Grist Magazine interview with Al Gore about An Inconvenient Truth.
Grist Magazine interview with Al Gore about An Inconvenient Truth.
Advertise here with Carbon Ads
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.
Beloved by 86.47% of the web.
kottke.org posts about movies
Pixar: where are all the women? “To
Pixar: where are all the women? “To date, there’s not a single Pixar film that has a female main character: The Incredibles comes the closest, but even there, both Helen Parr/Elastigirl and Violet are supporting characters, and it’s Bob Parr/Mr. Incredible that’s the hero.” Helen Parr and Dory are my favorite Pixar characters.
Uncanny Valley, CA
S-s-s-omething from the inbox. Paul writes regarding the uncanny valley:
Given your recent link re: the uncanny valley, I thought this article about Sun-Maid’s redesigned icon would be worth your time. Photo.
Clearly, she’s selling grapes from a certain valley. Creeeepy.
I love the idea of Uncanny Valley being an actual geographical location (situated in California, I would assume) inhabited by creepy video game characters, digitized actors, and retooled advertising icons.
Imagine the views from neighboring hillsides! (Image courtesy of Google Earth.)
Trailer for Fast Food Nation, based on
Trailer for Fast Food Nation, based on the book by Eric Schlosser.
These nutballs are making a 1 second film
These nutballs are making a 1 second film financed by anyone who wants to cough up a buck or two for a producer credit. The film will be followed by an estimated 90 minutes of credits (in order to list all the producers). Awesome. (thx, blythe)
Re: Jim Emerson’s list of films you
Re: Jim Emerson’s list of films you should see to consider yourself movie literate, what are the essential gay/queer movies?
When asked whether or not the Da
When asked whether or not the Da Vinci Code movie should have a “this is fiction” disclaimer on it, Ian McKellen (who stars in the movie) replied, “I’ve often thought the Bible should have a disclaimer in the front saying this is fiction”. Zing! (via cyn-c)
Internet-only trailer for Clerks 2 by Kevin Smith.
Internet-only trailer for Clerks 2 by Kevin Smith. Going boldly where Harold and Kumar have gone before.
Why does it take Wes Anderson (and
Why does it take Wes Anderson (and Sofia Coppola and Spike Jonze and PT Anderson and…) so long to make a movie? “The Eccentrics seem to be guarding their personal ideas so jealously that it sometimes suggests a creative block. The eternity of anticipation has frustrated those film lovers who look to certain artists to provide the Great American Movie.” Slate also has a review of Wes Anderson’s great Amex commerical.
Re Croquet and the ridiculous breathlessness about
Re Croquet and the ridiculous breathlessness about it, “3-D isn’t an interface paradigm. 3-D isn’t a world model. 3-D isn’t the missing ingredient. 3-D isn’t an inherently better representation for every purpose. 3-D is an attribute, like the color blue. Any time you read or hear about how great 3-D is and how it’s going to change everything about computers and services, substitute the word blue for 3-D.” (via bbj, who says “YES YES YES!!! ALWAYS REMEMBER: 3D INTERFACES ARE WHY THOSE KIDS ALMOST GOT EATEN BY RAPTORS IN JURASSIC PARK”)
Yet more advertising….a paparazzi photo of
Yet more advertising….a paparazzi photo of Lindsey Lohan made its way onto a movie poster promoting a film that starred Lohan.
List of 10 character actors that should be in every movie.
List of 10 character actors that should be in every movie.
The original 13-minute version of Wes Anderson’s Bottle Rocket
Before he started making the super stylized films for which he is now known, a 23-year-old Wes Anderson made a 13-minute short film called Bottle Rocket. The film was shot in 1992, found its way to Sundance, and gave Anderson the opportunity to make his first feature film of the same name. Here’s that original short, starring then-unknown actors Owen and Luke Wilson.
Riding a wave of publicity from his
Riding a wave of publicity from his movie, An Inconvenient Truth, might Al Gore run for President in 2008? (My answer: unlikely.)
The NY Times has a big summer
The NY Times has a big summer movie preview section, including a movie release schedule (May, June, July, August).
A list of the films preserved in
A list of the films preserved in the United States National Film Registry. (thx, robert)
Lengthy update on what Al Gore has
Lengthy update on what Al Gore has been up to since the 2000 Presidential Election, including his work on global warming, documented in An Inconvenient Truth (my review).
The Onion AV Club is not impressed
The Onion AV Club is not impressed with this year’s crop of blockbusters in their 2006 Summer Movie Preview.
The Bridge
Having lived in San Francisco, I’ve walked across the Golden Gate Bridge and driven across it countless times. The bridge is a nearly perfect metaphor for what some people go there to do. The view on a clear day into the city, the red painted cables glowing in the sun, the sudden way the fog comes in off the ocean to envelop the bridge, the path from the cold city to the warmth of Marin County. Death too is beautiful, dramatic, mysterious, abrupt, and an escape to another place.
In The Bridge, a film about the Golden Gate and suicide, director Eric Steel makes effective use of the bridge’s imagery and its relation to death; you can see why so many people choose to end their lives there. The footage he and his crew got is astounding at times…families discuss the death of a loved one while that same person is shown pacing back and forth on the bridge, thinking, waiting. You see a group of police officers, looking almost bored (which was probably hyper-aware nonchalance), talking a man back over the railing.
And yet, I can’t tell if that footage actually added anything to the discussion of the issues of mental illness, depression, and coping which were at the heart of many of the jumpers’ problems. Does watching death make it any more understandable to family members. To audience members? The footage doesn’t say why, it just shows us how, and those aren’t quite the same things.
Here’s an earlier post on The Bridge, a graph of suicides by location on the Bridge, and the New Yorker article by Tad Friend that inspired the film.
Movie schedule for the 2006 Bryant Park Summer
Movie schedule for the 2006 Bryant Park Summer FIlm Festival. Bring a picnic and enjoy the likes of Bullitt, Rocky, and The Manchurian Candidate.
Update: Subscribe to the movie schedule in XML or iCal format. (thx, brian)
Controversy over The Bridge
One of the films premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival is The Bridge, a documentary by Eric Steel about suicide and the Golden Gate Bridge. The trailer is available on the festival site but be warned that it contains actual footage of people climbing over the railing of the bridge to commit suicide.
The Bridge was inspired by a 2003 New Yorker story by Tad Friend called Jumpers, a piece about suicide and the bridge. The subject of suicide is often not discussed in the media. Self-inflicted deaths aren’t usually reported in the newspapers or on TV. Suicide prevention activists caution against suicide contagion due to media exposure of individual suicides leading to copycat deaths.
But that’s just the start of the controversy surrounding the film. In order to secure a permit to shoot the Golden Gate (which he did for the entirety of 2004, amassing almost 10,000 hours of footage), Steel said he was shooting footage to capture “the powerful, spectacular intersection of monument and nature that takes place every day at the Golden Gate Bridge”. He says he lied to discourage people to seek out his cameras to immortalize their deaths on film, but it’s also true that Golden Gate National Recreation Area officials certainly wouldn’t have given him a permit to film suicides.
Steel interviewed family members of the jumpers without disclosing that he’d filmed the death of their loved ones (again to avoid publicity for the filming and the death immortalization problem). Some family members felt manipulated by the omission when they learned of it.
Then there’s the matter of the filming itself. The film crew’s basic job description was to wait for people to die…they needed people to die for their film. If there’s no good footage of people jumping, there’s no film. Without too much trouble, you can imagine Steel instructing his crew to shoot the next one at a wider angle, the crew refining their techniques for catching the jumpers on film, and the mixture of excitement, dread, and the satisfaction of a job well done when they catch a jumper on film. But the crew was also trained in suicide prevention and intervened in several attempts. And listening to Steel talk about the film, it obviously wasn’t meant to be Faces of Death Part XII.
Here are a few more articles on The Bridge:
- Film documenting Golden Gate Bridge suicides premieres, San Jose Mercury News
- Golden Gate star of dark documentary, San Francisco Chronicle
- Man Survives Suicide Jump From Golden Gate Bridge, ABC News
Following up on why HAL sings “Daisy,
Following up on why HAL sings “Daisy, Daisy” in 2001: A Space Odyssey”, Lee Hartsfeld found a 1961 record with the Bell Labs recording on it at a junk shop for $10.
Conversation between filmmakers Errol Morris and Adam
Conversation between filmmakers Errol Morris and Adam Curtis. “People criticized my film by saying things like, ‘Why aren’t you balanced? What aren’t you putting in the other views?’ And my response was, ‘What if the other view is wrong?’ That’s the real problem of the balanced view - what’s called “perceived wisdom.” What if perceived wisdom’s wrong?”
Socials & More