Roger Ebert’s Review of National Treasure brings back some of the biting sarcasm:
‘National Treasure’ is so silly that the Monty Python version could use the same screenplay, line for line.
Ebert considers the whole thing a rip-off of The Da Vinci Code — which he didn’t exactly like:
I should read a potboiler like The Da Vinci Code every once in a while, just to remind myself that life is too short to read books like The Da Vinci Code.
Notes from Antiquity explains that Greek poems and plays were actually musicals:
Greek poets and dramatists regularly set their work to music themselves, and from at least the fifth century B.C. on they used a highly sophisticated system of musical notation. The very idea of poetry, in fact, originally tended to imply music, and Athenian tragedy at its artistic peak, in the fifth century B.C., was a complex combination of poetic text, solo and choral song, recitation with instrumental accompaniment, and dance. This has an unsettling if little-recognized implication: watching a play by Euripides or reading poetry by Sappho is perhaps as incomplete an experience today as watching a ‘play’ by Wagner or reading ‘poetry’ by Stephen Sondheim would be.
(Hat tip to 2blowhards.)
How Pixar conquered the planet examines the most successful film studio of all time:
In Hollywood, though, figuring out Pixar’s secret has become a matter of panicky necessity. Since 1995, when Toy Story became the first computer-animated feature film, the company has had an unbroken record of triumphs, as popular with critics as the box office, resulting in 17 Oscars and sufficient millions to make Pixar, movie for movie, the most successful studio of any kind in the history of cinema. (The Incredibles took $70.7m [£38m] in its first three days in America, more than the rest of that weekend’s top 10 put together.) Other animation studios, saddled with a string of flops, have been left to glower from the sidelines – with the exception of Disney, the grandfather of them all, thanks to a deal under which it provided most of the financing for Pixar’s hits.
At Pixar, the work is tremendously technical and time-consuming — yet gleefully childish:
Telling a good story in animated form, though, requires a particularly bizarre kind of personality — an equal mix of childishness and deep, very adult patience. Pixar’s offices are carefully calibrated to nurture the requisite eccentricity. The animation team work not in cubicles but in miniature open-fronted wooden cottages, each individually furnished by their occupants with a clashing variety of leopardskin sofas and extensive toy car collections. (In a detail that epitomises Pixar’s alchemical knack for turning freewheeling creativity into profit, the cottages were actually cheaper than standard-issue office cubicles.)Days begin with an hour-long “sweatbox”, where the movie’s director gathers the animators and critiques their latest shots in front of the others. But for the most part, the nuts and bolts of the work is done inside the cottages, at computer screens, as artists painstakingly manipulate hundreds of points on a character’s body, spending whole days on shots that could last for no more than 10 frames.
So true:
It is an article of faith at Pixar that trying to make your animated characters look as realistic as possible is as pointless as it is difficult. [...] “There is a contingent of the digital-effects community to whom that is the holy grail — to create photographically real humans,” says Brad Bird, the writer and director of The Incredibles and, previously, The Iron Giant. “To me that is the dumbest goal that you could possibly have. What’s wonderful about the medium of animation isn’t recreating reality. It’s distilling it.”
What’s wonderful about the medium of animation isn’t recreating reality. It’s distilling it. More Brad Bird wisdom:
“Really, really little kids should not see this movie ,” says Bird, who wrote and directed the film, and provided the voice for its funniest character, Edna, a fashion designer to the superheroes. “They should wait till they get older. We’re getting some reactions from people who were disappointed that their four-year-old was a little freaked out by it. Well, I don’t want to compromise the intensity in order to please a four-year-old.”Bird makes no effort to disguise his anger at critics who suggest the movie, brilliant though it undoubtedly is, may fail as a result of failing to cater properly to an audience of young children. “I reject that whole point of view — that animation is a children’s medium,” he says. “The way people talk about it is, well, hey, it’s a good thing I have kids, because now I get to see this. Well, hey, no, man! You can just go and see it. There’s no other art form that is defined in such a narrow way. It’s narrowminded, and I can’t wait for it to die.”
Sigh. Angry Greeks Deny Alexander the Great Was Bisexual:
A group of Greek lawyers are threatening to sue Warner Bros. film studios and Oliver Stone, director of the widely anticipated film ‘Alexander,’ for suggesting Alexander the Great was bisexual.
From How Big Bird and Kermit Saved the World:
A documentary that will examine the cultural, political and social impact of the various foreign versions of ‘Sesame Street’ is getting ready to begin a yearlong shoot across several continents.Among the topics of ‘The World According to Sesame Street’ are the impact of an HIV-positive ‘Muppet’ character in compelling the South African government to address the country’s HIV/AIDS epidemic, the creation of a strong female character that challenged traditional gender roles in Egypt and programing designed to foster cross-cultural tolerance in post-conflict Kosovo.
Everything reactionaries say about Sesame Street is true. Wow.
This should surprise no one. From Bob Dylan Tops Rolling Stone’s Greatest-Song List:
‘Like a Rolling Stone,’ Bob Dylan (news)’s scornful, ironic ode to a spoiled woman’s reversal of fortune, was named the greatest rock ‘n’ roll song of all time on Wednesday by Rolling Stone magazine.
Rolling Stone magazine chose “Like a Rolling Stone” as the greatest rock song. Second greatest? The Rolling Stone’s “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” See a pattern?
For the past seven years, the American Film Institute has put together a special for CBS. This year, it’s AFI’s 100 Years…100 Movie Quotes:
Previous programs within this series have included AFI 100 Years…100 Movies (1998), … 100 Stars (1999), … 100 Laughs (2000), . . . 100 Thrills (2001), … 100 Passions (2002), … 100 Heroes & Villains (2003) and … 100 Songs (2004).
This one sounds like fun:
Chronologically, the ballot spans from 1927-with the first full-length sound film, THE JAZZ SINGER: “Wait a minute, wait a minute. You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!”-to 2002 and “My precious” from THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS.CASABLANCA has seven quotes in AFI’s ballot, making it the most represented film.
THE WIZARD OF OZ is the second most represented film with six quotes.
Humphrey Bogart has 10 quotes on the ballot, the most represented male actor. Al Pacino and the Marx Brothers follow with six quotes each and Tom Hanks, Robert De Niro, James Stewart and Jack Nicholson are all represented with five quotes each. Funnymen Woody Allen, Peter Sellers and Mike Myers each have four quotes represented.
Bette Davis, Greta Garbo, Judy Garland and Vivien Leigh each have four memorable movie quotes on the ballot.
Billy Wilder is the top represented writer with 13 quotes, some co-written with I.A.L. Diamond, Charles Brackett and Raymond Chandler. Frances Ford Coppola has nine quotes represented, with seven coming from THE GODFATHER Trilogy. Mario Puzo, Coppola’s collaborator on THE GODFATHER trilogy, has a total of eight quotes. Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch each have seven quotes (all from CASABLANCA), followed by Woody Allen with six and Cameron Crowe, William Goldman and Stanley Kubrick with five quotes each.
1939 is the most represented year with 19 movie quotes. 1942 has 17 quotes and 1980 has 12.
Hollywood’s Odd Couple: Cage and Bruckheimer is a puff-piece on the oddball actor and the very Hollywood producer:
Oscar-winning actor Nicolas Cage (news), who had been specializing in quirky roles, and producer Jerry Bruckheimer first teamed for 1996′s ‘The Rock’ and hope to work the same magic in action-adventure film ‘National Treasure.’ Their previous movies — ‘Rock,’ ‘Con Air’ and ‘Gone in Sixty Seconds’ — have reaped $750 million in global ticket sales.
The Rock, Con Air, and Gone in Sixty Seconds — oh, right, all of Cage’s bad movies. OK, The Rock wasn’t bad, and National Treasure, their latest teamup, looks fun.
Nursery Rhymes Have More Violence Than Kids TV presents the findings of an amusing study on violence in the media:
Children’s nursery rhymes contain 10 times more violence than British television shows broadcast before the country’s 9 p.m. ‘watershed’ after which more adult content can be shown, research published on Thursday said.
Denis Dutton looks at Literary Darwinism and why humans are obsessed with story-telling in The Pleasures of Fiction.
Joseph Carroll, in his new Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature, explores a species that:
is highly social and mildly polygynous, that displays concealed ovulation, continuous female receptivity, and postmenopausal life expectancy corresponding to a uniquely extended period of childhood development, that has extraordinary aptitudes for technology, that has developed language and the capacity for peering into the minds of its conspecifics, and that displays a unique disposition for fabricating and consuming aesthetic and imaginative artifacts.
According to Carroll, human behavior fits into seven “behavioral systems”:
Carroll makes the case that ?Authors are people talking to people about people,? and uses a passage from Pride and Prejudice to illustrate:
For example, he cites the episode in which Mr. Collins introduces himself to the Bennett household in a letter that is read by the family. This letter is, as Carroll nicely describes it, ?an absolute marvel of fatuity and of pompous self-importance,? and much is revealed in how mother, father, and the Bennett sisters react to it. The excessively sweet-tempered older sister, Jane, is puzzled by it, though she credits Mr. Collins with good intentions. The dull middle sister, Mary, says she rather likes Mr. Collins?s style. The mother, in her typical manner, only reacts to it opportunistically, in terms of a potential advantage in the situation. It is up to Elizabeth and her father to see clearly what a clownish performance the letter represents: their understanding marks an affinity of temperament and a quality perceptiveness the others lack. But what Carroll?s analysis makes clear is that there are two more people ? not fictional characters, but actual human beings ? who are in on the agreement between Mr. Bennett and his second daughter. These two further individuals are also members of their ?circle of wit and judgment.? First, there is Jane Austen, the author of Pride and Prejudice. And second, there is you, the reader of Pride and Prejudice.
As Billionaires Run Amok on TV? points out, Terry Southern wrote satire way ahead of its time:
Southern, the legendary novelist, journalist and screenwriter, died back in 1995, way too soon for him to savor the exquisite pleasure — or perhaps the hideous pain — of seeing one of his most outrageous comic ideas come to life as the latest craze in reality TV, which is, of course, sadistic billionaires tormenting money-grubbing weasels.
[...]
Back in the ’50s and ’60s, Southern was famous, the author of “Candy,” a comic porn novel, as well as the screenplays of such classic movies as “Easy Rider,” “The Loved One” and, best of all, the brilliantly demented Cold War comedy “Dr. Strangelove.” Southern had a dark, sardonic wit and he traveled in the hippest of circles, hanging out with the Rolling Stones, Allen Ginsberg and Lenny Bruce. He was so cool the Beatles put his face on the cover of their “Sgt. Pepper” album.In 1960, Southern published a novel called “The Magic Christian,” the comic tale of Guy Grand, a billionaire who amuses himself by staging elaborate pranks that cause people to reveal how much they’re willing to degrade themselves for money.
In the book’s most famous scene, Grand buys a building in downtown Chicago, demolishes it and builds a gigantic vat perched atop a huge gas heater. He fills the vat with 300 cubic feet of manure, urine and blood purchased from the Chicago stockyards. When this hellish cocktail is nice and hot, he stirs 10,000 $100 bills into it and puts up a sign that reads “FREE $ HERE.”
And then … well, people will do just about anything for money, won’t they?
Dead Be Not Proud looks at the cultural lessons of zombie movies:
Romero’s unusual treatment of the subject matter, combining the zombie with the mummy and the ghoul, gave the zombie film what it had previously lacked: a threat to the general population. In Night of the Living Dead, it is not just a pretty young female who is threatened, but all of us — in fact, as the movie’s ending makes clear, civilization itself is at stake.Romero’s film caught the imagination with its symbolism: the plague of zombies tearing a town to bits and eating people alive called to mind the rising disorder and social chaos of late ’60s, early ’70s America. The authorities were stupid and ineffectual, powerless to stop the horror, and people had no clue as to how to respond. Romero’s zombies evoked, on a symbolic level, ordinary people’s fears of being torn to shreds by a rising tide of crime and immorality.
As the title, Shaun of the Dead, suggests, Shaun is for all intents and purposes a zombie, as are most of his friends and associates:
Shaun is a classic underachiever, and it is clearly because there is little in the culture around him to inspire a person to work hard. With a minimum of effort, one can have a comfortable life, if a pointless and dull one, and that is exactly what Shaun has. Ed, who gets by without any job at all other than the occasional marijuana sale, serves as a caricature of Shaun’s aimlessness and a warning of what he could yet become.
But the threat wakes them up:
Shaun of the Dead brings back the stiff-upper-lip, muddling-through, stolid British attitude of years past, without any overload of irony, using humor and excitement to make it palatable and appealing to contemporary audiences.
Brad Bird discusses his role as executive consultant on The Simpsons:
Even though our animation was very simplified, our filmmaking was not. James Brooks and Matt Groening and Sam Simon asked me to be a part of it because they liked Family Dog — they liked the fact that it had a live-action sensibility in terms of camera angles and cutting. When I first got into it, the visual language of television animation was very, very rudimentary. There was a standard way of handling things, and that had gotten into the art form itself, to where people were doing this stuff by rote. The rule was, whenever you go to a new location, you do an establishing shot, whenever somebody’s moving, you have a medium shot, and whenever anybody’s talking, you cut to whoever’s talking. It’s all done at eye level. You never have high angles or low angles or anything like that. That’s TV animation; I’m not saying there weren’t great camera angles in Chuck Jones or anything else. But on TV, that’s the way they were doing it.When I got in there with the storyboard artists, they were approaching things that way because that’s the way they were trained. I said, “No, come on, man! We’re doing a take on The Shining here. Let’s look at how Kubrick uses his camera. His camera always has wide-angle lenses. Oftentimes, the compositions are symmetrical. Let’s do a drawing that simulates a wide-angle lens. They’re deep focus. Let’s push things off and play on that.” At first they were completely bewildered, and very soon they were into it. I said, “Look, we can’t spend a lot of money on elaborate animation, but we can have sophisticated filmmaking.” So I think the show is very visually distinctive.
From Behind a Book on Tape Is a Good Dictionary And a Glass of Water:
Scott Brick sat alone before a music stand in a small recording studio last month, puzzling over the word “fecundated” on the sheet of paper in front of him. Should the accent be on the first or second syllable? “I think it’s safe to say I’ve never spoken this word aloud before,” he said.Mr. Brick has uttered many uncommon words — “rapine,” “retributive” and “circumvallated” among them — on his way to becoming an invisible star in a growing business: audio books. In his five-year career, the 38-year-old Mr. Brick has narrated about 200 books, including such bestsellers as “The Lion’s Game,” a novel by Nelson DeMille, and “In the Heart of the Sea,” a nonfiction work about a shipwreck, by Nathaniel Philbrick. “He has the kind of voice you don’t grow tired of,” says Scott Matthews, president of Books on Tape, a big audio publisher that uses Mr. Brick more than it does any other narrator. Audio books are now an $800 million business in the U.S.
[...]
Now, Mr. Brick narrates 45 to 60 books a year, earning about $300 per finished hour, about double what other audio narrators make. It takes about four to five hours of recording to make one finished hour. Mr. Brick says he expects to earn about $150,000 this year from his audio work.
I really enjoyed The Incredibles — but it looks like Joe Morgenstern enjoyed it even more than I did. From his Wall Street Journal film review:
“The Incredibles” is the year’s best movie so far, and by far; it’s hard to see what might still come along to surpass it.
I have to agree with this too:
With this, its sixth animated feature, Pixar will have its sixth megasuccess, both as art and commerce; there’s never been a winning streak like it in the history of the movie business. And, to judge from the results, the studio couldn’t have provided a happier home for Brad Bird, who needed and deserved one after the mishandling, by Warner Bros., of his marvelous first feature “The Iron Giant.”