Based on what has been revealed about Prometheus, it continues to look like a winner.
And here is the official full trailer:
Another Prometheus trailer
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Tag Archives: movies
Watching the watchers
Here is a great compilation of movie scenes where the characters stop and look directly at the audience. If you turn captions on (the red CC icon), you will see the titles of the films.
(via Andrew Sullivan)
New Prometheus teaser
I have mentioned the film Prometheus in prior posts here and here. The movie has some sort of connection to the Alien films of the past, but it is not yet clear exactly how they may be related.
Check out this new teaser for the film:
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Live your dash
Werner Herzog is a director of films. And he has directed a great many terrific films, including Rescue Dawn, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, and Fitzcarraldo.
In my view, his best and most powerful films are his documentaries, including “Grizzly Man, and “Cave of Forgotten Dreams”. I just watched his documentary titled “Into the Abyss“. Bottom line: watch it.
This documentary argues against the death penalty. Yet it focuses intensely on the families of murder victims. He documents the damage to the victims’ families, but also documents the damage done to relatives of murderers and those charged with carrying out the death penalty. This is the most balanced view of the death penalty I have ever seen.
From the review in the New York Times, by A.O. Scott:
The paradox of this film is that it is both unremittingly bleak and rigorously humane. Mr. Herzog, interviewing killers, survivors, witnesses and officials in law enforcement and corrections, is polite even when asking uncomfortable questions, and the seriousness of his intentions allows humor and absurdity to bubble up amid all the pain. He never appears on camera, but his unmistakable voice — dry, precise, carrying the accent of his native Bavaria — ties together this tapestry of conflicting testimony, inchoate emotion and unredeemed ugliness.
In its alternation of talking-head interviews and archival video clips, “Into the Abyss” superficially resembles the kind of titillating, moralizing true-crime shockumentary that is a staple of off-hours cable television. But the grim ordinariness of the narrative makes its Dostoyevskian dimensions all the more arresting.
… Mr. Herzog is not interested in vindicating any particular point of view or version of events. Nor, despite his clearly stated moral opposition to capital punishment, is he advocating a political position. He is instead — as he so often has, in fictional features and documentaries alike — probing the contradictions of the human heart, in which nobility and savagery are so entwined as to be almost indistinguishable.
It is moving throughout and you really should take the time to view the movie. It is available via Netflix streaming.
Movie stars in their first roles
DVD of the week
General Orders No. 9, a documentary written and directed by Robert Persons, is extraordinary. Persons, in a short 72 minute film, poetically describes a way of life and living that is healthy, and contrasts it with the modern large city, surrounded by and entwined with freeways generating an overall experience negating humanity. His views on the impact of interstate highways is clear:
The interstate does not serve, it possesses. It has the power to make the land invisible to our attention.
Because of the absence of “place” in modern cities, he declares these cities to be machines. And he graphically illustrates the point with beautiful, disturbing imagery. This alienation in the midst of a huge constructed landscape grossly out of proportion to human interaction is one many people can agree with The city chews people up and spits them out. Others may find that his views reflect a longing for a simpler way of living on a smaller scale that may be unworkable or actually disturbing.
Nonetheless, for me the poetry of the piece is compelling. You can read an interview with the director here.
This is what Michael Tulley had to say:
Before General Orders No. 9, Robert Persons had never made a film. His first foray into the land of cinema is a mesmerizing experience, a 71-minute reflection upon his home state of Georgia and the somber evolution of a quieter, greener, more gentle America into the loud, cement-highwayed 21st century. It’s hard to experience Persons’ film and not make an immediate connection to the work of Terrence Malick, yet as I tweeted after seeing it for the first time at the 2010 Sarasota Film Festival, General Orders No. 9 makes Malick look like a straight shot of Hollywood. Experimental, dense, and poetic, Persons’ film casts a truly hypnotic spell.
You can watch the trailer below or at Apple:
Rent or buy this movie.
Ruin
Check out this excellent portrait of a post-apocalypse world. Watch full screen HD for full effect.
RUIN from OddBall Animation on Vimeo.
Avalanche rescue cats
Check out CARCA, the Canadian Avalanche Rescue Cat Association. Its slogan: “Cats have nine lives, because you only have one.”
- Does it look like I’m joking?
Media nirvana? (updated)
The new iPad (3rd generation) was launched this week at one of Apple’s always-effective marketing events. The new iPad looks great, has some powerful improvements, and will attract huge sales. But the new iPad hardware and software is only a part of Apple’s plan for 2012.
The last words spoken by Tim Cook at the launch event were as follows:
Only Apple could deliver this kind of innovation, in such a beautiful, integrated, and easy-to-use way. It’s what we love to do. It’s what we stand for. And across the year, you’re going to see a lot more of this kind of innovation. We are just getting started.
I take Tim Cook at his word when he says Apple is just getting started. The rest of the plan will be executed by early fall. Apple will roll-out iOS 6 (already in field testing) and Mountain Lion (available to developers now). iCloud will be improved and stabilized by then as well. Read the Tim Cook quotation above once more and you can see that all of these developments clearly are headed in one direction: complete, elegant, and easy to use integration of all Apple hardware devices, including computers, iPad (and iPad’s most important accessory, Apple TV), and iPhone.
Apple is building the integration one piece at a time. An example of the integration already completed is iPhoto for the iPad. Coupled with the iPad hardware, iPhoto is a sleek touch-based application for creating beautiful photos using powerful effects and easily sharing them via photo presentations (called Photo Journals) that display the photos and related data and which are shared with friends via iCloud with the touch of a button.
Further evidence is the newly added ability to re-download movies previously purchased in the iTunes store that Apple rolled out Wednesday. It is actually not completely rolled out because two movie studios (20th Century Fox and Universal Pictures) are not yet included in this feature. But you can bet they will be soon. And the goal here is to allow customers to purchase movies once and access them anywhere anytime forever without having to manage where the data is stored or how to back up the media. Nice.
But gaps in complete integration remain. An example is today’s absence of AirPlay on Macs. AirPlay (coupled with iCloud) is and will be the core feature that actually provides the integration and it must be on all Apple devices to complete the process. And, sure enough, a key feature of this summer’s Mountain Lion release is that it will add AirPlay to the Mac, eliminating this critical gap in the overall integration plan.
All of this integration and software development is, I think, the foundation for an even bigger breakthrough for Apple. Apple’s goal is to deliver to customers, by the end of this calendar year, an always-available media stream including TV, movies, music, and books. Customers will be able to purchase media once and access it anywhere anytime on any (Apple) screen they own without having to manage where the data is stored or how to back up the media. Imagine being able to tell Siri to show Hugo on the TV in the den for the kids, and the Red Wings hockey game on the TV in the living room for dad and his friends. No remote control, no TV channel searching, just speak your wish. And customers will be able to create, edit and publish their own media as well from any device, anywhere.
I believe that this effort will be huge a success for Apple this year, even though it won’t be completed immediately. Apple’s huge cash hoard will allow it to succeed in getting the media deals it will need, once all the Apple technology is in place and deployed. And Apple is the poster child of disruptive businesses. Finally, I think that only Apple has the financial and technical chops to pull something like this off. Simple, elegant software that “just works” is the key and no company on earth does that as well as Apple.
And that is what Tim Cook was saying at the iPad launch event this week.
2012 might be a bad year on the Mayan calendar. But 2012 will be a huge year for Apple.
Update: According to the Wall Street Journal, Fox and Universal movies will be made available shortly in iCloud due to agreements, in process but likely to occur, with HBO. It seems that things are beginning to fall into place.
Disclosure: I am long AAPL.
A TED talk from the future
Cover of Alien (The Director's Cut)
Check out this (obviously fictional) TED talk from 2023, as directed by Ridley Scott. This is tied into his upcoming film, Prometheus, at least loosely connected to the Alien trilogy.
By the way, if you don’t know about the real life TED talks that are currently available, you really should take the time to learn.
(via Daring Fireball)
Related articles
- Ridley Scott Talks Prometheus and Sheds Light on Guy Pearce’s Character (dreadcentral.com)
IP quote of the day
Image via Wikipedia
It’s so corrupt. Now they want to have longer copyright periods because they say the young artists are relying on this money. The young artists never see any money because they sign away that money to big media corporations, like Universal and Viacom. We, the artists, lose all of our rights to these massive corporations, who then come down heavy on these kids for downloading films and music that we never see a penny from. It’s complete bullshit. I want to encourage your audience to go and pirate a bunch of my stuff right away.
– Alex Cox, director of the classic Repo Man. This is one of my favorite movies.
Thelma and Louise (redux and then some)
Thelma and Louise. But honestly addressing the lesbian plot in a straightforward manner, with overtones of Mulholland Drive. Yet no cliff. The movie is Gasoline. Check it out.
Kansas and Toto
Animal cruelty
Project Nim, available on DVD, chronicles a 1970s (totally misguided) attempt to take an infant chimp away from its zoo mother, and teach it sign language while living among humans. The movie depicts the damage done by the various humans involved in this bizarre experiment, and the hubris and carelessness of those humans.
The film graphically depicts the horror when the helpless chimp, after attaining adulthood and fluency with sign language, but never having seen other chimpanzees, is summarily transported back to the zoo from whence he came. The lead researcher in the original study, Columbia University Professor Herbert Terrace, was (and is) a clearly a self-interested and despicable human being, and he is featured throughout voicing self-important, and false, self-justifications for his inhuman behavior, including a sexual relationship with at least one of of his teaching assistants.
To add insult to injury, a year after leaving Nim back at his zoo, in horrible conditions, Terrace shows up for a photo op with Nim. Nim reacts with relief, as if he will be released from prison. He was not released. And eventually, a medical researcher targeted Nim and moved him to a New York Univiersity medical research center. You can guess the rest, but it is not a totally grim ending.
Related articles
- Project Nim (mrmovietimes.com)
- Review: Project Nim (2011) (thefilmoracle.wordpress.com)
- The 40 Best Films of 2011 (Feature) (popmatters.com)
God Bless America
I can’t wait for this one.