Salon.com > Moonrise Kingdom

Prada releases short film by Roman Coppola and Wes Anderson

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 16:38:00 +0000

Chanel, which released a much-parodied ad starring Brad Pitt last year, may want to take a cue from Prada, which last year released a well-received short film by Roman Polanski for the brand. This year, Prada has teamed up with "Moonrise Kingdom" indie film duo Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola to deliver another round of engaging ads featuring Léa Seydoux, Owen Wilson's fantasy woman from "Midnight in Paris."

The Oscar posters that should have been

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 21:35:00 +0000

Now that the Oscars have come and gone, it is time for Hollywood to look back and wonder, "What could we have done differently?" Our advice: look in the direction of Austin, Texas' Mondo Gallery. Through a partnership with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, Mondo commissioned a series of limited edition silk-screened posters that, we think, put the actual campaigns to shame.

Who knows – perhaps with the right poster, "Wreck-It Ralph" might have snagged best picture!

Be sure to view these in full-screen mode.

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The Oscar posters that should have been

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 21:34:00 +0000

Check out the movie posters that Mondo Gallery commissioned for this year's crop of Oscar movies

Who should win the Oscars (but probably won’t)

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 18:35:00 +0000

It’s been an unusually dramatic Oscar race this year, with a remarkably strong roster of films – most of which are actually popular with the general public! – and several unexpected switchbacks. Here we are, five days away from the big night, and nearly everyone expects the big winner to be “Argo,” a movie that was given up for dead after Ben Affleck wasn’t nominated for best director. So let’s stipulate that while three of the top six categories appear to have been decided beyond any reasonable doubt, there’s probably one big surprise out there somewhere that no one sees coming.

Physics and culture collide

Fri, 13 Jul 2012 18:32:00 +0000

IN GEVEVA A COUPLE of weeks ago, some profoundly smart people overseeing the Large Hadron Collider seem to have located the Higgs boson—the so-called God Particle. Since then, they have been trying to tell us what it is. It may or may not be the root of all matter in the universe. It may be a particle, and if it is, it is the particle that gives all other particles mass. But it also could be a field or a wave. Also, if you manage to produce a Higgs boson, a thousandth of a billionth of a billionth of a second later, you will no longer have a Higgs boson.

A story in the New York Times suggested that a good way to think about how the Higgs boson’s relationship to matter is: “Particles wading through the field gain heft the way a bill going through Congress attracts riders and amendments, becoming ever more ponderous.” That’s not a good way to think about anything. Even National Geographic, which may not have any great purchase of the Standard Model of Physics but is, at least, scientific, could only establish that the scientists are 99% sure there’s only a one-in-a-million chance they’re wrong about finding the Higgs boson or “something of the like.” I talk like that a lot, but I’m full of it. Perhaps not so much, though, as the eminent Nobel Prize-winning physicist who before the boson was actually found called it a “toilet” because according to the New York Times “that’s where all the ugly details that allow the marvelous beauty of the physical world are hidden.”

Does Hollywood hate adults?

Sat, 07 Jul 2012 22:00:00 +0000

Is Hollywood's business model failing because it's almost exclusively focused on teenagers and young adults, and largely ignores moviegoers over 30? This question reappears in various guises every year or so, and after you pick it apart -- what do we mean by "failing," when they're still making piles of dough? What do we mean by "largely ignores," when plenty of adults still show up? -- it almost always merits a murky, yes-and-no answer. And while that's still the case, the debate has broken out anew across the movie blogosphere.

This year's "tentpole" season has already produced three whopping huge hits -- "The Hunger Games," "The Avengers" and, apparently, "The Amazing Spider-Man" -- with "The Dark Knight Rises" still to come. But the billions of dollars those movies will generate have failed to dispel the atmosphere of anomie surrounding the film industry, or the sense that it hasn't yet adjusted to a cultural and technological marketplace that has fundamentally changed. Ticket sales in North America appear to be on a permanent downhill slide, and the big studios' profit margins now depend on two interrelated factors: Increasing ticket prices, especially for 3-D projection, and a single-minded focus on big-budget, effects-driven action spectacles that can be successfully exported to the biggest markets in the developing world, most notably India and China.