Brendan Dawes is a cinephil and a hacker. His site is pretty interesting because a) he’s got some smart things to say ’bout film and coding and the nexus between the two and b) his wordpress blog is totally tricked out with all kinds of shit I’ve never seen before.
Using eight of my favourite films from eight of my most admired directors including Sidney Lumet, Francis Ford Coppola and John Boorman, each film is processed through a Java program written with the processing environment. This small piece of software samples a movie every second and generates an 8 x 6 pixel image of the frame at that moment in time. It does this for the entire film, with each row representing one minute of film time.
It wasn’t that long ago that Mike Bay was the go to guy for film snobs looking for some one to hate. And it wasn’t so long ago that I was among the ranks of haters. That Armageddon business was pure shit. And as for Pearl Harbor, I fully stand behind my decision to hate that film without ever having seen it. Continue reading ‘Transformers is our last best hope’
Has it been a week, fuck all if I know, but this is getting posted.
In honor of Mr. Harmony Korine’s latest, sure to be at a theater near some day here is an old (circa Julien Donkey-Boy) interview with the retarded prince himself.
Update: well fuck this. That clip’s not allowed to be embedded. Well fuck off BurtonLeonReynoldsJr. Instead I’m posting this clip absolute pandemonium amid Korine talking about why he loves Werner Herzog.
There’s some kind of internet exclusive trailer out for PT Andersons’ newest There Will Be Blood which is some kind of morality tale about the high cost of sustaining our oil economy and also it’s a western.
Anderson’s got what I would call a pretty consistent style between film, the stamp of the auteur which is what blows me away about this footage. This trailer is a lot of things but it’s doesn’t look like a PT Anderson film. I thought of Days of Heaven, and Bound for Glory and Macabe and Mrs. Miller. This trailer embodies what it is that I love about the films of the 70’s. It’s been a long time since we’ve had a new PTA movie to look forward and it’s nice to see that he’s undergone a transformation as an artist.
There’s a café I’m known to frequent, and on the bathroom wall is scrawled the following line, credited to Tom Robins.
“Just more suckers betting their share of the present on the future, banking every misery on a happy ending” Continue reading ‘The Lookout’
Disturbia is a film I’m going to assume you’ve never heard of but it has been number one at the box office for the past two weeks. I’ve been hearing a lot about the box office failure of Grindhouse which people have been analyzing and conversing about. Well this Disturbia film is the reason why: so enamored is everyone with its charms they just don’t have time to buy tickets to sit and watch Grindhouse for three and a half hours.
Depending on how snide you want to be Disturbia is either a remake of Rear Window or a rip off of it. It is also geared towards the teenage crowd so instead of a Jimmy Stewart with a broken leg it’s the Disney Channel’s own Shia LaBouef under house arrest for punching his Spanish teacher. He gets an ankle braclet that will go off if he steps outside his property so he spends his time stalking his room window. He and his obligatory Asian comic relief friend spend half their time ogling the new girl next door and the other half convincing them selves that their other neighbor is a notorious serial killer. One thing that bothered me was that their evidence against the neighbor was less than convincing. Of course in the great tradition of Rear Window rip offs they are never less than zealous in their convictions that this guy absolutely has dozens of hacked up bodies in his garage.
As soon as you get that this is Rear Window for the under twenty crowd you know exactly what will happen. This is as predictable a film as you’re likely to see in the theater anytime soon. But what Disturbia gets right is that it has an uncanny understanding of its audience and what they want to see. Pop songs, cell phone cameras, Xbox live. Whatever they’re into this movie is into as well. Plus, for some reason I really like the Disney Channel’s own Shia LaBouef, possibly for the same reason I like Cory Feldman.
I’m a reluctant to come out a recommend this movie but it has an easy charisma that sort of won my over.
For awhile now I’ve had a minor obsession with film critic Armond White. If your at all familiar with his work then you don’t need to ask why.
I equally love the anti-Armond “blog” (short for web-log) armonddangerous. Extra points for a great name, I’m sufficiently ashamed of my lame title for this post.
Somehow I’d managed to overlook the amazing wikipedia entry on the combatant critic whose captured my heart. Here’s the best part:
A blog established in 2006, Armond Dangerous, deals with many of these issues by posing false arguments, illogic and ad hominem attacks on White. The blog is maintained by an anonymous source; its writers do not identify themselves which undercuts their attempt to “criticize the critic.” It is evidence of the envy and hostility and cowardice that consumes fanboys of the internet subculture; they are dead-set against White’s freedom of speech.
I had no interest in this Number 23 movie. Jim Carrey plus Joel Schumacher plus an appallingly flimsy premise. Yeah I read RAW novels and looked for 23 conspiracies too, and then one day I had sex. They’re about 20 years late on this fad, and besides if we want to over-analyze number coincidences that never pay off then that’s what Lost is for.
But anyways the reviews for this debacle have officially piqued my interest (8% on RT). Every few years a film comes out that inspires critics to new new levels of poetic vitriol in their attempts to wrap their heads around how awful the experience really was. It takes a special type of monstrosity to illicit unfavorable comparisons to Batman & Robin. And that is just the type of monstrosity I would like to stand in line an pay 8 dollars to witness and then write a review of.
Davy Lynch, one of my very favorite film makers, has a new opus out and word on the street is it’s a three hour mess.
Now, I’m not one to sleep on a new Lynch release, I’m a die hard, a bit of a completest you could say. So I bought a ticket to Inland Empire expecting I was about to sit through a three hour exercise in frustration. My expectations were low. Continue reading ‘Inland Empire’
In the future women have stopped giving birth, and the human race is slowly dying out. As the film opens, the youngest person on Earth has just been killed, murdered by an unruly mob looking for his autograph. And his death casts a long shadow over the denizens of this dystopia the way celebrity deaths seem to do for some mysterious reason.
The opening shot is like something from Touch of Evil. Director Cuaron punctuates his film with complex tracking shots that erupt spontaneously in horror and violence. Cuaron has drawn from a rich well of inspiration and it’s not the typical sci-fi stuff. Touch of Evil, I Cuba, and Battle of Algiers are all recalled. I’ll go so far as to say that no film this year utilizes it’s camera and sound design as effectively. There are at least four classic scenes etched into my brain that I wouldn’t dream spoiling.
Like the best of sci-fi Children of Men manages to tell us about ourselves, who we are and where we’re going. The movie shows us humanity at it’s most desperate and profane but also humanity at it’s most noble. This is an apocalyptic dystopia interrupted by fleeting oases of tranquility.
As Bartholomew Clive Owen is playing a character who is often called upon to be heroic, but his performance is notable because of its absence of heroism. He gets through the ordeals and escapes danger mostly by accident and luck. He catches lucky breaks. He’s a reluctant hero and captures perfectly the face of despair. He’s a sleep walking pseudo alcoholic who sneaks nips from his flask to get through the morning s and has gotten used to he ringing in his ears that is the result of daily terrorist bombings. He is the citizen of interesting times and he’s adapted by keeping his head down and his nose to the ground. He is a perfect representative of humanity. Waiting for the inevitable end, not exactly dreading the prospect that it may come too soon.
Plus there are no less than three classic car chase scenes and an epically choreographed stroll through a war zone. As a sci-fi depiction of the future, as an action thriller and as brutal depiction of the depths and peaks of human behavior this film blew me away. This is a film that stuck with me. It planted itself into my brain where it took up residence and refused to leave.
