9 and Coraline

Watch this:


Tim Burton is making this into a movie which should be pretty cool...as long as he doesn't mess it up like he did with Charlie and the Chocolate factory.

I just watched Coraline 3-D and it was awesome.

'Coraline': Making the most of 3D

Selick describes this scenario as "Alice in Wonderland" meets "Hansel and Gretel." Moviegoers might recognize more than a little bit of "The Wizard of Oz."

It took several years for the filmmakers to come up with their own version of sepia-tone Kansas and Technicolor Oz. Selick took the unpublished manuscript of the book to Bill Mechanic, a producer of the movie, who had worked with him on past films.

Initially Mechanic thought "Coraline" would be live action too, but Selick's push for animation prevailed. Still, Mechanic said he considered stop motion "kind of passe" and cast around for ways to make it "showier." He suggested that half the movie be shot in stop motion and the other half in CGI.

But the alternative reality, in Mechanic's words, "didn't really do the wow"; it didn't look special enough for Coraline to want to stay, or for audiences to be impressed. That's when 3-D, which had only recently become technically viable thanks to better technology and more comfortable glasses, came into the picture.

But with the entire movie now in 3-D, Selick and his colleagues still needed to find a way to make the alternative world stand out, literally. Selick's solution was to flatten the colors and "crush" the sets in the real world. Coraline's bedroom, the kitchen, the apartments upstairs and down: All these locations were compressed through the use of forced perspective and sets pitched forward toward the camera. For the alternative reality, the colors were deepened, the sets built out and the 3-D cranked up.

Espinazo del Diablo

"What is a ghost? A tragedy condemned to repeat itself time and again? An instant of pain, perhaps. Something dead which still seems to be alive. An emotion suspended in time. Like a blurred photograph. Like an insect trapped in amber."



Why do I watch these movies late at night when I'm all alone? This, as well as most Guillermo del Toro stuff (e.g. Pan's Labyrinth) was beautiful and chilling. I like the historical background they both have, with the innocent child protagonist and similarities to fairy tales.

"unlike a maze, a labyrinth is actually a constant transit of finding, not getting lost. It’s about finding, not losing, your way. That was very important for me. It is a place where you do sharp turns and you can have the illusion of being lost, but you are always doing a constant transit to an inevitable center. That’s the difference. A maze is full of dead ends, and a labyrinth may have the illusion of having a dead end, but it always continues."

"There are fairy tales that are created to instill fear in children, and there are fairy tales that are created to instill hope and magic in children. I like those. I like the anarchic ones. I like the crazy ones. And, I think that all of them have a huge quotient of darkness because the one thing that alchemy understands, and fairy tale lore understands, is that you need the vile matter for magic to flourish. You need lead to turn it into gold. You need the two things for the process. So when people sanitize fairy tales and homogenize them, they become completely uninteresting for me.”

PEUR[s] DU NOIR

I can't wait to get my paws on this one:



I have to wait until February though. Boo. One of the animators is Charles Burns, who wrote Black Hole. Sex, drugs, and awesome black and white imagery.

I was looking at a hole… a black hole and as I looked, the hole opened up… and I could feel myself falling forward, tumbling down into nothingness. For a while I was just floating… I was in this totally black place. It was kind of spacey but it felt nice… nice and safe.





And of course I can't wait for this:



I hope this little ownership war between fox and warner bros ends well.

American Gods

I'm reading American Gods right now. It is pretty fantastical and wonderful. A battle is brewing between the ancient gods and our modern gods, full of myth and mysticism. Neil Gaiman blows my mind every time I read one of his stories. I recently finished "Fragile Things" which is a compilation of short stories, poems, and other little tidbits. It was beautiful.

He's working with Henry Selick, who did Nightmare before Christmas, on a new stop motion animation movie based on his book, Coraline. I'm super stoked on that one.


This could be useful information one day.

Watch this!

La Jette. This was Terry Gilliams inspiration for 12 monkeys:



Also this:La Cite des Enfants Perdus



I can't believe I went through this much of my life before I saw this movie. It had everything; evil conjoined twins, a sinister cult, and lots of hurdy gurdy.

In which I ponder a few things but fail to get stuck in a tight spot.

I have this friend that I don't see much anymore. We ran into each other about a year ago and at some point in our conversation we realized we were both at that time reading 'A Confederacy of Dunces.' About a month ago, I ran into that same friend, and we realized we were both reading 'The Master and Margarita.' We don't talk much, so it was pretty coincidental. Obviously, we are attracted to the same things. It just struck me as odd.
I picked up 'A Confederacy of Dunces' purely by chance, browsing in a used book store. The cover intrigued me. As for 'The Master and Margarita' I was at Wickerman in PA, sitting on a covered wagon, watching fire spinners and listening to crazy techno in the middle of the woods, having a conversations about books with a new friend and he told me I must absolutely read this book. So the friend who keeps reading the same books as me, obviously our circumstances for finding them are different, but we keep stumbling across the same things.
So I watched 'Zeitgeist' the other night, which by the way is a german word which is pretty fantastic meaning the spirit of the times, which talks about a sort of collective consciousness... or is it subconscious?...and there are clips in 'Zeitgeist' from this movie 'Network' of which I had never heard or seen, but based on the clips I thought it sounded fantastic. What do you know, tonight a friend called and said "Hey...wanna watch this movie with me? It's called Network." So of course I watched it and it was pretty amazing.
Here is a little clip. Maybe you've seen it?

You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here, you're beginning to believe that the tube is reality and your own lives are unreal. You do. Why, whatever the tube tells you: you dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even think like the tube. This is mass madness, you maniacs. In God's name, you people are the real thing, WE are the illusion.

The stuff of dreams...

The Sandman. A Stop Motion Animated Short Film By Paul Berry.
The film was nominated for an Oscar in 1991. Paul died tragically in 2001 of a tumor. He also worked on The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach. Models and sets by Ian Mackinnon who set up Mackinnon and Saunders in Manchester, UK. They went on to create the models for Corpse Bride.

Paul Berry "The Sandman"
by vibliographer

And this:








I used to have a link to the 1979 version with a soundtrack I liked better...It came in the night by A raincoat.
Here is that song:





RW: Rabbit's Moon is a very directly emotional film.

KA: It's what I call a nocturne, a dream about me. It's about unrequited love and the moon is a symbol, as it has been in romantic literature, of the unattainable. The moon has always been something that's longed for. I use the figures of Commedia: Pierrot, the lost clown; Columbine, the flirt; and Harlequin, who's the devil, the trickster.

RW: Your harlequin is very spiteful.

KA: So he is. The world, to Harlequin, is a comedy. To him, it's uproarious to trick - to trip people up. Harlequin is Lucifer. To look at it from Harlequin's standpoint - which may be the devil's point of view - he's having a good time. In other words, Harlequin has no complexes; his approach to the world is very direct. You can call him cruel, but he is also a survivor and Pierrot the sad sack is not.