7 Movies That Put Insane Work Into Details You Didn't Notice
Having not one but two directors' entire filmographies on the list seems like pretty serious cheating.
Oh, the humanity disillusionment.
"5 Reasons Every Article Title Starts With a Number."
"4 Comments That Are In An Unfogged Thread"
"6 Comments That Added No Value Except for #5 and That is Debatable."
I don't think that Still Bill had enough content to fill two movies.
Request denied by WatchGuard HTTP proxy.Reason: one or more categories denied helper='WebBlocker.2' details='Tasteless & Offensive'
That's awfully judgmental, work internet filter.
"Tasteless & Offensive" is a bit strong. "Written for 20 year olds with way too much time on their hands" might be more on point.
The filter proposed in 11 might rule out reading a depressing number of documents I need on a daily basis.
The thingy about Seven (no! I won't type it with a 7 in the middle!) puts me in mind of Sleep No More, which had rooms full of things like journals and clinical notes that you could stop and read, though the light was dim, and it was usually more interesting to follow whatever blood-covered actor ran by.
My favorite recent movie-related Internet meme was common themes in movie posters. Especially the "Tiny People on Beach with Heads In The Clouds" Theme.
I thought this TVTropes entry would give more examples, but most of it is just "he did meticulous research" or "she worked really hard" and similar DVD-commentary-style cheerleading.
On the set of The Office U.S. version, the computers on the extras' desks are plugged in and connected to the internet. The extras playing underemployed people with boring jobs who get paid for surfing the web at their desks are, in fact, underemployed people with boring jobs who get paid for surfing the web at their desks.
There are extras in The Office? I thought we knew everyone in the company, at least upstairs.
18: there are, but you never see them. It's like the pills in the Kurosawa movie.
I heard they were going to be replaced by some guys in India who'll surf the web at a fraction of the cost.
8.--Meow meow Fitzcarraldo meow.
I think everybody noticed the insane work in Fitzcarraldo.
(God, I love Herzog. From a distance.)
21 - Fair enough. Fritz Lang had an early movie where he hired an actual rocket scientist to design his fake moon rocket; the Robert Downey Sherlock Holmes makes nodding reference to the bizarre Victorian martial art mentioned by Conan Doyle; and the set design for The Great Escape was based on Donald Pleasance's actual wartime POW experience when he was a captured RAF aviator. But none of them are as cool as Fitzcarraldo.
Boardwalk Empire, which I think basically sucks but watch religiously anyway [I love the interior decorating!] spends outrageous amounts of money on small details, which distracts from the insanely meandering, largely nonsensical plots and total failure of Steve Buscemi as a lead.
In the most recent episode was a notice of divorce, which some prop guy had lovingly prepared to look exactly like an old-timey legal document from the 1920s. Only problem: The divorce notice was captioned "United States District Court." Hahaha! You just spent all that money and fucked up anyway.
The fact that Kubrick was so famously demanding about the small set details and such (not covered in that Cracked piece are things like using high-speed lenses developed for industrial research so he could shoot Barry Lyndon by candlelight) is one of the reasons that people go overboard trying to provide some sort of unifying exegesis of The Shining based on things like door handles shifting and the layout of the hotel not making sense.
Allegedly, there is a Starbucks logo present in every scene and most shots of Fight Club. An acquaintance worked on Fight Club and said that the house set was completely full of actual weird junk, down to specially-printed labels for the food on the kitchen shelves, which didn't appear in the finished film.
As a counter-example to this kind of obsessive hyper-management of the mise-en-scène, one of Buñuel's biographers or collaborators had a story about how he would let his DP set up a perfect, painterly shot, and then go over and joggle the camera so it was slightly off kilter and out of focus. There were a lot of aspects of Buñuel's personality that were pretty assholish.
It's actually pretty amazing how detailed the set decor type stuff is for even the crappiest of Hollywood product.
The lord of the rings movies should be on this list. They had the art department work up complex backstories for all of the race and subrace types, including period workups for the flashbacks. So that they all would have complex sets of housing, garb, armor, weapons that were internally consistent and mostly never filmed.
This way, if someone were to freeze frame a crowded scene and look at the extras, you could tell that the rightmost elf was a wood elf, and his neighbor from the planes, while a third was also from the plains, bu clearly from a different area.
thousands and thousands (tens?) of pages of this stuff. People (several of them) spent years of work on things peripheral to anything filmed. In theory it helped the actors find a sense of place.
Dude would presumably be of the opinion that everybody on the Cracked list was half-assing it.
For one movie (Eyes Wide Shut?) Kubrick supposedly couldn't find real rocks that looked right in a landscape scene, so he had prop people make fake rocks to his specifications.
Pixar somewhat legendarily models, textures and lights the entire scene, even things like the bottom of furniture that will never appear onscreen.
28.1: Just sent that to my Ukrainian-American correspondent to get his reaction. (He was in the Ukraine for a year or so recently.)
I got nothing, certainly nothing that compares to 28.
I mean sure, Ozu exhausted his actors with takes and wrote their facial expressions into the script. And buily his house-sets a little small so they could be crossed in 2 1/2 strides. Got stories about Naked Island and Nakadai freezing in Human Condition. Just all normal stuff. Craft.
I think Hou & Tsai have stories. Ashes of Time.
Syndromes & a Century has the actors chatting out of character over the opening credits.
Kurosawa was a unique asshole
Basically, the Japanese studios, and the generation after they diminished, had the same lifetime employment family atmosphere as much of Japanese industry, and directors knew they were responsible for jobs and profits. Directors were given independence, and after working for forty years (this industry had a start point when everybody was twenty, 1925) with scriptwriters and set designers fact was they could whip out fine innovative art films within budget and on schedule.
Still there. Miike hasn't made umpteen films in x years by being von Stroheim.
Everyone interested in this kind of thing should watch Stanley Kubrick's Boxes. And I say that as someone who's not a huge fan of all of Kubrick's films.*
*Is there a way to say you really like some films, don't have strong feelings about others, and dislike some others? "Not a huge fan" reads, "doesn't like" to me, but that's not what I mean. Also, there's still quite a few Kubrick movies I want to see.
Time for a bit of the ol in-out, eh, birdie
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I kinda love this image:
http://www.uline.com/Product/ProductDetailRootItem.Aspx?modelnumber=S-14615
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Is there a way to say you really like some films, don't have strong feelings about others, and dislike some others
With Stanley Kubrick?
I might have some suggestions.
I finally clicked through. I suppose the fact that the idea of manipulating and writing a bunch of notebooks to look like they've been kept by a crazy man for years does not sound like a bad work task to me (provided you get fair pay) is a sign that there's something wrong with me.
Also, this seems like a good thread to ask:
In Fritz Lang's Fury. there's a scene where people in court are confronted with evidence of their criminal behavior on film. I read somewhere that this might have pre-dated using film as evidence in a courtroom? Anyone know if that's true?
First period should be a comma; first question mark should be a period.
That article on Dau is jaw-dropping.
Khzhzhzhzhzhsy's "4" was one of the few most unpleasant and unrewarding movies I've seen. Just weird-for-the-sake-of-weird, followed by offensive-for-the-sake-of-offensive, followed by weird-for-the-sake-of-weird. After reading that article, my complete lack of respect for him on an artistic level is now combined with a feeling that he just does not deserve to get any attention from anybody as a person. This "Dau" seems like a "Heaven's Gate"-level production with Cimino replaced by the guy who made "Myra Breckinridge".
28 - this is to "Goodbye Lenin" as an actual prison is to "The Green Mile".
For one movie (Eyes Wide Shut?) Kubrick supposedly couldn't find real rocks that looked right in a landscape scene, so he had prop people make fake rocks to his specifications.
I don't know, but that doesn't sound particularly unusual. Hollywood is always making fake rocks for its landscapes, no?
Is it an urban legend that people actually died moving the ship in Fitzcarraldo? I'd had it stated to me as fact, but I don't see it mentioned on Wikipedia.
AFAIK it's true that more people died filming the storming of the Winter Palace for Eisenstein than died during the actual storming* of the Winter Palace.
*No one. It wasn't really defended. Basically it was more of a "squatting".
47: I don't think so. Somebody easily could have died and Herzog was accused of being reckless, though he swore that the whole boat hoisting setup was engineered to be perfectly safe.
A cameraman was severely injured filming the sequence when the boat enters the rapids. Some crew members were hurt in a plane crash on a muddy Amazonian landing strip.
This is all half-remembered from Herzog memoir Conquest of Dreams, which is exactly as droll and Herzog-ian as you would hope.
combined with a feeling that he just does not deserve to get any attention from anybody as a person.
Well, 1st of all:arrogant lecherous sleaze.
Oh no. Interesting at the least in the way Jim Jones or Manson were "interesting." He has inspired a community and raised outrageous sums of money.
And also interesting as art. Not the movie, but the creation of a community. I by no means give him all the credit, there are apparently dozens to hundreds of people also having fun.
Just a variant Society for Creative Anachronism. Why not?
Pixar somewhat legendarily models, textures and lights the entire scene, even things like the bottom of furniture that will never appear onscreen.
I know an architect who textures the cinder blocks in the basement, including ones that will be covered with new drywall, and won't ever be viewed by the client anyway.
Ahem.
52: My friend's contractor, who was making sure that everything that would be hidden behind the sheetrock was nice and neat, called it being "decent in the dark".
I would always write "Moby Hick was here" in places that would be covered by drywall when I was framing houses.
54: I've heard that phrase before, and I should remember it, if only because it sounds better than "obsessing over the irrelevant".