale.
And as long as we’re talking movies, I’ve gotten several emails over the past few months to the effect of: “you moron, how can you possibly justify giving the same rating to Casablanca as you gave to Barbershop?” The answer is that I’m not a movie critic (my review of Me and You and Everyone We Know didn’t even have anything to do with the actual movie) and my ratings are almost entirely subjective, except when they’re somewhat more objective. The subjective/objective ratio depends on the movie and my mood and which star is in the house of which planet and/or Greek god and hence is not to be trusted at all, unless you’re a regular reader of my “reviews” and have gotten a sense over many months just what makes me like or dislike particular movies. Also, it’s just a stupid rating. You know, for fun. Relax.
[1] Ever wondered why movie ratings assigned by critics are usually on 4 or 5-point scales and not on, say, 100-point scales? Yeah, me neither. But after using the 100-point scale for over a year, I may have discovered part of the reason. 100 is just way too many points[2]. How can there be any tangible difference between a 75 movie and a 76 movie? And when you start looking the whole list of ~220 movies ordered by rank on a 100-point scale, it gets even worse…why are the 15 movies rated 91 better than the 8 movies rated 90? From the standpoint of the rater, thinking about those one or two point differences is a big waste of energy (it gets worse with time as you try to “fit” a particular movie into the ever-lengthening ranked list) and it just confuses the reader anyway.
Also, the stars look nicer[3].
[2] Aggregated ratings (a la Metacritic) are an exception.
[3] I got the star from Zapf Dingbats (the capital H character at 16px). Astute readers will notice the similarity with the iTunes song rating stars, which is not altogether unintentional.
Profile of filmmaker Michael Winterbottom. Winterbottom directed the excellent 24 Hour Party People and the upcoming 9 Songs.
A list of mini golf holes based on movies. “Raiders of the Lost Ark: You must putt the ball precisely into the idol’s head, or a 15-foot-high, 1-ton golf ball comes rolling after you.”
Some film directors’ top ten movies lists. Directors Michael Mann, Sam Mendes, Cameron Crowe, Quentin Tarantino, and others choose their favorite films.
“Lord of the Bings” cherry advertisement in supermarket. “One bing to rule them all” and in the parfait bind them?
Leather master Tom Cruise. “Owning one leather jacket: cool. Owning eleven (and counting) different leather jackets: not so cool.”
“Dear hipsters, No matter how much you loved Napoleon Dynamite, Vote For Pedro shirts aren’t cool anymore.”. The Google Ads on this entry feature Vote for Pedro shirts. Hee.
Interview with Soso Whaley, director of Mickey D’s and Me, counterpoint to Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me. “Even without seeing [Super Size Me] I could tell from the clips and the description by Spurlock that this was nothing more than junk science masquerading as legitimate scientific discovery.”
Depressing article on how much hassle it was for the makers of Mad Hot Ballroom to clear all copyrighted music in the film. “If I had known all that I had to go through, I’m not sure I would have done it.”
AFI’s top 100 movie quotes. Anything missing from the list or something that should be dropped?
Me and You and Everyone We Know
We checked out the critically acclaimed Me and You and Everyone We Know (blog) on the opening weekend of the IFC Center here in NYC. The Center occupies the former Waverly Theatre space on 6th Avenue, right across the street from the basketball court on West 4th Street.
The auditorium we were in doesn’t have stadium seating like most newer theaters do, but the sound was great and they’ve got digital projection (which was a little surprising). And they don’t show any commercials before the show starts (and the manager says there never will be), but they did have a film short and one brief preview. However, the butter from the concession stand only comes in two baffling flavors to top your popcorn: rosemary flavor and truffle flavor. We opted for the truffle and quickly wished we’d done without…popcorn that tastes like a side of mushrooms with your chicken breast is pretty yucky. Stick with the basics, gang.
There were also some folks from the projectionists union picketing outside the theater, alleging that the IFC Center was employing non-professional projectionists. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but for our showing last night, the person pressing play on the HD rig in our auditorium seemed to know what they were doing.
Neal Stephenson on the larger lessons of Star Wars. “Nothing is more seductive than to think that we, like the Jedi, could be masters of the most advanced technologies while living simple lives: to have a geek standard of living and spend our copious leisure time vegging out.”
Socials & More