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sidkan:

Nuit Blanche

Beautiful short film.

Excellant cinematography, compositing, art direction, music

(this post was reblogged from sidkan)
welikehowtheytaste: thevelvetknife: stagemom: daniellefaith i think i need to rewatch this soon. I’ve got the Blu-ray!

welikehowtheytaste:

thevelvetknife:

stagemom:

daniellefaith

i think i need to rewatch this soon.

I’ve got the Blu-ray!

(this post was reblogged from welikehowtheytaste)
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) Click for high-res photo

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)

Sweden's high court rules against ad breaks

sidkan:

The Supreme Administrative Court ruled that when pubcast TV4 took commercial breaks during the most thrilling moments of films “Leon” and “Clear and Present Deanger,” [sic] it violated the “integrity and the value” of the films.

The article could just as well be headlined, “Swedish high court outlaws tastelessness”. It’ll be a cold day in hell when America comes around to something like this.

(this post was reblogged from sidkan)
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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.

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.

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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It was on the sound mixing stage when we were expecting a wire transfer that they called to say they needed more time to think about it. The mixer was literally looking at us, saying “are we starting?” and we said “We need the money NOW.” It turns out they were showing the completed cut on video to one of the investor’s 12 year old son. He turned to his dad and said “This is better than ‘American Pie’.” And that was it, they wired the money. Literally my career, my whole life’s work, was in the hands of a 12 year old. And thankfully, he loved it.
The Aughts (and The Aught-Not- Haves) | Mediaite - I’m not a fan of Eli Roth’s movies, and until this article I wasn’t really a fan of him either. But I can’t help but have some respect for the guy after reading this article (written by him) about breaking into the film industry.
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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.

Treated as an architectural premise, Die Hard becomes an exhilarating catalog of unorthodox movements through space. (via BLDGBLOG: Nakatomi Space) A fascinating essay on the role of architecture in Die Hard. Fantastic blog.
Treated as an architectural premise, Die Hard becomes an exhilarating catalog of unorthodox movements through space. (via BLDGBLOG: Nakatomi Space)

A fascinating essay on the role of architecture in Die Hard. Fantastic blog.

To the Point Reviews

A few months back I posted a round-up of all my Netflix reviews. I did it for the sake of sharing then, and I’m going to share the reviews I’ve done since then now.

I’m calling these “To the Point” reviews because I rarely write over a sentence or two (see the exception for The Fall). I write these little blurbs in the Facebook share box after I rate a movie on Netflix, but both of those services are walled gardens, and I much prefer my information like I prefer my chicken and eggs: free-range and cage-free. So here’s to the beginning of a regularly scheduled program.

Feel free to reblog and discuss!

The Man Who Would Be King (★★★): An entertaining film with a splendid cast and great acting. The tone and rhythm, however, leave the film feeling dramatically shallow.

The Fall (★★★★): The story was underdeveloped—there wasn’t enough emotional content in the Roy character to really make me feel anything for him. The little girl was just adorable and wonderful. Visually, the film was beautiful, but I can’t help thinking… that it seemed too clean (to use an essentially meaningless, abstract descriptive term). That’s the impression it left on me, visually. So it was beautiful, yes, but it also seemed a bit too precise, too controlled. The improvisational nature of the story could have been expressed in a more Gilliam-esque fashion, but I’m already getting into the realm of opinion rather than critique. It was a great film, and I look forward to seeing more of his stuff.

Good Night, and Good Luck (★★★★): A well-crafted, robust film from George Clooney and a fantastic cast. Beautiful black-and-white photography casts a hard look on the McCarthy days and the people who had the courage to stand up against his tyranny.

Rope (★★★★): Not the strongest Hitchcock film, but exceedingly well-crafted. Composed entirely of a handful of long takes.

The Happening (★): I’ve only just seen the first 15 minutes of this movie, and that’s enough. Terrible.

Avatar (★★★★): A fun, mesmerizing blockbuster full of beauty and pleasantly subtle 3D effects. Way better than Titantic.

Sita Sings the Blues (★★★★): A charming, funny, and heartfelt animated film about love and loss. What makes it special, though, is that the whole film, drawing, animation, everything, was done by one woman. Thus the film itself serves as a testament to the strength of the human will to endure.

The Odd Couple (★★★★★): Classic from start to finish.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (★★★★★): East meets Bad West. Bad West beats up East. Good West saves East. East wants to bring Bad West to justice. East can’t. Good West saves East again, kills Bad West, loses girl, and dies. New West takes shape with East’s help. The End. Brilliant film.

McCabe and Mrs. Miller (★★★★): Atmospheric. The final showdown is well done, but until that point there isn’t much to connect you to the main characters. Beautifully raw cinematography.

The Frighteners (★★★): Caught this on television one night. Goofy overall, but very entertaining.

A Hard Day’s Night (★★★): Pure fun and energy and classic music.

It’s a Wonderful Life (★★★★★): Sure, the last third of the film is borderline unbearably sentimental, but how could anyone hate a film with a heart this big? Classic.

Empire of the Sun (★★★): Beautiful, but doesn’t really get warmed up until the second half. Great story that could have been a better film.

The Big Picture (★★★): A fun film about the ins and outs of breaking into the film industry. Solid.

The Stranger (★★★): Like other Welles efforts: brilliant story, some striking images, but ultimately a flawed product thanks to the studio system Welles so loved to challenge.

Beauty and the Beast [1946, Jean Cocteau] (★★★★★): Simply beautiful.

The self-destructive romanticism, the artistic self-consciousness, the frenetically unhinged form, the blend of emotional extravagance and cool self-mocking, the vanished boundaries between irony and sincerity and between symbol and reality, the overt cinematic breakdown and breakup, were all of their moment. Pierrot le fou was the last of Godard’s first films, the herald of even more radical rejections and reconstructions to come—for Godard and for the world around him. Pierrot le fou: Self-Portrait in a Shattered Lens - From the Current - Buy it while you can. I did. Click for high-res photo
The self-destructive romanticism, the artistic self-consciousness, the frenetically unhinged form, the blend of emotional extravagance and cool self-mocking, the vanished boundaries between irony and sincerity and between symbol and reality, the overt cinematic breakdown and breakup, were all of their moment. Pierrot le fou was the last of Godard’s first films, the herald of even more radical rejections and reconstructions to come—for Godard and for the world around him.

Pierrot le fou: Self-Portrait in a Shattered Lens - From the Current - Buy it while you can. I did.

A sometimes-enlightening discussion of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. The film historian is an average scholarly bore at best, and the production values of this program leave something to be desired, but McDowell and Burgess are great. (via Google Video)

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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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Ingmar didn’t like spontaneous meetings with his children,” recalls Rodell, who was also Laretei’s accompanist, “but at the cinema, there was always something to talk about, and you met in some kind of structure. He liked that. Everyone lived in their own house, a little bit apart from one another, and then we met at specific hours.” As Rodell’s partner, Benny Marcel, another close friend of Bergman’s, saw it, “getting quality time with their father wasn’t easy. So on a fantastic afternoon when the sun was shining, they had to sit in a dark cinema to meet with him.
Ingmar Bergman: Art & Design: Wmagazine.com - A considered and perceptive piece about Bergman the person rather than the legend. He was a brilliant filmmaker, but by no means was he a role model for a good person or father.