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Each week at Slate, writer Alex Kotlowitz and Steve James (director of Hoop Dreams) dissect the week’s episode from the fourth season of The Wire. Warning: they are unabashed fans of the show. AOL recently interviewed The Wire creator David Simon. (via dj) Negro Please is posting fourth season episode synopsiseses summaries…here’s 4.2.
Update: Season four of The Wire scored a 98/100 on Metacritic, the highest score for a TV show on the site.
The trailer for 49 Up, the latest in a series of documentary films in which the same group of people (from varying socio-economic backgrounds) are interviewed every seven years. The first movie, Seven Up!, was released in 1964 when the participants were seven years old. “The premise of the film was taken from the Jesuit motto ‘Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.’”
Profile of Michel Gondry, director of the upcoming The Science of Sleep. An exhibition at the Jeffrey Deitch gallery in Manhattan accompanies the film’s opening. View some of Gondry’s short work (commercials, music videos) on YouTube.
A positive review of Idiocracy, Mike Judge’s “new” movie, a film that Fox has been loath to release and promote. One to look for on DVD, I guess.
Season four of The Wire just started, but I’ve got a season five wishlist item to share. I’d love to see an entire season that flashes back to Stringer Bell and Avon Barksdale establishng their operation, say 5-6 years before the start of season one. Maybe we’d also get to see McNulty’s days in the Western with Bunny, Daniels’ dark days, Bubs getting hooked on the junk, some backstory on The Greek, a bit of the Sobotka clan, and more Omar (there’s never enough Omar). This isn’t unprecendented; The Godfather: Part II followed the first movie’s saga of an aging gangster and his three sons with a look at how Vito Corleone’s operation came to be. With the way they’ve handled The Wire so far, I think the show’s creators could pull off something similar in effect and acclaim.
(Now that I think about it, they’re sort of doing that this season anyway. Marlo is kind of a young Avon and in the young school kids, we get a look at drug dealers in the making. Not related at all, but the best line of the series so far is from Clay Davis in the second episode of the 4th season: “Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeiiiiiiiiiiiiit.” Laughed my ass off.)
George Lucas, having run out of Star Wars movies he wants to make, continues to sell us the same movie we’ve seen 70 times in yet another format. Here’s the original theatrical version of Star Wars on DVD (in quaint Dolby 2.0!) so you can prove to your lesser nerd buddies that Han indeed shoots first. Empire and Jedi are also available.
Jay Fernandez of the LA Times gets his hands on the screenplay for Charlie Kaufman’s new movie, Synecdoche, New York — which Charlie will also be directing (in the absence of Spike Jonze) — and loves it. “No one has ever written a screenplay like this. It’s questionable whether cinema is even capable of handling the thematic, tonal and narrative weight of a story this ambitious.” Incidentally, synecdoche.
Documentary on hacking: The Secret History of Hacking. Features Woz, Capt. Crunch, and Kevin Mitnick.
An interview with Steven Soderbergh: “The hardest thing in the world is to be good and clear when creating anything. It’s the hardest thing in the world. It’s really easy to be obscure and elliptical and so fucking hard to be good and clear. It breaks people. Because you don’t often get encouragement to do that, to be good and clear.”
Big movie stars may not have that big of an effect on a movie’s profit as the film industry thinks. “Looking across a sample of more than 2,000 movies exhibited between 1985 and 1996, they found that only seven actors and actresses — Tom Hanks, Michelle Pfeiffer, Sandra Bullock, Jodie Foster, Jim Carrey, Barbra Streisand and Robin Williams — had a positive impact on the box office, mostly in the first few weeks of a film’s release.”
Film critic Jim Emerson is collecting great opening shots from movies, including Star Wars, Primer, and Annie Hall. Do you have any favorites that Emerson hasn’t covered yet?
Remember those neat library pictures I pointed to last week? Turns out that the Jedi archives in Star Wars Episode II were modeled after the Long Room Library at the Trinity College of Dublin. (thx, everyone who sent this in)
The lost art of film editing. “Why has this chaotic, rat-tat-tat style of assembly, the kind usually associated with Michael Bay-brand megatonnage, been cropping up in such unlikely places?”
I made it! I can’t believe I did, but I hung in there, bucked the odds, gave 110%, and totally did it. From the blog post that kicked this whole crazy thing off to the premiere of the film this past weekend, I didn’t mention Snakes on a Plane a single time on this site. Neither did I make any ________ on a ________ jokes, see the movie on opening weekend, nor comment on any other site about it.
How did I achieve such a high level of cultural snobbery? It wasn’t easy, friends. Not reading MetaFilter helped certainly, as did looking down on reality television and those who watch it. I practiced conversational calisthenics in the mirror every night before bed: “Was that in the New Yorker or The Economist? Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t read People.”
In commemoration of this achievement, I’ve made celebratory badges to place proudly on the site (in regular and without swearing variations):
Feel free to display this badge on your web site if you also successfully avoided Snakes on a Plane. (Copy the images to your own server, please.) To those that succumbed to the temptation, fear not…the official web site has plenty of posters, wallpapers, audio clips, videos, IM icons, and screensavers for you to download.
The NYC premiere of Blogumentary is August 30 at the Pioneer Theatre in the East Village. More info and tickets here.
Rare rave for M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water, which was demolished by the critics.
Jesus Camp is a forthcoming documentary about a camp in North Dakota “where kids as young as 6 years-old are taught to become dedicated Christian soldiers in God’s army”. David Byrne has a review: “One asks if religious visions are better off kept as a personal thing, or at least confined to a small group — otherwise the death and destruction sown by and in the name of religions more or less balances out their moral and personal virtues.”
Helvetica, The Movie! “The film is studded with the stars of typography: Erik Spiekermann, Matthew Carter, Massimo Vignelli, Michael Bierut, Wim Crouwel, Hermann Zapf, Stefan Sagmeister, Jonathan Hoefler, Tobias Frere-Jones, Experimental Jetset.”
Top 50 movies (by gross) that were never in wide release in the US. Top 3: Rocky Horror, Boyz n the Hood, and Royal Tenenbaums.
The Biology of B-Movie Monsters, or why you just can’t scale living things up (a la King Kong) or down (like in Fantastic Voyage) without consequence. One key problem: with a theoretical 20 foot tall human, mass increases much faster than bone strength and at some point, his skeleton wouldn’t be able to support the weight.
Wes Anderson’s new film (after The Fantastic Mr. Fox) will be called The Darjeeling Limited. Anderson, Roman Coppola, and Jason Schwartzman are writing it, with Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Schwartzman to star.
Design Within Reach is screening The Eames Film Festival, featuring the short films of Charles and Ray Eames, at cities across the US. Unfortunately for me, a small town called New York City doesn’t seem to be on the schedule. :(
A collection of posters and promotional art from the films of Stanley Kubrick. This Clockwork Orange poster is one of my favorites; I have a copy hanging in my apartment.
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