For his 40th birthday Steven Spielberg‘s friends made him this short film based on Citizen Kane (1941) about his life and career up to that point.
With a March of Time segment voiced by Dan Ackroyd, John Candy plays the reporter who is assigned the task of uncovering the famed director.
Keep a look out for previous Spielberg collaborators such as Dennis Weaver (Duel), Allen Daviau (E.T.), Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale (1941) and Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall (longtime producers).
You wonder how this stuff ends up online but I’m glad it did.
Press Play then decided to see how it sounded against other film sequences, so they staged a contest called ‘Vertigoed’ with the following rules:
Take the same Herrmann cue — “Scene D’Amour,” used in this memorable moment from Vertigo — and match it with a clip from any film. (You can nick the three-minute section from one of Kevin’s mash-ups if it makes things easier.) Is there any clip, no matter how silly, nonsensical, goofy or foul, that the score to Vertigo can’t ennoble? Let’s find out!
Although you can use any portion of “Scene D’Amour” as your soundtrack, the movie clip that you pair it with cannot have ANY edits; it must play straight through over the Herrmann music. This is an exercise in juxtaposition and timing. If you slice and dice the film clip to make things “work,” it’s cheating. MONTAGES WILL BE DISQUALIFIED.
Upload the result to YouTube, Vimeo, blipTV or wherever, email the link to [email protected] along with your name, and we’ll add your mash-up to this Index page.
Mainly because of the use of the “zoom dolly” shot that Hitchcock made famous on Vertigo but also because there are some interesting connections between the two directors.
Both made significant films at Universal and Hitchcock was also a major shareholder of the studio as Jaws smashed box office records.
Its financial success would have made both men a lot of money, but the two were destined never to meet.
In fact, Spielberg was twice escorted off the set of Hitchcock movies on the Universal lot.
According to a book by John Baxter, as a young man he was thrown off the set of Torn Curtain (1966) and years later an assistant director asked him to leave whilst Hitch was shooting Family Plot (1976):
There’s probably a reason that ‘Scene d’Amour’ has been used so often as a temp track (i.e. a piece of temporary music used before the composer settles on a final score), which is that it lends a haunting beauty to almost any image.
With that in mind here is the scene from Jaws set to Herrmann’s music:
The music accentuates the tragedy of a mother losing her son, whilst with Williams’ score there was a sense of impending dread and brilliantly orchestrated horror.
Note also how the scene in the original version is free of music until the shark appears.
What was showing at cinemas in London’s West End back in 1976?
This year has already seen a record-breaking 27 sequels and a depressing number of remakes.
Last month I took a picture of the Vue West End in Leicester Square just to remind myself that we really did live in a time when the three main attractions at one of the capital’s most prestigious cinemas were The Inbetweeners Movie, The Smurfs and Final Destination 5.
A NASA video of Space Shuttle Endeavor‘s last launch has been re-cut so we can see all four camera angles simultaneously.
The original video was shot on multiple cameras fixed to the solid rocket boosters, but a Vimeo user (Northern Lights) has re-arranged the footage so we can see it side-by-side.
Set to the music of Ulf Lohmann from the Because Before album, the end result is pretty spectacular.
(For the full effect, be sure expand the video to full screen)
The Heart Specialist is an independent comedy that was reportedly completed in 2006, about a group of young medical residents at a Florida hospital starring Wood Harris, Brian White and Zoe Saldana.
But a five year wait seems excessive and places this firmly in the realm of Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret (although that long-delayed film has more pedigree behind the camera).
It opened in the US in January and the verdict from the trades was pretty brutal.
“The Heart Specialist” is DOA. A ploddingly paced and tonally dissonant mix of broadly played sitcom-style humor and shameless heartstring-yanking, this long-shelved indie has been dropped into a limited theatrical run much like a terminally ill patient might be checked into a hospice. After its inevitable B.O. flatline, expect a quick transfer to Redbox kiosks.
Frank Scheck of The Hollywood Reporter was also less than enthusiastic:
Filmed in 2006 but only now receiving a limited theatrical release no doubt thanks to the presence of rising star Zoe Saldana (Avatar), the African-American, medical-themed The Heart Specialist plays like a poorly written episode of Gray’s Anatomy. This awkward, amateurish blend of comedy and melodrama will need life support stat to prevent it from immediately disappearing from theaters.
But this begs the question as to why it got a theatrical release at all. Did investors in the film have a legal clause demanding a theatrical release?
According to Box Office Mojo it has so far grossed $1,103,037.
The tradition has its roots in Christian and Roman times when early February became associated with weather prediction, possibly due to it being close to the pagan festival of Imbolc just a day earlier.
For some reason it was believed that hedgehogs were accurate forecasters of weather and when German immigrants to the United States settled in Pennsylvania, the lack of hedgehogs meant that they substituted them with the native groundhog.
‘Groundhog Day’ was born.
The largest celebration is held in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, which became the setting for the 1993 comedy starring Bill Murray as Phil Connors, a TV reporter who covers the event, only to find he is living the same day, over and over again.
Directed by Harold Ramis, part of what makes the film special is that it remains unusually inventive for a mainstream studio comedy.
I uses a clever and accessible premise to make shrewd points about human nature, without resorting to cheap sentimentality.
The protagonist is self-centred and takes his colleagues for granted which means there is a satisfying sense of comedic justice when he finds himself trapped inside the endlessly repeating day of February 2nd, 1992.
It is when this cycle begins that the script, co-written by Ramis and Danny Rubin, really shows its stripes, finding ever more inventive ways to explore the deja vu nightmare of its central character.
The increasing torture for Phil, is hilarity for the audience, as the little details repeat and build on one another: the Sonny and Cher song, the annoying man in the street, the waitress and crucially his encounters with his producer Rita (Andie MacDowell).
There is also the central dramatic irony as only we and Phil know that he is experiencing the same day over and over again and literally living life like there is no tomorrow.
Most comedies have some kind of cheesy self-improvement theme built into them, but the reason Groundhog Day is different lies in the power of the central idea: the more we experience the same routine, the greater our insight into others and ultimately ourselves.
There is also something film-like in the way Murray’s character is essentially doing endless ‘re-takes’ of the same day.
It was well received by audiences and critics when it was initially released in February 1993, going on to become the 13th highest grossing film of that year.
But it gradually became a firm favourite on home video: an appropriate fate for a film about repetition, which gets better through repeated viewings.
Perhaps the most lasting legacy of the film is that the title has itself become a phrase in the English language to denote a bad situation that repeats itself.
The parable-like qualities of the film have seen it embraced by religious viewers including Buddhists, who see the themes of selflessness and rebirth, and Catholics, who see February 2nd as representing Purgatory.
“Groundhog Day” is a film that finds its note and purpose so precisely that its genius may not be immediately noticeable. It unfolds so inevitably, is so entertaining, so apparently effortless, that you have to stand back and slap yourself before you see how good it really is.
Certainly I underrated it in my original review; I enjoyed it so easily that I was seduced into cheerful moderation. But there are a few films, and this is one of them, that burrow into our memories and become reference points. When you find yourself needing the phrase ‘This is like Groundhog Day’ to explain how you feel, a movie has accomplished something”
Although it didn’t receive any serious awards recognition at the time, it has since appeared on many retrospective polls of great comedy films and the Writers Guild of America even ranked the screenplay as 27th on their list of the 101 Greatest Screenplays ever written.
This year the movie channel Encore even showed the film on a loop for 24 hours, a fitting tribute for a film that gets better the more you see it.
It never got a release in the US, so remains something of an obscurity, but years later Connelly went on to star in Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream (2000).
There only appears to be a Japanese trailer on YouTube:
And now have a look at the trailer for Black Swan:
You can check them out side-by-side at YouTube Doubler here.
Some of the posters from Etoile are also interesting to compare with the designs for Black Swan.
Was the earlier film any inspiration for Aronofsky?
After strong festival buzz in the Autumn, it scored mostly favourable reviews and already looks like a multiple noiminee at the Oscars this year, with Portman already looking like the strong favourite for Best Actress.
The famous line ‘We’re not in Kansas anymore’ from The Wizard of Oz has cropped up in a lot of films.
Uttered by Dorothy (Judy Garland) to her dog Toto when she first arrives in Oz, the phrase came 4th in the AFI’s list of the top 100 movie quotations in American cinema.
But this video shows the extent to which it has firmly embedded itself in pop culture.
Here is the full list of films and TV shows in this video:
A US company specialising in bacon products recently commissioned an artist to make a bust of actor Kevin Bacon …made out of bacon.
Artist Mike Lahue carved a styrofoam bust of the actor and then used bacon bits covered by glue and several coats of lacquer as soft, cooked bacon would rot too easily.
The final result is called ‘Bacon Kevin Bacon’ and is being auctioned on eBay in support a nonprofit organization which helps families cope with cancer.
Rollover didn’t exactly make major waves upon its release, but its depiction of a global financial collapse now seems chilling.
A conspiracy thriller directed by Alan Pakula, it starred Jane Fonda and Kris Kristofferson and is about the chaos unleashed by an Arab firm which decides not to redeposit (or ‘rollover’) their huge investment in a US bank, which sends Wall Street and the global financial system into meltdown.
In truth the film itself is not particularly good and certainly nowhere near the quality of Pakula’s other films like All the President’s Men and The Parallax View.
A screening of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in Los Angeles on Friday night was interrupted by someone apparently having an acid trip during the climax.
Although it could be some kind of stunt, this video shot inside the Egyptian Theater makes for interesting viewing:
The Ultimate Trip turned into a bad trip Friday night at the American Cinematheque’s Egyptian Theater on Hollywood Boulevard when one member of the audience at a screening of the Academy’s 70mm vault print of “2001: A Space Odyssey” tried to recreate the late ‘60s a little too aggressively.
Toward the end of the film, when Keir Dullea’s Dr. Dave Bowman finds himself in an ornate bedroom after the trippy Stargate sequence, a voice started booming from the near-front center part of the nearly full house.
The words were disjointed and mostly incoherent but included phrases like “It’s time to sleep!” and “Stanely Kubrick!,” “Wait!,” “It’s time!” and so on. With the film continuing to unspool, there was enough light to see that the ranter was a big burly guy who had now stood up, was waving his arms abruptly and lurching about unpredictably.
Hoping the man would shut up and sit back down, the audience didn’t do much at first, but it was soon clear the guy was tripping big time and was not going to respond to polite admonitions.
Someone who seemed to know him tried to settle him but now the guy seemed provoked and was acting even more crazily.
After a couple of minutes the film was turned off, the lights came up and someone presumably connected to the Cinematheque came down and told the guy he had five seconds to clear out.
McCarthy’s opening line is referring to one of the posters from the original release, which had the tagline: “The Ultimate Trip”
The following BBC interview from 1968 is a fascinating snapshot of Ford in his later years (he would die in 1973).
Years of heavy drinking had clearly taken their toll and the opening question sets the tone:
Interviewer: What sort of childhood did you have? Where you interested in movies way back?
Ford: Not really. Not interested in them now, actually.
Also note the heavy smoking, Ford’s belligerent attitude, awkward zooms, random transitions to black and white and the obligatory posh English interviewer.
Christopher Nolan became an A-List Hollywood director with Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight (2008) but his early films contain intriguing images related to the caped crusader.
In his debut film Following (1998), there is a sequence in which two characters (played by Jeremy Theobold and Alex Haw) break into a flat which has a Batman logo on the front door.
When Nolan was shooting this film on a tiny budget of around $6,000 it would have been fanciful to imagine that just a few years later he would be the director entrusted by Warner Bros to reboot the Batman franchise with a budget of $150 million.
…the apartment of my character, ‘The Young Man’, was my flat in Iliffe Street, Walworth. Which is also where the bat was.
Keen-eyed viewers have spotted a Batman logo on the door of the flat. Some call it ironic (incorrectly), others say it’s prescient. Actually, I’d put it up in 1989 when I moved there; there was a film out called Batman that year…
And that was the way we made the film. None of the sets were designed, few were dressed. We made do — or rather, Chris chose places he thought were suitable and would take little arranging.
So far, so coincidental.
But it doesn’t stop there, as a screen grab Nolan’s next film Memento (2000) recently surfaced featuring …a Batman logo:
If you zoom in to the top right of the frame (timed at 0:47:58 on the DVD) you can see the logo for Batman alongside one for Superman.
The opening titles of a film can be very revealing as to how a film turns out and some (especially those by Kubrick and Hitchcock) can be iconic in their own right.
Why is this?
Partly I think it’s a statement of intent on behalf of the filmmakers but there is also something magical about the anticipation of what you might soon be experiencing – is it going to be Citizen Kane or White Chicks?
You never really know until it starts to unfold but the opening titles often give a tantalising glimpse of what lies ahead, be it good or bad.
With that in mind, web designer Christian Annyas has posted an amazing selection of movie titles which are arranged by decade, from 1929 to 2009.
I should add a dash of scepticism by saying that the husband claims to work for a company that “handles ninja affairs” but he’s probably joking of course.
Spoof or not, it does highlight that one of the primary reasons people watch films is for an emotional release.
Although one frequent complaint by mainstream audiences is that something is ‘too depressing’, some of the most successful films of all time like Love Story (1970), E.T. (1982) and Titanic (1997) were openly sad at their core.
One of the ideas Ancient Greeks had about drama was for it to provide catharsis and purge us of our negative emotions within a social situation.
Tragedies and their modern movie antecedents are a form of art based on human suffering, that paradoxically offers the audience pleasure.
Despite all the joking around in these videos, they actually hit upon this truth.
When I first saw Casino I remember thinking that it contained more f-words than any movie I had seen and someone has done this f-only edit of the film.
The world record for most uses of the word is a 2005 documentary called (appropriately) Fuck with 824 uses of the word, which works out at 8.86 per minute.
When it comes to feature films, Summer of Sam (1999) follows with 435 and then Nil By Mouth (1997) with 428.
Casino comes in on 398 and then Alpha Dog (2007) with 367.
A few years ago – back when Wikipedia and Google weren’t available on people’s mobile phones – I remember telling this to someone and they didn’t believe it.
However, aside from being on the IMDb and Wikipedia, Shatner himself has confirmed it in this video with his daughter. He even admits to once going out trick or treating in one.
Tommy Lee Wallace, the production designer and co-editor on Halloween, said that he was charged with finding a mask for Myers in the original film.
Aiming for a mask with a creepy ‘blank face’ he went shopping for one in Hollywood and found a Captain Kirk Halloween mask that seemed to fit the bill.
Wallace cut out larger eyeholes, removed the eyebrows and sideburns, and made the hair look weirder and painted it white.
For most of the film Myers, or ‘The Shape’ as he’s referred to in the credits, is played by actor Nick Castle (above).
In the DVD extras on the Halloween DVD box set John Carpenter claimed that the mask didn’t really look like Shatner, but joked:
“I guess I owe the success of Halloween to William Shatner.”
Fox got a big gala premiere last night, Goats screens tonight, Up in the Air shows on Sunday and even The Times wrote a gushing editorial declaring him ‘Fantastic Mr Clooney’. Which, to be fair, I’d mostly agree with – of all the major A-listers he is perhaps the most consistent in doing interestingwork within the Hollywood system.
But before he became a big star in the 90s with ER, he paid his dues in TV such as Street Hawk. For those who never saw this 80s show, the premise was basically Knight Rider with a motorbike (i.e. former government agent becomes a crusader against crime with the aid of a hi-tech vehicle).
Clooney was in an episode called A Second Self and here is some of his appearance in two videos.
