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cosmopolis fan art

As previously blogged, David Cronenberg is directing the film adaptation of Don DeLillo's novel Cosmopolis. It stars Robert Pattinson, which means there is already plenty of enthusiastic online coverage of the movie. Like, say, cosmopolisfilm.com, which features fan art that combines heart throb shots of Pattinson with text from DeLillo.

Mind blown.

stop the train i don't understand it anymore

Sometimes, you read a thing on a blog and your head goes Wait, what? From Pitchfork: "Last week, Badass Digest reported that Nine Inch Nails frontman and Oscar-winning film score composer Trent Reznor would write the score to the film Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and that Reznor would also have a cameo appearance in the movie, playing the vampire that kills Lincoln's mother."

screenplay for the social network

Sony Pictures has posted a PDF of Aaron Sorkin's screenplay for The Social Network. It reads as well as you'd think it would; but if you've seen the movie it's impossible not to see the film's action in your mind's eye as you make your way through it. Like a blueprint of an existing building, it's a plan for a thing that's already made its way into the world. Once you've seen the building, it can't be read purely as the plan.

jeffrey wells on little fockers

This is a great, great line...

To watch it is to slowly succumb to a kind of corporate poison that spreads through your veins like embalming fluid, causing your skin and your soul to turn gray.

via hollywood-elsewhere.com

roger ebert's best films of 2010

They're here; I particularly enjoyed this bit about his top pick, The Social Network:

The tension in the film is between Zuckerberg and the Winklevoss twins, who may well have invented Facebook for all I know, but are traditional analog humans motivated by pride and possessiveness. If Zuckerberg took their idea and ran with it, it was because he saw it as a logical insight rather than intellectual property. Some films observe fundamental shifts in human nature, and this is one of them.

Also? Sounds like I really need to see The American.

all your friends were so knocked out

The NYTimes obit for Elaine Kaufman is worth reading, especially if you were a suburban kid who enjoyed Woody Allen movies and bothered to listen to Billy Joel lyrics.

Ms. Kaufman treated many of her regular patrons as both friends and extended family, though she had her limits. She had several run-ins with well-known personalities. After an argument with her, Norman Mailer vowed never to return and wrote her an unflattering letter. She scribbled “Boring” across the top and sent it back to him. A day or two later, he was back.

(Reminder: even if this Mailer story is fake, it's still real.)

yesss. very powerful words.

Filmosophy reviews You've Got Mail.

I have been at some point in my growing up, so in this movie, so in love with the whole thing of it, that I wanted to buy armfuls of white t-shirts and olive green cardigans from The Gap and be that skinny, be “a lone reed”, wear a strappy wristwatch and go to Starbucks and maybe aim for bigger breasts and low-rise Dockers instead of pleat-front, but still, to this day, imagine he is walking just behind me on city blocks unnoticed, ordering me bouquets of sharpened pencils for Fall and stealing my business out from under me and making plans to ruin my life. Or something. Because that is love, we have learned, are reminded: we earn it, through unrelenting patience and saintlike forgiveness and cute-meet, Hollywood coincidence and E-MAIL.

Via The Awl, who quoted the meta-enabling bit re. how we've all been so busy doing email that we haven't had a chance to discuss the ramifications of it yet, plus listicles (whatever those are); meanwhile I just liked this perfect description of mid-to-late-nineties Meg Ryan-ness.

Also, Filmosophy is set in Rockwell, which makes it that much better.

and the jonze spin begins

The New York Times covers the Where the Wild Things Are in this Sunday's Magazine. Overall the piece feels like Jonze's publicity machine cranking up the "they gave us $80 million to make the movie but those studio types are boring corporate suits and it won't be our fault when it tanks at the box office" story line.

And though I'd love to be proven wrong, it sounds like the movie is gonna tank.*

Most kids’ movies are brightly, mouthwateringly colorful; Jonze favored a mushy-vegetable palate of greens and browns. Most kids’ movies have a clearly defined plot and an unambiguous moral lesson; Jonze’s film has about as much plot as an episode of “Jackass.” Most kids’ movies crackle with one-liners; in “Where the Wild Things Are,” the characters talk over one another and spend a lot of time stumbling over their own words as they try to articulate their feelings.

Jonze puts it this way...

"It's like the studio was expecting a boy, and I gave birth to a girl. And now they're learning to love and accept their daughter."

You know the next chapter of the saga will be the piece in November about how Where the Wild Things Are bombed because the studio just didn't spend enough to market the daughter they thought would be a son; with the subplot being that the blogger / Twitter buzz that they were counting on just couldn't push it to a $100 mm opening weekend...never mind the fact that the thing was just too damned sad for anyone under the age of about 35.

* For point of reference, G.I. Joe has done $265 million in worldwide box office.

the oscar piracy data's in!

Yay, the Oscar nominations were announced! Which means that Waxy's annual survey of pirated Oscar-nominated films is here as well!

Out of 26 nominated films, an incredible 23 films are already available in DVD quality on nomination day, ripped either from the screeners or the retail DVDs. This is the highest percentage since I started tracking.

he met the walrus

"It's all there." (Via VSL.)

i'll go out on a limb here...

Stating the obvious: W's gonna bomb. Oliver Stone jumped the shark with Born on the Fourth of July; people on the right will hate it without seeing it; and even the rabidly liberal probably don't want to spend their Saturday night reliving the present in a dark room, even if it is Josh Brolin. Best line from the Times review, on Brolin's performance: "Good as he is, he can’t touch the original."

Update: I love this line from Dave Winer's review: "Well, it was a nice movie, but I never really got into the plot. It could be I know too much about the actual story, like having read the book before seeing the movie."

liz phair on guyville

Liz Phair's made a new documentary about her 1993 landmark "Exile in Guyville," timed with a reissue of the album. New York Mag's Vulture has a great interview with her, and as the father of two daughters whom I'm doing my best to raise as strong, vocal and opinionated young girls (and me arguably being one of those "guys") I absolutely loved this particular bit... 

It was interesting to learn from the documentary that you were pretty surrounded by guys on the making of Exile.
I really was in Guyville. When I went back to the documentary, the one unifying thing with the guys is, they all talk a really long time, and then I get a tiny little word in edgewise. They were all like, "This is what's good," "This is what you should like," and I was like, [sing-songy] "fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you."

The documentary's bundled with the CD version of the reissue -- you can pick it up at Amazon and other fine retailers, I assume.

sydney pollack and the ache

Via somewhere that I can't remember right now, Trish Deitch at The New Yorker on Sydney Pollack. As a Pollack fan I've been reading a bunch of obits on Pollack this week, and while there's been a lot of talk about Pollack as a classically conservative filmmaker who makes Good Films, Deitch's post is the one that resonated with me the most...

Finding the spine of a story like "Out of Africa" was important to Sydney for many reasons, the most important of which was that it led to what he called "the ache." The ache is self-explanatory if you’ve seen Sydney’s films. It is the ache of having one chance at deep love in a lifetime of shallow loves, and losing it too early. It is the ache of perfect, private union destroyed by terrible, worldly circumstance. For Sydney, the ache was about the way that the things we hold most dear always elude us.

"The ache" is at the core of what I love about Three Days of the Condor, Absence of Malice and even Tootsie, as well as Pollack's acting in Husbands and Wives, Eyes Wide Shut and Michael Clayton. On the list to watch, Pollack's documentary on Frank Gehry.

cleaning out the browser tabs

It's about time I blog about all the open tabs in my browser, just so I can clear my head and get on with my life.

• They're making a movie version of The Road. Nuclear apocalypse! Cannibalism! With a charming young child actor!

OK, that was the only open tab...and blogging it isn't making me feel any better. After all, I doubt that even Viggo Mortensen can play it bleak enough to do justice to this line:

When your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that never will be and you are happy again than you will have given up. Do you understand? And you can't give up. I won't let you.

Hooray for Hollywood!

next up, our own executive chef

Join Six Apart and you too can get your hair cut by co-founder Mena Trott.

liveblogging reading some of the liveblogging of the oscars

Last night, 10:30 pm:  Finished watching our Tivo'd version of the Oscars.  Ba-boop'd our way through the montages.  Did email during some of the songs.  Didn't liveblog.

Last night, 10:40 pm:  Check in on Vox neighborhood.  Hey, Anil liveblogged the Oscars!  Skim skim skim, scroll scroll, scroll.  Here's a funny line: "Poor Nicole Kidman, ruined herself. Used to be fetching. I'm just saying. I do like her brave choice to wear a chandelier."

Last night, 11:30 pm:  Oh, hey, looks like Jason liveblogged not watching the Oscars. How clever.  "My liveblogging outfit this evening: jeans by Banana Republic, long sleeve tshirt by American Apparel, socks by Wal-Mart, boxer shorts by Muji." (Ahem, that sounds like a series of Facebook is statements to me.)

This morning, 11:00 am:  Wow, David liveblogged 'em, too.  "I think Owen Wilson should take over Heath Ledger's career."  Yes!  Excellent idea. Couldn't have said it better myself.

This morning, 11:25 am: OK, that's enough.

the mystery box

Timed perfectly for the pre-Cloverfield marketing cycle, TED.com has posted J.J. Abrams' talk from last year's conference:

J.J. Abrams traces his love of the unseen mystery -- the heart of Alias, Lost, and the upcoming Cloverfield -- back to its own magical beginnings, which may or may not include an early obsession with magic, the love of a supportive grandfather, or his own unopened Mystery Box.

I'm queuing that one up for the weekend.

Relatedly: Over the past several years, Bay Area painter Squeak Carnwath has routinely contributed Grab Bag Mystery Boxes to fund-raising art auctions. Here's the description of one from a 2002 di Rosa Preserve auction:

The object contained inside this box is presently a mystery to all. You, the bidder, are now taking a risk similar to the creative risks that artists take when they make a work of art. You, dear auction bidder, are experiencing the UNKNOWN. For the artist, making art is an exercise in trust. Trust that the unknown will reveal insight. You, like the artist, do not know what your desire will reveal to you. The item contained herein could be an artwork of my own making, studio archeology, an artwork by another artist, a grocery list, a sculpture, a drawing, jewelry, photos, materials to make your own artwork, a lock of hair, etc. etc.

no country for charlie rose

From this weekend's "Adventures with Tivo," Charlie Rose had Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin and the Coen brothers on to discuss No Country for Old Men. Worth the time, even though it's, you know, Charlie Rose.

redacted as tour of modern media environment

A.O. Scott on Brian DePalma's new movie, "Redacted."

An unrivaled master of showy cinematic technique, he has made a film whose governing conceit is that it is not a film at all but rather a palimpsest of found video culled from consumer-grade camcorders, surveillance cameras, cellphones and Web sites. (There are also snippets from a French documentary, a mischievous parody complete with portentous music and solemn narration.) “Redacted” takes us on a tour not only of the battlefield, but also of the modern media environment, where no moment goes unrecorded and where everyone is, at least potentially, a filmmaker.

I'm not planning on seeing "Redacted" in the theater for a variety of reasons ("I don't get out much and I'd rather spend babysitter money on 'No Country for Old Men'" being the leading contender), but I wish there were  way to experience this tour of "the modern media environment" in that actual environment.

ratatouille

I just saw a television commercial for the upcoming DVD release of Ratatouille that was unabashedly aspected 16:9. It stuck out because most movie commercials (esp for DVD releases) are formatted to fit your 4:3 screen... Of course the different look distracted me from the actual release date, though I'm assuming it'll be out in time for Thanksgiving.

Second order question: will the DVD drive incremental sales of Thomas Keller cookbooks?