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Speaking of Wes Anderson, The Criterion Collection is releasing The Royal Tenenbaums on Blu-ray in August (pre-order at Amazon). In this age of watching streaming movies on small screens, there are still many that are better in HD with surround sound. (via @moth)
The Hollywood Reporter is reporting that Johnny Depp will be in Wes Anderson’s next movie.
No details regarding the film’s plot or Depp’s character have been revealed, but the project is said to be titled The Grand Budapest Hotel and will mark Texas-born Anderson’s first time shooting in Europe.
A bunch of Anderson regulars are also rumored to be involved: Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Edward Norton, Jeff Goldblum, Adrien Brody, and Willem Dafoe. IMDB has it listed as Untitled Wes Anderson Project, described as “a European story”, and Owen Wilson is the only listed cast member.
Update: I am reminded, via Twitter, that Anderson has done several projects in Europe. The Life Aquatic was filmed in Italy, Hotel Chevalier was filmed in Paris, and Fantastic Mr. Fox was produced in the UK. Anderson lives in Paris full-time now, I believe, so I would expect that many of his projects moving forward will be filmed/set there.
For the next two weeks, Christian Marclay’s 24-hour supercut of clocks from movies will be on display at Lincoln Center. The Clock shows Tue-Thu from 8am to 10pm and continuously over the weekend.
The Clock is a spectacular and hypnotic 24-hour work of video art by renowned artist Christian Marclay. Marclay has brought together thousands of clips from the entire history of cinema, from silent films to the present, each featuring an exact time on a clock, on a watch, or in dialogue. The resulting collage tells the accurate time at any given moment, making it both a work of art and literally a working timepiece: a cinematic memento mori.
Admission is free, the space air-conditioned, and the couches only slightly uncomfortable. Seating capacity is 96, so the venue is posting updates on Twitter about how long the line is. I popped in earlier today expecting to wait 20 minutes or more and walked right in…quicker than the Shake Shack. I think the MoMA is supposed to be showing it in the next year or two and that is sure to be a complete mob scene so this is your chance to check it out with relative ease.
Earlier this year, Daniel Zalewski profiled Marclay for the New Yorker about how the artist created the film.
Marclay had a dangerous thought: “Wow, wouldn’t it be great to find clips with clocks for every minute of all twenty-four hours?” Marclay has an algorithmic mind, and, as with Sol LeWitt’s work, many of his best pieces have originated with a conceit as straightfoward as a recipe. The resulting collage, he realized, would be weirdly functional; the fragments, properly synched, would tell the time as well as a Rolex. And, because he’d be poaching from a vast number of films, the result would offer an unorthodox anthology of cinema.
There were darker resonances, too. People went to the movies to lose track of time; this video would pound viewers with an awareness of how long they’d been languishing in the dark. It would evoke the laziest of modern pleasures-channel surfing-except that the time wasted would be painfully underlined.
Andrew Stanton is working on a sequel to Finding Nemo. Holy cussing cuss!
I’ve been hearing for months that he would come aboard to direct the sequel to Disney-based Pixar’s Finding Nemo, with the idea that Disney would give him another shot behind the camera on a live-action film. I’m told he’s now officially come aboard the Finding Nemo sequel and has a concept the studio loves.
Well, this is something…an ex-jewel thief decides to unretire and rob people with help from his robot butler. I had to look this up on IMDB to make sure it wasn’t something from Funny or Die or College Humor.
Best robotic sidekick since Mr. Spock. Now reboot Lethal Weapon with Donald Glover and a robot playing the Mel Gibson role. (Yes, I meant Donald. Danny is clearly too old for that shit.)
I was reminded earlier today of True Films, Kevin Kelly’s collection of must-see documentaries, educational films, etc.
As dogged as I have been in tracking down great true films, I have seen only a fraction of the estimated 40,000 that have been made. So I am ready for more. However I will only list true films and documentaries that are available as VHS tape or DVDs at consumer prices. In other words, films that are easy for most people to see upon request. I won’t include films that are only shown in theaters, or available via high-priced rentals, or simply out of print.
The site hasn’t been updated in over a year but the content is evergreen. True Films is also available in book and ebook formats.
Back in 1999, as he prepared to make a movie called The Minority Report, Steven Spielberg gathered top science and technology types to an “idea summit” where they would share thoughts on what things might look like in 50 years. To mark the ten year anniversary of the movie’s release, Wired asked a dozen of the summit attendees to reflect on the experience. According to one participant: “There was no shortage of megalomania, although there was good reason for it.”
The prequel to Pixar’s Monsters, Inc. is coming out next summer…here’s a little teaser for it.
(via devour)
Swedish artist Anders Ramsell has recreated about twelve minutes of Blade Runner using 3285 different watercolor paintings. Wow.
See also Stamen’s watercolor maps. (via ★thefoxisblack)
Stanley Kubrick didn’t give long interviews…or didn’t like giving them anyway. But Jeremy Bernstein convinced him to sit down for one, perhaps because Kubrick was a huge chess nerd and Bernstein played chess seriously. So the two of them did this hour-long interview in 1965 that resulted in this New Yorker piece about his life, films, and the then in-production 2001.
During our conversation, I happened to mention that I had just been in Washington Square Park playing chess. He asked me who I had been playing with, and I described the Master. Kubrick recognized him immediately. I had been playing a good deal with the Master, and my game had improved to the point where I was almost breaking even with him, so I was a little stunned to learn that Kubrick had played the Master on occasion, and that in his view the Master was a potzer. Kubrick went on to say that he loved playing chess, and added, “How about a little game right now?” By pleading another appointment, I managed to stave off the challenge.
(via open culture)
It’s a Western film about bounty hunting starring Jamie Foxx, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Christoph Waltz.
The Nicholas Barclay/Frédéric Bourdin case, which David Grann covered in a 2008 article for the New Yorker, has now inspired a documentary film coming out in July.
As I wrote about Grann’s piece:
At some point, Bourdin’s story gets intertwined with that of Nicholas Barclay, a teen who went missing in Texas in 1994. After that, the story proceeds like the craziest episode of Law and Order you’ve ever seen.
(via @aaroncoleman0)
Saw this trailer in front of Moonrise Kingdom last night…Bill Murray plays Franklin Roosevelt in an upcoming movie called Hyde Park on Hudson.
I’m interested in seeing it, but Hyde Park on Hudson is a terrible name.
In the past day, I’ve run across two related theories of how all of Quentin Tarantino’s films are part of the same universe: this video and this post on Reddit. They differ slightly but the Reddit one is more interesting…specifically that Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, etc. take place in the aftermath of Inglourious Basterds and its unorthodox ending to World War II.
Because World War 2 ended in a movie theater, everybody lends greater significance to pop culture, hence why seemingly everybody has Abed-level knowledge of movies and TV. Likewise, because America won World War 2 in one concentrated act of hyperviolent slaughter, Americans as a whole are more desensitized to that sort of thing. Hence why Butch is unfazed by killing two people, Mr. White and Mr. Pink take a pragmatic approach to killing in their line of work, Esmerelda the cab driver is obsessed with death, etc.
You can extrapolate this further when you realize that Tarantino’s movies are technically two universes - he’s gone on record as saying that Kill Bill and From Dusk ‘Til Dawn take place in a ‘movie movie universe’; that is, they’re movies that characters from the Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, True Romance, and Death Proof universe would go to see in theaters. (Kill Bill, after all, is basically Fox Force Five, right on down to Mia Wallace playing the title role.)
(via ★pieratt & @natebirdman)
The teaser trailer for P.T. Anderson’s next film, The Master. Anderson himself cut the trailer — why don’t more director/editors do this?
Written and directed by Academy Award nominee Paul Thomas Anderson (the acclaimed director of, There Will Be Blood, Magnolia and Boogie Nights), this story stars Academy Award winner Philip Seymour Hoffman (Capote) and Academy Award-nominee Joaquin Phoenix (Walk the Line). Set in America in the years following World War II, a charismatic intellectual (Hoffman) launches a faith-based organization and taps a young drifter (Phoenix) as his right-hand man. But as the faith begins to gain a fervent following, the onetime vagabond finds himself questioning the belief system he has embraced, and his mentor. A truly one-of-a-kind drama, which promises magnetic virtuoso performances, the film marks the fifth collaboration between Anderson and Hoffman, following Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and Punch Drunk Love.
As good as this looks, I’m a wee bit disappointed that this isn’t a PT Anderson-directed documentary style film about Doctor Who’s nemesis. Wouldn’t that be something? (via cigarettes & red vines)
In this interview with The Daily Beast, Ridley Scott reveals that he’s currently working on a sequel to Blade Runner.
Funny enough, I started my first meetings on the Blade Runner sequel last week. We have a very good take on it. And we’ll definitely be featuring a female protagonist.
Jesse Thorn had me on Bullseye again to talk links. We discussed Benton’s ham (see if you can make it past the “we’re about to go ham” crack at the beginning) and Senna, one of my favorite films from the past six months.
The person who made Wes Anderson From Above and Tarantino From Below has put together a supercut of distinct sounds from Darren Aronofsky’s films.
(via ★interesting)
Taken from the Studio Stories series included on the Blu-ray versions of Toy Story 1 & 2, here’s a short story about how Toy Story 2 was almost erased before the film could be rendered for theaters.
Woody’s hat disappeared. And then his boots disappeared. And then as we kept checking, he disappeared entirely. Woody’s gone.
(via tested)
Update: Over at Quora, Oren Jacob (the guy in the video) explains in more detail what happened.
First, it wasn’t multiple terabytes of information. Neither all the rendered frames, nor all the data necessary to render those frames in animation, model, shaders, set, and lighting data files was that size back then.
A week prior to driving across the bridge in a last ditch attempt to recover the show (depicted pretty accurately in the video above) we had restored the film from backups within 48 hours of the /bin/rm -r -f *, run some validation tests, rendered frames, somehow got good pictures back and no errors, and invited the crew back to start working. It took another several days of the entire crew working on that initial restoral to really understand that the restoral was, in fact, incomplete and corrupt. Ack. At that point, we sent everyone home again and had the come-to-Jesus meeting where we all collectively realized that our backup software wasn’t dishing up errors properly (a full disk situation was masking them, if my memory serves), our validation software also wasn’t dishing up errors properly (that was written very hastily, and without a clean state to start from, was missing several important error conditions), and several other factors were compounding our lack of concrete, verifiable information.
The only prospect then was to roll back about 2 months to the last full backup that we thought might work. In that meeting, Galyn mentioned she might have a copy at her house. So we went home to get that machine, and you can watch the video for how that went…
Taxi Driver reimagineered to portray Travis Bickle as obsessed with Mickey Mouse.
(via waxy)
A group photograph of MGM’s stars and starlets under contract, taken for the studio’s 20th anniversary in 1943.
The full-size photo is available at Mlkshk or at Wikipedia for stargazing. Here’s who’s in the photo:
Front Row: James Stewart, Margaret Sullavan, Lucille Ball, Hedy Lamarr, Katharine Hepburn, Louis B Mayer, Greer Garson, Irene Dunne, Susan Peters, Ginny Simms, Lionel Barrymore
Second Row: Harry James, Brian Donlevy, Red Skelton, Mickey Rooney, William Powell, Wallace Beery, Spencer Tracy, Walter Pidgeon, Robert Taylor, Pierre Aumont, Lewis Stone, Gene Kelly, Jackie Jenkins
Third Row: Tommy Dorsey, George Murphy, Jean Rogers, James Craig, Donna Reed, Van Johnson, Fay Bainter, Marsha Hunt, Ruth Hussey, Marjorie Main, Robert Benchley
Fourth Row: Dame May Whitty, Reginald Owen, Keenan Wynn, Diana Lewis, Marilyn Maxwell, Esther Williams, Ann Richards, Marta Linden, Lee Bowman, Richard Carlson, Mary Astor
Fifth Row: Blanche Ring, Sara Haden, Fay Holden, Bert Lahr, Frances Gifford, June Allyson, Richard Whorf, Frances Rafferty, Spring Byington, Connie Gilchrist, Gladys Cooper
Sixth Row:
Ben Blue, Chill Wills, Keye Luke, Barry Nelson, Desi Arnaz, Henry O’Neill, Bob Crosby, Rags Ragland
From twenty years ago, Stephen Hawking reviews the film version of A Brief History of Time.
I have been fortunate in the director of the film, Errol Morris. He is a man of integrity, with a feeling for the issues. It would have been all too easy to have someone who would have concentrated on the more sensational aspects of my private life, and my medical condition, and who would have treated the science in a superficial way. A friend of mine, who has had several television programmes based on his work, was envious of how the scientific ideas came through on the film.
(via @errolmorris)
For Sight & Sound magazine, Roger Ebert came up with his picks for ten best films ever.
“Citizen Kane” speaks for itself. “2001: A Space Odyssey” is likewise a stand-along monument, a great visionary leap, unsurpassed in its vision of man and the universe. It was a statement that came at a time which now looks something like the peak of humanity’s technological optimism. Many would choose “Taxi Driver” as Scorsese’s greatest film, but I believe “Raging Bull” is his best and most personal, a film he says in some ways saved his life. It is the greatest cinematic expression of the torture of jealousy — his “Othello.”
(via df)
Hyman Strachman is one of the biggest bootleggers of Hollywood movies. He’s also 92 years old, a WWII veteran, and gives his movies away to American troops serving overseas.
“Big Hy” — his handle among many loyal customers — would almost certainly be cast as Hollywood Enemy No. 1 but for a few details. He is actually Hyman Strachman, a 92-year-old, 5-foot-5 World War II veteran trying to stay busy after the death of his wife. And he has sent every one of his copied DVDs, almost 4,000 boxes of them to date, free to American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
With the United States military presence in those regions dwindling, Big Hy Strachman will live on in many soldiers’ hearts as one of the war’s more shadowy heroes.
“It’s not the right thing to do, but I did it,” Mr. Strachman said, acknowledging that his actions violated copyright law.
From PBS Off Book, a quick look at the thinking behind the opening titles for TV shows and movies, including Zombieland, Mad Men, and Se7en.
See also Art of the Title and A Brief History of Title Design. (via devour)
As Allen Fuqua travels around, he looks for movie locations and attempts to duplicate scenes from them. For instance, here’s Allen and a friend reenacting a scene from Drive:
(thx, stephen)
Journalist William Zinsser played a bit part in Stardust Memories, one of Woody Allen’s early films. He’d interviewed Allen early in the director’s career, ran into him in NYC, and got a call a week later from his assistant.
“Bill, honey?” said a young woman’s voice. “This is Sandra from Woody Allen’s office. Woody wondered if you’d like to be in his new movie.”
That was something new in phone calls. I had never done any acting or dreamed any theatrical dreams. But who didn’t want to be in a Woody Allen movie? I knew that he often cast ordinary people in small roles. What small plum did he have for me? I hesitated for a decently modest moment and then told Sandra I’d like to do it.
“Good,” she said. “Woody will be very pleased.” She said that someone else would be calling me with further details.
(via @coudal)
Remember the Netflix Prize, the $1 million challenge cooked up by Netflix to improve their movie recommendation engine by 10%? Turns out they never implemented the winning algorithm, in part because their movie streaming service changed the game.
One of the reasons our focus in the recommendation algorithms has changed is because Netflix as a whole has changed dramatically in the last few years. Netflix launched an instant streaming service in 2007, one year after the Netflix Prize began. Streaming has not only changed the way our members interact with the service, but also the type of data available to use in our algorithms. For DVDs our goal is to help people fill their queue with titles to receive in the mail over the coming days and weeks; selection is distant in time from viewing, people select carefully because exchanging a DVD for another takes more than a day, and we get no feedback during viewing. For streaming members are looking for something great to watch right now; they can sample a few videos before settling on one, they can consume several in one session, and we can observe viewing statistics such as whether a video was watched fully or only partially.
(via waxy)
The latest installment of the Up Series of documentary films is due out in the UK in May. The films have followed the development of fourteen British children since 1964 with a new film appearing every seven years…the participants are now 56. A few details about the new film are revealed in this interview with one of the participants.
One of the issues that Apted reflects on in 56 Up is the way Britain has changed. “Michael asked us about how education had changed, because people are borrowing money to go to university now,” Mr Hitchon said. “In our day, none of us paid for our education. England’s also changed a lot. For instance, no one is farming the Dales any more and there are all these multimillion-pound houses. I don’t know what England’s like any more. I’ve been away for 30 years.”
Apted also revisits the theme of success. “If you’re still hanging in there and swinging punches then you’re a success,” said Mr Hitchon. “Does that apply to me? Sure, why not? I’m working all the time to solve problems that I think are important. I’m hanging in there despite the fact that it doesn’t all go the way you hope.”
This may be the last film in the series…director Michael Apted will be 78 when the next film is due and he’s unwilling to pass it off to someone else to finish. (thx, raynor)
Primer is one of my favorite films of the past ten years and is available on YouTube in its entirety.
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