Subway Cosmos is a film by Brad L. Cooper. It was shot in Tokyo. I like the way the filmmaker moves through the world observing things and filming what interests him. His shots of people through glass are fantastic. Here’s another film he did called Tsukiji about a fish market in Tokyo.
Category Archives: Movies
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1927 ‘Metropolis’ with 25 Minutes of Lost Footage
The TCM Classic Film Festival in Los Angeles is hosting the North American premiere of Fritz Lang’s 1927 science fiction classic, Metropolis, with 25 minutes of newly discovered footage.
Metropolis is the story of a mechanized future city with rulers who live atop high towers and masses of slave workers that operate the giant machines below. A rebellion is incited when a robot version of a young woman who works to help the poor is set out to inflame the oppressed workers. The setting of the film is just astounding and has not been matched for beauty by any film since. This is one of the great classics of world cinema and finding 25 minutes of lost footage is incredible. Several years ago, I went to the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood to see a newly restored version that had still photos inserted where footage was missing. I suspect that many of those missing scenes are now included!
The film was discovered in a museum storage room in Argentina. So not only did Argentina hide escaped Nazis, but it has also been hiding a German science fiction treasure… unwittingly of course. And if you look at Metropolis carefully, you can see the Nazis coming. The film is permeated with it. If you don’t believe me, consider that the screenwriter, Thea von Harbou did in fact become a Nazi. Another Fritz Lang classic, Spies, is so riddled with antisemitism that it is almost impossible to watch. So there it is. Great classic yes, but also profoundly threatening.
Here’s the Los Angeles Times article about the restoration.
Here’s a link to the prior restoration: Metropolis (Restored Authorized Edition)
Avatar’s James Cameron Interviewed by L.A. Times Blog
The Los Angeles Times Blog has an interview with James Cameron, the director of Avatar.
“We’re working on finishing an additional six minutes of the film — which includes a lot of Weta work — for a theatrical re-release in August. We were sold out of our Imax performances right up to the moment until they were contractually obligated to switch to “Alice in Wonderland,” so we know we left money on the table there. And the 3-D really helped “Avatar” right up until the moment that it hurt it. And it hurt it at the moment “Alice” and then “How to Train Your Dragon” and “Clash of the Titans” came in and sucked up all the 3-D screens. We went from declining 8% a week to declining 50%. Clearly, it wasn’t market forces directly; it was the availability of theaters. So we’re going to wait until there’s a time to come back in, inject the new footage into the mix and see if we can interest people in the “Avatar” experience in theaters.”
I don’t know about anyone else, but I am so sick of hearing people talk about this silly 3-D trend. It’s just a clever scam to raise ticket prices. I don’t care what Cameron says. Fortunately, however, the new DVD appears to be in regular 2-D.
Science Fiction Animation: Fard
Fard is a 2009 French animated short by Luis Briceno and David Alapont. The story is quite visual, but my limited French tells me that the main character is part of a colorless corporate world and he’s just done a good presentation at work. However, he gets a package that contains something which allows him for a brief time to see what really lies underneath the surface of things.
Via SF Signal
Poetry: Azeem
It’s National Poetry Month and here is my favorite poet of the month. Azeem. We see a lot of writing about cute poets with education credentials and then someone like this brilliant Azeem fellow comes along and says a few things into a camera and reminds everybody that poets can shoot word bullets. I watch this video and my heart starts pumping and I get fidgety and I want to leave my chair and get to know words as well as this guy knows them. I noticed Azeem because he is one of the few subscribers to my YouTube film channel and so I checked him out. I’m extremely impressed. You want people to be interested in poetry? Show them this guy and they’ll be interested in about 5 seconds flat. I think what makes most poets uninteresting to the American reading public is that they all secretly have an image of a bookshelf in mind. Bookshelves are fine if you are browsing for a book, but they are death for anyone who’s making something. Azeem is also working with some hugely talented filmmakers who make fantastic imagery and do it with ease. If he comes to Los Angeles, I want to know about it and go see him play.
Set a Blaze:
Jean-Luc Godard Interviews Woody Allen
Jean-Luc Godard interviews Woody Allen… sort of. What is clear to me from watching this video is that Woody Allen is an ordinary thinker. Jean-Luc Godard is not. And frankly I’m not certain who is funnier. I think this is a devastating dismantling of Mr. Allen. It’s bordering on open mockery. Watch how Allen looks at Godard. He hasn’t the slightest idea what’s going on. Every single answer Allen gives is perfectly expected and we’ve heard all of them before from a hundred other filmmakers. Godard’s questions however, come dropping out of the bottom of a 747 that’s flying without a pilot.
Jean-Luc Godard’s New Trailer is the Entire Film!
Film director Jean-Luc Godard has made one of the sharpest comments on copyright, piracy and film advertising that I have ever seen by releasing a trailer for his upcoming new film, Socialisme, that is actually the entire film in super-fast forward for 1 minute and 7 seconds. This is wit and intelligence like no other filmmaker in the world can muster. Once you see the opening presented to you by the films of Godard it becomes very difficult indeed to get up the energy to go watch highly paid American film stars mug and smile their way through belabored mega-scripts that seek opportunities to display Coke bottles and laundry detergent alongside Aston Martins and designer shoes. You begin to see that the Hollywood product is in reality just a very large catering operation and that movies are made with approximately 10 to 20 times the resources actually required to make any given film. American films, even the ‘independent’ ones, are shot from exactly the same point of view and think that movies are about telling stories. They are conceptually still living in the 19th century. They all adhere to the ‘beginning, middle and end’ framework and they uniformly lead to a ‘climax’ and a ‘resolution.’
Godard, on the other hand, functions in the present, treats film as an actual art form, and always uses a unique point of view that cannot be pinned down or turned into a style. He is death to James Cameron. He murders people like Woody Allen. He makes Scorsese look like the heavy-handed New York buffoon that he is. Godard makes films by persuading people to give him money on the basis of totally fake scripts, then shows up with a note pad and a bunch of confused actors and decides literally on the spot what he might want to be making that day and hopes for the best when it comes to fitting his material inside the structure of a project he might happen to be working on. In short, he works just like an artist is supposed to work. He works from himself. The fact that we have been misled by a century of industrial product aimed at showing us Paul Newman’s teeth is not of any concern to him.
If James Cameron showed up at my door with a contract to be in his next film, I would shove him backwards off my front porch. But I would fly to Europe to stand in the background of a Godard film for free.
Film: 21-87
Another film by Arthur Lipsett, the filmmaker who is the subject of an upcoming animation by Theodore Ushev. This one is called 21-87 and it’s a masterpiece. It seems to have something to do with trying to see how people are deadened somehow by the modern world. The filmmaker uses documentary clips in a mix-up with collage audio that unsettles the viewer. What is this life force behind us? And why do we keep trying to behave like machines?
Film: Very Nice, Very Nice
Here is a well-known film by Arthur Lipsett, the filmmaker who is the subject of an upcoming animation by Theodore Ushev. It’s called Very Nice, Very Nice. It features a layered collage soundtrack with still photos and film clips. It conveys a general sense of unease and remoteness in urban people of 1961. I like it with the possible reservation that it relies too heavily on photographs. I think it’s very tricky to use still photos in a film and pull it off and I’m not sure that Lipsett is entirely successful. It’s good, but has a static quality, a reserve that I don’t fully admire. The filmmaker is too well-behaved and does not pull the trigger.
Mark Twain in Thomas Edison Home Movies
Mark Twain, who wrote what I think might be the single greatest book ever written by an American – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – appears in a Thomas Edison film from 1909. He appears to be a natural-born performer who enjoys playing for the camera during his off-time.
Film: Die Schneider Krankheit
This 2008 film was written, produced and directed by Javier Chillon of Madrid, Spain. The director of photography was Luis Fuentes. Artistic direction by Ángel Boyano. In the fifties, a Soviet cosmonaut chimpanzee crash-lands in West Germany. Within weeks, a deadly virus has spread across the country and confounds all the scientific experts. The film is composed of entirely original footage made to look like a fifties documentary or newsreel. The very first shots with the camera tilting down through the trees to show us the crash site at long range is a nearly prefect rendition of old documentary style right down to how the camera would move. You have to really know what you are doing to come up with shots like that. Very fine work.
This is science fiction that is a deadly accurate portrayal of the calm, governmental, ponderous yet urgent, carefully-framed and full-of-import quality found in mid-century documentary films. The humor is sly and builds its effect gradually. It’s also somewhat frightening.
Found at No fat clips!!!
Film: Sign Language
Oscar Sharp made this beautiful short film in London. It stars Jethro Skinner as Ben, the ‘board guy.’ The performance is endearing and full of intelligent energy. The film was shot in HD by Anthony Gurner. I love the way the people have all these colors in their clothes and then the colors are repeated in the backgrounds. The colors of this film stand out brilliantly. I also enjoy the film’s subject matter. Many people do jobs that they are simply very happy to have and they find themselves truly and fully present in their moment. It’s one of life’s little important lessons.
Alice in Wonderland (1903)
The British Film Institute has released the first filmed version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. This British film was made in 1903 by Cecil Hepworth and Percy Stow.
Film About Blue Brain: Attempt to Build a Working Brain Model
Using IBM computers, Dr. Henry Markram is building a model of the human brain that he hopes will take about 10 years to complete. Filmmaker Noah Hutton is chronicling the endeavor in an ongoing documentary that will be finished once the brain model exists. This is one of the most fascinating and important efforts I have ever heard about in modern science. The brain project is called Blue Brain and is located at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. The idea to build a model based on minute and precise observations of how the brain synapses and cells actually work is a good one. Dr. Markram emphasizes that once you understand certain principles you can start to build models that increase in complexity and accuracy until you have have an understanding of how things work. Careful observation and exact mimicry will lead to a functioning model. Markram goes further to say that eventually you will be able to teach the model languages and watch it learn. He’s talking about artificial intelligence. He’s talking about making a machine think.
This is the modern world’s alchemy. The simplistic understanding of Medieval alchemy is that it was the attempt to turn base metals into gold. We are now trying to turn base metals into thinking beings. It is a logical thing to do. Think about it. Every household and every pocket in almost every developed nation on earth has a small thinking machine in it. What does that really tell you? It tells me that our main effort on a planetary scale – a human species level – is to make machines think. We aren’t going to the moon. Or going to Mars. Or trying to travel to the stars. What we’re actually doing is trying to make metal and electricity think. To live.
A working model of a brain is going to take us places we never thought we could go.
Film: Nuit Blanche
Spy Films produced this short film by Arev Manoukian. Lots of beautiful slow-motion, water and glass. I like the black & white retro look. The film captures one of those fleeting moments of imagination that usually don’t involve both parties, but rather just the lonelier one. Usually the guy. The woman in the restaurant would probably be too distracted by her drink and her own reflection in the window. The guy in the street is not going to stand a chance with this lady. No way. But it’s nice while it lasts. I found it over at my favorite film place, No Fat Clips!!!