Adam Westbrook explores our distorted view of success and our obsession with youth in his two part video series.

The Long Game Part 1: Why Leonardo DaVinci was no genius (4:25 minutes)

The Long Game Part 2: the missing chapter (5:48 minutes)

via Open Culture

Good to see Mcconaughey and I are on the same page with the new Star Wars trailer.

via ParisLemon

The big change that digitization made was it made it much easier to apply a single color scheme to a bunch of different scenes at once. The more of a movie you can make look good with a single scheme, the less work you have to do. Also, as filmmakers are bringing many different film formats together in a single movie, applying a uniform color scheme helps tie them together.

One way to figure out what will look good is to figure out what the common denominator is in the majority of your scenes. And it turns out that actors are in most scenes. And actors are usually human. And humans are orange, at least sort of!

—Why Every Movie Looks Sort of Orange and Blue

The Verge on J.J. Abrams interview with Collider:

Abrams also spoke to Collider briefly about his use of computer-generated effects in Episode VII. We’ve known all along that Abrams is leaning heavily on real sets and effects, but it’s also a Star Wars movie, so there’s no escaping CG. It turns out, Abrams use of CG is actually more reductive than additive — which is basically the total opposite approach that George Lucas would take.

“I feel like the beauty of this age of filmmaking is that there are more tools at your disposal, but it doesn’t mean that any of these new tools are automatically the right tools,” Abrams says. “And there are a lot of situations where we went very much old school and in fact used CG more to remove things than to add things.”

In a similar way as Apple has prospered despite the death of Steve Jobs, it’s great to see there’s the potential (we haven’t seen the new Star Wars movie) for the Star Wars franchise to prosper in the absence of George Lucas.

What an interesting guy:

Over the last 10 years, Nolan has emerged, along with Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson, as one of Hollywood’s most visible advocates for film, with its exacting texture and granularity of hue, over the Styrofoam flatness of digital. Nolan is a gestalt thinker and entertainer, and he thinks that it’s technical details like these, even the ones we register only unconsciously, that make the theatrical experience a vivid and continuous dream: “At the movies, we’re going to see someone else put on a show, and I feel a responsibility to put on the best show possible.”
I always love how a person’s formative years help define the course of his life:
To hear Nolan tell it, however, the film’s true origin story begins much earlier, when Nolan was 7; his father, a British advertising copywriter, took him to see, within the span of about a year, the initial release of “Star Wars” and a theatrical rerelease of “2001.” The age of 7, perhaps not coincidentally, was also the year in which he started to make his own movies, on a Super 8 he borrowed from his dad. Those two movies — one that helped inaugurate the auteur-driven New Hollywood, and one that inadvertently ushered in the era of the reinvigorated, blockbuster-based studio system — have remained his touchstones, and “Interstellar” represents his opportunity to repay his debt to both of them at the same time. Jonah, when he came to visit the set and saw the spaceships, said to him, “Of course we’re doing something like this; this was our whole childhood.”
And:
His childhood was apportioned between London and Chicago. Jonah, who is six years younger, told me that his very earliest memories were of his older brother making stop-motion space odysseys, painstaking processes of tweaking the gestures of action figures. They went to the movies constantly, and Jonah recalls that they brooked no distinction between the arty and the mainstream; they’d go to Scala Cinema Club in London to see “Akira” or a Werner Herzog film one month and then go to the Biograph in Chicago to see “The Commitments” the next. (When Jonah was 13 or 14, Nolan gave him two Frank Miller volumes, “Batman: Year One” and “The Dark Knight Returns,” which the two revered.)
I’m really looking forward to Interstellar.

Ignition Creative London recut the trailer for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and it’s great:

Remember, this movie was released in 1968.
1968.
[via Flavorwire]

From Bloomberg:

Actor Christian Bale didn’t have to audition for the role of Steve Jobs in the coming biopic of the Apple Inc. co-founder, according to screenwriter Aaron Sorkin.

“We needed the best actor on the board in a certain age range and that’s Chris Bale,” Sorkin told Bloomberg Television’s Emily Chang on a coming edition of “Studio 1.0.” “He didn’t have to audition. Well, there was a meeting.”
Why would he have to audition? The dude is perfect for the role.
I can’t wait to see him bury the awful version Ashton Kutcher did.
[ok, I know Kutcher is a huge fan of Jobs and he didn’t do a half-bad job playing him, but the movie wasn’t very good]

Oh shit.
DE contributor Bryan is at it again:

It’s the October Horrorshow! It’s no secret that I hate autumn. It’s a shit time to be alive here in the northern latitudes, where the air takes on a chill, the days become noticeably shorter, and every plant from here to Seattle looks like it’s dying. Thank goodness, then, for Halloween. The festival of death is a yearly finger in the eye to the fall season, when we, and by that, I mean me, watch lots and lots of horror flicks. I choose to embrace nature’s inexorable slide into hibernation by watching fake snuff films, paradoxical as that is, and I love every minute of it. Like last year, there’s a full slate of reviews this year. No gaps. And the first is a double bill.
Fall is the house.