Watch Steven Soderbergh’s Re-Edited Version of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey Free Online

in Film | January 15th, 2015

In 2013, Steven Soderbergh told me during an interview that he was retiring. “Five years ago, as we were finishing Che, I said, ‘OK, when I turn 50, I want to be done. I’m going to jam in as much as I can, but when I turn 50, I want to be done.’ ”

Yet Soderbergh’s concept of retirement must be different from most mortals. In the past year, he not only executive produced the Showtime series The Knick but he also directed all ten episodes. Using the handle @Bitchuation, he wrote an entire novel on Twitter called Glue. And he produced and directed a Broadway show starring Chloë Grace Moretz called The Library. And in his copious free time, he’s been producing various cinematic experiments on his website Extension 765, which included a piece that spliced together Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho with Gus Van Sant’s bizarro shot-by-shot remake, a black and white version of Raiders of the Lost Ark and an edit of Michael Cimino’s famously bloated Heaven’s Gates.

In his latest work, Soderbergh takes a crack at Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. You can watch it here. As he writes on his site:

i’ve been watching 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY regularly for four decades, but it wasn’t until a few years ago i started thinking about touching it, and then over the holidays i decided to make my move. why now? I don’t know. maybe i wasn’t old enough to touch it until now. maybe i was too scared to touch it until now, because not only does the film not need my—or anyone else’s—help, but if it’s not THE most impressively imagined and sustained piece of visual art created in the 20th century, then it’s tied for first. meaning IF i was finally going to touch it, i’d better have a bigger idea than just trimming or re-scoring.

What that bigger idea is, however, isn’t immediately clear. Soderbergh’s version is a good 50 minutes shorter than the original. Unlike the original, which unfolds in a deliberate pace, Soderbergh’s version moves briskly. Most of the cuts aren’t immediately missed.

But there is one clear, and jarring difference between the two – he drops HAL’s unblinking electronic red eye into unexpected scenes. It pops up right in the beginning, then again when the tribe of early humans first encounter the monolith, and then again during the film’s trippy light show deep at the end. Whereas Kubrick used the HAL’s eye as a sinister example of the perils of technology and mankind’s hubris, Soderbergh turns it into something else, something more spiritual. Does it work? I don’t know. But it’s interesting.

Soderbergh goes on to argue that Kubrick, were he alive, would be a big fan of digital video and he makes a pretty compelling case.

i believe SK would have embraced the current crop of digital cameras, because from a visual standpoint, he was obsessed with two things: absolute fidelity to reality-based light sources, and image stabilization. regarding the former, the increased sensitivity without resolution loss allows us to really capture the world as it is, and regarding the latter, post-2001 SK generally shot matte perf film (normally reserved for effects shots, because of its added steadiness) all day, every day, something which digital capture makes moot. pile on things like never being distracted by weaving, splices, dirt, scratches, bad lab matches during changeovers, changeovers themselves, bad framing and focus exacerbated by projector vibration, and you can see why i think he might dig digital.

Again, you can watch Soderbergh’s re-edit of 2001 here. More films can be found in our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

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Steven Soderbergh Creates a Big List of What He Watched, Read & Listened to in 2014

Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.

by Jonathan Crow | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 11 ) |

365: One Animated Film, Shot One Second a Day, Over One Year

in Animation | January 14th, 2015

Back in September, we highlighted an animation that humorously imagined David Bowie and Brian Eno’s collaboration on the song, “Warszawa,” which eventually appeared on the album, Low. The cartoon was created by The Brothers McLeod, and they’re now back with an animation called “365 — One Year, One Film, One Second a Day.” The title pretty much says it all. But if you want more background information, here’s how Vimeo frames the clip: “Greg [McLeod] animated one second of animation every day for the 365 days of the year 2013. There was no storyline, script or storyboard. The ideas come from things read, seen or experienced on the day, with a little artistic license for good measure.” The result you can watch above. Also find daily stills from the project on Facebook.

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

George Lucas Shoots a Cinema Verité-Style Documentary on Francis Ford Coppola (1969)

in Film | January 14th, 2015

In 1968, years before American Graffiti, Raiders of the Lost Ark and, shudder, the Star Wars prequels, George Lucas was a struggling filmmaker with a couple of experimental films movies under his belt. His short Electronic Labyrinth THX 1138 4EB took first prize at the National Student Film Festival, but he had yet to make the plunge into feature films. So he did what many other artists and creative types did in the past – he glommed onto a more successful friend.

The friend in this case was Francis Ford Coppola, who by 1968 had already directed three features and was starting production of his latest movie, The Rain People. Lucas talked his friend into letting him shoot a behind-the-scenes documentary about the production. The resulting doc, Filmmaker –A Diary By George Lucas, is a fascinating document of the early days of New Hollywood and the struggles of getting an independent movie made. You can watch it above.

Shot in a cinéma vérité matter, Lucas captures Coppola at his most charming, creative and passionate – dealing with the studios over the phone, consulting with a baby-faced James Caan on set and struggling to shoot a scene while battling the stomach flu. He was even forced to shave his trademark beard so as not to upset any of the local anti-hippy constabularies. The film shows Coppola making up the film as he went along. At one point, he re-writes a scene to incorporate an actual local parade. Filmmaker makes an interesting contrast with that other Coppola documentary, Hearts of Darkness, made on the set of Apocalypse Now. Here he’s filled with a youthful vigor that in Hearts, deep in the jungles of the Philippines, has transformed into half-mad egomania. Of course, the shoot for Rain People wasn’t anywhere near as epic or disastrous as Apocalypse.

On set, Lucas shot and recorded sound for the doc all by himself and generally made himself as unobtrusive as possible. “George was around in a very quiet way,” recalled Rain People producer Ron Colby. “You’d look around and suddenly there’d be George in a corner with his camera. He’d just kind of drift around.”

The movie proved to be valuable for Lucas’s confidence as a filmmaker. He later described making the movie as “more therapy than anything else. “At night, after production had wrapped for the day, Lucas would go off to write the script to his first feature THX-1138.

Filmmaker finally premiered in 1977, the year that Lucas released Star Wars and completely stepped out from the shadow of his friend and mentor Coppola.

An alternative version can be found on Youtube here. Other great films can be found in our rich collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

Via Devour/Kitbashed

Freiheit, George Lucas’ Short Student Film About a Fatal Run from Communism (1966)

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Hundreds of Fans Collectively Remade Star Wars; Now They Remake The Empire Strikes Back

Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.

by Jonathan Crow | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Allen Ginsberg Sings the Poetry of William Blake (1970)

in Music, Poetry | January 14th, 2015

There was once a time, if you can believe it, when Allen Ginsberg could take the poetry of William Blake, sing it in a recording studio, and then MGM Records would release it as a long-playing album. I refer to the time, of course, of “the sixties,” that half-mythical era that seems to have run from around 1966 to 1972. Smack in the middle of the sixties, thus defined, came this distinctive release, Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake, tuned by Allen Ginsberg, recorded in December 1969 and released in 1970.

Every reader familiar with Blake, of course, knows Songs of Innocence and of Experience as a book, an illustrated collection of poems first self-published in 1789 and in 1794 re-issued and expanded as Songs of Innocence and of Experience Showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. This work of an 18th-century poet captured the imagination of the 20th-century poet Ginsberg, and not just as reading material; he came to believe that not only did Blake intend his words to be sung, but that he himself could render them faithfully in song — as well as play the piano and harmonium in accompaniment.

You can hear hear the fruit of Ginsberg’s musical-poetic reconstructive labors at the top of the post, at the Internet Archive, or at PennSound, which not only offers each track individually but also its lyrics and sometimes even links to the corresponding page from the original book at the William Blake Archive. When we think of sixties-defining albums, we think of Blonde on Blonde, Are You Experienced?, Sgt, Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, that sort of thing, and rightly so, but a project like Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake, tuned by Allen Ginsberg speaks just as much to what became possible in that artistic Cambrian explosion of an era.

Hear Allen Ginsberg’s Short Free Course on Shakespeare’s Play, The Tempest (1980)

Allen Ginsberg’s “Celestial Homework”: A Reading List for His Class “Literary History of the Beats”

Allen Ginsberg’s Last Three Days on Earth as a Spirit: The Poet’s Final Days Captured in a 1997 Film

Allen Ginsberg Recordings Brought to the Digital Age. Listen to Eight Full Tracks for Free

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture as well as the video series The City in Cinema and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Vladimir Nabokov Names the Greatest (and Most Overrated) Novels of the 20th Century

in Literature | January 14th, 2015

Just above, hear émigré Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita read the opening sentences of that novel in both English and Russian, after offering some brief comments on his relationship to his former native country. Then, after a few minutes of discussion of a work that became incorporated into his Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, we get Nabokov the cantankerous critic. Or rather, Nabokov, the critic of critics. The author had little regard for critics themselves. In a Paris Review interview, he opines that the only purpose of literary criticism was that it “gives readers, including the author of the book, some information about the critic’s intelligence, or honesty, or both.” In the filmed interview above (at the 3:24 mark), Nabokov points his lance at the inflated popular notion of “great books”:

I’ve been perplexed and amused by fabricated notions about so-called “great books.” That, for instance, Mann’s asinine Death in Venice, or Pasternak’s melodramatic, vilely written Doctor Zhivago, or Faulkner’s corncobby chronicles can be considered masterpieces, or at least what journalists term “great books,” is to me the same sort of absurd delusion as when a hypnotized person makes love to a chair.

That Lolita regularly tops such “great books” lists, such as the Modern Library’s “100 Best Novels,” would hardly have impressed its author.

Nonetheless, after his takedown of such venerated names as Thomas Mann, Boris Pasternak, and the “corncobby” William Faulkner, Nabokov doesn’t hesitate to name his “greatest masterpieces of 20th century prose.” They are, in this order:

1) James Joyce’s Ulysses

2) Kafka’s The Metamorphosis

3) Andrei Bely’s St. Petersburg

4) The first half of Proust’s fairy tale, In Search of Lost Time

So there you have it, from the mouth of the master himself. Should you hang in there for the next clip, you will hear Nabokov read from his notebook titled “Things I Detest.” How seriously we are to take any of this is hard to say—one never really knows with Nabokov.

Vladimir Nabokov Marvels Over Different “Lolita” Book Covers

The Notecards on Which Vladimir Nabokov Wrote Lolita: A Look Inside the Author’s Creative Process

Vladimir Nabokov Creates a Hand-Drawn Map of James Joyce’s Ulysses

Vladimir Nabokov’s Delightful Butterfly Drawings

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 12 ) |

Buddhism 101: A Short Introductory Lecture by Jorge Luis Borges

in Literature, Religion | January 14th, 2015

In 1977, erudite Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges delivered a series of seven lectures in Buenos Aires on a variety of topics, including Dante’s Divine Comedy, nightmares, and the Kabbalah. (The lecture series is collected in an English translation entitled Seven Nights.) One of the lectures is simply called “Buddhism,” and in it, Borges presents an overview of the ancient Eastern religion. Borges had previously made scattered reference to Buddhist subjects in his writing, though he certainly never devoted as much attention to it as he did Catholicism or Judaism, a faith and heritage he found endlessly fascinating and admirable.

His portrait of Buddhism, though much less in depth, is no less sympathetic. The lecture is adapted, it seems, from a short book written the previous year, Qué es el Budismo?, a “clear and concise explanation of the religion, its value systems, and how some of its principal teachings share some similarities with other faiths.” So writes the blog Vaguely Borgesian, who also comment that Borges’ book—and by extension the lecture—“rarely goes beyond what one might find on say a Wikipedia article on Buddhism.” That may be so, but—as we can see in this English translation of Borges’ lecture—the author does several times during his summary offer some distinctly Borgesian commentary of his own. Below are just a few excerpts:

Buddism’s Tolerance:

[Buddhism’s] longevity can be explained for historical reasons, but such reasons are fortuitous or, rather, they are debatable, fallible. I think there are two fundamental causes. The first is Buddhism’s tolerance. That strange tolerance does not correspond, as is the case with other religions, to distinct epochs: Buddism was always tolerant.

It has never had recourse to steel or fire, has never thought that steel or fire were persuasive…. A good Buddhist can be Lutheran, or Methodist, or Calvinist, or Sintoist, or Taoist, or Catholic; he can be a proselyte to Islam or Judaism, with complete freedom. But it is not permissible for a Christian, a Jew or a Muslim to be a Buddhist.

On the Historical Existence of the Buddha:

We may disbelieve this legend. I have a Japanese friend, a Zen Buddhist, with whom I have had long and friendly arguments. I told him that I believed in the historic truth of Buddha. I believed and I believe that two thousand five hundred years ago there was a Nepalese prince called Siddharta or Gautama who became the Buddha, that is, the Awoken, the Lucid One – as opposed to us who are asleep or who are dreaming this long dream which is life. I remember one of Joyce’s phrases: “History is a nightmare from which I want to awake.” Well then, Siddharta, at thirty years of age, awoke and became Buddha.

On Buddhism and Belief:

The other religions demand much more credulity on our part. If we are Christians we must believe that one of the three persons of the Divinity condescended to become a man and was crucified in Judea. If we are Muslims we must believe that there is no other god than God and that Mohammad is his apostle. We can be good Buddhists and deny that Buddha existed. Or, rather, we may think, we must think that our belief in history isn’t important: what is important is to believe in the Doctrine. Nevertheless, the legend of Buddha is so beautiful that we cannot help but refer to it.

Borges has much more to say in the full lecture on Buddhist cosmology and history. He concludes with the very respectful statement below:

What I have said today is fragmentary. It would have been absurd for me to have expounded on a doctrine to which I have dedicated many years – and of which I have understood little, really – with a wish to show a museum piece. Buddhism is not a museum piece for me: it is a path to salvation. Not for me, but for millions of people. It is the most widely held religion in the world and I believe that I have treated it with respect when explaining it tonight.

To learn more about Borges and Buddhism, see this article, and the watch the video above, a short introduction to a lecture course given by Borges’ friend Amelia Barili at UC Berkeley.

Jorge Luis Borges’ Favorite Short Stories (Read 7 Free Online)

Borges Explains The Task of Art

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Daily Routines of Famous Creative People, Presented in an Interactive Infographic

in Creativity, Productivity | January 13th, 2015

Click the image above to access the interactive infographic.
The daily life of great authors, artists and philosophers has long been the subject of fascination among those who look upon their work in awe. After all, life can often feel like, to quote Elbert Hubbard, “one damned thing after another” — a constant muddle of obligations and responsibilities interspersed with moments of fleeting pleasure, wrapped in gnawing low-level existential panic. (Or, at least, it does to me.) Yet some people manage to transcend this perpetual barrage of office meetings, commuter traffic and the unholy allure of reality TV to create brilliant work. It’s easy to think that the key to their success is how they structure their day.

Mason Currey’s blog-turned-book Daily Rituals describes the workaday life of great minds from W.H. Auden to Immanuel Kant, from Flannery O’Connor to Franz Kafka. The one thing that Currey’s project underlines is that there is no magic bullet. The daily routines are as varied as the people who follow them– though long walks, a ridiculously early wake up time and a stiff drink are common to many.

One school of thought for creating is summed up by Gustave Flaubert’s maxim, “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” Haruki Murakami has a famously rigid routine that involves getting up at 4am and writing for nine hours straight, followed by a daily 10km run. “The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind. But to hold to such repetition for so long—six months to a year—requires a good amount of mental and physical strength. In that sense, writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.” He admits that his schedule allows little room for a social life.

Then there’s the fantastically prolific Belgian author George Simenon, who somehow managed to crank out 425 books over the course of his career. He would go for weeks without writing, followed by short bursts of frenzied activity. He would also wear the same outfit everyday while working on his novel, regularly take tranquilizers and somehow find the time to have sex with up to four different women a day.

Most writers fall somewhere in between. Toni Morrison, for instance, has a routine that that seems far more relatable than the superman schedules of Murakami or Simeon. Since she juggled raising two children and a full time job as an editor at Random House, Morrison simply wrote when she could. “I am not able to write regularly,” she once told The Paris Review. “I have never been able to do that—mostly because I have always had a nine-to-five job. I had to write either in between those hours, hurriedly, or spend a lot of weekend and predawn time.”

Above is a way cool infographic of the daily routines of 26 different creators, created by Podio.com. And if you want to see an interactive version of the same graphic but with rollover bits of trivia, just click here. You’ll learn that Voltaire slept only 4 hours a day and worked constantly. Victor Hugo preferred to take a morning ice bath on his roof. And Maya Angelou preferred to work in an anonymous hotel room.

via ThisisColossal

John Updike’s Advice to Young Writers: ‘Reserve an Hour a Day’

John Cleese’s Philosophy of Creativity: Creating Oases for Childlike Play

Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.

by Jonathan Crow | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

50 Years of Changing David Bowie Hair Styles in One Animated GIF

in Music | January 13th, 2015

Last summer we time traveled back to 1964 and showed you the very first TV appearance of David Bowie. Here, we found Bowie, only 17 years old, presenting himself as the spokesman for “The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-Haired Men.” Long hair wasn’t widely accepted in the England of 1964, and, with a touch of humor, Bowie was taking a stand. “I think we’re all fairly tolerant, but for the last two years we’ve had comments like ‘Darling!’ and ‘Can I carry your handbag?’ thrown at us, and I think it just has to stop now.”

Bowie’s obsession with hair never went away. Creative hairstyles would come and go throughout the years. And they’re all on display in an animated gif, which Helen Green published on her Tumblr last week to celebrate the musician’s 68th birthday.

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via Kottke

David Bowie and Cher Sing Duet of “Young Americans” and Other Songs on 1975 Variety Show

David Bowie Sings ‘I Got You Babe’ with Marianne Faithfull in His Last Performance As Ziggy Stardust

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Watch Steven Soderbergh’s Re-Edited Version of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey Free Online

365: One Animated Film, Shot One Second a Day, Over One Year

George Lucas Shoots a Cinema Verité-Style Documentary on Francis Ford Coppola (1969)

Allen Ginsberg Sings the Poetry of William Blake (1970)

Vladimir Nabokov Names the Greatest (and Most Overrated) Novels of the 20th Century

Buddhism 101: A Short Introductory Lecture by Jorge Luis Borges

The Daily Routines of Famous Creative People, Presented in an Interactive Infographic

50 Years of Changing David Bowie Hair Styles in One Animated GIF

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