Category: Movies

Are Children Sounding the Global-Warming Alarm?

Freakonomics co-author Stephen Dubner wonders.

How did this happen? How has such a sweeping, complex, controversial issue become such a pressing concern — not overnight, certainly, but very rapidly as of late?

One theory came to mind the other day when I was looking over a list of the most profitable worldwide movie releases of 2006. No. 1 on the list was Ice Age 2: The Meltdown, an animated — and apocalyptic — kids’ movie, which took in just over $1 billion at the box office. And as you can see here, the animated kids’ movie Happy Feet has also been huge, with over $350 million worldwide, and counting. While Happy Feet isn’t quite about global warming, it is about mankind’s disastrous overreach into nature. (In order to appreciate the reach of these kids’ movies, consider that Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, a global warming jeremiad, has done $42 million worldwide, a huge figure for a documentary but a drop in the bucket compared to the animated blockbusters.)

We all know how influential kids can be. Newspaper editors and TV producers and even politicians have kids, and when those kids start obsessing about something, it’s amazing how fast the parents do, too. Just look at anti-smoking education in the U.S. My kids are so thoroughly indoctrinated against smoking that if they see someone in an old movie smoking a cigarette, they look at me, horrified, as if they’ve just seen someone slit a puppy’s throat. Similarly, I wonder if children may have been the ones who were scared straight about global warming — and have gone nipping at their parents’ heels.

Of course, then, it wouldn’t be children sounding the alarm but producers of animated films sounding it. Whatever, just so someone is.

All the news that fits

Not to shill for The New York Times, but . . .

First, a best line from David Carr writing about Monday night’s Golden Globes:

“The Queen” might not have taken home gold for best picture, but its star, Helen Mirren, had enough hardware at the end of the night that she looked as if she’d spent time at Home Depot.

An article on some beautiful pencil and paper drawings by Monet.

David Leonhardt on the cost of a mistake:

For starters, $1.2 trillion would pay for an unprecedented public health campaign — a doubling of cancer research funding, treatment for every American whose diabetes or heart disease is now going unmanaged and a global immunization campaign to save millions of children’s lives.

Combined, the cost of running those programs for a decade wouldn’t use up even half our money pot. So we could then turn to poverty and education, starting with universal preschool for every 3- and 4-year-old child across the country. The city of New Orleans could also receive a huge increase in reconstruction funds.

The final big chunk of the money could go to national security. The recommendations of the 9/11 Commission that have not been put in place — better baggage and cargo screening, stronger measures against nuclear proliferation — could be enacted. Financing for the war in Afghanistan could be increased to beat back the Taliban’s recent gains, and a peacekeeping force could put a stop to the genocide in Darfur.

All that would be one way to spend $1.2 trillion. Here would be another:

The war in Iraq.

And Selena Roberts has an interesting assessment of Michelle Wie, though this one is behind the Times Select wall.

Dream Girls

Dreamgirls is a great film that even people who don’t like musicals may like. Jennifer Hudson, inexplicably winning the Golden Globe for “supporting” actress last night, is just remarkable — supporting, I don’t think so. The rest of the cast, including Eddie Murphy, Jamie Foxx, Danny Glover and Beyoncé Knowles, is terrific.

Longest sentence of the day, so far

“The movie, inspired by the real-life story of Diana Ross and the Supremes, is probably the first musical in 50 years to channel the extravagant spirit and smooth Technicolor glory of Vincente Minnelli — creator of such iconic films as “An American in Paris” — and yet it’s harnessed to a real, and realistic showbiz story about the rise of an aspiring African American girl group, in which the talented but hefty singer Effie Jennifer Hudson gets shoved out of the spotlight by her lover and manager, Curtis Jamie Foxx, to make way for Deena Beyoncé Knowles, the more attractive singer in the group who has broader crossover appeal.”

Rachel Abramowitz in the Los Angeles Times as reported by David Carr in The New York Times, who says, “In the spirit of the season, the Bagger is going to send Ms. Abramowitz a box of periods, so she won’t always have to use commas.”

Which are we, Pottersville or Bedford Falls?

In It’s A Wonderful Life George Bailey learns that if he’d never been born his hometown would have turned from Bedford Falls into Pottersville.

So what has America become in the 60 years since the Frank Capra movie?

{democracy:6}

You sit around here and you spin your little webs and you think the whole world revolves around you and your money! Well, it doesn’t, Mister Potter! In the—in the whole vast configuration of things, I’d say, you were nothing but a scurvy little spider!

Another Google feature

If you type the name of a current film into the Google search box, it will return, for example, as the top item:

Google Movie Link

The above is an image. Click on it to see the real thing. You can follow links to the trailer, reviews, and enter your zip code for show times near you.

How did we live before the internets?

If you’d bought $10 million worth of Google shares when they became available in 2004 — and kept them — you’d have $56.5 million in Google stock today.

Gone with the Wind

… premiered in Atlanta on this date 67 years ago.

Hattie McDaniel, who won a supporting-actress Oscar for her portrayal of Mammy, was not present in segregated Atlanta.

Martin Luther King, Jr., sang in the “negro boys choir” from his father’s church at the Gone With The Wind Ball the evening before the premiere.

The 2,000 tickets were $10 and up.

When the news of war is announced in the film, the audience in the theater rose to its feet with rebel yells.

Laurence Olivier reportedly proposed to Vivien Leigh on their flight from Atlanta to New York after the premiere. Their marriage lasted 20 years.

The Loew’s Grand Theater, where the premiere was shown, was destroyed by fire in 1978.

The film, however great as a motion picture, forever ruined America’s understanding of what the War of the Rebellion was all about.

Walt Disney

…died of lung cancer on this date in 1966. He was 65.

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The Walt Disney Family Museum provides in-depth background.

Was Walt frozen?

No researcher has discovered where this myth began, but it certainly is widespread. Quite the opposite, Walt’s daughter Diane recalls that her father spoke frequently about his desire to be cremated — and in fact he was. When Disney archivist Robert Tieman researched the issue, he discovered that the first attempts at freezing a person weren’t even discussed until after Walt’s death. In any case, the people who knew Walt and loved him never heard him utter a word about trying it out himself. What’s more, his family lingered around him for some time after his death. No white-smocked physicians rushed his body off to some kind of freezing chamber as would undoubtedly have been the case if he was being preserved.

List of Golden Globe Nominees

The New York Times has the complete list.

Here are the Golden Globe nominees for films:

Picture, Drama: “Babel,” “Bobby,” “The Departed,” “Little Children,” “The Queen”

Picture, Musical or Comedy: “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” “The Devil Wears Prada,” “Dreamgirls,” “Little Miss Sunshine,” “Thank You for Smoking”

Dreamgirls

Do you think Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers enjoyed Dreamgirls?

This baby dazzles like nothing else anywhere. Starting with its dream cast, led by Jamie Foxx and Beyoncé, Dreamgirls is a movie that has everything: a blazing new star in Jennifer Hudson, a riveting, revitalized Eddie Murphy, a hot-lick score by Henry Krieger and the late Tom Eyen, a timely story about how music can sell its soul to greed and compromise, and a dynamo of a director and screenwriter in Bill Condon (Gods and Monsters, Kinsey). He’s the white guy with the brass to direct a tale of black artists who break faith with race, family and R&B to swim in the mainstream. As he proved with his script for Chicago, Condon also knows his way around a musical. He keeps Dreamgirls charging until it moves right into your heart.

Hudson was dispatched by Simon Cowell a few years back. Now they’re talking Oscar. Nice rebound, girl.

FYI, Travers also liked Apocalypto, The Good German and Inland Empire. He disliked Bobby.

I’ve seen just one of these, you?

“United 93,” which unflinchingly depicts the hijacked 9/11 flight that crashed into a Pennsylvania field, was chosen Monday as best picture of the year by the New York Film Critics Circle.

Written and directed by Paul Greengrass and featuring a cast of unknowns to give it an authentic, documentary-style feel, the film painstakingly recreates the events of that morning. It culminates with passengers bursting into the cockpit and wrestling their attackers for control of the jet, which ultimately plummets nose-first into the ground.

Forest Whitaker and Helen Mirren continue to solidify their positions as Oscar front-runners — each won the top acting prize from the New York critics, Whitaker for his thunderous portrayal of Idi Amin in “The Last King of Scotland” and Helen Mirren for her withering take on Queen Elizabeth II in “The Queen.” Both have received the same awards in recent days from the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the New York Film Critics Online.

Supporting-actor awards went to Jackie Earle Haley for his haunting turn as a sex offender in “Little Children” and Jennifer Hudson, who is emerging as an awards favorite for her showstopping performance in “Dreamgirls.” She received the same honor Sunday from the New York Film Critics Online and won a breakthrough-performance award last week from the National Board of Review.

Martin Scorsese was the group’s choice for best director for his Boston mob epic “The Departed.”

AP via The Envelope.com

Elsewhere, New Yorker critics David Denby and Anthony Lane offer their lists of memorable 2006 films.

Walter Elias Disney

… was born on this date in 1901. At The New Yorker Anthony Lane has an assessment.

Even now, forty years after his death, the slight figure of Walt himself is almost impossible to pick out from the parti-colored throng of movie clips, projects, and moral tendencies that march under the banner of “Walt Disney.” Say the name to most people and you know what will flash onto their mind’s eye: unashamedly bright hues, flying elephants, singing bears, corporate dominance, happy endings, and a helping of values that slip down as easily as ice cream. How did we arrive at this blinding apotheosis? One attempt at an answer, the most comprehensive to date, is provided by Neil Gabler, in “Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination” (Knopf; $35). Gabler takes more than eight hundred pages to tell and note his tale, which sounds excessive, but then Disney himself was a model of unflagging thoroughness, and, as Thumper would say, if you can’t do nice annotations, then don’t do nuthin’ at all.

Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination

Best opening line in a movie review ever, so far

“It’s best to think of ‘The Nativity Story’ as a Hollywood version of the kind of Christmas production some of the ‘Peanuts’ kids put on in ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas.’ This is not meant as a criticism. Quite the contrary.”

A.O Scott in The New York Times.

At the Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan wasn’t as positive.

“Hardwicke, whose work includes the fake-transgressive ‘Thirteen’ and ‘Lords of Dogtown,’ has made a super-earnest Classics Illustrated version of the Nativity story, a cinematic Bible class that flatters the chosen but has little to offer anyone who is not already a believer.”

Love-Hate Movies

Via Kottke, Netflix is offering a $1 million prize for developing a better movie recommendation system. An individual analyzing their data noted that Netflix members have rated some movies either particularly high or particularly low. Here’s the top 10:

1. The Royal Tenenbaums
2. Lost in Translation
3. Pearl Harbor
4. Miss Congeniality
5. Napoleon Dynamite
6. Fahrenheit 9/11
7. The Patriot
8. The Day After Tomorrow
9. Sister Act
10. Armageddon

An interesting list. NewMexiKen has seen eight of these and I understand the strong feelings.

Kottke has more.

Best ‘well isn’t that always the case’ line of the day, so far

“The languages used by the astonishingly diverse cast include Spanish, Berber, Japanese, sign language and English. The misunderstandings multiply accordingly, though they tend to be most acute between husbands and wives or parents and children, rather than between strangers.”

— A.O. Scott in a review of Babel, which I’m not sure he likes, be he sure seems to feel. (Not unexpected from a film that see references to “Amores Perros,” “21 Grams,” and “Crash” in its review.}

Soggy Mountain Boys

Singer Dan Tyminski of Union Station (Alison Krauss’ band) tells the story of getting to sing the voice over for I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow for the Coen Brothers film O Brother, Where Art Thou?. When he told his wife, she asked him, “What’s a voice over?”

“It’s where you see George Clooney, but hear my voice,” Dan told her.

“Oh Dan,” she replied, “that’s been my fantasy.”

The Departed

The Departed is an engrossing, entertaining film worth the trip to the theater (rather than the wait for the DVD). Leonardo DiCaprio is outstanding, Matt Damon perhaps at his best, and Jack Nicholson — well, Jack plays Jack Nicholson better than anybody else can. In lesser roles, Alec Baldwin and Mark Wahlberg win every scene in which they play. Vera Farmiga is appealing in the one female role; Martin Sheen plays Jed Bartlet playing a police captain.

Damon is a hoodlum who is undercover as a cop. DiCaprio is a cop who is undercover working for a hoodlum. Nicholson is the hoodlum. All these clashing male egos (performers and characters) are brought together by Martin Scorsese, who builds the tension on the screen and uncertainty in the audience. Is the bad guy getting good? Is the good guy getting bad? Is Jack Nicholson for real? Fans of Goodfellas will like this film, though it is darker, more complex and—unbelievably enough—considerably more violent.

NewMexiKen thought the film a bit long (about 2:20 before the credits rolled). And the ending seemed a trifle too contrived, but any discussion here would necessarily reveal too much, so see for yourself. Not for the faint-of-heart, but otherwise a very, very well-made movie.

Birthday Folks

Red Auerbach is 89.

Red Auerbach is the architect and mastermind behind one of the most dominant franchises in professional sports history, the Boston Celtics. The cigar-chomping Auerbach wasn’t a passive bench coach, but an aggressive, demanding and often volatile mentor who coached 11 Hall of Famers and led Boston to 10 Eastern Division titles in 16 years. Auerbach’s passionate style reaped large rewards. From 1959 to 1966, the Celtics won eight straight NBA championships, a streak unmatched in sports history. His 938-479 (.662) career coaching record currently ranks fifth all-time in NBA history. Auerbach led Boston to 99 playoff victories, third all-time behind Phil Jackson and Pat Riley. (Basketball Hall of Fame)

Academy Award winning actress Sophia Loren is 72 today. She won the best actress Oscar for Two Women (La Ciociara). (A film well-worth seeing even 45 years later.) Loren was nominated but did not win for Marriage Italian Style (Matrimonio all’italiana).

Old Joy

A movie review to take note of from Manhola Dargis. It begins:

There are roughly 90 viewing days left till Christmas. By that point most of the big studio movies will have opened for the consideration of the paying public and Academy Award voters, and untold numbers of words will have been spilled about the same handful of serviceable or perhaps even brilliant films of the sort that dominate the discourse every fall. Odds are that none of those contenders will capture the tenor of these difficult times with more sensitivity or greater attention to beauty than Kelly Reichardt’s “Old Joy,” a triumph of modesty and of seriousness that also happens to be one of the finest American films of the year.

Peaking Too Soon

Two articles from The New York Times about artists who made it early.

First, If Mozart Had Had Better Health Care; it begins:

Poor Mozart, who died at 35, must have inherited at least the potential for longevity from his parental gene pool.

His father, Leopold Mozart, died at 67, a ripe old age in an era when rampant illnesses claimed the majority of European children in infancy. Sadly, Mozart’s indomitable mother, Anna Maria, died at 58 while in Paris, having contracted viral infections and a severe fever during an arduous trip with her rambunctious, opportunity-seeking 22-year-old son. Mozart’s sister, Nannerl, who had also been a musical prodigy, died in 1829 in Salzburg at the impressive age of 78, having well outlived her husband, an officious Austrian prefect and two-time widower with five children, who resented their stepmother.

Mozart’s death in 1791 was probably caused by streptococcal infection, renal failure, terminal bronchial pneumonia and a matrix of other illnesses, some dating from his childhood, when the Mozart family spent years touring Europe to show off the boy genius and, to a lesser extent, his sister.

Imagine how different music history would have been had Mozart lived to Nannerl’s age.

Then, Some Good News Arrives at Last for a Bad News Bear; the article begins:

In the original “Bad News Bears,” the actor Jackie Earle Haley made a memorable entrance riding a motorbike across a Little League baseball diamond, disrupting the opening day ceremonies. Personifying Bicentennial-era rebel cool, Mr. Haley achieved stardom at the age of 15.

As with so many young actors, though, it has been a long and difficult road ever since for Mr. Haley.