Last week's post about the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie hinted that I was having difficulty reconciling its summer blockbusterness (and all the suckiness that usual entails) and the feeling that there was something more to be discovered under the distracting explosions and swordplay. Ryland Walker Knight, writing at The House Next Door, says that Pirates trilogy is a film series worth watching seriously (emphasis mine):
The Caribbean world of Verbinski's trilogy is, after the first film, one of constant shuffling, of tangential narrative ruptures: the world of the film, like the world we audience members live in, is chaotic. Of course, this Caribbean world is not the world we live in. In our world, there are no giant mythological squids or sea goddesses, but there are, however, pirates - and daily acts of piracy. And there are social dictums, social pacts, that we appropriate and reconstitute on an individual basis, to live with ourselves, to live with the world. The main thrust of this trilogy is that reckoning: How will we live in the world when our autonomous freedom is continually challenged?
It's certainly not a stretch to make the connection between the autonomous freedom theme and the US government's recent actions to limit freedoms in the name of fighting the "global war on terror". The Onion AV Club's Noel Murray didn't read that much into it, but he did think it was more than just swashbuckling and gunnery:
No, I'd rather argue that Pirates is not junk. It may be a lousy movie -- I'll accept that argument, even if I more or less disagree -- but it's not just, as Nathan Lee writes in his Village Voice review, "a delivery system for two kinds of special effect: those created by computers, and those generated by Johnny Depp." I believe that a genuine effort to delight -- and not just subdue -- has been made here. The movie contains the same kind of preoccupation with clockwork gags and bad guys accidentally doing good that's been part of The Verbinski Method since Mouse Hunt. Like it or not, Pirates does have a brain, and a soul.
I almost want to go see it again, to watch it not as a blockbuster but as a film that might have a little something to say.
Let's say you're interested in movies and New York City. Then you could do worse than check out the Celluloid Skyline exhibit being displayed in Vanderbilt Hall in Grand Central from May 25 through June 22. The exhibit is based on the book of the same name by James Sanders, an exploration of how New York is portrayed in film. The exhibit includes "scenic backing" paintings made for movie sets in the 40s & 50s, film footage of films set in NYC, production stills and location shots, and other artifacts of NYC's intersection with film. Sanders was kind enough to send me a photo of one of the scenic backing paintings:
I left the tool chest in the foreground for scale...the paintings are three stories tall! I'm always down for a trip up to Grand Central so I'll definitely be checking this out.
In doing some research in anticipation of seeing Zodiac sometime this weekend, I came across the following tidbit:
[Zodiac is] believed to be the first full-length studio feature film shot and produced entirely as data from start to finish, with no physical media involved beyond backing up all raw imagery to 500 vaulted LTO data tapes during postproduction.
This sounds wrong to me, but I can't think of what movie might have been both filmed and cut digitally before this one. Do Pixar's animated features count? Surely there's no film involved there. Does Soderbergh shoot & edit his big studio stuff digitally? The Coens edited Intolerable Cruelty digitally with Final Cut Pro but shot it on film. Maybe some of the newer action films...Superman Returns, King Kong, Batman Begins? I know there are some obsessive film-savvy kottke.org readers out there, can you shed any light on this?
Update: According to this feature on Apple's web site, Kerry Conran shot and edited Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow digitally.
One of my favorite actresses is Cate Blanchett, but I don't know much about her. A profile of Blanchett from last week's New Yorker (not online) filled in the blanks nicely:
What Blanchett hides from her directors and her audience she also hides from herself. "I do like to preserve the mystique of the thing, for myself as much as anyone else," she has said. Over the years, she has repeatedly dodged autobiographical questions by claiming, "I've sort of forgotten my childhood." These ellipses in conversation help Blanchett to trick herself out of self-consciousness. "I'm not interested in the character I am in myself," she told James Lipton on the television series "Inside the Actors Studio." "Any connection I have to my characters will be subliminal and subconscious."
Her approach to acting sounds similar to the idea of relaxed concentration in sports, like the practicing of free throw shooting until you can do it automatically without having to focus on shooting and can instead just focus on being focused while shooting. The author of Blanchett's profile, John Lahr, wrote a piece on stage fright for the magazine a few months ago that deals with the same theme. British actor and comedian Stephen Fry describes how he seized up after reading a review of a performance in the Financial Times:
The impact of the review was, Fry says, "phenomenal." He describes the sense of acute self-consciousness and loss of confidence that followed as "stage dread," a sort of "paradigm shift." He says, "It's not 'Look at me - I'm flying.' It's 'Look at me - I might fall.' It would be like playing a game of chess where you're constantly regretting the moves you've already played rather than looking at the ones you're going to play." Fry could not mobilize his defenses; unable to shore himself up, he took himself away.
To me, the battle with the self is one of the most interesting aspects of watching performance, whether it's sports, ballet, live music, movies, or someone giving a talk at a conference.
Morris introduced us to his latest project about the Abu Ghraib, and the iconic images created from the prisoner torture. It's his hypothesis that it's a handful of those photos from that we'll remember a hundred years from now about the Iraq War. He explained that this project began with the mystery of two photos by Roger Fenton described by Susan Sontag in her book, Regarding the Pain of Others. During the Crimean War, Fenton took photos of the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Two are of the same road, one with cannonballs littering the road, one with the cannonballs in the ravine. The Mystery being which photo was taken first, which was staged?
This is an interesting topic for Morris considering he pioneered the use of "expressionistic reenactments" in documentary filmmaking with The Thin Blue Line.
Update: The film is called "S.O.P.: Standard Operating Procedure".
Consider the mall or the urban multiplex. The steady rain of contempt that I heard Hollywood executives direct at the theatres has been amplified, a dozen times over, by friends and strangers alike. The concession stands were wrathfully noted, with their "small" Cokes in which you could drown a rabbit, their candy bars the size of cow patties; add to that the pre-movie purgatory padded out to thirty minutes with ads, coming attractions, public-service announcements, theatre-chain logos, enticements for kitty-kat clubs and Ukrainian bakeries-anything to delay the movie and send you back to the concession stand, where the theatres make forty per cent of their profits. If you go to a thriller, you may sit through coming attractions for five or six action movies, with bodies bursting out of windows and flaming cars flipping through the air-a long stretch of convulsive imagery from what seems like a single terrible movie that you've seen before. At poorly run multiplexes, projector bulbs go dim, the prints develop scratches or turn yellow, the soles of your shoes stick to the floor, people jabber on cell phones, and rumbles and blasts bleed through the walls.
If we want to see something badly enough, we go, of course, and once everyone settles down we can still enjoy ourselves. But we go amid murmurs of discontent, and the discontent will only get louder as the theatre complexes age. Many of them were randomly and cheaply built in response to what George Lucas conclusively demonstrated with "Star Wars," in 1977: that a pop movie heavily advertised on national television could open simultaneously in theatres across the country and attract enormous opening-weekend audiences. As these theatres age, the gold leaf doesn't slowly peel off fluted columns. They rot, like disused industrial spaces. They have become the detritus of what seems, on a bad day, like a dying culture.
Denby also considers what happens to movies when the primary target audience (12-30 year-olds make up 50% of the movie-going population) may prefer to watch movies on DVD, their computers, or on iPods.
No exhibition method is innocent of aesthetic qualities. Platform agnosticism may flourish among kids, but platform neutrality doesn't exist. Fifty years ago, the length of a pop single was influenced by what would fit on a forty-five-r.p.m. seven-inch disk. The length and the episodic structure of the Victorian novel -- Dickens's novels, especially -- were at least partly created by writers and editors working on deadline for monthly periodicals. Television, for a variety of commercial and spatial reasons, developed the single-set or two-set sitcom. Format always affects form, and the exhibition space changes what's exhibited.
As a fan of watching movies on the big screen of a theater, I hope that sort of movie making doesn't go away anytime soon.
Some upcoming and recently released sequels which are released a long time after the previous movie in the series, some real and some imagined:
Sylvester Stallone returns as the 50-something year-old title character in Rocky Balboa to fight the heavyweight champion of the world.
Police Academy 8: To the Moon. Steve Gutenberg leads a merry band of recruits and Bubba Smith to the moon to form the first extraterrestrial police force. Hijinks ensue. Special appearance by Henry Winkler, who jumps a shark on waterskis in the Sea of Tranquility.
ET 2. Henry Thomas needs the work.
Star Trek 12. William Shatner, Ricardo Montalban, and a wormhole. Enough said.
Sir Sean Connery as James Bond in Goldfinger 2. Turns out Oddjob wasn't really dead. He and Bond battle it out after tempers flare and hats are thrown at a Florida condo board meeting. Pussy makes crabcakes for dinner.
Jaws 5. I think the shark talks this time.
Rambo IV: Pearl of the Cobra. Stallone has run out of material.
Marty travels forward in time to bring embryonic stem cells back to the present in Back to the Future Part IV.
Harrison Ford is set to star in Indiana Jones 4, slated to be released almost 20 years after the last installment of the film. Ford will be 65 years old at the time of the filming. Not sure how many swashes he'll be buckling in the this one.
Star Wars: Episode 7. Han, Leia, and their high school-aged kids are ensconced in a Tatooine suburb (Chewy lives in the garage, R2 & 3PO in a little love-nest down the street) while Luke scours the galaxy for little kids with high midichlorian counts. Seventy-year-old Billy Dee Williams will appear as Lando Calrissian.
Clerks 2. Randal and Dante work through a midlife crisis for minimum wage while Jay and Silent Bob kick their habit.
Sharon Stone is still sexy and irritating at 47 in Basic Instinct 2.
Beverly Hills Cop IV. Axel does paperwork at his desk all day. Eddie Murphy does double duty by playing a elderly, sassy, obese black woman.
Karate Kid IV. Sadly, Pat Morita is unable to reprise his role as Mr. Miyagi and a 45-yo Ralph Macchio unconvincingly plays college sophomore Daniel LaRusso. Academy Award nominee William Zabka directs.
Bill & Ted's Straightforward Trip to Home Depot. Station!
Breakin' 3: Electric Boogaloo 2.
Disco is Dead. John Travolta runs a wrecking company that is contracted to tear down the very Brooklyn discotheque he danced in as a youth. Intense self-examination of his current path in life follows.
Ei8ht. Gwyneth's character having been dispatched in the first film, Pitt is free to bring Angelina into this one as wife #2. This time, murders are committed where the first names of the victims match those of the children on the Eight Is Enough television program. I don't want to ruin it for you, but Dick Van Patten's head might end up in a box.
In P.T. Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love, Adam Sandler's character takes advantage of a Healthy Choice promotion for frequent flier miles, buying 1000s of miles and lots of pudding for just a few dollars. This aspect of Sandler's character was based on a caper well-known within the frequent flier community when David Phillips purchased over 1.2 million frequent flyer miles for just under $2400, which has allowed him and his family to fly to over 20 countries for free.
Now the big thing is cheese. This weekend I was handed an opened wheel of processed cheeses by a friend. He said that his brother-in-law had caught wind of a frequent flyer promotion whereby you get 500 miles for each purchase of this cheese wheel and had purchased 75,000 miles for ~$300, which also means he's got more opened cheese wheels than he knows what to do with. The frequent flyer forums and blogs are already on the case. These forums are actually pretty fascinating...there's a lot of free/cheap travel to be had for those with a little time on their hands. This fellow claims to have taken advantage of airline pricing errors to fly 16 flights this year for a total cost of $77.57. (Digg this?)
The recent New Yorker piece on Will Wright is a thorough profile of the game designer, but also functions as a bibliography of sorts for the games he's created over the past 20 years. Bibliographies are something normally reserved for books, but Wright draws much of the inspiration for his games from articles, books, papers, and other games that a list of further reading/playing in the instruction booklet for SimCity wouldn't feel out of place. Because I like utilizing bibliographies -- they allow you to get into the head of an author and see how they sampled & remixed the original ideas to create something new -- I've created one for Will Wright. Sources are grouped by game; general influences are listed seperately.
Montessori school. "It's all about learning on your terms, rather than a teacher explaining stuff to you. SimCity comes right out of Montessori -- if you give people this model for building cities, they will abstract from it principles of urban design."
Urban Dynamics - Jay Wright Forrester. "This study of urban dynamics was undertaken principally because of discoveries made in modeling the growth process of corporations. It has become clear that complex systems are counterintuitive. That is, they give indications that suggest corrective action which will often be ineffective or even adverse in its results. Very often one finds that the policies that have been adopted for correcting a difficulty are actually intensifying it rather than producing a solution."
The Sims A Pattern Language - Christopher Alexander. "By understanding recurrent design problems in our environment, readers can identify extant patterns in their own design projects and use these patterns to create a language of their own. Extraordinarily thorough, coherent, and accessible, this book has become a bible for homebuilders, contractors, and developers who care about creating healthy, high-level design."
Other Sim Games Gaia hypothesis - James Lovelock. "The Gaia hypothesis is an ecological theory that proposes that the living matter of planet Earth functions like a single organism."
The Ants - E.O. Wilson. "This is the definitive scientific study of one of the most diverse animal groups on earth; pretty well everything that is known about ants is in this massive work."
Spore Powers of Ten - Charles and Ray Eames. "The film starts on a picnic blanket in Chicago and zooms out 10x every 10 seconds until the entire universe (more or less) is visible. And then they zoom all the way back down into the nucleus of an atom. A timeless classic."
Drake Equation - Frank Drake. "Dr. Frank Drake conceived a means to mathematically estimate the number of worlds that might harbor beings with technology sufficient to communicate across the vast gulfs of interstellar space."
SETI. "The mission of the SETI Institute is to explore, understand and explain the origin, nature and prevalence of life in the universe."
Panspermia - Freeman Dyson. "This approach was directly inspired by Freeman Dyson's notion of Panspermia - the idea that life on earth may have been seeded via meteors carrying microscopic "spores" of life from other planets. (Dyson's concept is also the origin of the game's title.)"
The Life of the Cosmos - Lee Smolin. "[Smolin's] theory of cosmic evolution by the natural selection of black-hole universes makes what we can experience into an infinitesimal, yet crucial, part of an ever-larger whole."
The Anthropic Cosmological Principle - John Barrow, Frank Tipler, and John Wheeler. "Is there any connection between the vastness of the universes of stars and galaxies and the existence of life on a small planet out in the suburbs of the Milky Way?"
The demoscene. "The demoscene was originally limited by the hardware and storage capabilities of their target machines (16/32 bit micros such as the Atari and the Amiga ran on floppy disks), they developed intricate algorithms to produce large amounts of content from very little initial data."
General influences PanzerBlitz - Avalon Hill. "PanzerBlitz is a tactical-scale board wargame of tank, artillery, and infantry combat set in the Eastern Front of the Second World War."
Super Mario Bros. - Shigeru Miyamoto. "[SMB] encouraged exploration for its own sake; in this regard, it was less like a competitive game than a 'software toy' -- a concept that influenced Will Wright's notion of possibility space. 'The breadth and the scope of the game really blew me away,' Wright told me. 'It was made out of these simple elements, and it worked according to simple rules, but it added up to this very complex design."
Go. "[Go] is a strategic, zero-sum, deterministic board game of perfect information."
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
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.
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)
I made it! I can't believe I did, but I hung in there, bucked the odds, gave 110%, and totally did it. From the blog post that kicked this whole crazy thing off to the premiere of the film this past weekend, I didn't mention Snakes on a Plane a single time on this site. Neither did I make any ________ on a ________ jokes, see the movie on opening weekend, nor comment on any other site about it.
How did I achieve such a high level of cultural snobbery? It wasn't easy, friends. Not reading MetaFilter helped certainly, as did looking down on reality television and those who watch it. I practiced conversational calisthenics in the mirror every night before bed: "Was that in the New Yorker or The Economist? Oh, I'm sorry, I don't read People."
In commemoration of this achievement, I've made celebratory badges to place proudly on the site (in regular and without swearing variations):
Feel free to display this badge on your web site if you also successfully avoided Snakes on a Plane. (Copy the images to your own server, please.) To those that succumbed to the temptation, fear not...the official web site has plenty of posters, wallpapers, audio clips, videos, IM icons, and screensavers for you to download.
Thanks to the glories of YouTube, you can now watch Kaj Pindal's Oscar-nominated short film, What On Earth!:
[Update: For reasons unknown, the video has been removed from YouTube. Nuts.]
Made in 1966 under the auspices of the National Film Board of Canada, the animated film records a visit by Martians to Earth and their observations about the planet's dominant life form, the automobile.
Some sweet soul has put Powers of Ten online. If you've never seen it, I can't recommend it enough:
Powers of Ten is a short film by Charles and Ray Eames, whose work you may have previously sat in. The film starts on a picnic blanket in Chicago and zooms out 10x every 10 seconds until the entire universe (more or less) is visible. And then they zoom all the way back down into the nucleus of an atom. A timeless classic. (via youngna)
Headline writers everywhere are rejoicing the impending release of Pixar's new movie, Cars. As with Apple's release of their Tiger operating system, Cars comes loaded with so many opportunities for puns and metaphors that the media just can't help themselves. A sampling of puntacular fun so far:
With 'Cars,' Pixar Revs Up to Outpace Walt Disney Himself (NY Times)
NASCAR, Hollywood share the fast lane (USA Today)
'Cars' Voices Toot Their Horns (Zap2it.com)
A toon-up for Petty (Orlando Sentinel)
With 'Cars', Paul Newman stays in the race (Malaysia Star)
Newman's need for speed (Toronto Sun)
Cars: Cruising along in Weirdsville, Cartoonland (NY Times)
Cars' Riding on Flat Tires (OhMyNews International)
Shifting gear (The Age)
Pixar's Cars stalls with reviewers (Guardian Unlimited)
"Cars" is one sweet ride (Hollywood Reporter)
Cars rolls along like an animated version of Doc Hollywood (Canada.com)
'Cars' an auto-matic hit (Tucson Citizen)
Great-looking 'Cars' stuck in cruise control (goTriad.com)
'Cars' revs up marketing campaign (Inside Bay Area)
Disney/Pixar revvs up its latest cash cow (Monterey Herald)
Finely drawn characters drive 'Cars' and its director (St. Paul Pioneer Press)
'Cars' wins the race hands down for summer's best film (Press & Sun Bulletin)
Kickin' the Tires (East Bay Express)
Star vehicle veers a bit (St. Petersburg Times)
Pixar's 'Cars' falls a little short of winner's circle (SouthCoastToday.com)
'Cars' just can't get it out of first (Statesman Journal)
'Cars' will take you straight to the dump (Scripps Howard)
Running on Fumes (Village Voice)
Headlines courtesy of Google News. If the movie were getting mostly bad reviews, one could imagine headlines like "Cars a lemon", "New Disney movie is the pits", and "Reviewers to Pixar: Your new film is car-rappy".
Clearly, she's selling grapes from a certain valley. Creeeepy.
I love the idea of Uncanny Valley being an actual geographical location (situated in California, I would assume) inhabited by creepy video game characters, digitized actors, and retooled advertising icons.
Imagine the views from neighboring hillsides! (Image courtesy of Google Earth.)
One of the films premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival is The Bridge, a documentary by Eric Steel about suicide and the Golden Gate Bridge. The trailer is available on the festival site but be warned that it contains actual footage of people climbing over the railing of the bridge to commit suicide.
The Bridge was inspired by a 2003 New Yorker story by Tad Friend called Jumpers, a piece about suicide and the bridge. The subject of suicide is often not discussed in the media. Self-inflicted deaths aren't usually reported in the newspapers or on TV. Suicide prevention activists caution against suicide contagion due to media exposure of individual suicides leading to copycat deaths.
But that's just the start of the controversy surrounding the film. In order to secure a permit to shoot the Golden Gate (which he did for the entirety of 2004, amassing almost 10,000 hours of footage), Steel said he was shooting footage to capture "the powerful, spectacular intersection of monument and nature that takes place every day at the Golden Gate Bridge". He says he lied to discourage people to seek out his cameras to immortalize their deaths on film, but it's also true that Golden Gate National Recreation Area officials certainly wouldn't have given him a permit to film suicides.
Steel interviewed family members of the jumpers without disclosing that he'd filmed the death of their loved ones (again to avoid publicity for the filming and the death immortalization problem). Some family members felt manipulated by the omission when they learned of it.
Then there's the matter of the filming itself. The film crew's basic job description was to wait for people to die...they needed people to die for their film. If there's no good footage of people jumping, there's no film. Without too much trouble, you can imagine Steel instructing his crew to shoot the next one at a wider angle, the crew refining their techniques for catching the jumpers on film, and the mixture of excitement, dread, and the satisfaction of a job well done when they catch a jumper on film. But the crew was also trained in suicide prevention and intervened in several attempts. And listening to Steel talk about the film, it obviously wasn't meant to be Faces of Death Part XII.
...they [are] the movies you just kind of figure everybody ought to have seen in order to have any sort of informed discussion about movies. They're the common cultural currency of our time, the basic cinematic texts that everyone should know, at minimum, to be somewhat "movie-literate."
I've reproduced Emerson's list here and marked with an asterisk those that I've seen.
* 2001: A Space Odyssey
* The 400 Blows
8 1/2
Aguirre, the Wrath of God
* Alien
All About Eve
* Annie Hall
* Apocalypse Now
* Bambi
The Battleship Potemkin
The Best Years of Our Lives
The Big Red One
The Bicycle Thief
The Big Sleep
* Blade Runner
Blowup
* Blue Velvet
Bonnie and Clyde
Breathless
Bringing Up Baby
Carrie
* Casablanca
Un Chien Andalou
Children of Paradise / Les Enfants du Paradis
* Chinatown
* Citizen Kane
* A Clockwork Orange
* The Crying Game
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Days of Heaven
* Dirty Harry
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
* Do the Right Thing
La Dolce Vita
Double Indemnity
* Dr. Strangelove
Duck Soup
* E.T. -- The Extra-Terrestrial
Easy Rider
* The Empire Strikes Back
The Exorcist
* Fargo
* Fight Club
Frankenstein
The General
* The Godfather, The Godfather, Part II
* Gone With the Wind
* GoodFellas
* The Graduate
Halloween
* A Hard Day's Night
Intolerance
It's a Gift
* It's a Wonderful Life
Jaws
The Lady Eve
Lawrence of Arabia
M
Mad Max 2 / The Road Warrior
The Maltese Falcon
* The Manchurian Candidate
Metropolis
Modern Times
* Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Nashville
The Night of the Hunter
Night of the Living Dead
* North by Northwest
* Nosferatu
* On the Waterfront
Once Upon a Time in the West
Out of the Past
Persona
Pink Flamingos
Psycho
* Pulp Fiction
Rashomon
* Rear Window
Rebel Without a Cause
Red River
Repulsion
The Rules of the Game
* Scarface
The Scarlet Empress
* Schindler's List
The Searchers
* The Seven Samurai
Singin' in the Rain
Some Like It Hot
A Star Is Born
A Streetcar Named Desire
Sunset Boulevard
* Taxi Driver
The Third Man
Tokyo Story
* Touch of Evil
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Trouble in Paradise
Vertigo
* West Side Story
The Wild Bunch
* The Wizard of Oz
That's 40 out of 102. My pre-1970 movie knowledge is just plain pathetic, but I've seen all six movies on the list made since 1990 (and 5 out of 7 of the 80s movies). And I think I've seen Bambi (when I was a kid), but I marked it as seen even though I'm not completely sure. As for what's missing from the list, I'm not even going to go there given my poor showing. There are some hardcore movie fans reading this...anyone seen them all?
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?
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.
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?
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
A few days ago, I reviewed March of the Penguins, a well-regarded documentary film that's doing quite well here in the US (despite being a well-regarded documentary film):
Like many sleeper hits, there's something quite unHollywood about it; it wasn't manufactured to push specific demographic buttons or market tested to within an inch of its life. It's handmade, crafted, and full of soul.
Turns out the film is not quite so unmanufactured as I thought. The original film (en français) features voiceovers for each of the main family characters (dad, mom, baby boy) and some French pop songs. The effect is quite cheesy at times, particularly during the singing of the love songs. I wish I had a video clip for you watch...I've seen bits and pieces of the French version and can vouch for Joe Leydon's take on the film:
Once he focuses on the primary couple, however, Jacquet uncorks the schmaltz while employing actors Romance Bohringer and Charles Berling to voice penguins murmuring sweet nothings to each other. It's easy to understand helmer's desire to personalize the birds with anthropomorphic affectation. But it's difficult not to laugh out loud as nuzzling penguins pledge their troth as each other's "soul mate."
Warner Bros. president Mark Gill saw the film at Sundance, called writer-director Jordan Roberts and asked if something could be done to make it more appealing to American audiences. Jordan wrote a narration, performed by Morgan Freeman, and hired composer Alex Wurman to create a new score. The final result is showing in close to 2,000 theatres across America.
The narration by Morgan Freeman is not a close translation of the original French voiceovers and I think it's a better film that way (for a US audience, at least). It also explains the odd pacing of Freeman's narration at times. Anyway, as I said above, not quite the clear expression of artistic vision as I'd assumed.
When estimating losses due to piracy in the media, movie studios are fond of using the full purchase price of the pirated DVD or movie ticket. So if I download a copy of Bewitched off of the internet, Sony (and associated companies, the theater, distributors, etc.) feels like they've lost $10.50[1], even if I had no plans to ever see the movie in the theatre.
So why is it when Sony defrauds their customers by fabricating movie reviews to promote the theatrical releases of some of their films, they're only refunding $5 of the total ticket price for those that actually saw those films? Why not the full price? Or better yet, how about a refund for transportation costs, the price of any concessions purchased, estimated loss of wages for time spent watching the film, and compensation for any emotional trauma suffered as a result of thinking the movie was going to be great when it in fact sucked? That sounds about fair.
[1] Well, $10.50 if you live in Manhattan. If you live in rural Wisconsin, you're only cheating Sony out of $8.00 or so. Well, until the movie comes out on pay-per-view and it costs $3.95. But then when the DVD comes out, Sony's loss will shoot back to $26.99. Twelve months after the DVD release, when Bewitched is available in a value two-pack with Anchorman, Sony will only be losing $6. Whew, must be hard to keep all those losses straight.
In the past 5 years, I've probably been to a theater an average of once every two weeks to see a movie. Even though it costs a small fortune, I almost always get a soda and popcorn (topped with "butter"[1]) to go with the show. Many of the larger chains offer a deal if you purchase a large popcorn and a large drink together. This "Super Combo" costs a lot less than ordering a L popcorn and a L soda separately from the menu but often it will actually cost you less than a L popcorn/M soda, M popcorn/L soda, or even a M popcorn/M soda (?!??). Why such a steep discount when the theaters make so much of their money on concessions? I've developed a few theories over the years but would like to hear your thoughts before sharing them.
[1] The proper way to butter movie popcorn is to fill the bag half full, apply butter, fill the rest of the bag and apply more butter. This results in fairly even application of butter to kernel throughout the bag. Due to a lack of focus on service and an increasing number of theaters moving to DIY butter application, it's getting more and more difficult to buy a good bag of buttered popcorn at the movies.
Now Google, whose name has become synonymous with internet searching, plans to build a database that will compare the track record and credibility of all news sources around the world, and adjust the ranking of any search results accordingly.
The database will be built by continually monitoring the number of stories from all news sources, along with average story length, number with bylines, and number of the bureaux cited, along with how long they have been in business. Google's database will also keep track of the number of staff a news source employs, the volume of internet traffic to its website and the number of countries accessing the site.
Google will take all these parameters, weight them according to formulae it is constructing, and distil them down to create a single value. This number will then be used to rank the results of any news search.
This overall score, or METASCORE, is a weighted average of the individual critic scores. Why a weighted average? When selecting our source publications, we noticed that some critics consistently write better (more detailed, more insightful, more articulate) reviews than others. In addition, some critics and/or publications typically have more prestige and weight in the industry than others. To reflect these factors, we have assigned weights to each publication (and, in the case of film, to individual critics as well), thus making some publications count more in the METASCORE calculations than others.
I wonder if these systems will eventually let their users tweak the credibility algorithms to their liking. For instance, it won't take long for conservatives to start complaining about the liberal bias of Google News. In the case of Metacritic, I'd like them to ignore Anthony Lane's rating when he writes about summer blockbusters and put greater emphasis on whatever Ebert has to say. In the meantime, I'm readying my patent applications for RecipeRank, PhotoRank, ModernFurnitureRank, SoftDrinkRank, and, oooh, PatentRank. I'm sure they're brilliantly unique enough to be recognized by the US Patent Office as new inventions.
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.
Reader peter vanDerbeek has gone above and beyond the call of duty, producing a 2005 summer movie calendar (in iCal format) from the entire NY Times listing with details about each film, and links to the full NY Times review and movie trailer on apple.com (if available). If you're a movie fan and have calendaring software that supports the iCal format, this is a great resource. If your calendar can't import iCal files, you can still view this calendar on the web in HTML format. Thanks, peter!
After seeing this calendar of summer movie openings in the NY Times this weekend, I put all the movies that I was interested in seeing into a calendar in iCal. If someone wants to go through the rest of the list and add them to the calendar, I would be happy to host and/or link to the finished file.
Update: I corrected the link to the iCal file. Typos again! Argh!!!
Update #2: Relatedly, Apple has a movie releases calendar that you can subscribe to that goes about a month out. Bit weird that each movie isn't a separate item, but still useful. Thx, Tim.
I always feel a bit stupid when I purchase a movie on DVD. With networks getting faster and hard drives & flash memory prices dropping, it's only a matter of time until a gigantic catalog of movies is available online or on USB keys sent back and forth in the mail like Netflix rentals. Things are moving in this direction already: Sony wants to create an online movie service like the iTunes Music Store and a huge amount of movies are already available online on Usenet, BitTorrent, and various P2P networks. The upshot is that all those movies I have -- because the technology companies and the media companies are making it so I can't make copies of my movies to move them from the DVDs to whatever the hell device I'm going to play my movies on in the future -- I'm going to end up purchasing them all again (or worse, renting them each time I want to watch them...movie and music ownership may soon be a thing of the past if the media companies have anything to say about it). Which is great if you're a big media company but makes me, like I said before, feel a bit stupid when buying DVDs.
Once every three years, the first trailer for yet another crappy George Lucas Star Wars movie is released somewhere to great fanfare. And each time, I watch said trailer and get all excited. It looks great, I'll say. Maybe it'll actually be good. My hopes start to rise. And then the movie comes out, Natalie Portman is transformed by Lucas' awful direction into the worst actress ever, and I leave the theatre disappointed that a cherished childhood institution has been handled in such a piss-poor manner. With the impending release of Episode III and the trailer during last night's episode of The OC, I have vowed not to get my hopes up. Never again, George Lucas, will you disappoint me.
However.
OMFG THE TRAILER FOR THE NEW STAR WARS MOVIE IS SOOO GREAT AND EXCITING AND THIS MOVIE IS GOING TO KICK SO MUCH ASS!!!
First the Kelly Clarkson thing and now this...I don't know what's going on here. I promise there's an interesting scientific explanation for all this. I'll write about it soon, honest. Malcolm, Steven, James, can you help me out here? Something about the Blinking Long Tail of a Mind Wide Open Tipping Point Wisdom of Crowds of a Nonzero Moral Animal visiting the Cathedral and the Bazaar on the Cluetrain Freakonomics Selfish Gene Emergence. Lollipop. hopscotch.
peenut butr samwitches,,,
Daisy, Daisy, give me your answerrrr ddddooooooooo..... Iiiiimmmm hhhhhaaaaallffffff craaaaaaa....
[Sorry about that. Jason's been sent off to Austin for repairs. He'll be back in a few days, right as rain. -ed [ps. STAR WARS FOREVER!!!! -ed]]
Every year around this time, my thoughts turn to Wes Anderson and Futura. As noted elsewhere, Mr. Anderson is consistent in his use of Futura (bold) in his films. The supporting materials for The Life Aquatic (which opens here in NYC on Dec 10) continue the Futura trend, with the font appearing in the trailers and on posters. (A little Helvetica -- or worse, Arial -- has somehow crept onto this new poster, probably slapped on there by some intern when Someone Important noticed that Bill Murray's name wasn't on there.) What I've never been able to find an answer to, Wes, is why the Futura? This Typophile thread (kind of) suggests that David Wasco, Anderson's production designer on Tenenbaums, may have had something to do with it. Or is it a shout-out to Stanley Kubrick, who was partial to Futura Extra Bold? Does anyone know?
Just because the market has shifted so dramatically. A lot of people are getting very worried about piracy. That has really eaten dramatically into the sales. It really just came down to, there may not be a market when I wanted to bring it out, which was like, three years from now. So rather than just sit by and watch the whole thing fall apart, better to bring it out early and get it over with.
In the words of a famous sports announcer, let's go the videotape. The Web site for the DVD Entertainment Group (their BOD is stocked with bigwigs from the large entertainment and electronics companies) states that "DVD [is] the fastest adopted consumer electronics product ever". There have been literally thousands of news articles written about the explosive growth of DVD sales; here are some quotes from an article on the CBS News Web site (from 10/2003):
Home video sales now account for nearly 60 percent of Hollywood's revenue. DVD sales are not only the fastest growing part of the movie business, they're changing the way Hollywood does business.
He says DVD sales can save a film like "Dark Blue," which pulled in a modest $9 million in theaters. "It actually did more revenues in DVD than it did at the box office," says McGurk, because the DVD market is a man's world.
Blockbuster films now often sell more than 10 million DVDs in the U.S. alone. And that's at $20 a pop. And with DVD players still in only half of American homes, Hollywood believes those soaring sales will just get hotter still.
Finding Nemo grossed $320 million from DVD sales in 2003. "Consumers spend more money on the DVD version of almost every movie than they do on that same movie in theaters, including blockbusters such as The Lord of the Rings, Finding Nemo and Pirates of the Caribbean" (USA Today). CNN/Money reports that the movie studios "pocket roughly 80 cents of every dollar on each DVD sold, a take well above the 50 cents for each dollar at the box office" and The Hollywood Reporter says that "studios are earning about 60% more upon initial release from video sales of theatrical feature films than they did during the VHS-only era". So, not only are video sales up overall, DVDs are more profitable for the media companies than VHS or the box office.
We project filmed entertainment spending in the United States, EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa), Asia/Pacific, Latin America, and Canada will rise at a 7.5 percent compound annual rate, reaching $108 billion in 2008 from $75.3 billion in 2003. EMEA will be the fastest-growing region, rising by 10.3 percent compounded annually to $36.9 billion in 2008 compared with $22.6 billion in 2003. The U.S. market will expand at a 6.3 percent rate, from $34.3 billion in 2003 to $46.6 billion in 2008. Spending in Asia/Pacific will increase from $13.3 billion to $17.3 billion in the five-year period, growing at a 5.4 percent compound annual rate. Filmed entertainment in Latin America will total $1.6 billion in 2008, up from $1.3 billion in 2003, representing a 4.6 percent gain compounded annually. Spending in Canada will rise from $3.9 billion in 2003 to $5.6 billion in 2008, 7.7 percent compounded annually.
This is anything but piracy "dramatically" eating into sales. Mr. Lucas, would you like to change your answer?
** The same report also says that "piracy will cut into spending, particularly on rental, with the most pronounced impact in Asia/Pacific and Latin America, although all regions will be affected", but there is no evidence given. In fact, in all the articles I read, piracy was handled in a very hand-waving fashion with no numbers or evidence to back up claims.
When there's a 40-foot tall robot in Times Square, even the most jaded New Yorkers gawk up at it like tourists. It was next to the Good Morning America studios; I think it's a promotion for the movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.
Teen Wolf vs. The Godfather
Terminator vs. Spiderman
Cujo vs. Annie
Gladiator vs. Amadeus
Dirty Harry vs. Mrs. Doubtfire
Popeye vs. Anchorman
Annie Hall vs. Donnie Darko
The Wizard of Oz vs. The Man who Wasn't There
Gandhi vs. Tootsie
Nixon vs. All the President's Men
Henry V vs. Lawrence of Arabia
Forrest Gump vs. Rain Man
Rambo vs. Rocky
Kramer vs. Kramer vs. The Princess Bride
Happy Gilmore vs. 12 Angry Men
Unbeknowst to me, Matthew Baldwin covered similar ground a few days ago with his Cinematic Supervillain Showdown. kottke.org: I may not get there first, but I get there eventually.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban topped the American box office this past weekend, but fell off 63% from its opening weekend gross of $93.6 million. Studios usually aim for less than a 50% drop weekend-to-weekend, so that was obviously disappointing news for Warner Bros. The odd thing is that from the outside, Potter looked poised to do well after opening weekend. Critical response was positive (Azkaban was a much better movie than either of the first two films), word of mouth was good (I liked it more than the first two and everyone I talked to enjoyed it), and it was up against no major new movies this weekend (Chronicles of Riddick didn't open well at all...although Garfield and Stepford Wives did better than I expected).
So what gives? Is the movie too adult? Is it getting bad word of mouth among the tween/teen crowd? Has Hollywood well and truly shot itself in the foot in emphasizing the opening weekend of their blockbuster movies at the possible expense of post-opening returns? (But Shrek is still doing really well...) Instead of seeing the movie again in the theatre, are net-savvy teens downloading the movie from the Internet for a second viewing? Did the diversity of new offerings (Garfield, Stepford, Riddick, continuing strong performance by Shrek, wider opening for Saved!) not leave any audience for Potter? Are people losing interest in Harry Potter in general?
Unfortunately, the media outlets that cover the movie business (many of which are owned by companies that make/produce/distribute movies) tend, for whatever reason, not to ask or answer any of these questions. Which is understandable, I guess. Not as many people are interested in the economics of movies as in multi-millionaires throwing pajama parties on jumbo jets.
In law, the corporation is a "person". But what kind of person is it?
Unsurprisingly, a corporation doesn't make for a very well-adjusted individual (emphasis mine):
Considering the odd legal fiction that deems a corporation a "person" in the eyes of the law, the feature documentary employees a checklist, based on actual diagnostic criteria of the World Health Organization and DSM IV, the standard tool of psychiatrists and psychologists. What emerges is a disturbing diagnosis.
Self-interested, amoral, callous and deceitful, a corporation's operational principles make it anti-social. It breaches social and legal standards to get its way even while it mimics the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism. It suffers no guilt. Diagnosis: the institutional embodiment of laissez-faire capitalism fully meets the diagnostic criteria of a psychopath.
I don't think all companies are like this, but it certainly is an interesting idea to explore. In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins asserts that the larger organism exists in order to propagate the genes and not the other way around as we, the organism, had always assumed. In the same way, corporations have traditionally thought of themselves as the most important entities in the economic ecosystem, but it might be more healthy for society in general to think of them as the organisms that ultimately benefit the humans that comprise them (humans = the genes in the corporation organism).
A business develops an identity by providing a product or a service to people. To do that it needs capital, and it needs to make a profit, but no more than it needs to have competent employees or customers or any other thing that enables production to take place. None of this is the goal of the activity.
The first mention of the sequence GATTACA in the human genome is 14109 characters in. It will be several decades before science is able to explain why I spent 20 minutes tracking that down.
The guy in front of me on the train is a writer of some sort. Peering over his shoulder at his laptop screen, I can see he's writing the synopsis of a novel. Or a screenplay. He's looking at screenplays (Big Fish, The Last Samurai) for reference or ideas or something. Anyway, it appears as though he's not making much progress, his laptop sits open on the tray while he reads the newspaper.
Then a burst of energy. Inspiration. The man flicks Ctrl-N in Word, a blank page. A new story called The Glimpse. He writes:
Man on a train. A fast one. The Acela from New York to Boston.
It's a really unattractive sight to see an actor or actress who really wants an Oscar. And you often see it on the show, you see their faces and the desperation is so ugly.
Desperation is not a quality I long for. I'm over the Oscar. Sometimes people win it and you think, "This can't be true." It's a little bit of a popularity contest, too.
Sometimes it's right, but it's wrong just as often, so I don't care. I'd rather make movies that lots of people saw and liked. I'm happy with the results.
At the theater the other day, I saw a trailer for a movie called The Day After Tomorrow. The trailer doesn't give any of the plot away, but the movie is about the aftermath of global warming, basically an audiovisual depiction of the direst of effects of massive global climate changes. A flooded-and-then-frozen NYC seems to be one of the featured locations, as does a tornado-ravaged LA. I have a soft spot for this genre of movie (I don't know that the genre has a name...it's part sci-fi, part disaster flick, but not really entirely either). Take all of humanity, add a global catastrophe/event of some sort (the event doesn't have to be negative, just global), and see what happens.
Unfortunately for me, movies of this type are rarely done well. Off the top of my head, the only good representative film I can think of is Dr. Strangelove (ooh, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind). The not-so-good ones are easy to name: Independence Day, Godzilla, Armageddon, Deep Impact, The Core, etc. etc. It looks like The Day After Tomorrow will also be of the not-so-good variety. Schlockmeister Roland Emmerich is writing and directing, the guy behind such films as The Patriot and Stargate as well as the aforementioned Godzilla and Independence Day. I've (unfortunately) seen all of those movies and I haven't groaned that much since....well, you know.
I wish I were Sofia Coppola. Then I could say, hey, Air, why don't you, like, record a song for the soundtrack of my new movie, Lost in Translation? And then they would and the song would be great and I would play it on my iPod again and again, so much so that it would become my #1 most played song in a single day. That would be cool. Fo shizzle.
In reviewing S.W.A.T., Yahoo! member rufffryder22 blasts the movie critics who've given the film some not-so-good marks:
Let me start by criticizing the critics! They are an assorted bunch of failed writers or something who probably said the original Terminator sucked because it was too shallow and gave you only bang for your bucks....and look how popular Terminator is today! Dont believe these guys because these are the sort who would probably give a completely USELESS sleeper of a movie like Titanic(which had nothing to do with the REAL titanic sotry by the way)an A rating and yet find it hard to do so for an entertaining, action packed yarn.
I for one dont want REALITY per-se in my movies...I can get that outside in the real world. I have always gone to the movies to be entertained, to forget the world outside and hopefully always have the good guys win...THATS entertainment for me and if others have different opinions, fine.
Clint eastwood's spaghetti western's , bruce lee's first movies all had this same kind of crap written about them, which leads me to believe that its always been only probably boring old or middle aged white guys (who couldnt enjoy a movie unless it had sean connery and classical music in it or something) write these *****ty reviews.
With all the spelling mistakes, sketchy grammar and poor argument, it's easy to make fun of rufffryder22's review and side with the critics in saying Hollywood is producing a lot of crap these days. But the truth is Hollywood knows their audience very well (a cynic might say, "they should know their audience well, they created it," and that's probably true) and rufffryder22 represents a significant chunk of it. He's unknowingly quoting from slide #1 of the Hollywood Movie Producer's Powerpoint presentation:
Attributes of a Successful Blockbuster Movie
1. Entertaining
2. Make people forget the outside world
3. Always have the good guys win
When your audience is parroting your prime directive back at you without any prompting, you know you're doing something right.
Back on May 15th, I wrote a 221-word entry on my first impression of The Matrix Reloaded. At last count (mid-afternoonish on June 17th), people have left 700 comments in the thread attached to that entry (7 of which are mine). Those 700 comments comprise a total of ~125,000 words (~180 per entry); that's about 3.3 150-page books. The HTML file is in excess of 1.3 MB in size, has been viewed about 5000 times in the past two weeks (during which about half of the comments were left), and is responsible, all by itself, for 5.3 gigabytes of data transferred from kottke.org this month.
In comparison to the rest of kottke.org (just a few more stats here), the most comments on previous thread was just over 200 (a Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon thread that is no longer online), there are around 3500 comments that have been left on the site in dozens of threads, and over the past 5 years, I have posted around 2500 entries to kottke.org, 27 of them since the Matrix post. My total bandwidth usage for June thus far is about 14.6 GB.
In short, the Matrix thread is unexpectedly large, and depending on how you look at it, is anywhere from 10% to 36% of my entire site, and significantly more than 50% of the total output since May 15th. If you were to look at all the content of the site in the aggregate, you might come to the conclusion that kottke.org is a Matrix Reloaded-related site even though it's been chugging along Reloaded-free for more than 5 years.
Given that the thread is still active (25 posts today alone), how do I deal with it going forward? I haven't read any of the conversation since around comment #200, and if it hits 1000 comments (which, 2 weeks ago seemed unlikely but now seems inevitable), the file approaches 2 MB in size, and sucks up 15 GB of bandwidth a month, it seems prudent for me to close the thread.
On the other hand, it continues to be valuable as a forum for a small number of participants and a larger number of readers...and from what I can tell, is a relatively high-quality conversation. Who am I to shut down a conversation that I'm not involved in? This may be my site, but the participants own the conversation. As much as it makes sense to shut it down, I'm inclined to let the participants go as long as they want. Who knows, maybe they'll even let me know when they're done.
Finding Nemo** opens today (and it's getting great reviews) but I'm already looking forward to Pixar's next movie, The Incredibles. The man in charge of the film is Brad Bird, Simpsons alum and director/writer of The Iron Giant, one of my favorite movies of the past few years and probably the most underrated children's film ever. More on The Incredibles:
This is the sixth film from Steve Job's production company Pixar, which has also produced Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Toy Story 2, and Monsters, Inc. The film, which is about a family of superheroes, is completely CGI and the distributor is Pixar's partner Walt Disney Pictures. Like the Fantastic Four, the film explores the dysfunctional family situations that can result from constantly having to save the world. During the concept stage, the title for this film started out as The Incredibles, then changed to The Invincibles, before finally changing back to The Incredibles. The picture is the brainchild of masterful storyteller Brad Bird, the director of the critically acclaimed animated film Iron Giant, which had mixed results at the box office. Many blamed the distributor of that film, Warner Bros., for poor marketing, and soon after in early 2000 Bird moved on to Pixar.
** We got a new server today at work and the guy setting it up named it "Nemo". When he was testing it over the network later in the day, he got an error message that said, "Cannot find Nemo".
Guest's latest mockumentary is probably the strongest film of the bunch that includes Best in Show, This is Spinal Tap, and Waiting for Guffman. A Mighty Wind tells the tale of a folk singers reunion show and is funny, genuinely touching in parts (the Mitch and Mickey storyline), and features some great original music (and I'm not a big folk music fan). However, Guest's mockumentary format is beginning to wear a little thin for me; I would have liked it a lot more had I not seen the others first.
