On the recommendation of fellow Exhauster Bryan, today I rented the documentary, Jiro Dreams of Sushi.
It’s a beautiful film about Jiro Ono, a master sushi chef who’s been doing what he does for 75 years.

Open Culture remixes The Making of Apocalypse Now:

In an interview aired on San Francisco radio last week, Francis Ford Coppola acknowledged that he could no longer compete with himself — that he couldn’t make the kind of films that made him famous during the 1970s. The Godfather (1972), The Godfather II (1974), and Apocalypse Now (1979) — they were big, sprawling, masterful films. And they sometimes pushed a young Coppola to the physical and financial brink.

And:

Apocalypse Now hit theaters exactly 33 years ago this week. And to commemorate that occasion, we’re serving up a short remix film, Heart of Coppola, that weaves together scenes from the film, footage from behind the scenes, and audio of the great Orson Welles reading from Heart of Darkness, the Joseph Conrad novella upon which Apocalypse Now was loosely based.

Filmed with Contour Cameras

It’s hard to imagine anyone other than Jeff Bridges as The Dude from The Big Lebowski. But it turns out that dude was based on a real life dude – and he most certainly abides.

Fellow Exhauster Bryan reviewed The Dark Knight Rises over at his site, Missile Test, and he didn’t pull punches:

Bane, in short, is a joke. A third-tier Batman villain artificially elevated to prominence like a newcomer in the WWE whom Vince McMahon decided to give some juice because Smackdown was lagging in ratings. Bane is a failed experiment, a tawdry diversion from what can make the comics great. Featuring Bane as the villain in The Dark Knight Rises is a disappointment. It was a choice that was intriguing only in its ability to challenge Nolan as a storyteller. Elevating a character lacking in depth and sincerity to such a degree while requiring he carry the final act of the greatest superhero trilogy of all time is ambitious, indeed.

Was Nolan up to the task? Could he take such dreck and make it compelling through sheer will and talent?

It’s an interesting and very educational review. Bryan not only delves into Batman comic book history, but also pivots it into a review of the campy Batman movie from 1966:

Recently, Grant Morrison, the great comics writer, watched all the Batman films, and a good deal of the television series. In a short blurb about the 1966 film, he pointed out that it was the type of movie that children love, adolescents loathe, and adults find hilarious. I agree.

Per Bryan’s recommendation, I loaded up Batman: Year One onto my iPad and it’s pretty great.

Batman: Dark Knightfall – a short stop-motion film made entirely with action figures.
Sound silly? Go check it out.

Hitchcock movies as GIFs. Wish they were bigger.

The object of everybody’s search in movies – the power cube, the energy crystal, Marcellus Wallace’s briefcase?
Turns out theres a name for these objects – a MacGuffin:

In fiction, a MacGuffin (sometimes McGuffin or maguffin) is a plot device in the form of some goal, desired object, or other motivator that the protagonist (and sometimes the antagonist) is willing to do and sacrifice almost anything to pursue, often with little or no narrative explanation as to why it is considered so desirable. A MacGuffin, therefore, functions merely as “a plot element that catches the viewers’ attention or drives the plot of a work of fiction”.[1] In fact, the specific nature of the MacGuffin may be ambiguous, undefined, generic, left open to interpretation or otherwise completely unimportant to the plot. Common examples are money, victory, glory, survival, a source of power, a potential threat, a mysterious but highly desired item or object, or simply something that is entirely unexplained.

Thanks Bryan.

The Master, a new film by Paul Thomas Anderson, the director of There Will Be Blood.
Can’t wait.
via Joshua Topolsky