I haven't traveled for work regularly in ages. Last week's trip to L.A. absolutely destroyed my productivity here. I've got six or seven days worth of Daily Grab(s) posting tomorrow, to make up for my now comical-looking promise of one a day.
The launch of Screen Time has gone well too. That's soaked up loads of time, too.
The new Evernote-compatible Moleskine notebooks are available for pre-order. For 24-freaking-dollars-95 American, you get a notebook that your Evernote app can scan thanks to its "special paper".
Unfortunately, these will be massively successful, which means that the ridiculously inflated price point will stick.
After resetting my password, I realize that I used Evernote exactly once, in 2008. Huh.
This is a new thing. Every day, a screengrab from a disc I've recently watched or am in the process of watching, sometimes with brief comments.
Tony Scott did not simply make good action films. He made films that transcended genre and reduction. That the characters are relatable and realistic makes the movies work when they are coupled with the hyper-reality of his camera. Even the least of his films are entertaining.
At the end of this post, I've included a guide to finding all of his films on disc or digital streaming.
Thrilled to finally announce the first episode of my new podcast on the 5by5 network. I've been developing this since last year.
My first guest is Ryan Gallagher, paterfamilias of the Hyperbolic Labs network of podcasts. We talk about all the ways we currently watch things on our devices, as well as how we wish we could watch things.
The focus of the show will be the evolving world of screen-based media. Next week's show will include interviews with Richard Kind, Virginia Madsen, and Pietro Scalia. Scalia is the Academy Award-winning editor of Prometheus and Amazing Spider-Man, and we get into the Third Act Problems that the Alien prequel has.
As I noted on Twitter earlier, there are some interesting (or you might say amusing) things to be drawn from the wealth of new data available from today. I picked up on a few (8) notable things after about twenty minutes of poring over it:
Malick's The Tree of Life missed the top 100 by a hair, coming in at an 8-way tie for #102.
After the first 50, which were announced a couple of weeks ago, there are massive strings of ties. This is due to the fact that ranking is not weighted, and is instead in the order of which movies received the most votes, regardless of where a given critic or academic/historian ranked it. For example, Chimes at Midnight, My Neighbor Totoro, Black Natcissus, The Shining, and The Gold Rush are among 17 tied for #154.
It took less than ten votes to be in the top 250.
Only three animated films are in the top 250: Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, and WALL•E.
WALL•E was tied for #202 alongside Manhattan, Badlands, Duck Soup, Saló, Spirited Away, and many others.
Eraserhead got the same number of votes from critics as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.
All but one of Terrence Malick's films made the top 250, with the odd movie out being The New World.
They broke out three specific categories on the main index of The List. Godard's Breathless was the movie by a living director with the most votes, The Third Man was the top British film, and The Searchers was the top Western. We could already know this from the previously-released top 50, but it's interesting that they broke these categories out specifically.
We're getting Kurosawa's masterpiece of POV Blu-graded, a Pasolini box set in time for the holidays, one of Godard's most incendiary works, Cimino's controversial epic, and yet another great Eclipse set featuring weird Japanese movies. In short: yet another wallet-pain-inducing month.
Back in June, I wrote the first installment of my column at Ain't It Cool News, wherein I lead with an urging to Disney that they should recall the Blu-ray of The Color of Money, one of Scorsese's many great films. A few days earlier, the great Robert A. Harris apparently said the same thing about this disgraceful "25th Anniversary Edition". Harris is one of (if not the) foremost experts on film restoration, having done many of the most high-profile remastering projects in movie history, including no less than Lawrence of Arabia.
This looks like a low-rez DVD screen capture, and I pulled it right from the Blu-ray.
It looks like we've lost on this one, since it would appear that no one cares enough to complain like we did about Gladiator and Saving Private Ryan and other screw-ups in the HD remastering world. I suppose we might see another pass at this release for its 30th Anniversary in...five years.
I've debated this subject since High School, and from both sides. That's what academic debate is: sometimes you're defending the rights of the disabled, and at other times, you're defending Japan for bombing Pearl Harbor.
In this case, if we're going to blame the video games cited by the College Station shooter's stepdad, we should blame all of the influences found on his Facebook profile, right? Some items are abbreviated and/or paraphrased:
One of the greatest and most inspiring comics creatives in history passed away over the weekend. Some massive jerk compared him to Joe Paterno for doing "scab" work like Before Watchmen...in a piece eulogizing a better man than he'll ever be.
Naturally, pissing off a fanboy for daring to do work-for-hire on a property deemed by a few asshats to be untouchable sacred ground is equivalent to covering up the rape of a child. He used the word "unethical" to describe one of the paragons of sequential art. He has since issued an unapologetic "apology". He'd have been better off just fully taking his lumps and admitted that he made an incalculably bad comparison. Instead, his mea culpa was "I'm so sorry that you guys misunderstood my towering critical genius and don't like, get me" (sarcasm added mine).
I recommend against giving this guy the traffic by not going to his site to read this stuff, but you're an adult, police yourself as you see fit. I do fully endorse the recourse I urged in this tweet.
Seventeen of Ozu's films are irretrievably lost. In fact, none of his first seven films survive. No scripts, stills, or prints are known to exist. This installment of Discovering Ozu looks at what we do know about those seven films and examines Ozu's earliest surviving feature, Days of Youth.
From 1929's Days of Youth, Ozu's earliest surviving feature
JEFusion is reporting that it takes place during a "lost decade" in the story after the defeat of "Maijin Buu". The trailer embedded below features loads of CG, and I have no idea is that's consistent with what they plan to do in the finished product. You never can tell with these anime trailers.
My wife was big into Dragonball Z when she was in grade school. I never got into it until she and I got bored with too much money and started buying the Dragon Box DVD Collector's Sets, which included the original Japanese audio, retranslated subtitles, and no edits...and loads of filler.
This is the best news since the invention of fire. Mega-ultra-nerd Brian Posehn is co-writing a Deadpool comic alongside Gerry Duggan, with whom he did The Last Christmas with a few years ago.
Posehn is not only one of my favorite comedians from the Comedians of Comedy side of the standup world, but he's also one of the most authentic comic book nerds in the universe.
Multiversity Comics caught something in an interview in USA Today:
She-Hulk has a pedigree with the team since she has been a member of the Fantastic Four, plus she’d be Ben’s pick because she’s “the one person he knew he could never lick,” says Fraction, who writes Red She-Hulk in Defenders, which ends its run at issue 12 in November.
This is a shame, as I felt the book was getting a good footing, and the team dynamic could work in the ongoing and broader-than-ever Marvel U.
"That's called a 'murdering them'."
Variety has the exclusive on this news:
According to source familiar with Warner's release plans for Peter Jackson's first "Hobbit," the HFR version will go out to only select locations, perhaps not even into all major cities.
People who have seen much of the film in 48 frames-per-second 3D tell Variety the picture now looks vastly better than the test footage shown this April at CinemaCon, which had not yet undergone post-production polishing and got a mixed reception from exhibitors.
I don't think this choice is unwise in the least. It definitely looks quite different from what literally everyone is used to. I'm still very hopeful and optimistic. There are those who said that talkies, color, and 70mm weren't cinematic.
Maybe I'll love it, maybe I'll hate it. Can't wait to see.
I met Marvin Hamlisch once, after a Tate Lecture Series event at SMU in December of 1999. His most called-back reference was about how he found Kim B-"ass"-inger (emphasis his on "ass", which I didn't entirely get at the time) has an amazing rump. He brought this up no less than six times.
He was lively, funny, and candid. When I asked from the audience about his thoughts on the movie of A Chorus Line and film musical adaptations at large, he responded very bluntly that it was a waste of the material. He actively wished someone would remake it. He hated it.
He told me in the hall afterward that "if only the business people still cared about making something people will want to watch, the movie business wouldn't be in the toilet". That was 13 years ago, before 9/11, the explosion of comic book blockbusters, and the rise of streaming.
I genuinely love and cherish so much of his work, from the Bond tune "Nobody Does It Better" to the score of A Chorus Line to the under-appreciated musical Barnum, and on and on.
Yasujiro Ozu
In 2010, I embarked on a quest to explore the entire filmography of Yasujiro Ozu in chronological order. The aim was to not only revisit favorite films by the Japanese cinematic master, but to also fill myriad knowledge gaps for myself within the career of one of my favorite directors.
This post will be regularly updated as a dynamic index for all posts and sub-categories that are a part of Discovering Ozu.