Posts tagged film
Nullary Sources
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When News Corporation completes the separation of its news and entertainment divisions in a few months time, the latter will be known as 21st Century Fox. That much we knew back in April, but now we’re getting a look at the soon-to-be-independent company’s logo.
‘Ili: Logo is fine, but lmao @ at the audio
‘Ili: 21ST CENTURY
‘Ili: ::1960s computer bleeps::
Colin: The logo is quite nice actualy.
Colin: I like the type. Reserved but unique.
Colin: God yeah the audio is GARBAGE
Colin: Rest of it is great though.
‘Ili: Yeah.
Colin: Love the spotlight sweeps.
Colin: I am so tempted to replace this with modem dialing sounds.
Colin: SO TEMPTED
And some bonus commentary from Colin on a comment left on the logo’s Vimeo page:
NO. This is NO WAY of honoring a great movie studio’s legacy. This is an upraised middle finger in the face of almost 100 years of history.
Colin: Let’s break this down
Colin: “Honoring a movie studio’s legacy” specifically
Colin: Reminder that a movie studio is essentially a bank.
Colin: So the appropriate way to “honor” its “legacy” would be either with the text of a movie contract scrolling by very quickly or just dollar bills blowing every which way, money booth style.
10 Film Legends in the Final Image of Their Careers
Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable appeared together in The Misfits, a haunting final image of two legends who died shortly after filming. Also pictured: Fred Astaire, Audrey Hepburn, Marlon Brando, Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, James Dean, Grace Kelly, and John Wayne in their final roles.
I had somehow never heard of The Final Image until John Gruber linked one of their posts last month on Daring Fireball. This collection is quite beautiful.
RIP Roger Ebert
Whatever you thought of Ebert’s taste — I certainly did not always agree with him — he was an outstanding, prolific writer and a perceptive, lucid critic. His reviews were always an absolute joy to read, even if I took a completely different tack on the film in question.
The link here is to a wonderful obit in the Chicago Tribune — the rival of Ebert’s Sun-Times and former home of fellow critic Gene Siskel. But what makes this death so saddening and shocking is that just two days ago Ebert published that he was taking a “leave of presence” and had, it seems, a ton of projects on deck.
My heart goes out to wife Chaz and to his family. Perhaps it’s s small comfort that Ebertfest is coming up soon and the whole community he built will get a chance to mourn together.
Review In Peace, Roger Ebert.
Adam Schickling created this rockin’ concept poster of what the original cast members of Star Wars might look like reprising their roles.
Completely unofficial obviously but something along these lines could be kinda sweet?
How Disney Bought Lucasfilm—and Its Plans for 'Star Wars'
Wide-ranging feature from Devin Leonard in BusinessWeek. Covers a lot of ground. Leonard profiles both Lucas — including Lucas’s initial decision to retire, how he went about selling Lucasfilm, the pre-acquisition development of Episode VII — and Disney CEO Bob Iger. Really, really great stuff — read it all.
(But what’s up with those weirdo pull quotes? Why are they in Arial? Why are the W, D and sometimes O glyphs replaced with ones from the Walt Disney logo mark? Why are the baselines all jacked up? Just another unsolved mystery…)
The Economics of Visual Effects
Melissa Ryzik writing on the New York Times’s Carpetbagger blog:
There’s a high-stakes fight brewing here, between the digital artists who create the movie-magic effects that many blockbusters depend on and the studios that employ them. Audiences got a taste of it on Sunday, when Bill Westenhofer, a visual effects winner for “Life of Pi,” was played off the Oscar stage with the “Jaws” music, just as he was talking about the bankruptcy of the film’s effects house, Rhythm & Hues.
In a related protest, more than 400 people, many of them laid-off Rhythm & Hues workers, demonstrated just a few blocks from the theater where the Oscars were taking place, voicing their grievances against the industry. According to Deadline.com, they protested working conditions (long hours without equivalent pay) and the foreign subsidies that draw jobs overseas. Some talked of unionizing. A plane bearing the banner ““BOXOFFICE + BANKRUPT = VISUAL EFFECTS VFXUNION.COM” was scheduled to fly over the Dolby Theater during the Oscars red carpet.
VFX artists should unionize.
Wikipedia: The Fantastic Four (1994 film)
I was, until quite recently, completely unaware that the 2005 film Fantastic Four was not the first live film adaptation of the superheroes. The first was a low-budget film that was completed in 1994 but was never released. It is, by all accounts, a not terribly great B movie.
My favorite part of the article was this:
Speculation arose that the film had never been intended for release, but had gone into production solely as a way for [producer Bernd] Eichinger to retain rights to the characters; Marvel Comics’ Stan Lee in 2005 said this was the case, insisting, “The movie was never supposed to be shown to anybody,” and adding that the cast and crew had been left unaware. [Producer Roger] Corman and Eichinger had dismissed Lee’s claims, with the former stating in the same article, “We had a contract to release it, and I had to be bought out of that contract” by Eichinger.
I just really love the idea of slapping together a movie based on a high profile license just to maintain that license.
Review: Headhunters (2011)
Headhunters 2011 — ★★★★
I love action movies. I can’t get enough of them. They’re our modern day version of ritualized combat. There’s a kind of ancient, tribal connection that gives the action movie its power. It’s the power to make us believe in the impossible, for just about two hours or so. Headhunters is fully aware of that tradition and moreover delivers with outstanding verve.
Askel Hennie, a sort of Scandinavian Nic Cage, delivers an outstanding performance as a corporate headhunter moonlighting as an art thief whose double lives whirl around him as they both collapse. I honestly could not tell where the film was going next, and I think a lot of that had to do with Hennie’s wide range. He, and director Morten Tyldum, shift tone from moment to moment — here bored-yet-enthralled by corporate, male swordfighting; there resolute and intense in the face of an unpleasant deed that must be done; here edge-of-your-seat, hair trigger suspense; there genuine, naked, revelatory emotion.
John Andreas Andersen’s photography deals mostly in cool pastels — this compliments the film’s visual semiosis including a striking rushing / flowing water motif. Speaking of the mise en scène, the film’s world and side-characters (I’m thinking of a certain beblued, Thomson and Thompson–esque pair) are very deep and very entertaining. Considering it’s based on a novel by one of Scandanavian noir’s stars, Jo Nesbø, this should hardly be surprising.
Sure, there’s a Hollywood remake coming. And maybe they’ll get someone of David Fincher’s caliber to direct it. Though if you pressed me, the American film I think this most resembles, despite Headhunters being its tonal opposite (bright and full of roiling life rather than Kitano bleak and empty) is Drive (2011), directed by fellow Scandinavian Nicolas Winding Refn. Plus, in the mean time, you can always watch Hennie and Tyldum dance their little dance one more time. I will be.
Originally posted on Letterboxd
Here’s the trailer for Hana-bi (1997). Written, Directed, Edited and Starring “Beat” Takeshi Kitano. Hana-bi is a bleak movie. Kitano’s Nishi, a brilliant, still-waters-run-deep good-cop detective, is stuck in a sea of grief — his best friend is injured on a case and is paralyzed; a fellow cop is killed and he blames himself; his wife, still reeling from the death of their child, develops leukemia — and unable to move on — his best friend lives a miserable, broken existence; he continues to support his dead co-worker’s family; he visits his wife in the hospital and they both sit, silently, not looking at each other.
In talking to ‘Ili about the film, I feel he cut right to the heart of it when he said that it “looks and feels so empty and bleak, yet he tells a whole story through the editing.” It really is through Kitano’s editing that the film comes alive. As I said earlier, the film is an extended meditation on the nature of grief. The stories of Nishi and his partner, Hirobe, are intercut as they both try to process their grief and move on with their life after some serious, awful traumas. ‘Ili again: “Nishi deals with [grief] by destroying, Horibe deals with it by creating. Kitano deals in really shocking violence, but Hana-bi especially kind of makes me wonder what he actually thinks about it. If any of his films had a ‘this is not the way’ statement, it’s that one.”
I’ll close this out with a quote ‘Ili found from an interview with Kitano:
I think my way of showing violence is different from that of other filmmakers. When I show it, it hurts. I don’t want people to think it’s just a game, because violence is painful. I’m often asked whether I like violence, but I don’t think that’s the case at all. If you compare my films to something like Die Hard, the death toll in my films is pretty low.
Kitano is a personal favorite of both ‘Ili and myself; if you want to see cinema pushed to its absolute limits, you’d be hard pressed to find someone doing that more adroitly than Kitano.
Styles and Themes of Hayao Miyazaki
Wikipedia:
Hayao Miyazaki is a prominent Japanese filmmaker and producer whose animated works are characterised by several recurring themes and motifs.
Many of these recurrent features are notable for being so uncommon in the medium, for example the lack of evil or villain characters, the advocacy of a pacifist ethic and prominence of feminism. Other features are more notable for being personal idiosyncrasies, such as the obsession with flight and the symbolism of water. The formal emphasis placed on these various elements constitutes a running discourse that transcends the individual works and creates a larger, ongoing meta-narrative.
Really good article. Also Miyazaki is literally the best. Just the best.
