Being John Malkovich director and longtime Beastie Boys collaborator Spike Jonze has directed yet another music video for the band: A high-concept sci-fi extravaganza that features zombies, GI Joe action figures, and, as usual, a soundtrack with a pretty decent hook.
The song is called “Don’t Play No Game That I Can’t Win,” and the version we’ve posted above is the 11-minute director’s cut. You can watch a shorter version here, but why would you ever want to?
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
Rob Shaw’s dark animated short The Machinewas voted Best Film at last week’s Robot Film Festival in New York City. The movie starts on what looks like a standard boy-makes-machine, machine-runs-amok, boy-kills-machine trajectory, but veers nicely off-course and ends on a note much more Sartre than Terminator. (Battlestar Galacticafans will see the twist coming from a mile away).
The Machine seems like a good fit for the new festival, which founder and Carnegie Mellon roboticist Heather Knight hopes will fuel innovation and help improve robots’ image in a post-Cylon world. For more backstory, check out editor and RFF judge Celeste Biever’s fascinating wrap-up at the New Scientist.
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
Talk about dodging cinematic bullets. Imagine The Godfather without Marlon Brando. It almost happened. And then Star Wars with Kurt Russell (playing Han Solo). It was a real enough possibility, and here’s the audition tape as proof…
This short film showing Havana in the 1930s was shot by André de la Varre, the long-time cameraman and cinematographer for American traveler, photographer and filmmaker Burton Holmes. In those days, Havana was a flourishing and fashionable city dubbed the “Paris of the Caribbean,” attracting an ever increasing number of tourists. André de la Varre’s film portrays Havana as the “exotic capital of appeal,” which pretty much sums up its essence during those days.
Bonus material: A list of all the sights shown in this film can be found here; another short film about Havana in the 1950s here. This video from late 2008 gives an idea of the sorry state of Havana’s city center today. And don’t foget to marvel at the wonderful collection of vintage travel films at The Travel Film Archive.
By profession, Matthias Rascher teaches English and History at a High School in northern Bavaria, Germany. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twitter.
Although British director Peter Greenaway is best known for feature films like The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, Prospero’s Books, and The Pillow Book, he has also completed several highly respected projects for television, including this 53-minute exploration of the life and work of Charles Darwin. Darwinis structured around 18 separate tableaux, each focusing on another chapter in the naturalist’s life, and each consisting of just one long uninterrupted shot. Other than the narrator’s voiceover, there is no dialogue.
As with most Greenaway films, the visual composition of individual scenes in Darwin reflects the director’s fascination with Renaissance painting (he was first trained as a muralist). In 2006, Greenaway even embarked on an ambitious series of video installations called Nine Classic Paintings Revisited, in which he applied his often controversial vision to The Last Supper, The Wedding at Cana and other famous artworks. You can watch an interview with the filmmaker about The Last Supperhere. Even better, watch his 2010 UC-Berkeley lecture on the inspiration and philosophy behind the entire project, which we’ve included in our collection of 275 Cultural Icons. We’ve also added Darwin to our collection of Free Movies Online.
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
Three years ago, the members of the band Interpol sat down with filmmaker David Lynch. It was a casual meeting, an “ice breaker,” that paved the way for a future collaboration.
Skip ahead to 2010, and the collaboration begins. Interpol wants to develop visuals to accompany their performance at the 2011 Coachella Festival, and Lynch agrees to take on the job. The result: “I Touch a Red Button Man,” a short animated film that accompanies Interpol’s song “Lights.” The film (originally shown at Coachella) was officially released online yesterday at HuffPo, where the band also talked about the genesis of the project in their own words.
You can find this film listed in the Animation section of our big collection of Free Movies Online.
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We want to be excited about the latest film version of Franz Kafka’s 1915 novella The Metamorphosis (get free etext here), especially because it’s an indie production, and we just can’t see the existential drama of Gregor Samsa’s journey from human to insect surviving a major studio adaptation. Furthermore, we love Nick Searcy in the F/X drama, Justified, and we’re happy to see him on the big screen.
We can accept the marketing twist of turning Samsa into a 17-year-old boy, but after seeing the concept art in the filmmakers’ trailer, we’re wondering if the proposed feature’s biggest star might be the special effects. Give it a watch and let us know what you think.
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
In 1932, as America slipped deeper into the Great Depression, Raymond Chandler lost his job as an oil company executive. Drinking and absenteeism didn’t help. So it was time to improvise. Soon enough, the 45 year old reinvented himself, becoming America’s foremost writer of hard-boiled detective fiction. During the 30s, he wrote 20 stories for pulp magazines and published his first novel, The Big Sleep(1939). Then, it was off to Hollywood, where Chandler co-wrote Double Indemnity (1944) with Billy Wilder and collaborated on Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train(1951).
Hollywood may have buttered Chandler’s bread, but he never felt much affection for the film industry, and didn’t hesitate to say so. Writing for The Atlantic in November, 1945, he lamented how the Hollywood system bled anything you’d call “art” from the screenwriting process:
Hollywood is a showman’s paradise. But showmen make nothing; they exploit what someone else has made. The publisher and the play producer are showmen too; but they exploit what is already made. The showmen of Hollywood control the making – and thereby degrade it. For the basic art of motion pictures is the screenplay; it is fundamental, without it there is nothing. Everything derives from the screenplay, and most of that which derives is an applied skill which, however adept, is artistically not in the same class with the creation of a screenplay. But in Hollywood the screenplay in written by a salaried writer under the supervision of a producer — that is to say, by an employee without power or decision over the uses of his own craft, without ownership of it, and, however extravagantly paid, almost without honor for it.
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