Some watch the Super Bowl for just the commercials. Others watch films for the title designs. Title sequences begin and end every movie. They can be “engaging or wildly entertaining … or simply drop dead beautiful.” They can “ooze with visual poetry and sophisticated imagery.” And they can put the audience in the right mood for the movie, or close it in the right way. The ins-and-outs of title design get lovingly covered by a website called Forget the Films, Watch the Titles, and today we’re featuring the closing moments of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, a 2004 black humor film. This five minute animated sequence is the work of Jamie Caliri, a director with a self-described passion for visual story telling. Not too long ago, we highlighted the animation concepts he developed for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. And, here, Caliri sits down for an interview with Forget the Films, Watch the Titles and talks about his artful approach to title design…
Danny Boyle’s Frankenstein Live at a Cinema Near You
Here’s the trailer for the play Frankenstein, which opens in London at the National Theater this Thursday. Two intriguing points: 1.) This production is helmed by Danny Boyle, the Oscar-winning director behind Slumdog Milionaire, 127 Hours, and the appropriately terrifying zombie movie 28 Days Later. 2.) Boyle’s Frankenstein is part of the National Theater Live program – now in its second season – and will be simulcast live in hundreds of movie theaters all over the world. There are 12 participating venues in California alone – click here to find out if there’s one near you.
For a pre-screening refresher, you can download Mary Shelley’s classic novel for free at Project Gutenberg, or as a free audiobook at LibriVox. And whatever you do, don’t miss this video of the gorgeous 1934 illustrated edition, with woodcuts by the American artist Lynd Ward.
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Frankenstein Hits the Silver Screen (1910)
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.
Mark Twain Lives (in Animation)
Taking a page from the RSA playbook, the New York Public Library has uploaded to its YouTube Channel a series of illustrated talks. John Waters, Jay‑Z, Werner Herzog – they’re all there. And so too is Mark Twain “reading” from his own work – work that was first published in 2009 within a volume called Who is Mark Twain?. Flash Rosenberg provides the art (see her work on Vimeo); John Lithgow does the voice.…
New David Foster Wallace Story Appears in The New Yorker
A quick heads up: The March 7 edition of The New Yorker magazine features a previously unpublished story by David Foster Wallace, the celebrated American author who committed suicide back in 2008. The story, “Backbone,” begins:
Every whole person has ambitions, objectives, initiatives, goals. This one particular boy’s goal was to be able to press his lips to every square inch of his own body.
His arms to the shoulders and most of his legs beneath the knee were child’s play. After these areas of his body, however, the difficulty increased with the abruptness of a coastal shelf. The boy came to understand that unimaginable challenges lay ahead of him. He was six.
The full story appears on The New Yorker website. And perhaps it will whet your appetite for a bigger literary event. On April 15th, Wallace’s final (and still not quite complete) novel, ‘The Pale King’, will be published. You can already reserve your copy on Amazon here. Thanks to @sheerly for the tip…
Free Interactive Comic Book: Poe’s “Pit and the Pendulum”
First came the stop motion film. Now comes the interactive digital comic book that gives you a modern take on Edgar Allan Poe’s classic horror story, “The Pit and the Pendulum.” (Find Poe’s original text here or listen in audio here.) The digital Pit and the Pendulum comic book is the brainchild of Marc Lougee and Susan Ma, who have layered informative links, QR codes and social media into their visual design, adding a new measure of interactivity to the traditional comic book experience. To get the most out of the experience, you will need to download a good PDF reader and QR code reader. Find those resources here. And, on a related note, don’t forget to watch another favorite of ours: the 1953 animated film version of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” narrated by James Mason. A classic!
Tim O’Brien & Tobias Wolff Talk “Writing and War”
Last month, two award-winning writers and Vietnam veterans – Tim O’Brien and Tobias Wolff – met at Stanford University to talk about war and literature, a tradition that has given us Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, and Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. O’Brien has confronted war in two previous works, If I Die in a Combat Zone and Going After Cacciato. But he’s best known for The Things They Carried, a collection of short stories that gives literary expression to the Vietnam experience, and that’s now a staple of high school and college literature courses. As for Tobias Wolff, his memoir recounting his disillusioning experience as a soldier in Vietnam – In Pharaoh’s Army – was a National Book Award finalist, ranking up there with This Boy’s Life and Old School. Their wide-ranging conversation runs 80 minutes…
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay: Animation Concepts
Michael Chabon published The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay in 2000, and the next year it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The film version of the novel has been locked in “development hell” for a good decade now. (The producer Scott Rudin has a reputation for optioning high-profile novels and sitting on them for a long time; he also holds the film rights to Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections.) Anyway, somewhere in the development process, the director Jamie Caliri was asked to explore animation concepts, and here’s what he came up with: a fun intertwining of live action and animation.
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Norman Mailer & Gore Vidal Feud on The Dick Cavett Show
Another chapter from America’s long history of incivility. Today, we rewind the videotape to December 1971, when Gore Vidal (already known for his televised spat with William F. Buckley) got into a verbal brawl with the always mercurial (and, on this occasion, sauced) novelist Norman Mailer. What the television audience sees is just the tip of the iceberg. Back in the greenroom, Mailer actually headbutted Vidal, taking revenge for a negative review that Vidal published in the New York Review of Books that previous summer. (Slate has more on this.) Cavett navigated the whole scene rather remarkably, as you’ll see. But still, almost 40 years later, he mulls over the difficulty of this one interview (and here again), even though many others (take for example this bit with Sly Stone) were no small challenge…
Related Content:
Norman Mailer & Marshall McLuhan Debate the Electronic Age
Mailer on the Ali-Foreman Classic
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