A look at the shopping-mall car chase from The Blues Brothers, including some of the recent history of the Dixie Square Shopping Mall.
Audio Commentary: Persona (Bergman, 1966)
A look at a crucial “dream sequence” from Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, drawing on ideas in the book Mindscreen by Bruce Kawin.
Audio Commentary: Prospero’s Books (Greenaway, 1991)
A look at the opening credits sequence of Prospero’s Books, including some of the paintings that inspired director Peter Greenaway’s visuals.
Audio Commentary: Drunken Master 2 (Lau, 1994)
A look at a fight sequence from Drunken Master 2, including a brief comparison of the original Hong Kong audio and the dubbed, re-scored, and re-foleyed U.S. release version.
Audio Commentary: Se7en (Fincher, 1995)
A look at the opening titles sequence for Se7en; some of the work by Joel-Peter Witkin, Stan Brakhage, and Norman McLaren that inspired it; and the Mark Romanek music video for “Closer,” which served, in a remixed version, as the movie’s theme song.
Link Dump #5: W., Stars, Vampire Weekend, and Criterion Blu-Ray
W., un film de Oliver Stone
If this trailer (for Oliver Stone’s W.) were just a joke, it would be a great joke. We’ll see what happens with the movie.
Music Video: Stars/”Bitches in Tokyo”
“This is what you’re worried about: something called The New York Dolls.”
Music Video: Vampire Weekend/”Oxford Comma”
It’s probably too soon for the Wes Anderson homage videos, but whatever.
Criterion Collection, High-Definition Division
Speaking of Wes Anderson, The Criterion Collection has just announced details on its November (delayed from October) opening salvo of Blu-ray Disc releases, and it’s a doozy. Bottle Rocket
. Chungking Express. (Swoon.) The Third Man
. The Man Who Fell to Earth
. And The Last Emperor
. Five solid selections from five great directors — and two films (the one with Faye Wong and the one with Orson Welles) that I absolutely adore. I am so there.
Link Dump #4
How desperate does Hollywood have to be to vandalize its own movies?. According to the usually reliable projectionist crowd over at Film-Tech.com, Deluxe sent out film prints of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull that had the audio tracks deliberately fucked up as part of some monumentally misguided plan to catch pirates down the line by tracing the audio glitches in their pirated recordings. (The audio tracks of bootlegged movies are often of much higher quality than the video, since pirates have figured out how to tap directly into theatrical sound systems.) The mob at boingboing reports what seems like a high occurrence of anecdotes about screenings of the film where the soundtrack fell back to analog — or dropped out entirely. If this is true, it’s a massive “fuck you” to moviegoers, much worse than those annoying orange dots that serve the same supposed anti-piracy function. My local theaters have a hard enough time maintaining the integrity of picture and sound without the distributors making their lives even more difficult. Just unbelievable. (Via Movie City News.)
Link Dump #4
I can only hope that reports of Mike D’Angelo’s death are, once again, greatly exaggerated. Even if they come from Mike D’Angelo himself.
Not movie-related, but kinda fascinating, I’d think, for content geeks of any stripe: A Usenet-based team of music obsessives — known, apparently, as The Whitburn Project — has been not only working on creating a huge (illegal) archive of post-1890 pop songs, but also maintaining a huge spreadsheet database of song data, including song length, BPM, label, and more. Andy Baio (Waxy.org) is running the numbers. Today, Baio charts average song duration over time, but promises more to come.
Zhang Ziyi appears in a Mercedes commercial. In China.
Check out this slideshow: Liberty City vs. New York City. What’s especially interesting is, at low resolution, it’s sometimes hard to tell the live-action shots from the videogame grabs.
From the Flickr comments on this image: “Last night I blew up a cab with my rocket launcher here. Bodies were everywhere.”