Warren Miller’s ski film trailers are well worth checking out.
Category: Movies
A Window into Nature
Fascinating: Rivers and Tides:
This amazing documentary from Thomas Riedelsheimer won the Golden Gate Award Grand Prize for Best Documentary at the 2003 San Francisco International Film Festival. The film follows renowned sculptor Andy Goldsworthy as he creates with ice, driftwood, bracken, leaves, stone, dirt and snow in open fields, beaches, rivers, creeks and forests. With each new creation, he carefully studies the energetic flow and transitory nature of his work.
Garrison Keillor: A Voice for the Movies
The cast and crew of the latest Robert Altman film wrapped up their work and headed home this week. For the past month they’d taken over the Fitizgerald Theater in Saint Paul, Minn., home to the popular public radio show A Prairie Home Companion, which also happens to be the subject of the film.
The show’s creator Garrison Keillor wrote the screenplay, a fictional account of life on the show. Keillor plays himself, acting with a host of Hollywood stars including Meryl Streep, Tommy Lee Jones, Kevin Kline and the young star Lindsay Lohan.
NPR has posted an extended audio interview. Check it out.
George Gilder on Hollywood
Scott Kirsner interviews George Gilder about the pending “dissolution of the television and motion picture industries as we know them”. MP3 Audio. Meanwhile, our good Senator, Herb Kohl has some decisions to make on whether he supports the future, or the past.
Fire in the Mountain
Great film, check it out:
An elite group of champion skiers, mountain climbers and European mountaineers become the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division, America’s only mountain and winter warfare fighting unit. From the intensive training atop the Colorado Rockies to the spectacular night climb of Italy’s Riva Ridge — where the 10th scored their biggest victory against Hitler’s troops — the exploits of this famous division are scrupulously chronicled.
Kevin Kelly: True Films
Kevin Kelly just released a $3.00 PDF version of his book, True Films. This interesting and useful e-book contains the best 100 documenatries he reviewed as True Films in December, 2004.
Planes, Trains & Automobiles
This weekend’s snowstorm and the ongoing airline turmoil provides a perfect background to check out the John Candy/Steve Martin 1987 film: Plains, Trains and Automobiles. This film is full of laughs and strangely prescient for a nearly 20 year old movie. I’m not optimistic that air travel will improve a whole lot the next few years.
Dr. Strangelove: Documentary?
The result was wildly iconoclastic: released at the height of the cold war, not long after the Cuban missile crisis, before the escalation in Vietnam, “Dr. Strangelove” dared to suggest – with yucks! – that our top generals might be bonkers and that our well-designed system for preserving the peace was in fact a doomsday machine.
What few people knew, at the time and since, was just how accurate this film was. Its premise, plotline, some of the dialogue, even its wildest characters eerily resembled the policies, debates and military leaders of the day. The audience had almost no way of detecting these similiarities:Nearly everything about the bomb was shrouded in secrecy back then. There was no Freedom of Information Act and little investigative reporting on the subject. It was easy to laugh off “Dr. Strangelove” as a comic book.
Goodbye Lenin
Wolfgang Becker’s Goodbye Lenin is one of the better films I’ve seen recently. Netflix
H.G. Wells War of the Worlds Secretly Filmed in the UK
In news fit to set Steven Spielberg’s hair on end, Pendragon Pictures has just announced the completion of principal photography on their take of H.G. Wells’ The War Of The Worlds. Set in Wells’ intended turn-of-the-century English locale, the movie is the world’s first authentic adaptation of the H.G. Wells classic 1898 novel