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I wish more people understood this simple fact!
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The Americans
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More Equal Than Others: Six Films of 2012 Done Better
For better or worse, films don’t exist in a vacuum. If literature derives from itself, and, according to Marshall McLuhan, the content in any new medium is always the same as in the old, then films don’t exactly have a wealth of opportunities to be original. You can always compare a film to one that came before it, but to do so isn’t always pragmatic or fair.
Each should be judged on its own merits, but then again, certain flaws within said film can foster a greater appreciation for those that did it right. To commandeer a concept from the forever-truculent Armond White, I’d like to list six films released last year that were done better by others, but unlike Mr. White, I’ve also included some I did like. This is, of course, a subjective list, and could’ve easily been expanded to fit more. Feel free to disagree with my choices.
*Warning: spoilers ahead
Ricky D’s 50 Favourite Films of 2012 (Part One) - How many have you seen?
2012 wasn’t a bad year for movies. It was actually a great year. The problem is, the movies we were most anticipating, specifically the Hollywood blockbusters like Prometheus and The Hobbit, didn’t live up to our expectations. With that said I still managed to make a list of 50 films I loved. Maybe I just have bad taste or maybe I just love movies but the most time consuming factor when making this list was sitting down and deciding what makes the cut and what doesn’t. Even with 50 films listed below, I found it hard to not include movies like Frankenweenie, The Loneliest Planet, Compliance, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, and Searching For Sugar Man. Come to think of it, every film featured on our list of best documentaries could have easily snuck into this list. I haven’t seen everything of course. Below is a brief list of oversights – but there were a few films that received critical acclaim that I just didn’t like including Alps and Cosmopolis. As with all lists, this is personal and order isn’t too important until you get to my top 10. I could easily rearrange the ordering for any film featured on this list as I enjoy them all.
Note: I am only including movies that were theatrically released. That means I am not including many of the gems I watched at film festivals nor is Zero Dark Thirty eligible.
A few oversights:
The Hunt, Barbara, Attenberg, Almayer’s Folly, The Comedy, Girl Walk / All Day, The Day He Arrives and Neighbouring Sounds.
Sound on Sight Podcast #323: Ridley Scott (‘Prometheus’ / ‘Alien’)
The cinematic summer of 2012 rolls on with director Ridley Scott’s first sci-fi effort in almost 30 years, Prometheus, whic has provoked fierce discussion among critics, audiences, fanboys and cinephiles as to its merits since it hit theaters this weekend. In both spoiler-free and spoiler-ful flavors, Ricky D, Julian Carrington and Simon Howell are here to dissect the remains. In between, they take a look back at 1979′s original Alien to see how the canonical sci-fi/horror chiller holds up.
2012′s Great Movie Moments: June
At the end of each month, the Sound On Sight staff will band together to write an article about their favourite scenes in films released. Here are our favourite scenes from the month of May.
Warning: Of course, spoilers are in full effect here!
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Killer Joe – KFC Rape
Killer Joe marks an unshakeable return for William Friedkin, the legendary director of The French Connection, To Live And Die In L.A. and The Exorcist. This vigorous mix of sex, violence and family values gone wrong is a roller-coaster ride, designed for those who like their Southern neo-noir thrillers sprinkled with a heavy dose of black humour and an irresistibly bold dose of crazy. Take for instance the most shocking scene: Killer Joe’s KFC-flavored rape.
Prometheus by Daniel Norris - @DanKNorris on Twitter.
2012: The Best Movies of June
2012 promises to be a fantastic year in cinema ,(although halfway through the year it has been somewhat of a letdown). Not too long ago, we posted a list of thirty of our most anticipated films of 2012, and so I decided I would keep track of my favourite films released each month. Here are my favorite films released in June.
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Prometheus
Directed by Ridley Scott
Screenplay by Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof
2012, USA
Ridley Scott’s ambitious quasi-prequel to Alien may not answer all of its big questions (or any for that matter), but it’s redeemed by its sheer visual spectacle, technical wizardry and emphasis on tone and atmosphere. Prometheus is not without problems – just ask the fine folk over at Red Letter Media – but director Ridley Scott takes chances and while some of his choices don’t always work, Prometheus is at least never boring. While weighing heavily on familiar science fiction conceits, Scott still injects enough horrific elements to label this sci-fi horror. After-all, stripped to its visceral essentials, the franchise began with a horror film meant simply to frighten us and gross us out. Unlike any of the sequels between this and the original, Prometheus is a horror movie first and foremost; a haunting visual grandeur eating away at subconscious terrors. But if there is any reason to see Prometheus, it is simply for the compelling performance by Michael Fassbender as a fastidious android named David. Fassbender plays David with a mixture of curiosity, detachment, and arrogance, an android who models his appearance intentionally like that of Peter O’Toole’s iconic Lawrence of Arabia – a performance so good it might help launch Prometheus into the cult stratosphere.
Prometheus poster by Vegetax6
Breaking the Bank: Six of Hollywood’s Lost Old-School Epics
For moviegoers growing up in the last 20-30 years, big is the new normal. I’m talking about those big-budget, over-produced, effects/action-packed extravaganzas that are as expected and routine an arrival as a commuter bus, and never more so than during the summer months. Come a rise in temperatures, there’s an almost ceaseless parade of these megabuck behemoths through multiplexes starting in May and continuing until the kids go back to school, one rolling out almost every week.
Consider these May-August releases and their eye-popping price tags:
5/4: Marvel’s The Avengers — $220 million
5/11: Dark Shadows — $150 million
5/18: Battleship — $209 million
5/25: Men in Black 3 — $250 million
6/8: Prometheus — $120-130 million
7/3: The Amazing Spider-Man — $220 million
7/20: The Dark Knight Rises — $250 million
7/31: Total Recall — $200 million
8/5: The Expendables 2 — $100 million
For those of you who haven’t been keeping count, that’s a little over $1.7 billion in productions costs for just these nine flicks. And that doesn’t include money spent on marketing. Press buzz around the time of its release was that worldwide marketing expenses for MIB3 pushed the movie’s total tab to $375 million. Based on that, it’s a reasonable guess, then, that the real cost for the above nine releases is probably – and easily — somewhere over $2 billion.
What makes these gargantuas physically possible and financially affordable are technological advances in special effects, particularly CGI; and a swelling overseas audience as well as broad and deep ancillary markets.
The amount of bigness in today’s movies may be particular to the last few decades, but bigness itself goes back to the earliest days of commercial moviemaking.
D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) is not only the film which turned a nickelodeon diversion into a major form of serious entertainment, but with its sprawling, episodic story and its scenes of grand scale, screen-filling action, it also qualifies as the first epic.
Tim Anderson created these beautiful posters for some our favorite classic sci-fi films.
Tim graduated from Art Center College of Design in 2009 with a BFA in Illustration and has worked on various entertainment design projects for Paramount Pictures, video games and a few independent films. He is currently working as a concept designer for Electronic Arts in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Link Of The Day: Mad Magazine’s Alien Parodies
Video - The Perfect Organism (Doctor Who Dalek Tribute)- using Ash (Ian Holm) from Alien
#Prometheus species origin
Great Posters for #Prometheus
Sound on Sight Podcast #323: Ridley Scott (‘Prometheus’ / ‘Alien’)
The cinematic summer of 2012 rolls on with director Ridley Scott’s first sci-fi effort in almost 30 years, Prometheus, whic has provoked fierce discussion among critics, audiences, fanboys and cinephiles as to its merits since it hit theaters this weekend. In both spoiler-free and spoiler-ful flavors, Ricky D, Julian Carrington and Simon Howell are here to dissect the remains. In between, they take a look back at 1979′s original Alien to see how the canonical sci-fi/horror chiller holds up.
