BLUE MAG

From AP:
“In the empty, silent spaces of the world, he has found metaphors that illuminate the silent places our hearts, and found in them, too, a strange and terrible beauty: austere, elegant, enigmatic, haunting,” Jack Nicholson said in presenting Antonioni with the career Oscar. Nicholson starred in the director’s 1975 film The Passenger.

I’m getting tired of reporting the deaths of film greats.

He was “probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera,” Woody Allen said in a 70th birthday tribute in 1988. For me the last of the GREAT filmmakers has passed. Continue reading Ingmar Bergman, 1918 - 2007.

Via digg… I like the screenshot of Sawyer reading a book.

The dorkocity of others - at ComiCon - has yielded this…

UPDATE: And of course there’s also the teaser trailer, with no footage. An email buddy questioned what exactly the mob could do that would be “too far”…

Wes Anderson fans will be delighted to see the trailer for The Darjeeling Limited, Wes and Co’s next movie due out in September. I think it looks pretty good.

Lazlo Kovacs was a cinematographer who named himself after Belmondo’s character in Breathless after moving from Hungry to America. It was almost as if he were saying he was born from the movies once he got to Hollywood. He was at film school in his native Budapest when a revolt against the Communist regime started on the streets. With classmate Vilmos Zsigmond, he borrowed a school camera and filmed the conflict. They smuggled the footage into Austria and entered the U.S. as political refugees in 1957. The historic footage was later featured in a CBS docu narrated by Walter Cronkite. Once in Hollywood, Kovacs went on to make the images for “Easy Rider,” “The King of Marvin Gardens,” “Paper Moon,” “The Last Movie,” “Shampoo,” “New York, New York,” “Ghostbusters” and many others. I’m not sure this man was created by the movies but he was certainly created for them.

He was won or was even nominated for an Oscar but shot with Bogdanovitch, Rafelson, and Scorsese on some of the best films of the 1970s. Do yourself a favor and watch one of the many films he made this week.

While watching “Extras: Season 2″ on DVD it became necessary to develop a technique for laughing hysterically but silently. Like most great comedies, it is possible to miss great laughs whilst recovering from the previous laugh. It almost makes one miss the laugh track, which provides a built-in laugh buffer. I call my technique “circular laughing” as a nod to circular breathing, the technique musical instrument players use to be able to breathe in and out simultaneously to provide a constant sound.

It’s a simple trick, really: All you have to do is laugh with the same vigor as you would normally, only you don’t make any sounds. Even with the long awkward pauses that make Ricky Gervais’s comedy so great, you still miss too much when you’re picking yourself off the floor. The need came to a head in the scene which follows, when Sir Ian McKellen is explaining to Gervais’s Andy Millman his acting “method.” Practice for yourself…

Continue reading Circular laughing: A Ricky Gervais survival technique

Glenn Morshower, who played agent Aaron Pierce on “24,” has been cast to play Landry’s dad on “Friday Night Lights” this fall. Landry is played by Jesse Plemons. With a resemblance like this how can they not fire up this casting call.

UPDATE: This was our 100th post!

The actual nomination list is notoriously hard to get because they always just dump the entire list, which buries the major ones toward the middle of the bottom. I’m reading from here. My thoughts after the jump…

Continue reading My Emmy noms reactions