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If Saul Bass Designed the Star Wars Credits

Christopher Campbell
By Christopher Campbell posted 1 year ago
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Star Wars may have the most famous opening title sequence in film history, but in terms of influence it’s got nothing on the work of Saul Bass. He’s the brilliant graphic designer who gave us the animated credits for Hitchcock’s Vertigo, North by Northwest and Psycho and Scorsese’s Casino, Cape Fear, The Age of Innocence and Goodfellas and most of Otto Preminger’s work, including Exodus, Anatomy of a Murder and The Man With the Golden Arm. You’ve also seen his work at the beginning of West Side Story and Alien and Big and The Seven Year Itch and Spartacus.

But what if he had designed the opening credits to Star Wars? Well, it might have looked something like this video, which was created for a school project. Interesting, yes. Creative, yes. Entertaining, yes. Memorable, no. It just goes to show how significant some credit sequences can be, because this is hardly appropriate for George Lucas’ film. And I don’t just mean because the music is all wrong. If this student wanted to go with a jazz score for the titles, he should have gone with a jazz cover of the Star Wars theme. And if he wanted something more upbeat, he could have used a jazz cover of the Cantina Band song (both covers can be heard on this album).

If I was this guy’s professor, I’d give him a B+, mostly for effort and the fact that I love the lazer blasts and the zoom in on the Death Star at the end. For the A, though, he’d need to resubmit with something more suitable than a Buddy Rich soundtrack.

[via Fraktastic]

Cinema Ouroboros — Watching the Detectives Trailer

Christopher Campbell
By Christopher Campbell posted 1 year ago
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Let’s face it, fellow film bloggers, we don’t have many readers who don’t have film blogs of their own. The world of cinephilia is quite cannibalistic, and we need each other to survive. However, we don’t just feed on ourselves. We also are part of an extended food chain that includes filmmakers, many of whom nowadays are also or were once cinephiles themselves. These filmmakers like to borrow, pay homage and reference movies of the past more than they like to advance the craft forward with distinct and/or innovative style. But admit it, you sometimes like the movie references, at least if you like the movie being referenced. And maybe sometimes your judgment is a little clouded by all those obscure bits that you feel cool for having gotten.

Paul Soter’s Watching the Detectives looks like yet another movie that only us cinephiles are made to enjoy, which is unfortunate since many of us are too pretentious to admit that we’d enjoy just any movie about a fellow movie geek working at a video store and commenting on the merits of City of Lost Children and the faults of Casino (see Clip 1) to our customers — aren’t most of us just like video store employees who own computers and can (sometimes) write well? Watching the Detectives could be something of a light companion piece to Michel Gondry’s upcoming Be Kind Rewind; both films should in theory have little relevance to people unfamiliar with their references to movie-geek favorites. But are there enough of us movie geeks out there to make these films worth their effort?

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