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Tag: cinema

A Brief History of Title Design

Ian Albinson of the excellent The Art of the Title Sequence put together this short collection of film titles for the SXSW “Excellence in Title Design” competition screening:

(via Coudal)

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Midweek Miscellany

Chris Ware’s cover for the latest issue of The New Yorker (via The Ephemerist).

Pop Will Eat Itself — Author Lev Grossman (The Magicians) on automated recommendations:

[Recommendation engines] introduce us to new things, which is good, but those new things tend to be a lot like the old things, and they tend to be drawn from the shallow pool of things other people have already liked. As a result, they create a blockbuster culture in which the same few runaway hits get recommended over and over again. It’s the backlash against the “long tail,” the idea that shopping online is all about near infinite selection and cultural diversity. It has a bad habit of eating its own tail and leaving you back where you started.

The Dark Underside of American LifeThe Observer‘s film critic Philip French on the late Jim Thompson and Michael Winterbottom‘s film adaptation of The Killer Inside Me:

Thompson was a man of the left, a lifelong alcoholic and became closely acquainted with the dark underside of American life, the lonely crowd where petty criminals, low-level cops, conmen and prostitutes rub shoulders… One of Thompson’s critics has called him without disparagement “a dime novel Dostoevsky”…

And finally… Popville, a super stylish pop-up book by Anouck Boisrobert and Louis Rigaud, published by Macmillan (thanks Sio!):

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The Back of My Head

The Caustic Cover Critic has posted some amazing book covers by the legendary Saul Bass that are just too good not to share:

I love the covers adapted from Bass’ movie posters for the Penguin editions of Saint Joan and Anatomy of a Murder, but this cover of Preminger: An Autobiography (pictured) is less well known. And it was nice to be reminded of the movie Yi Yi in which 8-year-old Yang-Yang makes it his mission to lovingly photograph the back of people’s heads…

…And in looking an image for Yi Yi, I came across a rather lovely post by designer Eric Skillman about creating the DVD edition for Criterion Collection:

The actor who played Yang Yang was obviously no longer available, so we had find a back-of-head double. We found a photographer (the talented Andre Constantini), who led us to a young model named Brian, the back of whose head was a fine match for Yang Yang.

Eric also designs books as it turns out. His blog looks great! A day of nice finds.

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