Best movie posters of 2011

From MUBI notebook, a selection of great movies posters from 2011, including Chris Ware's lovely one for Uncle Boonmee.

(via dooce)

Koyaanisqatsi in five minutes

Wyatt Hodgson took Koyaanisqatsi and sped it up 1552% so you can watch the whole movie in about five minutes.

Reggio uses time lapse in the film to great effect -- you notice different things at different playback speeds -- and Hodgson's clever use of the same technique reveals the overall structure of the film much more than watching it in realtime...but the emotion of the film is completely removed. (via the candler blog)

An escapes and heists film festival

BLDGBLOG is running a distributed film festival called Breaking Out and Breaking In that will explore the architecture of escapes and break-ins in movies.

Breaking Out and Breaking In is an exploration of the use and misuse of space in escapes and heists, where architecture is the obstacle between you and what you're looking for.

Watch the films at home-or anywhere you may be-and then come back to discuss the films here on BLDGBLOG. It's a "distributed" film fest; there is no central venue, just a curated list of films and a list of days on which to watch them. There's no set time, no geographic exclusion, and no limit to the food breaks or repeated scenes you might require. And it all leads up to a public discussion at Studio-X NYC on Tuesday, April 24.

The overall idea is to discuss breaking out and breaking in as spatial scenarios that operate as mirror images of one another, each process with its own tools, techniques, and unique forms of unexpected architectural expertise.

It started on Friday, but there's still plenty of time and opportunity to join in.

New Monty Python movie (sort of)

Monty Python member Terry Jones is set to direct a sci-fi comedy that will feature other Python members "voicing key roles". Gilliam, Cleese, and Palin have all signed on and they're working on getting Eric Idle.

Members of Monty Python's Flying Circus are reteaming for "Absolutely Anything," a sci-fi farce combining CGI and live action, with Terry Jones to direct and Mike Medavoy to produce.

Plans are for filming to begin in the U.K. this spring, with the Pythons voicing key roles as a a group of aliens who endow an earthling with the power to do "absolutely anything" to see what a mess he'll make of things -- which is precisely what happens. There's also a talking dog named Dennis who seems to understand more about the mayhem that ensues than anyone else does. Robin Williams will voice the character.

"It's not a Monty Python picture, but it certainly has that sensibility," Jones told Variety.

(via ★vuokko)

Truthful movie posters

Posters for Oscar nominated movies that maybe tell the truth of each movie a bit more than the conventional posters. For instance, Iron Lady becomes Total Bitch, Tree of Life becomes Wuh?, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo becomes All the Rape, No Subtitles.

(via ★vuokko)

Premakes: new movies with old actors

If recent movies like The Hangover, Drive, Inception, and Rushmore had been made in an earlier era, who would have starred in and directed these premakes? How about Dean Martin, Jack Lemmon, and Jerry Lewis in The Hangover?

Or Inception directed by Fritz Lang?

(thx, al)

Mission Impossible - IKEA Protocol

Type designer Matthew Butterick sent a letter to director Brad Bird about the use of Verdana in captions and subtitles in the latest Mission Impossible movie.

Second, it's not stylistically suitable. Verdana is a built-in font on nearly every Windows and Mac computer. It's used on zillions of web pages. It's ubiquitous. Therefore, the person who uses Verdana suggests to readers "I couldn't be bothered to pick anything better." It's also well-known as the corporate font of IKEA -- probably not the association you're going for.

(via ★aaronsw)

George Lucas is retiring from movie making

Well, from making blockbuster movies anyway. And that's only one of the interesting tidbits in this long NY Times profile of Lucas

Lucas has decided to devote the rest of his life to what cineastes in the 1970s used to call personal films. They'll be small in scope, esoteric in subject and screened mostly in art houses. They'll be like the experimental movies Lucas made in the 1960s, around the time he was at U.S.C. film school, when he recorded clouds moving over the desert and made a movie based on an E. E. Cummings poem. During that period, Lucas assumed he would spend his career on the fringes. Then "Star Wars" happened -- and though Lucas often mused about it, he never committed himself to the uncommercial world until now.

Sitting in a sun-drenched office, his voice boyish, Lucas talked about himself as if he were a character in one of his movies. He's at the end of an epic saga; he's embracing a new destiny ("Make the art films, George"); he's battling former acolytes who have become his sworn enemies; and George Lucas is -- no kidding -- in love. Before he takes his digital camera with him into obscurity, though, Lucas has one last mission. He wants to prove that with "Red Tails," he can still make the kind of movie everyone in the world will want to see.

The three deadliest words in the world: "it's a girl"

This article, about how gender is manipulated in South Asia, is very difficult to read.

It's a girl, a film being released this year, documents the practice of killing unwanted baby girls in South Asia. The trailer's most chilling scene is one with an Indian woman who, unable to contain her laughter, confesses to having killed eight infant daughters.

The statistics are sickening. The UN reports approximately 200 million girls in the world today are 'missing'. India and China are said to eliminate more female infants than the number of girls born in the US each year. Lianyungang in China has the worst infant gender ratio on record with 163 boys born for every 100 girls. Taiwan, South Korea and Pakistan are also countries in which unwanted female babies are aborted, killed or abandoned.

Here's more information on the mentioned film. (via @cshirky)

Kubrick invented the box office report

Stanley Kubrick's meticulousness about his movies extended right on down to how they were marketed. When A Clockwork Orange came out in the US, he spent weeks crunching theater ticket grosses to figure out which theaters the film should play in.

Clockwork would be shown in standard cinemas as a quality platform release, which meant there were many options per city. I knew that Don Rugoff's Cinema 1, the most prestigious cinema in New York, had to be the New York theater, but how to be sure that the film would be booked into the best cinema in Indianapolis or Cleveland or Atlanta? To choose the right theater in each city, we needed to know which cinema sold the most tickets to the most interesting pictures. But while a studio would know what its own films grossed, detailed box-office figures of competitive films were closely held secrets. There was no comparative information, and that is exactly what Stanley wanted.

Influenced by Kubrick's system, Variety released their first nation box office rankings chart a few months later. (via df)

Tarantino's favorite films of 2011

Quentin Tarantino released a list of his favorite films of last year. His number one choice? Midnight in Paris. Here's his top five...click through for his other choices:

1. Midnight In Paris
2. Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes
3. Moneyball
4. The Skin I Live In
5. X-Men: First Class

(via moviefone)

Moonrise Kingdom trailer

We interrupt this internet to bring you the very first trailer for Wes Anderson's new movie, Moonrise Kingdom.

Set on an island off the coast of New England in the summer of 1965, MOONRISE KINGDOM tells the story of two twelve-year-olds who fall in love, make a secret pact, and run away together into the wilderness. As various authorities try to hunt them down, a violent storm is brewing off-shore -- and the peaceful island community is turned upside down in more ways than anyone can handle.

It's Wes Andersonmas, y'all!

A Brief History of Time by Errol Morris

The sound and picture are poor, but the entirety of Errol Morris' A Brief History of Time is available on YouTube.

Featuring music from Philip Glass, the film is a documentary about Stephen Hawking and his ideas about the universe. Morris recently stated on Twitter:

Yes. I plan to re-release [A Brief History of Time]. (It was never properly color corrected and is one of my best films.)

The film is difficult, if not impossible, to find on DVD and isn't available on Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, or iTunes. And as far as I can tell, the soundtrack was never released either.

Girl Walk // All Day online for free

Thanks to Gothamist, you can watch the entirety of Jacob Krupnick's Girl Walk // All Day online. GWAD is a feature-length music video set to Girl Talk's All Day.

Don't go changing

In a piece for Vanity Fair, Kurt Andersen argues that for the first time in recent history, American pop culture (fashion, art, music, design, entertainment) hasn't changed dramatically in the past 20 years.

Since 1992, as the technological miracles and wonders have propagated and the political economy has transformed, the world has become radically and profoundly new. (And then there's the miraculous drop in violent crime in the United States, by half.) Here is what's odd: during these same 20 years, the appearance of the world (computers, TVs, telephones, and music players aside) has changed hardly at all, less than it did during any 20-year period for at least a century. The past is a foreign country, but the recent past -- the 00s, the 90s, even a lot of the 80s -- looks almost identical to the present. This is the First Great Paradox of Contemporary Cultural History.

Think about it. Picture it. Rewind any other 20-year chunk of 20th-century time. There's no chance you would mistake a photograph or movie of Americans or an American city from 1972-giant sideburns, collars, and bell-bottoms, leisure suits and cigarettes, AMC Javelins and Matadors and Gremlins alongside Dodge Demons, Swingers, Plymouth Dusters, and Scamps-with images from 1992. Time-travel back another 20 years, before rock 'n' roll and the Pill and Vietnam, when both sexes wore hats and cars were big and bulbous with late-moderne fenders and fins-again, unmistakably different, 1952 from 1972. You can keep doing it and see that the characteristic surfaces and sounds of each historical moment are absolutely distinct from those of 20 years earlier or later: the clothes, the hair, the cars, the advertising -- all of it. It's even true of the 19th century: practically no respectable American man wore a beard before the 1850s, for instance, but beards were almost obligatory in the 1870s, and then disappeared again by 1900. The modern sensibility has been defined by brief stylistic shelf lives, our minds trained to register the recent past as old-fashioned.

Beyond the uncanny valley

Kevin Kelly argues that Spielberg's Tintin movie passes beyond the uncanny valley into the "plains of hyperreality".

One of the great charms of the Tin Tin movie (besides its solid story, and uplifting sensibility) is the incredible degree of detail, texture, lighting, and drama that infuses every scene. Because the whole movie is synthetic, every scene can be composed perfectly, lit perfectly, arranged perfectly, and captured perfectly. There is a painterly perfection that the original Tin Tin comics had that this movie captures. This means that the stupendous detail found in say TinTin's room, or in a back alley, or on the ship's deck can be highlighted beyond what it could in reality. You SEE EVERYTHING. When TinTin's motorcycle is chasing the bad guy and begins to fall apart, nothing is obscured. Every realistic mechanical part is illuminated realistically. This technique gives a heightened sense of reality because every corner of the entire scene is heightened realistically, which cannot happen in real life, yet you only see real-looking things. This trick lends the movie a hyperreality. Its artificial world looks realer than real.

The uncanny valley issue has been less noticeable lately, but what really snaps me out of being immersed in movies lately is the Impossible Camera™. In 100% CGI shots, when cameras move quickly with sharp changes in direction over long distances, something that actual cameras can't do, it snaps me right out of the action because it's so obviously fake. For instance, any scene in the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man movies where Spidey is flying through Manhattan. Fay, fay, fake.

Why David Fincher chose his films

David Fincher explains why he chose to make each of his films.

The Social Network (2010): "You don't get scripts like that every day. You don't get a studio coming to you saying, 'We just fucking love this script. Let's make it into a movie.' So often people are mitigating against the disaster or trying to cover the downside and saying, 'Well, OK, look, the script is great, but...' ['Can you make something out of it?'] Yeah.

I have given Fincher shit about the films he's chosen to make but it turns out that he's better at spotting good material than I am. Go figure. (via @khoi)

Why are movie revenues dropping?

Roger Ebert takes a crack at explaining why fewer and fewer people are going to see movies in theaters.

The message I get is that Americans love the movies as much as ever. It's the theaters that are losing their charm. Proof: theaters thrive that police their audiences, show a variety of titles and emphasize value-added features. The rest of the industry can't depend forever on blockbusters to bail it out.

This and the maximizing shareholder value thing seem to be related.

First trailer for The Hobbit

Apple's got the exclusive first trailer for The Hobbit. I am irrationally excited about this movie!

Update: And here's a YouTube embed...I'm sure this won't last too long though.

(thx, david)

Studio Ghibli films at IFC

Starting today and continuing for the next four weeks, IFC Center in NYC is showing a "comprehensive retrospective" of films (Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro) made by Studio Ghibli. Most of the films are new 35mm prints and some will be screened in dubbed and subtitled Japanese versions.

Oh, and IFC is also doing midnight showings of Raiders of the Lost Ark this month.

Why Quantum of Solace wasn't so good

Daniel Craig, star of the two most recent Bond films, in an interview with Time Out London:

Q: It seems that the script is sometimes an after-thought on huge productions.

A: 'Yes and you swear that you'll never get involved with shit like that, and it happens. On "Quantum", we were fucked. We had the bare bones of a script and then there was a writers' strike and there was nothing we could do. We couldn't employ a writer to finish it. I say to myself, "Never again", but who knows? There was me trying to rewrite scenes - and a writer I am not.'

Q: You had to rewrite scenes yourself?

A: 'Me and the director [Marc Forster] were the ones allowed to do it. The rules were that you couldn't employ anyone as a writer, but the actor and director could work on scenes together. We were stuffed. We got away with it, but only just. It was never meant to be as much of a sequel as it was, but it ended up being a sequel, starting where the last one finished.'

I wonder how many other movies that happened with? io9 and Screenrant speculated on this very question after the strike ended. (via df)

Pulp Fiction in chronological order

I can't imagine this is going to be up for much longer, so grab it while you can: Pulp Fiction presented in chronological order.

(via ★interesting)

Charles & Ray Eames: The Architect and the Painter on PBS

Speaking of the Eames, the recent documentry on the pair is going to be on American Masters on PBS.

American Masters presents the first film made about America's most important and influential designers, Charles and Ray Eames, since their deaths in 1978 and 1988, respectively -- and the only film that explores the link between their artistic collaboration and sometimes tortured marriage. Jason Cohn and Bill Jersey's definitive documentary delves into the private world the Eameses created in their Renaissance-style, Venice Beach, California studio, where design history was born. Narrated by James Franco, Charles & Ray Eames: The Architect and the Painter premieres nationally Monday, December 19 from 10-11:30 p.m. (ET/PT) on PBS (check local listings) as the 25th anniversary season finale of American Masters.

The new Pixar film, it's coming from inside the brain!

In a recent appearance on Charlie Rose, John Lasseter revealed the rough premise of an upcoming-but-untitled Pixar film:

Pete Docter, from Monsters, Inc. and Up, is doing a new film that takes place inside of a girl's mind and it is about her emotions as characters, and that is unlike anything you've ever seen.

With Brave and now this, it looks like Pixar is finally taking their lack of female lead characters seriously.

Reznor's Girl with the Dragon Tattoo soundtrack out soon

Trent Reznor's and Atticus Ross' soundtrack for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is in the can and will be released in one week. For now, you can pre-order the soundtrack or download a free six-song sampler. Reznor and Ross won an Oscar for their The Social Network soundtrack.

Girl Walk // All Day NYC premiere

Girl Walk // All Day is a feature-length dance music video set in NYC...the soundtrack is Girl Talk's All Day. Kickstarter is hosting a premiere for the film (+ dance party) on December 8 at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple...and it's free (you just need to RSVP). Here's the trailer:

Either the best or the worst DVD commentary ever

This is Arnold Schwarzenegger doing the DVD commentary for Total Recall. Instead of adding any context to the film, he simply describes exactly what was happening in each scene.

I have three guesses as to what's going on here:

1. It's a fake from a really good impersonator.

2. Arnold is dumb and he's unaware of how dumb he is.

3. But my money's on this one: Arnold was contractually obligated to do the DVD commentary but when it came to it, he didn't really want to. So he torpedoed the whole thing and had some fun in the meantime. (via stellar)

The Fantastic and Inglourious Mr. Fox

A trailer for Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox using dialogue from Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds.

(via biancolo)

New Werner Herzog film on the death penalty

It's called Into the Abyss and it opens today. Trailer is here:

There's an interview with Herzog about the film on the Tribeca Film Festival site and Ebert gave it four stars.

Kubrick movie collections on sale

Collections of Stanley Kubrick's movies are on sale at Amazon today only: on DVD for $31.50 and on Blu-ray for $63...both collections are 58% off retail.

SPARTACUS (1960) The genre-defining epic tale of a bold gladiator (Kirk Douglas) who leads a triumphant Roman slave revolt.

LOLITA (1962) Academic Humbert Humbert (James Mason) is obsessed with a blithe teen (Sue Lyon) in a dark comedy from Vladimir Nabokov's novel.

DR. STRANGELOVE (1964) "Accidental" nuclear apocalypse, anyone? Peter Sellers heads the cast of one of the most blazingly hilarious movies of all time.

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) "The most awesome, beautiful and mentally stimulating science-fiction film of all time" (Danny Peary, Guide for the Film Fanatic).

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE: 40th Anniversary Edition (2-Discs) (1971) Future world neo-punk Malcolm McDowell becomes the guinea pig for a government cure of his tendency toward "the old ultraviolence."

BARRY LYNDON (1975) The visually spellbinding tale of an 18th-century Irish rogue's (Ryan O'Neal) climb to wealth and privilege.

THE SHINING (1980) In a macabre masterpiece adapted from Stephen King's novel, Jack Nicholson falls prey to forces haunting a snowbound mountain resort.

FULL METAL JACKET (1987) Marine recruits endure basic training under a leather-lunged D.I., then plunge into the hell of Vietnam.

EYES WIDE SHUT (1999) A wife's admission of unfulfilled longing plunges a Manhattan doctor into a bizarre erotic odyssey. Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman star.

Watch Bill Cunningham New York on Hulu for free

Bill Cunningham New York, the documentary on street fashion photographer Bill Cunningham, is available to watch on Hulu for free. (US-only probably.)

Koyaanisqatsi

Saw Koyaanisqatsi last night (with great seats), accompanied by the New York Philharmonic and the Philip Glass Ensemble...Glass played one of the emsemble's two keyboards. It was really fantastic.

KOYAANISQATSI, [Godfrey] Reggio's debut as a film director and producer, is the first film of the QATSI trilogy. The title is a Hopi Indian word meaning "life out of balance." Created between 1975 and 1982, the film is an apocalyptic vision of the collision of two different worlds -- urban life and technology versus the environment. The musical score was composed by Philip Glass.

The entire film is available on both YouTube and Hulu.

It's just apps on apps on apps

Riffing off of a short observation I sent him, John Gruber speculates about what an Apple TV ecosystem might look like.

Why not the same thing [as Newsstand] for TV channels? We're seeing the beginnings of this, with iPhone and iPad apps like HBO Go, Watch ESPN, and the aforementioned Bloomberg TV+. Letting each TV network do their own app allows them the flexibility that writing software provides. News networks can combine their written and video news into an integrated layout. Networks with contractual obligations to cable operators, like HBO and ESPN, can write code that requires users to log in to verify their status as an eligible subscriber.

This smells right to me...it's a very Apple-y way of approaching the TV/movie problem. Rather than fight with the studios and networks over content sold through the iTunes Store (where the studios control the licensing rights), just provide a platform (iPhone + iPad + iTV + App Store) controlled by Apple and if the studios/networks want to reach those customers, they need to provide an app...with Apple taking a 30% cut of the App *and* content sales.

Charles and Ray Eames documentary

Eames: The Architect and the Painter, a documentary on the husband and wife design duo, will be out in theaters in mid-November.

The husband-and-wife team of Charles and Ray Eames are widely regarded as America's most important designers. Perhaps best remembered for their mid-century plywood and fiberglass furniture, the Eames Office also created a mind-bending variety of other products, from splints for wounded military during World War II, to photography, interiors, multi-media exhibits, graphics, games, films and toys. But their personal lives and influence on significant events in American life -- from the development of modernism, to the rise of the computer age -- has been less widely understood. Narrated by James Franco, Eames: The Architect and the Painter is the first film dedicated to these creative geniuses and their work.

The DVD is already available for pre-order on Amazon. (via @aaroncoleman0)

The Secret World of Arrietty

The Secret World of Arrietty, the latest film from Studio Ghibli (Ponyo, Princess Mononoke, Howl's Moving Castle), came out in Japan last year and will be in US theaters in February 2012. Here's the English trailer:

The screenplay was adapted from Mary Norton's The Borrowers. (thx, david)

Kids movie from Martin Scorsese?

Apparently so. It's called Hugo:

I was going to make a joke about how this is Scorsese's first movie without Leonardo DiCaprio in like 20 years, but it's actually his first DiCaprio-free film in 12 years. (via stellar)

What if Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare?

Everyone knows that William Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's plays. What Roland Emmerich's new film presupposes is...maybe he didn't?

Professors of Shakespeare -- and I was one once upon a time -- are blissfully unaware of the impending disaster that this film means for their professional lives. Thanks to "Anonymous," undergraduates will be confidently asserting that Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare for the next 10 years at least, and profs will have to waste countless hours explaining the obvious. "Anonymous" subscribes to the Oxfordian theory of authorship, the contention that Edward de Vere, the 17th earl of Oxford, wrote Shakespeare's plays. Among Shakespeare scholars, the idea has roughly the same currency as the faked moon landing does among astronauts.

Sheriff Woody Allen

From artist Lim Heng Swee. Grab a print at Etsy while you can.

Fun fact: Tom Hanks does the voice for Woody in the movies but in most other media, he's voiced by Tom's younger brother Jim Hanks.

Four-year-old learns Darth Vadar is Luke's father

You've never seen a literally slack jaw until you've seen a four-year-old watching Empire Strikes Back for the first time and learning that Darth Vader is Luke's father.

Being Elmo trailer

Being Elmo is a documentary about the puppeteer who performs Sesame Street's Elmo. It looks fantastic.

(via unlikely words)

Tom Selleck's moustache makes every movie better

(via ★interesting)

Netflix explodes into two companies

Qwikster will rent you DVDs and Netflix will rent you streaming movies. Two separate sites/companies, no interop, you have to sub to both separately, etc. Here's the explanation from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. This seems amazingly dumb at first blush. (ps. Qwikster?!!)

Update: This is an excellent level-headed analysis of the deal from Dan Frommer.

Netflix's holy grail is to get each person, not each household, to have a separate streaming subscription, the way everyone also has a separate Facebook account. Separating a per-household service like DVD rentals-by-mail helps simplify that eventual transition.

Bill Cunningham New York DVD

Bill Cunningham New York, a documentary film about the unassuming king of street fashion photography, is out on DVD today.

"We all get dressed for Bill," says Vogue editor Anna Wintour. The Bill in question is 80+ New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham. For decades, this Schwinn-riding cultural anthropologist has been obsessively and inventively chronicling fashion trends he spots emerging from Manhattan sidewalks and high society charity soirees for his beloved Style section columns On The Street and Evening Hours.

Cunningham's enormous body of work is more reliable than any catwalk as an expression of time, place and individual flair. The range of people he snaps uptown fixtures like Wintour, Brooke Astor, Tom Wolfe and Annette de la Renta (who appear in the film out of their love for Bill), downtown eccentrics and everyone in between reveals a delirious and delicious romp through New York. But rarely has anyone embodied contradictions as happily and harmoniously as Bill, who lived a monk-like existence in the same Carnegie Hall studio at for fifty years, never eats in restaurants and gets around solely on bike number 29 (28 having been stolen).

It got great reviews...currently 98% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Fifty must-see documentaries

Current TV has compiled a list of the fifty contemporary documentaries that you must see before you die. Lots of familiar names on the list...here are my personal favorites:

The Kid Stays in the Picture
When We Were Kings
Dogtown and Z-Boys
Man on Wire
Capturing the Friedmans
Touching the Void
The Fog of War
Grizzly Man
The Thin Blue Line
Hoop Dreams

Koyaanisqatsi live performances in NYC

The New York Philharmonic, joined by Philip Glass himself, will perform the score for Koyaanisqatsi while the film is projected on a screen above the stage.

Lose yourself in Philip Glass's powerful music for the 1982 Godfrey Reggio film Koyaanisqatsi: A Life Out Of Balance, performed live by the Philharmonic and the Philip Glass Ensemble, as the landmark film is projected on a huge screen above the Avery Fisher Hall stage.

There will be two performances, Nov 2 and Nov 3 at 7:30pm at Avery Fisher Hall. There are still tons of great seats available, but get 'em while you can. Excited!

Superheroes are all around us

This chart shows former and future superheroes by movie. That is, George Clooney played Batman, so Out of Sight gets a Batman, along with another Batman for Micheal Keaton, and a Nick Fury for Sam Jackson. Lots of movies have 4 superheroes, though none on this chart have 5. Click through, you'll understand. If you want to see how they all fit together, he's made that chart, too. Raynor, you may raymember, also made the Harry Potter wizards in other movies chart.

HBO recently released a documentary about real-life superheroes. The trailer is below. It reminded me of the fascinating Rolling Stone article about Master Legend, but I can't find it on their site because Rolling Stone doesn't believe the internet needs to see old articles.

Incidentally, I found not 1, but 3 networks for real-life superheroes.
1, 2 3. But also, hipster superheroes. Hulk is only smashing ironically. And here's a list of all the superheroes. All of them.

Lastly, I'd be remiss not to mention Petsaresuperhero.es, a project I put together with a friend. You know your pet's a superhero, now you can show the world.

Really being John Malkovich

Using facial recognition in realtime via a webcam, this system lets you control the face of another person...like, say, John Malkovich.

Given a photo of person A, we seek a photo of person B with similar pose and expression. Solving this problem enables a form of puppetry, in which one person appears to control the face of another. When deployed on a webcam-equipped computer, our approach enables a user to control another person's face in real-time. This image-retrieval inspired approach employs a fully-automated pipeline of face analysis techniques, and is extremely general-we can puppet anyone directly from their photo collection or videos in which they appear. We show several examples using images and videos of celebrities from the Internet.

Making 'The Shining'

A 33-minute documentary made by a then-17-year-old Vivian Kubrick (Stanley's daughter) about the making of The Shining is available in its entirety on Google Video. From Wikipedia:

It has some candid interviews and very private moments caught on set such as arguments with cast and director, moments of a no-nonsense Kubrick directing his actors, Scatman Crothers being overwhelmed with emotion during his interview, Shelley Duvall collapsing through mental exhaustion on set and a very playful Jack Nicholson enjoying playing up to the behind the scenes camera.

Fake + logo = Fauxgo

Fauxgo is a site that collects fictional logos from movies and TV shows.

Forty Harrison Fords

Harrison Ford has made credited appearances in 40 movies...to celebrate, the National Post had illustrator Chip Zdarsky draw portraits of Ford from each of his films.

(via @moleitau)

In Time trailer

Here's a four-minute teaser trailer for In Time, a sci-fi action thriller directed by Andrew Niccol (Gattaca) and starring Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried.

In the late 21st century, time has replaced money as the unit of currency. At 25 years old, aging stops and each person is given one more year to live. Unless you replenish your clock, you die.

Nice to see someone taking the attention economy literally. (thx, david)

El Bulli documentary

A documentary about El Bulli offers "a rare inside look at some of the world's most innovative and exciting cooking".

(thx, aaron)

What if the Potter books had been the Hermione books instead?

From Sady Doyle, an alternate history of the Harry Potter series if Rowling would have written the books from the perspective of Hermione Granger.

So, before she goes away for good, let us sing the praises of Hermione. A generation could not have asked for a better role model. Looking back over the series -- from Hermione Granger and the Philosopher's Stone through to Hermione Granger and the Deathly Hallows -- the startling thing about it is how original it is. It's what inspires your respect for Rowling: She could only have written the Hermione Granger by refusing to take the easy way out.

For starters, she gave us a female lead. As difficult as it is to imagine, Rowling was pressured to revise her initial drafts to make the lead wizard male. "More universal," they said. "Nobody's going to follow a female character for 4,000 pages," they said. "Girls don't buy books," they said, "and boys won't buy books about them." But Rowling proved them wrong. She was even asked to hide her own gender, and to publish her books under a pen name, so that children wouldn't run screaming at the thought of reading something by a lady. But Joanne Rowling never bowed to the forces of crass commercialism. She will forever be "Joanne Rowling," and the Hermione Granger series will always be Hermione's show.

The Royal Tenenbaums' House

The Onion's A.V. Club takes a field trip to see the Harlem house where the exteriors (and many of the interiors) were shot for The Royal Tenenbaums.

(via devour)

Final movie scenes

A collection of final frames from well-known movies...see if you can guess them all.

Harry Potter summed up in seven minutes

If you're headed out to see the final Potter movie this weekend, here's a recap of the previous seven films in just seven minutes:

Tabloid's star breaking the fourth wall

Joyce McKinney, the subject of Errol Morris' documentary film called Tabloid, has been popping up at screenings of the film around the country, seemingly on her own dime, to conduct Q&A sessions of her own.

"I sat till the audience started to leave and waited for the precise moment, and then jumped up and yelled, 'I'm Joyce McKinney!'" she said, with considerable glee. "They went crazy."

There are also reports of some reviewers receiving anonymous legal threats.

A day in the life of John Lasseter

I wasn't going to watch all twenty-five minutes of this day-in-the-life feature about Pixar's John Lasseter, but I got sucked in after the first two minutes for some reason and couldn't stop. The main takeaway is that Lasseter is a relentlessly upbeat, absurdly rich, hugging, cheeseball train freak.

Watching it, I found it almost impossible to reconcile his cheeseball personality with the kind of movies that Pixar makes, except to note that the Pixar films he's been involved with in a directorial or story capacity (Toy Storys 1-3, Cars 1-2) are the studio's syrupiest (and Randy Newmanest). (via devour)

Errol Morris making a movie with Paul Rudd and Ira Glass

It's fictional but based on a This American Life story about a man whose cryogenics business goes wrong.

The film, as previously reported, is an adaptation of a 2008 report on Bob Nelson, a self-styled cryogenics pioneer. Mr. Morris claims the film, not listed on IMDB, will be written by Zach Helm, writer of the aptly titled Will Ferrell vehicle Stranger Than Fiction. This American Life previously spawned the kids'-movie adaptation Unaccompanied Minors, but Mr. Morris's pedigree -- and unique interests-promise to make this a bit more highbrow, and simultaneously more intriguingly tabloid-y.

The Star Wars blueprints

Star Wars: The Blueprints is a $500 limited edition book that contains photographs and illustrations about how the Star Wars movies wre created.

Star Wars: The Blueprints brings together, for the first time, the original blueprints created for the filming of the Star Wars Saga. Drawn from deep within the Lucasfilm Archives and combined with exhaustive and insightful commentary from best-selling author J. W. Rinzler, the collection maps in precise, vivid, and intricate detail the very genesis of the most enduring and beloved story ever to appear onscreen.

Star Wars: The Blueprints gives voice to the groundbreaking and brilliant engineers, designers, and artists that have, in film after film, created the most imaginative and iconic locales in the history of cinema. Melding science and art, these drawings giving birth to fantastic new worlds, ships, and creatures.

Most importantly, Blueprints shows how in bringing this extraordinary epic to life, the world of special effects as we know it was born. For the first time, here you will see the initial concepts behind such iconic Star Wars scenes as the Rebel blockade runner hallways, the bridge of General Grievous s flagship, the interior of the fastest hunk of junk in the Galaxy, and Jabba the Hutt's palace. Never before seen craftsmanship and artistry is evident whether floating on the Death Star, escaping on a speeder bike, or exploring the Tatooine Homestead.

And hey, Amazon's got it for only $450.

Arrested Development = The Godfather!

Basically, Arrested Development is a sitcom version of The Godfather. Michael = Michael, G.O.B. = Sonny, and Fredo = Buster.

Fredo Corleone is the second oldest son of Don Vito Corleone, but is unfit to run the family business. His stupidity, lack of confidence, and otherwise child-like behavior prevent him from being taken seriously by any member of the family. Despite his attempts at success, integration into the family usually comes to no avail. He is often humored by deciding family members (Michael), and given menial business tasks (i.e. casinos, whorehouses) for the family.

Buster Bluth is the youngest son of George, Sr., and is unfit to run the family business. His stupidity, lack of confidence, and otherwise child-like behavior prevent him from being taken seriously by any member of the family. Despite his attempts at success, integration into the family business usually comes to no avail. He is often humored by deciding family members (his mother), and given menial tasks (i.e. learning cartography) to distract him.

(via mlkshk, sorta)

The complete Harry Potter, in comic form

Epic comic version of all eight of the Happy Potter movies by Lucy Knisley.

Knisley is also offering large format images of the comic for personal use...for a limited time only.

SnorriCam

The SnorriCam is the chest-mounted camera that directors like Darren Aronofsky have used to great effect. You can see a bit of Aronofsky's use of the SnorriCam in these clips from Requiem for a Dream. (Note: that second clip is a bit graphic.)

Moneyball movie trailer

Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill...I'm not so sure about this...

NYC summer movies

Today's service journalism: here's a simple one-page list of outdoor movie screenings in NYC this summer. The lineup includes Rosemary's Baby, Airplane!, and Spiderman. (thx, matthew)

Partying with Captain America

In this profile of Chris Evans (aka Captain America) for GQ, Edith Zimmerman catches a movie actor on the rise testing the boundaries of his soon-to-be mega-fame.

Since we're both single and roughly the same age, it was hard for me not to treat our interview as a sort of date. Surprisingly, Chris did the same, asking all about me, my family, my job, my most recent relationship. And from ten minutes into that first interview, when he reached across the table to punctuate a joke by putting his hand on top of mine, Chris kept up frequent hand holding and lower-back touching, palm kissing and knee squeezing. He's an attractive movie star, no complaints. I also didn't know how much I was supposed to respond; when I did, it sometimes felt a little like hitting on the bartender or misconstruing the bartender's professional fliirting for something more. I wanted to think it was genuine, or that part of it was, because I liked him right away.

Is this the part of a celebrity profile where I go into how blue the star's eyes are? Because they are very blue.

(via @choire)

Fellowship of the Ring back in theaters tonight

A bunch of theaters in NYC (and around the US I would assume) are showing the extended edition of Fellowship of the Ring at 7pm tonight.

The event will include a personal introduction from director Peter Jackson captured from the set of his current film and "Lord of the Rings" prequel "The Hobbit," immediately followed by the feature presentation.

The same thing will happen with Two Towers on June 21 and Return of the King on June 28. Can't believe Fellowship came out 10 years ago already.

Where has all the drama gone?

From very small array, an infographic look at which movie genres have done well at the box office and at awards time. Dramas have all but vanished from the box office chart in recent years. (thx, jon)

2001 ads for HAL and Pan Am

Love these. Prints are available.

Trailer for Tabloid, Errol Morris' new film

It's a documentary about Joyce McKinney and the so-called Mormon sex in chains case.

Here it is on Apple Trailers in case the YouTube one gets yanked.

Hollywood Career-O-Matic

Taking ratings data from Rotten Tomatoes, Slate made a neat little toy called the Hollywood Career-O-Matic that tracks the movie ratings of actors and directors since 1985.

Most Improved: Josh Brolin, Dakota Fanning, and Ken Loach. If the average Hollywood career is a slow decline into mediocrity, an actor or director whose films actually improve deserves special recognition. Among actors with at least 20 films in the Rotten Tomatoes database since 1985, Brolin has seen the greatest increase in average rating from the first half of his career to the second half -- an improvement of 28.4 percentage points. Despite Brolin's early appearance in The Goonies (63 percent), the first half of his career was marred by abominations like The Mod Squad (4 percent), and Hollow Man (27 percent). His later transition into gems like No Country for Old Men (95 percent), Milk (94 percent), and True Grit (96 percent) is a tale of redemption that not even Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (54 percent) could derail. The most improved actress is Fanning, with a 20.1-point increase from such duds as I Am Sam (34 percent) to critical darlings like Coraline (89 percent). Among directors, the award goes to Ken Loach, the British filmmaker whose reviews went from great in the first half of his career (80 percent) to stunning in the second half (88.1 percent).

For actors it would be interesting to see a similar analysis of box office gross and especially a weighted analysis that takes both critical acclaim and box office gross into account...the RT ratings for many actors are all over the place as they bounce from crappy big gross/paycheck blockbusters to lower grossing/paying critical darlings.

Behind the scenes

A great collection of behind-the-scenes shots from famous movies. Here's Kubrick and Sellers on the set of Dr. Strangelove:

(via df)

Terrence Malick loves Zoolander

Not from The Onion, folks. Turns out that the reclusive and celebrated director really likes the movie Zoolander.

He is also said to be such a fan of Zoolander, the 2001 send-up of the fashion world, that colleagues say he watches it regularly and likes to quote it. Ben Stiller, the star of the film, once dressed up in character and recorded him a special birthday video message.

Trailer for Fincher's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Larsson? Fincher? Reznor? Rooney Mara's brief NSFW nipple flash? What's not to like?

I was skeptical about this (and The Social Network) but lesson learned: never doubt David Fincher.

Ten modern movies that are better in black and white

Last month, Steven Soderbergh's list of what he's been watching and reading told us that the director watched Raiders of the Lost Ark in black & white three times in one week, presumably to emphasize the film's structure and cinematography. Flavorwire's Jason Bailey wondered what other films might be better in black & white and compiled a list of ten, with video examples and commentary of each. Included are Raiders, Fargo, and A Christmas Story.

Indiana Jones' stunt double

Vic Armstrong just published a memoir about his career as a Hollywood stuntman; the LA Times has an excerpt. Armstrong worked as Harrison Ford's double on all three Indiana Jones films...and no wonder, they look amazingly similar:

The next day we shot the fight around the plane. Harrison and Roach squared up to each other and Harrison threw a punch. "That's great. Moving on," said Steven. Now as a stunt co-ordinator my job is to make sure that, on film, those punches look like they've connected. I was standing looking right over the lens of the camera and in my opinion it was a miss. Now I was stuck between a rock and a hard place because Steven had called it good, but I thought I'd better say something. "Excuse me sir, that was actually a miss." He went, "Oh, you again." I said, "Yeah, sorry, it was a miss." Steven paused briefly. "Well, I thought it was a hit." I said, "No, I was actually looking over the lens and it was a miss, I think." Finally Steven said, "OK, we'll do it again." After that take was completed Steven, sarcastically almost, turned to me and said, "How was that?" I went, "That was good. That was a hit." And we carried on and created a great fight routine. Three days later we were all watching dailies when the shot that I'd said was a miss came on screen. Steven had printed it. The old heart started to go, but sure enough it was a miss and Steven, who was right in front of me, turned round and said, "Good call Vic." I couldn't do much wrong after that, it was great.

(via ★robinsloan)

Back to the Future as period piece

Theory: Robert Zemeckis intentionally made Back to the Future not as a contemporary film set in the present but as a period piece set in 1985.

Back To The Future is both undeniably timeless (its place in pop culture is beyond question) and incredibly dated (it's very much a product of its time). Interestingly, it's a period piece made in 1985 that depicts 1985 as an era as distant-seeming as its version of 1955. Of course, when Back To The Future was first released, 1985 just looked like "now." It's entirely possible that director Robert Zemeckis and co-writer Bob Gale referenced Ronald Reagan and Eddie Van Halen and dressed Fox's Marty McFly up in a denim jacket and Calvin Klein underwear because they wanted Back To The Future to exist in the same universe as The Breakfast Club, Girls Just Want To Have Fun, and other teen films from 1985. But I'm going to give them way more credit than they probably deserve. I think Zemeckis and Gale knew all the timely accoutrements signifying "the present" in Back To The Future would inevitably look like 1985 within just a couple of years; in fact, they were banking on it. Zemeckis and Gale were trying to create an archetypical representation of 1985 just like they did for 1955, with its soda fountains, social repression, and subjugated black people. In this way, Back To The Future only gets better the further we get from the '80s. Everything that defines Marty McFly-how he walks, talks, acts, and dresses-acts as instantly recognizable shorthand for the year he comes from.

(via ★joanne)

Movie references in Kill Bill

Following on from the Kill Bill section of episode 2 of Everything is a Remix, this video contains what feels like an exhaustive look at the movies that Tarantino referenced in Kill Bill.

(via @kbandersen)

Tintin trailer

Produced by Peter Jackson and directed by Steven Spielberg, it looks like an all-CGI adventure. I got sort of a Polar Express vibe from the trailer though, which is not encouraging.

(via ★fchimero)

Original ending of Election found at flea market

In this version, Tracy Flick tries to buy a car from Mr McAllister.

I bought a box of old VHS tapes at the Farmers Market in Wilmington, DE for $5 on Mothers Day. I had no idea that this working print was included in the box when I purchased it.

(via @kombuchakamp)

Tarantino's next movie: Django Unchained

Hint: it's not about the Python MVC framework...Django Unchained is Tarantino's spaghetti western.

According to Indiewire, Waltz's character "joins up with former slave Django to save his wife from an evil plantation owner." According to Deadline, Django will reunite Tarantino with Pulp Fiction producer Stacey Sher, and the movie will begin production as soon as this summer or fall.

Christoph Waltz, who was excellent in Inglourious Basterds, and perhaps Will Smith, who was excellent in the Parents Just Don't Understand video, will star.

You come at the Lion King, you best not miss

The Lion King movie recut into a five-minute summary of all five seasons of The Wire.

I almost didn't post this because it dogs on the underrated season 2. (via ★vuokko)

OS X Inception

For those of you who are still confused about what happened to whom and in whose mind, here's a 1-minute silent explanation of Inception using only the OS X Finder.

(via stellar)

Orson Welles, media theorist

It's the 70th anniversary of Orson Welles's masterpiece Citizen Kane:

Audacity and genius his trademark, and with a third medium to conquer and transform, Welles didn't think small. With the Mercury players in tow, he enlisted veteran satirist and screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz. Together they crafted a story that began with the death of an enigmatic protagonist, and explored his life through flashbacks told from multiple points of view. As questions are answered, questions are raised. The script ultimately compares a man's life to a jigsaw puzzle missing pieces, and thus impossible to solve. The writers very loosely based the title character of Charles Foster Kane on William Randolph Hearst, thus incurring the newspaper titan's wrath. Welles, Mercury, RKO, and the studio heads endured journalistic scandalmongering, and the film eventually earned a blacklist. Welles would later remark, "If Hearst isn't rightfully careful, I'm going to make a film that's really based on his life."

By coincidence, as related by Welles in his autobiography, he once found himself alone in an elevator with Hearst. It was the night of Citizen Kane's San Francisco premiere, and Welles invited him to the opening. "He didn't answer. And as he was getting off at his floor, I said, 'Charles Foster Kane would have accepted.'"

Everybody talks about the movie's formal innovations, but I wish the content would get more love. As A.O. Scott says, "Citizen Kane shows Welles to be a master of genre. It's a newspaper comedy, a domestic melodrama, a gothic romance, and a historical epic." Pauline Kael said Kane was "more fun than any great movie I can think of."

Citizen Kane is The Beatles of movies, not just because of its universal influence and acclaim, or because it really does live up to the historical hype, but because on top of its arty aspirations, what it really wants to do is entertain the hell out of you.

Also, if you're watching it carefully, the movie's self-reflexiveness hides and reveals a devastating history of media. You've got CFK, accidental heir to a fortune based on "oil wells, gold mines, shipping, and real estate," who trades it all for a communications empire: newspapers, radio stations, paper mills, opera houses, and grocery stores, only to be pushed to the margins after a failed political run in favor of the next generation: magazines and movies, the trade of the newsreel producers who try to track down the labyrinthine origin of "Rosebud."

The whole movie's about trying to invent something from nothing, about pretenses to real value, and how that whole house of cards tumbles apart. Eventually you've just got a giant room, where you can't tell the art from the jigsaw puzzles, the childhood heirlooms from the tchotchke snowglobes. Everything propping up value disintegrates. (That's what Kane figures out at the end, by the way, not that he misses his sled or his mom.)

As Borges wrote, it's a metaphysical detective story that leads us to a labyrinth with no center. All that's left is paper, just kindling for the fire.

Revisiting 1984

After yesterday's post on Ghostbusters ("Don't cross the streams"), I got hit with a few follow-ups worth following up:

• When I said 1984 was arguably "the biggest/most important year in modern cinematic comedy," I meant mostly because of the ridiculous amount of money comedies made that year and how those surprise blockbusters affected how comedies were made afterwards.
• Still when you add This Is Spinal Tap, which also came out in 1984 but didn't make very much money, you really could make a case that it really could be the best/most influential year for movie comedies.
• I didn't know this, but Aaron Cohen tipped me off: Jason actually already preemptively backed me up: "1984, a fine year for movies." As Jason says, "My God, the pop culture references."
• Also via Aaron, his own "1984 Was a Good Year for a Lot of Things" and Bill Simmons's 2004 post "1984, it was a very good year." Both mine the same pop culture vein, adding books, TV, and sports into the mix too.

I particularly like Simmons's note about college basketball (maybe even more relevant today):

College hoops meant something in '84. You stayed home on Monday nights to watch the Big East. You knew the players because they had been around for years. And since guys stuck around, you could follow Ewing and Georgetown, Hakeem and Phi Slamma Jamma, Mullin and St. John's, Pearl and Syracuse, MJ at UNC . . . these were like pro teams on a smaller scale. I'm telling you, a Georgetown-St. John's game in the middle of February was an event. These moments aren't even possibilities anymore. They're gone.

My favorite document of 1984 (sports or otherwise) is undoubtedly Sparky Anderson's Bless You Boys, his running diary/memoir of the Detroit Tigers' amazing season that year. It's about baseball, but so many other things -- life, death, perspective. I wrote about it last year for The Idler when Sparky Anderson passed away.

One last "what if?" note from Simmons:

Rolling Stone was offered the chance to buy MTV, and Sports Illustrated was offered the chance to buy ESPN. Both magazines decided against it.

Talk about crossing the streams.

Don't cross the streams

Rick Moranis wasn't supposed to be in Ghostbusters:

John Candy was the first choice for the part of Sigourney Weaver's dweeby neighbor Louis. Candy was interested, but he wanted his character to speak with a German accent and own several large dogs.

Neither were Ernie Hudson or Bill Murray. Dan Aykroyd wrote Peter Venkman for John Belushi, then rewrote it for Murray after Belushi died. I can't even imagine how that would have worked.

(Actually, I don't know if I can easily substitute any other actor for Bill Murray in any of his roles. That might be an imaginative blind spot for me.)

Likewise Paul Reubens (pre-Pee Wee Herman) was originally slated to play the demonic Gozer, as a straight-laced architect in a business suit.

As for Ernie Hudson's Winston:

Eddie Murphy was offered the part of Winston Zeddemore, which was intended to be a much larger character at the time. The plan was for Zeddemore to have been hired as a Ghostbuster much earlier in the movie, and in the scene at the hotel, he would have been the one covered in green slime by the ghost Slimer, instead of Bill Murray.

Murphy's reaction to getting slimed would have been priceless, but going for the lead in Beverly Hills Cop rather than teaming up with Aykroyd again was a great call. It probably all worked out for the best.

In fact, between Ghostbusters, Beverly Hills Cop, and Sixteen Candles, you could make a case that 1984 was the biggest/most important year in modern cinematic comedy. Even Police Academy, Gremlins, Splash, and Romancing the Stone were huge that year, even though I don't like those movies so much.

A/B testing comedy the Judd Apatow way

Freaks and Geeks creator and Bridesmaids director Paul Feig talks about his collaborator Judd Apatow's audience-driven approach to editing movies:

Judd actually has this whole thing they do with side-by-side screenings at two theaters right next door to each other and do a "P" version, which is a polished version, which is the one we think is close to what we want to have be our final cut. And then another one called the "E" version, the extended version, which is the dumping ground for everything we think might work, or we wanted to try, or we're just curious if it's gonna work. And out of all of those screenings, you'll always get about five or 10 new things that you didn't think were ever gonna work that go through the roof and you plug 'em into the polished one...

We'll always keep in a couple of jokes, just for ourselves. Then you go, "Okay, if it doesn't work, whatever. This is kinda for us." But none of us are brave enough to wait that long to see if it works because you want to have something that you know is clicking with an audience.

A lot of filmmakers will hate hearing that. To them, that feels very hacky, But the audience are the ones that are going to come and pay the money and they're the ones who are going tell their friends if it's good or not. I didn't get in the business, and Judd didn't get in the business, to make stuff that nobody sees. I've made a career making stuff that nobody sees, so anything that I can do to help make something that people are going to enjoy and want to see over and over again, then I'm there.

Feig also has an interesting take on the continued love for Freaks and Geeks: in 2000, when the show was cancelled, cancellation for a single show was pretty much total death. If there weren't enough episodes for syndication, it would only linger on through word of mouth and the occasional samizdat VHS tape.

[Feig:] The British model, which I've always thought was great, is that you do a TV show and then they sell it. Then you can buy it at the video stores forever, so it never went away. But American TV used to be if you had a show and it got cancelled, then it never existed.

DVDs changed the culture. It's not really a "cult hit" in the same way if you can just Netflix the entire run. Now, single-season shows like Freaks and Geeks can be sold and rewatched and lent out, and play out for their fans over and over again like long, favorite movies. And they don't need their A/V teacher to have a copy of the film reel to do it.

Why Stan Lee is the Shakespeare of the 20th century

Kenneth Branagh seemed like an odd fit to direct Thor, but he makes a solid case here about the affinities between Shakespeare, comics, and our love of all things larger-than-life:

We've just seen about two billion people watch a royal family at work, you know? And so I would say that it is Shakespearean, but it's also global, I suppose. That we're interested in what goes on in the corridors of power whether it's the White House or whether it's Buckingham Palace. And so Shakespeare was interested in the lives of the medieval royal families, but he also raided the Roman myths and the Greek myths for the same purpose. And I think Stan Lee went to the myths that Shakespeare hadn't used. You know, [they both] recognized that they contain briefly told, very condensed stories that I think are very universal in their application.

I think the connection, if there is one, is that the stakes are high. So in something like Henry IV or Henry V, where the young prince is a reckless man who falls into bad company: could that prince be the king? [In Thor], our flawed hero who must earn the right to be king, but I think what's key is the stakes. There it's Europe and England in power and here it's the universe. It's when that family has problems everybody else is affected, so if Thor throws a fit and is yelling at his father and is banished, suddenly the worlds are unstable. And what it means is if the actors take those stakes seriously it is passionate and it is, you know, very intense. And I suppose that kind of a observation of ordinary human - although they're gods - frailties in people in positions of power is an obsession of great storytellers including Shakespeare and including the Marvel universe.

Thor's story -- especially early on -- really is a lot like Prince Hal's, now that I think of it. Guy's even got his own Falstaff: dude is named Volstagg, which now seems almost too on-the nose.

Finally, have you seen Branagh's Henry V?

Guy knows how to make old-school battle cinematically work.

A drama of formation

The Paris Review's John Jeremiah Sullivan interviews filmmaker Werner Herzog and archeologist Jan Simek about cave paintings in the south of France (subject of Herzog's new 3-D documentary) and middle Tennessee (Simek's area of expertise):

SULLIVAN

On the subject of the lighting in this film, Dr. Simek, you made an observation, which is that the light tends to be in motion ...

JAN SIMEK

The light never rests. Every time he changes the picture, it goes through a light sweep. The film is clearly concerned with how the moving light causes the images themselves to change. This is not inaccurate at all. The original impression that this artwork made was in some ways dictated by how it got lit by the people who made it, with torchlight.

HERZOG

What we did was very simple: we walked with the light, so that the source of light would make the shadows move slightly, like curtains of darkness rising. Or, for example, a fade-out would be done by just physically removing the light. So it was never a purely technical thing; it was always something human, as if somebody with torchlight were just leaving or coming in.

When you try to imagine how these images looked for Paleolithic people, in the flickering shadows, the animals must have been moving, must have had a strange life in them.

I was also struck by Herzog's reaction to Sullivan's observation that Cave of Forgotten Dreams largely departs from the heroic-discovery mode common to movies about cave explorers:

I'm suspicious of that notion of adventure. It belongs to earlier centuries, and somehow fizzled away with, let's say, the exploration of the North and South Poles, which was only a media ego trip, unhealthy and unwise, on the part of some individuals. The Polar explorations were a huge mistake of the human race, an indication that the twentieth century was a mistake in its entirety. They are one of the indicators.

While researching a story I wrote not too long ago about spaceflight and radio communications, I was surprised at how central the polar expeditions were to that story:

In 1929, Richard E. Byrd made history -- not for reaching the South Pole, but for bringing on his Antarctic expedition 24 radio transmitters, 31 receivers, five radio engineers, three airplanes and an aerial camera. Unlike Ernest Shackleton's trans-Antarctic expedition, who 15 years earlier spent 17 months fighting for their lives after being trapped in the polar ice, Byrd's team was able to stay in constant communication with each other and with the outside world. It was the beginning of modern technology-aided exploration, and arguably the model for human spaceflight.

Also, I think Werner Herzog may be the only living human being who is still allowed to say things like "the twentieth century was a mistake in its entirety" in semi-casual conversation. The rest of us lack the prerequisite voice, record of achievements, and enormous balls.

Napoleonic preproduction

Stanley Kubrick's unfinished Napoleon project was supposed to be (in Kubrick's words) "the greatest film ever made." At the meticulous-yet-epic scale Kubrick imagined it -- think 30,000 real troops (from Romanian and Lithuanian Cold-War-armies) in authentic costume on location as extras for the battle scenes -- it was unfilmable.

So instead of the film, we have Kubrick's gigantic preproduction archive of notes and drawings and photographs, which (on top of the complete screenplay and drafts for the movie) is one of the largest scholarship-grade Napoleonic archives in the world.

Two years ago, Taschen put out a ten-volume de luxe edition of this material that cost $1500, which was by all accounts definitely awesome, but so expensive and unwieldy I don't think even Kubrick superfan John Gruber bought it.

Now there's a one-volume, 1100-page edition that lists at $70 but is running for $44 at Amazon. Brainiac's Josh Rothman breaks it down:

The book, in a deliberate echo of the film, is rough around the edges. Rather than providing a seamless, synthesized account of Kubrick's vision, the editor, Alison Castle, has focused on the raw materials: the photographs, clippings, letters, and notes that Kubrick kept in binders and a huge, library-style card catalog. There are interviews with Kubrick, and a complete draft of the screenplay, with many marked-up pages from earlier drafts. Here and there you'll find introductory essays by Kubrick experts, or a historian's response to Kubrick's screenplay -- but the emphasis is on the small gestures, as in the collection of underlined passages and marginal notes that Castle compiles from Kubrick's personal library of books about the emperor. A special 'key card' included with the book gives you access to a huge online library of images.

While I was wondering how/if we'd remember Kubrick differently if the Napoleon movie had come together, I came across this snappy transition from Kubrick's Wikipedia page:

After 2001, Kubrick initially attempted to make a film about the life of Napoleon Bonaparte. When financing fell through, Kubrick went looking for a project that he could film quickly on a small budget. He eventually settled on A Clockwork Orange (1971).

AC/D2 to play Star Wars music festival

If there was a Star Wars version of Coachella, some of the bands playing at the festival would be called Kessel Run DMC, Guided by Millions of Voices That Suddenly Cried Out in Terror and Were Suddenly Silenced, and C-3PO Speedwagon.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams at IFC

Starting April 29, the IFC Center in NYC will start showing Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams in 3-D. A refresher on the film:

The visionary director of Grizzly Man leads us on an unforgettable journey 32,000 years back in time to explore the earliest known images made by human hands. Discovered in 1994, France's Chauvet caves contain the rarest of the world's historic treasures, restricted to only a handful of researchers. Granted once-in-a-lifetime access and filming in 3D, Herzog captures the beauty of a truly awe-inspiring place, while musing in his inimitable fashion about its original inhabitants, the birth of art and the curious people surrounding the caves today.

Herzog first heard of the Chauvet caves from this Judith Thurman piece in the New Yorker.

Kubrick's lost first film

Stanley Kubrick's first feature-length film was called Fear and Desire and copies of it are hard to come by these days -- very few prints exist and it is unavailable on DVD or even VHS. But there's a copy available on Google Video, billed as "the most uncut print" available.

(via ★joanne)

Update: The film is available on DVD at Elusive DVD. (via @unknownpenguin)

Sometimes the best way to film a fight is to fight and film it

For the fight scenes in The Fighter, the producers hired a film crew that shoots real fights for HBO...and they shot all the fight scenes in three days instead of the industry standard 35 days. Here's Mark Wahlberg, the film's star and producer:

And what I kept telling everybody is that HBO does it in one take and they don't know what's going to happen and they never miss a thing. We have the luxury of showing them what we're going to do in the morning before we shoot it and doing it over and over and over again. So why do you need 20 days? For what? To jerk each other off? To touch up your makeup? To go in the trailer and take a nap?

We're not talking about putting the camera in there and saying, "OK, we're going to do a stunt punch here." No, we're going in there and beat the shit out of each other and we're going to make it real.

Tron Legacy soundtrack remixed

If you liked Daft Punk's Tron Legacy soundtrack, you might like Tron Legacy R3CONF1GUR3D with remixes by Crystal Method, Paul Oakenfold, and M83. It's just out today and I haven't listen to it yet, so caveat emptor.

Tron Legacy's special effects

One of the special effects artists who worked on Tron Legacy shares the effects that he and his team did for the film.

In Tron, the hacker was not supposed to be snooping around on a network; he was supposed to kill a process. So we went with posix kill and also had him pipe ps into grep. I also ended up using emacs eshell to make the terminal more l33t. The team was delighted to see my emacs performance -- splitting the editor into nested panes and running different modes. I was tickled that I got emacs into a block buster movie.

(via @dens)

Full trailer for Hangover 2

Who knows if this is even going to be any good...I'm just posting this to annoy David again.

Movie bar codes

Not quite sure how these are done -- it looks like each vertical slice is representative of the colors in a given frame from the film -- but these moviebarcodes provide a good sense of a movie's tone and color. This one is...any guesses?

It's 2001: A Space Odyssey. An unexpectedly colorful film. BTW, prints are available. Oh and see also Brendan Dawes' Cinema Redux.

Update: Here's how you can make your own (w/ downloadable source code). (thx, @seoulfully)

The rich visual filmmaking of The Social Network

Jim Emerson has a great post about the information-rich cinematography of The Social Network.

This sense of a private/public self is reinforced in nearly every scene, with the presence of a video camera (during the depositions), laptops and monitors, or other frames within frames (screens, windows, doorways, stairways, hallways) through which we can see other people going about their lives, doing whatever they're doing. (The extras and bit players had a lot of work in this movie.)

And then there's the guy in the white shirt who sits there behind the Winkelvii's lawyer. He turns out to be the videographer, and he gets one big moment when the attorneys call "lunch" and he leaps up to turn off the camera and the monitor. We're always reminded that what we're seeing is being documented. Even the documentation is being documented: the affidavits that have already been filed, the e-mails and texts that were sent, the blog entries, the Harvard Crimson articles entered into evidence... Whenever Mark tries to claim he doesn't remember what he may or may not have said to Erica or the Winkelvii (Armie Hammer), there's always something there to remind him -- often in words he typed and electronically transmitted himself.

This is the "guy in the white shirt" shot:

I only saw this movie for the first time about three weeks ago, but it's stuck in my brain...I keep coming back to it. As Emerson notes (or at least strongly hints at), the story might be specifically about Facebook, but the rest of the film is more generally about the connection and alienation of being online, of being human in a hyperconnected age. Same kind of thing Caterina was getting at in her Fear of Missing Out essay, I think.

Spoiler alert

A montage of spoilers from 71 different films, including The Usual Suspects, Citizen Kane, The 400 Blows, Inception, and The Graduate.

Or if you prefer, something similar in t-shirt form. (via devour)

Harry Potter wizards in other movies

Here's an infographic that shows feature films with four or more Harry Potter wizards in them.

i was watching sense & sensibility in the back of my neighbour's minivan while on a stakeout the other night and realized that professors snape, trelawney, and umbridge had each somehow apparated into the cast. my neighbour (who is a former hogwarts alumna) pointed out that cornelius fudge and madam pomfrey were also in it. was this a record for the most harry potter wizards in a non-harry potter film?

Close but nine Potter wizards is the record...can you guess which movie before clicking through?

Saul Bass title sequences

Here's a collection of video and stills from most of the movie title sequences created by Saul Bass.

"PROJECTIONISTS - PULL CURTAIN BEFORE TITLES".

This is the text of a note that was stuck on the cans when the reels of film for "The Man With the Golden Arm" arrived at US movie theatres in 1955. Until then the credits were referred to as 'popcorn time.' Audiences resented them and projectionists only pulled back the curtains to reveal the screen once they'd finished. Saul Bass' powerful title sequence for "The Man With the Golden Arm" changed the way directors and designers would treat the opening titles.

The extra who's in everything

This extra is the acting equivalent of the Wilhelm Scream...he shows up just about everywhere.

(via stellar)

A Brief History of Title Design

From the excellent blog The Art of the Title Sequence, a short video called A Brief History of Title Design.

The video page has a full listing of the movies from which the opening title sequences are pulled.

Famous objects from classic movies

This site presents you with famous objects from movies and asks you to identify them. If you're a pop culture junkie, this is your crack. (via @sippey)

Why movies suck

Totally depressing article about how Hollywood movies suck worse than ever and "the potential death of the great American art form".

For the studios, a good new idea has become just too scary a road to travel. Inception, they will tell you, is an exceptional movie. And movies that need to be exceptional to succeed are bad business. "The scab you're picking at is called execution," says legendary producer Scott Rudin (The Social Network, True Grit). "Studios are hardwired not to bet on execution, and the terrible thing is, they're right. Because in terms of execution, most movies disappoint."

With that in mind, let's look ahead to what's on the menu for this year: four adaptations of comic books. One prequel to an adaptation of a comic book. One sequel to a sequel to a movie based on a toy. One sequel to a sequel to a sequel to a movie based on an amusement-park ride. One prequel to a remake. Two sequels to cartoons. One sequel to a comedy. An adaptation of a children's book. An adaptation of a Saturday-morning cartoon. One sequel with a 4 in the title. Two sequels with a 5 in the title. One sequel that, if it were inclined to use numbers, would have to have a 7 1/2 in the title.

Debating The Hangover

The timeline of events goes like this:

Last night, I posted the trailer for the sequel to The Hangover.

This morning, my friend David posts the following on Twitter:

Poleaxed by indication that pop culture aesthete @jkottke might actually like Hangover, the execrable frat boy flick

To which I replied a few hours later:

@daveg Are you kidding? That movie is hilarious.

Anil suggested a debate:

@jkottke @daveg I will pay you guys for an Oxford debate about the Hangover's merits, or lack thereof.

And Michael Sippey went there and posted a video of an animated David and an animated me having a debate about The Hangover:

I thought you were a pop culture aesthete.

No, I'm from the Midwest.

You live in Manhattan.

But I grew up eating hot dogs.

But you write about expensive conceptual restaurants and post pictures of contemporary art like that thing at the Museum of Modern Art in New York where the woman sat at the table all summer.

That's a pretty accurate five-line bio of me.

The Hangover 2 trailer

Movie sounds guy

A fascinating look at how a Foley artist makes all of the sounds that find their way into Hollywood films.

(thx, deron)

Free streaming movies for Amazon Prime members

Whoa, Amazon just kicked Netflix and Apple in the nuts. Or poked them in the eye at least. Amazon Prime members can now stream about 5000 movies and TV shows for free. There aren't a lot of new releases, but there's some good stuff in there.

El Bulli documentary

At MoMA on Friday and Saturday: screenings of a German documentary on Ferran Adrià's El Bulli.

For six months of the year, heralded chef Ferran Adrià and his team of experts concoct new dishes for the 30 course menu of the world famous El Bulli Restaurant. Here we watch their behind-the-scenes process, an artistic laboratory of tasting, smelling, designing and carefully recording each new idea, then selecting their top choices.

Expiring Netflix Watch Instantly alerts

queuenoodle is a Twitter account that will tell you when movies expire from Netflix Watch Instantly so you can, uh, watch them. Brought you by Twitter's media pastamaker, Robin Sloan.

Next for P.T. Anderson: Pynchon and Scientology

Speaking of Scientology, P.T. Anderson is working on two movies: 1) a film people are calling The Master about a religious movement similar to Scientology, and 2) an adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice.

Last December, this blog was the first to report that Anderson had written a treatment of Pynchon's seventh novel, and was considering doing a screenplay. Now insiders confirm to Vulture that Anderson has, in fact, obtained the blessing of Pynchon and -- in frequent consultation with the eremite novelist himself -- has not only written a first draft, but is more than halfway done with a second.

James Bond as Bond girl

An interesting take on Casino Royale from Warren Ellis:

In CASINO ROYALE, James Bond is the Bond girl. Look at the way they even show him emerging from the ocean like Ursula Andress. Sexual torture, too, if less creepy-glam than being stripped and painted gold. Vesper Lynd is Bond: never not in control, never without a plan, seducing to further her goals. She has to die so Bond can become her.

Everything is a Remix, part two

Kirby Ferguson is back with the next installment of Everything is a Remix, his examination of remix techniques used in film.

Featured are two of the most extensive borrowers in film: George Lucas and Quentin Tarantino. Part one is available here.

Who said art has to cost money?

Francis Ford Coppola on how filmmakers might make go about making a living in the future.

We have to be very clever about those things. You have to remember that it's only a few hundred years, if that much, that artists are working with money. Artists never got money. Artists had a patron, either the leader of the state or the duke of Weimar or somewhere, or the church, the pope. Or they had another job. I have another job. I make films. No one tells me what to do. But I make the money in the wine industry. You work another job and get up at five in the morning and write your script.

This idea of Metallica or some rock n' roll singer being rich, that's not necessarily going to happen anymore. Because, as we enter into a new age, maybe art will be free. Maybe the students are right. They should be able to download music and movies. I'm going to be shot for saying this. But who said art has to cost money? And therefore, who says artists have to make money?

In the old days, 200 years ago, if you were a composer, the only way you could make money was to travel with the orchestra and be the conductor, because then you'd be paid as a musician. There was no recording. There were no record royalties. So I would say, "Try to disconnect the idea of cinema with the idea of making a living and money." Because there are ways around it.

1950s version of The Empire Strikes Back

Ivan Guerrero remakes recent-ish movie trailers using footage from old movies...for instance, imagine if The Empire Strikes Back came out in 1950:

Guerrero has done several others, including Ghostbusters (1954), Up (1965), and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1951). (via @themexican)

Pirating the 2011 Oscars

Andy Baio presents his annual look at when the Oscar nominated films get leaked online.

Continuing the trend from the last couple years, fewer screeners are leaking online by nomination day than ever. Last year at this time, only 41% of screeners leaked online; this year, that number drops again slightly to 38%.

But if you include retail DVD releases along with screeners, 66% of this year's nominated films have already leaked online in high quality. This makes sense; if a retail DVD release is already available, there's no point in leaking the screener. But I think it's safe to say that industry efforts to watermark screeners and prosecute leaks by members have almost certainly contributed to the decline.

Walter Murch on why 3-D won't work

The problem with using 3-D for feature-length films is not so much the technology or its lack of contribution to the storytelling, it's that human eyes were not designed to focus and converge on images at two different distances. Walter Murch, the legendary sound designer and editor, explains in a note to Roger Ebert:

The biggest problem with 3D, though, is the "convergence/focus" issue. A couple of the other issues -- darkness and "smallness" -- are at least theoretically solvable. But the deeper problem is that the audience must focus their eyes at the plane of the screen -- say it is 80 feet away. This is constant no matter what.

But their eyes must converge at perhaps 10 feet away, then 60 feet, then 120 feet, and so on, depending on what the illusion is. So 3D films require us to focus at one distance and converge at another. And 600 million years of evolution has never presented this problem before. All living things with eyes have always focussed and converged at the same point.

New Orson Welles film?

The Observer reports that an unfinished film shot by Orson Welles in 1972 will be completed and shown to the public.

The Other Side of the Wind portrays the last hours of an ageing film director. Welles is said to have told John Huston, who plays the lead role: "It's about a bastard director... full of himself, who catches people and creates and destroys them. It's about us, John."

(via df)

More Matrix movies HOAX!

[This is a hoax. Sorry to get your hopes up/down. thx, @kimberlyp] According to a report at Ain't It Cool News, Keanu Reeves said that he met with the Wachowskis and that they are working on a "script treatment" for a fourth and fifth Matrix movies that would feature Reeves as Neo.

Says he met the Wachowski's (no emphasis on the word brothers), for lunch over Christmas and stated that they had completed work on a two picture script treatment that would see him return to the world of the matrix as Neo. Says the brothers have met with Jim Cameron to discuss the pro's and con's of 3D and are looking to deliver something which has never been seen again. keanu stated that he still has an obligation to the fans to deliver a movie worthy of the title "The Matrix" and he swears this time that the treatment will truly revolutionise the action genre like the first movie. Wachowski's are working on a movie called "Cloud Atlas" at the moment, once that concludes they will talk again.

And also, there's talk of a Bill & Ted 3. Take a few minutes to let all that sink in before continuing with your day.

Coenfographic

An infographic that stitches together the 15 films that the Coen brothers have made.

Hand Catching Lead

In addition to sculpture, Richard Serra makes films. This is Serra's first film from 1968, featuring a hand's repeated attempts to catch pieces of lead.

Watching just 20 seconds made me surprisingly anxious. (via sippey, i think)

Bill Cunningham film

Looks like Bill Cunningham New York will be showing around the US starting with New York on March 16th. (Film Forum!) And hark, a trailer.

If you don't take money, they can't tell you what to do. That's the key to the whole thing.

The Kids Grow Up

Documentary filmmaker Doug Block popped up on the internet's radar with the release of Home Page in 1998. In 2005, he released the excellent 51 Birch Street, a film about his family.

51 Birch Street is the first-person account of a family's unpredictable journey through dramatic life-changing events. Having observed most of his parents' 54-year marriage, Doug Block believed it to be quite a good one. A few months after his mother's sudden death from pneumonia, Doug Block's 83-year old father, Mike, calls him to announce that he's moving to Florida to live with "Kitty", his secretary from 40 years before. Always close to his mother and equally distant from his father, Doug and his two older sisters were shocked and suspicious. How long had Kitty been an intimate part of their father's life, they wondered.

Block's latest film also deals with his family. The Kids Grow Up is about his relationship with his only daughter Lucy as she prepares to leave for college.

'Just think," says Doug Block's wife, Marjorie, while he trains his camera on her, "when she works all this through in therapy she can take the footage with her. Her therapist won't have to imagine what you were like." Block, a documentary-maker, filmed their daughter Lucy's final year at high school -- interspersed with footage of her over the years. His film, The Kids Grow Up, is ostensibly about how a father copes with the prospect of his cherished only child leaving home to go to college. But there is lots more here. It is about his own childhood - "I was a lousy parent in the main," admits Block's elderly, ailing father -- and about what it means to be a modern dad (friend or father?). It is about the passage of time,and Block's inability to let go of the past and grow up, as his wife -- ever the voice of reason -- puts it during one of their filmed interviews.

How does Block get out of accepting that he has become a grandfather when his stepson and his wife have a baby? By insisting on being called Uncle Doug. "Pathetic," Marjorie says with a smile and a shake of the head.

Bill Murray strikes again

Bill Murray made an absolutely fantastic speech at the National Board of Review Awards last night when introducing Sofia Coppola.

They told me I have two minutes. I'm going to pop this Red Hot [candy, pops in mouth] so I'll be finished in two minutes [mumbling with candy in mouth]. Why do you give this award? Why? Because you have to throw a party. Because you have to compete with the Golden Globes. [Cheers.] We all asked that question. You're able to get out tonight, celebrate - without your relatives - you earned, you deserve it.

But why do you give it to Sofia Coppola? Why? Because you want to encourage her, I think. I think that's the real reason. Look at her. Look at her! She comes from a family, mother and father both very successful, creating entertainments, amusements and thought-provoking work. She wrote a spec script for The Virgin Suicides. The ambition of these young people! Can you believe it? The ambition! She got the job as the director. She directed Lost in Translation in another country in another language, and got a prize for it. [Pause.] God, this is a hot, hot Red Hot. But I'm not going to quit on you people, because I've got another half in my pocket. [Pulls out of pocket and puts in mouth.] I got one-and-a-half in my mouth right now. [Mumbling.]

And the whole bit about life and success and freedom derailing careers and creative work is just spot on gold. (thx, david)

The Dude Abides

PBS is airing a documentary about Jeff Bridges tonight called Jeff Bridges: The Dude Abides. In a short clip from the episode, Bridges visits a The Big Lebowski memorabilia store called The Little Lebowski. Watch the cashier's mind explode as he recognizes who just walked into his store.

And I love how he calls Joel and Ethan "The Brothers". (via devour)

The design of the sci-fi corridor

A long photo essay on the hallways and corridors of science fiction movies and television.

Alien started the kind of corridor-fetishism in screen sci-fi that Kubrick had failed to start with 2001: A Space Oddyssey, since the latter film was so visionary and expensive that practically no-one could even attempt to imitate it.

Instead Roger Christian got inventive with his lower budget and strip-mined an aircraft graveyard, strewing Alien's Nostromo with sections and detailing from WWII bombers. This usage of full-sized 'nurnies' followed the long-established visual effects practice of cannibalising parts from model kits (most especially WWII tanks and destroyers) in order to provide ready-made detailing without resort to custom-crafting and vacuum-forming every last valve and pipe. By the time the 1980s set in, Alien's strip-mined tech was practically de rigeur for screen sci-fi...

(via @moleitau)

Quentin Tarantino's first movie

No, not Reservoir Dogs. It's called My Best Friend's Birthday, which he made for $5000 in 1987. Here's the surviving 36 minutes of footage; the rest was destroyed in a fire.

Some of the ideas and material in this film would be recycled for the Tarantino-penned True Romance screenplay. (via sly oyster)

Quentin Tarantino's favorite films of 2010

1. Toy Story 3
2. The Social Network
3. Animal Kingdom
4. I Am Love
5. Tangled
6. True Grit
7. The Town
8. Greenberg
9. Cyrus
10. Enter The Void

The rest of the list is here.

Strongman

Here's the trailer for Strongman, a documentary about the "The Strongest Man in the World at Bending Steel and Metal":

The film will be playing in NYC at the IFC Center for one week starting on Jan 26th.

Se7en ending with stuffed animals

Surprisingly, the ending scene of Se7en is no less effective with stuffed animals standing in for the actors.

(via @sippey)

Best movie posters of 2010

Two very different lists of the best movie posters from last year: the more indie-oriented list from Mubi and the mainstream one from FirstShowing. The Mubi list is better but you may recognize more of the films from the FirstShowing list.

Ebert's guide to Citizen Kane

In 2004, Roger Ebert wrote A Viewer's Companion to Citizen Kane. It starts off:

"Rosebud." The most famous word in the history of cinema. It explains everything, and nothing. Who, for that matter, actually heard Charles Foster Kane say it before he died? The butler says, late in the film, that he did. But Kane seems to be alone when he dies, and the reflection on the shard of glass from the broken paperweight shows the nurse entering the room. Gossip has it that the screenwriter, Herman Mankiewicz, used "rosebud" as an inside joke, because as a friend of Hearst's mistress, Marion Davies, he knew "rosebud" was the old man's pet name for the most intimate part of her anatomy.

The beauty of Pixar

A nice video tribute to Pixar that weaves together footage from all their films.

(thx, asdhsa)

Cedar Rapids, the movie

Hey everyone I went to college with, they made a movie about the town we went to college in! I don't remember it being this much fun.

This is Cedar Rapids' biggest movie break since Titanic!

Vivian Maier documentary

Last year I posted about the discovery of an extensive body of photographic work by the previously unknown Vivian Maier. Now, a documentary film is in the planning stages and the producers are asking for funds on Kickstarter.

Vivian Maier's photographs were seemingly destined for obscurity, lost among the clutter of the countless objects she'd collected throughout her life. Instead these images have shocked the world of street photography and irrevocably changed the life of the man who brought them to the public eye. This film brings to life the improbable saga of John Maloof's discovery of Vivian Maier. Along with her documentary films, photographs, odd collections, and accounts from people who knew her, we take you on the journey of 'Finding Vivian Maier'.

Backed it!

Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze getting the band back together

Well, maybe. According to the LA Times, the pair are pitching a film around that Kaufman will write and Jonze will direct.

The pair are pitching a new movie. While the plot is being kept under tight wraps -- it's a pitch, so a script has yet to be written, and Kaufman movies are famously hard to describe in a few sentences anyway -- two people familiar with the project said it has been making the rounds to independent financiers in recent weeks.

If it moves forward, the film would reunite the pair in the roles that vaulted them to fame for the first time since "Adaptation" in 2002.

The Tree of Life trailer

Finally, a trailer for Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life:

The year in film, 2010

Some gloriously crazy person took clips from 270 films that were out in 2010 and mixed them together into a coherent narrative:

This year's movies have legitimately transformed my idea of what is creatively possible. To commemorate, I've remixed 270 of them into one giant ass video.

Wonderful. Here's a list of all the films used. (thx, aaron)

Inception iPhone app

The Inception iPhone app takes the music from the movie and remixes it with the sounds around you (office chatter, street noise, etc.).

Inception The App transports Inception The Movie straight into your life. New dreams can be unlocked in many ways, for example by walking, being in a quiet room, while traveling or when the sun shines. You will get realtime musical experiences, featuring new and exclusive music from the Inception soundtrack composed by Hans Zimmer.

Bad: I can hear the people in the office talking, which is the precise thing I'm attempting to prevent by wearing headphones.

Fake Criterion films

Favorite Tumblr of the week: Fake Criterions, featuring mockups of Criterion films that would never get made. For example:

Note: a surprising non-fake Criterion is Michael Bay's Armageddon. Well, it does feature Steve Buscemi and Oscar winners Billy Bob Thornton and Ben Affleck. (thx, george)

Tron Legacy soundtrack by Daft Punk

I have enjoyed nothing (nothing!) more over the past week or so than Daft Punk's Tron Legacy soundtrack. Amazon's got the mp3 album today for only $3.99.

Spinal Tap's IMDB rating goes to eleven

This might be the coolest Easter egg of all time:

(via prosthetic knowledge)

Crazy bad 80s reunion videos

Somehow a Norwegian television station got a bunch of 80s celebrities -- people like Norm from Cheers, Tiffany, Malcolm Jamal Warner, Ricki Lake, Eddie the Eagle, Tanya Harding, Dolph Lundgren, Bananarama, Manuel from Fawlty Towers, etc. etc. -- to do promotional music videos for an 80s nostalgia show and the results are nothing less than a supertrainwreck. First they did "We Are the World":

And followed that up with "Let It Be":

Unbelievable. (via @sportsguy33)

Planetary sci-fi

Matt Webb of BERG shares some of his favorite sci-fi about each of the planets. And the Sun (sort of)...no solar system sci-fi list would be complete without a mention of Sunshine.

In 2057, the Sun is dying, and the Earth is freezing. So the ship Icarus 2 goes on a mission to reignite it with a massive bomb. This is the movie Sunshine, and if you get a chance to see it, watch it on a big screen. The crew themselves watch the Sun close-up, awestruck, from a view-port the exact dimensions of a movie screen, so the Sun fills your picture too and you spend half the film bathing in powerful yellow light. Like some kind of church.

Although I didn't, Matt, appreciate the diss of Pluto. Never forget, my friend.

Charlie Chaplin's Tron

Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times + Tron =

(via migurski)

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Werner Herzog's new film is in 3-D; it's a documentary about the 30,000-year-old drawings recently discovered in the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc cave in southern France.

Herzog gained extraordinary permission to film the caves using lights that emit no heat. But Herzog being Herzog, this is no simple act of documentation. He initially resisted shooting in 3D, then embraced the process, and now it's hard to imagine the film any other way. Just as Lascaux left Picasso in awe, the works at Chauvet are breathtaking in their artistry. The 3D format proves essential in communicating the contoured surfaces on which the charcoal figures are drawn. Beyond the walls, Herzog uses 3D to render the cave's stalagmites like a crystal cathedral and to capture stunning aerial shots of the nearby Pont-d'Arc natural bridge. His probing questions for the cave specialists also plunge deep; for instance: "What constitutes humanness?"

Herzog pursued the film after reading Judith Thurman's 2008 piece about the cave drawings in the New Yorker.

My movie release schedule

Harry Potter 7, pt 1 (Nov 19)
Black Swan (Dec 3)
Tron Legacy (Dec 17)
True Grit (Dec 22)
Somewhere (Dec 22)

I'll be lucky to catch one of these in the theater.

Animated films for grown-ups

Writing for The Morning News, Matthew Baldwin shares some of his favorite animated films for adults, including some of my favorites: The Iron Giant, Spirited Away (and Princess Mononoke), and Wall-E.

Half a decade later I walked into a theater, for reasons I cannot recall, to see Princess Mononoke. It was a revelation-somehow, in my absence, animated films had gotten all grow'd up. There were no songs or dance numbers, the plot was complex and disturbing, and the running time of two hours -- not to mention some shockingly violent scenes -- was far from kid-friendly.

The subtext of Princess Mononoke is one of environmental protectionism-the same theme that Pocahantas wore on its sleeve. Had I had seen the former film in 1995, instead of the latter, I probably never would have left the fold.

Spielberg's Abe Lincoln movie

It's called Lincoln and will be a collection of the talents of Steven Spielberg (director), Daniel Day-Lewis (plays Lincoln), Doris Kearns Goodwin (wrote the book), and Tony Kushner (screenplay).

It is anticipated that the film will focus on the political collision of Lincoln and the powerful men of his cabinet on the road to abolition and the end of the Civil War.

Movie introductions

A video of 250 people introducing themselves in movies.

(via devour)

Kubrick explains 2001

One of the more common reactions to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey is "wait, what the hell happened exactly?" In a 1969 interview with Joseph Gelmis, Kubrick explained the plot in a very straightforward manner:

You begin with an artifact left on earth four million years ago by extraterrestrial explorers who observed the behavior of the man-apes of the time and decided to influence their evolutionary progression. Then you have a second artifact buried deep on the lunar surface and programmed to signal word of man's first baby steps into the universe -- a kind of cosmic burglar alarm. And finally there's a third artifact placed in orbit around Jupiter and waiting for the time when man has reached the outer rim of his own solar system.

When the surviving astronaut, Bowman, ultimately reaches Jupiter, this artifact sweeps him into a force field or star gate that hurls him on a journey through inner and outer space and finally transports him to another part of the galaxy, where he's placed in a human zoo approximating a hospital terrestrial environment drawn out of his own dreams and imagination. In a timeless state, his life passes from middle age to senescence to death. He is reborn, an enhanced being, a star child, an angel, a superman, if you like, and returns to earth prepared for the next leap forward of man's evolutionary destiny.

That is what happens on the film's simplest level. Since an encounter with an advanced interstellar intelligence would be incomprehensible within our present earthbound frames of reference, reactions to it will have elements of philosophy and metaphysics that have nothing to do with the bare plot outline itself.

P.S. Kubrick also stated that HAL was not gay -- "HAL was a 'straight' computer". (via prosthetic knowledge)

Wes Anderson's next film

It'll be called Moon Rise Kingdom, it's set in the 1960s, and check out this cast:

I'm told that Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand and Tilda Swinton are all in talks to star in Moon Rise Kingdom, a script that Anderson wrote with Roman Coppola and which Anderson will direct late next spring.

Tilda + Wes? Major swoon.

A movie about Linotype

Here's a teaser trailer:

From the film's website:

Linotype: The Film is a feature-length documentary film centered around the Linotype typecasting machine invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler. Called the "Eighth Wonder of the World" by Thomas Edison, the Linotype revolutionized printing and society, but very few people know about the inventor or his fascinating machine.

The Linotype completely transformed the communication of information similarly to how the internet is now changing it all again. Although these machines were revolutionary, technology began to supersede the Linotype and they were scrapped and melted-down by the thousands. Today, very few machines are still in existence.

(via df)

Kubrick directs The Beatles in Lord of the Rings?

Possibly the worst idea in the world: a movie version of Lord of the Rings starring The Beatles (with Lennon as Gollum) and directed by Stanley Kubrick. According to Peter Jackson, this was a possibility but JRR said hells no.

According to Peter Jackson, who knows a little something about making Lord of the Rings movies, John Lennon was the Beatle most keen on LOTR back in the '60s -- and he wanted to play Gollum, while Paul McCartney would play Frodo, Ringo Starr would take on Sam and George Harrison would beard it up for Gandalf. And he approached a pre-2001 Stanley Kubrick to direct.

Building the Empire State Building

New York, the documentary film by Ric Burns, contains a great segment on the Empire State Building that is available on YouTube in three parts.

The first two parts are particularly interesting, especially the construction stuff that starts around the five minute mark of part one. Oh, and don't miss the steelworkers throwing red hot rivets around to each other...that starts right near the end of part one and continues into part two. Some other highlights:

- The original Waldorf-Astoria hotel was torn down (with no small amount of glee from the ESB's developers) to make room for the new skyscraper. The hotel was built by William Waldorf Astor, heir to the forture created by his father and grandfather (John Jacob Astor & John Jacob Astor III), on the site of his father's mansion. WW Astor's cousin, John Jacob Astor IV, went down on the Titanic and the Senate hearings into the disaster were held at the hotel.

- The steel beams were custom forged in Pittsburgh and shipped immediately to the building site...some arrived still hot to the touch from the furnaces.

- At the peak of construction, the workers were adding 4-5 stories a week. During one 22-day stretch, 22 new floors were erected. From start to finish, the entire building took an astonishing 13 months to build, about the same amount of time recently taken by the MTA to fix the right side of the stairs of the Christopher St subway station entrance.

- The building didn't become profitable until 1950.

(thx, lily)

Super There Will Be Blood

The Super Nintendo version of There Will Be Blood:

This is pitch perfect. What really puts this video over the top are the sound effects ("milkshake!") and that it doesn't go on too long.

Greatest movie drug scenes

Without even looking, you could probably guess that scenes from Pulp Fiction and Requiem for a Dream would make a list of film's greatest drug scenes. But there are 28 other worthy scenes on there as well.

Bill Murray as other Wes Anderson characters

Man, what if Spike Jonze had made Being Bill Murray instead? Casey Weldon did a series of paintings of Bill Murray as characters from Wes Anderson's movies...but non-Murray characters like Max Fischer, Margot Tenenbaum, and the Baumer.

Prints are available. And these were a part of a show called Bad Dads, consisting of art inspired by various Anderson films. Again, prints are available.

Avatar sequels

James Cameron has announced that there will be not one but two sequels to Avatar, scheduled for 2014 and 2015.

Gorgeous Black Swan movie posters

That one is the best of the lot, but the others are great as well. (via matt)

The Hobbit is moving forward

Alright, the film adaptation of The Hobbit is moving forward. After Guillermo Del Toro stepped down as director a few months ago, I heard that Jackson was set to direct and that's what's happening. They've also cast the perfect Bilbo: Martin Freeman. Freeman was Tim on The Office, Arthur Dent in the Hitchhiker's movie, and John Watson in the excellent new Sherlock series.

Memorable movie quotes extinct?

Writing for the NY Times, Michael Cieply argues that the golden age of quotable movie lines is over. The likes of "go ahead, make my day", "you had me at hello", and "you talking to me?" are becoming more rare...Cieply's most recent example was Daniel Plainview's "I drink your milkshake" from There Will Be Blood and even that wasn't that widespread.

I have a poor memory for movie quotes, but what about the Joker's "Why so serious?" in the Dark Knight, Jack Twist's "I wish I knew how to quit you" in Brokeback Mountain, and the "fucking Merlot" line in Sideways?

The complete Metropolis

If you're in NYC, they're showing the restored version of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (including 25 minutes of recently discovered footage) at the Ziegfeld on West 54th from Oct 22 - Nov 4.

If you're not in NYC, the complete Metropolis is out on Blu-ray and DVD on Nov 16.

Inception Blu-ray/DVD pre-order

Inception is available for pre-order at Amazon in Blu-ray and DVD formats. Release date is December 7th.

The making of The Empire Strikes Back

Vanity Fair has excerpts (photos mostly) of a new book on the making of The Empire Strikes Back.

This is right before Luke fell to his death sleep. (via df)

Powers of Ten

There's finally a stable copy of Charles and Ray Eames' seminal Powers of Ten video available online, courtesy of the Eames Office YouTube account.

Powers of Ten takes us on an adventure in magnitudes. Starting at a picnic by the lakeside in Chicago, this famous film transports us to the outer edges of the universe. Every ten seconds we view the starting point from ten times farther out until our own galaxy is visible only a s a speck of light among many others. Returning to Earth with breathtaking speed, we move inward -- into the hand of the sleeping picnicker -- with ten times more magnification every ten seconds. Our journey ends inside a proton of a carbon atom within a DNA molecule in a white blood cell.

Core77 and Eames Office are holding a competition to see who can make the best 2-minute video response to Powers of Ten.

True Grit by the Coen brothers

Coming this Christmas from the Coen brothers, a remake of the John Wayne classic, True Grit. Here's the trailer:

(via devour)

Five best movie villains of the 2000s

Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men is on the list...click through for the rest. (via @tcarmody)

A movie that tells time

Christian Marclay is working on a 24-hour film called The Clock.

"The Clock" is a montage of clips from several thousand films, structured so that the resulting artwork always conveys the correct time, minute by minute, in the time zone in which is it being exhibited. The scenes in which we see clocks or hear chimes tend to be either transitional ones suggesting the passage of time or suspenseful ones building up to dramatic action. "If I asked you to watch a clock tick, you would get bored quickly," explains the artist in remarkably neutral English. "But there is enough action in this film to keep you entertained, so you forget the time, but then you're constantly reminded of it."

Love that Marclay. Back when I was still doing 0sil8 -- man, what a time capsule that is -- one of the projects that I started working on but never got close to finishing was a clock made up of photographs...1440 photographs, one for each minute of the day.

And on the sixth day, Lucas created Chewbacca

Ok, so this is about how George Lucas came up with idea of Chewbacca (hint: he basically stole it from someone else) and yes it's a bit inside-baseball but it's also a great illustration of how the creative process works and the difficulty of explaining how the magic happened even after the fact.

And that's what this post it about; the creative process. Cultural touchstones like Star Wars might seem to have sprung fully formed from the minds of their lauded creators, but as in all creative endeavours, movie making, web design or this very post, nothing could be further from the truth. Creation is a process, and strangely, by looking at how everyone's favority plush first-mate sprang into existance, we can learn a lot about any collaborative creative endeavour.

Also, the name of Lucas' dog was Indiana.

Roger Ebert talks with Errol Morris

Roger Ebert recently sat down with Errol Morris to talk about his new movie, Tabloid, and a bunch of other stuff. The interview is presented as a series of eight YouTube videos. In this one, he talks about how he got started writing his blog for The NY Times and how that helped him get over his 30-year struggle with writer's block:

He's working on a seventeen-part article about a murder case for the blog. Seventeen parts!

Morris and Herzog in conversation

Errol Morris and Werner Herzog both had films premiere at the Toronto Film Festival. To mark the occasion, they sat down and had a conversation with each other.

That's just part one...Ebert has the rest of it on his blog.

Ebert relaunches At the Movies

The new show will appear on PBS and feature Elvis Mitchell & Christy Lemire as the main hosts.

"I believe that by returning to its public roots, our new show will win better and more consistent time slots in more markets," added Ebert. "American television is swamped by mindless gossip about celebrities, and I'm happy this show will continue to tell viewers honestly if the critics think a new movie is worth seeing."

Stars January 2011.

Logorama

If you've never seen the excellent Oscar-winning short film Logorama, it's available in its entirety on Vimeo:

The uploading party did the music and sound design for the film, so hopefully it won't get yanked down. (thx, @matthiasrascher)

100 great movie moments

A collection by Roger Ebert from 1995. The moments include:

Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta discuss what they call Quarter Pounders in France, in "Pulp Fiction."

Jack Nicholson trying to order a chicken salad sandwich in "Five Easy Pieces."

"I love the smell of napalm in the morning," dialogue by Robert Duvall, in "Apocalypse Now."

1980 Ebert interview with Jodie Foster

From 1980, Roger Ebert interviews Jodie Foster, who is on the cusp of entering college. Here's an anecdote about Taxi Driver at Cannes:

The movie had been controversial. The president of the festival jury, Tennessee Williams, already had vowed that it would win a prize only over his dead body (it won the Grand Prix; Williams lived). The key people at the press conference were Martin Scorsese, the film's director, and Paul Schrader, who wrote it. The French critics were lobbing complex philosophical questions at them in French, and then the English-language translators were wading in, and everyone was getting nicely confused.

Someone finally condescended to ask a question of the little girl down at the end of the table - the one, you might assume, who'd been brought along to France as a treat, along with all the ice cream she could eat. The translator grabbed for the microphone, but Jodie Foster waved him off and answered the question herself, in perfect French. There was an astonished round of applause: At last, an American who spoke French! And less than 5 feet tall!

Napoleon Dynamite opening title sequence

The Art of the Title Sequence interviews Napoleon Dynamite director Jared Hess about how the film's instant-classic title sequence came about.

We actually had Jon Heder placing all the objects in and out [of frame], and then showed it to Searchlight who really liked it and thought it was great, but some lady over there was like "There are some hangnails, or something -- the hands look kinda gross! It's really bothering me, can we re-shoot some of those? We'll send you guys a hand model." We were like "WHAT?!" This of course was my first interaction with a studio at all, so they flew out a hand model a couple weeks later, who had great hands, but was five or six shades darker than Jon Heder. So we reshot, but they're now intermixed, so if you look there are like three different dudes hands (our producer's are in there too.) It all worked our great though and was a lot of fun.

The interview also addresses Pablo Ferro's involvement and the Napoleon Dynamite animated series currently in development.

Dancing in the movies

A really well-done montage of cinematic dancing scenes.

Fermat's Last Theorem

This 45-minute documentary on Andrew Wiles' proof of Fermat's Last Theorem is surprisingly powerful and emotional. Give it until 1:45 or so and you'll want to watch the whole thing. The film is not really about math; it's about all of those movie trailer cliches -- "one man!", "finds the truth!", "fights the odds!", etc. -- except that this is actually true and poignant.

Movies scenes + Cee-Lo's Fuck You

The Dallas Observer has collected a few clips from movies where the music has been replaced by Cee-Lo's Fuck You. The Dirty Dancing one is probably the best:

I wonder how the slow-dance scene at the end of Rushmore would work. Or the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance in Back to the Future. Audio NSFW. (via @erikmal)

Tron sex

Somehow it became NSFW day here at kottke.org. So we're rolling with it, in the hay. Here's the Tron version of the Kama Sutra. It is so very NSFW even though everyone stays fully clothed in glowing blue garments.

Francois Truffaut's last interview

The New Yorker has published an interview with Francois Truffaut conducted before his death in 1984.

Cardullo centers the conversation around Truffaut's first feature film, "The 400 Blows," the overwhelming success of which, in 1959, was a key moment in the launching of the French New Wave. As such, he gets Truffaut to talk about what went into the beginning of his career and how his filmmaking process was influenced by his years of work as a film critic and his lifelong obsession with watching movies.

Freakonomics trailer

The movie comes out on iTunes first (Sept 3) and then in theaters a month later.

Black Swan trailer

The first trailer for Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan is out. Natalie Portman plays an out-of-control ballerina.

Kalle Fucking Fincher

I totally didn't know that David Fincher was directing an American version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo with Daniel Craig as Blomkvist. First the Facebook movie and now this. Fincher's career continues to develop in a curious fashion.

Asexuality documentary

Over on Kickstarter, Angela Tucker is trying to raise the last $1500 she needs to edit her documentary on asexuality.

In 2000, David Jay came out to his parents. But they were surprised by what he told them. He was asexual. David knew he was not alone in his feelings. He bought the url for asexuality.org and soon, the forum he created for people to talk about their experiences as asexuals was abuzz around the globe online and on talk shows like The View. Inspired by the LGBT movement of the 1960s, Jay is growing the asexual movement. Other members of his community are skeptical that they are a part of the LGBT community. But Jay and experts, like Dan Savage, agree that asexuals are a sexual minority and therefore eligible. But are members of the sex-positive PRIDE march going to accept a group that has rejected sex?

Live from February 1996

Roger Ebert just tweeted:

Terry Gross is re-running an interview with Gene Siskel and me on NPR's "Fresh Air" today.

The episode isn't up on NPR's site yet, but a search of the archives turns up only one hit for Gene Siskel on Fresh Air:

Film Critics GENE SISKEL and ROGER EBERT join Terry Gross on stage in Chicago for a "live" audience version of Fresh Air. This was recorded in February 1996. The duo began their TV collaboration in 1975 on Chicago Public Television station WTTW. After two successful season, the program became a national PBS show. In 1981 it moved to commercial television.Their show is now known as "Siskel and Ebert" and is heard in 180 markets. Gene Siskel is film colmnist for the Chicago Tribune, and Roger Ebert is critic for the Chicago Sun-Times. "Siskel and Ebert" has been nominated for five national emmy awards. Ebert has recieved a Pulitzer Prize for film criticism.

I don't know how people in the industry feel, but for me, the internet is the best thing that ever happened to radio.

The real Charlie Chan

Early proto-film-noir-hero/Chinese-American stereotype Charlie Chan was based on a real detective in Honolulu:

Biggers read about him in the newspaper. His real name was Chang Apana. He was born, around 1871, in Waipio, a village outside Honolulu. His mother, Chun Shee, was also born in Hawaii. People from China had settled in what were then called the Sandwich Islands, beginning in the late seventeen-seventies. Sugarcane had been cultivated in China for centuries, and the first person to grow it for sugar processing in the Sandwich Islands was a man named Wong Tze-chun, who arrived from China in 1802. Chang Jong Tong, Chang Apana's father, probably travelled from China to Hawaii in the eighteen-sixties. In the second half of the nineteenth century, some forty-six thousand Chinese laborers made that journey. In 1866, when the sugarcane trade was booming, Mark Twain went to Hawaii to report for the Sacramento Union. "The Government sends to China for coolies and farms them out at $5 a month each for five years," Twain wrote. When Chang Jong Tong's five years were up, he took his wife and children and headed home, to the tiny village of Oo Sack, south of Canton...In 1881, when Chang was about ten years old, his parents sent him to Oahu, with an uncle; he never returned to China...

In the nineteen-tens, he was part of a crime-busting squad. His escapades were the stuff of legend. He was said to be as agile as a cat. Thrown from a second-floor window by a gang of dope fiends, he landed on his feet. He leaped from one rooftop to the next, like a "human fly." When he reached for his whip, thugs scattered and miscreants wept. He once arrested forty gamblers in their lair, single-handed. He was a master of disguises. Once, patrolling a pier at dawn, disguised as a poor merchant--wearing a straw hat and stained clothes and carrying baskets of coconuts, tied to a bamboo shoulder pole--he raised the alarm on a shipment of contraband even while he was being run over by a horse and buggy, and breaking his legs. He once solved a robbery by noticing a strange thread of silk on a bedroom floor. He discovered a murderer by observing that one of the suspects, a Filipino man, had changed his muddy shoes, asking him, "Why you wear new shoes this morning?"

Warner Oland, who played Chan in most of the films, was Swedish. In yellowface, he also played Fu Manchu and other east Asian characters. In 25 years as an actor, he made 96 films, including playing lead in as many as 4 Charlie Chan films a year in the 1930s. Here, Kartina Richardson talks about his performance as the half-Chinese warlord Mr Henry Chang in Shanghai Express:

Race in Film: Shanghai Express from Mirror on Vimeo.

Awesome detail only for me (and literary nerds like me): Yunte Huang, a UC-Santa Barbara professor who wrote the new history of Charlie Chan, also wrote a terrific book about transpacific American literature (for some reason, everyone forgets that almost all of Moby Dick is set in the Pacific) and translated Ezra Pound's Pisan Cantos into Chinese.

via Charles Bernstein and Roger Ebert

The year of Metropolis

All summer (depending on what city you live in), a restored extended edit of Fritz Lang's 1927 science-fiction avant-spectacle Metropolis has been playing in American theaters, augmented by a nearly full-length print discovered at Buenos Aires's Museo del Cine in 2008:

Adolfo Z. Wilson, a man from Buenos Aires and head of the Terra film distribution company, arranged for a copy of the long version of "Metropolis" to be sent to Argentina in 1928 to show it in cinemas there. Shortly afterwards a film critic called Manuel Pena Rodriguez came into possession of the reels and added them to his private collection. In the 1960s Pena Rodriguez sold the film reels to Argentina's National Art Fund - clearly nobody had yet realised the value of the reels. A copy of these reels passed into the collection of the Museo del Cine (Cinema Museum) in Buenos Aires in 1992, the curatorship of which was taken over by Paula Felix-Didier in January this year. Her ex-husband, director of the film department of the Museum of Latin American Art, first entertained the decisive suspicion: He had heard from the manager of a cinema club, who years before had been surprised by how long a screening of this film had taken. Together, Paula Felix-Didier and her ex-husband took a look at the film in her archive - and discovered the missing scenes.

I wrote a chapter of my dissertation about Lang, so I was pretty familiar with how the film had been hacked and mangled. Early cinema was a lot like the early years of print books. No two extant copies of Shakespeare's First Folio are exactly the same, because the printer made small changes and corrected errors before finishing each one. Likewise, filmmakers and producers made edits on the fly, and different countries, and sometimes different theater owners, would recut prints to suit their taste. Without an original master print, most early movies have been restored, screened, and transferred to disc in versions cobbled together from various sources, in most cases still quite different from what was initially shown to the public. Metropolis was really only different in that we knew most of the content of the scenes that had been cut.

If you haven't seen Metropolis this summer, you may have seen Inception, another science-fiction movie featuring corporate intrigue, a sentimental subplot, and a setting consisting of multiple levels of a highly allegorical dreamlike city. Annalee Newitz goes deeper, finding subtle affinities with the dream-city of Inception and another Metropolis, the utopian city imagined by King Camp Gillette, who woud go on to invent the safety razor.

Gillette wanted to solve the problem of social inequality with his perfect city, which he named Metropolis. The city, which he outlines in his book The Human Drift, would be built on top of Niagara Falls. Gillette wanted to Nikola Tesla design a water-powered electrical grid, which would be amply supplied with energy from the falls.

The sidewalks of the city would be transparent so that workers laboring beneath the buildings, dealing with plumbing and other infrastructure, would have light. But Gillette also wanted the city's residents to see the people at work below their feet. The idea was to prevent people from forgetting about all the essential work that goes into making a city run.

Freud compared the unconscious to a city:

Now let us, by a flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity with a similarly long past--an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one.

And in The Human Drift, King Gillette talks about a city's economy like the unconscious, too, and panics and depressions like a neurosis:

Never in the history of the world has business been organized as a whole in any country. It has always been a tangled skein beyond the power of man to unravel. It has been impossible to regulate supply and demand within reasonable limit, simply because every man is for himself, and he never knows what the rest of the world is doing. As a result, we have a constant fluctuation in prices of articles of consumption. At one time the whole country is overstocked with certain lines of goods, and there is a depression of prices. Then the manufacturers shut down or restrict the output, and the next thing we hear is that the whole country is short of these goods. It is here that the institution of speculation, or gambling in necessities, has its birth; and this lack of knowledge and power to regulate supply and demand, is, in part, the cause of our periods of depression and failure.

The solution, in both cases, is to become aware of those subterranean, unknown forces, and bring them into consciousness.

Finally, and less depressingly, there's Janelle Monae, whose terrific album The ArchAndroid, is part of a suite titled Metropolis, which also creates a kind of imagined not-quite-retro-future that tries to touch on the uneasiness in culture.

Also, you may think Lang's and Gillette's Metropolis had some funky horns, but clearly not a horn section as funky as this.

Urbanized

The next film in Gary Hustwit's design trilogy (after Helvetica and Objectified) is Urbanized, an investigation of urban design.

Who is allowed to shape our cities, and how do they do it? Unlike many other fields of design, cities aren't created by any one specialist or expert. There are many contributors to urban change, including ordinary citizens who can have a great impact improving the cities in which they live. By exploring a diverse range of urban design projects around the world, Urbanized will frame a global discussion on the future of cities.

Christopher Nolan's Implementation

What if Dom Cobb and his team from Inception were management consultants instead of dream extractors? This:

DiCaprio takes a helicopter to Wharton, where he meets his father. "Who's your best student in the visual representation of quantitative information?"

Ellen Page walks a few steps behind DiCaprio onto a roof. He turns to her. "You have three minutes to make a PowerPoint presentation that will take me three hours to click through."

Great Bill Murray interview

This has been linked around quite a bit in the last week, but it's worth a look if you haven't read it and like Bill Murray at all. According to the article, this is only the fourth or fifth time that Murray has been interviewed in the past ten years. On his involvement with Garfield: The Movie:

No! I didn't make that for the dough! Well, not completely. I thought it would be kind of fun, because doing a voice is challenging, and I'd never done that. Plus, I looked at the script, and it said, "So-and-so and Joel Coen." And I thought: Christ, well, I love those Coens! They're funny. So I sorta read a few pages of it and thought, Yeah, I'd like to do that.

[...] So I worked all day and kept going, "That's the line? Well, I can't say that." And you sit there and go, What can I say that will make this funny? And make it make sense? And I worked. I was exhausted, soaked with sweat, and the lines got worse and worse. And I said, "Okay, you better show me the whole rest of the movie, so we can see what we're dealing with." So I sat down and watched the whole thing, and I kept saying, "Who the hell cut this thing? Who did this? What the fuck was Coen thinking?" And then they explained it to me: It wasn't written by that Joel Coen.

And I love that he loved Kung Fu Hustle so much...I agree that it is underrated.

Best sites for film criticism

An annotated list of the best film criticism blogs. (via the house next door)

Moon opening title sequence

The Art of the Title Sequence blog highlights the opening titles for Moon. Love, love, love that song...the whole soundtrack (by Clint "Requiem for a Dream" Mansell) is good actually.

Ferris Club (or maybe Fight Bueller?)

Ferris Bueller. Fight Club. You see where this is headed, right?

Well done. (via matt)

Tarkovsky films online for free viewing

If Smashing Telly were still going, this would be perfect for it: every feature-length Andrei Tarkovsky film is available for viewing online for free.

Woody Allen's six favorite Woody Allen films

They are: Purple Rose of Cairo, Match Point, Bullets Over Broadway, Zelig, Husbands and Wives, and Vicky Cristina Barcelona. As Ebert said, "wrong".

100 greatest movie insults

Pretty good...except that they forgot Corky St. Clair's "I hate you and I hate your ass face" from Waiting for Guffman.