[via]
Taught Bazin this week. Here are some other cinematic languages [evolved and unregenerate] I've been reading.
- Screw Top 10 lists. Brainiac reveals that the future of film is... Sabermetrics? "Sports Illustrated senior writer Joe Posnanski... introduces the concept of VOOB -- as in 'value over originating book.' It's a way to rank movie adaptations.... VOOB gives a ranking of how much better, or worse, the movie is than the book. He gives Social Network a VOOB of 29, while 21 get a -7."
- Let me hear your body talk. Hal Hartley on film and physicality: When we were making Trust, may cameraman Mike Spiller and I would ask ourselves, “In every image we make, what does the human body have to do with this picture? How does this picture gain in significance from the body in it?” Even in landscape shots, we were thinking of how to show towns – that particular Middle American kind of town – without having to get away from a human being. We might show someone walking by a bunch of power plant wires and fences and whatnot, simply to convey a sense of the landscape graphically, in juxtaposition to the human form.
- Cinema and sports collide. Chip Kelly, noted football coach and amateur script doctor, rewrites six movie classics. An excerpt: "Million Dollar Baby, 2004 Actual Ending: Clint Eastwood euthanizes Hillary Swank's paralyzed boxer in the hospital. Chip Kelly rewrite: Clint knows what's going to happen so he chokes her in the first thirty seconds of the film. Then he and Morgan Freeman go have a nice lunch at a place doing trivia. They win all the gift certificates and bar tabs and don't share them with anyone." [via the 'Fesser]
- Criterion producer Curtis Tsui, a man who once dubbed his Danger: Diabolik laser disc for me, plays Hausu. "House is a movie that, strangely enough, coincides with my first move out to New York around 97 or 98. I have something of a long history with it, I moved out here to go to school and a friend of mine was visiting from LA. ... we were obsessed with finding this movie. We trekked out to Kim’s Video out on Saint Mark’s Place, the late great Kim’s Video, and we found it on the shelves. This battered, 10th generation, unsubtitled VHS, but we were happy. We were definitely film buff enough to watch movies without subs.... I have to see these movies NOW and if they’re not subbed yet, it’s cool, I’ll watch them.... [T]o be able to work on a movie that actually dovetails with my first years here in New York is kind of great."
