The Greatest Fan Film of All Time

Hot off the presses... I haven't even had a chance to watch the whole thing yet (it's 45 minutes long) but I like what I have seen so far. Here's the guy's blog who wrote it directed and animated it.

UPDATE: This is fucking awesome! It's funny, it's bloody, and best of all, it rewards people who have been reading comic books and watching superhero programs for the past 30 years.

The Greatest Fan Film of All Time
Uploaded by Bullcrank

Siskel & Ebert reviews of great 80s and 90s films

Googling about the last post, I came across these postings of Siskel & Ebert reviews. All of these ae now known to be modern classics, but what did the guys think at the time? Awesome!

Reservoir Dogs:



Pulp Fiction:



Full Metal Jacket:



Goodfellas:



Fargo (Ebert fell for the "true story" thing.):



Silence of the Lambs (Siskel hated it!):



Terminator 2:

Tarantino's Mind

A lot of these theories and ties and observations have been floating around for quite some time (to say the least) but check out this Brazilian short film about two film geeks discussing the ties within the Tarantinoverse.

Take a Look at Darkon If You Have the Chance

I got the movie Darkon from Netflix the other day, and it's real good! It's about these LARPers from Maryland who philosophize about their weekend antics. Two different commentaries! I was reminded of the magnificent obsessions of those featured in the documentary Trekkies, and I see that the folks at Film Threat thought the same thing. I like this quote from their review:

They’re a really smart, charming bunch (okay, some of these dudes are a little spooky), constantly using their imaginations and creating and that’s quite a bit more than you can say for many other people out there leading dull existences with no creative outlet. So in the end, you’re not laughing at these guys because they’re a bunch of weirdos, you’re laughing in celebration of their unbridled passion.

Here's the question I pose to narrow-minded conformists "regular" people who roll their eyes at such things:

Why is this stupid, but football isn't?

Full 90+ minute movie below:

And, JFTHOI, here's a couple of minutes from Trekkies:



Update, 5-26-08: Thanks to commenter Fantasy Freak for pointing me towards Monster Camp.

Mid-October Already...

OK, only five blogposts in the last month and a half. I know, pathetic. Meh. Things are still mega-busy, so I'll be back among the bloggeratti one of these weeks, just not right now.

Items:

• Japanese legislator busted for too much Wikipedia editing: A Japanese bureaucrat has been reprimanded for shirking his duties to make hundreds of Wikipedia contributions about toy robots, officials said Friday. The agriculture ministry said the bureaucrat, whose name was not released, contributed 260 times to the Japanese-language Wikipedia entry on Gundam, a popular, long-running animated series about giant robots that has spun off intricate toys popular among children and adults who belong to the so-called "otaku culture" of fascination with comic books, animation and robots. "The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam," ministry official Tsutomu Shimomura said.
• Via 43 Folders, 41 Reasons Why Your Blog Probably Sucks. Number 13 (I know, I know): Not posting regularly. There are two primary reasons that not posting regularly is "bad". One is that readers lose patience when they don't your schedule. (Not everyone uses an RSS reader.) The other reason is that search engine spiders often index your pages on a frequency proportional to your posting. The more you post, the more frequently you might get indexed, thus increasing the chances of search engine traffic. (Note that in some niches such as politics, you need to post 10-20 times per day to get noticed.) At the least, if you can't post regularly, have a consistent schedule that's obvious to your most loyal readers.
• I've watched several films over the past few weeks. Two great thrillers from the 1970s: The Day of the Jackal and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three; A couple of Robert Altman's lesser known films, O.C. & Stiggs and Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or, Sitting Bull's History Lesson; and two very "different" films (I like 'em when they're different) -- Shortbus and Cube. More on these later
• I also read a book by a guy named Ian Ayres that I have to recommend for all you numbery people -- Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart. Lots of good stuff in here on statistics, data gathering, and practical applications of the analyses presented so as to be understood by the interested amateur.

Simpsons Shots Matched With Their Inspirations

In honor of the season premiere of The Simpsons (occurring right now) here are a bunch of Simpso-mages matched up with their inspirations. For instance:

What I've Been Watching Lately

Several movies in the last couple weeks:

McCabe and Mrs. Miller -- I saw this first about 12-13 years ago, and I was prompted to watch it again as part of my campaign to watch or re-watch all of Robert Altman's films -- a campaign upon which I embarked after his death. It's kind of like an anti-Western -- the hero spends a bunch of time avoiding the showdown and sneaking around in the snow. I watched Altman's Popeye a little while ago, and they both had elaborate, quirky sets that almost acted as characters themselves. On McC&MM, Altman points out in the commentary that the because the story was about people building a town in the old West, that he got the carpenters who were building the actual set to dress in period clothing and do their work, and just incorporated that work into the background of the film itself.

Boxcar Bertha -- This was an early Martin Scorcese film. Now I am a huge Scorcese fan, and I certainly will not say that I am dissatisfied with having viewed this film -- It was pretty good. I just don't think it was all that great. Like McC&MM, the railroad was the bad guy.

Smokin' Aces -- Kicked fuckin' ass! Kind of Pulp-Fictionish, but not exactly, and this movie just gets started and does not stop! Here are some samples of the Smokin' Aces comic books. Here's the director's blog, and he says there might be some prequels in the works. Can't wait!

Superman Returns -- I loved the overall feel of this movie; It was very loyal to the first two films in the Superman franchise of the late 70s and early 80s. I didn't see it until just now, and I kind of wish I had caught it on the big screen. I loved the way they incorporated the original John Williams score so thoroughly, and how they did the retro-futuristic effects on the opening credits. The plot... well, you know -- the villainous Lex Luthor is out to rule the world, kill Superman, etc. But that's what the plot is supposed to be. This is definitely a situation where the form of the film is at least as important as the plot, if not more so, and I think SR realizes that.

LBNL, (I haven't watched them all yet) -- We went to Wal-Mart yesterday for kitty litter, and I saw that they were selling all four of the first Star Trek movies for $7.50 each! And I don't mean some bare bones garbage, I mean double-disc, director's version, collectors' editons of each! Boo-yah! I watched ST:TMP late last night (for the first time in many years) and I was struck by how 70s it was. I saw it in the theater when I was about 11, and I remember being like "Huh? When are they going to do something?" Much more abstract than the following installments. (Update, 11:07 PM, Monday 5/28/07 -- I have now watched them all, and over the next couple weeks will go back and catch the extras and commentaries. Keep an eye out for ex-Go-Go Jane Wiedlin in IV!)

Good Research Sites; Web redesign; NYT on Cannes; NYT on Coulton et al.; Slave Leia

Items:

• Via Rebecca Blood, here's a whole bunch (119) of links to non-Google research resources on the Web.
• Help Me Redesign the Web -- Article from Technology Review. Excerpt: Like singing a song or writing a story, designing a printed page is a craft that is fundamentally uni­directional, or one-to-many. The flexibility of Web structures confounded and then humbled many traditional designers as they started trying to make Web pages. The whole thing had been developed to let the readers--the users, software developers confusingly called them, as if they were addicts--have control. How could that be good? For these reasons, and others, most magazines' websites until very recently were dull, repurposed versions of their print editions. Thus, a new crowd took on the design of websites. These enthusiasts assumed that the print crowd didn't get it, that what they saw as the "new paradigm" would last forever. The two-way flow of information, the Web's flexibility, immediacy, and cheapness, deeply appealed to them.
• Good NYT article on the Cannes Film Festival. Excerpt: Its international scope is part of what makes Cannes so unmistakably French. No matter how wide-ranging their selections, American festivals — New York, Chicago, San Francisco, even Sundance — remain parochial events, but Cannes is bigger than the city that bears its name. It is a French affair, a source of national pride and a reminder of this country’s cherished, and perhaps vestigial, status as a capital of world culture. The covers of the glossy magazines cluttering newsstands are divided between Nicolas Sarkozy, the newly elected president, and Cannes, and it is not always clear which — affairs of state or affairs of cinema — are more important.
• Another good NYT article, this one on the web-based efforts of musician Jonathan Coulton (Wiki, 43 Folders Pt. 1, 43 Folders Pt. 2, NPR) and others (OK Go, Jane Siberry Issa, The Hold Steady). Excerpts: The universe of musicians making their way online includes many bands that function in a traditional way — signing up with a label — while using the Internet primarily as a means of promotion, the way OK Go has done. Two-thirds of OK Go’s album sales are still in the physical world: actual CDs sold through traditional CD stores. But the B-list increasingly includes a newer and more curious life-form: performers like Coulton, who construct their entire business model online. Without the Internet, their musical careers might not exist at all. Coulton has forgone a record-label contract; instead, he uses a growing array of online tools to sell music directly to fans. He contracts with a virtual fulfillment house called CD Baby, which warehouses his CDs, processes the credit-card payment for each sale and ships it out, while pocketing only $4 of the album’s price, a much smaller cut than a traditional label would take. CD Baby also places his music on the major digital-music stores like iTunes, Rhapsody and Napster. Most lucratively, Coulton sells MP3s from his own personal Web sites, where there’s no middleman at all... ...Will the Internet change the type of person who becomes a musician or writer? It’s possible to see these online trends as Darwinian pressures that will inevitably produce a new breed — call it an Artist 2.0 — and mark the end of the artist as a sensitive, bohemian soul who shuns the spotlight. In “The Catcher in the Rye,” J. D. Salinger wrote about how reading a good book makes you want to call up the author and chat with him, which neatly predicted the modern online urge; but Salinger, a committed recluse, wouldn’t last a minute in this confessional new world. Neither would, say, Margo Timmins of the Cowboy Junkies, a singer who was initially so intimidated by a crowd that she would sit facing the back of the stage. What happens to art when people like that are chased away?
• LBNL, here is a site of fangirls who like to dress up like the Jabba-enslaved Princess Leia.

Danny Peary's Guide for the Film Fanatic; BttF Timelines; Bill O'Reilly Is a Ka-Ka Head; King of Thailand Is Also a Ka-Ka Head

Items:

• Over a year ago I commented on my affinity for the film writings of Danny Peary. Here is a very thorough website devoted to Mr. Peary. Excerpt: What’s this site all about? Sixteen years ago I bought a copy of Danny Peary’s Guide for the Film Fanatic (1986), and since then, I’ve steadily been trying to see each of the titles listed. I recently decided there was a need for a website where devotees of this book—and other hardcore film fanatics—could chat with each other, debate Peary’s selections, discuss how to locate the more hard-to-find films in the book, suggest “must see” movies released since the book’s publication, and more. I also wanted a forum for posting my own reviews for each of Peary’s listed titles, and I’m adding new ones every day. I started this site for me, but I hope you will enjoy it as well! Note: If you are at all interested in cinema, you need to check out Danny Peary.
• Speaking of film fanaticism, here's a chart that shows the timelines of the Back to the Future films.
• Here's a chart of how often Bill O'Reilly uses name-calling techniques, and comments from the WSJ. Mr. O'Reilly is compared with Father Charles Coughlin.
• Speaking of name-calling, NYT article: Google blocking videos that insult the King of Thailand. Excerpt: Google has agreed to block four video clips on its YouTube Web site that the government of Thailand said insulted its king. But in a letter to the minister of communications, Sitthichai Pookaiyaudom, Google said two other videos that had angered Thailand’s military government would stay on the site, because they did not break laws against offending the monarchy. “They appear to be political comments that are critical of both the government and the conduct of foreigners,” said the letter, signed by Kent Walker, Google’s general counsel. “Because they are political in nature, and not intended insults of His Majesty, we do not see a basis for blocking these videos.” The government, which blocked access to YouTube last month when clips mocking King Bhumibol Adulyadej first appeared, gave copies of the letter to reporters on Friday. The company could not immediately be reached for comment. You know what I have to say about that? Fuck the King of Thailand! The King of Thailand picks his earwax and eats it! Now that's not political at all -- it's just an insult. I don't even know anything about the poo-poo head King of Thailand; I just hate the fact that Google un-YouTubed those videos! What happened to "Don't Be Evil" --? Bangkoksuckers.

Blade Runner Documentary

Long before I wondered if I was actually a Cylon programmed to think I was a human, I wondered if I was a replicant programmed to think I was a human. Here's a real good British documentary on Blade Runner.

Weekend Items

Several things:

• The ♥G♥ and I also watched the film The Prestige this morning, and I was fascinated by it. (I kept pausing the DVD every few minutes to share my theories on the story with her.) Mild spoiler warning: If you've ever read Spock Must Die, there are some similar concepts. I want to see about reading the novel by Christopher Priest. They gist of the story was about magicians being psychotically obsessive about hiding their secrets. I was reminded of the contrasting approach that Penn & Teller have used to much success, in which they tell the audience they are flim-flamming them, and then explain how they did it.
• Does the Internet need an overhaul? Some people at Stanford University (and elsewhere) think so. Excerpt: We believe that the current Internet has significant deficiencies that need to be solved before it can become a unified global communication infrastructure. Further, we believe the Internet's shortcomings will not be resolved by the conventional incremental and 'backward-compatible' style of academic and industrial networking research. The proposed program will focus on unconventional, bold, and long-term research that tries to break the network's ossification. To this end, the research program can be characterized by two research questions: "With what we know today, if we were to start again with a clean slate, how would we design a global communications infrastructure?", and "How should the Internet look in 15 years?" We will measure our success in the long-term: We intend to look back in 15 years time and see significant impact from our program.
• Happy belated birthday to the institution of the blog.
• Lots of stuff on the late great Kurt Vonnegut. Where do you begin on his writings? I haven't read all of it, but I've read a lot of it. Maybe start with Slaughterhouse Five, if you have not yet initiated yourself into the Cult of Vonnegut. Or is that my bias because that was my first book of his? Maybe God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater for a more optimistic characterization?
• I came across some copies of Juxtapoz Magazine this weekend. (I swear, it was before I saw this Boing Boing link -- Some friends of ours have some copies in a basket next to the bidet in their bathroom.) Check 'em out. I like the magazine's overall vibe, and I will be looking at more of their articles in the next few weeks.

Good Items for Friday

Like I said, I just got back from another business trip the other day. I feel like going inside of a cave, pulling a rock in front of me, and not coming out for three days.

Items:

• I'm trying to figure out how to do tag clouds. Anyone know any simple code to paste into Blogger? Here's the Wiki page, here's a blog devoted to the subject, here's a tagging tool, and here's a tagline generator.
• Non-Wikipedia wiki encyclopediae: Conservapedia, Encyclopedia Dramatica, Wookiepedia.
• Only 46 days left to vote for your favorite Star Wars stamp!



• New Orson Welles movie! Excerpt: Welles spent at least five years during the 1970s working on "The Other Side of the Wind," which stars John Huston as an aging filmmaker directing what turns out to be his final movie. Huston's character dies in a car crash before he finishes his film, and Welles's story unfolds in flashback after the death of the central character, a device Welles previously employed in "Citizen Kane," considered by many to be the greatest film ever made. Before he died, Welles claimed that the shooting of "The Other Side of the Wind" was almost complete, and the filmmaker is known to have edited between 40 minutes and 50 minutes of the work, excerpts of which have occasionally been screened at Welles retrospectives. But the negatives were entombed in France against Welles's wishes after he accepted funding for the movie from an Iranian financier, Mehdi Bousheri, the brother-in-law of the former Shah. Bousheri invested a reported $1 million in the film during its drawn-out production, but the negatives became trapped in the vault of his Paris-based film company in the legal fallout of the Iranian revolution of 1979. Rumors of embezzlement of funding by a Spanish producer also surround the movie. Welles managed to smuggle a working copy of his film out of Paris, but was denied access to the original negatives for the last 10 years of his life… …"The Other Side of the Wind" was expected to be Welles's most ambitious movie, utilizing innovative shooting and editing techniques new to filmmaking in the early 1970s. Although he denied any autobiographical resonance, it also appears to be Welles's most personal film, with commentators who have read the screenplay suggesting that it contains a series of thinly-veiled caricatures of people who angered the director during his career.

Denby on Non-Sequential Chronology in Movies

Here's David Denby in the New Yorker on trends in non-chronologically sequential narratives in film. Excerpts: As they seem to be heading in separate directions, these fate-driven films [Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and Babel] can be seen as a kind of trilogy. All three send characters from separate stories smacking into one another in tragic accidents; all three jump backward and forward in a scrambling of time frames that can leave the viewer experiencing reactions before actions, dénouements before climaxes, disillusion before ecstasy, and many other upsetting reversals and discombobulations... ...In recent years, we’ve had movies, like “Adaptation” (written by the antic confabulator Charlie Kaufman), that are explicitly about the making of movies, and others, like “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” (also written by Kaufman), that move forward dramatically by going backward in time. Then, there is a related group of clogged-sink narratives, like “Traffic,” “Syriana,” and “Miami Vice,” which are so heavily loaded with subplots and complicated information that the story can hardly seep through the surrounding material. “Syriana” made sense in the end, but you practically needed a database to sort out the story elements; the movie became a weird formal experiment, testing the audience’s endurance and patience. Some of the directors may be just playing with us or, perhaps, acting out their boredom with that Hollywood script-conference menace the conventional “story arc.” But others may be trying to jolt us into a new understanding of art, or even a new understanding of life. In the past, mainstream audiences notoriously resisted being jolted. Are moviegoers bringing some new sensibility to these riddling movies? What are we getting out of the overloading, the dislocations and disruptions?

Real good article. He comments on Pulp Fiction as the film that set off the latest wave of non-sequentialism. Lots of other examples he could have given, but the one most notable by its omission was Stanley Kubrik's 1956 film The Killing, which was very much a forerunner to Pulp. It was a heist movie about these thugs who have a sure thing but manage to screw it up with their backstabbing. The story unfolded through the eyes of each character, so that you saw the day's events several times from different perspectives. If you like Pulp Fiction, then I can't recommend this film enough.
Also, I ought to point out that my favorite 20th-Century American novel is Catch-22, which manages to intimidate even the most anal-retentive reader away from trying to put its events into chronological sequence. Once when I was in high school, I spent a whole weekend with notecards spread out on the floor of my bedroom trying to do just that, before I just decided to enjoy the revolving door of the whole thing.

Theremin Interview; Alex Gross's Green Lantern; TM:SNC Quote

Items:

• Recently we watched the Criterion version of the 1945 Hitchcock classic Spellbound, a film that made use of the Theremin. Here's one of the DVD extras, an episode of the Fishko Files in which WNYC radio host Sara Fishko takes a Theremin lesson.
• Do yourself a favor and check out the work of Alex Gross. I saw a copy of his new book today, and it was far out! Here's a painting of an old photograph he saw of a guy who kind of looked like the original Green Lantern. A little artistic license, and voilà!

• A real good music film -- Thelonious Monk: Straight No Chaser. Monk is one of my three favorite jazz musicians (the other two being Duke Ellington and Dave Brubeck). Interesting side note -- TM:SNC is the film that (as far as I know) has the first use of the phrase "You'll flip. I mean flip for real." later adapted and immortalized in The Usual Suspects as follows: Fenster - "I said he'll flip you." Cop - "He'll what?" Fenster - "Flip you. Flip ya for real." Monk actually used the phrase (at 01:07:38) after Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter gave him an expensive magic marker, and he was commenting on the illegibility of his autographs: "Get somebody that can decipher that for you, you know, and say what it means... and get what it means... you know. It'll upset you. You'll flip. I mean flip for real." (I just updated the Wikipedia page on Unusual Suspects to make that clarification.)

Mid-week Items

Winter storm warning today. Wussed out and took the day off work. Items:

• Via A&LD, a review of a book that tells you how to drop references to books you have not read into conversation. I have not read this book.
• Excellent essay on digital rights management, an open letter to Edgar Bronfman. Excerpt: The thing "without logic or merit," Mr. Bronfman, is the idea that everything produced has a value that can only be equated with a dollar sign. You elude to the fact that because LPs, Cassettes, and CDs, (or as you call it the "legacy product") have no piracy protection technology on them, that doesn't mean that their counterpart…the digital file…shouldn't have them. I would like to point out to you that in the past 30 years, with all the Chicken Little antics from your industry over people being able to copy the music they purchased, and share that music with others…your industry did not fail or falter as you predicted. In fact, you've thrived. In 30 years, despite real piracy issues, you've made money hand over fist…and you've been wrong about every single prediction you've ever made. You have no credibility on this subject. And you simply can't blame every slump in music sales on piracy. We don't believe you anymore. While you continue to fight your own customers, your customers continue to create the innovation that keeps you in business.
• I've been watching the PBS series Art: 21 -- Art in the 21st Century lately. The series is very good. Some of the artists I'm like "meh" but some I think are real cool -- For instance, Andrea Zittel, among whose specialties is making the most of confined living spaces, Michael Ray Charles, who was a consultant on the Spike Lee joint Bamboozled, and Maya Lin, best known as creator of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
  
• This has been up for a couple of weeks, but make sure to browse through the Facets top-movie list for 2006, full of staff favorites. Facets Multi-Media is a Chicago institution -- Arthouse theater, Super-mega video rental store, and releaser of obscure or foreign gems.

Speaking of Quentin Tarantino...

...I am totally stoked about his upcoming co-production with his pal Robert Rodriguez, Grindhouse! Here's an interview they did, along with an International Herald Tribune article on the topic. Excerpt: By the filmmakers' lights "Grindhouse" is a gift to moviegoers who miss, or missed, the experience of watching B-grade genre pictures of the sort that in the '50s, '60s and '70s sold what the big studios wouldn't: usually sex and gore. The films, often shown back to back, were plugged with garish posters that promised more than their pathetically low budgets could deliver. (In that spirit "Planet Terror" isn't about another planet at all, but our own, at a particularly bad moment.)

Here's the trailer:

And here are some trailers from some of the films that inspired this one -- These are great!

First Annual WaRoAlMoWe

I think this should be the First Annual Watch-a-Robert-Altman-Movie Weekend, in honor of the great man's life and recent death. What to start with?

• If you think that Army doctors in the Korean War were all sensitive 70s males, watch (the original) M*A*S*H.
• If you like your movies a little off the beaten path, try Brewster McCloud.
• For those of you with a scorecard and a sharp pencil, you'll want to take a look at Nashville.
• The Player will probably be for you if you're into nihilistic self-referentialism.
• Like Westerns? Try an anti-Western: McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

I love Altman's work for the sheer variety of characters (and actors) it used, all of whom stay in character and talk over each other while the plot is unfolding. Altman liked to take a given film convention and see how he could fuck around with it and make it something new and different (inspiring, I suspect, to the Coen Bros.) and everybody knows how much I love it when people do things like that. He'll be missed, but I intend to honor him by re-watching, appreciating, and promoting his work.

Update: Good Altman essay at 2 Blowhards.

Lots of Movies on Google Video

Hey! There's a ton of great movies (mostly public domain) you can watch for free on Google Video. Some of these things I had spent years in the early 90s scouring the county's video stores and libraries for.

Ghostbusters (Might not last long?)
Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon Update: Here's Rashomon with English subtitles (oops!) and also AK's first film, Sugata Sanshiro (also subtitled). Props to Vili Maunula at the Akira Kurosawa News and Information Blog.
The 1915 German expressionist film The Golem
The 1920 German expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (J.C. Loophole watches this every Halloween.)
The 1922 German expressionist film Nosferatu
The 1916 adaptation of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
The 1925 adaptation of A.C. Doyle's The Lost World
The 1962 Russian documentary film The Great Battle on the Volga, which used Soviet combat footage from the Battle of Stalingrad.