North by Northwest (1959)

Ahhhh North By Northwest. Quintessential Alfred Hitchcock. Maybe not my favorite Hitchcock film, but it pretty much contains all the elements that I enjoy about spy stories. The classic wrong man scenario. A man is mistook for a secret agent and becomes embroiled in a conspiracy. If you have not seen this, put it right at the top of your list.

And to entice you, here is the famous crop-duster sequence. This scene really shows Hitchcock's mastery of camera placement, movement, and editing. Here is a man who knew exactly what this scene was going to look like before and during the filming. So many of these shots I love, many for their simplicity. I mean, look at the first shot of the two men standing on opposite sides of the highway. I would hang that one my wall! It shows what a smart director can accomplish with the most basic elements: a man, a location, and an enemy. Note the absence of music until the very ending. In fact, if music was there (and you can watch this scene on YouTube with music, should you so desire) it would be much less powerful. The sound of the airplane is all that is needed. Only some sparse dialogue sets up the scene, and that last words spoken are the most ominous: "That's funny, that plane's dusting crops where there ain't no crops."

Hitchcock understood that the unknown is much more frightening and more intimidating than anything: he leaves the identity of the pilot unknown, we never see if it's more than one person in the plane, and we never get even a point-of-view shot from the plane. The audience is put squarely in Carey Grant's shoes. And I find this sequence terrifying. It is so effective at creating a nightmarish scenario. We are placed in an endless flat environment with plenty of room to run, but nowhere to hide. I don't mean to exaggerate when I say I think this is one of the greatest movie sequences ever filmed.

Click here to watch on YouTube.

I'm Here (2010)

This is a new Spike Jonze short film! It's called I'm Here and is about a lonely librarian robot discovering love in the modern age! It uses the same technology of costuming and motion capture that Jonze used in his film adaptation of Where The Wild Things Are. The actors wear the robot costumes, but the face is the only thing that is animated. And it works extremely well! I love the music and sound of this short, and I also love the robots. It's just really well done. Sponsored by Absolut. It appears as though corporate financing is the new internet short film way!

You have to watch it in your browser, but if you have a good internet connection it shouldn't be a problem.

Malcolm McDowell

Parallel Lines - The Gift (2010)

Cool short film by a guy described to me as a protege of Ridley Scott. I'm on board!
Directed by Carl Erik Rinsch.

Sigh... So awesome.

When the Maybach Exelero Concept car came out, everyone was saying that was Darth Vader's Car. Turns out Vader drives an Ariel Atom, and his stormtroopers rock the Lotuses. These pictures are all so great on their own that it's kind of a shame to post them all together, but I couldn't decide which one to put up so I put em all up. They make me sigh because they are so awesome I wish I had thought of them and had the means to do them myself! If I had lots of money and sports cars, I would totally take pictures like this.

Pixels, by Patrick Jean

Pretty cool little short film about pixels from old school video games taking over the world! Very well done. By Patrick Jean.

From here.

Passenger Side (2010)

So I just heard the tail of an interview on Q this morning about this movie. You may have too. It sounds interesting and now that I see the trailer, well it still sounds interesting and in a way it looks exactly as how I was expecting.

Road trip movie of sorts? Check.
Two guys driving around California etc. in an old BMW? Check.
A young Canadian filmmaker? Check.
Named after and featuring this awesome Wilco song that I listen to in my car all the time? Check!

So I'm going to make an effort. Limited release in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver on April 26th I believe. Starring Adam Scott and Joel Bissonnette. Written and directed by Matthew Bissonnette.

Here is the trailer.

The Bloody Olive (1996)

Take a look at this fantastic little short film directed by Vincent Bal. It's a tongue and cheek noir from Belgium with more twists and turns then a pretzel factory, all the way up to the end! They obviously had a lot of fun putting together this enjoyable little homage to the deception, backstabbing, and surprises found in the films from the great era of classical film noirs. Enjoy!

Double Indemnity (1944)

Walter Neff and Phyllis Dietrichson (Fred MacMurrary and Barbara Stanwyck)

It's been a little while since I've seen this, but it's on TV periodically and if I happen to flip to it I always end up watching it. Double Indemnity is a fantastic little noir. It has all the ingredients: doomed protagonists, murder, lust, fraud, paranoia, deception, unease, tension, and anxiety! Despite how this list of qualities might make you feel in real life, in the film world it is a perfect cocktail for a noir thriller.

Walter Neff (Fred McMurray) is a smoothtalking insurance salesman who, with unhappy housewife Mrs. Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), conspires to collect on the life insurance of her stuffy husband. Neff convinces Mrs. Deitrichson to have her husband change his insurance plan to include "double indemnity"--meaning it pays double if his death is accidental. The lusty duo elaborately plans the murder of Mr. Dietrichson so that it looks like an accident. Of course, even with all the planning, it never goes as smoothly as intended, which is where the incomparable Edward G. Robinson comes in. He plays Neff's colleague, Barton Keyes, an insurance adjuster who is sure there is something fishy going on with the Dietrichson file. A huge pay-out to someone who just recently changed their plan is always a giant red flag. He begins probing the case, without guessing that the very conspirator is sitting right across the office.


It's a great film, and writing and reading about it just makes me want to watch it again! It's got gorgeous cinematography, excellent direction by Hollywood master Billy Wilder, fun performances by some very talented actors, and a creative narration structure in which Neff confesses the whole scheme right from the top to the audience and his colleague Keyes by way of a voice recorder. This is a highly recommended film and a textbook (and very celebrated) example of the film noir mode.

Neff and Keyes.

The Go-Getter

Last summer a friend of mine randomly brought this film over to watch one night. What followed was, despite the dorky poster, a great little indie film starring Lou Pucci, Jena Malone, Maura Tierney, and the supercool Zooey Deschanel, and featuring the music (and a cameo) of M. Ward. Now this is also significant if you are a fan of musical act She & Him which is composed of, you guessed it, Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward.

The film is about a young man named Mercer (Lou Pucci) who sets out to locate his estranged brother to inform him that their mother has died. Mercer impulsively steals a car, and the owner (Zooey) calls him on her cell phone which she had left inside. They proceed to have continuing dialogue as Mercer continues on his quest to locate his long-lost sibling. There are a series of vignettes in which Mercer encounters various eccentric folk on his journey, and the scenery is gorgeous as he dreamily flows through Oregon, Nevada, and California.

The film is heavily autobiographical, according to writer-director Martin Hynes, who after losing his own mother to cancer and having his marriage collapse, set out on a soul-searching road trip. Martin Hynes, also an actor, starred as George Lucas in the previously mentioned short film George Lucas In Love, by Joe Nussbaum.

I've included a dream sequence from the film (hmmmm, there could be a whole post on good dream sequences!). Have a gander, if it catches your interested, go rent the film! I put on it my stamp of approval.



I found a better poster for it: