education & film — #
Waiting For ‘Superman’ is a movie about the depravity of the American education system and the forces joining to fix it.
23 August 2010
8 August 2010
film & culture — #
The Key to ‘Inception’: It’s a Movie About Making Movies
It’s the merest cliché, that a movie is itself a shared dream. The lights go down, and the audience shares a vision created by others. We are the real targets of the inception, here.
After I read the Faraci review, I had to go and see the movie again. And having done that, it now seems to me that Faraci did not go nearly far enough with the 8½ analogy. Like 8½, Inception is a movie about making movies; it’s not that the whole movie “is a dream,” though, but rather that the whole movie is an allegory of creation. It’s the story of Dom Cobb/Christopher Nolan, and his struggle with his own youthful, self-absorbed aesthetic in order to return “home,” where he can be united with his “real” children—his works, his films.
People have asked: why are the children generally wearing the same clothes, and why are they mostly the same age, throughout this movie? It’s because they’re the perfect vision of his creation, the ideal works of his mind’s eye; they symbolize the movies Nolan would like to make, or to have made.
29 July 2010
film & technology — #
Brain Farm Cinema’s Reel showcases their aerial cinematography chops.
28 July 2010
film & culture — #
A really great interview with Bill Murray
You have a lot of lines in this one that get tons of laughs I doubt were on the page. It’s all in the rhythm, the delivery. How do you pitch something like that? How do you make something out of nothing?
I have developed a kind of different style over the years. I hate trying to re-create a tone or a pitch. Saying, “I want to make it sound like I made it sound the last time”? That’s insane, because the last time doesn’t exist. It’s only this time. And everything is going to be different this time. There’s only now. And I don’t think a director, as often as not, knows what is going to play funny anyway. As often as not, the right one is the one that they’re surprised by, so I don’t think that they have the right tone in their head. And I think that good actors always—or if you’re being good, anyway—you’re making it better than the script. That’s your fucking job. It’s like, Okay, the script says this? Well, watch this. Let’s just roar a little bit. Let’s see how high we can go.
30 May 2010
culture & film — #
Rolling Stone’s obituary for Dennis Hopper
Hopper may have had the surest hand on the zeitgeist of anyone in Hollywood, putting his fingerprints on a series of iconic, era-defining pictures.
[..]
Hopper’s career is doubly impressive in light of the nearly two decades he was one of Hollywood’s most notorious drug addicts. He spent much of the ’70s and early ’80s as an outcast in a town he’d once owned, thanks to the surprising success of Easy Rider, one of the earliest salvos of the New Hollywood that artistically dominated the ’70s. Hopper is also notorious for his troubled relationships with women: Michelle Phillips, whom he married in 1970, divorced him after less than two weeks.
9 April 2010
film & web — #
Spike Jone’s short, I’M HERE, A LOVE STORY IN AN ABSOLUT WORLD, is online for those older than 18.
26 March 2010
film & culture — #
Ron Fricke’s sequel to Baraka, Samsara, is currently in post-production
20 March 2010
television & film — #
This is a very well executed short film which happens to be an ad.
4 March 2010
film & nature — #
This ad featuring various pedigreed dogs jumping for treats is stunning
2 March 2010
culture & film — #
How Not to Depict a War details all the ways The Hurt Locker is just plain wrong.
This time, the soldiers were right. The film is a collection of scenes that are completely implausible — wrong in almost every respect. This time, it’s not just minor details that are wrong.
If there is one rule with the military, it is that there is strength in numbers. No one soldier, no one vehicle, goes out alone. Ever. Four vehicles and a 20-man squad is the minimum that I have worked with in Iraq. A lone Humvee would not be allowed to clear the gate at any base in Iraq.
[…]
The movie’s denouement — the explosive ordnance disposal (E.O.D.) team responds to a massive truck bomb in the Green Zone — is so completely wrong in every respect that it borders on farce. Insurgents did not operate freely in the Green Zone. They would never have kidnapped a soldier in an area with thousands of U.S. troops. And they would never have hung around an active investigation scene with their weapons. No American E.O.D. team in existence (or any other three-man squad) would go charging alone down dark alleyways when there are hundreds of infantrymen at hand.
17 February 2010
politics & film — #
FreeDocumentaries.org airs left-leaning documentaries for free online.