Movies – Page 4 – artdiamondblog.com

Dogs, and Movie About Dog, Banned in Iran

(p. D6) In Jafar Panahi’s new movie, a writer in Iran smuggles his pet dog into his home inside a tote bag. The film, “Closed Curtain,” addresses Iranian lawmakers’ recent ban on dog-walking in public, part of an effort to curb perceived Western influences including keeping pets. For two decades, Mr. Panahi has captured such vagaries of life in his native country.
“Closed Curtain,” which won the best screenplay award at the Berlin Film Festival in 2013, opens at New York City’s Film Forum on July 9. It is Mr. Panahi’s second film since December 2010, when Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Court banned him from making movies for 20 years.

For the interview with Panahi, see:
TOBIAS GREY. “An Iranian Director’s Best Friend.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., June 27, 2014): D6.
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date June 26, 2014, an has the title “Iranian Director Flouts Ban on Filming.”)

Edison Failed to Stop Film Projectors from Disrupting His Kinetoscope

Edison tried to kill film projection because he thought the whole country would only need 10 projectors, while they could sell a great many of the single-view kinetoscopes. But the wonderful twist to the story is that it DID NOT WORK because Edison could not stop the Lathams and others from coming forward and disrupting the kinetoscope.

(p. 205) The Lathams were not the only exhibitors frustrated with Edison’s kinetoscope, and the others urged Edison to introduce a projection machine. Edison was adamant: no. He reasoned that the peephole machines (p. 206) were selling well and at a good profit. The problem with projection was that it would work all too well–if he replaced the inefficient kinetoscope with projection systems that could serve up the show to everyone, “there will be a use for maybe about ten of them in the whole United States.” He concluded, “Let’s not kill the goose that lays the golden egg.”

At Edison’s lab in Orange, without his boss’s approval, W. K. L. Dickson carried out research on film projection on his own and shared his findings with a friend who was a keen listener: Otway Latham. And when Dickson accepted an invitation to try a projection experiment in a physics laboratory at Columbia, who should show up but Otway’s father, Professor Latham. The Lathams made an offer to Dickson–come join us and we’ll give you a quarter-share interest in the business–but Dickson was unwilling to make the leap. When Edison got word of his fraternizing with the Lathams, however, and failed to reassure Dickson that he believed Dickson’s dealings had been perfectly honorable, Dickson felt he had no choice but to resign. The exact chronology of what he did and what he knew at various points preceding his resignation would be the subject of much litigation that followed. But regardless of intellectual-property issues, Edison lost the one person on his staff who would have been most valuable to him in developing a projection system.
The Lathams and Dickson had discovered that sending a bright light through a moving strip of film did not project satisfactorily because any given image did not absorb enough light before it sped on. The Lathams came up with a partial solution, which was to make the film wider, providing more area for the light to catch as each image went by. The projected images were about the size of a window and good enough to unveil publicly. Professor Latham gave a demonstration of his newly christened Pantoptikon to reporters in April 1895.

Source:
Stross, Randall E. The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World. New York: Crown Publishers, 2007.

Catmull’s Pixar Had Technology Serve Story

Source of book image: http://rorotoko.com/images/uploads/gottschall_storytelling_animal.jpg

Ed Catmull, one of the creators of Pixar, discusses a favorite book of 2013. Catmull’s appreciation of the importance of storytelling may help explain why the early Pixar movies were so wonderful:

(p. C6) I am constantly struck by how many people think of stories solely as entertainment–edifying or time-wasting but still: entertainment. “The Storytelling Animal” by Jonathan Gottschall shows that the storytelling part of our brain is deeper and more complex than that, wired into the way we think and learn. This struck me as a powerful idea, that our brain is structured for and shaped by stories whose value goes beyond entertainment and socialization.

For the full article, see:
“12 Months of Reading; We asked 50 of our friends–from April Bloomfield to Mike Tyson–to name their favorite books of 2013.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Dec. 14, 2013): C6 & C9-C12.
(Note: the online version of the article has the date Dec. 13, 2013.)

The book that Catmull praises is:
Gottschall, Jonathan. The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012.

Walt Disney’s “Job” Was to “Restore Order to the Chaos of Life”

“Emma Thompson and Tom Hanks in “Saving Mr. Banks,” directed by John Lee Hancock.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

I’m a fan of Disney the entrepreneur and I think that Hanks does a good job of showing that side of Disney. It’s a movie made by the Disney company, but has a darker, more adult-themed, side than most “Disney” movies. It’s not on my all-time-top-10-list. But we enjoyed it, overall. (Paul Giamatti is wonderful.)

(p. C8) “Saving Mr. Banks,” released by Disney, is a movie about the making of a Disney movie (“Mary Poppins”), in which Walt Disney himself (played by Tom Hanks) is a major character. It includes a visit to Disneyland and, if you look closely, a teaser for its companion theme park in Florida (as yet unbuilt, when the story takes place). A large Mickey Mouse plush toy appears from time to time to provide an extra touch of humor and warmth. But it would be unfair to dismiss this picture, directed by John Lee Hancock from a script by Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith, as an exercise in corporate self-promotion. It’s more of a mission statement.
. . .
. . . Walt is less a mogul than a kind and reliable daddy. He dotes on his intellectual properties (the mouse, the park, the picture) as if they were his children. He wants to adapt Mrs. Travers’s novel to keep a promise to his daughters.
. . .
. . . Walt, in a late, decisive conversation, explains that their job as storytellers is to “restore order” to the chaos of life and infuse bleak realities with bright, happy colors.

For the full review, see:
A. O. SCOTT. “An Unbeliever in Disney World.” The New York Times (Fri., December 13, 2013): C8.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date December 12, 2013.)

“Engrossing, Brain-Tickling” Refutation of Al Gore’s Global Warming Assertions

“The Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg in “Cool It,” a documentary based on his book.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT review quoted and cited below.

(p. C8) Debunking claims made by “An Inconvenient Truth” and presenting alternative strategies, “Cool It” finally blossoms into an engrossing, brain-tickling picture as many of Al Gore’s meticulously graphed assertions are systematically — and persuasively — refuted. (I was intrigued to hear Mr. Lomborg say, for instance, that the polar-bear population is more endangered by hunters than melting ice.)
. . .
. . . “Cool It” is all about the pep: playing down the talking heads and playing up the “git ‘er done.” If algae can suck up carbon dioxide and spit out oil, what on earth are we worrying about?

For the full review, see:
JEANNETTE CATSOULIS. “Global Warming and Common Sense.” The New York Times (Fri., November 12, 2010): C8.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date November 11, 2010.)

The documentary is based on the book:
Lomborg, Bjørn. Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.

“Burning Bush” Depicts Communists’ Diabolical Harassment of Jan Palach’s Family

“BURNING BUSH; Tatiana Pauhofova in Agnieszka Holland’s story of Prague under Communism.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT review quoted and cited below.

(p. C6) The Polish director Agnieszka Holland’s magnificent docudrama, “Burning Bush,” is a three-part mini-series made for HBO Europe that remembers the Soviet crackdown in Czechoslovakia following the Prague Spring. It begins with the death in 1969 of Jan Palach, a Czech student who set himself on fire as a political protest, and follows the diabolical attempts of the Soviet occupiers to blacken his name by portraying him as a fraud and right-wing tool. The film’s depiction of the Communist regime’s relentless harassment of his family and its sowing of paranoia within the student resistance recalls the 2007 film “The Lives of Others,” about the Stasi’s operations in East Berlin. In the sophisticated worldview of “Burning Bush,” oppression may win in the short term, but the spark that ignites freedom movements, once lighted, can’t be extinguished.

For the full review, see:
STEPHEN HOLDEN. “CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK; Still Meaty, Film Festival Lightens Up.” The New York Times (Mon., September 30, 2013): C1 & C6.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date September 29, 2013.)

Edison, Not Muybridge, Remains the Father of Hollywood

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. A13) Wish it though we might, this strangely off-center Briton isn’t really the Father of Hollywood, nor even a distant progenitor of “Avatar.” The famous time-lapse images that he took for Stanford, proving that a horse does take all four hoofs off the ground while galloping–and the tens of thousands of photographs that he went on to make of birds flying and people sneezing or bending over and picking things up–were soon so comprehensively overtaken by newer technologies (lenses, shutters, celluloid) that his stature as a proto-movie-maker was soon reduced to a way-station. His contribution was technically interesting but hardly seminal at all. The tragic reality is that Thomas Edison, with whom Muybridge was friendly enough to propose collaboration, retains the laurels–though, as Mr. Ball points out with restrained politeness, Muybridge might have fared better had he been aware of Edison’s reputation for “borrowing the work of others and not returning it.”

For the full review, see:
SIMON WINCHESTER. “BOOKSHELF; Lights, Camera, Murder; The time-lapse photos Muybridge took in the 19th century were technically innovative, but they didn’t make him the Father of Hollywood.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., February 6, 2013): A13.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date February 6, 2013.)

The book under review is:
Ball, Edward. The Inventor and the Tycoon: A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving Pictures. New York: Doubleday, 2013.

Tesla CTO Straubel Likes Biography of Tesla

J.B. Straubel, Chief Technology Officer of Tesla Motors. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 2) J. B. Straubel is a founder and the chief technical officer of Tesla Motors in Palo Alto, Calif. The company makes electric vehicles that some compare to Apple products in terms of obsessive attention to design, intuitive user interface and expense.

READING I like to read biographies of interesting people, mostly scientists and engineers. Right now, it’s “Steve Jobs,” by Walter Isaacson. One of my favorites biographies was “Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla,” by Marc Seifer, which I read even before Tesla Motors started.
. . .
WATCHING I really like the movie “October Sky.” It’s about a guy who grew up in a little coal-mining town around the time of Sputnik. He fell in love with the idea of building rockets and the movie follows him through his high school years when he’s building rockets and eventually he ends up becoming an engineer at NASA. I watch it every year or so. It’s inspirational. I always come out of it wanting to work harder.

For the full interview, see:
KATE MURPHY. “DOWNLOAD; J. B. Straubel.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., April 7, 2013): 2.
(Note: ellipsis added; bold in original.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date April 6, 2013.)

The Difference Between Bogart’s Smart and Sinatra’s Cool

(p. A11) Everyone loved Old Blue Eyes and mourned him when he died in 1998. Everyone except Michael Kelly.
Kelly hated Frank because Frank had invented Cool, and Cool had replaced Smart. What was Smart? It was Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca: “He possesses an outward cynicism, but at his core he is a square. . . . He is willing to die for his beliefs, and his beliefs are, although he takes pains to hide it, old-fashioned. He believes in truth, justice, the American way, and love. . . . When there is a war, he goes to it. . . . He may be world weary, but he is not ironic.”
Cool was something else. “Cool said the old values were for suckers. . . . Cool didn’t go to war; Saps went to war, and anyway, cool had no beliefs he was willing to die for. Cool never, ever, got in a fight it might lose; cool had friends who could take care of that sort of thing.”
It never, ever would have occurred to me to make the distinction until I read Kelly’s column. And then I understood Sinatra. And then I understood Kelly, too.

For the full commentary, see:
BRET STEPHENS. “GLOBAL VIEW; Remembering Michael Kelly; A columnist who hated phonies, stood for truth, and died for his beliefs.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., April 2, 2013): A11.
(Note: ellipses in original.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date April 1, 2013.)

Sometimes There Are Second Acts in American Lives

“In the foreground, Ian Wolfe, Charles Laughton and Clark Gable in 1935’s ‘Mutiny on the Bounty.'” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. D10) In 1947 Charles Laughton’s career, if not quite on the skids, was definitely in the doldrums. Long acclaimed as Hollywood’s foremost character actor, he had made only one film of any artistic consequence, Jean Renoir’s “This Land Is Mine,” in the past seven years. The rest of the time he coasted, frequently indulging in self-parody–and nobody was easier to spoof than the man who played Captain Bligh in “Mutiny on the Bounty” and Quasimodo in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” He wouldn’t have been the first actor to sell his soul for a swimming pool (or, in his case, an art collection). But with Mr. Laughton the waste would have been unforgivable, since he was, in Laurence Olivier’s words, “the only actor I ever knew who was a genius.”

Instead, Mr. Laughton fooled everyone by returning to the stage for the first time since 1936. Nor did he choose a safe star vehicle for his return: He played the title role in the U.S. premiere of Bertolt Brecht’s “Galileo,” and he translated the play himself.
. . .
Except for “The Night of the Hunter,” Mr. Laughton’s post-“Galileo” career is no longer widely remembered save by scholars. But enough of it survives on sound recordings and kinescopes to prove that F. Scott Fitzgerald was all wet when he claimed that “there are no second acts in American lives.” Charles Laughton, who moved from England to America to seek fame and fortune and came perilously close to losing his soul along the way, had a second act that redeemed all that came before it. No actor could ask for a better curtain.

For the full commentary, see:
TERRY TEACHOUT. “SIGHTINGS; Charles Laughton’s Late Bounty.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., March 2, 2012): D10.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date March 1, 2012.)