July 1, 2010
[kubrick] Go Look: BeaucoupKevin just very much likes this photo of Stanley Kubrick at work. [Previously: Wonderful Pic Of Stanley Kubrick on set of 2001]
June 21, 2010
[kubrick] Scorsese on Kubrick … Martin Scorcese on Stanley Kubrick, Full Metal Jacket, Eyes Wide Shut and the Shining … ‘I also love the visions—the maze, the elevator, Nicholson bouncing a rubber ball across the vast expanses of the hotel lobby to kill time, the enormous golden ballroom, the red Formica bathroom in which Nicholson “meets” the butler. And, perhaps most frightening of all, the vision of an ordinary American family, beautifully acted, who’ve wandered into deep psychic waters.’
May 31, 2010
[movies] Paul Verhoeven: ‘Robocop was a Jesus metaphor’ … ‘The point of Robocop, of course, it is a Christ story. It is about a guy who gets crucified in the first 50 minutes, and then is resurrected in the next 50 minutes, and then is like the supercop of the world, but is also a Jesus figure as he walks over water at the end.’
April 26, 2010
[movies] My Lifelong Pursuit of the Perfect Blade Runner Gun … one man’s obessional pursuit of a perfect replica of Rick Deckard’s gun … ‘In 2006, the screen-used original surfaced after 25 some-odd years and sold at auction last year for $256,000.’
March 31, 2010
[morris] New Details on Errol Morris’ Next Documentary, Tabloid … ‘His next film, Tabloid, is a considerable departure from his previous film, Standard Operating Procedure, and centers on the fascinating figure of former Miss Wyoming, convicted rapist, and dog-cloning supporter Joyce McKinney.’
February 18, 2010
[movies] Kosmograd: Why 2010 wont be like ‘2010’ … why the imagery and portrayal of computers in the 1984 film 2010 doesn’t match up to the computers we use today … ‘Unlike the computers of 2010, the computers in ‘2010’ do not create space. The computers of the Leonov, and even HAL 9000 on the Discovery, are little more than tools or automatons, tactile and solid. Whereas HAL looked out into our world, today we look into the world created within the computer.’
February 12, 2010
[movies] Is Great Cinema Ever The Work Of A Single Man? … how much does a great movie owe to it’s director? … ‘Theoretically, says Loader, it is entirely possible for a film to direct itself. A solid cast and crew can be relied on to fill in the gaps left by a director who is either inept or awol. “Oh, it happens all the time,” he says.’
February 9, 2010
February 2, 2010
[movies] The Director of Downfall Speaks Out on All Those Angry YouTube Hitlers … ‘As for the idea of such a serious scene being used for laughs, Hirschbiegel thinks it actually fits with the theme of the movie. “The point of the film was to kick these terrible people off the throne that made them demons, making them real and their actions into reality,” he says.’
January 30, 2010
[comics] V for Vendetta in Kinetic Typography … ‘Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so let me simply add that it’s my very good honor to meet you and you may call me V.’ (more…)
December 31, 2009
[funny] The Perfect Billboard … ‘My God, it even has a watermark.’
December 23, 2009
[movies] Great Overview Of The Best Of Asian Cinema … my friend Steve has been looking at Asian Cinema from some time now on his blog Things Fall Apart. His review of progress so far is a great jumping on point … ‘The blog has not run the way I thought it would. I started with a list of 15 movies. I still have to cover my favourite 7 (Oldboy, My Sassy Girl, Infernal Affairs, Uzamki, Battle Royale, Suicide Circle and Kairo). I have at least another 20 movies that I know I want to talk about.’
December 22, 2009
[comics] Mike Sterling On Watchmen: ‘…there’s a part of me that wishes the Watchmen film had been an enormous hit, enough so that a sequel would have been inevitable, and that even possibly new comic book follow-ups and tie-ins would have been published. Because really, the fanguish that would have caused would have been epically awesome.’
December 18, 2009
[tv] Let’s Enhance Montage … ‘Lock On and enhance the Zee Axis…’ (more…)
December 15, 2009
[funny] Go Look: The Morgan Freeman Chain Of Command. [via Robot Wisdom]
November 26, 2009
[comics] Go Look: Jack Kirby’s Inglourious Basterds Comic Book Adaptation!
November 11, 2009
[movies] In Praise Of The Sci-Fi Corridor … On the corridors in Alien: ‘Ridley Scott knows that corridors matter in a horror (or ‘haunted house’) movie, but these marvellous sets are also being showcased to sell the gritty and grimy, commercial and industrial reality of the Nostromo as well. The upper sections related to the command deck were dirtied down with gold and black paint after a reshuffle of sections in order to convey the grittier world inhabited and Parker and Brett on the engineering level.’ [via Metafilter]
November 2, 2009
[movies] Rediscovered: A Wonderful Pic Of Stanley Kubrick on set of 2001 … (more…)
October 19, 2009
[movies] Roger Ebert Reviews Alien …
As the sequels (“Aliens,” “Alien 3,” “Alien Resurrection”) will make all too abundantly clear, the alien is capable of being just about any monster the story requires. Because it doesn’t play by any rules of appearance or behavior, it becomes an amorphous menace, haunting the ship with the specter of shape-shifting evil. Ash (Ian Holm), the science officer, calls it a “perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility,” and admits: “I admire its purity, its sense of survival; unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.”
September 29, 2009
[movies] Philip K. Dick on Blade Runner … ‘As for my own role in the BLADE RUNNER project, I can only say that I did not know that a work of mine or a set of ideas of mine could be escalated into such stunning dimensions.’ [via @girlonetrack]
September 7, 2009
[movies] Matt Haughey on Julie and Julia: ‘There was this one scene. Julie is in her cube and she’s ecstatic that a post got 53 comments and she high fives her coworker, and moments later her husband calls and says he just noticed she’s #3 on the most popular Salon blogs list and her arms shoot up out of her cube in victory and I began to cry tears of joy. I sat in the theater thinking about my little blog…’ [via Robot Wisdom]
August 27, 2009
[funny] Go Look: Stormtrooping in the Rain
August 26, 2009
[timeline] Time Travel Timeline … Information is Beautiful provides a visual timeline of time travel movies showing where paradoxes might occur.
July 21, 2009
[comics] After Watchmen, What’s ‘Unfilmable’? These Legendary Texts … Wired looks at some susposedly unfilmable comics and books … On Sandman: ‘Too long. Spanning 74 issues and more than a decade, if you count spinoffs and standalones, Neil Gaiman’s decorated mythopoetic fantasy starring Dream, Death and other revered, abstract personifications is stuck in film limbo. “There is talk of an HBO Sandman,” Gaiman told Wired.com in March, “because no one quite knows what to do with it. But the truth is, if anybody is going to make [it] a movie, it will probably be a kid in film school right now to whom The Sandman was the most important thing ever. It will take the amount of commitment, dedication and madness that Peter Jackson brought to Lord of the Rings to get it on the screen…”‘
June 27, 2009
[movies] Michael Mann Interview … the director of Public Enemies interviewed in the Guardian … ‘Public Enemies is the first movie to attempt to disentangle the Dillinger myth from the facts – until now every other filmmaker has, so to speak, printed the legend – and one wonders, in retrospect, why it took Mann this long to get around to it, so well matched are the gangster’s story and the themes and concerns that have animated Mann throughout his career.’
June 16, 2009
[funny] Dr Manhattan is… Awesome.
June 4, 2009
[funny] Han Solo, P.I. … Star Wars done in the style of Magnum P.I.’s opening credits. [via Waxy]
May 8, 2009
[lists] 10 Best Head-Scratching Stories, Explained … ‘Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth: Jimmy relives his granddad’s life. He finally meets his father, who then dies. Superman can’t save him.’
May 6, 2009
[movies] Top 13 Stupidest Decisions In The History Of Horror Films … ‘Building your house on top of that old cemetery.’
April 27, 2009
[funny] Ask Mefi: I would like a comprehensive list of each offense Ferris and his friends commit during the movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” … ‘There are many cases of fraud in the movie. For example, when one kid is asked, “Do you know Ferris Bueller,” he responds, “Yeah, he’s getting me out of summer school.” [..]
Oh, and in theory, Cameron’s father could go after both Ferris and Cameron for grand theft auto of the Ferrari.’
April 25, 2009
[film] Go Watch: Carousel … I watched this and wondered… Where’s Batman? … ‘Tribal DDB, Amsterdam commissioned us to create a piece of filmed content that could hold its own with Hollywood’s best. Director Adam Berg responded with an idea for an epic ‘frozen moment’ cops and robbers shootout sequence that included clowns, explosions, a decimated hospital, and plenty of broken glass and bullet casings.’
April 21, 2009
[funny] Go Look: Escape From Thom Yorke [via David McCandless]
April 15, 2009
[funny] Uncomfortable Plot Summaries … from postmodernbarney.com … ‘DAREDEVIL: Blind man pisses off crime boss, gets all his girl-friends killed.’
March 25, 2009
[comics] The 20 Best Movies Adapted from Comic Books … interesting list to ponder … ‘American Splendor (2003. USA) Welcome to the esoteric life and times of Harvey Pekar, a cranky file clerk from Cleveland whose cult-fave self-published comix used to get pimped back in the day on the David Letterman show. Paul Giamati does a fantastic job of portraying Pekar, and even more eerie is how dead-on some of the supporting cast are at channelling Robert Crumb and Tobey Radloff. Pretty much a perfect movie about one of the most important autobiographical comics to ever come out of the underground.’
March 18, 2009
[watchmen] Charlie Brooker On Watchmen: ‘Fun as a massive great spectacle, but it surely can’t make any sense whatsoever to anyone who hasn’t read the comic; it was a bit like watching an impressive animated version of a collection of snatched memories of what the comic was like, if you see what I mean.’
March 6, 2009
[comics] Who Makes The Watchmen? … A illustrated guide to the tortured history of the production of the Watchmen movie … ‘Hurm. Snyder and Tse seem to have faithful adaptation. Minus the squid. But keeping the violence. Fine with me.’
[comics] Review of the Watchmen Movie by Pádraig Ó Méalóid … a real Alan Moore fan reviews Watchmen … ‘There is a scene in the film where Doctor Manhattan is being interviewed in a television studio, just before he abruptly leaves the Earth to go to Mars. He describes something – I don’t recall what at this point – as being as useful as a photograph of Oxygen would be to a drowning man. And this is actually the most apt description I can think of for this film: It looks a lot like the original Watchmen book, but has none of its grace, or beauty, or subtlety, or sinuously beautiful timing.’
February 27, 2009
[watchmen] The Visceral Horrors of ‘Watchmen’ Movie Merchandise … On a Comedian Costume: ‘So, how many people are going to wear this without realizing that they’re dressed as a serial rapist who shot a pregnant woman in the face?’
February 20, 2009
[comics] BeaucoupKevin(dot)com: Why I will not be seeing Watchmen … ‘The more I see of the film version of Watchmen, the less I like it, and perhaps more importantly, the more I dislike what it represents: the dumbing-down of something greater for the sake of a false “authenticity” that’s apparent only to those shallowest of readers of the source material.’
[movies] How accurate was Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” about the future? … from Currybetdotnet … On Leonard Rossiter: ‘The problem is that, 6 years before ‘Rising Damp’ hit British television, Leonard Rossiter is basically playing a Russian scientist as if he were Rupert Rigsby…’
February 19, 2009
[movies] The Universe According to Kaufman … profile of Charlie Kaufman … On Synecdoche: ‘Near the film’s end Caden is confronted by a sea of Post-it notes that stretch toward the horizon, each signifying a part of a larger whole. He takes in the expanse and says, “I don’t know why I make it so complicated”.’
February 16, 2009
[quotes] The words of Mickey Rourke, actor, 56 … On his early days in Hollywood: ‘I was bouncing at a transvestite nightclub… and back then all the transvestites were on this shit called Angel Dust, so you’d hit them over the head with a baseball bat but they’d keep on coming…’
February 13, 2009
[movies] A List Of Mindfuck Movies … On 2001: A Space Odyssey: Yes, it’s a meticulously crafted and imminently rational three-course meal of a film. For the first two hours, anyhow. And then, in the final 30 minutes, it serves up a steaming bowl of WTF for dessert.
January 20, 2009
[rEDrUM] Finally Published: All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy by Jack Torrence … you can buy a copy at blurb.com: ‘If it’s nearly impossible to read, let us take a moment to consider how difficult it must have been to write. One is forced to consider the author, heroically pitting himself against the Sisyphusean sentence. It’s that metatextual struggle of Man vs. Typewriter that gives this book its spellbinding power’
December 15, 2008
40 Inspirational Speeches in 2 Minutes … ‘Let us cut out their living guts one inch at a time, and they will know what we can do!’ [via Waxy’s Links]
December 13, 2008
December 12, 2008
[movies] Stuff About Stanley Kubrick – big page of links from a Kubrick fan.
November 29, 2008
[movies] Michael Caine reveals Italian Job ending … ‘The star says he would have saved them by “switching on the engine”, burning off petrol until it righted itself. “I crawl up, switch on the engine and stay there for four hours until all the petrol runs out,” he said. “The van bounces back up so we can all get out, but then the gold goes over…”‘
November 18, 2008
[comics] 75 comics being made into films … they are really digging through the comic archives for film properties. The Hands of Shang-Chi: ‘This kung-fu crazy character emerged from Marvel comics at the height of the early 70s martial-arts boom and the stories incorporated Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu and Nayland Smith characters. Ang Lee is in the producer’s chair with Forbidden Kingdom stunt arranger Woo-ping Yuen set to direct, but most of the news on the project is pretty old.’ [via Robot Wisdom]
October 28, 2008
[movies] Dog Day Afternoon … a page about the Al Pacino movie Dog Day Afternoon which includes a Life Magazine article about the real robbery which inspired the movie … ‘Inside the bank is bedlam. Bank robbers and hostages listening to live radio coverage of the caper. Phone calls going out, phone calls coming in. “I hope they kill you all,” a voice, at the end of the line tells bank manager Barrett. “Make your move now,” whispers another voice, calling every 15 minutes.’