February 3, 2007
[movies] When Harry met Sally Recut — the romance film with Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan as a thriller … ‘Don’t Fuck with Mister Zero.’ [via Metafilter]
January 29, 2007
[film] What if Ferris Bueller really was sick? — another remixed film trailer. [via Sore Eyes]
January 5, 2007
[movies] Ask Metafilter: Why is the CGI in Jurassic Park so good? ‘…largely because of Spielberg’s restraint. ILM’s ambitions were commensurate with their abilities: their animators could create convincing scaly creatures, and that’s what they did. They could not create convincing CG cities, battlefields, or human faces, and they didn’t try. Additionally, they did a great job of simulating how large, heavy creatures move.’
December 10, 2006
[film] Hot Fuzz — another trailer this time for the new movie from Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and Edgar Wright. [via Sore Eyes]
December 9, 2006
November 23, 2006
[movies] The Top 10 Movie Spaceships … ‘The Nostromo is little more than a space tugboat, pulling a giant ore refinery through space. Though it has no weapons, when given the (famously complex) command to self-destruct, it really goes off with a bang. An underrated ship, it could land on planets and scope out foreign lifeforms… which turned out to be not such a great idea after all.’
November 19, 2006
[film] Who killed Superman? — more from the Guardian on the true story behind the movie Hollywoodland … ‘As with the many theories that swirl around the unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short – the tortured and mutilated Black Dahlia – there are too many contradictory pieces to assemble a single coherent jigsaw puzzle of Reeves’ death/murder. Or rather, there are perhaps three jigsaws with not enough pieces to complete any of them.’
November 7, 2006
[comics] Come fly with me — the Guardian previews the film Hollywoodland – includes an interview with Ben Affleck on playing George Reeves … ‘When the actor George Reeves died in 1959, the headline ran: “Super hero, out of work, kills Self”.’
November 2, 2006
[books] My Mother and the Dahlia — James Ellroy on the Black Dahlia and his Mother … ‘I wrote six good novels and crashed Betty and Jean with The Black Dahlia. It was a salutary ode to Elizabeth Short and a self-serving and perfunctory embrace of my mother. I acknowledged the Jean-Betty confluence in media appearances and exploited it to sell books. My performances were commanding at first glance and glib upon reappraisal. I cut my mother down to sound-bite size and packaged her wholesale. I determined the cause of my ruthlessness years later. She owned me…’
October 31, 2006
[movies] 40 Things That Only Happen In Movies … ‘Anyone can land a 747 as long as there is someone in the control tower to talk you down.’
October 30, 2006
[film] Good Day, Mr. Kubrick! — in 1984 Stanley Kubrick placed an advert in Variety asking for audition tapes from unknown actors for his next film Full Metal Jacket – Brian Atene’s amazing tape has been posted to YouTube along with an update from the actor in 2006. Go watch, you won’t regret it… ‘D’You Wanna Know Somethin’!? I Scared. I Scared.’ (more…)
October 14, 2006
[comics] ‘300’ Comic-to-Screen Comparison — blog entry comparing images from Frank Miller’s comic on the Battle of Thermopylae to the movie trailer for 300. [via linkbunnies.org]
October 11, 2006
[film] Ask Metafilter: Borat Ruined my Life … ‘Last year, a guy came to my town claiming to be filming a documentary for Kazakhstan. He recruited my friend John to be in it. John signed the papers and everything- that’s not the issue. However, the producers got John really drunk and he said some things he really regrets that made it to the final cut. John’s terrified that everyone’s going to see the movie and think he’s an awful human being (which he’s not). He’s very distraught…’
September 9, 2006
[movies] The Queen Trailer — it’s probably a very British thing but I’m really looking forward to watching Helen Mirren’s performance in a film about the Queen’s reaction to the death of Diana.
June 28, 2006
[wikipedia] My Wikipedia Contrail: Alfred Henry Hook — I took a look at this because I wondered what happed to Hooky from Zulu after the Battle of Rourke’s Drift … ‘In the film Zulu, Hook is portrayed as an insubordinate malingerer and drunkard who only comes good during the battle. In fact he had been awarded Good Conduct pay shortly prior to the battle, and reports also suggest he was a teetotaller.’
June 6, 2006
[pi] The Mountains of Pi — the 1992 New Yorker article which influenced Darren Aronofsky’s Pi about two mathematicians who build supercomputers in their Brooklyn flat. ‘…the digits of pi may ramble forever in a hideous cacophony, which is a kind of absolute perfection to a mathematician like Gregory Chudnovsky. Pi looks “monstrous?” to him. “We know absolutely nothing about pi,” he declared from his bed. “What the hell does it mean? The definition of pi is really very simple — it’s just the ratio of the circumference to the diameter — but the complexity of the sequence it spits out in digits is really unbelievable. We have a sequence of digits that looks like gibberish.” “Maybe in the eyes of God pi looks perfect,” David said, standing in a corner of the room…’
May 30, 2006
[film] Blade Runner Final Cut Due … ‘Warner Home Video will issue a new remastered director’s cut of the classic SF movie Blade Runner in September now that it has cleared up rights issues, followed by a theatrical release of a version promised to be truly director Ridley Scott’s final cut, Variety reported.’ [via Feeling Listless]
[film] Predilections — a profile of Errol Morris … ‘I like the idea of making films about ostensibly absolutely nothing,” Morris says. “I like the irrelevant, the tangential, the sidebar excursion to nowhere that suddenly becomes revelatory. That’s what all my movies are about. That and the idea that we’re in possession of certainty, truth, infallible knowledge, when actually we’re just a bunch of apes running around. My films are about people who think they’re connected to something, although they’re really not.’ [via Kottke]
[film] An Inconvenient Truth — movie trailer for Al Gore’s documentary about climate change.
May 26, 2006
[comics] Warren Ellis on Superman Returns: ‘…[the Superman Returns Trailer] hits the high points of the mythos in a sequence of painterly, carefully composed shots over an altered John Williams score. My appreciation of the Superman movies stops about halfway through the first one, but those high points have over the years accreted the strange magic of Judeo-Christian myth about them, and as a writer I can admire that.’ [from Bad Signal]
May 11, 2006
[comics] He say Blade Runner — BeaucoupKevin posts a page from Marvel’s comic adaptation of Blade Runner.
May 8, 2006
[film] Top 10 Sci-fi Films — voted by a panel of scientists. Aubrey Manning on 2001: ‘…the brilliance of the simulations – still never done better despite all the modern computer graphics. The brilliance of using Brazilian tapirs as ‘prehistoric animals’. The brilliance of the cut from the stick as club, to the space shuttle. Kubrick declaring that once tool use begins – the rest is inevitable. Hal: the first of the super computers with its honeyed East-Coast-Establishment voice.’
May 3, 2006
[comics] But Is It Art? — interview with Dan Clowes and Terry Zwigoff. Clowes on Conceptual Art: ‘I don’t want to come off like one of those Republicans picking on the NEA, like, “Oh this guy pissed on a crucifix and called it art.” That’s not what this is about. But when I was in art school, people literally were bringing in the tampon in the teacup.’ [via Robot Wisdom]
[comics] Superman Returns Trailer … ‘You’re Bald.’
May 1, 2006
[comics] Daniel Clowes Talks Confidential — Clowes interviewed regarding Art School Confidential … ‘I figured we’d work on (Ghost World footage) a bit and be done in two weeks. Cut to a year later and we are still struggling and rearranging scenes and changing the music and doing all of these drastic and subtle things. It made me realize how fluid the medium of film was. You can change a film entirely — you can give the two different editors the same footage and they’ll make two entirely different films…. It got me excited about trying to figure out how to edit and change comics after the fact.’
April 29, 2006
[film] It Becomes a Self-fulfilling Thing — a discussion between Errol Morris and Adam Curtis … ‘Where people do set out to have conspiracies, they don’t ever end up like they’re supposed to. History is a series of unintended consequences resulting from confused actions, some of which are committed by people who may think they’re taking part in a conspiracy, but it never works out the way they intended.’ [via Kottke’s Links]
April 24, 2006
[film] 102 Essential Movies — interesting list from Jim Emerson. ‘… [these] were the movies you just kind of figure everybody ought to have seen in order to have any sort of informed discussion about movies. They’re the common cultural currency of our time, the basic cinematic texts that everyone should know, at minimum, to be somewhat “movie-literate.”‘
April 20, 2006
[films] Film of the Book: Top 50 Adaptations Revealed — a list of best book to film adaptations includes Frank Miller’s Sin City.
April 15, 2006
[film] Snakes on a Blog — a blog for the movie Snakes on a Plane … ‘I want these motherfucking snakes off the motherfucking plane!’
March 24, 2006
[ning] Snakes on a Plane Quote Tracker — suggest dialog for upcoming film Snakes on a Motherfucking Plane … ‘Wait… Wait… WHAT’s loose on this motherfucker?’ [via Yoz]
March 18, 2006
[comics] The Vendetta Behind ‘V for Vendetta’ — another article on Vendetta and Alan Moore from the NYT … ‘[Moore] resides in the sort of home that every gothic adolescent dreams of, one furnished with a library of rare books, antique gold-adorned wands and a painting of the mystical Enochian tables used by Dr. John Dee, the court astrologer of Queen Elizabeth I. He shuns comic-book conventions, never travels outside England and is a firm believer in magic as a “science of consciousness.” “I am what Harry Potter grew up into,” he said, “and it’s not a pretty sight.” Actually, he more closely resembles the boy-wizard’s half-giant friend Hagrid…’ [via BeaucoupKevin]
[comics] D for Vendetta — Wired News Review … ‘From the start, Larry and Andy Wachowski, the Matrix brothers, pack Vendetta with literary, religious, political and pop culture references: the Sex Pistols and The Girl From Ipanema, The Count of Monte Cristo and Beethoven, Twelfth Night and Benny Hill.’
March 17, 2006
[funny] Must Love Jaws — what if Sheriff Brody learned to love Jaws?… ‘Love comes to the surface.’ [via BeaucoupKevin]
[comics] Jonathan Ross reviews V for Vendetta: ‘Despite postponing the release date from last November to allow more time for post-production work, the film looks cheap and lacks any sense of time or place. Throw in Matrix veteran James McTeigue’s flat direction and you have a woeful, depressing failure. If it had been called V for Vasectomy I could scarcely have found it a less enjoyable experience…’ [via Haddock]
March 11, 2006
[comics] Nostalgic Superman Montage Trailer — looks like part of the build up for Superman Returns. [via Metafilter]
March 3, 2006
[comics] ‘$1m a minute to film? No problem’ — Neil Gaiman discusses the relationship between comics and movies … ‘Last week an interviewer asked me whether I thought that the recent success of superhero movies meant that we might see a world in which comics that don’t include the capes-and-tights brigade might also have a chance at making it onto the silver screen. “You mean comics like Road to Perdition, Ghost World, Men in Black, A History of Violence, Sin City, From Hell, American Splendor…?”‘
February 24, 2006
[film] Peter Bradshaw reviews Capote … ‘[In Cold Blood] virtually invented the modern genre of reportage. The true-life nature of his subject – the brutal slaying of a farmer’s family in Kansas – had a horrible, unacknowledged sexiness that polite literary fiction could not match; reality gave it ballast and sinew, and Capote awarded himself the novelist’s licence to intuit feelings, ideas, moods. Readers then as now struggled to see how the metropolitan gadfly who wrote Breakfast at Tiffany’s could have moved on to this. It was as if Audrey Hepburn has stopped singing Moon River and taken a chainsaw to George Peppard. How the heck had this aesthete-weakling armwrestled American reality into submission?’
February 13, 2006
[film] Art School Confidential Quicktime Trailer … from Dan Clowes and Terry Zwigoff. [via Pete’s Linklog]
December 16, 2005
[movies] Vision of Hell — a Guardian article which asks: What Makes a Great War Film? … ‘It is easy to understand why Jane Fonda abominated The Deer Hunter. The Vietnamese characters are not sympathetic or deep, the American soldiers are, and the movie ends with the survivors sitting around the table, singing God Bless America. But that simplistic summary, and Fonda’s hostility, mischaracterise the subtlety and complexity of Cimino’s feature: the tender slowness with which he describes the home town the conscripts come from, which makes you understand the coldness of the American war machine, the depth of the betrayal involved in hurling trusting young patriots into an incomprehensible nightmare for which their upbringing has not prepared them, and the true, lingering nature of war wounds.’
December 15, 2005
[movies] Letters to Walken — amusing Christmas Letters to Christopher Walken … ‘Mr Walken, Please, will you come Dance at my Birthday Party?’ [via linkbunnies.org]
November 19, 2005
[movies] Glanced at: Superman Returns Teaser Trailer
November 18, 2005
[books] Blink: The Movie — Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink to be turned into a movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio?! ‘…we were curious to hear what [Gladwell] had in mind for the movie. He tells us, “It takes a single character from Blink — Silvan Tompkins — and fashions an entirely new story around him, about what it means to be someone who can read other people’s thoughts.”‘
November 3, 2005
[soundboard] The Shining Soundboard — yet another flash soundboard using clips from The Shining … ‘Does it matter to you at all that the owners have placed their complete confidence and trust in me, and that I have signed a letter of agreement, a contract, in which I have accepted that responsibility? Do you have the slightest idea what a moral and ethical principle is, do you? Has it ever occurred to you what would happen to my future if I were to fail to live up to my responsibilities? Has it ever occurred to you? Has it?!’
October 2, 2005
[film] His ‘Secret’ Movie Trailer Is No Secret Anymore — NYT on the remixed Shining trailer … ‘The challenge? Take any movie and cut a new trailer for it — but in an entirely different genre. Only the sound and dialogue could be modified, not the visuals, he said. Mr. Ryang chose “The Shining,” Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror film starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall. In his hands, it became a saccharine comedy — about a writer struggling to find his muse and a boy lonely for a father. Gilding the lily, he even set it against “Solsbury Hill,” the way-too-overused Peter Gabriel song heard in comedies billed as life-changing experiences’
September 30, 2005
[film] Shining Trailer — a new family film from Stanley Kubrick … ‘Sometimes… what we need the most is just around the corner.’
September 21, 2005
[film] Actress Mirren’s Queen unveiled — BBC News on Helen Mirren playing the Queen … ‘Mirren, 60, is pictured reading news of the death of Diana in the movie, which is called The Queen. Directed by Stephen Frears, it is set in the week following the crash which killed Diana and her lover Dodi Fayed in August 1997.’
September 11, 2005
[film] Interview with Dave McKean — Guardian Online interviews the comic creator and director of MirrorMask … ‘Q: Can you instantly tell if you’re watching computer generated images in a movie? A: Yes, although the integration is sometimes so clever it is hard to be sure. I think some images that are unashamed to look fabricated can be fascinating in their own right, especially as many make use of what computers can do very well, creating complexity, adding complex systems to manmade simple basic building blocks.’ [Related: MirrorMask Trailer]
August 27, 2005
[film] Don’t Let Yourself Get Attached To Anything — a lookback at Michael Mann’s Heat … ‘McCauley is perhaps the part that De Niro played that is closest to the actor’s own personality: a screen, a cipher, depthless, icily professional, lacking in reflexivity, stripped down to pure Method (‘I do what I do best’). When McCauley meets the love interest, Eadey, he is reading a book on metals.’ [via Blackbeltjones Links]
August 22, 2005
[film] Interview with Errol Morris … from the Huffington Post .. On Robert McNamara and The Fog of War: ‘When people say to me, this is just some self-serving account that McNamara has provided, part of my feeling when I hear that is, “Well, yeah, of course it is!” But that’s not all it is. It’s not just a self-serving account, it’s a complicated account. We all have narratives about ourselves, about who we are and why we do what we do. We have accounts of ourselves for ourselves and we have accounts of ourselves for other people to try to convince them about who we are and our underlying motivations. Part of the premise here is that people reveal themselves through their use of language, through talking.’
August 11, 2005
[comics] Interview with Dan Clowes — mainly covering his new film Art School Confidential … ‘I had a revelatory moment as a child when I was drawing Superman. He had that insignia on his chest, and I was studying it for hours (I think I was 4 or 5). I saw the negative shapes that define the S, but I didn’t get that it was a letter. I would draw those shapes over and over. Then one day I realized, “It’s an S!” It all fit together. “S for Superman, of course!”‘