Category Archives: Movies

Known Pleasures

ControlSpeaking of control, it’s only a funny coincidence that I gave a new talk with that title the same week that Anton Corbijn’s biopic about Joy Division singer Ian Curtis was released. That film is also called “Control,” and while it has nothing to do with design, it’s neverthelesss an entertaining if imperfect movie. I saw it on Monday night at New York’s Film Forum theater.

I’m a big fan of Joy Division as well as the post-Joy Division work of New Order, who formed in the aftermath of Curtis’ untimely suicide. But I’ve always been skeptical of the cultish fascination with Curtis’ demise, which has always seemed to add an uneasily pat bookend to his briefly prolific career. The facts of his death, while undeniably tragic, have always veered too far into the territory of convenient mythology for me.

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The Start Is at the Finish

Speaking of movies, I did in fact go to see “The Bourne Ultimatum,” which was fantastic. With my perpetually critical designer’s eye, though, I noticed two things: first, that the movie’s titles are actually quite bad. They use a simplistic, somewhat retrograde graphical animation that amounts to pretty much what I imagine the titles for “Freejack” must have looked like.

But if you saw the movie too, you might not have paid much attention to the titles, because of my second observation: like a lot of films released in the past half decade, the titles follow at the end of the film, after the final frame of action. Though they are designed very much in the same way as titles that precede the film — you could almost move them to the start of the picture and they would work as is — they’re inserted as parting gestures instead of opening salutations.

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Total Eclipse of the Heart

L’EclisseIn the next few days I expect — or at least I hope — we’ll see a lot of thoughtful remembrances of the life and work of the great Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, who died on Monday at the age of ninety-four. Here’s the Times obituary and critic Stephen Holden’s insightful appraisal, plus an article at Slate that tackles this great loss from the doubly unfortunate angle of having also lost Ingmar Bergman the same day. What a tragic day for film.

These and other articles will give you a much more well-rounded idea of Antonioni’s career and impact than I ever could. Still, I want to add one thing: his 1962 masterwork “L’Eclisse” is among my favorite movies of all time. Few more elegant, exquisitely crafted or beautifully populated essays on alienation have ever been committed to film.

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Coin-operated, User Experienced

Tilt: The Battle to Save PinballGreg Maletic’s film “Tilt: The Battle to Save Pinball” is, like many of its peers in this recent golden age of documentary films, a temporary detour into what might have otherwise been — and what may yet be again — overlooked subject matter. It’s highly entertaining, completely engrossing and beautifully made, but you’d be forgiven for not expecting much in the way of day-to-day practicality. As it turns out though, it provides a surprising amount of tangible relevance for those of us working in digital design.

With a prefigured sense of melancholy, Maletic uncovers the tale of Williams Electronic Games’ last ditch attempt to reinvigorate a gaming industry suffering through a precipitous decline. That the decline followed so soon after the industry’s peak, and that both happened so recently — the pinball business hit all-time highs in 1993 and was on its last legs by 1998 — is a turnabout in fortune familiar to anyone who lived through the dot-com wave that boomed in the late 1990s and foundered in the early part of this decade. In a way, the one can be seen as a less-glamorous template for the other, or even a cautionary tale for the present.

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Robots, Rats and La Ragazza con la valigia

I’m back from my miniature sabbatical and rested up. What did I do on my time off? I took a lot of walks with Mister President, hung out a lot in my new neighborhood with various friends, and managed to catch a movie or two, including one that was on my list.

Here’s my advice on seeing “Transformers”: if you find yourself falling asleep in the middle of its two-plus hours running time due to the movie’s crushingly dull story line, monotonously unrewarding visual pyrotechnics, and director Michael Bay’s apparent disinterest in characters, don’t fight the feeling. Instead, just do I what I did and let yourself nod off. You won’t miss a thing.

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Transform Hard with a Vengeance

Optimus PrimeThe forthcoming movie adaptation of the toy franchise “Transformers” has somehow climbed to the very tippy-top of my summer movie-going list over recent weeks. I don’t know how it got there, because like many people, the esteem in which I hold the previous work of director Michael Bay can be best described as ‘minimal.” Still, it looks like the most promisingly satisfying of a sorry summer lot, even if the core of its offering is only a momentarily satiation. I’m really excited to see it. Oh, and I’ll go see the apparently not-badly-reviewed “Live Free or Die Hard,” too.

I just wanted to come out and say that. No more secrets, people.

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Moviegoing in the Thirties

Hot FuzzA friend of mine who teaches film told me once not to misinterpret how often I went to the movies in my twenties as a sign of how frequently I’d be seeing them in the decades to come. Rather, the frequency of my moviegoing in my early thirties would be a more useful indicator, because it’s at that age when people start to form habits around whatever particular balance of responsibility and recreation suits them.

That advice is bearing itself out. Where I once saw, at a minimum, one or two movies a week, now at age thirty-five I can barely make it to the movie theaters more than once or twice a month. (I also currently happen to have two rentals from Netflix that have made themselves at home on my coffee table for more than two weeks now, unwatched, but that’s a digression.) The equilibrium I’ve achieved between responsibility and recreation tends to favor the former, and I find myself too busy to sit still for the hundred minutes or more required to properly view a film.

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The Helvetica Hegemony

A quick update on matters Helvetica.

First, Gary Hustwit’s “Helvetica” documentary is real, or at least about ten minutes of it are, anyway. That’s how much I saw in a private screening of a handful of clips that was held last night at Pentagram here in New York. Hustwit invited about fifty or so of us to a “reception celebrating the release of three limited-edition letterpress prints” commemorating the film (beautiful work from Experimental Jetset in Amsterdam, Build in London and Norm in Zürich), but the real star of the show was the sneak peeks.

It’s very hard to judge an entire movie on the basis of a handful of snippets, but let me just say that I’m really excited for its release after this little taste. To see graphic design writ large on the silver screen (well, it was projected on a big wall last night, but that’s close enough) was really invigorating, and the interviews he showed, especially with Michael Bierut and Wim Crouwel, were riotous. Fingers crossed, the final product is going to be a film we’ll all treasure for a long time.

In other news, a resounding “Yes!” to those of you who have emailed in to ask — I will indeed be doing another run of my Hel-Fucking-Vetica tee shirts soon. I have a lot of traveling to do in the next few months, but I’ll try and squeeze in the time to actually put another order through. This round, the shirts will be run in a different color entirely, so as to preserve the ‘limited edition-ality’ of the first batch, perhaps in a shade of black or gray for increased bad ass-ness. And, in all likelihood, I’ll be running that second batch alongside a first edition run of my Fear of a Cooper Black Planet tee shirt, too. Stay tuned, type fans.

Finally, take note of “Helvetica Memory,” an alphabet designed by Mike Essl for Rick Valicenti’s Playground. It’s a fun reinterpretation of the typeface, as filtered through the lens of Helvetica’s contemporary ubiquity. And it’s also a good lead-in to something else Essl-related, for which you’ll need to come back to this blog next week. How about that? A weekend cliff-hanger!

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The Nontraditional Traditionalist

Robert AltmanI saw the great American film director Robert Altman live and in person just once, in 2004, when he answered questions after a screening of his recently restored movie, “Secret Honor,” at Symphony Space’s Thalia Theater in Manhattan. That film, a fictional account of Richard Nixon in full bunker mode, might best be described as more endurance test than entertainment for all but the most die-hard Altman fans. It was a brave piece of work, but it demanded a certain patience from its audience.

To be blunt, I didn’t enjoy “Secret Honor” very much, but it didn’t matter, because I got to see and hear Altman in person. He looked old and frail, yet he remained razor sharp and unmistakably willful in his demeanour. Which, to me, mapped exactly to how I’ve understood his entire body of work: if ever there was a director who managed, through the sheer force of will, to bring fully realized worlds to life — complex, nuanced, incredibly engrossing worlds that eschewed special effects and Hollywood hyperbole — and then to subvert them with a masterful playfulness, it was Robert Altman. He was truly a giant among the many artists who have committed their visions to film.

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Back to the Batcave

Batman BeginsAlready, I’ve seen “Batman Begins” twice, which gives you some indication of how I feel about the movie. I wanted to write a long review of it, but time simply won’t permit it — and there’s no dearth of glowing reviews available elsewhere — so I thought instead I might comment on the context in which this new interpretation has debuted.

Watch the very end of Tim Burton’s 1989 version of “Batman” and you’ll see just one of many, many examples of why I found very little of redeeming value in the last major hurrah for this franchise. The scene provides that movie’s resolution: Jack Nicholson’s miscast and misplayed Joker has been vanquished (after a ridiculous showdown in which he shot down the titular hero’s plane with a handgun!). Gotham City’s mayor, district attorney and police chief are addressing a crowd on the steps of an overwrought City Hall set, publicly reassuring the citizenry that the danger has passed.

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