metadata links

---"Why PRISM isn't a problem"

---terrorist words

---the impossible irrational design of the Overlook Hotel

---"The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls"

---notes from the Hulk on the convoluted blockbuster

---Truffaut's Les Mistons

---"A Brief Survey of Experimental Comic Books"

---"Although the movie is obviously subversive and deals with people who don’t believe in God, what the movie ultimately is saying is that there is a God and that you have to follow His rules or you’ll go to hell." --Seth Rogen

---trailers for The Battery, Blue Jasmine, The Wolf of Wall Street, The Family,  Elysium, Salinger, In a World, Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me, Riddick, Diana, and Magic Magic  

---"the internet, in effect, is a surveillance state"

---Inside Jaws

---"If we embrace assassination as a central component of our foreign policy and continue with the mentality that we can kill our way to victory — or worse, kill our way to peace — then we’re whistling past the graveyard." --Jeremy Scahill

---a scene from Much Ado About Nothing

---"Everything in the government — which once was thought to be 'your' government — is increasingly disappearing into a professional universe of secrecy."

---Mick Garris appreciates Poltergeist

---"Ever since the Nixon administration broke into the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychoanalyst's office, the tactic of the US government has been to attack and demonize whistleblowers as a means of distracting attention from their own exposed wrongdoing and destroying the credibility of the messenger so that everyone tunes out the message."  --Glenn Greenwald

---Linklater's and Jodorowsky's filmmaking tips

---We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks reel

---an interview with Olivier Assayas

---concerning Todd Haynes' Safe (1995)

---"The big implication is that those studios are—not necessarily inappropriately— terrified to do anything because they don’t know what the numbers look like.”  --Lynda Obst

Marketing Krypton Christ: 10 things I liked about Zack Snyder's Man of Steel

I was inclined to dislike Man of Steel in advance. With all of its product placements (Sears, Ihop, Nikon), its 100+ promotional tie-ins, its air of corporate cooptation of our collective summer attention span, Superman's earnest, square pedigree, the silly red robe, the red booties, and the thought of film executives at Warner Brothers perspiring over their 225 million dollar investment in a crowded blockbuster season, Man of Steel makes for an obvious target of ridicule.

1) But, then again, I like many of the actors involved. As Lois Lane, Amy Adams vanquished any hint of middle-aged spread she affected in last year's The Master. Here she returns with a hint of her old Enchanted (2007) self, only now with an ace reporter of the Daily Planet tough babe veneer. About halfway into the movie, one begins to notice various filmmaking ploys to keep her merely human self involved amidst all of the super-powered crashing-through-buildings uber-fisticuff shenanigans of General Zod, Superman, etc., but nevermind.

2) As Superman/Clark Kent/Kal-El, English actor Henry Cavill has the advantage of a fresh face, an unassuming manner, and much muscle tone. Cavill looks good in a beard, construction boots, and long-sleeved henleys. In the midst of saving some men from an exploding oil rig, Cavill shreds his pants Hulk-style as he shows off his ripped beefcake physique. Late in the movie, a brunette Army captain blurts out that she thinks he's "kinda hot" (just to make sure that we get that).

3) I also happen to like Michael Shannon's work in movies like Revolutionary Road (2008) and Take Shelter (2011). He resented not being invited to Late Show with David Letterman, so it's a pleasure to see him snarl and glower as General Zod in such a big deal tent pole production.

4) As Daily Planet editor Perry White, Laurence Fishburne gets to show off some authoritative post-Matrix irritation with Amy Adams, although later he has to endure the obligatory running-away-from-various-skyscrapers-falling-on-top-of-you mega-death 9/11 reference scene.

5) As Clark Kent's adopted human parents, Diane Lane (Martha) and Kevin Costner (Jonathan) both provide pleasant associations with better movies, although they must also bear much of the trappings of the movie's Armageddon-esque cornpone working-class Americana--the star and stripes, farms, water towers, Costner (with his predistressed baseball cap) getting greasy under the hood of a Chevy Truck, Lane looking sentimentally through scrapbooks, laundry drying on the clothes line, a dear dog romping in the weeds, a cornfield, a sunlit barn. Costner has one scene where he tells his young super-stepson that he should have, in effect, let a bunch of kids die on a bus that veers off a bridge into a river. When boy Clark asks what should he have done, Jonathan replies that he should "keep this side of yourself a secret." Jonathan and Clark also memorably discuss his origins:

"You're the answer, son. You're the answer to are we alone in the universe."

"Can't I just keep pretending I'm your son?"

"You are my son," says Jonathan, his voice breaking, as he looks off into the distance of the barn.

6) Costner also gets to (spoiler alert) die in the single-most ludicrous scene in the movie. When a tornado blows up during a family outing, Jonathan tells his family to run under an overpass as he strives heroically to save the dog trapped in the truck. When the young adult Clark considers saving his father from the storm (as he could easily do), Jonathan holds him back with one arm outstretched (after saving the dog), looks nobly at his family, and then honorably floats off as Clark screams in horror.

7) Man of Steel did everything possible to run away from the cheesier aspects of its lucrative brand (a form of restraint missing from the iconographic promotional tie-ins). Clark Kent goes incognito like Caine in Kung Fu for much of the movie, drifting from job to job. The word "superman" is scarcely spoken. When Lois Lane threatens to mention it when discussing the giant S on Superman's front, he bleeps out her word so that others can't hear it. When Clark finally does don the red cape and blue uniform, director Zack Snyder treats this new look tentatively, the movie's plot momentum faltering for a moment in a fit of self-consciousness. Perhaps chastened by the critical ridicule of Sucker Punch (2011), or perhaps out of a sense of loyalty to the Superman iconography, Snyder doesn't take many risks. He does find a way to include a drone, however.

8) Snyder makes Superman Christlike by having Clark stand before a stained glass image of Jesus when he visits a priest (a metaphysical form of product placement).

9) I was intrigued by the Alien-esque reptilian/insect design of the Krypton space ships. One ship resembles a giant black beetle. Another one zips around like a tsetse fly. Another menacing ship brandishes 3 crab claws over Metropolis.

10) Lastly, I enjoyed the retro-treatment of the Daily Planet, as if newspapers still retained the relevance they had when the original DC action comics were created back in 1938. Clark Kent not only gets an opening level reporter job at the Daily Planet, the film even makes such a career move look like a good idea. Nowadays, only Superman could do that.

eco-anarchy links

---"The average smartphone user checks his or her device 150 times per day, or about once every six minutes."

---"Google will interpose itself, and hence the United States government, between the communications of every human being not in China (naughty China). Commodities just become more marvelous; young, urban professionals sleep, work and shop with greater ease and comfort; democracy is insidiously subverted by technologies of surveillance, and control is enthusiastically rebranded as “participation”; and our present world order of systematized domination, intimidation and oppression continues, unmentioned, unafflicted or only faintly perturbed." --Julian Assange

---an interview with James Brown

---"the proper way to tame all those Yemeni kids angry about the drone strikes is to distract them with—ready?—cute cats on YouTube and Angry Birds on their phones" --Evgeny Morozov

---the modern surveillance state

---"the logic justifying drone attacks comes full circle: we kill them because they are our enemies, and they are our enemies because we kill them."

---"what if computers were able to learn from us to the point they could instantly draw on every interaction we’ve ever had online?"

---media attention after a murder in Woolwich

---"every movie I have mentioned and many more besides, from mega-budget spectacle out to the indie fringe, is just a mechanism for deflecting actual political resistance into the symbolic realm. And, hey, having a godlike quartet of prankster-magicians increase my bank balance several times over sounds like a lot more fun than contemplating the impossible or implausible social changes that would be required in order to divert Wall Street’s zillions to better purposes." --Andrew O'Hehir

---“If you want to make an anarchist film, make it with a corporation”  --Zal Batmanglij, director of The East

---social media-fueled protest in Turkey and in Zuccotti Park

---White One Hundred

---discussing Samuel Fuller

---"Male charm is all but absent from the screen because it’s all but absent from our lives."

---"poverty is what makes the rich, rich."

---"A higher-up declared that, forthwith, every story in the magazine had to answer at least one of two questions: 'How do I dress?' and 'How can I get laid?'" --Peter Rainer

---"How to make an indie movie"

---Richard Brody considers Howard Hawks' Scarface

---trailers for The Act of Killing, Ain't Them Bodies Saints, and Machete Kills

---"Nasser al-Awlaki told me that, when he found out that his son was on a kill list, he wrote a letter to President Obama and said basically 'Can’t we resolve this some other way? If my son did something, can’t you present the evidence?' He got no response."

The metaphysical angst of The Hangover Part III: 2 notes

1) Much like looking into the eyes of the Gorgon, thinking about The Hangover Part III actively causes pain. The mind would just as soon slide off to dwell on anything else, a kind of merciful defense mechanism. Instead of a review, imagine instead distant screams (late at night, and you can't tell in which direction), the dislocated and unnerving sensation of waking up with two missing kidneys. With its sole interest in money, its grimly inconsequential accumulation of unfunny scenes, its baldfaced advertising for Las Vegas (which does now have Hangover slot machines), its Asian stereotyping that makes Mr. Yunioshi of Breakfast at Tiffany's look enlightened, and for the stunning way it exemplifies today (and for all time) the word "inert," The Hangover Part III may have much to teach us by negative example of the long-overdue need to get beyond Adam Sandler-esque aggressive baby men and their self-deluded sense of entitlement. The movie argues for the sheer superfluity of anyone of the masculine gender, the logical cessation of the XY chromosome, the abolishment of studios who make profits on threequels, and the simple need to move on. Mercifully, only four people were in the large theater when I watched it last Thursday afternoon, which seemed fitting and just (even if still four too many).

2) In fairness, the first 40 minutes of the movie serve as an excellent sedative.

Some links:  

"'he killed a giraffe—who gives a . . . ?' says Bradley Cooper, in what amounts to a candid articulation of the trilogy's worldview." --Chris Packham

"Pajiba: Well, it’s hard to get people to read reviews these days unless there’s a gimmick, but what else can I say? It’s the same film as the other two, only with half the laughs of the second film, which only had two. You took a scene stealer from the first film (Ken Jeong) and you turned him into a major character. I mean, you went to Georgetown; how does an Asian caricature speaking in broken English for nearly two hours sit with you?

Cooper: Look, I didn’t write the film."

"Early tracking suggested Hangover would open to about $20 million, great for a low-budget comedy. When the movie grossed $45 million during its first weekend, the stars' lives changed instantly. Neither Phillips nor any of the actors was signed for a sequel. That gave CAA, which represented all four of them, enormous leverage. Sources say the stars got raises to about $10 million each to return, and Phillips received about $10 million against 10 percent of profits. The trio got bumps to about $15 million each for the third film."

Kermode Uncut's reaction to The Hangover Part III

The Film Doctor's fifth anniversary

Five years ago, the Film Doctor started posting reviews, including this one concerning Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette.









Some links:

---Masculin Feminin

---“The only great problem of cinema seems to be more and more, with each film, when and why to start a shot and when and why to end it.”  --Jean Luc Godard

---the right to observe and record

---Jonathan Rosenbaum considers Rushmore

---Cinephilia and Beyond's Taxi Driver files

---"This is how we live: greedily, enviously, superficially, in a state of endless, self-justifying desire. This is the pursuit of happiness, mirrored in the pleasure these movies provide."  --A. O. Scott

---Interiors on the spaces of Martha Marcy May Marlene

---"The reason to keep working is almost to build a certain mental tone, like people talk about body tone. You have to move quickly when the time comes, and the time might come very infrequently – once or twice a year, or even less."  --Brian Eno

---"The hardest thing in making a movie is to keep in the front of your consciousness your original response to the material. Because that's going to be the thing that will make the movie. And the loss of that will break the movie."  --Stanley Kubrick

---The Vertigo of Anagnorisis by Catherine Grant

---Origins of Film Noir

---the Hamlet supercut

---"Welcome to America's Thirty Years War."

---trailers for Don Jon, Blood Ties, The Purge, A Field in England, The Dance of Reality, Jimmy P., Europa Report, Patrick, Fruitvale Station, War on Whistleblowers, The Congress, Berberian Sound Studio, and Rapture-Palooza

---anatomy of a scene: Frances Ha

---Campion's top 10 Criterion films and Mel Brooks' 11 favorite movie scenes

---the Oklahoma tornado

The great romantic and the flibbertigibbet blonde: 11 questions about The Great Gatsby

1) An entire movie about a handsome glorified romantic solely defined by his love for a flibbertigibbet blonde?

2) Really?

3) If we took away all of his trappings--the nice house, the associations with Romeo + Juliet and Titanic (note: DiCaprio inhabits the role extremely well), the parties, the car, and the fine clothes--wouldn't we consider Gatsby gullible and slightly silly?

4) While I admired the set designs, the costuming, the cars, and several scenes of the movie (especially the humorous super-awkward encounter between Gatsby and Daisy (with Nick Carroway (Tobey Maguire) making the slightly dubious arrangements for them to meet (sort of pimping out his married cousin)), and Nick's awkward drunken evening with Myrtle Wilson's (Isla Fisher) social circle), I kept wondering about Lurhmann's melodramatic technique as it began to wear me down. When in doubt, cut to the green light?

5) What is the significance of those spectacled eyes on the billboard again? My significant other (who teaches the novel) says it could indicate the absence of God. There's nothing to put your hopes in after the devastation of the first World War, so the divine power has been replaced with conspicuous consumption and advertising, the antithesis of religious hope. Ironically, the eyes look over the Waste Land-esque area of abject poverty, which just enhances the scene's air of futility. As Kathryn Schulz points out, the book is full of "low-hanging symbols."  

6) Was Lurhmann borrowing a narrative strategy from Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye when he included the Nick-stuck-in-a-sanatorium frame device?

7) What would F. Scott Fitzgerald have thought of the movie's elision of psychiatric curing techniques and writing? Doesn't that equation diminish his artistic achievement?

8) As Nick, Tobey Maguire observes, perceives, sees, and then witnesses some more. Maguire is good at doing that, but couldn't he take a break from all of that burdensome point-of-view work and swing through the skyscraper canyons of New York for old times' sake?

9) In this rough and tumble blogosphere world of endless film analyses, why do the critics who liked The Great Gatsby often sound apologetic? Does the Internet encourage us to be competitively vicious?

10) My significant other (who really liked the movie) insists that Gatsby is admirable for being, as Nick says, "the single-most hopeful person [he's] ever met," the one man "exempt from [his] disgust." At one point, Nick yells to Gatsby in the distance, "They're a rotten crowd. You're worth the whole damn bunch together." As we gradually learn, Jay Gatsby is an idealist who deserves credit for sticking to his endlessly renewable love, no matter how much his beloved may be unworthy of it (not to mention she's married and with a child). Yes, Gatsby embodies a fond glorious vision that serves as the foundation of a beautifully written novel, but isn't he also, at bottom, a dashing but still delusional goofball?

11) Is his unwillingness to abandon a dream ultimately what makes Gatsby great?

Some related links:

---comparisons between the book and the movie

---Baz Lurhmann's creative process

---remembering the Robert Redford version

film vocabulary links

---Wes Anderson's 1994 short Bottle Rocket

---Logorama

---the 2013 summer movie preview

---an interview with Sofia Coppola

---David Foster Wallace's "This is water" speech visualized

---3 Reasons: Band of Outsiders

---“Asocial people will be able to find a way to do asocial things with this technology, but on average people like to maintain the social contract,” Mr. Starner said. He added that he and colleagues had experimented with Glass-type devices for years, “and I can’t think of a single instance where something bad has happened.”

An incident at a Silicon Valley event shows, however, the way the increasing ease in capturing a moment can lead to problems — even if unintentionally. Adria Richards, who worked for the Colorado e-mail company SendGrid, was offended by the jokes two men were cracking behind her at the PyCon developers conference. She posted a picture of them on Twitter with the mildly reproving comment, “Not cool.”

One of the men, who has not been identified, was immediately fired by his employer, PlayHaven. “There is another side to this story,” he wrote on a hacking site, saying it was barely one lame sexual joke. “She gave me no warning, she smiled while she snapped the pic and sealed my fate,” he complained.

Critics lashed out at Ms. Richards, using language much more offensive than the two men used. SendGrid was hacked. The company dismissed Ms. Richards, saying there was such an uproar over her conduct, it “put our business in danger.”

---Growing Up John Waters

---“I understand that writing is an art, and I deeply respect that,” he said. “But the earlier you get in with testing and research, the more successful movies you will make.”

---Philip French's favourite movies

---9 Film Frames

---"One scene early in the film that was objected to was a rooftop party in Islamabad where an officer, after drinking fires a celebratory burst of AK-47 gunfire into the air. We insisted mixing drinking and firearms is a major violation and actions like this do not happen in real life. We requested this be taken out of the film. Boal confirmed he took this out of the film."

---Yeah Yeah Yeahs' "Mosquito"

---"12 Great Opening Shots" and "20 Shots to Be Retired Henceforth from Film Vocabulary"

---"Something has got to give at some point with all of that product in the market," said Vincent Bruzzese, chief executive of Worldwide Motion Picture Group, a research firm, speaking about the coming summer. "There has got to be some cannibalization."

---celebrating Saul Bass' title sequences

---“Tell Mike it was only business. I always liked him.”

---trailers for Gravity, Inside Llewyn Davis, Ain't Them Bodies Saints, The World's End, and The Butler

---Destroy boredom

---"Because the first take went fairly well, I immediately become cocky and start overplaying it. I’m acting drunk. It’s whiny and high-pitched, and for some reason I’m leaning over the sink in a way that makes me look like a hunchback."  --Greta Gerwig

---the Behind the Candelabra featurette

---“Our ancestors predicted all of this,” he said to no one in particular. “The weather changing in strange ways, the destruction of the land, the water, the fish, the animals. They said, ‘The white man will continue to come, and everything will die.’"