Archive for the movies tag
New homie John-the-irish-mexican turns me on to Allan Weisbecker and his wicked newsletter, who in turn, turns me on to:
Dear and Yonder, An Ocean Odyssey of the Female Kind. A new surf film coming out in ‘09. No trailer quite yet, but an impressive list of surfers are captured in celluloid, including Kassia Meador, Prue Jeffries and Sofia Mulanovich. And it’s directed by Tiffany Campbell (wife of one TMoe Campbell).
Could it have been Tiffany shooting Kassia that day, out at Burros, a few years back?
The Playlist is “a place dedicated to that sweet spot where movies and music meet”. It’s the place to go if you’re a soundtrack junky like me. Articles usually focus on not-so-commercial upcoming film news with an emphasis on soundtrack related info. Their movie and music tastes follow my own, their sense of humor is unorthodox* and they’re in my top five daily blog reads.
The Playlist has an on-going feature called The Sountrack Series where the author picks a director who has an established sonic palette that accompanies their films, and creates 20 song playlists of music that could be used in said director’s films. The series is ongoing and current volumes include: Sofia Coppola, Jim Jarmusch, Cameron Crowe, Michel Gondry, David Gordon Green and Miranda July, Noah Baumbach, Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson. I downloaded the David Gordon Green volume (part 1) and dug it so much, I’m now downloading all 12 parts in the 9 current volumes.
This series is more then just an ode to soundtrack genius, it’s a great resource for discovering new music and possibly listening to music you’ve heard before through a different context. It’s a great freakin’ idea and I’m nonplussed I didn’t think of it first. As a consolation prize, I have hours and hours of new music to listen to. go check it out.
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Marcia and I have been on a circus vibe lately, that’s kinda how our minds work. Get on a theme and learn/discover/investigate. A few weeks ago, we got into the circus thing starting with Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen which marks a perfect jumping off point for historically accurate circus mythology dripping with Great Depression era magic and tragedy. If this book were ever made in to a movie, I’m sure the Coen Brothers would be directing.
Next, at the urging of everyone in my family, we read Geek Love. This book has been floating around my parents’ extensive book collection since it was published in ‘89. Geek Love’s emergency orange cover is burned into my memory. Never knowing quite what it was about, I was delighted to find a heart-breaking story about a traveling family of circus freaks and their eventual demise. I’d love to see Geek Love as a movie, although to be honest I spent most of the book wanted to choke the shit of the narrator, an albino hunchback dwarf with an obsessive, psychotically misplaced loyalty. In short, I loved it. A quick check at Wikipedia tells me that Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam and Johnny Depp have all expressed interest in making Geek Love into a film. good crowd.
Making it a triumvirate of circus/freak culture, I introduced Marcia to Tod Browning’s Freaks. This movie is practically in my family canon, first showed to me when I was a kid by my uncle Tim, who managed to get a pirate copy on VHS. It was never officially released on VHS and didn’t make it to DVD until 2005 so for years Freaks enjoyed a cult-classic mythology surrounding it’s bombed release and subsequent burial by MGM. If you saw Freaks, you were privileged or at the very least, had a family member obsessed enough to seek out an elicit copy, long before the holy trinity of ebay, youtube and bit torrent. Unfortunately the versions floating around bt don’t have spanish subtitles and there are some spoken parts, not even I can understand. So my advice is get the DVD. It’s worth it. The signature line from the family of circus freaks shown in the film is “gooble gobble, one of us, one of us”, usually done in chanting style. This is sort of like an unconscious running line in our family that silently unifies us and always gets a smile from all, around the dinner table. I could be wrong, but I think that my entire family were circus freaks, in our last lives.
Well, I was gonna say this entry til the middle of our trip to Bali, but I got to thinkin’ that it didn’t have too much to do with Bali (well, nothing to do with) and I was trying to keep a theme to the entries that are auto-posted during our trip. Plus, these movies are pretty old anyway, so it doesn’t make much sense to wait. So, I’m publishing this now, a shortnsweet list of the films I saw in the past week or so. Here goes…
- Deathproof - why is the first half of the movie in this jacked up, grindhouse style and the second half not a dust scratch in sight? schizophrenic and lopsided.
- Ratatouille - absolutely wonderful.
- Ken Park - horrible video cinematography. wandering, boring plot. a must for anyone whose not exactly sure what male anatomy looks like.
- Ocean’s 13 - I’ll never get tired of Soderberg’s formula for these movies, I hope he never stops making them. but Ellen Arkin’s cougar-under-love-potion-spell scenes? horrible.
- The Heartbreak kid - dumb. some funny parts. but over all, dumb. Michelle Monaghan can do no wrong.
- Curse of the Golden Flower - gorgeous cinematography, sets, costumes etc… meandering plot.
- 3:10 to Yuma - bad guys as the new good guys? eh. over it.
- Lions For Lambs - 10x better then the reviews said it’d be. I actually liked it. Tom Cruise is a scary mofo. Despite what ignorant sock puppets are saying, the politics in this movie are spot on. go see it.
- Bonus: Bionic Woman (2007 tv show) - the producers wanted this show to look and feel like the new Battlestar Galactica series so much they even took two of its main actors. plots are formulaic and syrupy.
Unfortunately, here in mexico, we get crap movies in the theaters and even crappier movies on dvd. So in essence, this list is an approximation of the better movies that pass through our two horse town. We won’t be getting The Darjeeling Limited, There Will Be Blood, Control, No Country For Old Men anytime soon and we most certainly won’t get Juno.
I am the sound of Ed’s inner film buff, crying tears of shame.
We finally got around to renting Ratatouille this past weekend. Two words: f*cking wonderful.
Battlestar Galactica (2004) writer/producer/creator Ron Moore speaks out about the WGA strike and why you should care:
I had a situation last year on Battlestar Galactica where we were asked by Universal to do webisodes [Note: Moore is referring to The Resistance webisodes which ran before Season 3 premiered], which at that point were very new and ‘Oooh, webisodes! What does that mean?’ It was all very new stuff. And it was very eye opening, because the studio’s position was ‘Oh, we’re not going to pay anybody to do this. You have to do this, because you work on the show. And we’re not going to pay you to write it. We’re not going to pay the director, and we’re not going to pay the actors.’ At which point we said ‘No thanks, we won’t do it.
We got in this long, protracted thing and eventually they agreed to pay everybody involved. But then, as we got deeper into it, they said ‘But we’re not going to put any credits on it. You’re not going to be credited for this work. And we can use it later, in any fashion that we want.’ At which point I said ‘Well, then we’re done and I’m not going to deliver the webisodes to you.’ And they came and they took them out of the editing room anyway — which they have every right to do. They own the material — But it was that experience that really showed me that that’s what this is all about. If there’s not an agreement with the studios about the internet, that specifically says ‘This is covered material, you have to pay us a formula - whatever that formula turns out to be - for use of the material and how it’s all done,’ the studios will simply rape and pillage.
pretty f*cking good argument. Let’s hope the studios take their collective heads out of their asses and give the writers a decent shake. On a darker note, if the strike keeps up Battlestar Galactica and Lost won’t have new episodes in the spring.
Oooooh fuuuudge. (but it wasn’t ‘fudge’ it was the mother of all curse words…)
[via crooksnliars via FireDogLake]
The Playlist has the skinny on the poster art and Judd Apatow’s hate/hate relationship with “The Academy”. Hilarious! File this one under: “rediculous insider jokes that won’t make sense to anyone that hasn’t worked in “Hollywood” or doesn’t have a serious film industry fetish”. nice.
Oscar Temperature & Predictions: For Your Consideration. The Playlist gets in an early oscar contender list and some pretty interesting observations. It’s gonna be an ‘indiewood’ year. nice.
‘Silent Light‘ is a new film from mexican director Carlos Reygadas, about the Mennonites near Chihuahua, Mex. It looks to be a do-not-miss film full of Terence Malick influenced flowing, golden hour landscape shots. official site | more info on Mennonites in Mexico.
My good buddy James just finished up editing a new indie feature film called Sunday. It’s about a young couple on their last day, before he sets off for Iraq, set in the wilds of Montana. They’ve submitted it to Sundance. pretty cool.
