films

Credit where credit is due dept.:

This gorgeous GIF of fish morphing into reptiles morphing into dinosaurs morphing into woolly mammoths chased by cavemen, currently making the internet rounds, is a clip from the Brian De Palma movie Mission to Mars (2000). At the film's climax, a hologram of a long-extinct Martian shows U.S. astronauts a 3D video of his planet being hit by a comet millions of years in the past, then the DNA-seeding of the Earth by Martian scientists in the months before their civilization is completely annihilated. The DNA grows into Earth's variegated lifeforms.

Mission to Mars had a huge budget and is a visually stunning film despite its somewhat sci-fi conventional, Spielbergesque ending. Critics completely trashed it and it died a box office death even with Disney bankrolling (coming on the heels of De Palma's success with the first Mission Impossible movie). Disney notwithstanding, the movie is pretty dark, featuring an astronaut being torn to pieces in a Martian dust-tornado and Tim Robbins' face turning into a freeze-dried skull when his spacesuit faceplate shatters. Gary Sinise spends the entire movie in a depressed funk.

tedg reviews The Social Network:

The facts are intimidating. Soon, Facebook will have a billion users. It is already the most visited site in history. As an entity, it already is on par with the the top tier tech companies: Apple and Google. But far beyond that, far, far more significant is the way that the world is changing. Until now, friendship was absolutely anchored in physical proximity. All media allowed that to be extended, but only if it were well established by actually being together.

Now, this notion is being replaced by an entire generation. The compact is no longer on mutual support and emotional needs, but simply being paid attention to. Life is flattened while the numbers get larger. Shared abstract thinking is reduced to whether something is "liked" or not. Political movements exploit this and we are getting into trouble faster than we can imagine. So we enter a theater with a film about this phenomenon with dire worries. Social networking is the successor to TeeVee as the next possible disaster in the social experiment.

The filmmaker and writer decided to make a movie about this simplification of the social fabric by taking a story that is necessarily rich and human, and reduc[ing] it to a cartoon. We liked it not because the thing is well crafted, though it is. We embrace it because it explains things. In fact, it simplifies things so much that we can feel superior in knowing that we would have made a (slightly) more rich version.

and

In the real world, what is interesting is not what happened with a girlfriend or some jock twins. What matters is the way that connection is changing, the way we form associations and indeed what an association means and what value it gives. This is not a fad. Facebook and Twitter may fade but something profound has started, perhaps changing the very nature of what it means to invest in societies. We likely are not yet past a tipping point in government and family units, but it is likely that we are well past the tipping point in narratives. We may never get richness back as a basic value. It will be relegated to a few who form a social network.

It is also interesting that Zuckerberg, Dorsey, Canter, Mullenweg and Winer truly believe that what they are about amplifies life in all its dimensions. They believe they are doing good work. If this film is anything, it is evidence that the contrary is true.

And Zuck isn't cool enough to be an Emacs user any more, though he seems to have a genius in the opposite direction: finding the lowest common, scalable need.

I shouldn't like this review, as a blogger who for years has flattened and un-enriched experience by reducing it short posts, jpegs, GIFs, "google juice," and conversations with strangers in comments. Where it resonates for me is the idea that this simulacrum of connection becomes the exclusive domain of a "top tier tech company." Facebook is AOL that works, which means that the media convergence the AOL-Time Warner merger represented in the late 90s is finally coming to pass. There is no place for the "indie" in this scheme except completely outside it--as opposed to the loose fabric of independents we briefly enjoyed in the early to mid '00s. Dire worries is right.

Afterthought: Have hated facebooks since my college days when I put down an outre fake hobby and never heard the end of it (no way I'm repeating it). Although you can create a "persona" on Facebook it is discouraged, in the same manner as entering "Nightly, I.P." in the phone book. You are supposed to be you and people are supposed to be able to find you so they can sell you stuff.

Ted Goranson writes scathingly about In the Realms of the Unreal, a film about the outsider artist Henry Darger. Didn't see the film; sounds like yet another botched attempt to explain visual art and artists.

But gosh this filmmaker makes so many bad choices. Although the story has no explicit sexual flavor, it is quite close to perverse. My own view is that the world and the girls as [Darger] imagined them were tokens of otherworldliness so abstract and pure that they need to be admired for the clean purity. Having Dakota Fanning narrate as one of the Vivian Girls, and with practiced childishness, tips the balance from abstract to absolutely dangerous. A big mistake. The fellow that narrates Darger's inner voice is profoundly wrong too. A narrator could work. Animating the drawings could work. But gosh, either you need to fully buy into the world and enter it as Darger would, or you have to set a platform in between him and us that has some solidity. We have to know who and where we are. This filmmaker does not do that, skipping from place to place with no anchor, no coherence. If the man is about anything, it is coherence.

Goranson also questions the documentary's lack of objectivity:

It would have been good to know that some of the "witnesses" here basically stole the man's legacy and became wealthy as a result. Their recall is colored by some pretty crass motives.

Don't know about "stole" and "wealthy" (a little research is needed here) but this is a fair question to raise. Posthumous spin is part of an artist's story and you can't get any distance on that if you handle your sources with kid gloves, no pun intended.

The best indie movie about the making of an indie movie is on Hulu right now - don't miss it if you haven't seen it. If you ever had the urge to make a film, this dark comedy will kill it dead. It's the antidote to Robert Rodriguez' hopeful advice to newbs. This is a career high for Steve Buscemi in a career of career highs. Watch as he sweet-talks the primadonna actors and cameraman to keep them from walking off the disastrous set, blows his top at the line producer, sound guy, and assorted grips, and is dressed down by a dwarf for the use of a dwarf in a dream sequence: "I don't even dream about dwarves!" yells the small person. Written and directed from the bottom of a cinematographically longsuffering heart by Tom DiCillo, who also made The Real Blonde, another underappreciated gem.

Completely unplanned screen cap from Hulu - not bad, I think.