A list of the 20 most anticipated sci-fi films of 2011. Notable entries include Tarsem Singh’s Immortals (“mythic warrior Theseus battles demons and Titans on his way to becoming a legendary Greek hero”), Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion (“an international team of doctors is assembled by the Centers for Disease Control to battle an outbreak of a deadly virus”; stars Damon, Paltrow, Winslet, Fishburne, Cotillard, and Law, Jude Law), and Kenneth Branagh’s Thor (“superbeing Thor is cast out of the cosmic realm of Asgard and forced to live among humans, where he must find a way to both defend Earth and reclaim his birthright”).
Speaking of Errol Morris, it seems that his next film will be out this fall and is a documentary about Joyce McKinney, a former Miss Wyoming, rapist of Mormons, and dog cloning enthusiast.
According to our sources, it seems Morris has just finished up a brand new documentary, “Tabloid” aka “A Very Special Love Story” (the title is not yet final) about Joyce McKinney, a former Miss Wyoming, who, in the late seventies, abducted Kirk Anderson, a Mormon missionary in England, chained him to a bed and forced him to have sex with her. But that’s hardly the weirdest thing about McKinney or the case. After jumping bail, she was eventually sentenced in absentia to one year in prison, due to the fact that Britain, at the time, didn’t really have rape laws against men in the books. She was later accused of stalking her victim — who had since married and had children — during the 1980s and in 2008, she gained more media attention after taking her dog to Korea to be cloned.
Warning: this video contains spoilers, violence, and cinematic greatness.
Many friends after seeing my video “Tarantino vs Coen Brothers” requested me to do a new video duel of directors, so I decided to do now a tribute to my two favorite directors, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese, were 25 days re-watching 34 films, selected more than 500 scenes, and a hard work editing.
Writer/director Sofia Coppola reunites with the film company with which she made the Academy Award-winning hit “Lost in Translation.” Her new film is an intimate story set in contemporary Los Angeles; Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) is a bad-boy actor stumbling through a life of excess at the Chateau Marmont Hotel in Hollywood. With an unexpected visit from his 11-year-old daughter (Elle Fanning), Johnny is forced to look at the questions we must all confront.
As one of the few people who enjoyed Marie Antoinette, I’m of course looking forward to this. (via df)
John Underkoffler was one of the science advisors for Minority Report. After doing that, he helped build a computer with an interface very much like the ones in the movie…you know, where Tom Cruise flings stuff around on a screen with his hands. In this TED talk, Underkoffler demonstrates the system.
The whole thing is worth watching but skip to 5:20 (or even 6:30) if you want to see some crazy ass shit go down. (via lonelysandwich)
“Guillermo is co-writing the Hobbit screenplays with Philippa Boyens, Fran Walsh and myself, and happily our writing partnership will continue for several more months, until the scripts are fine tuned and polished” says Jackson. “New Line and Warner Bros will sit down with us this week, to ensure a smooth and uneventful transition, as we secure a new director for the Hobbit. We do not anticipate any delay or disruption to ongoing pre-production work”.
Obviously Jackson should just direct the damn thing.
Update: Hmm, I just heard from a small bird that Jackson is pretty much set to direct…just finalizing the deal with the studio. On the other hand, Jackson’s manager says that the director is committed to other directing projects. So I guess we’ll see what happens.
Slim Pickens riding a nuclear bomb out of the bay doors of his B-52 Bomber in Dr. Strangelove is an iconic cinematic scene. But the imagery of people riding on bombs has been used on comic book covers since the early 1940s:
That’s some mighty Pickensian hat wavin’ by Uncle Sam. (via oobject)
The Truman Show delusion is how some psychiatrists are describing the condition of psychotic patients who believe they are filmed stars of reality TV programs.
Another patient traveled to New York City and showed up at a federal building in downtown Manhattan seeking asylum so he could get off his reality show, Dr. Gold said. The patient reported that he also came to New York to see if the Twin Towers were still standing, because he believed that seeing their destruction on Sept. 11 on television was part of his reality show. If they were still standing, he said, then he would know that the terrorist attack was all part of the script.
As for the movie itself, for all its popularity and critical success when released, it’s little-remembered today. And unfairly so; the “realness” about our increasingly mediated lives remains a hot topic of debate.
Today’s entry in the A.V. Club’s Gateways to Geekery series is Spaghetti Westerns. Want to get into Spaghetti Westerns, but feeling a little sheepish (If God didn’t want them sheared, he wouldn’t have made them sheep) about not knowing where to start? Gateways to Geekery suggests A Fistful of Dollars.
It’s an adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s cynical samurai masterpiece Yojimbo, which was itself inspired by Dashiell Hammett’s noir classic Red Harvest. And thus, an American TV actor became a movie star playing a cowboy for an Italian director working in Spain looking to a Japanese interpretation of an American crime novel for inspiration. It really is a small world after all, or at least a world pop culture helped make smaller.
You might also be interested in the Gateways to Geekery take on David Foster Wallace.
Kids in Mind reviews movies with a finer tooth comb than G/PG/PG-13/etc. — it’s basically “won’t somebody please think of the children” for movies. Babies, the documentary that follows four infants through the first years of their lives, didn’t do so well in the Sex/Nudity department.
Children of various ages, from newborns to toddlers, are seen in various states of undress, including unobscured views of both male and female genitals.
This was filed under Violence/Gore:
An infant’s bare buttocks are seen with what appears to be fecal matter; a woman lifts up the child and in the process gets fecal matter on her leg, which she wipes off with a corncob. A stream of urine is seen coming from a baby and landing on a table.
Set hundreds of years after the events of the first movie, when the world has once again fallen into darkness, “Power of the Dark Crystal” follows the adventures of a mysterious girl made of fire who, together with a Gelfling outcast, steals a shard of the legendary crystal in an attempt to reignite the dying sun that exists at the center of the planet.
Made at a time of hyperinflation in Germany, “Metropolis” offered a grandiose version — of a father and son fighting for the soul of a futuristic city — that nearly bankrupted the studio that commissioned it, UFA. After lukewarm reviews and initial box office results in Europe, Paramount Pictures, the American partner brought in toward the end of the shoot, took control of the film and made drastic excisions, arguing that Lang’s cut was too complicated and unwieldy for American audiences to understand.
James Cameron spoke about the science of Avatar at Caltech last month; Discovery has a summary.
“We tried to make it not completely fanciful,” Cameron told the crowd, which filled the auditorium. “If it was too outlandish, there would be a believability gap.” So while Pandora features floating mountains, that might not be so far-fetched, Cameron said, considering Earth has developed high-speed “bullet” trains that levitate on magnetic fields. Of course, the “reality-based” scenario did have its limits. “We figured that to actually lift mountains, the magnetic field would have to be strong enough to rip the hemoglobin out of your blood,” says Cameron. “But we decided not to go there.”
Taking his central cue from Levitt’s conviction that “incentives matter,” executive producer Seth Gordon (“The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters”) directs several introductory segments featuring Levitt (the economist) and Dubner (the journalist) breaking down the book’s main assertions, aided by playful 2-D animation. The first of these sequences borrows from an early chapter in the source material, taking on self-interested real estate agents to explain the authors’ intention of parsing the motives behind many phenomena often taken for granted. While Gordon’s fluffy treatment of his chatty subjects suggests the potential for a “This American Life”-type television series, the individual short films embody their claims with a variety of methods.
There are likely several “Foursquare for X” apps out there (and many more to come), but I thought Miso was pretty interesting. From Cinematical:
Instead of checking in to a location (though you can do that too, if you link your existing Foursquare account), you check in with what you’re watching. Miso keeps track of your check-ins and rewards you with badges relating to specific genres (and sub-genres) of film and television. Link your Twitter or Facebook, and suddenly, you’re posting what you’re watching with friends and seeing what movies they’re watching as well. Genius.
You ever think about how in, like, a Tom Hanks movie, everyone lives in a reality in which there’s no such person as Tom Hanks? Because otherwise, people would be mistaking the main character for Tom Hanks all the time? So either Tom Hanks doesn’t exist in the world the movie takes place in, or he does exist but he looks like someone else?
Charlie Kaufman probably has a half-written screenplay about this stuffed in a drawer somewhere. (via jimray)
Update: Dozens reminded me that the “lookie loo with a bundle of joy” scheme in Ocean’s 12 involved the pregnant Tess Ocean character (played by Julia Roberts) looking like the movie star Julia Roberts. Several other people cited this scene in The Last Action Hero. And in Take Her, She’s Mine, character played by Jimmy Stewart is repeatedly mistaken for the famous actor, Jimmy Stewart. (thx, all)
Update: TV Tropes has many many examples of this phenomenon, which they call the Celebrity Paradox. (thx, joe)
Alice in Wonderland is one of the most adapted works in cinema, which is surprising, really, when you reflect on the fact that the book is pretty much unfilmable. There’s no real narrative thread besides ‘Alice is curious’ and the story is little more than a series of tableaux where Carroll can flex his surrealist prose. In light of the recent Burton riff on this very popular story, I thought I’d do a little historical trek through the numerous filmed versions of this famous novel. (No I haven’t seen the 1976 porn version so don’t expect a review).
[Researchers] found that using only the rate at which movies are mentioned could successfully predict future revenues. But when the sentiment of the tweet was factored in (how favorable it was toward the new movie), the prediction was even more exact.
But as someone noted in the comments:
Works fine until people realize it works, then they start gaming it, and it stops working.
Babies is a documentary that follows the lives of four newborn babies for the first year of life…in Namibia, Mongolia, Japan, and San Francisco. (via clusterflock)
In some cases, a single multiplex required different versions for different auditorium configurations. Creative decisions involving light levels also led to additional versions. 3D projection and glasses cut down the light the viewer sees, so “Avatar” also had separate color grades at different light levels, which are measured in foot lamberts. “If we had just sent out one version of the movie, it would have been very dark (in the larger theaters),” Barnett says. “We had a very big flow chart with all of the different steps, so we could send the right media to the right theater.”
I straight-up loved this movie. It’s a fascinating look at the creative process of a team with strong leadership operating at a very high level. The trailer is pretty misleading in this respect…the main story in the film has little to do with fashion and should be instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever worked with a bunch of people on a project. Others have made the comparison of Anna Wintour with Steve Jobs and it seems apt. At several points in the film, my thoughts drifted to Jobs and Apple; Wintour seems like the same sort of creative leader as Jobs.
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