tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-72793062435583483682024-03-16T11:52:16.684-07:00Homages, Ripoffs, and CoincidencesFilm images in context.Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02707753270598518341noreply@blogger.comBlogger1288125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7279306243558348368.post-72378249933613067462017-02-26T11:00:00.001-08:002017-02-26T13:18:30.194-08:00Go Make a Movie<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5OZBlewkf_Y/WLMgA8B2OHI/AAAAAAAAOnU/2-CJwoJgYjAzMCi8N0iLpBu7c1nQv0crwCLcB/s1600/chantal_akerman.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5OZBlewkf_Y/WLMgA8B2OHI/AAAAAAAAOnU/2-CJwoJgYjAzMCi8N0iLpBu7c1nQv0crwCLcB/s320/chantal_akerman.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>The late great Chantal Akerman</i></span></div>
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Everything is bad.</div>
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The inhumanity of money is killing the world. It is killing the rainforest, it is killing the Middle East, it is killing the breadbasket farmlands. And it is killing movies.</div>
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They are dying slowly and ignobly; choked to death by vast sums of capital and its inevitable progeny, the same venal dull comforting nothing that destroyed painting and sculpture. Studio filmmaking has become the inoffensive faux-expressionist paintings sold at Target, designed to fill space, not affect it; it has become those massive insipid sculptures in city squares paid for by public arts programs, that are seen by millions and inspire no strong feelings from anybody.</div>
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Okay, Moonlight was good. Manchester by the Sea was good. So why weren’t there 40 Moonlights last year, and 41 Manchesters? They will come from major studios — who are trapped in a gilded cage of superhero franchises — with the regularity and enthusiasm of pulling teeth. They have to come from you and I.<br />
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Personal art has to come from persons, not from committee meetings about careful franchise engineering and toy-line optimization. Something essential is bleeding out of the cinema, the way it bled out of paintings, and sculptures, and even the novel. We are constantly amazed that film after film gets whitewashed and dumbed down, but of course they do! Corporate inertia is the guiding principle behind corporate cinema, and there's no reason to expect films from Fox or Disney or whoever else to be any more progressive or heartfelt than a Walmart flashlight.<br />
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If movies are going to have any honesty, any humanity, they have to be created from the ground up, on the streets.</div>
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So why didn’t you make a movie last year?</div>
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<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-j7FcdLrJnlE/WLMgBPEwIxI/AAAAAAAAOnk/47f3A_Oi8IQGqqRnkxRdCT0LjispALxwACLcB/s1600/morris%2Bengel.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="193" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-j7FcdLrJnlE/WLMgBPEwIxI/AAAAAAAAOnk/47f3A_Oi8IQGqqRnkxRdCT0LjispALxwACLcB/s200/morris%2Bengel.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Morris Engel, New York's first indie darling, shooting Lovers & Lollipops</i></span></div>
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It has never been cheaper, it has never been easier, and yet, somehow, it seems likes energized impassioned indie cinema has not been rarer since the early 1950s. Is it because we are all trying to make proper studio films? Well, vanishingly few of us will ever be able to buy-in to the stratified shrinking Hollywood system, so it's time to bypass it. We all have the means, we all have the method. It is up to frustrated filmmakers to find the discipline and confidence to make the best movies possible on micro-budgets.</div>
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Sarah Maldoror, the godmother of Angolan cinema</span></i></div>
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To begin with, don’t make a movie about a person just like you. Do not take “write what you know” as an excuse to shrink and insulate yourself. It is an invitation to learn, to grow. Find the most interesting person you’ve ever met — or even heard of —, learn about them, and write what you now know. Do not waste your time, or that of your audience, on anything autobiographical. It’s a bad beginning. If you are that interesting, somebody else will make a movie about you. </div>
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Do not make a movie about movies. Do not make a movie about movies. Do not make a movie about movies. Your protagonist better not be a director, or a writer, or an actor, or GOD HELP YOU, not a pre-existing character. If you want to make a gritty version of a comic book or a cartoon you liked as a kid, please just stay home instead. Donate your camera gear to some kid living in poverty.</div>
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You can make your little tribute to movies when you’re 65. Make a movie about life.</div>
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Your script is going to be bad. That’s ok. See, most people write a draft or two and figure it’s good enough to shoot, but that’s like when you took shop class as a kid and you thought your stupid lopsided unsanded birdhouse looked great because you made it. Years later, you found that birdhouse again and saw that it was garbage. You’re an adult now, so you don’t need to wait for the postpartum afterglow to wear off to know that your script is bad and needs to be improved. Sand it down, polish it.</div>
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You need to look at your script with a harsh critical eye and not be afraid of how bad it is at first. The ideal mindset is confident that this is the story you want to tell but utterly ruthless about how well you are telling it. Take it apart second-for-second, look for those moments that make your stomach drop for just a second, and take them out. Find areas of connective tissue between scenes and strengthen them. Shop for solutions to script problems in other films, the newspaper, novels, life experiences, where ever. Get to the good stuff quicker. I don’t even have to read it or know what it’s about to tell you that: Get to the good stuff quicker.</div>
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Melvin Van Peebles, rated X by an all-white jury</span></i></div>
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You could get a Rebel or a Nikon D3300 for about 500 bucks, less if you buy used. You probably know a person who owns one already, and likely a bunch of other gear too. Give them the money instead and hire them to DP. Package deal. If they suck, put up an add on Craigslist or Mandy.com. There are about five million guys on YouTube doing compare/contrasts of various prosumer cameras and they’re a fun enough watch, but don’t get lost in the rabbit hole. You can make a watchable movie with the worst camera on the market, I promise you. There is no wrong answer.</div>
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Your cell phone outfitted with a little adapter lens shoots well enough to film a feature length film able to be screened even on cinema screens. Just ask Sean Baker, he did it with his movie <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALSwWTb88ZU">Tangerine</a>, which is beautiful and still probably the best movie since it came out. For even the profoundly poor, if you are able to read this, there is no reason you couldn’t have made a Tangerine last year. And your voice is needed.</div>
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The books will tell you that you need a light kit — they’re right, you do need to carefully light your film for effect. A general rule is keep your subjects eyes lit, no matter what. You can darken their eyes for effect, but don’t turn it into a crutch. You’ll know in your heart if you are. A light kit no longer means you need a dozen heavy kliegs that need heavy-duty outlets. You are reading this on a light source. Computers, phones, headlights, televisions, street lights. You are surrounded by light kits. For my first film, The Calm, I lit most of the night scenes by burning onto a DVD a video of full screen colors. Red, yellow, green, blue, etc. emulating the “gels” of a proper kit. I played the DVD on a television, or a computer screen, and paused it at whichever color I wanted. For close ups, I laid the computer monitor in my actor’s lap.</div>
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">A young Ruy Guerra, Brazil's answer to Werner Herzog</span></i></div>
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Focus on sound equipment, not camera and lighting gear. You can do just about anything with a mediocre camera, but nobody is going to watch your movie if you have bad sound. Find a professional — once again, you probably know some sullen DJ in your network, or once again, look to Craiglist. This should be one of your biggest expenses. Get a package deal of a pro with equipment, unless you’re confident enough that you don’t need any advice here. Expect to pay more for sound than for camera, up to twice as much. Keep your sound needs as simple and direct as possible. You can record sound harsh enough to burst an eardrum, you cannot record video ugly enough to burst an eyeball.</div>
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Take out dialogue where you can. If your line doesn’t tell us something new about the story or character, it should be a candidate for removal. The less people say, the easier your sound mix will be. If you can manage entire scenes without dialogue, you’ll find your shooting day so easy that it feels like a mini-vacation in the middle of your shoot.</div>
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Be good to your actors. Pop culture will tell you that directing is about alternately banging and yelling at your actors. It’s not true. Like anyone else, give them space to work. Take an acting class to understand what it’s like on the other side of the camera. It’s a fragile headspace. It’s far far easier to direct the camera than direct the actors, but don’t be a coward and retreat behind the lens to avoid the hard stuff. Do it properly. Listen to them, treat them with respect, and help them get what they need to work. Also, feed everybody. That goes a long way.</div>
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It’s time to edit now. You know somebody with Avid, Adobe Premiere, or even (god help you) Final Cut. If you do it yourself, fine, but you’re going to have to be extremely, psychotically self-critical.</div>
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Let’s get the stupid stuff out of the way first. You’re not going to be able to fill your soundtrack with songs, so put away your stupid Weezer mix and don’t count on that perfect song to spackle over the weaknesses in your script. You see why you had to stare at that script with a hard, unforgiving eye, and work those weaknesses out until they’re gone? If you did that well enough, all those great songs you heard in your head when you were writing will matter less. Your film will have grown past them.</div>
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Other than that, the editing process is quite a bit like the scripting process. You will have to watch your work over and over and over, analyzing those little things that don’t work. You might not even have a name for them, they could range from 20-minute chunks to a half-second where your mind wanders every time. There are a million books with a million rules about editing, and if you don’t know them, find somebody who does. There’s probably a 19-year-old kid around you with a cracked software suite who knows them all. When in doubt, minimize — don’t cut until you have a reason.</div>
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Now you have to get your film seen, and that sucks. I’m still working through that myself. But you’ll have to just navigate that river and push where you can push to get people to see what you’ve made. Once it’s recorded and put away, it’s not going anywhere. You did it.</div>
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Now make another.</div>
Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02707753270598518341noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7279306243558348368.post-60114719704067750882017-01-29T07:58:00.001-08:002017-01-29T08:00:30.676-08:00People Who Lived e. 1 - Caligari, the Dreamer, and the Devil<br />
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<b><a href="https://soundcloud.com/user-545503565/people-who-lived-e-1-caligari-the-dreamer-and-the-devil">People Who Lived </a></b></div>
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<a href="https://soundcloud.com/user-545503565/people-who-lived-e-1-caligari-the-dreamer-and-the-devil">1 - <i>Caligari, the Dreamer, and the Devil</i></a></div>
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I want to try something a little different, so here's episode one of a show I'm beginning here called <b>People Who Lived</b>, just simple short storytelling about people (usually from the arts or figures from history) who did something worth remembering, something that can help us make sense of our trouble times.<br />
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So here's episode one: <i>Caligari, the Dreamer, and the Devil</i>, about Conrad Veidt and Werner Krauss, two actors in Weimar Germany who found success together co-starring in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and whose lives diverged dramatically when the war came.Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02707753270598518341noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7279306243558348368.post-81626479562896834482016-12-18T15:24:00.006-08:002016-12-18T21:33:33.244-08:00A Cinema of Clutter<div style="font-family: helvetica; line-height: normal;">
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Natalie Portman for Miss Dior Chérie, nothing out of place.</div>
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I stopped writing here for a long time, for a few reasons. For a while, I was writing about movies on a different site, but even there it wasn’t at the rate I was cracking articles out here. The truth is, I pretty much lost interest in upcoming movies. I still haven’t quite got the passion back, but I’m trying. It feels like film has drifted from what it can and should be. The decline of the midbudget film is complete. Basically, if you want to see a thoughtfully written film for adults starring some big actors, you’d better get a time machine and turn on a television six years ago. But what’s worse is that even of the few modest films that make it out of the studio gauntlet, the majority feel empty. Literally.</div>
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In 2016 cinema, where the hell was the clutter? In this era of empty <a href="https://twitter.com/OnePerfectShot">One.Perfect.Shot.</a> symmetry, a messy room is the most under-appreciated tool in a filmmaker’s arsenal. If a narrative film is a presentation of a life and how it’s lived, the contemporary obsession with clean stark canvases reduces that life to nothing. How can you know anything about a person without seeing them surrounded by personal objects with meaning and value to them?<br />
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<i>Arrival</i> (2016) Denis Villeneuve</div>
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To prove my point, I’m going to pick on a film I sort of liked based on a short story I loved: Arrival. I came out of Arrival knowing virtually nothing about its protagonists — and consequentially <i>feeling</i> virtually nothing <i>for</i> them — despite the fact that I had spent 2 hours watching them, and one even intimately narrated the damn thing. Their lives were never on screen! In terms of movie romances, theirs had far less of an effect on me than, say, Chief and Mrs. Brody in Jaws, with whom we spend maybe 1/10th as much time.</div>
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<i>Jaws</i> (1975) Steven Spielberg</div>
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But every room in Jaws speaks. The spaces are pregnant with as much meaning as the people. What kind of food they eat, what color their walls are, what furniture they have and where it is — stuff like this isn't in the film to fill space but to <i>describe</i> space, to tell us about Amity and the people within. These details help <i>tell the story</i>. The economic, cultural, ethnic, social, and personal lives of the characters are all around them, all the time. This is one of the purest edges film has over a medium like, say, the novel, in which all of that would have to be described or at least implied. In a film you can essentially run a showreel of a character’s life around them while the story runs. Most of the time, most of this stuff will never be noticed consciously, but it doesn’t matter because the accumulated whole is not just a story, but as much <i>the </i>story as the shark is.<br />
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Spielberg has always been a genius with this kind of thing. Just look at the Neary home in Close Encounters, probably his masterpiece of set design-as-story. The cluttered human warmth, the sense of tripping over something at every step, is what makes the vast emptiness of the alien space feel so unusual. Think how flat the ending of that film would be if the entire film looked like the last thirty minutes. Instead, because of the work Spielberg and his team spent creating a realistic human space (incidentally, check out the foreshadowing in that painting over the piano), the featureless space of the aliens is a coherent visual alternative, a separate path from Roy's life with his family.<br />
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<i>Close Encounters of the Third Kind</i> (1977) Steven Spielberg</div>
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By contrast, with the exception of a single office, all of the empty desks and empty lakehouse in Arrival forfeit any personalized visual storytelling and put the film at an immediate disadvantage in terms of emotional connection. Who can believe a romance happening in empty space, in nowhere. In fact, the thoughtless beauty of the sets actively work <i>against</i> the film at times, since the lifestyle of the surroundings run in a counter-current to the lifestyle of the characters. I mean, honestly, who’s ever seen an academic with so few books? Her human grief plays out in a set that reads like a Bond villain's lair, or a perfume commercial.</div>
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It’s filmmaking for hanging on the walls, not living and breathing in, and it’s especially bad now in science fiction filmmaking (Ex Machina springs immediately to mind as another example), where the occasional inability to use existing locations often makes for a cinema of vast empty interiors. This attention to the texture of life is the primary visual difference between, say, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGkLMDaEnNk">Queen of Blood</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syyXdBg9BIc">Alien</a>. Both are fine films, but only in Alien, with its taped notes and physics toys and pornography on the walls, do you have the sense that you are watching events that happen to real people.</div>
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One could probably try and blame Kubrick for this. It always seems to come back to his symmetrical tidiness. But he knew the value of a humane, imperfect interior. Eyes Wide Shut, for example, is full of shots stacked with unobtrusive lived-in detail and until up-and-coming filmmakers learn that lesson, too, we’re in a world where we can no longer recognize our own quirks or idiosyncrasies on screen.</div>
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<i>Eyes Wide Shut </i>(1999) Stanley Kubrick</div>
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There's something of a moral dimension to this, too. Like I said, the Arrival house reminded me a of a perfume commercial. So: What is the goal of ads like that, of the space they build? It is a space to project desire and foment unquenchable envy. They are supposed to leave us dissatisfied, inadequate. If that's the language in which we're communicating in the lion's share of films, if that's the world we're presenting our protagonists in as a matter of course, we've totally scrubbed the humanity out of our imagination. Empty beauty isn't worth all that much. One would think the generation of filmmakers raised on Star Wars would know that emptiness reflects inward, and the cold spaces are for the bad guys.</div>
Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02707753270598518341noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7279306243558348368.post-28572438859942359742014-03-29T21:58:00.003-07:002014-03-29T21:58:44.818-07:00<span style="font-size: x-large;">Son of ShotContext:</span><br />
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http://shotcontext.tumblr.com<br />
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Run by Nick, I wish him luck!Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02707753270598518341noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7279306243558348368.post-39617954669234112372014-01-06T15:05:00.003-08:002014-01-06T15:05:57.386-08:00Congrats to Sasheer Zamata, first female black cast member of SNL in years.<br />
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She's profiled in a 2012 documentary called "On the Cusp, Off the Cuff" - an hour long look at the UCB improv scene in New York. Even as one of five being profiled, she shines. Worth a watch and free to view on YouTube:<br />
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<br />Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02707753270598518341noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7279306243558348368.post-24178567414941171322013-12-26T18:06:00.001-08:002013-12-28T19:45:26.147-08:002013 in film<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-size: x-large;">2013 in Review:</span></b><br />
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What a year! Lots of challenging, beautiful films. A strong year for minority representation - including films that weren't <i>about </i>that like <i>Fast & Furious 6</i> or <i>The Best Man Holiday </i>(<a href="http://www.deadline.com/2013/11/usa-today-race-themed-best-man-holiday-black-films/">oh lord</a>), which I haven't seen yet. Probably the strongest spread of black cinema since the late 1990s. but the prospect of a long-term sea change in that regard is rocky. Lots of films, both excellent (<i>Spring Breakers</i>) and terrible (<i>The Canyons</i>) about the changing landscape of the American Dream.</div>
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If you're not up to date on the direct-to-video action renaissance, you're missing out on much of the most powerful and ambitious filmmaking in the world today. Last year, this market was dominated by the incredible <i>Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning</i>, which has made the whole movement kinda too good to ignore for a lot mainstream critics. This is wonderful news, but unfortunately none that I saw wowed me this year - if I missed any good ones, let me know. I hope going forward we cease to be surprised to find quality in DTV, and instead expect amibition in the cracks as a matter of course. There's no reason not to, right?</div>
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Every year I wrap things up with capsule reviews of all the new releases I saw since January. There are some heavy hitters I'm still missing, like <i>The Wolf of Wall Street </i>and <i>The Hunger Games</i>, and I'm always behind the times on foreign releases, since they're slow to hit streaming.<br />
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Anyways, here's every 2013 movie I've seen, in order from best to worst. Feel free to add your input below!<br />
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<b>Gravity</b></div>
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Overwhelming. We've all known it was possible to make a space movie this immersive, beautiful, and relentless, and for me it was practically a relief to finally have it done. Beautiful sensory filmmaking, equal parts <i>The Naked Prey </i>and <i>Kaleidoscope, </i>this film has raised the bar for immersive camerawork for all time. The clear strong-lined compositions melt the constant motion of video games with the boldness of graphic design into something essentially cinematic<i>. </i>Like all films it has flaws and there are reasonable perspectives for disliking it, but a large part of the criticism I've seen of <i>Gravity </i>is from pedants and stuffed shirts who seem to think excitement, beauty, and awe are troublesome byproducts of filmmaking and not the essential core of the art. I had a little slapfight about it <a href="http://smugfilm.com/gravity/">here</a>.</div>
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<b>Spring Breakers</b></div>
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Pounding, complex, ridiculous magnificence. Keep an eye on this one, its uncomfortable and instinctual take on the sex-violence thing makes it our <i>Marnie</i>.</div>
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<b>Twelve Years a Slave</b></div>
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The best parts of Twelve Years a Slave take on the myth of the "good" slaveowner, in a challenge to even Solomon's own reports in his original narrative, the benevolents caught in an unjust economic system are cowards and hypocrites. Sort of a jarring and very present-day thing, one of the many examples of McQueen's ability to reflect on the very political present without having to announce it. Also of interest is the Gordon Parks-for-PBS version from 1984, which you can rent on Amazon Instant.</div>
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<b>Leviathan</b><br />
The ocean as a cold, ink-black, sloshing circle of hell and the human as a beleaguered demon upon it. A nightmare actuality that does for the GoPro what <i>The Shining</i> did for the Steadicam. I've cut down my fish intake since this - yet it's not a slog, every single shot is infused with weird beauty and occasionally a sprinkle of humor. It's not a <i>Moby Dick</i> adaptation, despite its title and "Sacred to the Memory of" title card, but it gets that <i>Moby Dick</i> was about seagulls.<br />
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<b>Pain & Gain</b></div>
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Michael Bay's <i>Fargo</i>.</div>
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<b>Her</b><br />
The secret to Spike Jonze, and what keeps his films from the mopey middlebrow, is his love of the human experience. There's a lot of wit here, especially in the fashion trends and nonjudgmental social politics of his future. It's a little too emotionally taxing to be as long as it is, but that's a minor quibble for such a very accomplished and timely movie.<br />
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<b>Fruitvale Station</b></div>
Nakedly political and affected in the same way as that old propaganda short where Frank Sinatra teaches us about anti-Semitism, Fruitvale is an absolute necessity right now. Michael B. Jordan, as usual, knocks it out of the park playing the exact man an entire cinematic subculture is built to demonize.</div>
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<b>Fast & Furious 6</b><br />
It's still bullshit that this isn't called Furious 6, but it's amazing to think back to the original <i>Fast and the Furious</i> and try and figure out just exactly how it all spun into a series about an international James Bond super team. Lin-era <i>Fast </i>movies are a rebuttal to the tedium of the similarly structured <i>Expendables</i> and <i>Avengers</i> films. <i>Fast 5</i> might be just a haaiiiiir better, but the beautiful locations, stacked cast, and absolutely insane action set pieces make this a masterclass in action cinema. I knew I was in love when Michelle Rodriguez used a handcuff as brass knuckles.<br />
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<b>This Is the End</b></div>
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Charmingly ambitious, weird, and surprisingly humanistic. At one point I laughed so hard I almost had to leave the theater.<br />
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<b>American Hustle</b><br />
The '70s as a yeyed-out oversexed polyester playground, and I loved every minute of it. The <i>Goodfellas</i> comparisons are facile as hell, it's much more in line with the dizzying betrayals of <i>Burn After Reading</i>. </div>
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<b>Upstream Color</b></div>
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I admire it for technical reasons more than emotional ones, but we need more filmmakers as willing to explore as Shane Carruth.</div>
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<b>As I Lay Dying</b></div>
<a href="http://smugfilm.com/as-i-lay-dying/">James Franco took something nobody thought could be done and did it, succeeding more than he fails. He’s grown a lot as a filmmaker, but has a great deal more growing to do.</a><br />
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<b>What Maisie Knew</b><br />
Loses none of the rage of Henry James's original novel about two childish adults and one very adult child. Has the heart of Ozu. A strong, quick, well-acted domestic drama, which feels like a rare commodity these days.<br />
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<b>The Place Beyond the Pines</b><br />
I love the idea of a triptych film and it never gets bad, exactly, but the big challenge of a movie like this is keeping each successive setting as interesting as the last, and this one fails at that. Interested to see what I think on a second viewing.<br />
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<b>Europa Report</b><br />
Heavily inspired by <i>The Abyss</i>, it has a nice Howard Hawks-ish professionalism and a captivatingly mature story. Solid acting and some really great exteriors - alongside <i>Gravity</i> as part of a new trend of post-Astronomy Picture of the Day high-def sci-fi. Unfortunately, it loses its luster in the interiors which are blocks of endless gray, and a too heavy hand in editing, especially in the last two minutes when they really <i>really </i>want to make sure you got the ending.<br />
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<b>The Killers - AmexUNSTAGED</b><br />
Werner Herzog's ten minute piece on earnest rockers The Killers is supposed to be fluff, but in a nonjudgemental and quiet way, it's a portrait of the doe-eyed, flaccid, literally creaky (check out that punchline of a last shot) state of corporate-backed rock and roll.<br />
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<b>We Are What We Are</b></div>
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Stately, small, and elegant, it feels like an <i>X-Files </i>episode in all the best ways. I get the sense that Jim Mickle's best work is still ahead of him, which is very exciting for the horror community.</div>
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<b>Rehearsals</b><br />
Compassionate, humane celebration of the mundane gestures and small tactile elements that mark our lives. Possesses a long, rhythmic quietude that captures the terror of waiting.<br />
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<b>Don Jon</b></div>
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Major character foibles cause a third act collapse, but it's a fun and confident debut. Charming and lightweight filmmaking.<br />
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<b>Computer Chess</b><br />
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I'm a sucker for anything in alternate formats. The daring visuals of this film, entirely shot on the long-dead Sony AVC 3260 video camera, do a good job complimenting its images of clunky old computers cobbled in California basements and its thematic perils of losing the analog, and director Bujalski's mumblecore background comes in handy with his cast of asocial obsessives. Its Achille's Heels are its gormless pacing and often less than stellar acting. Still, I'm glad something so idiosyncratic is out there. I kinda suspect in a few years we'll see a surge of interest in the early years of computing, and this weird little document might become a cult classic.</div>
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<b>Toy Story of Terror</b></div>
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The cloying and tacky <i>Toy Story 3</i> was the 21st century version of a velvet painting of Elvis, so this jolt of silly fun was a great of fresh air to me. I hope we get a new one of these every year.<br />
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<b>Inside Llewyn Davis</b></div>
Beautiful lighting and a carefully measured story that never once managed to pull me in. I'm thrown off by the refusal to explore the political side of '60s folk, but desperately in love with the visuals.<br />
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<b>To the Wonder</b></div>
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There are some truly incredible moments in this film, but after the ropy last act of <i>The Tree of Life</i>, the great Terrence Malick's editorial seams are very evident now. He can't come up with anything for Olga Kurylenko to do but prance, and he just can't bear to cut away from her.</div>
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<b>Last Days of Mars</b></div>
Better than its reputation, but it never musters the nerve to step out of the shadow of its influences. Too much <i>Alien</i>, not enough Last Days on Mars.<br />
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<b>Ninja: Shadow of a Tear</b><br />
Isaac Florentine has always had trouble finding a story to match his balletic action scenes, and Ninja: Shadow of a Tear saddles him with a particularly weak low-stakes story. They don't phone it in, though. The action scenes are downright beautiful, reveling in Shaw Brothers-inspired contraptions and relatively bloodless leaping and pirouetting. I've long felt that since the demise of musicals, action films are the last haven of choreography, and Scott Adkins is definitely in the Danny Kaye mold here. Takes a while to get going, but very much worth a watch.</div>
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<b>Sharknado</b></div>
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I kinda like that it got weird with it.<br />
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<b>Man of Steel</b></div>
There's a good hour and a half buried in here somewhere, but it's lost in a quagmire of exhausting adolescence. The 45 minute digression of Russell Crowe on a dragon is my personal hell. It's the best of Zach Snyder (unparalleled visual weight) and the worst of him (that embarrassing kung-fu lady) and the best of Christopher Nolan (impeccable casting) and the worst of him (godawful pacing).<br />
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<b>Oldboy</b></div>
Nice camerawork here and there, and Brolin really puts on a great show in the first half, but it just doesn't resolve the basic character problems of the original, which despite its "classic" reputation was, charitably, the 5th best mainstream Korean film of 2003.<br />
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<b>Star Trek Into Darkness</b></div>
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Emblematic of all the bad trends in filmmaking today, starting with the ugly fact that it's noticeably less progressive than an episode of 1960s children's television. The "twist" villain was a two-fold failure - explaining him ate up story time for people who weren't familiar with the show and his offensively bad casting alienated those who were. The filmmakers threw away a lot of goodwill by completely misjudging what worked about the '09 reboot. The idea of going "into darkness" was a bad one to begin with, and with the exception of a few little moments with the (still spectacular) cast, every decision here was the wrong one. It made all the mistakes of those horrible TNG-era Trek movies that got the franchise in this mess to begin with. Grow up. For god's sake, grow up.</div>
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<b>Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues</b><br />
Some good stuff in here, mostly from Kristen Wiig, but <i>Anchorman </i>works because it's jammed full of unexpected beats and this one is mostly just more elaborate remakes of jokes from the original. You can't outdo funny with big. Also: fuck Drake.<br />
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<b>Death Race 3: Inferno</b><br />
The story is actually pretty solid here with a few fun twists and stunning stunts, climaxing in a semi-remake of the original <i>Death Race 2000 </i>ending. But alas, the car stunts get a bit repetitive, the dialogue never rises above the merely functional - which would be okay if it wasn't so goddamn chatty, and it's all tarnished with Black Hawn Down-esque racism.<br />
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<b>Maniac</b></div>
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Weird rage and godawful dialogue, just like the original. The conceit of shooting entirely from the killer's perspective, promises unparalleled access to a killer's mind but compared to genuinely unnerving serial killer films like <i>Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer - </i>or, hell, even elegant trash like <i>The Cell -</i>, it offers absolutely nothing beyond throwback '80s blandness and sloppily sketched quasi-human characters It would've been better off if it committed to the silliness inherent in its horrendous script and William Castle gimmick instead of this half-assed "gritty" shock approach. It's all so goddamn pointless. Good musical score, though.<br />
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<b>Devil's Pass</b></div>
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It cribs liberally from <i>The Blair Witch Project </i>and it's clear that its concept of teenage culture hasn't moved much beyond 1999, either. The dialogue is stiff and outdated and it's all got the vibe of a dad-rock version of a horror movie, ya know? But, this is a damn fascinating film - it's a quickie found footage horror film about that internet-famous <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyatlov_Pass_incident">Dyatlov Pass</a> mystery directed by Renny Harlin of the hyper-budgeted <i>Cliffhanger, Deep Blue Sea, </i>and <i>Die Hard 2 </i>fame. The found footage style (which seems now to be on the wane) rose to prominence mostly because the rough aesthetic and semi-improvised storytelling style appealed to a horror community sick of slick bores like Harlin's own <i>Exorcist 4</i>. So it's interesting to watch Harlin's polished snappy style strain against a format specifically designed to oppose it. The compositions and actors never let go and sink into the milieu, which, when played against the occasional appeals to the camera itself and internet-derived premise/bad guys create a weird netherworld of a film, ill-at-ease and constantly at war with itself - picture a shitty late 90s action/horror interrupted by the constant question "are you recording?".<br />
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<b>The Canyons</b></div>
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It got so handily trashed before release that I was half-expecting this would be a misunderstood classic. But nope. Garbage. Everybody involved in this production needs to grow up. Not a single thing to do with the present, it's just an increasingly irrelevant Bret Easton Ellis's memories of 1985 with cellphones lazily pasted over everything.<br />
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<b>Movie 43</b></div>
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Whatever.</div>
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<b>Salinger</b></div>
Just a total mess. Edited like shit. Cheap, cheesy, ugly. It annoys me because they get so wrapped up in fabricated mysteries they breeze past the new information I DID want to hear about. Not just a waste of everyone's time, an unforgivably <i>vain</i> waste of a once-in-a-lifetime confluence of original material and compelling subject matter. The filmmakers should be ashamed of themselves.<br />
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<b>Pacific Rim</b></div>
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There wasn't enough sound, there wasn't enough fury, and it spent way too much time trying to signify something. Give me instead the grand insanity of <i>Transformers 3</i>, which - while also terrible - was at least enthusiastic about it.</div>
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Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02707753270598518341noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7279306243558348368.post-41263436525446754702013-12-10T19:09:00.000-08:002013-12-11T10:31:17.662-08:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
[NEW LINK PENDING, SIT TIGHT]</div>
I did a little restoration work on a classic industrial film, <i>Survival Shooting Techniques.</i><br />
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As I say in the description:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I love this absolutely bananas 1979 police training film. It's like the filmmakers knew this was the closest they'd ever get to making The French Connection and just went for it. TAMI, the Texas Film Archive, posted it in 2009 but unfortunately their copy (viewable here: http://www.texasarchive.org/library/index.php/Survival_Shooting_Techniques ) is in really bad shape, so I thought I'd try to clean it up a bit to share this remarkable piece of weird cinema.</blockquote>
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Hope you enjoy!Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02707753270598518341noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7279306243558348368.post-42583277084939594852013-10-03T17:49:00.003-07:002013-10-03T17:49:14.578-07:00The Perfect Geometry of Garden of Women<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-C3KUSrvqXks/Uk4QU2dWnvI/AAAAAAAAJzg/4783W37ixZY/s1600/Screen+Shot+2013-10-03+at+8.43.27+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="297" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-C3KUSrvqXks/Uk4QU2dWnvI/AAAAAAAAJzg/4783W37ixZY/s400/Screen+Shot+2013-10-03+at+8.43.27+PM.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ed7U8oinT0I/Uk4QVaHBCqI/AAAAAAAAJzs/-M_w6_CSeZU/s1600/Screen+Shot+2013-10-03+at+8.43.36+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="298" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ed7U8oinT0I/Uk4QVaHBCqI/AAAAAAAAJzs/-M_w6_CSeZU/s400/Screen+Shot+2013-10-03+at+8.43.36+PM.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-j_8H-_-IAGg/Uk4QWDjN-iI/AAAAAAAAJz8/G-b4KGAt78M/s1600/Screen+Shot+2013-10-03+at+8.44.06+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="297" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-j_8H-_-IAGg/Uk4QWDjN-iI/AAAAAAAAJz8/G-b4KGAt78M/s400/Screen+Shot+2013-10-03+at+8.44.06+PM.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-cpfoZQrCaPY/Uk4QTscasxI/AAAAAAAAJzM/nUxhvRyJxoM/s1600/Screen+Shot+2013-10-03+at+12.09.47+AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="298" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-cpfoZQrCaPY/Uk4QTscasxI/AAAAAAAAJzM/nUxhvRyJxoM/s400/Screen+Shot+2013-10-03+at+12.09.47+AM.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-rdC4WPz9qn0/Uk4QTpy-xfI/AAAAAAAAJzQ/j_yJ4JcCTTU/s1600/Screen+Shot+2013-10-03+at+12.09.56+AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="297" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-rdC4WPz9qn0/Uk4QTpy-xfI/AAAAAAAAJzQ/j_yJ4JcCTTU/s400/Screen+Shot+2013-10-03+at+12.09.56+AM.png" width="400" /></a></div>
<i>Garden of Women </i>(1954)<br />
dir. Keisuke KinoshitaJohnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02707753270598518341noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7279306243558348368.post-86291870077187796632013-09-24T12:33:00.003-07:002013-09-24T12:33:42.360-07:00<span style="font-size: x-large;">Celebrate the work of the recently departed Canadian film icon Michel Brault with his lovely light short <i>Geneviève.</i></span><br />
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<iframe height="320" src="http://www.nfb.ca/film/genevieve_en/embed/player" width="516"></iframe><br />
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<a href="http://www.nfb.ca/film/genevieve_en" target="_blank"><em>Geneviève</em></a> by <a href="http://www.nfb.ca/explore-all-directors/michel-brault/" target="_blank" title="more films by Michel Brault">Michel Brault</a>, <a href="http://www.nfb.ca/" target="_blank">National Film Board of Canada</a></div>
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Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02707753270598518341noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7279306243558348368.post-85676559021144504272013-09-21T16:14:00.001-07:002013-09-21T16:14:03.765-07:00<span style="font-size: x-large;">Check out my new commentary for Frank Borzage's <i>A Farewell to Arms.</i></span><br />
<i><span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></i>
<span style="font-size: x-large;">I go into the transition out of the silent era, the challenges of adapting a famous work, censorship problems in Classic Hollywood, and how the lives and careers of the principals informed the film. Also Gary Cooper's sex life.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/SMg0c1UdWqg?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></span></div>
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-large;">Here it is in MP3:</span><br />
<a href="http://www.sendspace.com/file/p3tqec"><span style="font-size: x-large;">http://www.sendspace.com/file/p3tqec</span></a>Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02707753270598518341noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7279306243558348368.post-87824328595110706892013-09-15T20:07:00.001-07:002013-09-15T20:07:25.076-07:00The Prairie<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-KE_68iNwm3E/UjZ1SnQDXkI/AAAAAAAAJyo/vYkRnxi-sTk/s1600/Who'll+Stop+the+Rain.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-KE_68iNwm3E/UjZ1SnQDXkI/AAAAAAAAJyo/vYkRnxi-sTk/s400/Who'll+Stop+the+Rain.jpg" width="251" /></a></div>
<i>Who'll Stop the Rain </i>(1978)<br />
dir. Karel Reisz<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-56p1dwhCDi4/UjZ1VIMO44I/AAAAAAAAJyw/s-dpbLFtb_s/s1600/yjC82ow.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-56p1dwhCDi4/UjZ1VIMO44I/AAAAAAAAJyw/s-dpbLFtb_s/s400/yjC82ow.jpg" width="323" /></a></div>
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<i>We Gotta Get Out of This Place </i>(2013)</div>
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dir. Simon Hawkins & Zeke Hawkins</div>
<br />Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02707753270598518341noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7279306243558348368.post-2403376567050200712013-09-02T11:26:00.000-07:002013-09-02T11:26:14.749-07:00A little known fact about Fritz Lang...is that, shortly before he died, he turned into John Ford.<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fxikljV58SU/UiTX90BqRcI/AAAAAAAAJxg/ABK2ZR_DIug/s1600/Screen+Shot+2013-09-02+at+2.22.59+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fxikljV58SU/UiTX90BqRcI/AAAAAAAAJxg/ABK2ZR_DIug/s200/Screen+Shot+2013-09-02+at+2.22.59+PM.png" width="175" /></a><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qqORQp2S3Bg/UiTX-VOvVfI/AAAAAAAAJxo/_S1ynxG9CpM/s1600/Screen+Shot+2013-09-02+at+2.19.32+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qqORQp2S3Bg/UiTX-VOvVfI/AAAAAAAAJxo/_S1ynxG9CpM/s200/Screen+Shot+2013-09-02+at+2.19.32+PM.png" width="191" /></a></div>
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Ford left, Lang right.</div>
Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02707753270598518341noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7279306243558348368.post-12788210207675328992013-08-24T05:23:00.000-07:002013-08-24T05:23:28.333-07:00The Lusty Gaze<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-5W9k8gQ3uQw/UhilM_KP0PI/AAAAAAAAJw4/SH3O-5lvGhI/s1600/0PdoM38.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="216" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-5W9k8gQ3uQw/UhilM_KP0PI/AAAAAAAAJw4/SH3O-5lvGhI/s400/0PdoM38.png" width="400" /></a></div>
<i>Adaptation </i>(2002)<br />
dir. Spike Jonze<br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zsy0wtFgins/UhilM6ONnRI/AAAAAAAAJw0/KxPKR-Vk9Co/s1600/i6mDfhO.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="225" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zsy0wtFgins/UhilM6ONnRI/AAAAAAAAJw0/KxPKR-Vk9Co/s400/i6mDfhO.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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<i>Louie</i> "Come On, God" (2011)<br />
Dir. Louis C.K.<br />
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<i>from TrixRabbi</i>Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02707753270598518341noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7279306243558348368.post-90273015918134782962013-08-24T04:18:00.000-07:002013-08-24T04:18:56.966-07:00The Gunman<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xNpUl5b14uM/UhiWAuGUZMI/AAAAAAAAJwg/CcjJXop8A-o/s1600/gf+csidle.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="225" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xNpUl5b14uM/UhiWAuGUZMI/AAAAAAAAJwg/CcjJXop8A-o/s400/gf+csidle.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<i>The Godfather: Part II </i>(1974)</div>
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dir. Francis Ford Coppola</div>
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<i>The Godfather: Part III </i>(1990)</div>
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dir. Francis Ford Coppola</div>
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<i>from csidle</i></div>
Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02707753270598518341noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7279306243558348368.post-62134793066376621132013-08-24T04:15:00.002-07:002013-08-24T04:15:53.204-07:00The Mower Deconstructed<br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Pww7484RSDc/UhiVFWCUSjI/AAAAAAAAJwA/8-oJtwCk_II/s1600/hb_67.187.131.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="251" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Pww7484RSDc/UhiVFWCUSjI/AAAAAAAAJwA/8-oJtwCk_II/s400/hb_67.187.131.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<i>The Veteran in a New Field </i>(1865)<br />
Winslow Homer<br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-yD_KelCRIZ8/UhiVFRwdslI/AAAAAAAAJwE/ewuDHISX4hk/s1600/seurat+mower.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="257" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-yD_KelCRIZ8/UhiVFRwdslI/AAAAAAAAJwE/ewuDHISX4hk/s400/seurat+mower.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<i>The Mower </i>(1882)</div>
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Georges Seurat</div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-yUi3E3uMegM/UhiVGR-CYvI/AAAAAAAAJwQ/n-8Tu96gty4/s1600/Edvard_Munch_-_The_Haymaker_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="343" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-yUi3E3uMegM/UhiVGR-CYvI/AAAAAAAAJwQ/n-8Tu96gty4/s400/Edvard_Munch_-_The_Haymaker_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<i>The Haymaker </i>(1916)<br />
Edvard MunchJohnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02707753270598518341noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7279306243558348368.post-81835873281093724882013-08-23T19:28:00.000-07:002013-08-23T19:28:14.781-07:00<span style="font-size: large;">People, people, people!</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The original cast recording of <i>Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? </i>is on youtube. This is a seismic event. Pre-Taylor/Burton, Uta Hagen spits hoarse fire and Arthur Hill takes a less rumpled, more frantic tack than Richard Burton.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">George Grizzard and Melinda Dillon feel more present than their film counterparts, particularly Dillon, who's drunkenness is more mischievous and less sleepy.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">This is a great listen. Just great.</span><br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" data-link="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZmzSmFmjOY" frameborder="0" height="370" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/pZmzSmFmjOY" width="490"></iframe><br />
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Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02707753270598518341noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7279306243558348368.post-40173798191988425942013-08-21T09:08:00.002-07:002013-08-21T09:09:32.710-07:00Greetings from 1962<i>I have been in contact with a time traveller. He has come from the from the far-flung past to lecture on the state of cinema, but I think maybe the pictures he included are wrong?</i><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Greetings movie-goers! Welcome to the year 1962.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Our theaters are filled with epic stories. Each year these films seem to get longer and more expensive, and each year we delight in watching the tales of our childhood heroes</span><span style="font-size: large;">, like El Cid, Spartacus, and Ben-Hur, recreated with more intensity and realism than could ever be dreamed even just a few decades earlier.</span><br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-B4u23xH2z3o/UhTk0rQgE5I/AAAAAAAAJvo/aMkA_9DZNYM/s1600/220px-Green_Lantern_poster.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-B4u23xH2z3o/UhTk0rQgE5I/AAAAAAAAJvo/aMkA_9DZNYM/s320/220px-Green_Lantern_poster.jpg" width="215" /></a></div>
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<i>El Cid </i>(1961)</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><br /></i></span>
<span style="font-size: large;">It's satisfying to watch our heroes brought to life before us, though sometimes they screw it up, like last summer's reboot of <i>King of Kings</i>, which strayed too far from the gritty Jesus we all know and love. A lot of us Jesus fans were really excited for an accurate movie of the character, but the studio ignored canon for no reason.</span><br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-IIIlR4Y5UBI/UhTkrJB08JI/AAAAAAAAJvg/rMxlvheOgzA/s1600/hulk.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="160" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-IIIlR4Y5UBI/UhTkrJB08JI/AAAAAAAAJvg/rMxlvheOgzA/s320/hulk.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<i>King of Kings </i>(1961)</div>
<i style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></i><span style="font-size: large;">On the plus side, they're not making as many westerns anymore. Good riddance, they were always the same story and they never understood how people fall in love. There were some good ones years ago like </span><i><span style="font-size: large;">Shane</span></i><span style="font-size: large;">, but now they seem more interested in just cramming every famous actor they can into one movie, like that ridiculous </span><i><span style="font-size: large;">How the West Was Won</span></i><i style="font-size: x-large;">.</i><br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-vhOxjbMuZoU/UhTkSC5euGI/AAAAAAAAJvQ/wyJVwXPAwoQ/s1600/pretty_woman_1990_1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-vhOxjbMuZoU/UhTkSC5euGI/AAAAAAAAJvQ/wyJVwXPAwoQ/s320/pretty_woman_1990_1.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>
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<i>Shane </i>(1951)</div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-oWZqPlNmW2g/UhTkWXHSqII/AAAAAAAAJvY/NgsC5IiANwQ/s1600/New_Year's_Eve_Poster.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-oWZqPlNmW2g/UhTkWXHSqII/AAAAAAAAJvY/NgsC5IiANwQ/s320/New_Year's_Eve_Poster.jpg" width="199" /></a></div>
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<i>How the West Was Won </i>(1962)</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">They're still all over TV, though, like <i>Bonanza</i> and <i>Wagon Train</i>, which is in its millionth season this year.</span><br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-42LejMJYsqE/UhTkDAJPseI/AAAAAAAAJvI/ksOdK1r3Kog/s1600/How-I-Met-Your-Mother-Cast-how-i-met-your-mother-791275_1280_1024.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="256" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-42LejMJYsqE/UhTkDAJPseI/AAAAAAAAJvI/ksOdK1r3Kog/s320/How-I-Met-Your-Mother-Cast-how-i-met-your-mother-791275_1280_1024.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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The long-running<i> Wagon Train</i></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Speaking of TV: In all honesty, if you're looking for a good drama, your best bet is television. With shows like <i>Naked City</i>, <i>Route 66</i>, and <i>The Defenders</i>, movies just can't compete with the greats of TV drama. Even big-time movie directors like Alfred Hitchcock have been making the move to TV.</span><br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-uOG1IyHamHA/UhTj0WrzbyI/AAAAAAAAJvA/md6jOU9KdlM/s1600/boardwalk-empire-poster-thumb-300xauto-18599.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-uOG1IyHamHA/UhTj0WrzbyI/AAAAAAAAJvA/md6jOU9KdlM/s320/boardwalk-empire-poster-thumb-300xauto-18599.jpg" width="237" /></a></div>
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Big-name Hollywood TV series <i>Alfred Hitchcock Presents</i></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Some movie buffs I know have been talking a lot about the coming revolution of new smaller camera and sound equipment, saying more and more regular people will be able to make their own films without worrying about the big studios or big actors. People mention names like John Cassavetes, Morris Engel, and some kind of "New Wave" coming from France.</span></div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1CJJnPoGxws/UhTlCJmRfaI/AAAAAAAAJvw/OB3sl5aaDI4/s1600/Steve+McQueen+director+Shame+premiere+London+CAO61S8RFICl.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1CJJnPoGxws/UhTlCJmRfaI/AAAAAAAAJvw/OB3sl5aaDI4/s320/Steve+McQueen+director+Shame+premiere+London+CAO61S8RFICl.jpg" width="230" /></a></div>
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John Cassavetes<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I don't know. I can't see anything coming from it. Who would want to watch that when they can watch an epic? We have <i>Cleopatra </i>coming out soon. It's apparently got a really big budget and is very long. Everyone's excited for it.</span></div>
<br />Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02707753270598518341noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7279306243558348368.post-85659373826027400472013-07-11T15:19:00.001-07:002013-07-11T15:28:51.924-07:00<span style="font-size: x-large;">Here's some quick math to show the scale of the money lost on a bomb the size of <i>Lone Ranger. </i>Let's compare it to last year's modest success <i>Jack Reacher</i>, another big studio action movie with a major star in a leading role.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><u><i>Jack Reacher:</i><b><i> </i></b></u></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>$60m </b>budget<b> </b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>$15m </b>opening weekend</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><i><u>Lone Ranger:</u></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>$250m </b>budget</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>$29m </b>opening weekend</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><i>Lone Ranger </i>made a little over twice <i>Jack Reacher</i>'s opening on a budget 3.6x larger.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">That means that a movie of <i>Lone Ranger</i>'s scale could've grossed the <b>entire budget</b> of the major star-driven <i>Jack Reacher </i>in <b>one single weekend </b>and still been a colossal disaster, particularly in the face of films like <i>The Avengers </i>which made $207m in its opening weekend - that's 80% of <i>Lone Ranger</i>'s entire budget recouped in three days.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>And at a budget of about $11,000 dollars, one would have to make 22,727 <i>Paranormal Activities </i>to add to one <i>Lone Ranger</i>.</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">The magnitude of tentpole action films is simply staggering, isn't it?</span>Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02707753270598518341noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7279306243558348368.post-72288009344134740442013-07-09T20:38:00.001-07:002013-07-09T20:38:32.228-07:00<iframe frameborder="0" height="486px" scrolling="no" src="http://www.indiegogo.com/project/452805/widget/3810970" width="224px"></iframe>Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02707753270598518341noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7279306243558348368.post-88747205547126554872013-06-30T19:51:00.000-07:002013-06-30T19:51:02.234-07:00<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Friends, I'd like to once again apologize for my absence lately, but I've been working very hard on my stage play <i>Very Little </i>which is debuting at Fringe NYC in August. We have about a month left of production and are running short of funds, if any of y'all feel like supporting independent theater, please help us out on our IndieGoGo page.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/very-little-a-one-act-play-debuting-at-the-nyc-fringe-festival/x/3810970">http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/very-little-a-one-act-play-debuting-at-the-nyc-fringe-festival/x/3810970</a></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Thanks!</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Love,</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">John</span>Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02707753270598518341noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7279306243558348368.post-43757435131165072022013-06-29T09:37:00.000-07:002013-06-29T09:37:02.468-07:00<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">I did another commentary track!</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">For Frank Borzage's <i>The Pilgrim</i>, a film I discussed <a href="http://shotcontext.blogspot.com/2012/10/35-great-westerns.html">here as well</a>.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">Enjoy!</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span>Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02707753270598518341noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7279306243558348368.post-7984342579463932912013-05-31T19:20:00.001-07:002013-05-31T19:20:42.115-07:00The Orgy<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>The Swap, and How They Made It</i> (1966)<br />
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<i>Eyes Wide Shut </i>(1999)<br />
dir. Stanley KubrickJohnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02707753270598518341noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7279306243558348368.post-17598047238186048582013-05-12T19:39:00.000-07:002013-05-12T19:39:10.105-07:00<div style="text-align: center;">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">Things are gonna be a bit quiet here for a while. I'm putting on a stage play for <a href="http://www.fringenyc.org/">FringeNYC</a>. Goes up in August. More details as the date approaches, I promise.</span></div>
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Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02707753270598518341noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7279306243558348368.post-76016685193878958592013-05-04T10:59:00.000-07:002013-05-04T11:03:56.094-07:00The White Whale addendum!A few more things:<br />
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- <i>The Long Hot Summer </i>is a really fascinating adaptation. It's Faulkner, but since <i>Cat On a Hot Tin Roof </i>was just a smash, it's in the style of Tennessee Williams. Not a natural fit, they have to hammer the edges a bit to make the characters work, but it's really strange and kinda funny to see recognizably Faulknerian elements dressed up with the sordid family saga of Williams.<br />
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- And <i>The Thing</i>.<br />
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John W. Campbell's story has been adapted three times, in 1951, 1982, and 2011 - coincidentally, each film is almost exactly 30 years apart.<br />
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Howard Hawks's 1951 <i>The Thing from Another World </i>is marked by sexual tension and optimism. Even the villain is eminent, reasonable, and accepted back into the film's fold as "heroic"in the final scene, he was merely stressed and naive. The threat is purely external - the monster does not shapeshift in this movie - and humanity (i.e. the US) survives by uniting and employing our technical wizardry to improvise a weapon. Shades of the A-Bomb, shades of the UN. Later, <i>Star Trek</i> would run for decades with the concept that the-US-as-the-world is elevated and invincible by technical ingenuity. It's a film caught in a historically unique moment - full of pride for the war we won and frightened and weary at another on the horizon. The arctic solitude here speaks to the American soldiers frozen and battered in Korea and, of course, to the frozen giant of the Soviet Union, which is hardly ever spoken of but is always present in this film.<br />
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John Carpenter's 1982 <i>The Thing </i>is a much angrier film. The threat comes from within. Humanity doesn't unite, it crumbles. Our heroes are burnouts and opportunists. The unit's captain, Garry, is impotent and faintly ridiculous. He's ridiculed most when he's decisive and fires off shots, and he famously almost spends the winter tied to a couch. There are no women in this version. It is sexless and loveless. At the film's end, there's a tired standoff - the idealogical stalemate Reagan had just broke? the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate malaise? It almost seems like human life isn't worth the effort to save.<br />
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Matthijs van Heijningen's 2011 <i>The Thing </i>is sort of a pastiche of the first two films. It plays on our foreknowledge of the events in Carpenter's film, but constantly undermines and tricks us. We don't really <i>know </i>what happened at the Norwegian camp, we realize, even though we got a pretty good sense of it from Carpenter. The details, the facts, are all shifting and unpredictable like that strange inhuman computer we see in the spaceship, as far removed from the Carpenter film's Atari-looking prediction machine, with its clean precision, as that film's computer was from the ominous flickering of Giger counters in Hawks's film.<br />
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Even the hero of Heijningen's <i>The Thing</i> is not who we expect. We've seen Carpenter's film and are aware that two men survive to fight the Thing, but they're a red herring - it was really a woman leading the fight. Women are totally absent from Carpenter's film and capable but ancillary to Hawks's. Here, women are forefronted. Mary Elizabeth Winstead's Kate will not be Rosalind Franklin-ed out of history.Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02707753270598518341noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7279306243558348368.post-55498680061024395482013-04-27T16:33:00.000-07:002013-04-27T20:44:19.184-07:00Lessons in Filmmaking #2: The White WhalePhew, been a while since a serious post from me, sorry y'all. Been a bit busy, but I'm back. What follows might make a good companion piece to my essay about <a href="http://shotcontext.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-lincoln-myth-on-film.html" target="_blank">what it means to adapt the life of Abraham Lincoln</a>.<br />
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<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Lessons in Filmmaking #2:</span></b></div>
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<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">The White Whale</span></b></div>
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I've been thinking a lot about adaptation lately. It's a tricky process to shepherd a piece of art across mediums, often a very personal and mutative one. What happens when a filmmaker adapts a literary work at its worst can resemble a child's timid book report, and at its best it can ennoble and strengthen the original work.<br />
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My mind's on this for a few reasons, but mostly because I just watched the 1930 John Barrymore version of <i>Moby Dick</i>. This film is a bit notorious in the annals of adaptation because it's about as far removed from Herman Melville's original characters, themes, and content as possible.<br />
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The story of the movie is a bit complicated, so best to start with the beginning - in 1926, John Barrymore, at the height of his career, four years after playing <i>Hamlet</i> and the same year as <i>Don Juan</i>, starred in a silent loose adaptation of <i>Moby Dick</i> called <i>The Sea Beast</i>. Really all they took from Melville's work was the concept of a big whale taking a man's leg - the bulk of it is a land-bound love triangle playing on Barrymore's reputation as a great romantic leading man. It's most famous for The Big Kiss when Barrymore's Ahab kisses the leading lady Dolores Costello so intensely she briefly passes out.<br />
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<i>The Sea Beast </i>was a smash - how could it not be? Barrymore macking like a pro, and all. With the rise of sound cinema, by the early 1930s there was a bit of a land rush to remake sound era hits, particularly those a literary pedigree since, hey, the actors could talk now! Barrymore's <i>Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde</i>, for example, got an update in the classic 1931 Rouben Mamoulian version, and Greta Garbo's 1927 <i>Anna Karenina</i> adaptation <i>Love </i>was remade in 1935 under the original title <i>Anna Karenina.</i><br />
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<i>The Sea Beast </i>has a similar progeny - its 1930 remake <i>Moby Dick</i>, like <i>Love/Karenina</i>, reverted to the original novel's title and retained the leading actor John Barrymore. The director, however, changed from 1926's Millard Webb to 1930's Lloyd Bacon, a solid workingman director with a strong sense of pacing and an aptitude for all genres.<br />
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I find the very existence of 1930's <i>Moby Dick </i>fascinating and kind of revealing. It's not actually <i>Moby Dick </i>at all. Like the '26 version, it famously changes the ending of the story to allow Ahab to kill Moby Dick and return to his love<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: red; font-size: xx-small;">1</span>. This is the most famous and obvious change, but far from the only or even most egregious one. We spend a firm forty minutes on land before taking to whaling, and the actual hunt for Moby Dick that constitutes the novel is less than twenty minutes, almost exactly one quarter of the film's 80 minute running time. That means that a firm 75% of this film is an original work. It's sort of an alternate <i>Moby Dick</i>, one which takes some character sketches and plot mechanics and weaves its own story from that. There's a pretty clear tip-off that we're in for a kind of mutant alternate <i>Moby Dick </i>in the opening credits.<br />
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The first shot is that hoary shot that opened so many classic-era Hollywood adaptations, a close up of the source novel being opened:<br />
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And we take a peek inside Herman Melville's book:</div>
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But what is this? Look, if <i>Moby Dick </i>is famous for anything, it's famous for the opening sentence. "Call me Ishmael," everybody knows it. Children know it, for god's sake, even the comic book version knows enough to include that:</div>
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Instead we have some boy's adventure story opening with no relation at all to Melville. And as it turns out, Ishmael - the protagonist and narrator of<i> </i>the novel - <i>never appears</i> in this film. The background is dotted with recognizable figures from the original - first mate Starbuck, the gruff Stubb (name altered to Stubbs), Father Mapple, and a surprisingly faithful version of Elijah all pop their heads in. Queequeg's role grows - he takes over much of Starbuck's duties as Ahab's confidante, and the religious customs we get a sense of in the novel became a source of complex concern in the film.</div>
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But Ishmael, our Ishmael, never arrives. His life and personality are stolen, in fact, by Ahab. Ahab, not Ishmael, grows close with the cannibal/prince/harpooner Queequeg. Ahab, not Ishmael, wanders Nantucket as a young and spirited man. Lloyd Bacon has condensed and muddled things. We no longer have old intractable Ahab and young poetic Ishmael, we have a whole new character, one with the light heart of Ishmael and the thunderous rage of Ahab. Ish-hab.</div>
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But real ride-or-die Melville fans will have raised their eyebrow even before seeing Ishmael's opening line gone, because "<i>Moby Dick or The White Whale</i>" is not the full title of Melville's work, it's really "<i>Moby-Dick; or, The Whale</i>." I can accept the loss of the hyphen and punctuation as the streamlined 20th century's tamping down of the talky 19th century<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: red; font-size: xx-small;">2</span>, but the film's addition of the word "White" strikes me. Moby Dick is famously white, so there's pretty unassailable logic in referring to him as such in the title - it's not simply <i>The Man in the Flannel Suit</i>, after all - but! and this is a big but: </div>
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<b>The Moby Dick of Lloyd Bacon's film is not a white whale.</b><br />
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It kind of blew my mind when I realized it. I think they only verbally refer to him as "white" once, but it's a distant yell from a watchman, easy to miss. The <a href="http://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/42/moby-dick/702/chapter-42-the-whiteness-of-the-whale/" target="_blank">whiteness of the whale</a> is very much de-emphasized from the novel. In this opening sequence we leaf a bit through the pages of the book, and in a chunk of garbled Reader's Digest Melville we're told that the whale has only a "white forehead" and "white hump."<br />
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One of the great debates of the text is whether Moby Dick is pure white or mottled white, and to that end one of the amazing proto-modernist touches of the text is that the animal seems only to grow<i> </i>whiter<i> </i>the more Ahab thinks and speaks of it. By the novel's end, Moby Dick is a burning, all-pervading, impossible white. But it's the opposite in this film. We start out with "the white whale" in the first paragraph of the prologue, get to patches of white in the second, and by the time we actually meet the thing... well, see for yourself:</div>
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I suspect there's a practical reason for this alteration. <i>Moby Dick </i>is often called unadaptable, and I want all y'all to remember that word because I'm going to return to it. One reason for its supposed unadaptability is the technical hassle of creating a giant white whale thrashing about the ocean. Just watch the making of <i>Jaws </i>to get a sense of the problems of working with models in water. <i>Jaws </i>could barely get made in 1975 with a 25 foot shark, the sheer magnitude of the task of creating a boat-sized whale in 1930 is staggering.</div>
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So when the white whale shows up a somewhat prosaic gray, I shook it off with the assumption that they had surrendered the coloring to match the prop whale with stock footage of real live sperm whales. But that didn't happen. There's a brief shot of a real whale's tail as it dives, but that's it, and that's hardly worth the change.</div>
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But then Ahab kills Moby Dick, and in the film's final minute we're shown a shocking, anatomical montage of the whale's shorn skin hauled on deck and sliced up. We linger in particular on this shot:</div>
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Was Moby Dick turned grey to match this shot? It seems like the only logical answer - even if they were working with old models from another production, there's no reason they couldn't repaint them. This shot is the only unmalleable element in the entire whale hunt sequence.</div>
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In the novel, the whale's color is a powerful and constant metaphor for Ahab's all-consuming vengeance, but Ahab is not really consumed by vengeance in this film. His great anguish comes not from the act of losing his leg to the whale but from his fiance's supposed rejection of him (long story involving a sinister brother trying to get in it). So therefore, the act of killing Moby Dick is about reestablishing his masculinity in this film, as opposed to the all consuming "for hate's sake" suicide spiral it is in the novel. Cutting up the whale, conquering it totally to the very flesh, is supremely important. Lloyd Bacon's whale hunt was a bullfight, and John Barrymore's Ahab (often showing off his raw athleticism) was the matador.</div>
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It ain't Melville, but really - what is? <i>The Sea Beast </i>was a swooning melodrama, this 1930 update is sort of an Alexander Korda-ish historical comedy romance (it reminds me a lot of Korda's <i>Rembrandt</i>, which also had a habit of fudging the source). </div>
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Elsewhere, <i>Moby Dick </i>has been adapted with more care paid to the framework of the text. The 1956 John Huston-directed, Ray Bradbury-scripted version was the first "respectful" crack at the story. Ishmael is back in place, there are no added romantic entanglements, and the whale is both white and alive at the end. It's as it should be, but it just doesn't work. It captures the mechanics of the plot and the whale boat scenes are well done, but there's none of the grandeur, camaraderie, or beauty of the text. It's literal, like a high school Macbeth. Even moments like this:</div>
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which for the most part retain the text verbatim, lack all lyricism because it's treated with stilted precision. My favorite part of the film is one of the few original touches, when Ahab's dead body gets tangled and lashed to the whale's. That lone digression from the text revealed a lot of potential that the film failed to capitalize on. </div>
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In all candor, though Huston's <i>Moby Dick </i>is better Melville, Lloyd Bacon's is better cinema. It's a good showcase for Barrymore's stuntwork and natural charm. It recasts the story as one of man's triumph over nature, which sort of an arrogant 1930s thing to do, but it's honest with itself and it's not hard to latch onto. </div>
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The same complaint I have with Huston's film can be leveled at the 1998 Franc Roddam <i>Moby Dick </i>minseries, which hosts great performances from the likes of Patrick Stewart and Bruce Spence but fails to find its own rhythm and heart.</div>
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The standout of Huston's film is Father Mapple as played by Orson Welles, who himself adapted the play to the stage with 1955's two-act play <i>Moby Dick - Rehearsed</i>. The play documents a theater company's rehearsal of a Moby Dick show, improvising props and slowly getting into character. It's a solid piece. I adapted it myself in college, but I was dissatisfied with the pacing and rewrote much of the first act. The result was credited as "John D'Amico's revision of Orson Welles's adaptation of Herman Melville's novel." Melville's text was the center of the show, but there was another story overlaid on it. It was not <i>Moby Dick</i>, it was something else entirely. It was the chronicle of my love for <i>Moby Dick </i>and for Orson Welles, and of Orson Welles's love for theater and for Melville. There was a lot at work in it. </div>
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But <i>Moby Dick - Rehearsed </i>is great <i>Moby Dick</i>, despite how far it flies from the text. Welles has a knack for adapting the core of a story rather than the simple dull machinations of its plot. Watch his take on one of the more lyrical passages. In one minute he pierces farther into the sad, proud heart of Ahab than any take I've ever seen:</div>
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Closer at least to my Ahab, that is.</div>
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To my eyes, the truest film adaptation of <i>Moby Dick</i> is an adaptation of another novel: <i>Jaws</i>. That sounds glib, but I'm being serious. Quint's complicated pride, skill, anger, and magnetism reach deep into Ahab, much deeper than the mannered unapproachability of Huston's film or the entirely different Ish-hab of Lloyd Bacon's. Chief Brody's lovable straight man is also the best take on Ishmael I could imagine. It's hardly a cinematic role, but with the skill of Spielberg and Scheider, his idiosyncrasies rise to the surface and he never feels like a mere cypher for the author. Peter Benchley's novel is pretty bad, Spielberg elevates it by paring it down to its best elements and marrying it with Melville, Hitchcock and a host of other influences, turning all that ore into something new and fresh, something deeply beautiful and irreducibly cinematic.</div>
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Actually there's a pretty sizable tradition of almost-<i>Moby Dick</i> cinema, with some heavy hitters like <i>The Wrath of Khan </i>and <i>The Bedford Incident</i>. I've always thought the best movie never made was <i>Moby Dick</i> as a crime thriller with Klaus Kinski as Ahab and Toshiro Mifune as the whale. Even <i>Wagon Train</i> took a crack at the story in its season two opener "Around the Horn." In a weird turn of events, there's even a 2007 French film called <i>Capitaine Achab </i>about the life of Ahab that can probably be called a remake of <i>The Sea Beast </i>instead of an adaptation of <i>Moby Dick</i>.</div>
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For an unadaptable story, this one gets adapted a lot. And yet, unlike Melville's novella <i>Billy Budd </i>which received a definitive and traditional<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: red; font-size: xx-small;">3</span> adaptation in 1962 that every version hence has emulated, each <i>Moby Dick </i>is different from the last.</div>
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But, then, it <i>is </i>unadaptable! We're talking about <i>Star Trek</i> and killer sharks and love triangles and just about everything <i>except </i>what's contained in Melville's book. Why is that? It can't be length. <i>Gone with the Wind </i>got a definitive home-run of an adaptation, and at 418,053 words to <i>Moby Dick</i>'s 206,052, you could theoretically fit two great Moby Dick movies inside <i>Gone with the Wind. </i></div>
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So what it is about <i>Moby Dick</i>?</div>
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There are no women in it, first of all. And it's all set on a boat about the size of a city bus. Our heroes are traveling the globe stabbing and hacking the most majestic creature on earth. They speak in odd slang. The racial politics are complex and uncomfortable. You have to shoot at sea. Everybody dies at the end. Yet it is one of the most enduring works of art in the world, with arguably the most compelling male role except for Hamlet, and a name that to this day commands instant attention and enduring awe and admiration. A complicated state of affairs has made <i>Moby Dick </i>both an attractive and terrifying prospect for a filmmaker, so each film is something of a minefield run, dodging the perils and trying to land surefooted in the triumphs of the text. Each film, therefore, takes a different path, and a good many of them blow up somewhere along the way.</div>
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But more than that, it seems to me that adapting <i>Moby Dick</i> is more like adapting something like <i>The Waste Land</i> than <i>Gone with the Wind. </i>Mood is often of absolute primacy. Mood is so essential that the novel (which in its way is an adaptation of Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: red; font-size: xx-small;">4</span>") begins with ten pages of quotes about whales, sort of a scrapbook of legends, stories, and factual accounts that serve as raw material for Melville's tale. Many lines from these quotations work their way into Ishmael's story.</div>
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A filmmaker of worth has some incredible raw material to work with here. There are passages of extraordinary ferocity and horror - at one point we hear of sharks that "viciously snapped like flexible bows, bent round, and bit their own disembowelments; till those entrails seemed swallowed over and over again by the same mouth, to be oppositely voided by the gaping wound," and passages of perfect serenity: "An intense copper calm, like a universal yellow lotus, was more and more unfolding its noiseless measureless leaves upon the sea." The whole gamut of the human experience is in this text. Many have failed to capture it, some have succeeded. The ones who have succeeded most enduringly - Welles, Spielberg, Nicholas Meyer, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0452823/" target="_blank">Paul Stanley</a> have succeeded by isolating the elements of the work that speak most profoundly to them, by nurturing the union between the novel and their heart.</div>
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I think there's a lesson in filmmaking in that.</div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: red; font-size: xx-small;">1 </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Ahab's wife is only ever addressed obliquely in the text - most powerfully in <a href="http://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/42/moby-dick/813/chapter-132-the-symphony/" target="_blank">Chapter 132 - The Symphony</a> ("I widowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck")</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">, but she seems to be a figure of constant interest. There's a </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7742.Ahab_s_Wife_or_The_Star_Gazer" target="_blank">novel</a></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> about her travels in the 19th century which I haven't yet read and would love to get opinions on. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: red; font-size: xx-small;">2</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">"Moby-Dick" with a hyphen is so unconventional Melville doesn't even do it inside the text - Chapter 41 is titled "Moby Dick."</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: red; font-size: xx-small;">3</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> Traditional but, like most films based on Melville, the homoeroticism was toned down as much as possible.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: red; font-size: xx-small;">4</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> Sole survivor of a nautical disaster recounts how a sailer's obsession with a mystical white animal cursed and killed the crew.</span></div>
Johnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02707753270598518341noreply@blogger.com6