Roger Ebert draws attention to another "best movies of all time" list, this one by Spectator magazine. The top one on their list is one I haven't seen atop these lists before, The Night of the Hunter: Here's the top 12 from the list, and you can see the rest here.
1. The Night of the Hunter, Laughton
2. Apocalypse Now, Coppola
3. Sunrise, Murnau
4. Black Narcissus, Powell & Pressburger
5. L'avventura, Antonioni
6. The Searchers, Ford
7. The Magnificent Ambersons, Welles
8. The Seventh Seal , Bergman
9. L'atalante, Vigo
10. Rio Bravo, Hawks
11. The Godfather: Part I and Part II, Coppola
12. The Passion of Joan of Arc, Dreyer
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The Times (UK) selects the 60 best novels of the last 60 years, with the twist that they could only choose one book published each year. This list is provocative in its mix of classics and more populist fare: on few lists will you see Twilight (as the best novel of 2005) sharing a podium with Lolita.
A trailer for Still Walking, the next movie from perhaps Japan's most talented director right now, Hirokazu Koreeda. I had a ticket to watch this at the LA Film Festival but ended up being in Japan of all places when it screened (vacation, so I can't complain).
Nobody Knows, one of his earlier works, remains one of the saddest movies I've ever seen.
Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker is one of the best movies I've seen this year. If only a fraction of the crowd that went to see Transformers 2 had gone to see The Hurt Locker instead, the whole world would experience a net gain in entertainment pleasure.
I was surprised to hear Steven Soderbergh was turning it into a movie, and even more surprised after watching this trailer.
The book always struck me as fairly somber, more of a tragedy or melodrama than what this trailer seems to convey, something more comic in tone. No doubt that informant Mark Whitacre, played here by a mustachioed Matt Damon, was a nut. But this adaptation seems to seek the humor in the witness and FBI's ineptitude rather than the tragedy of their shaky efforts to bring down Archer Daniels Midland.
It's always dangerous concluding too much based on a trailer, but the intent to set audience expectations on tone is very strong here, down to the exclamation point that punctuates the title (the official title listed at IMDb right now is "The Informant!").
Hot rumor of the day is that Lars Von Trier's controversial movie Antichrist, which caused the biggest ripples at Cannes this year, will be made into a PC-only videogame. Yes, the same Antichrist which features onscreen genital mutilation, said genitals belonging to one Willem Dafoe, and aforementioned mutilation occurring courtesy of Charlotte Gainsbourg. The Wii jokes are so obvious that they were stale even before they wrote themselves.
I saw Up in 3-D at the El Capitan last night. It's the richest, most moving script from Pixar yet. Animation lovers will love the references to Howl's Moving Castle and Castle in the Sky.
I will be curious, when it comes out on Blu-Ray, to see it in 2-D also, but this is probably the most polished 3-D movie I've seen to date. There is a level of control with digital animation that allows the 3-D effects to be extremely precise, with much less of the distracting blurring that makes other 3-D movies feel like gimmicks.
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So, did Susan Boyle win in the finals of Britain's Got Talent? Go see for yourself.
I keep forgetting you don't have to sing to be on that show. The finals are like America's Best Dance Crew vs. American Idol.
Nadal loses at the French Open. Massive upset. This makes Robin Soderling the future answer to a trivia question. Djokovic is out, too. Federer, the door is open. This is your best, and maybe last chance, to walk down that red clay carpet and on through.
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In the New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert reports that we are likely in the midst of the sixth mass extinction in Earth's history. By the end of this century, nearly half of Earth's species may be extinct. The suspected cause is the pace of human activity.
Toy Story 3 teaser trailer. What jumps out at me now is not the technology of the digital animation, which is commonplace, but how quickly we recognize our old friends Woody and Buzz and friends. Consistency of character is the magic sauce here.
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Cool--Hulu Desktop made it into Uncrate. I have a secret list of ambitions for Hulu, and most of them consist of getting Hulu featured in things I follow in my own daily life. Some others: getting mentioned on The Simpsons, by Oprah, by the President, and in the lyrics to a hip-hop song. Getting Jason to get one of those black and white dot photos in the WSJ.
Kottke posted a great dissection of the Kobe to Shaq alleyoop spot, noting how it contains evidence of just how dysfunctional Kobe and Shaq's relationship already was at that time.
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Jeffrey Toobin profiles Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts in The New Yorker. Toobin opened my eyes to just how much Roberts has already shifted the Supreme Court right during his short tenure. Roberts may be Bush's most unpublicized but lasting legacy.
Still, there is no disputing that the President and the Chief Justice are adversaries in a contest for control of the Court, and that both men come to that battle well armed. Obama has at most one more chance to take the oath of office, and Roberts will probably have a half-dozen more opportunities to get it right. But each time Roberts walks down the steps of the Capitol to administer the oath, he may well be surrounded—and eventually outvoted—by Supreme Court colleagues appointed by Barack Obama.
Years back, I saw a movie at Sundance called Brick, by a first-time director named Rian Johnson. Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Lukas Haas, Brick cast the traditional roles of a film noir in a high school setting, hard-boiled dialogue and all. Of the many movies I saw that year, Brick was among the most memorable for its intriguing conceit, one which the director committed to fully. It was no surprise that it won a special mention or award during the festival for uniqueness of voice or vision, something of the sort.
Back then, I made a mental checkmark next to Rian Johnson as a talented young director to watch. And soon I will have the chance. Hulu has an exclusive on the first seven minutes of his next movie, The Brothers Bloom.
As an espresso shot of inspiration, this musical number (YouTube) which many many people forwarded me yesterday. What would be perfect is if I heard she'd started dating Paul the opera singer.
Also moving, also musically related, is Anvil! The Story of Anvil, a documentary about a metal band. Like many who come to this movie, I had not heard of Anvil, nor am I a metalhead. My first thought on seeing the trailer was that I wanted to see it but perhaps just on DVD given how far on the periphery of my interests it fell.
But I kept getting pitched to see it from UCLA film schoolers who raved about it, and given that it was only in LA for a one week run at the Nuart, and after reading a rave review by Anthony Lane in The New Yorker, I planned an outing to see it last night and invited a bunch of friends.
Just one person responded, in the negative, and the remaining radio silence I read as tacit declines, perhaps reacting the same way I did to the trailer. So I went by myself; once I saw the documentary, that seemed only fitting.
Anvil was a seminal metal band, and in the early 80's, people in that genre of the industry foresaw big things for them, but for reasons not entirely clear to me as an outsider to that genre, they slipped into obscurity while bands like Anthrax, Megadeth, Metallica, and Slayer went on to fame and fortune (in the documentary, they are referred to as The Big Four, a bit of trivia that was news to me).
Lead singer Steve Kudlow is known to all but his family as Lips. The drummer's name is Robb Reiner, a coincidence that seems so improbable and perfect that I thought he might have changed his name at one point, but no, this is art and life together in a winking conspiracy. The two of them are the founders and soul of Anvil, and even now, in their 50's, bicker, make up, repeat, like an old married couple.
What always surprises me is how sweet all the people involved in heavy metal music seem to be, from the musicians with their face paint and outfits heavy on leather and endless waves of hair to the fans with their heads bopping and tongues hanging. Lips is the star of the documentary, almost childlike in his optimism. He and Sally Hawkins' Poppy from Happy-Go-Lucky should get together, just to see if their buoyancy might generate a harmonic convergence that could bring about world peace.
Not that Lips doesn't have his moments of despair, but much of the wonder of this movie is watching him, on screen confronting his despair, and then setting it aside with what comes to seem a courageous perseverance and good cheer.
I can see why so many film students gravitate towards the story, as all who enter the arts confront the issue of "what price my art?" on a daily basis. The internet has made critics of us all, but it has not simplified the question of why people pursue art, and at what cost to themselves and their loved ones.
It's a touching story about which I will reveal little else other than to recommend it highly. See it if/when it makes it to your town. The director Sacha Gervasi, who wrote the screenplay for The Terminal and who is teaching screenwriting at UCLA Film School this quarter, showed up after the screening for an unpublicized Q&A. He was gracious and shared some intriguing stories:
Gervasi met Anvil when he approached them backstage in London and introduced himself as their number one fan. Lips said it was their first time in London and asked Gervasi to show them around town, leading to the humorous image of Gervasi, a young metalhead, leading Lips and Reiner through the Tate Gallery. Gervasi claimed credit for introducing Reiner to the works of Francis Bacon, a story that is less humorous when you learn, in the movie, that Reiner paints Edward Hopper-esque scenes with considerable skill.
At the screening at Sundance in 2008, a woman during the Q&A asked Lips if he'd ever considered what toll his pursuit of his music placed on his family, and Kudlow broke down and started crying, and then the woman started crying. And she said to him that at least he'd taught his son one of the most valuable lessons, and that was to never give up on his dreams.
Lastly, as part of our documentary launch at Hulu, we added a documentary I saw at Sundance years ago and loved, called DIG!. It shares some parallels with Anvil in its exploration of why artists do what they do.
Director Ondi Timoner, the only two-time Grand Jury Prize winner ever at Sundance, spoke to Hulu editor Rebecca Harper recently. One of the reasons this appealed to me more than many documentaries is that Timoner used one of the principal characters as a narrator, and not an unbiased, omniscient narrator. It's a twist that works, something Timoner spoke about:
Why choose to have Courtney narrate the film?
Courtney was a huge breakthrough for me. I'd attempted to tell the story without narration, but I needed an anchor. I didn't want omniscient narration; I wanted it to be a ride, a journey. So I woke up very pregnant in the middle of the night a month and a half before I finished. I called Courtney right away. He happened to be in Europe at the time, but he was flying into L.A. the next day. He didn't change any of my words; he was gracious and generous. I appreciate him for that.
I can't think of too many directors who've built a more personal and varied body of work than Steven Soderbergh. He's written, produced, directed, and even been his own cinematographer, while doing anything that interests him, from personal projects to huge blockbusters with stars like George Clooney and Julia Roberts. He's experimented with distribution with a day-and-date release for Bubble, and he's shot epic movies like Che Parts 1 and 2 with a Red One camera that was still in beta. It's a dream of a career arc.
We have the premiere of the trailer of his next movie at Hulu. The Girlfriend Experience (also shot on the Red One) follows the life of a high-end call girl who offers not just sex but the full girlfriend experience, and it stars an adult film star, Sasha Grey. Soderbergh did a Q&A with Hulu about the movie.
Why choose to go with non-professional actors for this project?
I've been experimenting with non-actors (terrible term) for years now, and I really love what they bring. It's not a result-oriented process for them, so the feeling of the performance can, if you're lucky, be incredibly realistic, almost documentary-like. In fact, I viewed the whole film as kind of a fictionalized documentary.
Most of the movie was shot with nothing more than natural light. I'm looking forward to seeing it.
Recently someone posted about how the ubiquity of cell phones has neutered movie plotlines dependent on lack of communication for dramatic suspense (if someone knows which post I'm referring to, let me know; for the life of me I can't remember where I saw it). For example, Romeo and Juliet would've never ended tragically if the two of them could have texted each other rather than having a messenger try to deliver the news of the faked death ("Drnking drug to fake death for 2 and 40 hrs. Not rlly dead! Meet @CapuletCrypt? <3<3<3 -J")
So screenwriters depend on poor cell phone reception or destroyed cell phones to try and extend the useful life of communication barriers as a plot device.
The plot device that bothers me the most is the use of old-school answering machines to incite conflict. Every time a character comes home with a loved one and then presses play on one of those old-school answering machines, unwittingly playing a suspicious or incriminating message out loud before they can hit the stop button, I picture a lazy screenwriter at the laptop thinking of how to squeeze a plot turn into one page of script. I barely know anybody who still has a landline, let alone one of those answering machines. Mobile phone voicemail just isn't as convenient for a screenwriter, though, so the answering machine lives on.
Yes, it's a cheat in your movie trailer to use Arcade Fire (as in the appropriation of "Wake Up" in the trailer for Where the Wild Things Are, embedded below) or "Hoppipolla" by Sigur Ros (Children of Men, Slumdog Millionaire) or "Aquarium" from Saint-Saëns The Carnival of Animals (first Benjamin Button trailer, for example) in your trailer. But trailers are all about shortcuts to the pleasure centers of your brain, and the trailer below pushes many of them.
Not to say it might not still be a dud of a movie--you can't draw any meaningful conclusions from such a short and produced montage--but count me among the intrigued, especially since YYY's Karen O is collaborating with Carter Burwell on the score/soundtrack.
Titled Turn Off the Dark, with music and lyrics by Bono and The Edge and direction from Julie Taymor (Lion King), the Spider-Man musical will preview on Broadway beginning Jan. 16, 2010 and open officially on Feb. 18, 2010.
I can't help but picture a three melody ensemble piece: Neil Patrick Harris as Peter Parker, singing in his Spiderman suit, perched on the precipice of a tall building in NYC, Mary Jane (no thoughts who'd play her), many miles away, singing from a fashion catwalk where she stands as various assistants attend to her hair and makeup, and finally, Ewan McGregor as Eddie Brock, harmonizing from a NY city alley, as as Venom's inky black creeps across his skin and possesses him.
The best part of the interview below is when Ryan Seacrest asks one of the young kids from the Slumdog cast a question, and he doesn't reply. Another boy standing in the back row explains, "He doesn't speak English."
Ryan Seacrest then asks, "Can one of you translate?"
Another of the actors jumps in, "He doesn't speak English."
The other critical information revealed in this interview is that Freida Pinto is single and hasn't been asked out via her agent despite the movie's popularity. Sadly, I did a search on my iPhone for "Freida Pinto agent" and got zero results.
Complaining about the Oscars is some sort of national pastime, but one that's always exasperated me. If you don't like the Oscars, the movies they nominate, don't watch! The Oscars, like the Hall of Fame in baseball, are voted on by a select and insular group of people, so if your tastes don't align with those voting in each category, it's futile to expect anything to change. Saying you don't like the Oscars doesn't earn you any exclusive indie cred; that bandwagon is full every year and has been for years.
Honor the movies you enjoy by going to see them and telling people you know to see them. I grew up watching the Oscars with my family and have always looked forward to them. It's one of the few events left on TV outside of sporting events that people gather to watch live. I am sad when they show the montage of the recently deceased, excited to hear familiar musical cues from famous scores or see montages of classic movie scenes, and happy when someone I admire wins the golden naked guy statue. Sure, there's plenty of room for improvement in every telecast--what was with the odd acting award presentation process this year?--but there are usually enough fun moments (Anne Hathaway and Hugh Jackman dancing, Ben Stiller channeling Joaquin Phoenix channeling Ted Kaczynski) to keep me coming back for another dose the next year.
The new tv show Lie to Me is based on the real-life research of Dr. Paul Ekman into facial behaviors, or how muscles of the face reveal underlying psychology through microexpressions that are nearly unconscious or involuntary.
Ekman's system is called the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), and its companion is the Facial Action Coding System Affect Interpretation Dictionary (FACSAID). I first heard of Ekman's work through a Malcolm Gladwell article in the New Yorker titled "The Naked Face".
I put the prices there because I know some people don't like to pay for any apps, but if there's one thing I urge people to do this year it's to pay for things that provide value, even if they're things you can obtain illegally for free. Whether it's software or music or movies, with the Internet it's easier than ever to reward people directly for work you appreciate. When apps for the iPhone cost less than a Vietnamese Banh Mi sandwich, there's really no excuse. Do the right thing, fight the recession, reward people who do great work that improves your life.
Two other iPhone photography apps that I recommend: Photogene ($2.99) and QuadCamera ($1.99). The iPhone camera is not going to win any prizes for picture quality, but the use of these apps should improve your snaps noticeably. Your Facebook and Flickr friends thank you in advance.
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Speaking of iPhone apps, I've reached the nine page, 144 app limit. I don't use all the apps all the time, so it's not a problem to delete a few, but the limit seems somewhat arbitrary, and at some point in the near future I can see having more than 144 apps that I'd use semi-regularly, or at least often enough that I wouldn't want to have to be deleting and installing apps all the time.
Paging through nine pages of apps doesn't exactly play to the iPhone's interface strengths (some ability to group apps or nest them in folder would be handy) but it's certainly not unusable.
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Amazon's Universal wishlist feature allows you to add products from other websites. Not sure when this launched, but it's an idea I recall being bandied about at Amazon many years ago.
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Metacritic compiles top 10 lists from movie critics across the land (they need to fix their HTML header as it still reads 2007 Film Critic Top Ten Lists in my browser tab). I'm still waiting for their year-end compilation graphic that assimilates all these top ten lists into a master best-of list. I'm not sure if they're producing it again this year, but I hope they do.
There's this shot in The Wrestler, a steadicam shot behind Mickey Rourke as he walks through the back offices of a grocery store out to the deli counter. It echoes many other shots in the movie, from better times for Randy "The Ram" Robinson, and the visual reference is unmistakeable and poignant.
But just in case you're oblivious, the sound designer slowly mixes in the sounds of a raucous wrestling crowd chanting his name, just as he hears it when he prepares to walk out through the curtains at a wrestling event. It rises to a crescendo just as he's about to walk through the hanging plastic flaps out to the deli counter.
I wish they'd had the restraint to leave the shot as is and leave out the audio clue. What was an understated and lyrical moment is transformed into something overly sentimental, and I felt that way about many instances of the score in the movie which is otherwise shot in an unfussy, documentary style.
Besides that, though, it's a very moving film. You don't just feel for Randy "The Ram" Robinson but for Mickey Rourke who is nearly unrecognizable, at least to me. This is the guy from Diner and 9 1/2 Weeks?
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The Israel Consulate is using Twitter to manage their message during this military campaign against Hamas. It's a challenge, trying to communicate complex messages with a 140 character limit, as many organizations are learning while trying to use Twitter for unmediated communication with users. Lots of URL shorteners and common online abbreviations are used, lending an oddly casual air to what are serious messages.
Two perhaps adventitious consequences of this medium: the character limit forces a concise and often more forceful statement of a message, and users who write you are forced to adhere to the character limit also, so it's a level playing ground.
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Jay-Z crossed with Radiohead = Jaydiohead (from DJ Minty Fresh Beats)
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A movie trailer that is just one scene, perhaps not truncated or edited down from what appears in the movie itself? Effective.
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Given NYC's economic dependence on the finance industry, you'd expect Manhattan real estate to have taken a disproportionate beating in this recession.
In fact, New York's real estate market is proving more resilient in this downturn than that of other U.S. cities.
Today’s Case-Shiller housing price figures indicate that New York City’s prices dropped 7.5 percent in the last year, while prices in Los Angeles declined 27.9 percent. Nationwide prices dropped 18 percent. New York is the only major metropolitan area with prices that are still 90 percent above prices in January 2000. According to National Association of Realtors data, New York is the only city in the continental United States, outside of San Francisco Bay, where median sales prices remain north of $500,000.
Despite Wall Street’s suffering, the New York area’s unemployment rate, 5.6 percent in the latest figures, is lower than that in many other major cities. The comparable unemployment rate for Los Angeles is 8.2 percent. The comparable number for Chicago is 6.4 percent.
What's going on? Economist Edward Glaeser attributes it to faith in the city's talented citizens and concentration of said people.
New York still has an amazing concentration of talent. That talent is more effective because all those smart people are connected because of the city’s extreme population density levels. Historically, human capital — the education and skills of a work force — predicts which cities are able to reinvent themselves and which ones are not. Those people who are continuing to pay high prices for Manhattan real estate are implicitly betting that New York’s human capital will continue to come up with new ways of reinventing the city.
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The first album of 2009 that's gathering critical buzz and mp3 blog lust: Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion
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The statistics behind the B.C.S. are not just inscrutable but fundamentally flawed.
Statistically, the system is such an abomination that at least one expert — Hal S. Stern, a professor of statistics at the University of California, Irvine — advocated that no self-respecting statistician should have anything to do with it. In an article published in The Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports two years ago, he wrote that the B.C.S. computer rankings serve as little more than a confirmation of the results of the two opinion polls the system also uses to create its rankings. The people who run the computer rankings, he noted, have never been given any clear objective criteria to design their programs, and they are not allowed to use the score or site of a game in their calculations. Stern urged a boycott, a refusal by the community of statisticians to lend credibility to a system he regards as scientifically bankrupt.
In the end, it comes down to money.
“The six big conferences don’t want to share money with the smaller conferences,
