James Cameron’s Xenogenesis. (this is part one, here’s part two)
His student film about aliens.
(link)
The Archive.
A short film about Paul Mawhinney and his record-setting record collection. Amazing, but also kind of sad.
(davechen)
Up featurette about Dug the Dog.
The dogs were easily my favorite part of the film, which is chock full of amazing moments.
Following.
A series of “follow cam” shots edited together from various films, by Matt Zoller Seitz.
Notable ones I recognize and love from 2001, Hard Boiled, Children of Men, and Heat.
The Slashfilm bloggers and readers compiled a pretty comprehensive list of the hidden easter eggs and nods in Up. (Contains some spoilers for the film, but not many)
2001: a space odyssey, 1968 (dir. Stanley Kubrick)
By orshk
Original German poster for Der Untergang (Downfall).
Just watched this. The guy that plays Hitler is pretty amazing… Swiss actor Bruno Ganz.
Found on Wikipedia, no. 7
Interesting note about Casablanca:
“…there has been anecdotal evidence that Casablanca may have made a deeper impression among film-lovers than within the professional movie-making establishment. In the November/December 1982 issue of American Film, Chuck Ross claimed that he retyped the screenplay to Casablanca, only changing the title back to Everybody Comes to Rick’s and the name of the piano player to Dooley Wilson, and submitted it to 217 agencies. Eighty-five of them read it; of those, thirty-eight rejected it outright, thirty-three generally recognized it (but only eight specifically as Casablanca), three declared it commercially viable, and one suggested turning it into a novel.”
500 Days of Summer.
This movie looks so good. Joseph Gordon-Levitt was in another film I watched recently, Brick. He’s a hugely underappreciated actor.
Here’s the trailer for South African director Neill Blomkamp’s upcoming film, District 9. (HD version)
The film is set in South Africa and tells the story of a race of aliens who after showing up on Earth are forced to live in quarantine from society. It’s shot in the ever-popular vérité style, a la The Shield or Battlestar Galactica, although framed in an alternate history as a documentary. The couple of effects shots from the trailer look gorgeous and convincing. I hope they can extend that into a whole, cohesive film. It’s style actually reminds me of the Escape from City 17 short from a few months ago.
We watched The Pixar Story a couple nights ago. It’s a well-made documentary following the inception of Pixar and it’s growth and development into an animation studio on the backs of people like John Lasseter, Steve Jobs, Ed Catmull, and Alvy Ray Smith.
Lasseter was the main creative drive in getting the company so heavily invested in computer animation. Some of the things he created in the lead up to his first feature, Toy Story, are amazing to see, considering the time in which they were made.
