As we crack open fresh calendars for a new year, we’re treated to a predictable rash of blog posts: 2009 technology predictions. I’ve read a number of these, and prognostications about Microsoft buying Yahoo make me want to light my laptop on fire just to cure the boredom. As an anecdote to lame, ‘what’s the next Twitter?’-style tech prediction lists, I’ve decided to make a list 2009 tech predictions entirely inspired by movies.
2008 was the year in which widely available real-world gadgets were just as good as what James Bond had. Sure, Daniel Craig kicked some ass in Quantum of Solace, but his only real piece of tech was a phone with a camera and GPS! (Hope you got a good texting plan with that, James.) I predict this trend will continue in 2009. We’ll see even more real-world gadgets that used to be the sole domain of Hollywood special effects gurus. Sure, some of these technologies will require minor miracles to become a reality in the coming year, but others are closer than you think.
Strength-Enhancing Exoskeleton Armor
In Iron Man, Tony Stark creates a crude, internally-powered suit of armor to escape his terrorist captors. Once he’s safely at home in his billion-dollar laboratory, he hones the suit into a golden ass-kicking machine, and becomes Iron Man. This story isn’t that far from the truth. Rather than a single billionaire playboy, teams of research scientists are developing robotic suits that significantly increase the wearer’s strength. And the end goal is goal is the same: beating the hell out of terrorists. Almost five years ago, UC Berkley researchers announced a DARPA-funded project called BLEEX, the Berkley Lower Extremity Exoskeleton (pictured at left). If you’re thinking that giant backpack is full of the machinery that runs the thing, you’re wrong. That’s the 70 lbs. pack the wearer can hardly feel, thanks to his robot legs. Assuming secret military technology is always ahead of publicized military technology, and considering that the BLEEX is five years old, I think it’s safe to say that in 2009 President Obama will personally don an Iron Man suit and kill Osama bin Laden.
This week awards season got underway in earnest, we learned lineup details on Berlin and Rotterdam, and the long, cold ass kicking that is Sundance began. See you next week!
Two halfsie holiday weeks in one Week in Review! From the final days of recession gluttony to the cold dawn of 2009, we learned about charismatic Nazis, twisted nativities,Revolutionary Road, The Spirit, Chernenko-sploitation, and the most misunderstood movies of the past twelve months. Happy Everything!!!
It’s been more than 100 years since the Philadelphia Quakers changed their name to the Philadelphia Philadelphians, which was thankfully shortened to “Phillies” very quickly, probably by printers who were afraid of using up all of their ‘P’s in the printing press. Since being founded in 1883, they’ve been one of the most tenacious teams in baseball, winning six pennants, and the World Series in 1980. In fact, in all of American sports (not just baseball), the Phillies are the team that’s been in one city with one name for the longest time. They’re one game away from another World Series win tonight, despite being the Major League team with the most losses in history. We celebrate their scrappiness with a list of quintessential Philadelphia movies. Check them out after the break.
Is Bruce Wayne, as John Carney wonders at Dealbreaker, “exactly the ‘better class of criminal’ that the Joker describes”? Spoileriffic analysis of Batman’s white-collar misdeeds follows.
Mike Jones weighs in on the sale of indieWIRE to SnagFilms. “Despite the owners’ (which included myself, to a very small extent) desire to sell under the right terms, indieWIRE seemed destined to be independent.” Buuut…”The difficult truth about being independent is that it’s mostly for the young.”
Glenn “Lists are Bullshit” Kenny offers 14 numbered thoughts on Mamma Mia!He begins by contemplating “the comingled semens of Pierce Brosnan, Stellan Skarsgard, and Colin Firth competing in the fallopian tubes of Meryl Streep”; he ends with the admission, “I kind of want to have sex with Christine Baranski.”
Surely you are going to see The Dark Knightthis weekend. Even if you already saw it at a preview screening last night/this morning, you’re probably geeky enough to be planning on seeing it again before Monday morning comes along. After all, Warner Bros. has dispersed a record amount of prints to a record amount of screens and the pundits are predicting a record box office gross for the weekend (never mind the fact that fellow new releases Mamma Mia!and Space Chimpsand other still-strong blockbusters Hellboy II, Hancockand Wall-Ewill be supposedly be assisting in this matter). It’s almost being forced to be a monumental event. So, yeah, you’re totally going. You probably even already bought tickets, since Fandango reports that advance tickets for TDK have been the fastest sell since Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (while writing this I received a new Fandango press release claiming they’re selling 10 TDK tickets per second today).
Wait, what? You say you’re skipping out on TDK this weekend? Not possible. Whatever your lame excuse, I have a rebuttal:
10. You Didn’t See Batman Begins- This should be a decent enough reason not to see TDK, except that apparently it’s not really necessary to see the previous installment. I’ve seen TDK called better than BB, I’ve seen it called The Godfather Part II of superhero movies and I’ve seen it called the Empire Strikes Backof the franchise. But more importantly, I’m pretty sure I read somewhere (or maybe I dreamed it) that TDK should be where Christopher Nolan’s take on the series begins. So just retrospectively consider BB a prequel.
This is it, the day we’ve been waiting for two full decades (or, at least, since we first heard it was happening back in December): the Huey Lewis plot song written specifically for the David Gordon Green-driected, Judd Apatow-produced stoner comedy Pineapple Express has hit the web! The Playlist first posted a clip of the song last night; today, Whitney at Pop Candy points to the full thing, available for streaming or download on MySpace.
It’s very much in classic Huey Lewis plot song mode, complete with gratuitous hand claps and sax solo. It’s not as directly narrative as, say, “Back in Time” (above), but it’s slightly more literally connected to the film than, like, “The Power of Love.” A sample from the chorus: “How did we get into this mess? Pineapple Express! Can’t deal with this stress! Totally gone, cause we’re on, Pineapple Express!” It is the best, and it is also totally the worst.
As we’ve discussed before, plot songs take the science of the source cue to a new level. After the jump, a brief, video-guided journey through plot song history. Let us know what we’ve left out.
Are you a supporter of gay marriage?
“I know nothing about it. I don’t follow that.” Why doesn’t it interest you?
“The same reason heterosexual marriage doesn’t seem to interest me.”
Amen, sister. One of the perks of being queer is that you’re not expected to engage in unnatural acts like high school proms and monogamy. So in honor of the hedonistic right to our own guilt-free, queer Mardi Gras, here are some subversive suggestions that will get you in the mood and take you back to that more innocent, less commercial “Over The Rainbow” time. …Read more
Roger Ebert, who underwent his third cancer-related surgery in January, has posted a letter on his web site announcing his intention to return to reviewing films for the Chicago Sun-Times after the 2008 installment of his Overlooked Film Festival. Ebert says that another operation would be required in order to restore his ability to speak, but he’s holding off for the time being. “I am still cancer-free, and not ready to think about more surgery at this time,” he writes, “I should be content with the abundance I have.”
According to TimeOut London, Pedro Almodovar will be blogging throughout the production of his next film, Broken Hugs. The blog will allegedly live here, but when I go to the page all I get is a sea of blackness.
Chris Thilk approves of the Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull SuperPoke Facebook application, and he explains why: “I would be willing to bet there were more than a few people saying the studio needed to build their own “Whip Your Friends” application. But instead they decided to add functionality to an existing one, one that has a decent adoption rate already.”
At Twitch, Peter Martin offers a list that looks like it has the potential to become a giant meme: his Top 5 Experiences with New Cinema, or “the initial excursions into unexplored territory, the tentative expanding of boundaries and possibilities and new ways of looking at the world, all things that came about only when I broke down barriers I had set for myself and sampled various types of new cinema.”
The Tisch Film Review alerts us to Jean Eustache’s Circle, a weekly series at New York’s French Institute/Alliance Francaise beginning April 1. “Folks, this is essential viewing,” says Alex Ross Perry.
Oh, the irony: this Blue Velvet inspired cake looks bloody, but it’s totally vegan. It makes me want to sponsor a David Lynch Bake-Off.
Funny: The 10 Star Wars Toys that Unintentionally Look Like Other Celebrities, via BoingBoing. Number 6: Slave Leia/Christian Bale. “To be fair, Carrie Fisher was not the daintiest of leading ladies, and Christian Bale is not the most rugged of leading men, so the fact that their action figures would kind of look alike isn’t so surprising. The fact that we’ve seen Bale naked and not Fisher? Not so much surprising as gravely disappointing.”
The news that Mathieu Amalric, star of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, has been cast as the next Bond villain may not be such a great sign for Bond 22. Nothing against Amalric––in fact, just the opposite: the best actors have a tendency to show up in the worst Bond films. Here’s five bits of evidence to support that thesis; tell us what we’ve missed/why we’re wrong in the comments.
1) Max Von Sydow, Never Say Never Again
A lot of 007 purists barely acknowledge this “unofficial” Bond film, which was made outside the auspices of the Ian Fleming-sanctioned production company behind the rest of the franchise. But we have to include Von Sydow on this list, as the actor, who coincidentally plays the father of Amalric’s character in Diving Bell, was the source of an initial rumor that Almaric would be taking on the role of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, played by Sydow himself in Never.
Never came out the same year as Octopussy, but made less money; it’s essentially a rehash of the far-superior Thunderball. Sean Connery came back to play Bond after a 12 year hiatus, whilst Von Sydow takes over the recurring character of Blofeld, head of the villainous SPECTRE, previously played by Donald Pleasance, Telly Savalas and others. Wikipedia has a chart comparing the various Blofelds across the seven films in which they appear, which pegs the Pleasance and Savalas incarnations as a clear inspiration for Dr. Evil. Von Sydow’s characterization of Blofeld broke from that mold, and reactions were/are mixed. At Not Coming to a Theater Near You, Leo Goldsmith mocked Von Sydow’s “Dracula accent and silly haircut,” but The Bond Film Informant praises Von Sydow for making Blofeld “cool, calm and bearded.”
So, like father like fictional son? Somehow I can see Amalric rocking the “cool, calm and bearded” thing a little more easily than the “creepily impetuous Siamese cat-careeser” thing, but we shall see.
I have a friend who constantly needles me for my inappropriate crush on Michael Cera. He says the problem is not that the star of Superbad and Juno is almost a decade younger than me–the problem, is that apparently every late-20-something girl in New York has a crush on Michael Cera, and they all seem to get a kick out of talking about how inappropriate it is, and frankly, when it comes to inappropriate crushes, he expects me to have slightly more idiosyncratic tastes. I thought he was full of it, on all of the above…until I saw this.
I saw Ray Tintori’s short Death to the Tinman at three festivals in 2007, and it seemed to be a huge hit with audiences at each one. At Vulture, Bilge Ebiri embeds Tintori’s previous short, the apocalyptic Jettison Your Loved Ones.
Is David Fincher’s next film Curiously related to Mork & Mindy? Kevin Kelly at i09 investigates.
More lists: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days makes the top of David Hudson’s Best of 2007 list. The GreenCine Daily master blogger also gives shout-outs to Silver Jew,The Pervert’s Guide to the Cinema, and Hannah Takes the Stairs. And AJ Schnack names his 10 favorite non-fiction films of the year (plus 10 runners-up).
In lieu of a more traditional 2007 Top Ten, Variety has taken the conspicuously bloggy tactic of presenting the same information with a negative spin, publishing their picks for the Top Ten Things That Didn’t Happen over the course of the last 12 months. Nice idea in theory maybe, but in practice, it’s sort of an exercise in existential futility. Item #2 is “The WGA would keep working through the end of the year.” Are we sure that didn’t happen more than any of the eight things below it that didn’t happen? If something doesn’t happen in a forest, can Variety hear it? Etc. What a conversation starter!
Meanwhile, the WGA strike took the top spot on the American Film Institute’s list of things that *did* happen in 2007; its happening was deemed more than Iraq movies or the iPhone. And finally, to make the triumvirate of meaningless distinctions complete, The Hollywood Reporter has declared “Technology” to have been “the biggest Hollywood story in 2007.”
Above: Jim Emerson’s Top Ten of 2007, presented as a tribute to both the dearly departed Michelangelo Antonioni, and the striking writers.
“After I saw Cabaret my life was never same. I wanted to move away from home, and become Sally Bowles.” AMC’s Future of Classic blog asks burlesque dancers to name their favorite classic films.
Mike Jones at The Circuit has named Telluride the Best Film Festival of 2007. An example of the fest’s power: “Before it won Venice, Redacted was despised at Telluride. Before it was everyone’s sweetheart, Juno was loved at Telluride. Similar to the best of Telluride’s previous years, the early talk forecast the two films’ trajectories.”
Click here to watch the entirety of last Friday’s episode of Charlie Rose featuring Paul Thomas Anderson and Daniel Day Lewis, which I mentioned near the end of this post. Via The Playlist.
indieWIRE has posted the Top Ten lists of 20-something bloggers, filmmakers and industry types, including contributions from Matt Dentler, Aaron Katz, Michael Tully and yours truly. We’ll have more on the First Annual Boxing Helena Award in next week’s podcast.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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Roger Ebert, who underwent his third cancer-related surgery in January, has posted 
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I have a friend who constantly needles me for my inappropriate crush on Michael Cera. He says the problem is not that the star of Superbad and Juno is almost a decade younger than me–the problem, is that apparently every late-20-something girl in New York has a crush on Michael Cera, and they all seem to get a kick out of talking about how inappropriate it is, and frankly, when it comes to inappropriate crushes, he expects me to have slightly more idiosyncratic tastes. I thought he was full of it, on all of the above…until I saw 
In lieu of a more traditional 2007 Top Ten, Variety has taken the conspicuously bloggy tactic of presenting the same information with a negative spin, publishing their picks for the 
