Finding a rough model for how films fare at the box office. “They assume that revenue relies on three major factors: the size of the possible audience, the initial desire of audience members to see the film (which is often dictated by the amount spent on marketing and publicity), and audience response to the film.”
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kottke.org posts about movies
Interview with Errol Morris. He says he’s going to be doing some more commercials for Apple.
On the art of the movie trailer. “There are few more cynical forms of art, or of advertising. Trailers are full of deception. Because what they want you to do is to see the movie they want you to see, not the movie that it is.”
Nancy Cartwright says The Simpsons movie is now in production. Will one of the entertainment industry’s biggest pieces of vaporware actually get shipped?
Jason Scott on why he decided to license his straight-to-DVD documentary under a Creative Commons license. “It was in some ways a tough decision, because you want to ‘protect’ yourself, but then you realize you’re not really ‘protecting’ anything; all you’re doing is being a paranoid twitch-bag. And once you realize this, then it becomes a little easier.”
Crash
First of all, where did this movie come from? When a reader recommended it to me last week, I’d never heard of it before…I thought he was talking about the Cronenberg film. But it’s been out for almost six weeks now and has made $40 million at the box office (on a budget of $6.5 million). Looks to me it’s one of those films where Hollywood finally does something right and they don’t want to tell anyone about it.
I seem to be on a roll with movies lately…first Revenge of the Sith, then Primer, and now I really liked Crash. Reminded me a lot of Soderbergh’s Traffic crossed with P.T. Anderson’s Magnolia. At first, Crash seems to be about racism, but I think what Don Cheadle’s character had to say in the opening scene is closer to what it’s actually about:
I think we miss that touch so much that we crash into one another just to feel something.
He’s talking about cars in that scene, but it easily applies to the locks, guns, gated & segregated communities, money, racial epithets, and power structures we see in the rest of the film, all the technology, money, and power that people use to keep themselves safe but really just make things worse. From an interview with director Paul Haggis about the film:
It’s an odd life we live in Los Angeles, a city that uses freeways and wide boulevards to divide people by race and class. We spend most of our time encased in metal and glass; in our homes, our cars, at work. Unlike any real city, we only walk where “it’s safe”-those outdoor malls and ersatz city blocks we’ve created to feel like we’re still part of humanity, if only humanity could afford to shop where we do. We no longer truly feel the touch of strangers as we brush past them on the street.
Something tells me Jane Jacobs and James Kunstler would love this film.
The Blurb Racket is a weekly roundup of movie blurbs put back into context. “…Travolta is as smooth as ever…” is actually “…although Travolta is as smooth as ever, the picture is a bust, a grimly unfunny comedy with no connection to reality, and worst of all, running on and on for two dismal hours”.
If you’re going to see Revenge of the Sith again, look for these easter eggs. Both the Millennium Falcon and George Lucas have cameo appearances.
“A sampling of what prominent film critics wrote in their reviews of the earlier ‘Star Wars’ films”.
Primer
You think you know what’s going on in this (very**) indie film, you’ve caught yourself up, and then Primer just throws another curve ball at you. Even without the time twisting stuff, the complete lack of flashing arrows (Steven Johnson’s term for the plot clues embedded in movies and TV shows that scream “pay attention, this will be important later!”) left me scratching my head at exactly what happened. Luckily, the Internet to the rescue: a Primer timeline, another timeline, and an extensive visual timeline. Oy, I still don’t get it.
But that’s ok because the science fictiony stuff was actually not as interesting for me as what happened to the characters in the film. I’ve been thinking a lot about choice lately…too much of it, not enough of it, the sudden increase in the ability to determine one’s destiny by controlling choice, and the “normal” state of things where people have very little choice about anything. In Primer, the main characters find themselves in a situation where they can (almost) literally do anything they want with their lives. But instead of opening their lives up to an infinite range of possibilities, they find themselves constrained by their circumstances.
There’s a fractal aspect to human existance in this way…the particular details of any one person’s life may differ from those of another (older, smarter, richer, more powerful, etc. etc.), but the experience from the perspective of each individual is largely the same. Robert Frank touches on this in his essay on How Not to Buy Happiness. Having more power/money/control/experience/etc just may limit your choices as sure as being broke, stupid, powerless, or naive would.
Anyway, if you’re even a little bit of a geek, I’d urge you to check Primer out (it was recently released on DVD). It’s challenging in the way that Memento and Donnie Darko are, pays off in a human way like The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind does, and it gets my highest recommendation.
** Ebert correctly notes that although the film cost ~$7000 to make and that most of the principle photography took place in a garage, “the movie never looks cheap, because every shot looks as it must look.” One of my favorite aspects of the film was the cinematography…reminded me of what a Kubrick film might have looked like on a similarly tight budget.
The blog for Me and You and Everyone We Know, Miranda July’s acclaimed new movie. The most recent entries are about the film’s win at Cannes.
Mr. Sun goes to Revenge of the Sith with his youngling. “Why didn’t Obi-Wan finish off Anakin? That weakness of the mind cost millions of lives. Put down the coffee, Master Kenobi — coffee is for closers.”
The public choice economics of Star Wars: A Straussian reading. “The core point is that the Jedi are not to be trusted”.
Star Wars: The Revenge of the Sith
Warning: there are some major spoilers in here if you haven’t seen it yet.
As a life-long Star Wars fan (but not fanatic), I flat out loved Revenge of the Sith. Before the 20th Century Fox theme song started, the only expectation I had was to finally find out the details behind Anakin’s transition to the Dark Side, Padme’s death, Luke and Leia’s birth, and the near-extinction of the Jedi…everything that tied the somewhat lame prequels to the beloved trilogy of my youth. But as the movie began, I was surprised at how into it I got…I haven’t been that absorbed in watching a movie in a long time. Sure there were some rough spots (mostly dialogue related, unsurprisingly), but since the feelings I have about Star Wars are in alignment with how Alan feels, they were largely irrelevant. It’s much closer in feel to the original movies than the more recently filmed ones.
In some spots, even though I knew how things eventually turned out, I was still hoping that things would go another way. When the Emperor was trying to turn Anakin to the Dark Side, I held out hope that he wouldn’t make that choice. I didn’t want to see the Jedi slaughtered. When Yoda went to face the Emperor, I wanted that little guy to kill him. When Anakin and Obi-Wan faced each other at the end, I was hoping that somehow Obi-Wan would convince Anakin to step back from the Dark Side. But none of that happened and I was sad when it didn’t…which was the biggest surprise for me, that sadness. Somehow, Lucas made a real old-fashioned tragedy here; he actually made the evil Darth Vader into a sympathetic character. At the end, when the Emperor tells Vader — newly clothed in his now-familiar black suit — that it was his own anger that killed his wife and Vader broke free from his bonds and screamed at the universe, suddenly he didn’t seem so evil and imposing. Instead, you saw a small boy, manipulated, confused, and destined to spend the rest of his life inside himself, knowing that he destroyed everything and everyone he loved and having made his uncomfortable bed, that he would now need to lie in it.
The top 100 movie voices. Peter Sellers should really be higher on the list.
Why we shouldn’t pay that much attention to the box office gross. “Ticket sales from theaters provided 100 percent of the studios’ revenues in 1948; in 2003, they accounted for less than 20 percent.” And he doesn’t even mention inflation…Gone With the Wind is still the highest grossing film in history when you adjust for inflation.
Anthony Lane slams Revenge of the Sith in the New Yorker this week. “The general opinion of ‘Revenge of the Sith’ seems to be that it marks a distinct improvement on the last two episodes, ‘The Phantom Menace’ and ‘Attack of the Clones’. True, but only in the same way that dying from natural causes is preferable to crucifixion.” Ouch.
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