Believer’s annual Film Issue

Posted on March 25, 2008 at 4:58 pm

My very favorite magazine, The Believer, has an annual issue on one of my very favorite topics: Movies. And this one is their best, yet, with Chuck Klosterman’s essay on what I always say is the single most popular theme in film: the journey, or road movie. It often seems to me that at least 20-30 percent of films have as their theme two or more people who don’t know each other or who know each other and don’t like each other having to accomplish something together, usually involving a trip of some kind. That includes everything from “The Wizard of Oz” to “Toy Story,” “The African Queen,” “Midnight Run,” “North by Northwest,” “From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler,” “Two for the Road,” “Easy Rider,” and even “College Road Trip.” Rolf Potts writes about the way that international marketing of movies affects their content, dialog, and humor. Two of the most fascinating directors, Werner Herzog and Errol Morris, have a conversation. And the issue includes Part I of the provocatively titled “Pervert’s Guide to the Cinema,” which is not what you think — it is a kaleidoscopic illustrated lecture by Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek, talking about films and what they mean. His passion for his theories and for the films he describes are so intense that he literally enters into them through meticulously re-created sets that place him in Norman Bates’ cellar, Neo’s chair opposite Morpheus, and the hotel bathroom from Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation.” This issue, the DVD included, is bracingly engaged and engaging and a real treat for any cinephile.

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Understanding Media and Pop Culture

DVD Giveaway: Extreme ski documentary “Steep”

Posted on March 25, 2008 at 10:00 am

Think triple black diamond times, um, infinity. Steep is a documentary about people who ski down big mountains with sheer descents so steep they are just about perpendicular. I have three copies of the DVD to give away to my readers and they will go to the first three people who email me at moviemom@moviemom.com — good luck! (Be sure to put the title of the DVD you want in the subject line of the email.)

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Contests and Giveaways

Contest: Blackjack tip cards from “21”

Posted on March 24, 2008 at 8:00 am

Think you can beat the house in Blackjack? That’s what a group of MIT students did. By counting cards, which is perfectly legal, they won very big in Las Vegas. Their story was told in a book called Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions, now retitled “21” to tie in with this week’s release of the movie it inspired.

For those of us who are not MIT math geniuses, there is a playing card-size cheat sheet to guide your betting. Want one? I’ll send one to the first three people to send me an email at moviemom@moviemom.com. Stay tuned — later this week I will post my interviews with star Jim Sturgess and the MIT math whiz who inspired both the book and the movie, Jeff Ma.

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Contests and Giveaways

Interview with Hugh Welchman of “Peter and the Wolf”

Posted on March 23, 2008 at 2:00 pm

Peter and the Wolf,” this year’s Oscar-winner for best short animated film will be shown on PBS this Wednesday from 8-9 Eastern Time. It is a brilliantly imaginative film and well worth setting aside some family time to watch it together.
“Peter and the Wolf” was originally written by Sergei Prokofiev in 1936 as a way to introduce children to the instruments of the orchestra. A brief narration tells the story of the little boy who goes into the forest with his pet duck and cat. They meet up with a little bird and have an encounter with a scary wolf. Each character in the story is represented by a different instrument.
Bird: flute
Duck: oboe
Cat: clarinet
Grandfather: bassoon
Wolf: French horns
Hunters: percussion
Peter: strings
There have been many film versions of the story. Perhaps the most famous is a Disney animated cartoon made in 1946. This latest version, produced by Hugh Welchman of Breakthru Films, dispenses with the narration, which only takes up three minutes of the half-hour-long musical composition, but creates a complex and involving story with a contemporary setting that remains very true to the themes of the original. I spoke to Welchman about the challenges of creating Peter’s world for the painstaking stop-motion animation to create the film.
How big was the set?
“We were working at a one in five ratio. That’s the normal scale for stop-motion animation. The set was truly enormous. The forest had 1700 trees, each 6 feet high. The set was 80 feet long; it was like going into Wonderland. We also did all the close-ups at 1 in 3 . The grandfather puppet was 3 1/2 feet high. With that size, you get so much more detail. The grandfather’s hands were incredibly detailed which gave it a real different quality and makes it much more real.
The set was built in Poland and they worked amazingly quickly to build it. That was one of the fastest part of the process; making the models took much, much longer. We wanted it set in modern Russia and so we went there to take photographs. On a playground somewhere they found Peter. And they were arrested by the KGB for taking photographs of a power station! The Russian police didn’t really know what to do with these two women. They thought they were eco-terrorists. So, they wiped their photos.
But the Russians are very knowledgeable about film, especially animation.
Yes, they’ve got a heritage with stop-motion.

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Trevor Romain’s DVDs about Kid Problems

Posted on March 23, 2008 at 8:00 am

B+

Trevor Romain knows how to talk to kids about the problems they think no one understands. His DVDs are a great way to begin conversations at home, in school, in Scout troops, religious groups, or in other community gatherings. They are just right for that stage in life when children first begin to want to look beyond their parents for answers to questions that trouble them and they speak to kids in a frank but matter-of-fact tone that is very reassuring. Most important, they provide very concrete, practical suggestions for coping with some of the most complex troubles of childhood and early adolescence, from homework to bullies to divorce and loss.