Thinking of Herzog, if you haven't seen "Fitzcardboardaldo", the cardboard homage to Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, you should watch it. Even if you haven't seen the original, it's a good piece.
Watch on Youtube (about 3:30, pretty sure no dialog, just dramatic music)
A bit about the piece: from Makezine
American Hustle fits the same niche as Wolf of Wall Street, a more-or-less comedy based more-or-less on historical events. Hustle is a couple of years earlier than Wolf, starting in 1978 and covering the ABSCAM investigation from the point of view of the con-man the FBI pressured into helping them. The movie opens with "SOME OF THIS ACTUALLY HAPPENED" in big Helvetica letters to let you know it will deviate from the truth. (Closing credits are not in Helvetica.)
There is tension, drama, humor, no nudity but so much revealing clothing you might think there was nudity, cons and graft and manipulation, and a good cast. Also, unusual for film, we see the characters doing a lot of hair grooming. It opens with the effort Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) puts into his toupee / comb-over combination. We see at least two other characters in hair curlers and Rosenfeld has other (smaller) hair grooming scenes. Hair is apparently being used to metaphorically emphasize how fake these characters are.
Four out of five open-to-the-navel tops (four on Amy Adams, one on Richie DiMaso).
Before the movie were several trailers, only one of which was new to me and also intriguing: Dom Hemingway. Jude Law doesn't look like Jude Law here, which is a change from his normal. His on screen pal is played Richard E. Grant (looking old) and Grant is always a welcome sight. According to IMDB, Jude Law and Christian Bale both gained a lot of weight (30 and 40 pounds respectively) for these roles. Maybe that's why they seem so different in them.
Final thought: also interesting in the trailers was Wes Anderson's Grand Budapest
Technical observations about the computer graphic animation of this movie. It has a very stop motion look.
I grabbed a clip of Cloud Cuckoo Land from youtube and examined it.
Some, but not all, of the motion is only ever other frame. In particular fast moving things and the camera change ever frame, but slower things, like someone walking, hold still for two frames and then have a larger movement, then hold still for two frames again.
Here's twenty frames from the clip made into a slowed down gif:
The original frames have thousands of colors, unlike Legos proper.
If you watch the clip in some software that can go frame-by-frame advance, you can see the mixed jumpy and smooth even better. The click to advance lets you you can slow it down or speed it up as desired, and makes the frame change more obvious.
BMX Bandits (1983), perhaps best known as Nicole Kidman's first movie role, is a childish movie about some bicycle motorcross (BMX) enthusiast kids who inadvertantly get mixed up with some bumbling bank robbers. Today it could be pitched as The Goonies kids with Premium Rush bike chases. This one is full 1980s New South Wales. Drinking game: take a shot every time you see someone in a jumpsuit.
It feels like half of the movie exists to show "Can we get a bike to do this? To go here?" Down an escalator in a strip mall? Yes. Through a quarry? Yes. Jumping golfers in a sand trap? Yup. Use a VW Bug as a jump? Sure. Between tables at a pizza restaurant? You got it. Interference in a rugby game? It's there. Down a waterslide? Well, they do it, but not actually riding the bikes.
But for all of the silliness of the plot, the filming is fantastic. On the special features for Crank (Jason Stratham's Speed meets D.O.A. film between Transporter and Transporter 2), one of the two directors explains that when you put the camera in danger you make the audience feel like they are in danger. In Crank they do things like skateboard with the camera. In BMX Bandits they do things that could have inspired the GoPro people, like attach the camera to the bikes at six inches off the ground. There are times when do wonder, did the camera make it through all of the takes? The cinematographer was John Seale who has a long list of good titles: Rain Man, Dead Poets Society, The Perfect Storm, Cold Mountain, and an Oscar for his cinematography on The English Patient.
Six stolen police band walkie-talkies out of nine.
Selected links:
Final thought: and the movie poster screams 80s video game box / cabinet art
qz thoughts