Watch Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Robert Redford, and a bunch of other actors in these New York Times-produced short films

Every year, the New York Times devotes one of its Sunday magazines to the movie industry. This year, they've gone the extra mile and recruited longtime Speilberg cinematographer Janusz Kaminski to direct 11 short (like, under a minute short) films starring a gaggle of celebrities, from Bradley Cooper to Oprah Winfrey to Chewetel Ejiofor. Each film is built around a single line of dialogue submitted by a roster of well-known screenwriters like Spike Jonze, Richard Linklater, and Seth Rogan. It's a lot of celebrities in one place.

Some of the shorts are presented as twists on different movie genres- Ejiofor stars as a hard-boiled detective, Greta Gerwig lurches around a sound-stage in a scene from a horror movie, etc.- and some are just weird, in an arty way. The whole project has the air of a vanity project about it, but the films are lushly photographed and free to watch, so all is forgiven. Watch a couple of the snappier shorts below, or check out the complete roster on the New York Times YouTube page.

Watch The Hunger Games, and a bunch of other movies, reimagined as 8-bit videogames

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire came out this past weekend to positive reviews and massive box office success.  To catch people up on the story before it came out, YouTube mainstay Cinefix reimagined the original Hunger Games movie as a top-down Zelda-style action game, complete with bow-and-arrow sharpshooting, tinny soundtrack, and communication via text box.  Watch it below.

The filmmaker behind the 8-bit Hunger Games, David Dutton, has made a whole host of 8-bit film adaptations, including a side-scrolling beat-em-up version of Thor, a Japanese RPG riff on Anchorman, and a LucasArts-y adventure game take on The Shining.  Check out the complete list here.

Watch the other side of Sandra Bullock's distress call from 'Gravity'

Last month, Alfonso Cuarón's interplanetary survival thriller Gravity managed to become a box-office hit despite not featuring a superhero or being a sequel to anything.  At one point in the movie, astronaut Ryan Stone makes a distress call from a Soyuz spacecraft and has a brief conversation with an unidentified person back on Earth.  The two don't speak the same language, but Stone is glad to make contact with another person after spending so much alone and adrift in outer space.  Now, Warner Bros. has released a poignant short film shot by Jonas Cuarón, son of Alfonso, detailing what happened on the other side of that call.

The short film,called Aningaaq, was originally going to be a Gravity DVD extra, but after successful showings at a couple of film festivals has been submitted  has been submitted for Oscar consideration in the best live-action short category.  Check it out below.

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Take a look at this lovely Breaking Bad artwork

Breaking Bad may have wrapped up in September, but the internet isn't ready to forget.  Over the past few months, artist and graphic designer Isabella Morawetz has been posting a series of lovingly crafted digital paintings based on shots from the show.  According to Morawetz's website, some of the images will be published in a Breaking Bad companion book called Breaking Blue.  Some of them are available to buy in print form.  Pretty much all of them are worth a look.

 

 

A Grand Theft Auto III developer is making a videogame about the 1979 Iranian revolution

In the years leading up to 1979, large numbers of Iranian citizens participated in a series of increasingly impassioned protests against Mohammad Reza, the Shah of Iran, whom many believed was a puppet of Western powers. The protests eventually boiled over into a revolution that would leave hundreds dead and change the face of the country forever. Later, in 2001, a video game called Grand Theft Auto III came out. It allowed players to steal cars and have implied sex with virtual prostitutes. It was incredibly popular. Now, one man is finally trying to bring these two things together.

That man is Navid Khonsari, a director and writer on several of the Grant Theft Auto games and now head of his own development studio, iNK Stories. The game, 1979 Revolution, is being developed for tablets and shows a pretty impressive commitment to historical verisimilitude.  It has political and academic advisers on tap and has imported several concept artists straight from Iran.  Khosari is raising money for the game via a very robust Kickstarter page.  If you're interested in historically accurate virtual recreations of important events and/or video game violence, feel free to donate.

What Roger Ebert Meant To Us- Panel Discussion

This past Sunday, I went to Elmhurst College to observe a panel discussion about Roger Ebert, the famous film critic who passed away in April.  The panelists included Michael Phillips, film critic for the Chicago Tribune, Neil Steinberg, a columnist at the Chicago Sun-Times, and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, an independent film critic whose name makes sense when you hear it out loud.

Composer Jean Sibelius once dropped this pearl of wisdom: "Pay no attention to what critics say. No statue has ever been put up to a critic."  That’s true of every critic I can think of, except Roger Ebert, for whom a group called the Public Art League is building a memorial statue to be installed outside the Virginia Theater in Ebert’s hometown of Champaign, IL.

Ebert, of course, is afforded this special honor in part because he is the most famous film critic in the world.  He appeared on TV, in some form another, for roughly 35 years, reviewing movies most famously alongside Gene Siskel and later with Richard Roper after Siskel died in 1999.  But that doesn’t fully explain why he’s so beloved.  After all, no one is giving Siskel a statue.  Ebert has won multiple Pulitzer prizes, started his own film festival, and wrote reviews that are still quoted among film fans for their perception and wit.  Just look at this bon mot dropped on 2001’s Pearl Harbor:

‘"Pearl Harbor" is a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle.’

It’s hard not to chortle at that, even if you didn’t see the movie.  The panelists agreed, with several talking about how they would read Ebert’s reviews even if they didn’t plan to see the movies.  According to them, the reviews could be more entertaining than the films themselves, and reading them would save a couple hours of their life.  They also touched on Ebert’s accessible prose style.  Vishnevetsky commented that he changed his own wordy writing style after absorbing Ebert’s direct, unadorned reviews.

Most of the time, however, was spent remembering Ebert as a friend, colleague, and person.  Phillips chimed in with a self-deprecating story about his first trip to the Cannes Film Festival, when Ebert comforted him after the stress of the assignment left him weeping on the side of the street.  Steinberg told a story about how Ebert, once a heavy drinker and long after a champion of Alcoholics Anonymous, convinced his stubborn mother to quit drinking.  Vishnevetsky, who met Ebert toward the end of his life, had little to contribute to such discussions, but the good feeling given off by the other panelists was inclusive enough for it not to matter.  That good feeling extended to the audience, who were allowed to ask questions after the panelists had finished talking amongst themselves.

Film criticism can sound trivial.  All critics do, the argument goes, is rank and rate work made by others without making anything of value themselves.  That isn’t true of Roger Ebert.  His writing is bright and bold enough to be enjoyed entirely on its own merits.  It’s full of feeling and thoughtful enough for it not to sound ridiculous when one audience member commented that she thought of Ebert more as a philosopher who happened to write film criticism than a film critic.  This panel was a warm way to remember a man who dedicated his life to writing and who left a terrific body of work.

Get involved, Internet (if you really feel like it): Help fund a sorta creepy-looking statue of Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert, famed film critic and cool uncle to the Internet, passed away last April, but his influence is still being felt.  Just this past Sunday, The A.V. Club's Ignatiy Vishnevetsky joined a couple of Chicago newspapermen for a panel discussion about Ebert's contributions to film criticism, and Ebert's website is still going strong over six months after his death.  Now, a group called the Public Art League has commissioned a life-size statue of Mr. Ebert be built and installed outside the Virginia Theater in Champaign, IL, long the site of Roger Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival.

The statue will depict Mr. Ebert sitting on a theater chair and giving his famous thumbs-up gesture.  It must be said that the scale model kind of, a little bit, just a tad, makes Ebert look like a melting white monster, but if you'd like to donate you can do so here.  Or, if you'd rather not take part in bringing this thing into the world, you could just buy one of Ebert's excellent books.  Maybe that would be for the best.

Artist George Pfau made a collection of impressionist paintings of scenes from zombie movies

Night of the Living Dead as Édouard Manet might have depicted it.

See my blub at the Onion AV Club.

Relive bitter arguments about whether to boycott the Ender's Game movie with this timeline of Orson Scott Card's misdeeds

After 25-plus years in development hell, the film version of author Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game finally opened last weekend to decent (but not fantastic) reviews and solid (but not spectacular) numbers.  Whether the opening was affected by the furor over Card's well-publicized remarks disparaging homosexuals is not known, but the controversy often threatened to overshadow talk of the movie itself.  Now, Vulture has assembled a handy guide to the sci-fi author's various foot-in-mouth statements and attendant backpedalings, allowing you to relive the debate over whether Card's personal beliefs should affect whether people see the movie over and over to your heart's content.

Ender's Game

            When it comes to Hollywood blockbusters, children have had it pretty rough of late.  Earlier this year, young Jaden Smith had to avoid death by monsters on a post-apocalyptic planet in After Earth.  In a few weeks, Katniss Everdeen and her teenage companions will be pit to the death against each other in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.  And here, pubescent Ender Wiggin (Asa Butterfield) must survive a brutal military boot camp designed to crush the innocence out of him so he can become a leader capable of saving the world from a race of bug-eyed extra-terrestrials.  For a tent-pole action movie, Ender’s Game is restrained, briskly paced, and tightly written, but its solemnity keeps it from becoming fun or exhilarating.

            Ender’s Game begins on planet Earth, where young Ender attends a government-run academy meant to train Earth’s next generation of military talent.  Some fifty years ago, Earth narrowly avoided being conquered by an alien race known as the Formics, and its leaders have spent the time since strengthening their defenses.  Writer-director Gavin Hood drops hints about the tight controls imposed on Earth’s citizens by their government- there’s a cap on procreation, for example- but the particulars are largely skipped over so the movie can focus on Ender’s progression from boarding school brat to military leader.

            Ender rises quickly through the ranks at his school both because he’s adept at interpersonal politics, showing a knack for saying the right things at the right time in front of the right people, and because the adults in his life see something in him.  Colonel Graff, played effectively by a scowling Harrison Ford, is in charge of recruiting at the school.  He and some of the other teachers watch Ender on video monitors and talk about how he’s a genius, a natural leader, the only one capable of defeating the alien threat.  Ender is basically a another version of Luke Skywalker or Harry Potter, a pre-ordained messiah destined to save the world.  But unlike in those stories, there’s no sense that it’s at all enjoyable being Ender Wiggin, nothing to leaven the crushing responsibility of being the Chosen One.  Life at the academy is regimented and competitive.  There’s little room for joy, and Graff works overtime to make sure Ender gets less than even his fair share.  He tries to drive a wedge between Ender and the other students, the better to mold Ender into leadership material.  Some of Ender’s classmates become envious, even violent.  The adults leave Ender to deal with his enemies as they come, satisfied with his nascent brutality even as Ender is disturbed by it.  The largely unseen Formics may threaten humanity with extinction, but the movie sees these adults as the real villains.

            In the movie’s twist ending, those adults push Ender to do something unconscionable, and the final minutes raise interesting questions about the corrosive power of authority and the ambiguity of personal responsibility.  From some angles, Ender’s Game can be seen as adolescent wish fulfilment, with young viewers projecting themselves onto the stoic Ender, an incredibly gifted young man whose talents are manipulated and misused by authority figures.  That’s something of a disturbing way to hook viewers in for what is otherwise a special effects driven sci-fi spectacular, but those ideas give the movie a brooding, somber center that can’t be waved away.  Ender’s Game presents one point of view, a rather downbeat one, on what it’s like to be young.  It remains to be seen whether that will be enough for it to stand out among other movies doing the same thing.