Elokuvallisia huomioita maailmalta 25.01.2013 – 26.01.2013

Arvostelu: Zero Dark Thirty jahtaa Osama bin Ladenia kunnianhimoisesti

Mistä puhumme, kun puhumme Zero Dark Thirtystä? Trilleristä, jossa yhden naisen määrätietoisuus (jääräpäisyys?) päihittää sekä Yhdysvaltain tiedustelupalvelu CIA:n että maailman etsityimmän terroristin? Vai fiktioelokuvasta, joka käyttää tositapahtumia keppihevosena ja lisämausteena silloin kun se sille sopii ja lipsuu kaidalta polulta silloin kun sitä on liian hankala seurata? Näiden kahden elokuvan erottaminen toisistaan on lähes mahdotonta, mutta yritetään nyt kuitenkin.

Elokuvallisia huomioita maailmalta 21.01.2013 – 23.01.2013

  • Greg’s wonderful piece on the downsides (and up-) of online film writing –  One, I wouldn’t want to not converse with the online community of film lovers and friends I’ve discovered in this time and two, I’ve never learned more about the movies than I have in the last five years.  Before that, it was all isolated knowledge that seemed pretty impressive in a room of people who didn’t spend every waking moment thinking about, reading about and talking about cinema.  But once I got online, I realized I was a novice.  Hell, I realized we all were and if we didn’t learn from each other, no one else was ever going to fill us in on the 99 percent of film history ignored by the film history books.
  • ’Bored to Death’ Feature Film in Development at HBO –
  • David Thomson: How old Cary Grant? – The comparison of young and old, the stretching over 50 years, is one of the most touching things in Michael Haneke’s film Amour. If you’re 18 and uneducated about movies, the film will still affect you. But if, say, you’re 70, it has an extra resonance. It’s the story of an elderly couple, still married, still in love, granted the minor irritations that come with habit and endurance and being old. One of them falls ill. That’s the whole story.

Elokuvallisia huomioita maailmalta 17.01.2013 – 20.01.2013

  • John Woo on Hard Boiled – Here the gunman gets shot in the legs, and there’s a lot of smoke in the corner of the frame. In action scenes I usually like lots of things happening at once—big plumes of smoke or fires burning, or something else. If there’s no smoke, sometimes I’ll use fireworks that shoot off lots of sparklers. I like to blow up everything and anything so, before we shot the gunfight scene, I walked around the whole restaurant looking for things to explode. If I saw stacks of papers on a desk we’d use that. Or maybe the tickets waiters used for their food orders. If we were close to the kitchen, I might ask, ‘How about blowing up a gas tank?’
  • Why did Netlfix pick up the tab for House of Cards? – But before the studio met with any of them it put out a feeler to Netflix, thinking that fast-growing service might bid for the rights to repeat the show after a television premiere. The Netflix chief content officer, Ted Sarandos, a fan of the original, did what Netflix executives tend to do: He looked at the data. He found that Mr. Spacey and Mr. Fincher’s films were pretty popular among subscribers to Netflix’s streaming service. So were the films and TV shows in the category Netflix called “political thrillers.” And if that wasn’t enough evidence that a “House of Cards” reboot would fare well, there was this: The DVDs of the original mini-series were popular among subscribers to the company’s DVD-by-mail service.
  • ShotOnWhat? Motion picture & television technical database –
  • Kylie Minogue returns to TV in black comedy drama on Sky Arts – The fuq's this, Guardian: "the diminutive star"?