Pixar's UP: the 1960s "Premake"

"Premake" is a term coined by a clever youtuber named whoiseyevean. He takes vintage footage, edits it together with some special effects, and...voila! A trailer for a classic, earlier version of said movie that is so amazing, people often think it's real.

I didn't think he'd ever outdo his great Ghostbusters premake, but here he's done one I never even imagined being premaked, Pixar's Up.



As with most of his premakes, he's also made an entertaining, annotated guide to how he made it.

The Mainstream Oscars (Updated 1/25/11)

It's been apparent for a while now that The Academy Awards have lost a bit of their mass appeal, mainly because they tend to hand out the Best Picture Award to small, art house type movies like No Country For Old Men or the Hurt Locker.

They tried to address the issue in 2010 by nominating ten pictures for Best Picture, the most since 1943, when Casablanca won. A lot of mainstream flicks like Avatar and Up made the list, but the award ultimately went to Hurt Locker, which might be the most minor flick ever to win the prize. (It was the 116th top grossing move of the year.) There's a fairly good chance more people have seen Casablanca in the past year than the Hurt Locker.

Last year I had an idea of how to make the Best Picture list more mainstream, while making sure that the pictures were good, and avoiding a lot of the usual biases (like the tendency to favor movies released late in the year).

I call it the mainstream Oscars. It is a list of films that have accomplished three milestones:

1) A Certified Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes
2) A Universal Acclaim rating of 81% or more on Metacritic
3) A top fifty spot on Box Office Mojo's Yearly Box Office list.

It's a tough trifecta to hit. Last year, only five pictures made the cut:
Avatar
District Nine
Star Trek
Up
and Up in the Air.
Of these, only Star Trek failed to get a Best Picture nomination.

This year, the pickings are even slimmer, with three pictures qualifying:
The Kings' Speech
The Social Network
and Toy Story 3.
(King's Speech hasn't quite made the top fifty B.O. list, but it almost certainly will before it ends its run.)

It's an interesting and varied selection, even if it is short. The King's Speech is your classic hoity toity British "class" picture for the Masterpiece Theater crowd, the Social Network is a prime example of the increasingly endangered middlebrow drama, and Toy Story 3 is a critical and box office smash that stands the least chance of making the cut because it is A) a cartoon, and B) features Mattel's Barbie in a key supporting role.

There are some interesting close calls, mostly due to Metacritic, or as I like to refer to it, Mr. Picky-Picky. Recent critical and popular successes like True Grit (80%), Black Swan (79%), and the Fighter (79%) failed to hit its "Universal Acclaim" mark, instead having to settle for achieving "generally favorable reviews," which puts them in the same general category as the Karate Kid remake.

So how will this year's Mainstream Oscar winners do when the 2011 nominations are announced on January 25? Well, I predict that The Social Network and King's Speech are probably shoe-ins, and that True Grit, Black Swan, the Fighter, and Inception all stand pretty good chances. As for Toy Story 3, I hope it sneaks onto the list, and becomes the picture that nobody figured anybody else would vote for.

Update: Well, the nominations are in, and my predictions were pretty much spot-on though in truth, most were no-brainers:

127 Hours
Black Swan
The Fighter
Inception
The Kids Are All Right
The King's Speech
The Social Network
Toy Story 3
True Grit
Winter's Bone

127 Hours and especially The Kids Are All Right are, in retrospect, obvious choices, but Winter's Bone earned less than $8 million worldwide, meaning it was slightly less successful than MacGruber.

How Superman should have ended

A quickie: How Superman should have ended:

Ten Movies I Want to See: The Wrong Box

The Wrong Box is one of those movies I've seen bits and pieces of over the years. It's the kind of thing that would run on the daytime, not at night, because it was British and not American. I'd turn on the TV, see a few minutes, and then get distracted, making a note to myself to watch the thing properly some day. And then it stopped showing up on TV.

The plot, based on a Robert Louis Stevenson story, is about a very real thing that could create very surreal situations: the Tontine.

A Tontine is like a combination insurance policy, investment scheme, and Russian Roulette. A group of people chip in their money, and the last one alive takes everything.

In this case, it's Victorian England (Tontines are now illegal, for obvious reasons), and the Tontine is down to its last two elderly members. Now their respective heirs have to make sure their own Tontine member lives the longest. Or make it look like they do.

The potential for farce is limitless, the cast is amazing (Peter Sellers' brief appearance alone is said to be worth the price of admission), and the DVD is not out there yet.

I hope they get around to it. No one lives forever.

Hooray for Harold Lloyd!

My friend Robert was nice enough to send me a collections of DVDs to watch while I was recuperating from surgery. One of them, the Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection, is about the most amazing, comprehensive, beautifully preserved collection of vintage films I've ever seen. Lloyd, who had both big bucks and the ownership of his films, kept them all in good condition, and most of them look almost as good as the day they were released.

There's even a pristine print of his 1936 film, the Milky Way which producer Sam Goldwyn had bought the rights to just so he could destroy the negatives and all existing prints to keep them from competing with his own remake, the Kid From Brooklyn. So where'd this good print come from? Lloyd secretly kept his own negative. Smooth move, Harold.

Anyway, these great set has prompted me to do a few searches on Lloyd' on the internet, and two things keep coming up:

1) This is distinct improvement over Harold Lloyd's World of Comedy, a 1970s TV series which presented chopped up, abbreviated Lloyd bits with sarcastic narration, goofy music and sound effects in a misguided effort to make Lloyd's comedy palatable for a younger audience.

2) British movie buffs declaring "Hooray for Harold Lloyd!" That's the chorus of the same show's irresistibly catchy theme song by Neal Hefti, whose other accomplishments include the classic 1960s theme song to Batman.

Yes, this Harold Lloyd compilation show ran on the BBC2 in the 70s (and was apparently brough back later) and introduced many a young fan to Lloyd, silent comedy, and classic cinema in general.

Yes, the show is a hatches job. The clip above starts by unnecessarily combining the opening of Hot Water with the climax of For Heavens Sake, for instance.

But if it got young people watching Lloyd, who cares. It's still his comedy. Maybe film buff should worry less about keeping things pure and appreciate whatever brings in the converts.

Besides, that theme song couldn't put it any better. If ever a comic hero was a hero in the most traditional sense, it's Lloyd. You wanted him to overcome his limitations (in his best films, he always had a weakness to overcome), stop the bad guys and get the girl. And he pretty much always did.

Hooray for Harold Lloyd!

From urban legend to reality?

It's a famous (possibly true) urban legend: women knowingly or unknowingly swallowing tapeworms to lose weight.


But if this story is on the ball, it looks like it just became fact:

Female Chinese students resort to eating roundworm eggs to ensure they look thin for job interviews

Female students in China have been eating roundworm eggs to lose weight for job interviews - because employment is so hard to come by.

They hatch in the stomach, allowing those who take them to shed pounds without exercising or dieting in the Xiamen, China.