Girls, Girls, Girls
Girls. Trailer. Third season. HBO. January 12. Lena Dunham. Watch:
I am so excited for this show to return. I don’t think I can hide it. It’s like I’m about to lose control. Maybe I like that feeling?
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kottke.org posts about trailers
“Life in Ikea is impossible”
The trailer for Alfonso Cuarón’s “Ikea”, a film about a man and a woman lost in the vast nothingness of Ikea.
(via ★interesting)
Trailer for Noah
Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, Black Swan) has made a movie called Noah, about Noah’s ark. It stars Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Emma Watson, and Anthony Hopkins. Here’s the trailer:
Spoiler: Noah survives and lives to the age of 950. More spoilers in Genesis Chapter 6. (via devour)
The trailer for The Lego Movie
Some Hollywood people are making a Lego movie called The Lego Movie. Batman’s in it and the plot is from The Matrix. I can’t decide if it looks horrible or amazing.
An ordinary guy named Emmet (Chris Pratt) is mistaken as being the Master Builder, the one who can save the Lego universe. With the aid of an old mystic named Vitruvius (Morgan Freeman), a tough young lady named Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks), and Batman (Will Arnett), Emmet will fight to defeat the evil tyrant Lord Business (Will Ferrell) who is bent on destroying the Lego universe by gluing it together.
The Wikipedia page notes The Lego Movie Video Game will be released in conjunction with the movie. Which, if you’re following along, is a video game based on a movie based on stacking toys & figures containing characters based on other movies that are based on comic books. I can’t wait for The Lego Movie Videogame Comic Book Movie that comes out in 2019.
The Midnight Coterie of Sinister Intruders
Wes Anderson is coming out with a new horror movie. Here’s the trailer:
Ha ha just kidding it’s a SNL spoof. Ed Norton does a pretty ripping Owen Wilson.
Mike Tyson’s life as a young thug
In New York Magazine this week, Mike Tyson writes about growing up in Brooklyn and his discovery of boxing as a way out and up.
Having to wear glasses in the first grade was a real turning point in my life. My mother had me tested, and it turned out I was nearsighted, so she made me get glasses. They were so bad. One day I was leaving school at lunchtime to go home and I had some meatballs from the cafeteria wrapped up in aluminum to keep them hot. This guy came up to me and said, “Hey, you got any money?” I said, “No.” He started picking my pockets and searching me, and he tried to take my fucking meatballs. I was resisting, going, “No, no, no!” I would let the bullies take my money, but I never let them take my food. I was hunched over like a human shield, protecting my meatballs. So he started hitting me in the head and then took my glasses and put them down the gas tank of a truck. I ran home, but he didn’t get my meatballs. I still feel like a coward to this day because of that bullying. That’s a wild feeling, being that helpless. You never ever forget that feeling. That was the last day I went to school. I was 7 years old, and I just never went back to class.
The piece is adapted from Tyson’s upcoming memoir, Undisputed Truth. Tyson wrote the book with Larry Sloman, author of Reefer Madness who has also ghostwritten for Howard Stern, Anthony Kiedis, and KISS’s Peter Criss.
Update: Spike Lee directed a documentary version of Undisputed Truth; it’ll air on HBO on November 16. Here’s the trailer:
Trailer for the second Hobbit movie
The first full trailer for the second Hobbit movie is out. The movie is out in December and was shot at 48fps like the first one.
Cumberbatch! (via devour)
From punk rock to family men
The Other F Word is a 2011 documentary about how punk rockers and other countercultural figures made the transition from anti-authoritarianism to parenthood. Features members from Devo, NOFX, Black Flag, Rancid, and also pro skater Tony Hawk. Here’s the trailer:
To be sure, watching foul-mouthed, colorfully inked musicians attempt to fit themselves into Ward Cleaver’s smoking jacket provides for some consistently hilarious situational comedy, but the film’s deeper delving into a whole generation of artists clumsily making amends for their own absentee parents could strike a resonant note with anyone (punk or not) who’s stumbled headfirst into family life.
Available to rent/buy on iTunes and on Amazon.
(via @claytoncubitt)
The Unknown Known
Vice has a sneak peak at Errol Morris’ new documentary on Donald Rumsfeld, in what looks like a sequel of sorts to The Fog of War.
Morris has Rumsfeld perform and explain his “snowflakes,” the enormous archive of memos he wrote across almost 50 years in Congress, the White House, in business, and twice at the Pentagon. The memos provide a window into history — not as it actually happened, but as Rumsfeld wants us to see it.
Jesus, that little smile at the end. The Daily Beast has an interview with Morris about the film.
THE DAILY BEAST: How the hell did you get Rumsfeld to agree to do this? Were you chasing him down?
ERROL MORRIS: No, not at all. I wrote him a letter, enclosed a copy of The Fog of War, heard back from him very quickly, went to Washington, and spent a good part of the day with him. We started it under the premise that he would do two days of interviews, I would edit it, and if he liked it, we’d sign a contract and continue. If he didn’t, I’d put the footage in a closet and it would never see the light of day.
The name of the film, The Unknown Known, is a reference to a statement Rumsfeld made at a press briefing about WMDs, terrorism, and Iraq:
There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns — there are things we do not know we don’t know.
Visitors
Here’s the trailer for Visitors, a new film from Koyaanisqatsi collaborators Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass. Most of the trailer consists of a single two-minute shot.
That shot reminds me of many things: Andy Warhol, long photos, James Nares’ Street, and Robbie Cooper’s work depicting kids playing video games.
Also interesting is that Visitors is comprised of only 74 shots, which with a runtime of 87 minutes means the average shot lasts over a minute. According to a recent investigation by Adam Jameson, an ASL (average shot length) of more than a minute is unusual in contemporary film. Inception, for instance, has a ASL of just 3.1 seconds and even a film like Drive, with many long shots, has an ASL of 7 seconds. But as Jameson notes, Alfonso Cuarón’s upcoming Gravity contains only 156 shots, including a 17-minute-long shot that opens the film. But the Hollywood master of long-running shots? Hitchcock, I presume:
1. Rope (1948, Alfred Hitchcock), ASL = 433.9 [seconds]
OK, this isn’t a recent recent film, but it has to be noted, as it’s most likely the highest ASL in Hollywood. Hitchcock used only 10 shots in making it (the film’s Wikipedia page lists them). (As you probably know, Hitchcock designed those shots, then edited them such that the finished film appeared to be a single take.)
Her
Spike Jonze’s new movie features Joaquin Phoenix falling in love with his computer. The trailer:
That looks really good. I didn’t care for Where the Wild Things Are but Being John Malkovich is one of my favorite movies.
The Act of Killing
Executive produced by Errol Morris and Werner Herzog, The Act of Killing is a documentary directed by Joshua Oppenheimer about a group of Indonesian mass murderers.
In The Act of Killing, Anwar and his friends agree to tell us the story of the killings. But their idea of being in a movie is not to provide testimony for a documentary: they want to star in the kind of films they most love from their days scalping tickets at the cinemas. We seize this opportunity to expose how a regime that was founded on crimes against humanity, yet has never been held accountable, would project itself into history.
And so we challenge Anwar and his friends to develop fiction scenes about their experience of the killings, adapted to their favorite film genres — gangster, western, musical. They write the scripts. They play themselves. And they play their victims.
Wow. (via @aaroncoleman0)
Update: It expires today, but The Act of Killing is available to watch for free on PBS. After today, try Amazon.
Documentary about actor and magician Ricky Jay
Deceptive Practice is a documentary about Ricky Jay which features, among other things, a shaggy-haired Jay playing Three-card Monte with Steve Martin on an 80s chat show.
Jay is a fascinating guy, as this 1993 New Yorker profile of him by Mark Singer demonstrates.
Ricky Jay, who is perhaps the most gifted sleight-of-hand artist alive, was performing magic with a deck of cards. Also present was a friend of Mamet and Mosher’s named Christ Nogulich, the director of food and beverage at the hotel. After twenty minutes of disbelief-suspending manipulations, Jay spread the deck face up on the bar counter and asked Nogulich to concentrate on a specific card but not to reveal it. Jay then assembled the deck face down, shuffled, cut it into two piles, and asked Nogulich to point to one of the piles and name his card.
“Three of clubs,” Nogulich said, and he was then instructed to turn over the top card.
He turned over the three of clubs.
Mosher, in what could be interpreted as a passive-aggressive act, quietly announced, “Ricky, you know, I also concentrated on a card.”
After an interval of silence, Jay said, “That’s interesting, Gregory, but I only do this for one person at a time.”
Mosher persisted: “Well, Ricky, I really was thinking of a card.”
Jay paused, frowned, stared at Mosher, and said, “This is a distinct change of procedure.” A longer pause. “All right-what was the card?”
“Two of spades.”
Jay nodded, and gestured toward the other pile, and Mosher turned over its top card.
The deuce of spades.
A small riot ensued.
Anyway, the film is coming out next week in NYC. (via @aaroncoleman0)
Trailer for season three of Game of Thrones
Is it permissible to squee about Westeros?
Squee! I still miss Sean Bean though. I wouldn’t mind a little Six Feet Under Late Ned action. Maybe bring him back as a White Walker or something. They’re headless zombies, right? Hello?
Room 237, a documentary about Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining
The trailer doesn’t reveal much:
But from everything that I have heard, this movie is a must-see for Kubrick fans. In US theaters (and available online, I think) on March 29th.
Trailer for Finding Vivian Maier
The documentary about recently discovered street photographer Vivian Maier that was funded via Kickstarter almost two years ago is finally getting somewhere. Here’s the trailer for the film, which appears to involve a crazy twist in Maier’s story.
Ed Koch, RIP
Former three-term mayor of NYC Ed Koch died this morning at 88. Worth reading are obituaries by Robert McFadden in the NY Times:
Mr. Koch’s 12-year mayoralty encompassed the fiscal austerity of the late 1970s and the racial conflicts and municipal corruption scandals of the 1980s, an era of almost continuous discord that found Mr. Koch at the vortex of a maelstrom day after day.
But out among the people or facing a news media circus in the Blue Room at City Hall, he was a feisty, slippery egoist who could not be pinned down by questioners and who could outtalk anybody in the authentic voice of New York: as opinionated as a Flatbush cabby, as loud as the scrums on 42nd Street, as pugnacious as a West Side reform Democrat mother.
“I’m the sort of person who will never get ulcers,” the mayor - eyebrows devilishly up, grinning wickedly at his own wit - enlightened the reporters at his $475 rent-controlled apartment in Greenwich Village on Inauguration Day in 1978. “Why? Because I say exactly what I think. I’m the sort of person who might give other people ulcers.”
Koch, New York City’s dominant political figure of the 1980s and the architect of what remains its governing political coalition, stayed politically relevant through his long political twilight, courted aggressively by figures including Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama for his role as a proxy for pro-Israel Democrats willing, but not eager, to cross party lines.
But Koch’s later years of quips, movie reviews, and presidential politics remain secondary to his central legacy, which is in New York’s City Hall. Tall and gangly with a domed, bald head and a knowing smile, Koch was New York’s mayor and its mascot from 1978 to 1989. Through three terms, he repeated one question like a mantra: “How’m I doing?” At first, the answer was clear to observers who had watched the city slide toward bankruptcy: exceptionally well. Koch managed New York back from the brink, drove hard bargains with municipal unions, cut jobs where he had to and reduced taxes where he could. He presided over a boom in Manhattan, and spent his new revenues on renewing the south Bronx.
But as the Koch administration moved its third term, the mayor lost his momentum. As Wall Street boomed in the 1980s, Koch took advantage of the new revenues to double New York City’s budget and offer tax breaks to real estate developers. But the largesse couldn’t buy him friends: he clashed with black leaders and his old allies among Manhattan’s liberal democrats. New York became famous for its racial tensions and rising crime. He courted the Democratic Party bosses of Queens and the Bronx only to be tarnished by the corruption scandals that surrounded them.
Here’s the trailer for Koch, a documentary on the former mayor that coincidentally opens today in limited release:
Inside Llewyn Davis
Here’s the trailer for the new Coen brothers movie, Inside Llewyn Davis.
The film stars relative newcomer Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, Justin Timberlake, and John Goodman and according to IMDB, will be out in February. (via viewsource)
Full trailer for Upstream Color
Shane Carruth’s followup to Primer is set to be seen next week at Sundance and a full-length trailer has been released:
And it won’t be long before the rest of us will be able to see it as well. Ain’t It Cool notes that Carruth will be distributing the film himself.
Carruth isn’t waiting around for a big distributor or even a small, boutique distributor. He’s putting the film out himself, booking it in New York at the IFC Center on April 5th, then expanding theatrically to LA, Seattle, Boston, San Francisco, Dallas, Chicago and other big markets.
Around that time he’ll also have a digital distribution option, which will lead to Blu-Ray/DVD. You know, the standard Magnolia/IFC style release, but instead of being spearheaded by a distribution company, Carruth is doing it via his own company, erbp.
(via @mylesnyc)
New trailer for the new Superman movie
So this is the new trailer for the new Superman movie (Man of Steel), which should not be confused with the old trailer for the new Superman movie or with a trailer from the old new Superman movie or with a trailer from the old Superman movie.
What I am confused about is whether this trailer is any good. On one hand, it seems really really good but also really crappy at the same time. Tell me what to feel, Superman!
Teaser trailer for Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color
Just the other day, the news broke that Primer’s Shane Carruth had made a new movie and it was premiering at Sundance in January. Now there’s a teaser trailer.
Final trailer for the Arrested Development documentary
In production for the past twenty-four years, it looks as though the documentary about Arrested Development might be nearing its release. Here’s the final trailer:
Update: You can watch the documentary on Amazon. (via @mcnees)
Trailer for Cloud Atlas
The Wachowskis (The Matrix movies) and Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) are teaming up to bring David Mitchell’s award-winning novel, Cloud Atlas, to the big screen. It’s an ambitious effort given the plot of the book:
The novel consists of six nested stories that take the reader from the remote South Pacific in the nineteenth century to a distant, post-apocalyptic future. Each tale is revealed to be a story that is read (or observed) by the main character in the next. All stories but the last are interrupted at some moment, and after the sixth story concludes at the center of the book, the novel “goes back” in time, “closing” each story as the book progresses in terms of pages but regresses in terms of the historical period in which the action takes place. Eventually, readers end where they started, with Adam Ewing in the Pacific Ocean, circa 1850.
Here’s an extended trailer of the film:
The trailer is also on Apple’s site along with a short commentary by the directors. BTW, the Wachowskis are no longer brothers because Larry had sexual reassignment surgery and is now Lana…the directors’ commentary is the first I’ve seen of her since the switch.
Robot and Frank: a heist movie with a robot sidekick
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.)
Teaser trailer for Monsters University
The prequel to Pixar’s Monsters, Inc. is coming out next summer…here’s a little teaser for it.
(via devour)
First trailer for Tarantino’s Django Unchained
It’s a Western film about bounty hunting starring Jamie Foxx, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Christoph Waltz.
The Impostor
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)
Movie with Bill Murray as FDR?!
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.
Teaser trailer for P.T. Anderson’s The Master
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)
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