Lists of movies within movies are fairly common on the internet, enough that I now realize I need to finally see Bowfinger simply because I’ve counted about a million list makers in love with something titled “Chubby Rain.” And the lists are likely to keep on coming thanks to this week’s hot release, Tropic Thunder, which actually features two movies within (the Vietnam War film “Tropic Thunder” and the festival-winning making-of documentary “Rain of Madness”), as well as the upcoming How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, which has spawned a popular fake movie trailer for an NC-17 film titled “Mother Theresa: The Making of a Saint” (previewed above). Yet until someone makes a Wikipedia page for “List of Fictional Films,” these blogged and forumed lists are necessary to keep us movie fans remembering those non-existent movies we wish existed.

Narrowing down to ten seemed to be difficult — fictional films have been at least nominally been created for tons of films about filmmaking, otherwise reflexive films, sketch comedies, spoofs, etc. — until I realized that a lot of these films within films are appropriately nominal or trailer- or clip-sized gags and would in reality be terrible (imagine actually watching the entirety of “Asses of Fire” from South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut). Even “Je Vous Présente Paméla” (”Meet Pamela”) from Day for Night and the sci-fi film being made in 8½ would probably be major disappointments in actuality if you expected from them the work of Truffaut and Fellini, respectively.

So, I went mostly with fictional films that would probably be bad, but would at least be amusingly bad — though I purposefully avoided fictional porns, including those from Boogie Nights and The Big Lebowski, of which there are literally thousands:

…Read more

• The Tribeca Film Festival continues its mission to wow us with quantity over discovery by booking a full sidebar of festival leftovers like Savage Grace (which will have been on the festival circuit for about 50 weeks by the time it hits lower Manhattan courtesy of Robert DeNiro and American Express) and The Wackness (which will make its multiplex debut via Sony Classics a month or two after its Tribeca screening). But, as always, the festival’s Restored and Rediscovered program offers hope, including screenings of new prints of Fellini’s Toby Dammit, and Curtis Harrington’s Cat People–inspired, young-Dennis Hopper-starring Night Tide.
• While we’re on the topic of festival exports: Nanette Burstein’s American Teen will open the 2008 edition of Sundance at BAM on May 29.
• Would it even be news that a new Patrick Swayze movie is having its world premiere in Austria, if Swayze’s battle with cancer wasn’t currently grade-A tabloid grist, and if his health didn’t preclude his attendance? Yes––but only because Uwe Boll is distributing the movie.

• Suddenly, G.I. Joe became the Summer 2009 movie to avoid — not intentionally, of course, but we all know Sienna Miller, like her ex- Jude Law, is a bit of a box office kiss of death. Yet, Paramount has cast her as “the female lead” anyway. Don’t think she’ll be playing good-girl “Scarlett”, either; Miller’s character is apparently Baroness, the black-leather-clad femme fatale who works for COBRA.
• Two more high-profile films have been delayed thanks to the WGA strike. This time it’s Mira Nair’s Shantaram, which is being produced by and is to star Johnny Depp, and the next Rob Marshall musical, Nine, which is partially based on Fellini’s 8 1/2. These films join previously postponed Angels & Demons and Pinkville. At least strike talks are set to take place next week.
• John Singleton will never get another shot at Oscar with this kind of thinking, but at least he’ll have the honor of giving us yet another alien-invades-a-small-town movie.
• I may be the only one, but I am indeed looking forward to Final Destination 4, which is a little late in being the 3-D installment. Typically, and obviously, they make more sense as the third in a series. Whatever, as long as they have cooler kills than #3, and not just because they look neat with the technology. Yeah, I’m probably thinking too highly of the franchise. I don’t care.

I’m finishing up an entry this morning on David Fincher’s music videos for the Close-Up Blogathon. While I’m working on that, here’s a round-up of some of my favorite entries from other bloggers thus-far. There’s a full list of all entries at The House Next Door, which you should definitely check out–I don’t know how it happens, but somehow some of these blogathons manage to attract a median level of insight and writing that’s miles ahead of the average film journal or magazine.

• Hannah Frank on the problem of the close-up in animation: “[A]nimation confounds the whole notion of this blog-a-thon. There’s just not anything to be close to. And worse, when an animated film tries to get close, when it copies the patter of its live-action counterpart, it feels static and dull.”
• “I am in love with Cabiria, a woman who does not exist,” Steven Boone confesses. “How did this happen?” He offers a list of “clues.” Number 4: “Whenever Fellini wants to give us a cheat-sheet glimpse into Cabiria’s heart, he goes to a medium close-up. Only at the very end does he unleash one of the deadliest tight close-ups in cinema.”
• “In the Godardian spirit of making a movie as a critique/analysis of other movies,” Jim Emerson offers “a free-association visual essay/commentary on close-ups (with inserts, jump cuts, switchbacks, flashbacks, flash-forwards…) that got synapses firing in my brain as I flipped through shots in my memory — and my DVD collection.” Thanks to Jim for posting a Marlene Dietrich screencap that I’m going to use in my own Blogathon entry.
• Maul of America looks at a rare (for Hitchcock) bit of “gratuitous gore” in The Birds, and Camille Paglia’s theory that the film ultimately illustrates “a war between nature and culture, with the irrational and primitive vanquishing human illusions.”

Todd Haynes. photo by Karina Longworth.

At Tuesday’s press conference following the press and industry screening of I’m Not There, writer/director Todd Haynes talked about referencing Godard and Fellini (but not, he insists, Don’t Look Back), the ability of film to collapse time, and why he chose to cast a woman and a black child to represent two of the six disparate facets of Bob Dylan’s life. We have audio from the press conference after the jump; to skip to a specific section of the 28-minute clip, see these handy show notes:

00:01: Getting Bob Dylan’s music and life rights
04:03: Why six Dylans?
04:49: Working in different film stocks/formats
05:41: Dylan didn’t have approval of details
06:29: The collapse of time, in the film and in Dylan’s work
09:21: On breaking free of the constraints of the biopic
11:23: Casting
12:51: Don’t say Don’t Look Back
16:05: References to other films
21:41: Fitting the strands of the story together
23:48: Why have Dylan played by a woman?
25:45: Portraying Dylan’s cultural influences, and Dylan-as-wannabe

…Read more