Archive for the 'movie' Category

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100 essential movies

Published on April 27, 2006 in movie. 2 Comments

Jim Emerson has listed the 100 movies (103 actually) one should have seen to form an opinion about film
grace kelly

(…) the movies you just kind of figure everybody ought to have seen in order to have any sort of informed discussion about movies. They’re the common cultural currency of our time, the basic cinematic texts that everyone should know, at minimum, to be somewhat “movie-literate.”
from rogerebert.suntimes.com

That is a brave thing to do, because movie buffs will never agree on what those 100 movies should be, so his effort is bound to get contested. Which is what I’m going to do now.

Looking at his choice, I would say the said Mr Emerson is English speaking and born before 1960. Look at the histogram:
Essential movies per decade

Quick stats
85% of the listed movies are English spoken (mostly American). 70% of the movies were made before 1970. The best decade was the fifties (20 movies – from Hitchcock, Kurosawa, Wilder, Kazan, Godard …), then the seventies (19 movies – from Coppola, Scorsese, De Palma, Altman) and third the sixties (18 movies – Fellini, Kubrick, Bergman, Lean, Nichols).
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“The shining”: Here’s Johnny again!

Published on October 5, 2005 in movie. 2 Comments

Robert Ryang has become a semi-celebrity movie-remixer overnight:

A few weeks back, he said, he entered a contest for editors assistants sponsored by the New York chapter of the Association of Independent Creative Editors. The challenge? Take any movie and cut a new trailer for it but in an entirely different genre. Only the sound and dialogue could be modified, not the visuals, he said.
Mr. Ryang chose The Shining, Stanley Kubricks 1980 horror film starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall. In his hands, it became a saccharine comedy(!) about a writer struggling to find his muse and a boy lonely for a father. Gilding the lily, he even set it against Solsbury Hill, the way-too-overused Peter Gabriel song heard in comedies billed as life-changing experiences, like last years In Good Company.
(on nytimes.com)

Check out the result on ps260.com (QuickTime – 10MB).

If the movie business is anything like the music business, Robert should now worry mostly about getting sued by the MPAA (Movie Producers Association of America), or whoever the copyright holder would happen to be. Unless he gets signed up quickly by one of the majors, in which case his legal costs are covered.

BTW: picture on the right was altered by me, to make Jack smile (sort of).

(via Andy Waio – also on The Reeler)

Digital filmmaking: cheaper movies

Published on August 4, 2005 in digital cinema and movie. 2 Comments

“Shooting on 35-mm film costs about a dollar a foot,” Bob Harvey, Panavision senior vice president of sales, told Wired News. “A thousand feet for a thousand dollars adds up to about 11 minutes of footage. But about an hour of footage on a Genesis 24P HD, for instance, costs under a hundred dollars.”
from Wired

Kwon estimated that shooting digitally shaved about $150K off the production’s up-front costs such as film stock, dailies, and film-to-tape transfer for off-line, non-linear editing.
from digitalmedia.oreilly.com

And then there’s this movie, shot with the same prosumer camcorder that I have, the Canon XL1s, and blown up to 35mm film from miniDV (720 x 480):
28 Days Later…
Budget: 9 million* Gross (USA): 43.5 million (8/24)
from oreillynet.com

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Alexander: worst movie of 2005 yet

Published on January 8, 2005 in movie. 6 Comments


On paper it must have seemed a guaranteed winner:

  • Oliver Stone as director: not that active as of lately – true – but responsible for blockbusters like JFK, Wall Street, Platoon and Born on the 4th of July
  • a strong story of battle, success and leadership with a clear super-hero
  • Colin Farell (as Alexander): the Irish bloke who became the receptionists’ hero after hanging on the phone for over an hour in “Phone Booth”
  • Angelina Jolie (as his mom, Olympias): the predator babe with the luscious lips and the excellent performing C-cup
  • Anthony Hopkins (as Ptolemy): any director’s first choice for playing an old man in a movie
  • Val Kilmer (as Philip, Alexander’s father): the pilot with the chewing gum in Top Gun
  • Rosario Dawson (as Alexander’s ravishing wife Roxane): who also played in “Kids” and surely has ‘grown’ in more than one sense of the word!
  • some B and C-list actors like Christopher Plummer and Jared Leto …

But the result is a disaster. What will you remember from the movie’s characters? Ptolemy was a boring old man, Olympias a manipulating bitch, Philip had only one eye, Roxane was a hot-blooded exotic beauty with a funny accent and Alexander was a heavy drinker and definitely queer. What images will you carry with you: Egypt looks silly, Babylon looks formidable, war is bloody, elephants are huge and queer men wear mascara.
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