For your consideration — "So much for that 'Intermission' " edition

Addenda to my December 21 collection of "the Year's Best Movies" lists:

• The 40 Best Films of 2011, according to the Pop Matters staff. X-Men: First Class ahead of A Separation?
• New York Magazine: Vulture Critics' Poll: The Complete 'Worst Movie of 2011' Ballots — A comprehensive gathering, with some thoughtful and conversation-starting (or teeth-gnashing) choices, occasionally with a little added commentary. Jack and Jill appears to set the bar, to no one's surprise.

Also not surprisingly, you'll find some titles shared across both of those lists.

Meanwhile, Julie at Misfortune Cookie offers the Best overlooked and underappreciated performances of 2011 and Roger Ebert declares They wuz robbed.

IndieWire/Press Play: The winners of the Vertigoed contest — In response to the foofaraw (given a wobbly rocket boost by Kim Novak) over that pivotal scene in The Artist scored to a distinctive Bernard Herrmann cue from Hitchock's Vertigo, the Press Play staff launched a contest among their readers. Rule #1:

Take the same Herrmann cue -- "Scene D'Amour," used in this memorable moment from Vertigo -- and match it with a clip from any film.... Is there any clip, no matter how silly, nonsensical, goofy or foul, that the score to Vertigo can't ennoble? Let's find out!

And so they did. The results are in. Click here for the full scoop on the contest, its criteria, and the judges, followed by the Grand Prizewinner — STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN, by Jake Isgar — the four finalists, and some special awards (e.g., Citation for Homoerotic Grandeur: TOP GUN by De Maltese Valk).

My glowering assessment of that Vertigo cue in The Artist is here.


NPR: Movie Titles That Might Have Been — From Teenage Sex Comedy That Can Be Made for Under 10 Million Dollars, That Your Reader Will Love But the Executive Will Hate to (wait for it) American Pie.


How many movies will we watch over a lifetime? AD Jameson is keeping track of his own number — 1,925 so far:

That doesn’t sound like too many, not after fifteen years of avid cinephilia. But to put it in some perspective, that’s roughly 128 feature films/year, or about one every three days. ... We found last week that there have been at least 268,246 features made. (Since then, the IMDb’s count has grown to 268,601.) So I’ve seen little more than .7% of them—and remember, I think that IMDb count far too low.

Why he has given so many poor ratings to contemporary movies:

The more you watch from the present day, the more garbage you’re bound to see—but your conclusions will be your own. Conversely, the further back you go, the more you’ll be guided by the opinions of others. (If nothing else, what’s available will be largely determined by what’s remained popular.)

"What if..." Movies reimagined for another time & place — Artist Peter Stults asks "...what if movies we were all familiar with were made in a different slice of time? Who would be in it? Who would direct it?"

For your consideration — "If there were no Internet, Hedy Lamarr would have to invent it" edition

Photo by Art Streiber

Fast Company: The Vision Thing — How Marty Scorsese risked it all and lived to risk again in Hollywood.

Slate: The Return of Silent Cinema — The Artist isn't the only movie harkening back to the time before talkies.

Slate: The Real Movies Behind the Magical Hugo

The Film Stage: 10 Classic Films You Must Watch Before Seeing Martin Scorsese's 'Hugo'

The Daily Beast: Good Actors, Bad Movies, and the Oscars — In this year's unpredictable Academy Awards race, one trend has emerged: excellent performances in so-so films. Richard Rushfield has had enough:

Ultimately, great performances are not about acting as a self-involved exercise unto itself, but about creating great, rich, unforgettable characters. And if a film has a great, rich, unforgettable character at its heart, audiences will forgive it a galaxy of sins. But if the film is forgettable, how unforgettable can the performance be? In recent years, Oscar has bestowed its favors for various reasons—some political, some artistic—on performances in a collection of films that were almost erased from the public imagination while they were still on the screen: The Reader, La Vie en Rose, Walk the Line, Crazy Heart, and Capote, to name a few. Despite the alleged brilliance at their hearts, the films have managed to be forgotten. Perhaps that is a judgment Oscar should consider the next time it rewards good work in a failed project.

Indiewire: The 10 Biggest Surprises of the Spirit Award Nominations

Indiewire: Images From Ridley Scott's 'Prometheus' Comic-Con Footage Leak — Hints that Scott's hush-hush project, set for a June 2012 release, will look sensational whether or not it really is an Alien prequel. Update: /Film — High-Res Images From Ridley Scott's 'Prometheus'

NPR: 'Most Beautiful Woman' By Day, Inventor By Night — A new book by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes sets out to rewrite America's memory of Lamarr. Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, The Most Beautiful Woman in the World, chronicles her life and the inventive side that is not often mentioned.

Also:

• io9: Hedy Lamarr, the gorgeous geek genius who helped invent the cell phone
• Slate: The Inventor in Hollywood — Richard Rhodes explores Hedy Lamarr's other career. Also the video, Hedy Lamarr: The Other Side of the Screen Siren.
• Inventor.org: Female Inventors: Hedy Lamarr — Includes images of drawings from Lamarr's co-authored patent. 
• The Mary Sue: That Time Hedy Lamarr Invented Wifi

PBS.org: I enjoyed the new two-part PBS American Masters entry, Robert Weide's Woody Allen: A Documentary. I disagree with calling it "definitive" — it has conspicuous gaps and the depth of penetration of a drink coaster — but it's still a well-made introduction to a course in Woody Allen 101 and I was pleased to see Allen onscreen as our docent. It's available for free viewing online. (It may be rights-restricted to in the United States.)

The Guardian: Frank Miller and the rise of cryptofascist Hollywood — Fans were shocked when Batman writer Frank Miller furiously attacked the Occupy movement. They shouldn't have been, says Rick Moody – he was just voicing Hollywood's unspoken values.

In a related piece, here's David Brin's Roll over, Frank Miller: or why the Occupy Wall Street kids are better than #$%! Spartans

Slate: The Longform.org Guide to the Making of Movies — Five notable magazine stories about the film industry, from loony directors to phenomenal flops.

TPM: Right-Wing Freak-Out: Children's Movies Pushing Liberal Agenda — It's simple, really. Happy Feet has the word "happy" right there in the title, and there are few things right-wingers find more threatening than others' happiness.

How to be a Retronaut: New York, 1940s, by Stanley Kubrick — "Kubrick's striking black and white images of 1940s New York City — which were often shot on the sly, his camera concealed in a paper bag with a hole in it — hint at the dark beauty and psychological drama of his later creative output."

The Daily Beast: Confronting The Apocalypse — Andrew Sullivan rounds up some thoughtful responses to Lars Von Trier's Melancholia, which I too think of as half of a double-feature with Malick's Tree of Life. "...It’s what Malick was getting at in Life: Every human—like every dinosaur millions of years ago—is here for a brief time and then gone, terminated by a rogue asteroid, a wartime bullet, a freak accident or a wayward planet called Melancholia."

The Atlantic: The Johnny Depp 'Thin Man' Reboot Is on Its Third Writer. For a little background, here's a "green light" announcement from The Guardian last May. My question: Who could possibly play Nora without leaving us pining for Myrna Loy? Don't screw this up or I'll personally shoot you five times in tabloids.

Well, the new John Carter trailer sure looks sensational. The screenplay is by Andrew Stanton, who also wrote Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, Wall-E, and Toy Story 3. I'm not crazy about what I see here of the character of John Carter. He seems too much the Hollywood-standard bronze brute, which isn't at all like Edgar Rice Burroughs' original Southern gentleman. However, Stanton says he is a big fan of the novel and that the movie "feels like the book." Here's hoping.

Making a movie? Need medical and scientific antique props and set decor? Who ya gonna call? These guys.

'Manos' in HD: Why I’m Saving 'Manos: The Hands of Fate' — Earlier this year Ben Solovey found the original 16mm workprint of Manos: The Hands of Fate, one of the most famous culty bad horror movies this side of Plan 9 from Outer Space. This site documents his quest to rescue and preserve the film from the bottomless dumpster of obscurity. Why? I'm not certain. But I salute his diligence.

Tor: Your New Baby Needs This Star Trek Book — If you're wondering the best way to reinforce the concept of opposites to the toddler in your life, the Star Trek Book of Opposites is here to help.

The Onion: Next Tarantino Movie An Homage To Beloved Tarantino Movies Of Director's Youth

Bouncing off my recent teeth-gnashing at Anonymous: Who wrote Shakespeare? As usual, Monty Python's Eric Idle has the last word.

Added without comment (via Huffington Post):

For your consideration — "Not written by the Earl of Oxford" edition

Critic David Bordwell on Dante's cheerful purgatorio — Occasioned by a New York retrospective of director Joe Dante's films, including a marathon screening of his pop-culty mashup The Movie Orgy, Bordwell elegantly reflects on Dante's body of work. "Dante, impresario of the comic grotesque, finds his inspiration in popular culture, the more wacko and inept the better. The comedy may come from childhood silliness, the grotesque from childhood fears. They say we baby boomers will always be just big kids, and Dante accepts this with a grin and a darkly cheerful eye."

laurel-and-hardy.com: Film Preservation - Another fine mess — A thorough four-part look at a difficult but necessary curatorial artistry. "How could movies like these, so widely seen for so long, be at risk of disappearing forever in first-class quality copies? Because they were too popular. Too many prints and negatives wore out, is the simple answer."

As a somewhat more than armchair Shakespeare buff with teeth-gnashingly strong opinions about the moronic, counterfactual "authorship controversy" recently given the thud of a movie it deserves in Roland Emmerich's Anonymous, I have considered blogging about it at Open the Pod Bay Doors, HAL. But I fear such a post would devolve into a spittle-flecked Hulk-smash rant (on the Internet?! No way!) on the "Oxfordians'" logical fallacies and their absurd Creation Science/Birther/Moon Hoax-style pseudo-intellectualism. So instead I heartily recommend more clear-headed authorities such as Holger Syme (start here), Paul Edmonson, Ron Rosenbaum, and Bardfilm's KJ.

indiewire: Director & Actress Rie Rasmussen Says Quentin Tarantino's 'Django Unchained' Will "Revolutionize" Hollywood

Slate: William Monahan picks his Top 5 British Crime and Suspense Films from the ’60s and ’70s. David Haglund on When Pauline Kael Was Wrong.

Filmicability: Here's a charming and expansive retrospective on Charles Schulz at the movies.

Having seen and been equivocatingly enthralled by Von Trier's bleak yet beautiful newest, Melancholia, I've been curious to read a review of the film from someone with first-hand experience with depression. Dean Treadway at Filmicability rewards my quest here.

Ferdy on Films: Marilyn Ferdinand, one of the more thoughtful and interesting movie bloggers going, also helps me see Melancholia more clearly.

indiewire: Lars Von Trier Confronts Depression Head On In The Grim 'Melancholia'

io9: Planetary Collisions and Other Disasters: Lars von Trier’s Crackpocalyptic Melancholia —  "But Melancholia doesn't give us disaster porn — instead, it gives us disaster erotica."

NYT: A.O. Scott on Melancholia. Pat Ryan on The Prince, The Showgirl, And the Stray Strap, a bit of historical context ahead of My Week With Marilyn, which is high on my See It list.

The Guardian writers' My Favourite Film series, plus readers' comments.

Thirteen movie poster trends that are here to stay and what they say about their movies

Mythical Monkey — Buster Keaton, Samuel Beckett And Film. Waiting for Godot with a flat hat on. Also Happy Birthday, Louise Brooks. (Also see my own Alternate universe movies: "The Public Enemy" with Louise Brooks instead of Jean Harlow.)

io9: First Early Reviews of Looper, the Time Travel Movie That Could Be One of 2012’s Best Films and Why is Buckaroo Banzai such an enduring classic? (Because wherever it goes, there we are.)

Variety and, within hours, all over the geekiverse: "Harry Potter" director David Yates is teaming up with the BBC to turn its iconic sci-fi TV series "Doctor Who" into a bigscreen franchise. As a fan of Doctor Who, old and new, from way back, I remain dubious until I hear more directly from the Beeb. Still, io9's Charlie Jane Anders, whose opinions I've learned to respect on such things, is optimistic.

The Mary Sue: Toy Short Story Shows Us The Island of Abandoned Happy Meal Toys

The Girl With the White Parasol: Citizen Kane Takes the Stand - "The reason I watch films is so that I can find those moments of beauty, whether they come from a Technicolor image or from the throb in an actor's voice or from a string chorus. That's why I named my blog, 'The Girl with the White Parasol.' That's why I love film. And that's why I love Citizen Kane."

Music: Oscar Peterson
Near at hand: Yellow Submarine figures

For your consideration — "Prophets and losses" edition

In which I, yours truly, am apparently a prophet, or something, of the Real Donnie Darko. This guy's relationship with the movie is ... um ...  unique.

Slate: Buy the Citizen Kane Blu-ray — You haven't seen the Orson Welles classic until you've seen this newly restored version. Over at DVD Savant, Glenn Erickson gives this release his own ample approval.

Also at Slate: Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons finally comes to DVD — The original version may be lost to history, but even the compromised studio cut is a masterpiece.

On a related note, The Many Noses of Orson Welles.

indieWIRE: TIFF List 2011: The Complete Toronto Film Festival Lineup • Fall Movie Preview: The 30 Must-See Indies • IW's blogs (a strong, varied bunch)

Total Film: 39 Actors & Directors On Their Best Movies and 30 Greatest Modern Monster Movies, which kicks off with Troll Hunter.

The Telegraph: Ten Films That Changed the World — Much to argue about here, of course (the reader comments express the typical range of additive insight and subtractive sputtering flapdoodle), but still some surprising, interesting choices. Now to get a hold of Repentance.

Wired: Stop Buying Death Stars — Adam Rawnsley reports on Lieutenant Colonel Dan Ward's paper (pdf) using the Death Star as a metaphor for the poor state of DoD acquisition practices:

It’s embarrassing enough that the galaxy’s supposedly most fearsome weapon was felled by crappy duct work. But it was entirely predictable. A project so big and complex, Ward writes, will invariably stretch the oversight capabilities of acquisition staff. In this case, it led to manufacturing delays and prevented the Empire from realizing that one of its thermal exhaust ports was a de-facto self-destruct button. Moreover, for all the expense poured into it – $15.6 septillion and 94 cents, to be precise — the Death Star is destroyed twice and in its two iterations only ever manages to get off a single shot...Star Wars holds lessons about what to buy as well as what not to. Ward contends that the humble droid mechs represent a better acquisition path than Death Stars.

See also The Economics of Death Star Planet Destruction at Overthinking It.

Of course, Robot Chicken got there first.

NPR: Twenty Iconic Male Movie Roles In Which Helen Mirren Would Have Ruled — My suggestion: James T. Kirk.

/Film: 2011 Summer Movie Attendance Was the Lowest Since 1997

Time: Top 10 Worst Fake British Accents — In light of Anne Hathaway's mangling of the Queen's English in One Day, Time pays tribute to those thespians who have struggled through the years to pull off a convincing British accent. (I'm off to London this Saturday, so will practice thoroughly ahead of time. Last time I had my London accent down pat, although returned home over-using "lovely" as an all-purpose expression of agreeability.)

The New Yorker: Sean Penn vs. Terrence Malick — He doesn't like the movie or understand his character's relevance within it. I did like the movie quite a lot, but I gotta say I'm with him on the position of his role.

news.scotsman.com: Lost Great Escape tunnel is pinpointed — "Its location at the camp, immortalised in the Hollywood blockbuster The Great Escape starring Steve McQueen, Richard Attenborough and Donald Pleasance, remained a mystery until experts arrived in August and spent three weeks excavating the relics."

NYT: What Spooks the Masters of Horror?

John Scalzi: What Makes a Scifi Film a Classic?  

Engadget: Samsung cites '2001: A Space Odyssey' in Apple case — Um...

Jim Emerson: Living, breathing movie stills — "CinematoGIFs" by Gusaf Mantel.

blastr: Was Childs THE THING? One fan seeks to prove it — Glenn Erickson pointed me to Rob Ager's compelling video analysis (in two parts) of John Carpenter's The Thing. Ager puts plenty of Sherlockian thought into the mystery of who's a Thing and when, with an enlightening interpretation of the final scene. This piece dovetails neatly with Peter Watts' acclaimed 2010 short story, "The Things," which gives us the movie's narrative from the alien's point of view.

For your consideration — "Sad, beautiful facts" edition

Sound on Sight: The "Gray Ones" Fade To Black — A passionate personal essay that really wells up my own sense of generational despair. Will 20th century movies be watched the way 19th century novels are read now, by only dedicated academics and adherents?

Meanwhile, Kate Kulzick counterpoints: Why the True Classics Will Never Disappear

On a not unrelated note: NPR: The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We're All Going To Miss Almost Everything

Also NPR: On Location: Mansfield, Ohio's 'Shawshank' Industry (audio)

Also also NPR: Your Picks: Top 100 Science-Fiction, Fantasy Books — Unsurprisingly, more than half of the top 50 have been movie-ized in one form or another.

independent.co.uk: The Science of the Trailer

Great movie taglines according to Filmsite and Tagline Guru

CNBC: The 15 Lowest-Grossing Oscar Winners

Jim Emerson: Our Hospitality: Buster Keaton and gravity

A Bright Wall in a Dark Room: Amanda McCleod on Julie Delpy's 2 Days in Paris, a film I like quite a lot. Now I'm in the mood to see it again.

Slate: I Watched Every Coen Brothers Movie. Here's what I learned. Plus: What Are the Best and Worst Coen Brothers Films? Addendum: The readers speak and David Haglund follows up

Also Slate: The Saddest Movie Scene Since 1995

Parallax View: "You're Goddam Right I Remember" – Howard Hawks Interviewed — Originally published in Movietone News 54, June 1977

Juan Cole: Jordan Plans Green Star Trek Theme Park — Cole on, among other things, science fiction as an international attractor.

Cracked: B-Movie Posters for Classic Films

io9: Why We Love Suspending Our Disbelief

Also io9: "To the Moon" is like a backstage pass to the the sights and sounds of 1960's NASA

Click to sharkify. Via Medium Large

Music: John Barnes Chance
Near at hand: Wind-up robots

For your consideration — "Summertime and the livin' is easy" edition

Ebert Presents: 2011 Midyear Review: Roger Ebert — 2011 Midyear Review: Christy and Ignatiy — 2011 Worst Movies So Far: Christy and Ignatiy — 2011 Worst Movies So Far: Roger Ebert

With greater detail and deliberation, Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule offers up The SLIFR 2011 Movie Midterm Report......The Journey So Far

HuffPo: Venice Film Festival Announces Full Lineup: Our Most Anticipated Picks

Top10Films: Top 10 Quietly Important Films — Although my annoyance at "Top x" lists like this is on record, this is well-considered, interesting piece that includes some obscure, far-from-obvious selections. Could use a copyeditor, though.

Slate: The Six Best Planet of the Apes Parodies Ever — "Dr. Zaius! Dr. Zaius!" is the new "The Girl from Ipanema."  

Hollywood Reporter: Hollywood's First Digital Christmas to Cause Pain — Just last night Elizabeth and I were saying that discs, or at least big box sets, would probably be few on the Christmas lists this year, given the new options available.

Parallax View: Professor Bob’s Least Favorite Movie Clichés

ctv.ca: Scientists identify saddest movie ever — Really? Over Grave of the Fireflies? At The Smithsonian, Richard Chin goes deeper.

While we're at The Smithsonian — NASA Picks Best & Worst Sci-Fi Movies. What Are Yours?

Mythical Monkey: Cary Grant Has a Cold — Says MM in the comments: "I started with the title, from the Esquire piece about Frank Sinatra, and Cary Grant's real life quote about Irene Dunne being the 'sweetest smelling actress' he'd ever worked with, which always struck me as a charmingly oddball comment. Then I just put the two together -- what if a man who loves the scent of a woman has a cold? He can't indulge his fetish, which leads to a loss of identity, which leads to a crisis of confidence."

io9: 10 Quotes that Prove Guillermo del Toro is the Most Outrageous Horror Director Alive

Via The New Yorker

For your consideration — "Rom-coms at 20,000 feet" edition

Wired: July 19, 1961: Fasten Your Seatbelts, By Love Possessed Will Begin Shortly — Wired commemorates the 50th anniversary of in-flight movies.

Nerve.com: Bouncing off this summer's success of The Trip, here's a list of The Ten Best Films With No Plot. (I'd add Robert Altman's MASH.) I posted about The Trip here.

Aside: Yes, it's a good list, but can we, the collective Internet, agree that personal, subjective lists labeled "The [x] Best..." or "Worst" anything (especially "... Ever") is a fixation that has run its course? Please. I can name the ten best reasons why this is so.

io9: Secrets of Another Earth, the Science Fiction Movie that Rocked Sundance (minor spoilers) — See this movie. My own post on Another Earth is here.

The Guardian: The genius of Douglas Trumbull — "He blew minds with SFX work in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, and he's doing it again in Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life. In a rare interview, we catch up with a true visionary."

Moira Macdonald (Seattle Times): A summer reading list -- for the movies

Mythical Monkey: The Essential Cary Grant (A Baker's Dozen)

Glenn Erickson: Great Groucho's ghost! The legendary disaster Skidoo is finally on DVD. GreenCine Daily dubbed it DVD of the week.

So is Rango, which GreenCine Daily reminds me I'd like to see again.

Bardfilm: Macbeth: Something Robotic This Way Comes — "A new version of Macbeth may be coming... The twist this time involves an all-robot cast. Shakespeare's text will be retained, though the setting will be altered to 'a Cyber Scotland,' according to Daniel Gallagher, its creator."

Movie Morlocks (TCM): My classic movie gratitude list

Jim Emerson (Scanners) -- About this whole Netflix pricing thing... — What he said.

The Onion: Sadly, Gift Certificate To Loews Cinemas Perfect Gift For Area Man

io9 again: 10 Greatest Unintentionally Hilarious Lines from Science Fiction and Fantasy

Also io9: Everything You Need to Know about Disney's John Carter Movie — As someone who enjoyed those pulpy old Edgar Rice Burroughs' books as a kid, I'm curious (and cautiously optimistic) about this one.

Via The New Yorker

For your consideration — "Press Play" edition

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) — Directed by Tomas Alfredson (Let the Right One In). Screenplay by Tomas Alfredson, based on the bestseller by John le Carré. Starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Ciaran Hinds, Colin Firth, Gary Oldman, Mark Strong, Toby Jones, Simon McBurney and Tom Hardy. There's so much I like packed into those lines I don't know where to start. Release date: September 16. Trailer at The Guardian.

Via indieWire: Kim Morgan and Matt Zoller Seitz are the forces behind this smartly put together video essay on Mike Figgis' hardboiled 1988 debut film, Stormy Monday. Moreover, it's "not just about a certain film, but a certain review of a certain film: Roger Ebert's appreciation of Stormy Monday." Matt edited and Kim narrates using Ebert's words in precisely the voice I've always imagined her having, which is precisely how she writes. I swear, she could convince me to take up smoking.


DEEP FOCUS: Mike Figgis' STORMY MONDAY, as reviewed by Roger Ebert from Matt Zoller Seitz on Vimeo.

I hope they keep on making these. Oh, wait — they will!

Also via indieWire:

• The Best Films Of 2011…So Far — Regarding those I've seen, I can't complain. Those that I haven't are on my Check It Out list. 
• Reeling and Spinning: How the Inglourious Basterds soundtrack weaponizes cinema
• Francis Ford Coppola to Bring Horror Film to Comic-Con
• This Is Hardcore: John Cameron Mitchell's "Shortbus" — A film I jotted about recently here.

NYRB: The Variety of Movie Experience — In the same way that William James applies the tensile force of his logical prose toward the evocation of an imperceptible bridge beyond logic that must, somehow, be there, Malick has continued to muster the resources of film toward embodying what cannot actually be embodied.

The New Republic:  David Thomson on Films: Why I Loved Peter Falk as Columbo

Movie Morlocks (TCM): No, No, That’s Not Your Movie, This is Your Movie!

NPR: Marlon Brando's Lost Musical Innovation — The actor was also an amateur drummer, as well as an inventor with four patents to his credit. His lost prototypes for tuning conga drums were recently uncovered in a West Los Angeles storage facility.

Via Glenn Erickson: A vintage '60s commercial for Sun Sweet prunes, featuring Ray Bradbury in an ad campaign crafted by Stan Freberg. Some context at Wikipedia. (I posted about the time I worked with Mr. Bradbury here.)

Cracked: Storyboards from Michael Bay's The Great Gatsby

On taste, perspective, brains. This applies to movies as well as to anything else:

 via XKCD

For your consideration — "Life of Graham" edition

/Film: The Coen Bros.' New Script is Based on the 60's NYC Folk Scene

Total Film: Jared Harris discusses Sherlock Holmes 2's villain Moriarty — "He doesn’t believe in heaven and hell."

The Hathor Legacy: Why film schools teach screenwriters not to pass the Bechdel test

Vanity Fair: Robert Smigel on His Unmade Script for a Green Lantern Comedy Starring Jack Black

Dangerous Minds: Director cameos in their own and others' films

Guardian: BBC to dramatise unholy row over Monty Python's Life of Brian — Holy Flying Circus to focus on comedians' struggle with church, councils and critics in runup to release of controversial film.

Speaking of which ... BBC via Boing Boing: Monty Python members reunite for Graham Chapman film — The surviving members of Monty Python's Flying Circus have reunited to voice an animated adaptation of Graham Chapman's incredibly funny, very weird memoir A Liar's Autobiography. The film will include recordings of Chapman reading from the book as well. Regrettably, the movie will be in 3D, but with luck I'll be able to find a screen where it's showing without the need for dark, greasy, migraine-inducing prosthesis.

Jon Favreau found a nice variation on the EPK with these Cowboys & Aliens promotional interviews. He gives Harrison Ford (who notoriously hates the PR end of the film business) an amusing level of crap. (Hat tip: Mike Russell)

Augmented Reality Cinema is a conceptual iPhone app that would recognize your location, then play a scene from a movie that took place in that location.

Parallax View: 'Shrinking Man' reputation grows — As a fan of the film, I find this one personally gratifying.

Boing Boing: Lalo Schifrin and the Marquis de Sade  

According to The Telegraph, these are the five best Monty Python sketches.

113 seldom seen Star Wars photos

Via The New Yorker

For your consideration — "Olives for the martini" edition

Jim Emerson rebuts the premise behind Slate's Hollywood Career-O-Matic.

filmlinc: The Coen Brothers with Noah Baumbauch: Where and How to Begin a Film?

A.O. Scott: Ushering In Golden Age for Fans of Film — "And yet if we take off our rose-colored glasses and look around at the city and its screens, a different picture emerges, with startling vividness. The golden age of New York moviegoing is now."

streamingcriterions.com: Streaming Criterions is a self-updating list of all the Criterion films that are available to view via Netflix Instant Streaming. The site updates itself to reflect any recent changes made by Netflix, and also reflect any new movies being added to the Criterion Collection.

/Film: 70 Years Later, 'Citizen Kane' Coming to Blu-ray — "A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn't think he'd remember. You take me. One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in, and on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn't see me at all, but I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since that I haven't thought of that girl."

If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger...: The Frame Within the Frame series

The New Yorker: Show the Monster — Guillermo del Toro’s quest to get amazing creatures onscreen

Brandon Watson at Sirius: Paradox of Fiction — "We human beings read, watch, and listen to a lot of fiction. We know that it is fiction. But we have emotional responses and attachments to the characters. So, according to Colin Radford, who first put it forward, this shows that there's something incoherent in our emotional responses: we feel for things we know don't exist."

J.L. Wall furthers that discussion: "We empathize with fictional beings not despite their unreality, but because of their possible reality."

Michael Caine Talks Like This

audible.com: Samuel L. Jackson reads Adam Mansbach's Go the Fuck to Sleep — As indicated by his intro before the reading, Jackson delivers it with the élan of a father who's been exactly there. Currently it's a free download. It's also up on YouTube here. Also also, via indiewire: Werner Herzog Tells Kids to "Go the F**k to Sleep" Tonight at New York Public Library New York Public Library, which likewise got YouTubed here.

Blastr: How the Thor movie REALLY should have ended

UCLA Film & Television Archive: Laurel & Hardy preservation effort and Another Fine Mess: Laurel & Hardy's Legacy

tumblr: Rory Williams is the new Chuck Norris. More at Reddit. — Doctor Who high neepery. (Spoilers.)

Jewcy.com: Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review, nominates a moment when America got hip to the Jews: it's when M.A.S.H director Robert Altman cast Elliott Gould (with Jewfro and handlebar mustache) as Trapper John (a football hero from Dartmouth):

You read the coverage of Gould at the time—it’s all about how he's a Brooklynite, how he’s a street kid—but that’s not what the movies are telling you. The movies are telling you that in the better America we are now inhabiting—and in which we get to rewrite the history of the Korean war and redo Raymond Chandler—Elliott Gould is an American. Brooklyn born, but American. That America is, in its coolest and freest and most aristocratic stratum, maybe partly or secretly Jewish.

It all comes together in that first scene where Elliott Gould reaches into his army parka, pulls out an olive jar, and drops two olives into his martini. What’s that line? "A man can't really savor his martini without an olive."  Those olives put the mix back in mixology. They're miscegenating olives. In interviews Altman liked to pretend that he himself was "half-Jewish." He was a philo-semi-Semite.

Via Andrew Sullivan

Via The New Yorker

For your consideration — "It's not shtump" edition

The Warren Report (video): As part of her promo junket for The Beaver, Jodie Foster reveals that she'll be starring in a science-fiction movie with Matt Damon, directed by Neill Blomkamp (District 9). Lots more good stuff here too on clinical depression, mental groundedness, her kids, work as a survival tool, her approach to characters.... Warren was one of my instructors at TheFilmSchool and is among the best interviewers around. "Art gets me through, art and connection."

Self-Styled Siren: Anecdote of the Week: "That's Just Not an Orgasm" — When movie composer Dimitri Tiomkin got notes on how to score. "I like it, but it isn't orgasm music," said Selznick. "It's not shtump."

Roger Ebert's Journal: Godard's "Film Socialisme" in four minutes flat — "In connection with the premiere of this film at Cannes 2010, Jean-Luc Godard posted this four-minute version of it in fast-forward. He did not explain."

Jim Emerson: Into the Great Big Boring — "But now, 'boring' is hot, at least in overheated Interwebular film criticism circles, since the publication of Dan Kois' New York Times Magazine piece called 'Eating Your Cultural Vegetables,' in which he says..."

Also, Emerson revisits Days of Heaven after 20 years — "So, if you take the drama out of the dialog and the performances, where does it go? Into the world at large."

NYT: Ta-Nehisi Coates on X-Men: First Class — "When we left the theater, my son and I knew we had experienced the most thrilling movie of the summer. 'First Class' is narratively lean, beautifully acted and, at all the right moments, visually stunning. But I had experienced something else." He follows up on his Atlantic blog. Check the comments; on top of all his other smarts, the cat really knows his X-Men.

Slate: Slate's Hollywood Career-O-Matic — What Rotten Tomatoes data tell us about the best, worst, and most bizarre Hollywood trajectories.

Technology Review: The Five Worst (Hard) Science Fiction Movies Ever

Via Glenn Erickson: Backstage promo footage on the set of Roman Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers

Neil Gaiman: A Fairly Humongous Doctor Who Q&A Mostly — Answering questions about scripting "The Doctor's Wife" (mostly).

io9: Hula hoops and fish grenades: two contenders for the worst ninja fight ever

Via The New Yorker.

Fountain Square, Indianapolis

Via io9.

Music: Ella Fitzgerald
Near at hand: "The Woman Who Broke the Moon," first draft

For your consideration — "monstrous, twisted and eccentric" edition

Vimeo via Dangerous Minds: Sam Fuller auditions for 'The Godfather II' with Al Pacino — "A moment of cinema history - legendary film director Sam Fuller auditions for the role of Hyman Roth in The Godfather Part II. He reads alongside Al Pacino, as Michael Corleone, and the pair are superb together. The part eventually went to Lee Strasberg (who was nominated for an Oscar for his interpretation), but Fuller's Roth has more genuine menace, and a surprising warmth, which Strasberg's depiction lacked. You sense Fuller's Roth could stab you as much as smile at you, and Pacino's Corleone seems genuinely awed."

Misfortune Cookie: Auteurist amusement parks — "Altman's Bumper Cars. Up to 30 people can ride it at once, frequently crisscrossing and interacting."

MakingOf: Aaron Sorkin: Reel Life, Real Stories — Breaking the back of the story. (video)

MakingOf: Insider Interviews: Screenwriters

The Guardian: Fictional scientists - in pictures — "...we present some of the most monstrous, twisted and eccentric scientists ever depicted in television and film"

Bob Green (CNN contributor): Are our small screens making big stars little? — "Damn," he said. "Cary Grant."

Speaking of Cary Grant, some years ago I was invited by editor Esther Friesner to contribute a story to Chicks in Chainmail, an anthology of Satirical Tongue-in-Cheek Feminist Sword-and-Sorcery Fantasy stories. That book was a hit, and when the sequel followed (Did You Say “Chicks”?!), the editor invited me into that one too. That second story, "Like No Business I Know," was a modern Hollywood satire. In it, Cary Grant is referenced twice in regard to the affected style of a character's speaking voice.

Not Gary.

Now the first three Chicks books have been collected into a single omnibus edition, Chicks Ahoy (yes, I know). However, apparently the original books were digitally scanned during the preparation of the new volume, a now-common practice that occasionally results in little errors of a typographic nature. So now, in Chicks Ahoy, the two lines in "Like No Business I Know" referencing Cary Grant have been altered to read "Gary Grant," thus killing the joke each time.

Unless, of course, there's some very high-profile guy named Gary Grant out there I've somehow missed and whose voice makes the lines work even better than before. I don't think a retired NBA point guard quite cuts it.

Glad I didn't mention Bumphrey Bogart.

NYT: 'The Hangover' and the Age of the Jokeless Comedy

Ebert Presents: Movies That Made Us Critics: Jacques Tati's Play Time — Yes.

Media Darlings: Disney's "Pinocchio"? Proceed With Caution — "But in truth, it again feels more like every parent and child's worst nightmare of abduction and permanent disappearance, the boys literally silenced as they weep for mother and plead for mercy. Once more, the context and circumstances of the abuse are allegorical, deeply cynical, and not easily understood by a child. Even an adult could find these scenes haunting."

The Final Edition (NYT parody): New Spielberg Holocaust Epic Awarded Pre-Oscar 

Balloon Juice: The Entire Upcoming Republican Primary Campaign in 3:30 (or, the Brits got there first, as usual) — A bit of Fry & Laurie. "I thought at one point he was going to say something that actually made sense." "Yes, he just avoided it." Before he was House, Hugh Laurie was already brilliant.

5-Second Films: Check 'em out at the website or as or as compilations at Cracked.com. These guys will be running Hollywood within five years.

Roger Ebert's Journal: "I texted! You threw me out! You're assholes!" — Austin's Alamo Drafthouse theater turns rude patron's rude voice mail into a promo video that would sell me on the virtues of patronizing the Alamo Drafthouse, were I in Austin. (There's worthwhile commentary over at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule.)

The Atlantic: Nearly 100 Fantastic Pieces of Journalism — Not movie-related, but fine writing is always worth sharing.

Music: Susannah McCorkle, "Do You Miss New York?" (Yes.)
Near at hand: Elizabeth typing

For your consideration — "She'd be 85 today" edition

NYT: 3-D Starts to Fizzle, and Hollywood Frets
&
Business Insider: 3D Movies Are A Bust — Honestly, who outside "the biz" didn't see this coming?

io9: First look at Guillermo Del Toro’s creepy-as-hell Pinocchio puppet

NYT: Growing Funnier Each Serious Minute — A piece on Richard Ayoade, whose Submarine I waxed favorably about here.

Slate: In Praise of Unknown Actors — Jessica Chastain's graceful turn in The Tree of Life and other amazing performances by newcomers and nobodies

Roger Ebert's Journal: Harold Lloyd: A rare early short and an interview

McSweeney's: I Regret to Inform You That My Wedding to Captain Von Trapp Has Been Canceled

In that alternate universe I like to visit, Marilyn Monroe is celebrating a happy 85th birthday today, after a long and diverse career:

Sunset Gun: MM: More Than the Silver Witch of Us All — Kim Morgan on Marilyn Monroe on the occasion of Norma Jeane's 85th birthday.

If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger...: Marilyn in Action series

Life.com: Rare Photos: Marilyn in Training and more....

6/1/56 - MM on 30th birthday - Image by © Bettmann/CORBIS

Music: John Lee Hooker
Near at hand: Kai at my feet