History of the Movies - 1878: "The Horse in Motion"

HISTORY OF THE MOVIES: The Horse in Motion
1878 by Eadweard Muybridge

Uh oh! Curveball!

Not only do we jump back a full ten years on our trip through the History of This Stuff, the truth is this goddammer ain't even a movie!

It's a series of still photographs by famed photographer/murderer Muybridge (for real, he murdered a guy). 

The story is that the owner of this horse wanted to know if our man could use his big fancy camera to prove once and for all that a horse, while at a full gallop, would at some point have all four hooves off the ground. 

Boom. They do.

It took 24 frames to capture and repeat the cycle, which is also (possibly apocryphally) why 24fps is the standard to this day.

It's also true that 24fps is simply the smoothest photographic representation of what our eyes can process naturally in real life, but still, cool story, right?

Weird, too, that while 24 was the best then just as now, soon 16 became more of the industry standard but, again, if you can project it correctly, anything can look good (except those weird awful Hobbit frame-rate train wrecks P. Jackson was tryna shove down our throats a few years back. I've forgiven but not forgotten.)

Tomorrow the timeline gets back on track and we move Forward! through the history of Cinema.

Get your movie-watchin caps on.

History of the Movies - 1888: "The Roundhay Garden Scene"

HISTORY OF THE MOVIES: The Roundhay Garden Scene
1888 by Louis Le Prince.

The oldest movie in existence, this joint is basically a dude walking in a circle, in a garden, for two seconds. Not even "basically", really, it just is that.

This movie is so old it was shot before "24fps" was even a thing. [rimshot]

This movie is so old he had to build his own camera just to shoot it. [rimshot]

This movie is so old it's literally the oldest movie in the world. [rimshot]

What's crazy to me is that he built this camera, set it up, and didn't even want to have these people jump up and down or play with their dumb dog or push each other over? No? Just walk in a circle? I mean, that's cool and all. Not how I would've done it but whatthefuckyagonnado right?

Oh and that lady died a week later.

Summer Movie Preview - July 2015 (Part 1)

SUMMER MOVIE PREVIEW – July 2015

Buncha stuff coming out this month. Let’s get down to it…

Faith of Our Fathers

directed by Carey Scott

Theater owners have no idea what to do with this pile of garbage. Odds are you’ll never see it cause no one books it cause no one has any faith in it. If anyone remembers this movie exists a month from now I’ll eat my shoe.

Magic Mike XXL

directed by Gregory Jacobs

Notice that doesn’t say “directed by Steven Soderbergh.” It also doesn’t have Betsy Brandt or Matthew McConaughey. What’s the point of this? How frustrating must it be to have made the first Magic Mike, a movie most people think is some dumb garbage stripper movie but is actually a great piece of filmmaking, then have someone else put out what looks like some dumb garbage stripper movie as a sequel? Too bad Soderbergh is some enlightened genius and probably doesn’t give a shit what people do with this property. I’ll probably see it anyway.

Terminator Genisys

directed by Alan Taylor

Skynet goes all Back to the Future Part II with the great director of LOST, The Sopranos, and Boardwalk Empire. He also directed Thor: The Dark World, one of the worst things I’ve ever seen, so we’ll see how well this thing turns out. Prediction: really really fun, and really reallllly terrible.

Amy

directed by Asif Kapadia

That Amy Winehouse documentary. I don’t know anything about her (I liked Frank and “Tears Dry On Their Own” just fine, but whatever). But I’ll watch any documentary about a musician, when it comes down to it. Or maybe I’ll continue on my quest to never watch any of this director’s movies. I’ll let you know.

Minions

direceted by Pierre Coffin

I didn’t see the other Despicable Me joints because they looked absolutely hideous and obnoxious. This looks worse than those. Also I don’t watch movies made for eight-year-olds. Good luck to you.

Self/Less

directed by Tarsem

Go see whatever Tarsem gives you. Every time. I honestly don’t know anything about this one because I’ve been avoiding seeing anything about it before it comes out. The Fall trailer already told me too much and as a result I went in looking for something that wasn’t quite there. Visually, there really aren’t many other directors out there doing anything close to what Tarsem can do. Just go see it.

Ant-Man

directed by Peyton Reed

Looks like another Guardians-style jam, which was one of the only two good Marvel movies. Hopefully this will be the third. Also good to see Evangeline Lilly and Corey Stoll getting their hands on some of that Marvel money.

Trainwreck

directed by Judd Apatow

Honestly, fuck Apatow. But this is that Amy Schumer thing. She’s great. Go see it.

Smosh

directed by Alex Winter

Bill from Bill & Ted directed this. It stars some fucking youtube dorks. I don’t know.

Paper Towns

directed by Jake Schreier

YA horseshit. No.

Pixels

directed by Chris Columbus

Did you know Chris Columbus is still directing feature films? He is. This looks like Men in Black crossed with just random 80s nostalgia. Are we still pretending shitty arcade games are exciting? They are not exciting. They are fucking stupid. Know what I just watched for the first time ever? All these Aki Kaurismaki movies. You know that Proletariat Trilogy you’ve always heard about that everybody says is so great? It’s really great. These movies made me so happy. I don’t know much (hardly anything? nothing?) about Finnish Cinema but now I want to see more. The feeling of these films is incredible. I want to live my life that way. In the cold, going out to a brightly lit supermarket, living a weird solitary existence. I wish he was still making these things. Wait, no, fuck, there’s this movie coming out where Pac-Man attacks San Francisco.

Southpaw

directed by Antoine Fuqua

Remember when this was the sequel to 8 Mile? Hollywood is fucking insane.

Vacation

directed by John Francis Daley

SAM FUCKING WEIR directed this! I bet it’s gonna be terrible but, backtracking a little on what I said above about nostalgia, I will go see this because I want to give this guy money. Too bad I see all my movies for free.

Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation

directed by Christopher McQuarrie

Another Tom Cruise/Chris McQuarrie joint. Didn’t you see Going Clear?

Jurassic World

JURASSIC WORLD
Colin Trevorrow, 2015

Synopsis:
Dinosaurs are boring. Let's make new dinosaurs. Can't go wrong, right?

Review:
Wrong. It turns bad immediately. Obviously. Ugh.

JURASSIC PARK spent a lot of screen time establishing how and why the raptors were as intelligent as they were. This film features a creature that is super-intelligent... kinda just cause it is. And the rest of the plot hinges on that information. Alright, I guess.

While the movie gets in a few digs at the culture of bigger and louder sequels, other recent films have made the same point/joke more effectively, and at a certain point why not just give in and make your bigger, louder sequel if that's what you're doing (and honestly, it's not even a new thing, even though it is pretty much all-pervasive these days). My hope for Trevorrow is that this movie is a huge hit and he gets to go back to making more SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED-type stuff. 

Or am I misjudging all these directors? Maybe they all really want to be Spielberg and work as studio hit-makers. Maybe they DON'T want to keep making the smaller, weirder stuff they made their names on. Who knows. Watch this guy get hired to make a STAR WAR.

I guess I just don't get why Hollywood needs to constantly remake/remodel everything constantly. It's like there's an agenda to let filmmakers do whatever they want with minimal funding (like SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED) because they know they will then cull from that pool of directors to make the GODZILLAs, STAR WARS, CAPTAIN AMERICAs, and JURASSIC WORLDs. One way or another, all the real talent will be sucked into the machine. Agenda! It's like there's an Agenda!

It's crazy to think there was ever a time when these big-budget blockbusters were actually small passion projects from weirdo directors. A NEW HOPE, THE GODFATHER, THE MATRIX, all these films were things the directors had to fight for to get their vision onto the screen exactly the way they wanted it. But they spawned an entire culture of Hollywood bullshit that perpetuates to this day. The critically-hated STAR WARS prequels still weren't enough to stop THE FORCE AWAKENS from happening. And with it five or six more films from small-time directors (mostly, it seems) hoping to hop onboard that money train. And while I never fault filmmakers trying to make money, I mean... Who the fuck wants that headache? Have you ever seen a Peter Jackson or Michael Bay or James Cameron behind-the-scenes doc? It looks like the worst job imaginable. And when you're spending so much of the studio's money and they want very specific results (Marvel is allegedly the worst for this), I swear to god I can't imagine not wanting to just blow your brains out every second. Making any movie is hard enough because it's a constant drain of time and money and resources, but at least the end result is something to be proud of (hopefully). I just can't wrap my head around doing all that but on such a larger scale just to realize someone else's vision, when in most cases that vision is just a bunch of toys on shelves when it really comes down to it.

Okay, but anyway....

The big finale in this thing is pretty great though, despite the fact that when they first introduced the element early in the film that would eventually save the day, I kinda called it, but only because I've, like, seen other movies before. The ending still works, even if the first two hours really don't.

And by ending, I mean "there's one really cool shot that isn't as much of a surprise as the movie thinks it is."

Overall Score: ???/!!

Avengers: Age of Ultron

AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON
Joss Whedon, 2015

Synopsis:
Tony Stark creates an AI army, immediately regrets it. Banner and Romanoff are suddenly in love or something. Thor has a Vision. Steve Rogers does some stuff. Nick Fury. Hawkeye. Scarlet Witch. Quicksilver. Reunited and it feels so fucking loooooooong.

Review:
No, like realllllly long. Was this movie four hours long? I swear to god, these things just get more and more unwieldy and fanboys will scream and yell that Whedon is a god who can do no wrong but just judging from his own statements recently, this is barely his film to begin with (if there was ever any doubt). I bet he's wishing he'd pulled an Edgar Wright at this point. 

Anyhoot: James Spader pretty much pulls the roof off this thing from the get-go. People keep talking about how bad his performance is, the puns, the evil genius dialog, but honestly it's what kept me interested in the story (such as it was) when things got sloppy (which was constantly). With this many characters to keep track of, no one storyline gets the heft it deserves, so it was at least nice to know someone in there was having a good time, and Spader seems like he had a blast.

The story itself was doomed from the start, as it makes the classic mistake of completely missing its own point. How long was this "age" of Ultron, exactly? I was getting DARK KNIGHT RISES deja vu. Bruce Wayne's in retirement after eight years, no one's seen the Batman in all that time, and he's become a legend. But how long was he running around as Batman? The Joker storyline kicks in at the end of BEGINS, then we get the DARK KNIGHT story, which lasts, what, a few weeks? Was there even such a thing as a Batman for more than, like, two months? If that? This film has the same problem. I have no idea how dire things were getting mostly because I had no idea what the stakes ever really were. It seems like this whole problem was created and then solved in a matter of days? Is that not right? It's hard to tell. And hard to keep up with because, again, there's a million goddamn Avengers to deal with. And what are they Avenging, exactly? Jon Favreau's career arc?

Classic characters from the comics kinda just show up randomly, others are seemingly tossed in just so they'll have something to do in later films with minimal backstory obligations to attend to.... It just all feels so forced. I keep waiting for Marvel to truly throw us a curveball and start inventing brand new characters that exist solely in the MCU, and aren't tied to existing properties. They've toyed around with some origin stories here and there, or combined characters and traits as they need for the purposes of these scripts (and rights issues), but a film focusing on brand new characters would be great if only to calm the storm of shit they'll inevitably get when they "ruin" the wrong character.

The thing about all these heroes all assembled is that everything that happens becomes kinda meaningless in the process. Any one of them could have solved this thing all by themselves, as evidenced by the fact (much pointed-out) that they all have stand-alone stories where they're the only heroes in sight. Why assemble at all? Why does Nick Fury even care anymore? How can he know for sure, for sure, that one of them isn't secretly working for Hydra? Or brainwashed, at any given time? Or just working for some other secret agenda that'll surely get ret-conned into the framework of the MCU somewhere down the road? It's just hard to care much at this point.

Marvel's genius is its downfall, in that in getting us all excited for the coming Civil War (not to mention the freaking Infinity War), this whole Age of Ultron feels like a placeholder. Get everybody into place, get everybody bickering, or in love, so they can be all set up to knock down again in a couple years. And again, that's after we meet Ant-Man, Doctor Strange, Black Panther, and whoever the hell else is gonna get shoved down our throats by Disney. It's bonkers, this release plan. And it hurts every individual film in the process.
Bob Gale said "sequels aren't art, they're merchandise." And while we didn't need Gale to tell us, exactly, it's best to keep that in mind going forward with this series. Marvel knows what it's doing. DC is scrambling to even begin to figure out how to do this shit properly (they can start by not saddling a single director with creating the entire universal aesthetic, a huge mistake if you ask me). At a certain point, Marvel is gonna start running out of steam. For one thing, where's this all supposed to end? Where is it leading? Is Phase Three the end of the line? If so, the current line-up of product looks extremely random.

It's crazy to think that, kind of out of nowhere, the STAR WARS franchise (also by Disney) is showing Marvel how it's done by simply releasing a list of titles with no info whatsoever as to what these films are even gonna be about. 

As it stands, REVENGERS: AGENT VOLTRON is the worst of the current crop of Marvel movies. Well, maybe not as bad as THE FIRST AVENGER, but pretty bad.
The one bright spot for me, other than Spader, was the Vision, particularly a scene towards the end, in the woods with Ultron. It had the kind of weird, out-of-the-blue weight to it that I remember feeling in the Dr. Manhattan origin sequence from WATCHMEN. Just a great moment in the middle of a movie that probably didn't deserve it. Although, for the record, I love WATCHMEN.

And I want these movies to be good! I really do! When I was a little kid I wanted everything to be a movie. 
See what happens when you want things?

Overall Score: ?????

The Immigrant

THE IMMIGRANT
James Gray, 2013.

Synopsis:
Marion Cotillard comes to Ellis Island from Poland with her sister, who is immediately quarantined on the island. Joaquin Phoenix (an actor and pimp) and Jeremy Renner (a fucking magician of all things) are the two weird assholes who offer her protection and help. 

Review:
I thought I'd heard this was some kind of masterpiece or something? Seriously? I really didn't get it. This was literally just another movie. Really. Nothing really stood out to me, not the direction, the story, the acting, anything. Nothing at all. Yet people were cutting each other's heads off when this came out to pile on the praise. I'm so confused. I want to understand this movie. I really do.

Is it that life for young Polish immigrants in New York in 1920 was not a beautiful paradise? Is this news? 

Is it that life, in general, is terrible and all we can hope for is to not be completely miserable from time to time? 

Is it that you can live a life of pain and "sin" but eventually, if you meet the right combination of white men, things will kinda sorta work out? Are any of these themes dominant? Is it just a mishmash of all three, kinda sloppily just thrown together and smeared with sepia tone? Uh. Um.

And speaking of, yeah, I worship Gordon Willis just like anyone else but can we get away from making every single movie set in this era look like THE GODFATHER PART II? C'mon, moviemakers. Do something new, interesting, something. This movie is goddamn hideous. They're going for that GODFATHER look but ended up with something closer to TWIXT or TETRO, just a bad weird muddy cg desaturation. 

I haven't even talked about the script yet. There wasn't one. I bet this would've made a halfway decent book. Was this based on a book?

And Joaquin is terrible in this, incredibly. While Hawkeye is actually not bad. He's actually pretty good. How'd James Gray do that??

Cotillard, I can only imagine, had some kind of scary debt hanging over her head that month and needed some quick cash (she's still as good as always, though).

Overall Score: ????/!

Horns

HORNS
Alexandre Aja, 2014.

Synopsis:
What if a guy had horns that could mind-control everybody? Could that guy be played by Daniel Radcliffe? What if Daniel Radcliffe had horns? Can we throw in a thing where the whole thing kicks off with a pretty white girl getting brutally raped and murdered? Can we then explore how this tragedy effects all the men in her life? Can one of those guys have horns?

Review:
This movie is a fucking hate crime. 

Is there going to be a point where every single plot of every single movie doesn't revolve around a dead white woman's corpse? What do we have to do to eliminate this trope from every screenwriter's handbook? Or at the very least, how can we make it in any way meaningful to the actual plot? I would even settle for writers not agreeing ideologically that there's anything wrong with it if they could retire it simply because it's been done a million trillion goddamn times.

It's an even bigger shame because this movie is actually pretty good once the more interesting ideas start coming. The mind-control, the Metamorphosis stuff, the newscaster brawl... all great. The ending sequence in the woods where his final transformation(s) take place is pretty cool. But again, this script is completely evil and stupid.

Even the reasons for the initial murder turn out to be just random, unmotivated surprise character/tonal shifts. Characters who we first meet as just normal people turn out to be raving psychos, seemingly because the script can't function any other way. It's all premise and no story, no characters, no plot. Or rather, once the plot becomes more apparent, it becomes more and more ridiculous, to the point where I just kind of gave up and decided it wasn't gonna get better but I at least wanted to see how they ended this mess. Messily, as it turned out.

Aja is great with visuals and it's true for this film as well. But the weird darkness around the whole thing just ends up being ugly instead of interesting. And Radcliffe's accent is usually not bad, despite most of it being pretty obviously ADR'd to oblivion. 

Heather Graham shows up for a few scenes so she can wear a diner outfit that shows a lot of cleavage and wears bright red lipstick and is, overall, an awful piece of shit and a waste of a (sometimes) pretty great actor. Another terrible woman to fuck with the main male protagonist. 

And again, the fucking horns: for so much of this film being so symbolically on the nose (snakes, apples, pitchforks), it's almost impossible to discern the point of any of it. 

Fuck this movie. 

Overall Score: Hate Crime.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES
Jonathan Liebesman, 2014.

Synopsis:
Teenage mutant ninja turtles again.

Review:
I gotta say, for the most part I'm usually onboard for all these Bay/Platinum Dunes joints but this thing is just awful.

The cinematography has all the best and worst elements of recent Bay productions (and I say that as a huge fan, actually), the CG characters are pretty thin, and Megan Fox, I think, was rarely on set with another actor to play off of and it shows. And the script was typical bullshit. In fairness, though, this is a movie for eight-year-olds.

Having said all that, the production was huge, the action was cool as hell, and Tony Shalhoub continues to get work, which I am absolutely okay with. And Abby Elliot's in it for like two seconds.

In the end, it all comes down to Will Arnett slamming William Fichtner in the face with a fire extinguisher.

Overall Score: ????/! 

(one good point awarded for the shots of the baby sliders)

High Noon

HIGH NOON

Fred Zinnemann, 1952

Synopsis:
A town marshal, on his last day on the job before his wedding, has to face down a gang he put in jail years earlier. The rest of the town (including his own deputies) are a bunch of fucking chumps and refuse to help him. He has to go it alone. CAN HE DO IT??

Review:
Best script of the 50s? Is there even a lot of competition? (I know, SUNSET BOULEVARD, 400 BLOWS, PATHS OF GLORY, but still.) This movie gets in, does what it came to do, and gets the hell out of its own way. A lot less action than I was expecting but the payoff is worth it. 

Grace Kelly's in this and kinda has not a whole lot to do until the last two minutes of the movie, but she's still great.

One of the bad guys looks so much like Casey Affleck it was almost distracting, like CA had somehow gotten access to that time machine along with the lady on the cell phone in that Chaplin joint. And Katy Jurado looks like she could be Elvis's other twin.

Gary Cooper is boring as all hell but I guess that was kinda the point? He does a good job, though, as someone who could easily get the help he needs from certain scumbags but won't sink to their level in order to get it. Not bad, Coop.

Weird movie, but great. And excellent theme song. This movie has a THEME SONG!

Overall Score: !!!!!

56 Up

56 UP

Michael Apted, 2012

Synopsis:

"In 1964 Grenada Television brought together a group of seven-year-olds from all over the country and from all walks of life. They talked about their dreams, their ambitions, and their fears for the future. For nearly half a century in a unique, ground-breaking series of films we have followed their lives every seven years. They are now 56." - Michael Apted's opening narration.

Review:

Fourteen seven-year-olds in 1964 eventually dwindled down to about ten or so, then every few years there'd be a few more who would come back, usually to promote whatever their pet cause was at the time of the interviews, and others who would drop out (some only to come back in later films). For a long time it worked, as they got older and went through their awkward teenage years, in their early twenties when some of them became asshole know-it-alls and others got married and had kids, etc. Every seven years it was always interesting to see where these lives were going. "I'm never having kids!" Jackie says, then cut to her changing her baby's diaper seven years later. Or Neil, who says "I'd love to go into politics", then in the next film he's homeless and roaming the hills of Scotland, seeming to be on the verge of a breakdown. Lynn's entire arc about opening the book mobile and becoming a librarian is a drama that played out over films and was always interesting to see.

So, something's always happening. Even the ones who seem to be leading 'normal' lives are engaging, just to see how they grow and change with their families (and the times). Tony at seven said he wanted to be a jockey, then he became one, gave it up, became a taxi driver, got married, had an affair, she threw him out, then they got back together, then his mother died... it's like watching someone's life as it's happening. And it's always been kind of thrilling.

When Neil was at his lowest point in his forties, fellow interview subject Bruce found him and took him in to help him get back on his feet. Neil even read at Bruce's wedding, which, for this series, constituted a pretty incredible twist, and was amazing to see. 

Ebert said these films counted (together as a whole) as being in the "top ten films ever made" and called the series a "noble" use of cinema. He's right, but I wonder what he would have said about this new one.

56 Up is absolutely the weakest entry in the series. The problem is these nerds haven't done a whole lot that's very interesting in the past seven years except decide that they hate being in these movies and swearing on camera that this is the last time they're going to put up with it (just like every other time).

Neil and Tony are the only interesting "characters" anymore, since at least they're funny. I don't know if it's the uncertainty principle at work here or what, but most of these people just go on and on about how they're in these movies, while complaining that the movies don't fully represent who they really are. One dude even showed up for the first time since the 80s just to promote his boring country band. C'mon, guys. Also, am I crazy or is Michael Apted being a huge dick to everybody? He basically chastises Neil for having schizophrenia and makes sure he keeps reminding the women that they were born poor and haven't made much of themselves (or so his attitude seems to be).

Not too many highlights here, except the "revelation" that Suzy and Nick are now friends (they're interviewed together). Nothing here that tops the Bruce/Neil reveal in 42 Up.

My biggest question about this series still remains: what's up with Sue's son's throat wound?