This site is made possible by member support. 💞
Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
Last year, Taschen came out with a limited edition book on The Making of Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’. Only a couple thousand were made and one of them is selling on Amazon for $1750. This year, they’re releasing a regular edition for a much more reasonable $47. (via @michaelbierut)
Using images found on the internet through Google’s visually similar images feature, NASA, U.S. Geological Survey, and various mapping services, Kelli Anderson recreated part of the Eames’ iconic Powers of Ten as a flipbook. Watch a video here:
Or play around with a virtual flipbook at Anderson’s site. This could not possibly be anymore in my wheelhouse. Here’s the nitty gritty on how she made it happen.
The inspiration for making discontinuous-bits-of-culture into something continuous goes back to 2011. Some of my friends camped out on a sidewalk to see Christian Marclay’s The Clock. Like a loser with a deadline, I missed out-only catching it years later at MoMA. In the day-long film, Marclay recreates each minute of the 24-hour day using clips from films featuring the current time-on a clock or watch. It runs in perfect synchronization with the audience’s day (so: while a museum crowd slumps sleepily in their chairs at 6am, starlets hit snooze on the clocks onscreen.)
There’s a documentary on Steve Jobs coming out called Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine. The director is Alex Gibney, who directed the excellent Going Clear (about Scientology), We Steal Secrets (about Wikileaks), and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. The trailer:
From Aaron Reese at Hopes&Fears, a piece on sci-fi movie sound effects. It’s chock full of interesting tidbits, like where King Kong’s chest-beating sound came from:
Initial attempts hitting a fixed kettle drum with paddled-drumsticks didn’t work, with Spivak saying the sound wasn’t “fleshy” enough. An experiment beating the floor failed as well. So Spivak decided to beat one of his assistant’s chests with drumsticks instead, saying “If wood will not take the place of flesh, then let’s use flesh.” Sure enough, this was the sound used for production.
The stabbing noise in Psycho is a knife plunging into a melon:
In a recording studio, prop man [Bob] Bone auditioned the melons for Hitchcock, who sat listening with his eyes closed. When the table was littered with shredded fruit, Hitchcock opened his eyes, and intoned simply: “Casaba.”
And my favorite, from Terminator 2:
In Robert Patrick’s T-1000 prison break scene, the robot phases through the cell bars with a slurpy metallic sound. Oscar-winning sound designer Gary Rydstrom revealed the effect was achieved by a simple solution from the sound of dog food being slowly sucked out of the can.
Casper Christensen cut together footage from dozens of movie car chases into one big coherent chase. Well, as coherent as you can get when you’re dealing with car chases.
There’s some fun and clever editing in here…I particularly enjoyed the stitching together of Indiana Jones and Axel Foley. And I loved the brief clip of C’était un rendez-vous, which if you haven’t seen it, is a quick and thrilling watch.
In Pitchfork, Susan Shepard writes about how Magic Mike XXL uses strip club music to full advantage.
MMXXL functions more like a musical in that it uses the dance sequences deliberately to advance the plot; Mike doesn’t talk about wanting to get the band back together, he dances about it when “Pony” comes on in his workshop. Big Dick Richie finds the heart of his stripper character dancing to “I Want It That Way”. Malik challenges Mike to “Sex You”. And ultimately, they all find out something about themselves when they create new routines to new songs for the finale. It could transition seamlessly to the stage. They’re even already acting out the lyrics, which are for the most part of “this is what I want to do to you” tradition of R&B.
The film gets at the heart of strip club culture with its scenes at Domina, the exclusive club run by Mike’s former lover and working partner, Rome. All the best strip club ideas come from black clubs, specifically those in the South. Every good innovation in strip club dancing, music, and costume styles started in Atlanta or Houston or Miami clubs. The way the Florida dancers feel when they walk in and see Augustus, Andre, and Malik outdance and outperform them is exactly what it feels like to walk into Magic City from the Cheetah. Here is the future, here is how far behind it you are with your fireman routines and Kiss songs.
Having never been to a strip club in my entire life (WHAT?!! I know! I know!), I had no idea that Nine Inch Nails’ Closer was a strip club staple.
My very first stage performance was to the Revolting Cocks’ version of “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy” and Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer”, about a month after it had come out. It is one of those songs strippers fight over performing to because it’s that good and gets such a crowd response. “Closer” might as well be strip club furniture.
But it makes sense. Closer is one of the catchiest pop songs ever made. Shortly after it came out, I remember going to an on-campus party at which a friend of mine was DJing. He was playing mostly dance music — some club, some top 40ish, and some electronica — but threw on Closer for the benefit of a friend of ours who was a big industrial and NIN fan. Everyone loved it and got out onto the dance floor: the jocks, the ravers, the sorority girls, the physics club geeks. Our friend wasn’t too happy about it though. Somehow, Nine Inch Nails now belonged to everyone. Cultural appropriation is a biiii….
If you are a fan of Raiders of the Lost Ark — and who isn’t? — then this is your holy grail: a feature-length commentary on the movie by Jamie Benning that includes seemingly every tidbit related to the film, including deleted scenes, audio commentary from the cast and crew, behind the scenes video, and much more. An incredible resource in understanding the film.
Benning has also done similarly excellent commentaries for Jaws, Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi. (via @drwave)
Every day, a program written by Julien Deswaef selects a war-related news item from the NY Times, formats it in the style of the infamous Star Wars opening crawl (complete with John Williams’ score), and posts the results to YouTube.
Published yesterday, the crawl for Episode XXVII was taken from a NY Times article about an Obama speech about the Iranian nuclear deal.
Here’s how the project was made and if you’d like to try it yourself, grab the source code. (via prosthetic knowledge)
Ok, so narrowing down all of the beautifully shot movies in the world to a list of just 10 is absurd, but to their credit, the gang at Cinefix manage to mention more than 50 or 60 movies in their top 10 review. If you’ve only seen even a few of these, you’re doing well.
Manhattan, Citizen Kane, The Fall, 2001, Hero, The Tree of Life. Damn.
Hold onto your butts, gang… I just found out, via Pixar’s Michael B. Johnson, that the 3D file manager that Lex uses in Jurassic Park — “It’s a Unix system, I know this” — was a real thing. FSN (File System Navigator) was a demo tool for Silicon Graphics’ IRIX operating system that you could download from their web site.
P.S. In that same thread, Johnson shares that his office was the inspiration for Dennis Nedry’s work area.
For the first time since 2005, Pixar didn’t release a movie last year but are doubling up this year with Inside Out and The Good Dinosaur. Here’s the trailer for The Good Dinosaur, which looks like much more of a just-for-kids movie than Inside Out.
Man at Arms is a YouTube show in which real-life weapons from movies and TV shows are recreated. Recently they made the Bride’s Hattori Hanzo sword from Kill Bill. They started from scratch by building a furnace from before the Edo period (before 1603) to smelt the iron ore.
I know zero about swords, but it looks like these guys really did their homework in making as close to a traditional katana blade as they could. (via devour)
A compilation of some of the world special effects ever to make it to the big screen. Some of these are almost too bad to believe.
(via devour)
Taking inspiration from the opening sequence of Contact, lightyear.fm is a musical journey away from the Earth. As you get farther out (say, 10 light years away, just past star Ross 154 in the constellation of Sagittarius), you hear music that was broadcast on the radio at that time (Gold Digger by Kanye West).
Radio broadcasts leave Earth at the speed of light. Scroll away from Earth and hear how far the biggest hits of the past have travelled. The farther away you get, the longer the waves take to travel there — and the older the music you’ll hear.
This is the coolest.
They showed this 3 minute 30 second behind the scenes video of Star Wars: The Force Awakens at Comic-Con yesterday.
Fans at San Diego Comic-Con’s Hall H were treated to a special look behind the scenes of Star Wars:The Force Awakens by director J.J. Abrams, producer and Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy and writer Lawrence Kasdan. The filmmakers were joined on stage by cast members Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Adam Driver, Oscar Isaac, Domhnall Gleeson, Gwendoline Christie, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford to the surprise and delight of fans.
At the end of the Hall H presentation, the entire Hall H audience of more than 6,000 fans were all invited to continue the celebration and join cast and filmmakers at a surprise Star Wars Fan Concert. The San Diego Symphony performed the classic Star Wars music from John Williams at the Embarcadero Marina Park South.
I have zero interest in Comic-Con, but that would have been pretty cool to see.
Psychologists Dacher Keltner and Paul Ekman served as scientific consultants during the production of Pixar’s Inside Out. Keltner studies the origins of human emotion and Ekman pioneered research of microexpressions. In this NY Times piece, they discuss the science behind the movie.
Those quibbles aside, however, the movie’s portrayal of sadness successfully dramatizes two central insights from the science of emotion.
First, emotions organize — rather than disrupt — rational thinking. Traditionally, in the history of Western thought, the prevailing view has been that emotions are enemies of rationality and disruptive of cooperative social relations.
…
Second, emotions organize — rather than disrupt — our social lives. Studies have found, for example, that emotions structure (not just color) such disparate social interactions as attachment between parents and children, sibling conflicts, flirtations between young courters and negotiations between rivals.
I’ve thought about Inside Out every day since I saw it. Pixar clearly did their homework on the emotional stuff and it paid off.
The opening scenes from dozens of movies, including 2001, There Will Be Blood, Lost in Translation, Seven Samurai, and Star Wars.
(via devour)
On his YouTube channel, Dylan Marron is cutting down films to only include dialogue spoken by persons of color. Under those conditions, Moonrise Kingdom is 10 seconds long. Her is about 40 seconds. Noah is 0 seconds.
(via @riondotnu)
The Iron Giant has been remastered and burnished with a pair of extra scenes for a re-release in US theaters scheduled for the end of September.
Warner Bros. and Fathom Events are teaming up to bring The Iron Giant back to life. The beloved 1999 animated film is being remastered and augmented with new footage, and it’s coming to select American theatres as what the studio’s calling the “Signature Edition” on September 30th. There’ll also be an encore presentation in select theatres a few days later on October 4th.
The movie earned a respectable $23 million at the box office and critical acclaim, but failed to recoup its $70 million production budget. After reading a bunch of positive reviews, including one from my cinematic divining rod Roger Ebert, I was one of the brave few souls to see The Iron Giant in the theater. Hope to catch it again in September. (via @anildash)
Bummer, film site The Dissolve has shut down. They burned bright for a short time.
For the past two years-well, two years this Friday — it’s been our pleasure to put up this site, a site founded on and driven by a love for movies, alongside a company with passion and talent for creating thoughtful, important work. Sadly, because of the various challenges inherent in launching a freestanding website in a crowded publishing environment, financial and otherwise, today is the last day we will be doing that. We’ve had this opportunity thanks to Pitchfork, which has been incredibly supportive of our vision. We couldn’t have asked for a better partner.
I’ve linked to a few of their things over the past few months, and the quality was always high. Tony Zhou has collected a few of his favorite pieces from the site.
Disney is proceeding at full steam in delivering more Star Wars to your eyeballs. Today they announced that Christopher Miller and Phil Lord, the duo behind The Lego Movie, will direct a movie about a young Han Solo.
The screenplay is written by Lawrence Kasdan and Jon Kasdan. The story focuses on how young Han Solo became the smuggler, thief, and scoundrel whom Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi first encountered in the cantina at Mos Eisley.
Release date is May 2018. As Princess Leia once said, “Disney, I hope you know what you’re doing.”
Books loom large in Wes Anderson’s movies. Several of his films open with opening books and Fantastic Mr. Fox is based on an actual book. Here’s a nicely edited selection of bookish moments from Anderson’s films.
In the work of Wes Anderson, books and art in general have a strong connection with memory. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) begins with a homonymous book, as does Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009). The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) begins and ends with a book. Moonrise Kingdom (2012) ends with a painting of a place which no longer exists. These movies have a clear message: books preserve stories, for they exist within them and live on through them.
Saul Bass designed the opening sequences for dozens of films, including North by Northwest, Psycho, West Side Story, and Goodfellas. Here’s a look at some of his best work:
(via art of the title)
I Am Chris Farley is a feature length documentary on the comedian and movie star. Here’s a trailer:
The film is out in theaters on July 31 and will be available as a digital download in August. (via buzzfeed)
Update: I caught I Am Chris Farley the other day on Spike TV and it was great. Worth seeking out. (FYI, it’s on Amazon Instant.) Ian Crouch has a review of the movie for the New Yorker.
A new documentary, “I Am Chris Farley,” which d’ebuts Monday night on Spike TV, frames the sketch as an unqualified triumph, the moment when Farley became a national star. But in the book “The Chris Farley Show,” a rich and illuminating oral history compiled, in 2008, by Tanner Colby and Farley’s older brother, Tom, it is the source of controversy among those who were there. Jim Downey, who wrote the sketch, insisted that Farley’s dancing ability elevated it, so that the audience was celebrating his audacious performance rather than merely mocking his appearance. People were laughing with Farley, not at him-that distinction being one of the essential tensions of Farley’s career. Bob Odenkirk, though, who was a writer on the show, recalled the entire thing as “weak bullshit,” and said that Farley “never should have done it.” Chris Rock, a cast member at the time, viewed it as a dangerous turning point for Farley. “That was a weird moment in Chris’s life,” he said. “As funny as that sketch was, and as many accolades as he got for it, it’s one of the things that killed him. It really is. Something happened right then.”
“Success through failure, calm through embracing anxiety…” This book sounds perfect for me. The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman.
Self-help books don’t seem to work. Few of the many advantages of modern life seem capable of lifting our collective mood. Wealth — even if you can get it — doesn’t necessarily lead to happiness. Romance, family life, and work often bring as much stress as joy. We can’t even agree on what “happiness” means. So are we engaged in a futile pursuit? Or are we just going about it the wrong way?
Looking both east and west, in bulletins from the past and from far afield, Oliver Burkeman introduces us to an unusual group of people who share a single, surprising way of thinking about life. Whether experimental psychologists, terrorism experts, Buddhists, hardheaded business consultants, Greek philosophers, or modern-day gurus, they argue that in our personal lives, and in society at large, it’s our constant effort to be happy that is making us miserable. And that there is an alternative path to happiness and success that involves embracing failure, pessimism, insecurity, and uncertainty — the very things we spend our lives trying to avoid. Thought-provoking, counterintuitive, and ultimately uplifting, The Antidote is the intelligent person’s guide to understanding the much-misunderstood idea of happiness.
I learned about the book from Tyler Cowen, who notes:
[Burkeman] is one of the best non-fiction essay writers, and he remains oddly underrated in the United States. It is no mistake to simply buy his books sight unseen. I think of this book as “happiness for grumps.”
Given Cowen’s recent review of Inside Out, I wonder if [slight spoilers ahoy!] he noticed the similarity of Joy’s a-ha moment w/r/t to Sadness at the end of the film to the book’s “alternative path to happiness and success that involves embracing failure, pessimism, insecurity, and uncertainty”. Mmmm, zeitgeisty!
Inside the Making of Dr. Strangelove is a 45-minute behind-the-scenes documentary about Stanley Kubrick’s kooky masterpiece (and one of my two favorite movies).1
And speaking of Kubrick, director Marc Forster is making a trilogy of films based on Kubrick’s script for The Downslope, a movie about the Civil War. *tents fingers* Interesting…
The other is Rushmore.↩
Brown Bunny, Cannibal Holocaust, The 120 Days of Sodom, and The Last Temptation of Christ… they are among the most controversial movies of all time.
Perhaps a little NSFW. (via devour)
TheTake identifies products and places in movies so you can purchase or visit. For instance, there are dozens of products listed from Jurassic World…you can even play the trailer and product matches will pop up. (via @pieratt)
Tim Grierson and Will Leitch did a pretty good job in this list of All 15 Pixar Movies, Ranked From Worst to Best.
We went back-and-forth on the top two here, but we ultimately had to go with [Wall-E], the most original and ambitious of all the Pixar movies. The first half-hour, which basically tells the story of the destruction of the planet and the devolution of the human race without a single line of dialogue, is total perfection: It’s almost Kubrickian in its attention to detail and perspective, though it never feels cold or ungenerous.
Piece-of-shit Cars 2 is rightly parked at the bottom of the heap, Wall-E is obviously #1, and they correctly acknowledged Up as overrated. I would have rated the original Toy Story lower and Ratatouille higher, but overall: well done.
Stay Connected