I meant to show the first few minutes of this interview with Kiarostami in class today, but we had some technical difficulties. My favorite line: “I prefer films that put their audience to sleep in the theater.”

Lest you think that all trailers from the 1970s were as awful as the original Star Wars trailer, here is the trailer for the first Alien film, which is like the Citizen Kane of movie trailers.

If you missed class yesterday, you missed your chance to participate in cinematic democracy (sorry New York field trippers!). By a margin of 17 to 10, Tropic Thunder was chosen over Stories We Tell as our Week 10 film, the final film for the class . . . A late addition to the race, the 2011 Muppet movie received a shameful 0 votes (they should have left the original alone). I will apologize in advance for ruining Tropic Thunder by making you all talk about the film’s ideology and the protests surrounding its representation of disability.
P.S. If you’re really into learning more about trailers, you might check out this article and this video.

Here’s a recut trailer thing that imagines a mashup of 8 1/2 and 8 Mile, the Eminem movie. It’s kind of funny. We’ll be talking about movie trailers before we vote on the film choice for week 10 . . . next week, maybe?

One of the better film criticism blogs, The Dissolve, has named Sherlock Jr. their “movie of the week” for this week. Here’s the first post, which says some interesting things about the film’s “rectangularity.”

Here’s a link to the full version of Man with a Movie Camera (1929) on youtube. I like the soundtrack to this one better (neither soundtrack is original to the film).

Here’s a great recent article by the film critic Matt Zoller Seitz about why it’s important for film critics to pay attention to formal analysis (and why it’s a problem that most contemporary critics don’t). Here’s his thesis:

Form is not just an academic side dish to the main course of content.  We critics of film and TV have a duty to help viewers understand how form and and content interact, and how content is expressed through form. The film or TV critic who refuses to write about form in any serious way abdicates that duty, and abets visual illiteracy.

I think it’s a good argument (of course, I’m biased). If you get a chance, it’s worth a read.

Our first film, Sherlock Jr. (1924), is in the public domain. Here’s the entire film, courtesy of youtube.