notes.husk.org

Stills of Andrea Riseborough and Tom Cruise from Joseph...

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 22:51:50 +0100

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

moviesinframes: Gyakuten Saiban (Ace Attorney), 2012 (dir...

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 03:20:09 +0000

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...

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 18:01:59 +0100

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...

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 18:04:51 +0100

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...

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 19:25:06 +0000

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

"Box-office tracking shows that the bright spot in 2011 was the performance of indie, foreign or..."

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 21:44:48 +0000

“Box-office tracking shows that the bright spot in 2011 was the performance of indie, foreign or documentary films. On many weekends, one or more of those titles captures first-place in per-screen average receipts.”

- Roger Ebert: I’ll tell you why movie revenue is dropping…

tumblr.com/explore/film

Fri, 04 Mar 2011 02:52:00 +0000

Films seem to be particularly well suited to having Tumblr blogs dedicated to them.

I’ve been following Movies in Frames for what feels like ages. “One movie - four frames. That’s it.”. The quality is a little variable, but it’s generally well worth following.

If We Don’t, Remember Me is newer, but possibly even better. Short, looping animated GIFs (the web’s native art form?) Have a look.

Newer yet is Behind My Back, which takes stills where you’re invited to share the viewpoint of the film’s protagonists.

Finally, and a new find today, is Movie Barcode, which turns every film into a single image, recording the predominant colours throughout.

Enjoy browsing their respective archives.

"That generation of 16-to-24-year-olds—the guys who felt the rush of Top Gun because it was..."

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 22:33:05 +0000

“That generation of 16-to-24-year-olds—the guys who felt the rush of Top Gun because it was custom-built to excite them—is now in its forties, exactly the age of many mid- and upper-midrange studio executives. And increasingly, it is their taste, their appetite, and the aesthetic of their late-’80s postadolescence that is shaping moviemaking. Which may be a brutally unfair generalization, but also leads to a legitimate question: Who would you rather have in charge—someone whose definition of a classic is Jaws or someone whose definition of a classic is Top Gun?”

- Mark Harris in the multiply-quotable The Day the Movies Died: Movies + TV at GQ.

Allen Ginsberg’s photograph of Neal Cassady and Natalie...

Mon, 13 Sep 2010 15:55:42 +0100

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

moviescrolliosis (via stradders06)

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:20:27 +0000

moviescrolliosis (via stradders06)