notes.husk.org. scribblings by Paul Mison.

Stills of Andrea Riseborough and Tom Cruise from Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion.

moviesinframes:

Gyakuten Saiban (Ace Attorney), 2012 (dir Takashi Miike)

By quello-nello-specchio

Wait, what?

Jane Yager writing for the Paris Review: (via)

A man with a briefcase arrives in a place called City-A looking like a double agent from 1973: mustachioed and trenchcoated, forever ducking into phone booths for cryptic conversations. The man, Mr. Holz, is a geophysicist of unknown origin. He has come here to work for the New Method Oil Well Cementing Company. City-A is mesmerizingly bleak, a grid of concrete high-rises set between a brackish sea and a wintry industrial wasteland, all of it reeking of environmental contamination and failed utopia. Many things, Holz notices, are amiss here. Clocks don’t run sixty seconds to the minute in City-A. The drinking water is spiked with lithium, a shadowy entity has confiscated his passport, language is rationed, and what exactly is this New Method Oil Well Cementing Company, anyway? As the bewildered-looking Holz moves through the city, is he piecing together clues to solve these mysteries or just being shuttled around by a powerful unseen force?

This, roughly, is the storyline of whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir, the new film by Eve Sussman and the Rufus Corporation. But because this noir is, as the title promises, algorithmic, the film has no beginning, middle, or end. At each screening, a computer program live-edits a movie out of more than three thousand film clips, eighty voice-overs, and 150 pieces of music. Each of these movable parts is marked with loosely content-related tags (“horizon,” “anxiety,” “white”), and the computer fits the pieces together according to an algorithm that matches tags. Sussman calls this apparatus the “serendipity machine.” Containing more than thirty hours of material, the movie never comes together the same way twice, and it never loops. A small screen to the side runs the metadata of the algorithm while the film plays, reminding viewers that a computer is chugging away busily as they watch, matching “discomfort” tags to “discomfort” tags, “surveillance” to “surveillance.”

Hopefully this is enough for you to go off and read the rest of the article. It’s worth it.

A poster for Cypher, a somewhat silly but definitely enjoyable techno-thriller type thing from 2002.

(I rewatched this last night while pottering with Photoshop, and there are some nice touches in it. I also decided to create a movieinframes four-frame version of it, which is more about the protagonist’s relationships with women in the film than the other direction I could have gone, focussing on the whizz-bang gadgets. Maybe I’ll do another take later.)

Costumes in Alien, from an excellent post on uniforms and characterisation, the first in a series on the films, at Hello Tailor. (via)

Allen Ginsberg’s photograph of Neal Cassady and Natalie Jackson in San Francisco, as seen in the ‘Beat Memories’ slide show at NYTimes.com.