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Filtering by Tag: movies
Elliot Scott is the delusional subject of a documentary by Matthew Bauckman & Jaret Belliveau.
Kung Fu Elliot, a documentary about a man who aspires to be the Canadian Chuck Norris, turns nasty enough quickly enough to call its makers' intentions into question. I reviewed the 2014 Slamdance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize-winner for Documentary Feature for The Dissolve.
Michael Mann's Heat, one of my favorite films, is The Dissolve's Movie of the Week this week. I contributed this essay about the sprawling crime picture's many progenitors, including the short-lived-but-great late-80s TV series Crime Story.
You'll want to read Scott Tobias' keynote and Nathan Rabin & Matthew Dessem's forum discussion, too. The latter is where I learned that Kate Mantilini, the Beverly Hills bistro where Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro's famous late-night sit-down in Heat was shot, closed last year. When last I was there, in 2005, a giant still from The Scene hung on the wall.
Read MoreKip Thorne on the set of Interstellar. (Paramount/Warner Bros./Legendary Pictures)
For my day job at Air & Space / Smithsonian, I interviewed Kip Thorne, the theoretical physicist who with his friend the movie producer Lynda Obst, conceived the film Interstellar back in 2006. Thorne remained closely involved with the picture throughout its writing, production, and editing, and has now published a 324-page companion to the film called The Science of "Interstellar" laying out his scientific rationalization for every aspect of its story -- even the Love Tesseract Wormhole.
DUH: Don't read this interview if you intend to see Interstellar but haven't yet.
And if that's your situation, and you live anywhere in the Washington, DC diaspora, make sure to catch the movie in 70mm IMAX at either the National Air & Space Museum downtown or at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center out by Dulles International Airport. I've seen it both this way and in digital IMAX, and the 70mm presentation is more painterly and majestic. It also sounds better, curiously. The muddy sound mix we talked about on Pop Culture Happy Hour last week (based on a digital IMAX screening in Silver Spring, Maryland) was not a problem when I saw the film again at NASM in 70mm.
The same weekend I saw both Captain America: The Winter Soldier and The Raid 2 -- prompting this piece for NPR Monkey See -- my pal Glen Weldon showed me the mostly-animated G.I. Joe episode of Community. The show got a lot of mileage out of the fact that nobody ever got killed in that war cartoon, wherein an elite American military unit fought a uniformed army of terrorists to a stalemate every 21 minutes using ray guns.
The G.I. Joe comic book, meanwhile, took a realistic approach to firearms. Characters sometimes got killed, too, although not very often. It didn't get me hooked on guns, thankfully, but it got me hooked on comics. It was also pretty clearly a gateway drug to more sophisticated depictions of violence in movies and TV.
One of my favorite warm-weather traditions is to take in a double or triple-feature at the Bengies Drive-In, which opens for the season tonight. The area's sole surviving specimen of a once-flourishing movie-exhibition format, Bengies offers the opportunity to see three current films, if your backside can go the distance, for the you-can't-afford-not-to-go admission price of $9 per person. Or roughly 75 percent of what you would pay to see Oblivion, and only Oblivion, at the multiplex this weekend, where you'll enjoy the un-sublime non-pleasure of being distracted by your fellow patrons' glowing smartphone screens throughout the film. (Only those patrons who are pitiable, uncouth savages, of course. But one bad Apple iPhone user can spoil the whole bunch, as Confucius said.)
You need wheels to get there: It's a 2.5-hour round trip from DC to Easton, MD, where Bengies is located. You can make some of that cash back by bringing your own food, though you should buy an honor-system outside food permit for $10 if you do that. Pack a picnic basket; you'll be there for six or seven hours, remember. (Alcohol is verboten, a rule always strictly observed by everyone, just like the 55 mph speed limit posted on Interstate 95.)
Read MoreBecause I routinely make awful decisions about how to spend my time, I paid $24.99 (50% of MSRP) for the four-disc, 3D Blu-Ray edition of Prometheus, a film I'd harbored huge hopes for but ultimately found disappointing. A Ridley Scott film, in other words.
I don't have the gear or the inclination to watch a 3D movie at home, but the deluxe set that includes the 3D version of Prometheus (along with the plain-Jane 2D in three different formats, because what price piece of mind?) is the only way to get The Furious Gods, a three-hour, 40 minute (!) making-of documentary by Charles de Lauzirika, a nonfiction filmmaker whose substantive, well-edited making-ofs for similarly lavish reissues of Scott's only two great films -- say their names with me now, everybody, Alien and Blade Runner -- have already claimed many irreplaceable hours of my life.
The Furious Gods is long, sure, but actually it's longer, because I've been watching in "enhanced mode," meaning that when an icon appears at the top of the screen I can press a button on my remote and watch an "enhancement pod" -- a video footnote, basically -- containing even more nerdily trivial information about whatever specific aspect of the film's conception and production is being discussed at that moment.
When Scott talks about casting original Dragon Tattoo Girl Noomi Rapace in the movie, you can watch her screen test. When production designer Arthur Max talks about creating the movie's titular spacecraft (which was still called the Magellan for a long time, did you know, even after the Untitled Alien Prequel acquired the name Prometheus), you can click through dozens of drawings and schematics of the ship -- which I think that all of us, regardless of our political affiliation, can agree is fucking rad. You can even watch an enhancement pod about the film's many rejected titles. Alien: Tomb of the Gods, anyone?
Read MoreMalcolm MacDowell in Stanley Kubrick's inescapable 1971 film version.
Scena Theatre's production of A Clockwork Orange, using Anthony Burgess' adaptation of his own 1962 novella, did not make me want to throw up. Reviewed in today's Washington City Paper.
Thanks to my editor, Jon Fischer, for what he called the "inevitable" hed. I have to admit, it's better than The Milk-Plus of Human Cruelty.
I was delighted to appear on Pop Culture Happy Hour again last week. (Listen here, you.) The show's A-topic was movie action heroes, inspired by the publication of Arnold Schwarzengger's memoir Total Recall (which I'd only half-read prior to taping, on account of its 624-page girth and the fact I'm reading it in tandem with Salman Rushdie's equally substantial memoir Joseph Anton) and, I thought, Taken 2(which I haven't seen, and won't until it turns up on Encore Action at 11:30 p.m. on a Tuesday eight months from now).
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