With just five features in 13 years, Wes Anderson has established himself as the most influential American filmmaker of the post-Baby Boom generation. Supremely confident in his knowledge of film history and technique, he’s a classic example of the sort of filmmaker that the Cahiers du cinéma critics labeled an auteur—an artist who imprints his personality and preoccupations on each work so strongly that, whatever the contributions of his collaborators, he deserves to be considered the primary author of the film. This series examines some of Anderson’s many cinematic influences and his attempt to meld them into a striking, uniquely personal sensibility.
Great series of videos, worth checking out for any fan. Posting just the first video, the rest are through this page here.
Got back late last night/early this morning from Auckland having caught a few films at the World Cinema Festival. Coppola’s Youth Without Youth is a prime example of the cop out critique of saying “it looked great” without having anything else nice to say about it.
JCVD was surprisingly good. I say surprisingly good, even though I’ve heard plenty of good things about it, I’d not known in what context ‘good’ actually meant. But it’s a good film, not a masterpiece, but a damn film vehicle for Van Damme and who the hell knew he could act?
Genius Party Beyond was mildy disappointing. The first Genius Party is pretty damn awesome, displaying the multiple angles and methods of animation and storytelling. This follow up compilation was more about style than story. In saying that, there are some wicked animations going on in some of the shorts, but it’s not something I’d be beating down peoples heads to go see immediately.
Meanwhile 48 Hours looms closer and closer. After the weekend of filming 48 Seconds stuff and testing out the equipment, we’re feeling pretty confident and the biggest bonus of all is the fact that we’ve now got a damn decent mic that’s (fingers crossed) won’t crap out on us at the last minute, unlike issues we’ve had with sound every other year. Not much is being revealed about the competition this year and that’s just fine with me. It’s sure gonna be an interesting one this year.
While I await the viewing of Geinus Party Beyond, a collection of anime shorts, I’ve discovered Ani*Kuri15, an awesome collection of 15 one minute anime shorts by an impressive line up of directors made for the NHK channel.
While the official website that hosted them seems to be down at the moment, you can find these videos on youtube quite easily, though almost all of them don’t have english subtitles. But that doesn’t matter much, cause these videos are in the hands of some damn fine directors. Here’s a couple of my favourites…
A Gathering of Cat by Makoto Shinkai. I love this guy’s films, check out Voices of a Distant Star and Places Promised in Our Early Years if you can.
Invasion from Space – Hiroshi’s Castle by Shōjirō Nishimi. This guys a newcomer, but he was involved in the awesome Tekkonkinkreet and basically this short is a helluva lot of fun.
Project Omega by Shōji Kawamori. From the creator of one of my favourites The Visions of Escaflowne, this one is just fun.
Good Morning by Satoshi Kon. By far one of the best anime directors out there and one of my personal favourite filmmakers of all, this short is just… great.
Not content with just the robots taking over the planet, I’ve been reading up a lot of articles on the big bang theory and the ultimate fate of the universe, which, though long after the robots have enslaved our planet, stripped it of all its resources and took to the stars, is the theory that the universe is actually expanding at an accelerating rate and eventually will be nothing but redshift to radiation. Gotta love science.
Anyway, been pretty shit still at keeping this constantly updated, which I still maintain is a robot conspiracy. Caught up with some friends over the weekend and managed to stay conscious through the most of a friend’s Samurai movie marathon and got to watch a few films that I’ve been meaning to watch for a long time. In particular is Hari-Kiri by Masaki Kobayashi which was just great and something I’ve got to get my own copy of sometime. Wonderful lighting and intense performances from all, check out his other film Kwaidan if you can sometime.
Also caught Watchmen which left me at a loss for an opinion for a few days and even now I’m not as close to deciding if I liked it or hated it. On one hand, the adaptation of the comic in terms of visuals and dialogue have been done brilliantly well and the film looks amazing and lots of the scenes reminded me of bits exactly in the books, on the other hand, that’s almost just saying that comics are nothing but movies that don’t move and I think that’s the growing attitude towards graphic novels which is stupid. While this worked in Sin City and 300 cause there was this macho attitude towards everything in the comics and that attitude was there on screen, Watchmen the comic is full of nuances and subtext and themes that just weren’t there on the screen. It was like a hollow doppleganger or carbon copy of the general plot and no soul behind it.
In saying all that actually, I think I’m getting closer to not hating Watchmen. Other gripes I had were that the pacing of the film was very off, the soundtrack (apart from the wonderful use of Dylan in the opening credits) was awful, the changed ending was terrible, most of the action scenes were boring and unnecessary and what the hell was up with Nixon’s nose? It was hard to pay attention to anything else when the damn thing was on screen.
I wanted to like the movie, I really did, and I admire Snyder for “staying true” to the comics, but in doing so, he’s just made a hollow moving picture version that made me want to go back to the comic and stay there.
Really, I should have posted this semi-review separately, but meh. Here’s a version of Watchmen I’m certainly glad they never did and yet strangely would have still watched it anyway…
Can’t post anything properly today. Drank too much last night.
A two faced kitten was born in Australia and I immediately thought of Transmetropolitan. Should really send the link to Warren Ellis, reckon he’d dig it.
Starting to get a little movied out, but still enjoying it. Mind Game is practically at the top of my list of films seen at this festival and the Science of Sleep is pretty damn close behind. I think i can afford to make it to maybe one or two more films, but that’d be about it for this year.
Thats the one great thing living up here in Auckland. Down in Hamilton, during every film festival season, I’d make a trip to Auckland to get me a copy of the festival booklets and work out how the hell I’m going to see what I want to see in either city during whenever. It’s just nice to have them all in one city for a change.
Anyway, been coming up wiht multiple ideas for short films to be made for the end of year, but have yet to stick to one I actually like and is worth doing in a student film enviorment. I’ll bet our screenwriting lecturer is enjoying recieving pages after pages of different treatments from me, as I’ve simply shut off my filter in handing her stuff and I’ll just drop off whatever now. Gave her five treatments on Friday and I have a feeling I’ve got four more for her tomorrow.
Anyway, because ninjas are cool here is a trailer for one kick arse ninja movie coming up… well… if your into that and turtles… here.
But a more worthwhile trailer to download is Aranofsky’s new film The Fountain to be downloaded here.