For years I’ve heard the phrase bandied around:

How do you like them apples?

Now I finally have a source. A little smart googling brought me to this entry in the Urban Dictionary site and it turns out it’s a line from Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo.

In the movie Stumpy, played by Walter Brennan, tosses a grenade and shouts How do ya like them apples?

Written as a Film Note for Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“I’m not a storyteller, I’m a man who draws pictures,” says Hayao Miyazaki the super-director of some of the highest grossing Japanese films of all time, such as My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away and most recently, Howl’s Moving Castle.

In Hollywood, children’s films in general and animated ones in particular follow the classical storytelling mold. The protagonist is oblivious, the protagonist faces difficulty and the protagonist overcomes difficulty. While the world that is built around these stories may be extremely detailed and enchanting- such as the talking furniture of Beauty and the Beast or the fun forest friends of Bambi- the story arc of the protagonist is central to the film and the tapestry is for show. Read More »

Written as a Film Note for Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Shane Black, the writer and director of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, was the original Hollywood screenwriting fairy tale. At the age of 24, in 1985, he sold his first screenplay for a quarter of a million dollars and in the process invented a certain kind action film that defined Hollywood in the late 80s and early 90s.

That first film was Lethal Weapon. It transformed Mel Gibson from Mad Max to a true k faced a lot of resentment and backlash within the industry over the high price tag of that script combined with its critical and box office failure. At the same time, there was a perceived competition over becoming the “highest paid screenwriter in Hollywood” with writers such as Joe Eszterhas. Also, his talents as a writer were not very highly regarded among some of his peers since Black had stuck to writing action films for the most part of his career. Read More »

An Inconvenient Truth is a fantastic film. I saw it this past weekend and would encourage everyone to see it- take friends, families and especially that special skeptic you know. To quote Roger Ebert

In 39 years, I have never written these words in a movie review, but here they are: You owe it to yourself to see this film. If you do not, and you have grandchildren, you should explain to them why you decided not to.

Interesting Facts

1. It is based on a presentation Al Gore has been giving since 1989.
2. Paramount Classics has committed 5% of their domestic theatrical gross for their film, An Inconvenient Truth, with a minimum guarantee of $500,000 to be donated to a new bipartisan climate effort, Alliance for Climate Protection.
3. The presentation was switched from easels and charts to Apple’s Keynote and a Powerbook after Gore’s wife Tipper said, “Well, Mr. Information Superhighway, why don’t you put your slides on your computer?”.
4. The film was produced and financed by eBay billionaire and philanthropist Jeff Skoll.
5. Al Gore sits on the board of Apple.
6. Jeff Skoll’s Participant Productions funds films with a social message and commercial potential. Past hits: Syriana, North Country and Murderball.
7. The director of An Inconvenient Truth, Davis Guggenheim, is married to Elizabeth Shue (_Back to the Future_ sequels, Karate Kid, Adventures in Babysitting, City of Angels).
8. Gore’s 1992 book Earth in the Balance became the first book written by a sitting US senator to make the New York Times bestseller list since John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage.
9. The film barely mentions the current president or the party in power.
10. On Gore, Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf said “...as the two people who designed the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the Internet work, we would like to acknowledge VP Gore’s contributions as a Congressman, Senator and as Vice President. No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time.”
11. Michael Shermer, founder of the Skeptics Society and regular writer for Scientific American, recently admitted in an article for Sci Am that Al Gore’s presentation, among other things, turned him from a global warming skeptic in to someone who knows it is true.
12. Gore, along with David Blood, run an investment company called Generation Investment Management that makes investments based on long-term economic, environmental, social and geopolitical challenges. The duo’s names together form “Blood and Gore”.
13. Gore is also Chairman of Current TV, a national youth television channel that has ties with Google.
14. In response to the film’s publicity, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (which accepts donations from ExxonMobil, Amoco and other honorable oil companies) released two advertisements that mischaracterize scientific research – one of the ads claims that the glaciers of Greenland are actually thickening. Partially true, some parts of Greenland are thickening- but that’s like saying that one end of the Titanic went up as the other sank. Other parts of Greenland are clearly melting.
15. This past week, Gore has claimed that he has no presidential aspirations but only time will tell.

Written as a Film Note for Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

There is an old Hollywood story that goes something like this. Only three years and six movies into his acting career, Gene Kelly had a novel idea for his next film, 1945’s Anchor’s Aweigh. He wanted to dance with an animated character and his first choice, unsurprisingly, was Mickey Mouse. Kelly and his assistant Stanely Donen brought it before Walt Disney. Walt impressed and encouraging, but Mickey Mouse would never work in an MGM film.

Around the same time, two young men, who arrived at MGM around the same time as Kelly, named William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, had created a comic cartoon cat and mouse duo named Tom and Jerry. In 1944, when Kelly was looking for a dancing partner, the Tom and Jerry series was coming off back to back Academy Award wins in the Animated Short Film category. When Walt turned Kelly down, the other mouse became the obvious choice. Gene Kelly danced with Jerry Mouse in 1945’s Anchor’s Aweigh and made cinematic history as the first dance with an animated character. The animation was a painstaking process, and to his credit, it is said that Disney’s got MGM to take the risk on the sequence. Everything down to Jerry’s dancing reflection was perfected. It proved to be a good career move for all involved. Anchors Aweigh garnered five Oscar nominations. Tom and Jerry went on to win a total of seven. Read More »

Written as a Film Note for Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Stanley Donen was never nominated for an Oscar, so in 1998, the Academy did what was right and awarded him an honorary Academy Award. Donen danced with his Oscar on stage before declaring the secret behind his directorial success. “You show up,” he said. “You show up- and you stay out of the way. But you gotta show up or else you can’t take the credit and win one of these.” Read More »

Mark Cuban’s Landmark Theatre chain has 57 theatres with 213 screens in the United States which makes it the largest chain that focuses on independent/foreign/art films- until now. According to StudioBriefing AMC is getting in to the game:

Kansas City-based AMC Theatres, the No. 2 U.S. movie chain after Regal Theaters, said today (Tuesday) that it plans to set aside 72 screens in 39 U.S. cities to show traditional art-house fare. The exhibitor said that it planned to introduce independent and foreign film fare under a program dubbed “AMC Select.” Initial films under the program are due to debut this weekend, including the Al Gore global-warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth and Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion.

This is fantastic news. The chains are taking the true cinephiles seriously and that is precisely the right way to go about running their business. We are the people who will spend our money in the theatres for the small films, the big films and everything in between. That’s why Landmark makes money- they, like Apple in the computer business, have a monopoly over people who spend a lot of money on the product, care a lot about it and will be faithful if you treat them well.

Akeelah and the Bee is one of the great sport movies of all time- except that it does not really a sport. The sport is spelling, but the theme and plot are as old as rooting for the underdog. Read More »

Screenwriter John August, who I have been reading (on his blog and IMDb) for many years, and have been watching lazily since Charlie’s Angels and more closely since Big Fish has a great post on his blog today about an overused film cliché (I copied and pasted that accented ‘é’ because I have no clue how to type it!). Read More »

The Writers Guild of America (WGA)- i.e. the labor union for screenplay writers- just released their picks for the top 101 screenplays of all time as voted by members of the guild. Read More »