i think i need to rewatch this soon.
I’ve got the Blu-ray!
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Credits of old movies vs. credits from Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. We live in a polarized age in cinema: mega-budget blockbusters and miniscule-budget independent productions. This graphic is the perfect representation of why that’s the case. (via NYTimes.com)
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That pain, the way my aspirations were dashed, that’s going to find its way in there. So I’m not doing a James L. Brooks—I loved how personal Spanglish was, but I thought that where Sofia Coppola got praised for being personal, he got criticized for being personal in the exact same aching way. But that doesn’t interest me, at least not now, to do my little story about my little situation. The more I hide it, the more revealing I can be.
Quentin Tarantino: The Inglourious Basterds Interview - Page 1 - News - New York - Village Voice - Tarantino, about how he works within genre to express himself more earnestly than he could by working outside of it. Solid interview.
Lessons of Darkness (Lektionen in Finsternis): ★★★★★
Haunting. Herzog shows us a world on fire, an apocalypse, and not only do we watch it burn—we set the fire ourselves.
Available on Netflix Instant.
The Hurt Locker - ★★★★★
Saw this tonight at the Landmark. If you live in Atlanta and you haven’t seen this film, see it while it’s playing on the big screen. If that doesn’t pan out, see it on DVD/Blu-ray. It’s just brilliant. My roommate and I didn’t have much to say about it besides, “That was a great movie.” Kathryn Bigelow completely deserves the accolades.
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Synecdoche, New York” is the best film of the decade. It intends no less than to evoke the strategies we use to live our lives. After beginning my first viewing in confusion, I began to glimpse its purpose and by the end was eager to see it again, then once again, and I am not finished. Charlie Kaufman understands how I live my life, and I suppose his own, and I suspect most of us. Faced with the bewildering demands of time, space, emotion, morality, lust, greed, hope, dreams, dreads and faiths, we build compartments in our minds. It is a way of seeming sane.
The best films of the decade - Roger Ebert’s Journal - A great list of great films.
I still have not seen Synecdoche, New York, unfortunately. For me, it’s Kaufman’s honesty, his frankness in his work that makes it so powerful and meaningful and admirable. In a time when we are inundated with artifice and illusion, here’s a guy who writes movies about real people and creatively presents those people and their problems to us with alarming immediacy and insight. Brilliant.
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What’s left out from these movies is as important and beautiful as what’s included. They’re exercises in doing as much as possible with as little as possible, implying whole swaths of narrative information by allowing the audience to extrapolate events, details, backstories and subplots from only the barest hints of their presence. In fact, what Mann is doing here (and why I am so obviously drawn to this sensibility) is designing these stories — not just their presentation but more fundamentally their construction, too — and doing so in a way that evokes many of the very same things that thrill me about design.
Subtraction.com: Minimalism, Michael Mann and Miami Vice - While I don’t think Mann is doing anything particularly unique among the works of other great directors (see the films of Jean-Pierre Melville, Stanley Kubrick, Wim Wenders, Michelangelo Antonioni, Terrence Malick, etc., and tell me their films aren’t “experiences”), I do like the correlation Vinh is drawing between design and cinematic storytelling.
A great film is great for what it excludes as much as for what it includes, exactly like great design. In that regard design is itself a kind of mise en scene—what is there is how it works, and how effectively it works is a result of how carefully and skillfully the processes that affected the design were refined and employed.
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Beyond that, we are an organism that has elected to root much of our legal and social system in family ties (or bonds). And we have made family the lifeblood of great art. At the same time, philosophically or metaphysically, we have pushed ourselves into a state of existence where almost the only sane conclusion is that the family has become dysfunctional.
David Thomson: Ozu v Avatar – this really is what cinema has come down to | Film | guardian.co.uk - A great essay on the failings of contemporary cinema to deal with real issues that affect us, real people. Thomson longs for a time when people would seek out the work of someone like Ozu because it speaks to them, because it deals with reality as most people live it.
I am reminded of a description a friend of Werner Herzog’s once gave of his films: “the miraculous in the mundane.” It would seem that mainstream cinema has forgotten the mundane altogether, and so has discarded the raw material with which we find common ground with each other. I thought Cameron’s Avatar was beautiful, but its beauty, its story, and its messages are lost in a kind of selfish pride, as if the film shouts into your eyes, “Look how amazing I am!” Cinema can be anything, but it’s due for a realist movement any day now.
