I do love a good list and this is a good list. In an industry in which making money is always the main object, the hugely overpaid and overrated deserve to be outed. When stars base their salaries on being able to guarantee an audience or “open” a film, they need to be called to account.
According to Forbes’ list, the movie funnyman made just $3.29 (£1.97) for every dollar he was paid after a run of box office disappointments.
Ewan McGregor finished second, followed by Billy Bob Thornton, Eddie Murphy and rapper turned actor Ice Cube.
Here’s an Observer article on the American Independent cinema movement as it stands today. Some of you may have seen the Duplass Brothers’ Baghead last year — worth checking out, if you haven’t. Snip:
Back in the 80s when Arnie, Sly and Bruce ruled the world’s box office, there was another level of American cinema that catered for more, shall we say, sophisticated tastes. The “indie scene” operated at a distance from Hollywood, often out of New York, and gave the cinema names such as Jim Jarmusch, Hal Hartley, Spike Lee, the Coen brothers and Steven Soderbergh. Ushered, via the Sundance film festival, to commercial and awards success by visionary (perhaps mercenary) producers such as Harvey Weinstein, the indie scene became part of mainstream Hollywood with films such as Pulp Fiction and Good Will Hunting. By the end of the 1990s, most of the big studios had opened speciality boutique divisions such as Fox Searchlight, Sony Pictures Classics and Paramount Vantage to deal with and foster “indie” film-makers, although by now they could hardly be called independent.
…
Lynn Shelton’s “bromance”, Humpday, could have been shaped into a high-grossing Hollywood concept comedy starring, say, Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson. But the Seattle-based director didn’t want to hang around to make her movie. “It’s very simple,” she says. “We had the cameras, we had the script and the actors, we borrowed some houses and rented a motel room and we shot a film. It makes you wonder what they do all day in Hollywood, doesn’t it?” The result is a very funny, wholly audible comedy confronting modern masculinity.
This is a very funny compilation of clips from various films showing just how often the no-signal/flat-battery/dropped-phone cliché has been used in recent years. Watch out for some fruity language. Via boingboing.
This is Part 2, with a focus on the way Spielberg uses both camera and colour in the beach scene (the one where the Kintner boy is killed). I love this scene:
There are six (count ‘em) decent film noir classics on BBC4 this weekend, along with a documentary entitled The Rules of Film Noir.
Essential viewing, I’d have thought. If you only watch two, then make sure you see Farewell, My Lovely and The Lady From Shanghai. The first one has Dick Powell as Philip Marlowe; the second one ticks several Moving Image Arts boxes as it’s an Orson Welles throwaway-turned-classic, featuring one extremely long take and an amazing set piece in a hall of mirrors.
Saturday: Farewell, My Lovely. Film noir classic, based on the novel by Raymond Chandler, in which private eye Philip Marlowe is hired by ex-con Moose Malloy to find his girlfriend. [B&W, 1945] The Lady from Shanghai. A sailor accompanies a couple on a cruise, but becomes a pawn in a game of murder. [B&W, 1948] The Big Combo. A stylish film noir about a police lieutenant who comes under pressure from a gang headed by a vicious thug. [B&W, 1955] Force of Evil. Dark and brooding drama about two brothers caught up in the crime and corruption surrounding New York’s illegal lottery. [B&W, 1948]
Sunday: Build My Gallows High. Classic 1940s American film noir telling a grim, complex tale of love and betrayal. A failed detective falls for the mistress of a mobster. Stars Robert Mitchum. [B&W, 1947] Stranger on the Third Floor. Film noir. The testimony of an ambitious reporter helps to convict a young man of murder. [B&W, 1940]
Is The Birds a story about the revenge of nature? Or is it an exploration of suppressed emotions and unconscious desires? Or is it a vast and elaborate joke that plays with the audience’s need to interpret what we see and find meaning in it?
All of the above?
Made in 1963, The Birds was loosely based on a Daphne Du Maurier short story. It contains some (somewhat dated looking) pioneering special effects, and has an extraordinary soundtrack of electronic bird sounds – and no music. It’s easy to look back at the so-called Classical Hollywood style as being in some way conservative, but we also have to remember that Hitchcock was one of the pioneers of this style, and as such something of an innovator. Sometimes flashy, sometimes clunky, Hitchcock invented a very influential style.
It’s interesting to look back on a film like this and note the things that they tend not to do nowadays. In modern film and TV production, it’s common – for example – to put a car onto a low trailer and tow it around whilst filming the actors pretending to drive. In 1963, it was more common to use the rear projection technique, of having the actors pretend to drive against a projected backdrop known as a plate. The advantage of the latter, mostly abandoned, technique, is that you maintained a level of control over lighting and sound which is not possible on the move.
Similarly, the habit of filming actors on a sound stage in front of painted scenery was much more common back then than it is now. There’s something rather lovely and purely cinematic in beautifully lit scenes with pristine sound recording, filmed against a brilliantly rendered artificial landscape. You’ll note if you watch The Birds that there’s very attempt to record actual dialogue when filming on location. The location shots are used to set up a scene, and then the sound stage shots are used to record the dialogue.
