Wikipedia gets into the 2000s roundup game with a main article and a number of topic-based summaries, including fashion, film, and sports. From the fashion page:
In hip hop, the throwback jersey and baggy pants (popular in the ’90s to 2004) look was replaced with the more “grown man” look which was highly popularized by Kanye West around the year 2005.
If you say so. More interesting is the chart of the 20 highest grossing movies from the film page (the top 3 each grossed $1 billion+ worldwide):
1. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
2. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
3. The Dark Knight
4. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
5. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End
6. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
7. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
8. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
9. Shrek 2
10. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
11. Spider-Man 3
12. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
13. Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
14. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
15. Finding Nemo
16. Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
17. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
18. Spider-Man
19. Shrek the Third
20. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Only one movie on the list was made from an original screenplay: Finding Nemo…the rest are all sequels or adapted from books, TV shows, amusement park rides, etc. Out of the top 50, only nine are not franchise films.
3. The Rock - Director Michael Bay, 1996 Ugh. That’s right. I failed to mention up top that there are not one, but two Michael Bay films in the Criterion Collection. It’s the kind of shock-inducing information you need delivered in increments. If they wanted to include an Alcatraz movie, uh, why not Escape from Alcatraz? Perhaps Criterion felt they needed a couple of signature “explosion” films to represent the genre. But given that logic, why not throw in Every Which Way but Loose to represent the “truck driver with an orangutan sidekick” genre too?
Also, Michael Bay is doing a remake of Hitchcock’s The Birds? What? WHAT??
I was watching The Perfect Storm on The Weather Channel the other night and witnessed the worst cut to commercial in the history of television.
If you’re not familiar with the film, this is *the* scene in the movie, the climax…when this huge wave overwhelms the Andrea Gail and all souls are lost at sea. Bravo, Weather Channel. Next time, have somebody view the movie before you chop it up randomly for ads.
Update:This one might be worse. With about two minutes remaining in extra time of a 0-0 match between Everton and Liverpool, ITV cut away to commercial and back just in time…to see the players celebrating the winning goal. I think “wankers!” is the appropriate response here.
This cut to commercial during Battlestar Galactica (spoilers! or so I’m told) is pretty bad as well. (thx, michael & gerald)
The thing is, truth is always at the center of Morris’ films, as you’d expect of a documentary filmmaker, but he also acknowledges that truth is a complicated thing; he’s always toying with questions of truth and fiction. Morris’ films aren’t about The Truth; they’re about our personal, private truths, as well as the lies and rationalizations we create for our actions. So fiction and lies and manipulation are also at the center of Morris’ films. Fiction is as much the spine of his work as truth.
A short video about the making of Fantastic Mr. Fox.
In it, you can see a brief glimpse of one of the emailed videos that Wes Anderson sent his London-based crew from Paris.
As well, for reference, the director would send short films of himself enacting certain scenes. “It’s kind of embarrassing,” Anderson said, laughing. “For most of these things, the performance is just a few seconds. Somebody hearing a noise and looking at their watch. The simplest way to relate how to do it is to make these little movies.”
The making of video is from a site called, uh, Making Of, which was co-founded by Natalie Portman and contains a bunch of interesting stuff: a bunch of on-the-set stuff from A Serious Man, Where the Wild Things Are, The Lovely Bones, etc., director interviews from the likes of Aronofsky, Neill Blomkamp, Michel Gondry, Mira Nair, etc., and all sorts of other stuff. (via @akstanwyck)
After doing the script, working with the actors, and supervise the set design, Wes Anderson directed Fantastic Mr. Fox over email. He also didn’t want to use many contemporary stop-motion animation techniques. Both of these decisions ruffled some feathers.
“It’s not the most pleasant thing to force somebody to do it the way they don’t want to do it,” Anderson said. “In Tristan’s case, what I was telling him was, ‘You can’t use the techniques that you’ve learned to use. I’m going to make your life more difficult by demanding a certain approach.’
“The simple reality is,” Anderson continued, “the movie would not be the way I wanted it if I just did it the way people were accustomed to doing it. I realized this is an opportunity to do something nobody’s ever seen before. I want to see it. I don’t want afterward to say, ‘I could have gone further with this.’”
The Informant (Steven Soderbergh, Matt Damon) is out in theaters now. I had no idea it was based on a true story…a genuinely crazy true story of corporate price fixing, FBI informants, and an eager-to-please executive. Kurt Eichenwald wrote a series of article about the case for The New York Times, which he fashioned into a book. This American Life devoted an entire hour to this story back in 2000…it’s a fascinating listen.
We hear from Kurt Eichenwald, whose book The Informant is about the price fixing conspiracy at the food company ADM, Archer Daniels Midland, and the executive who cooperated with the FBI in recording over 250 hours of secret video and audio tapes, probably the most remarkable videotapes ever made of an American company in the middle of a criminal act.
The cinema is now one of the main objects on which efforts should be concentrated in order to conduct the revolution in art and literature. The cinema occupies an important place in the overall development of art and literature. As such it is a powerful ideological weapon for the revolution and construction. Therefore, concentrating efforts on the cinema, making breakthroughs and following up success in all areas of art and literature is the basic principle that we must adhere to in revolutionizing art and literature.
Here’s more information about Dear Leader’s cinematic and operatic interests.
On the Art of Opera describes how Kim and his dad, the late Great Leader Kim Il Sung, discovered the husk of a tired art form and gave it a much-needed shot of North Korean communism. Any impartial observer would agree that Kim’s aesthetic prescriptions are every bit as crowd-pleasing as his economic policies.
“In conventional operas,” Kim writes, “the personalities of the characters were abstract, their acting clumsy, and the flow of the drama tedious, because the singers were forced to sing unnaturally and their acting was neglected.” Furthermore, until the arrival of the Kims, “no one interwove dance and story very closely.”
And now? “The ‘Sea of Blood’-style opera,” he observes, “has opened up a new phase in dramaturgy.” In case you’ve been living in a cave, Sea of Blood is North Korea’s longest-running production, the Cats of Pyongyang. It has been staged 1,500 times, according to the official Korea News Service, which calls it an “immortal classical masterpiece.” Kim claims to have revamped the form by chucking the aria out the window and replacing all solo performance with a cunning Kim innovation: the pangchang, a more satisfying off-stage chorus representing groupthink.
If you and someone else hate the same third person, but like each other, balance theory says you’re golden — all three can persist without changing their opinions. On the other hand, if all three of you despise the others, it’s an unstable triad, as well as a wildly common plot point for crime movies. While there are numerous resolutions — one person changes his preference toward another, a relationship tie is cut — another route back to stability, albeit a messy one, is the gunning down of at least one person.
Arbesman has some videos and stills on his web site from the movies mentioned in the article as well as the relevant mathematical materials.
“It’s in the visual language of, like, some sort of fantasy film, and it is a fantasy film to some degree,” he acknowledged, “but the tone of it is its own tone. We wanted it all to feel true to a 9-year-old and not have some big movie speech where a 9-year-old is suddenly reciting the wisdom of the sage.” He hadn’t set out to make a children’s movie, he said, so much as to accurately depict childhood. “Everything we did, all the decisions that we made, were to try to capture the feeling of what it is to be 9.”
It’s difficult to draw a conclusion from this article other than Wild Things is going to bomb but be really good.
One of the main arguments always rolled out in favor of conversion is that theaters can charge more for 3-D screenings. Proportionately, theaters that show a film in 3-D will take in more at the box-office because they charge in the range of $3 more per ticket than do theaters offering the same title in a flat version.
But what happens when, say, half the films playing at any given time in a city are in 3-D? Will moviegoers decide that the $3 isn’t really worth it? Even now, would they pay $3 extra to see The Proposal or Julie & Julia in 3-D? The kinds of films that seem as if they call out for 3-D are far from being the only kinds people want to see. Films like these already make money on their own, unassisted by fancy technology.
Thompson briefly mentions Pixar as well, saying that they don’t seem too keen on 3-D (or at least not as keen as Cameron or Katzenberg). But the zeal with which the 3-D-ness of Up was promoted was tacky and not at all typical of Pixar, a company that spent the last twenty years insisting that their films were not about the technology but about the same things that the makers of live action films were concerned with…real moviemaking stuff. To trumpet this 3-D technology that doesn’t enhance films in anything other than a superficial sense seems like a step backwards for them.
Beverly Hills Cop
Ghostbusters
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Gremlins
The Karate Kid
Police Academy
Footloose
Purple Rain
Amadeus
Revenge of the Nerds
Red Dawn
The Terminator
The Killing Fields
A Nightmare on Elm Street
Sixteen Candles
Once Upon a Time in America
This Is Spinal Tap
Top Secret!
That’s a pretty good year. My God, the pop culture references.
Matt Zoller Seitz and Aaron Aradillas recently completed a five-part video series on the evolution of the summer blockbuster movie focused on the summers of 1984 and 1989.
Part 1: “The origins of MTV editing and post-Boomer cynicism. Also starring Ronald Reagan, John Hughes, semi-gratuitous T&A, synth-pop videos, The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, and Prince.”
Part 2: “Steven Spielberg’s society of the spectacle, the rise of sadism and cynicism in the blockbuster movie, and the influence of the PG-13 rating. Also starring Indiana Jones, Red Dawn, and gremlins. Lots and lots of gremlins.”
Part 3: “A lickety-split recap of the second Reagan term, and begin the Bush years with the rise of hip-hop, Field of Dreams, Do the Right Thing, and the American indie film opting out and breaking out with sex, lies and videotape.”
Part 4: “We watch feel-good sequels ape the spirit of ‘84 while the heroes of Lethal Weapon II and The Abyss flip out, and the unprecedented Batman taps into the decayed American city.”
Part 5: “The New Sincerity, as rediscovered in the hallowed teen-movie triumvirate of Heathers, Dead Poets Society and Say Anything, released within three months of each other twenty years ago.”
This video features a number of directors talking about the difference between viewing films in widescreen vs. pan and scan. Martin Scorsese:
[Converting to pan & scan] is, technically, re-directing the movie.
Update: Thoughts from David Lynch about pan and scan taken from a 1997 interview:
I would like to see everything done letterboxed and with great sound. I’m not too interested in doing the commentary, you know, like a lot of people do. But in some strange way I kind of like pan-and-scan. Because you see things. It is a compromise, and in a couple of things you really say, “Why am I doing it?” But it’s just an interesting thing that happens- another composition. It’s not so bad, but I wish really that people could see the thing in a theater and that laserdiscs and videos didn’t exist. Because on the big screen with the sound, you become inside the film, and that’s the beauty of cinema. And it never happens on video, and it doesn’t happen on laserdisc, either.
The Cove is a 2009 documentary film documenting the annual killing of more than 2,500 dolphins in a cove at Taiji, Wakayama in Japan. The film was directed by former National Geographic photographer Louis Psihoyos, and was filmed secretly during 2007 using underwater microphones and high-definition cameras disguised as rocks.
Dave Eggers has written a young adult novel called The Wild Things that is based loosely on Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are and the screenplay he co-wrote with Spike Jonze for the movie version. The New Yorker published an excerpt of the book this week.
Max left the room and found Gary lying on the couch in his work clothes, his frog eyes closed, his chin entirely receded into his neck. Max gritted his teeth and let out a low, simmering growl.
Gary opened his eyes and rubbed them.
“Uh, hey, Max. I’m baggin’ a few after-work Z’s. How goes it?”
Max looked at the floor. This was one of Gary’s typical questions: Another day, huh? How goes it? No play for the playa, right? None of his questions had answers. Gary never seemed to say anything that meant anything at all.
“Cool suit,” Gary said. “Maybe I’ll get me one of those. What are you, like a rabbit or something?”
But while I was working on the book, it was funny, because I started going in new directions, different from any of the screenplay versions, pushing it into some territory that was personal to me. So in a way the movie is more Spike’s version of Maurice’s book, and this novel is more my version.
THE GOONIES: Physically abused, retarded man finds love with overweight preteen. THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST: Mel Gibson fulfills fantasy of showing a Jew beaten to a bloody pulp and killed on-screen. TITANIC: Crazy old widow disregards lifelong memories of husband, children, and grandchildren in favor of that one time she fucked a bum. STAR WARS: Religious extremist terrorists destroy government installation, killing thousands. LORD OF THE RINGS: Midget destroys stolen property. DOCTOR WHO: Elderly man serially abducts young women. BOOGIE NIGHTS: Deformed boy goaded into life of crime.
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