The Furniture: Fantastic Voyage's Absurd Anatomy

"The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. Here's Daniel Walber... 

This week marks the 50th anniversary of Richard Fleischer’s Fantastic Voyage, as absurd and beautiful a film as Hollywood has ever made. It’s also a testament to what live action science fiction used to be like, before digital technology gave directors the tools to make every fantasy look realistic.

Inspired by the arms races of the Cold War, it chronicles a submarine trip into the tumorous brain of a brilliant scientist. The mission is to eliminate his cancer with a tiny laser, save his life, and preserve his miniaturization knowledge for the USA. It’s utterly ridiculous. Isaac Asimov, alarmed by the script’s plot holes, demanded the right to fix all of its problems for his novelization.

Of course, that might classify him as a bit of a fuddy-duddy. Trips into the body wouldn’t be nearly as much fun if they were realistic. If anything, they’d probably gross out the audience. 

Pixar understood this, creating an entirely new organ system for Inside Out. Fleischer’s team for Fantastic Voyage also prioritized the striking over the reasonable.

Much of this success is, of course, due to the production design...

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5 Things That The New Poster For 'Zoom' Is Lacking

by Manuel Betancourt

Let's talk about the film Zoom. Have you heard of it? It’s this international co-production film that sounds like the hybrid lovechild of Stranger than Fiction and Adaptation, a third of which is animated, starring a 2D-animated Gael García Bernal. I caught the film earlier this year so I was fascinated (read: bemused) by the latest poster that puts the Mexican actor front and center alongside undersung actress Alison Pill. And yet, compared to the earlier poster that had been revealed for the film, this new floating heads one is pretty… uninspiring to say the least. It loses all the specificity of what makes the film worth seeking out.

But you should be excited for this unique movie. Here are 5 things that the new poster for Zoom isn’t telling you...

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Interview: Alice Winocour on Disorder, PTSD, and Joining the Academy

by Nathaniel R

Alice Winocour, writer/director of "Disorder"The absence of strong female representation behind the camera has been a constant sore subject this past year in the world of cinema. But there are shining exceptions to the rule. Though Alice Winocour began making shorts a dozen years ago and released her first feature in 2013, the 40 year old French director really broke through with the one-two punch of Mustang (which she co-wrote) and Disorder (which she co-wrote and directed) last summer at Cannes. Mustang went on to an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film (and much love - including right here). After serving on the Cannes International Critics Week jury this summer (one year after her own breakthrough double) she's making the rounds promoting Disorder which has finally hit US screens after its festival run.

I had the pleasure of seeing both films nearly back to back at AFI last November and I was stunned that the same person was involved with both. She admits that "it was funny to switch from one film to the other" during their festival runs. They really couldn't be more different, one a memoirish feminist drama and the other a tightly wound home invasion thriller. I had the pleasure of sitting down with her in Manhattan this month to talk about her big year.

NATHANIEL: Since you've written a few features was Disorder a conscious choice to show your directorial chops? Thrillers are not generally thought of as writer's pictures. 

ALICE WINOCOUR: Writing is an unconscious process. You don't think about it like that. You just fall in love with the subject or character and then you start to tell the story...

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Ben-Who? Weekend Box Office

The name "Ben-Hur" wasn't enough of a brand on its own to lure moviegoers to theaters this weekend for the remake. My guess: Those who know of Ben-Hur love the 1959 version too much to care about a 2016 version. I have zero desire to see it so if you dared the movie theater this weekend to do so, tell me this: did any of the 1925 sensuality or the 1959 homoeroticism survive in the 2016 version. Or is this just all antiseptic generic blockbuster action mode? 

Ben Hur in 1959, 2016, and 1925If you didn't see Ben-Hur, what did you see? Did you like it? More after the jump including the fate of Kubo and the Two Strings and the best thing I saw this weekend...

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"Best Shot" Finale

IMPORTANT NOTICE: Apologies that last week's episode was  delayed one week but real life got in the way. So this Tuesday I'll be discussing Baz Luhrmann's The Get Down and Splash will serve as our season (series?) finale of Hit Me With Your Best Shot next week. It'll also double as the wrap up of our Year of the Month (1984) just after the Smackdown.

And then it's on to fall film season, festivals, and Oscar build-up! 

This Tuesday Evening, August 23rd
THE GET DOWN (2016) 
Pick one shot from the first episode of Baz Luhrmann's Netflix series described as "a mythic saga of how New York at the brink of bankruptcy gave birth to hip-hop, punk and disco"... though from more intricate descriptions it sounds like it's mostly hip-hop we're talking about.  Can he bring that Moulin Rouge! magic? Was it worth the insane investment with a budget of $10 million per episode? (The first half of the first season -- six of twelve episodes -- began streaming on August 12th) 

SEASON FINALE  - Tuesday Evening, August 30th
SPLASH (1984)
With 1984 being our "year of the month" and a rumored gender flipped remake coming, we'll look back at the best live-action mermaid movie that I was obsessed with as a kid. Daryl Hannah's Crimped Hair forever!