Trailers: Newest Skyfall, Total Recall; Sight & Sound Greatest Films

Mr. Daniel Craig wants to insure there is never, ever a Bond that can compare to him; ladies and gentlemen,the newest trailer for Skyfall, due out in November:

Total Recall opens this weekend, and there is a new trailer for it; the synopsis runs thusly:

As the nation states Euromerica and New Shanghai vie for supremacy, a factory worker begins to suspect that he's a spy, though he is unaware which side of the fight he's on.

The part about life not working out the way you wanted it to is probably another reference to the socialist attack on the American Dream.Why would socialists keep telling us the American Dream is a lie? Because they want to destabilize what Americans see as our history and our past, vs what we just want to believe about America and ourselves. Because the film primarily confronts the faculty of memory, "destabilization" will play a key role in the events of the film. Our memories are faulty, and the longer we hold a memory, the less and less reliable that memory becomes; then there is the task of articulating that memory (it may seem our memory is perfectly preserved in our mind, but once we have to tell someone about it, huge gaps widen between what is in our mind and what we are trying to communicate). Now, it's possible that--since we will be identifying with the factory worker Douglas Quaid (Colin Farrell)--we will be shown how we are being attacked by socialism and the film will portray how socialism is trying to re-write our memories of what America has been about and what our lives mean.

This is probably just concept art which will not appear in the film at all, however, it is interesting to consider it. The man on the moon; where else have we seen this? Men In Black III, so it's possible that the US winning the Space Race against the communist Soviet Union will appear in another film this year or, like MIB3, Total Recall doesn't want us to forget our past and who we are as a nation, but it's up for grabs until we see the film.

For real, die-hard film fans,... This is quite a day in film history. Cinema publication Sight & Sound, perhaps the most esteemed film publication in the world, has counted all the votes for updating their decade list of greatest films and the long-time champ, Orson Welles with Citizen Kane at the number 1 slot, has today been replaced by Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. 846 film critics were called upon to choose the 50 greatest films (listed below) and, separately, 358 directors were asked to submit list of 10 greatest films (listed below). The question is, how many of them have you seen? (Personally, I am shocked that Roshomon is so low on the list). Granted,we have not done Hitchcock yet on this site (as I have mentioned before, I have this fantasy of doing all 50 of his films in chronological order, and I won't do any of them until I get my fantasy). But Vertigo is by far Alfred Hitchcock's most Catholic film so that's a real shocker that it would be the new darling of film experts. Sight & Sound The Critics’ Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time

• 1. Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958)
• 2. Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)
• 3. Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953)
• 4. La Règle du jeu (Renoir, 1939)
• 5. Sunrise: a Song for Two Humans (Murnau, 1927)
• 6. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968)
• 7. The Searchers (Ford, 1956)
• 8. Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
• 9. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, 1927)
• 10. 8 ½ (Fellini, 1963)
• 11. Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925)
• 12. L’Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934)
• 13. Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960)
• 14. Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)
• 15. Late Spring (Ozu Yasujiro, 1949)
• 16. Au hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966)
• 17. Seven Samurai (Kurosawa Akira, 1954)
• 17. Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)
• 19. Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1974)
• 19. Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly, 1951)
• 21. L’avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960)
• 21. Le Mépris (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963)
• 21. The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)
• 24. Ordet (Carl Dreyer, 1955)
• 24. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-Wai, 2000)
• 26. Rashomon (Kurosawa Akira, 1950)
• 26. Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966)
• 28. Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch, 2001)
• 29. Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)
• 29. Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985)
• 31. The Godfather Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)
• 31. Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)
• 33. Bicycle Thieves (Vittoria De Sica, 1948)
• 34. The General (Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman, 1926)
• 35. Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927)
• 35. Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
• 35. Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975)
• 35. Sátántangó (Béla Tarr, 1994)
• 39. The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, 1959)
• 39. La dolce vita (Federico Fellini, 1960)
• 41. Journey to Italy (Roberto Rossellini, 1954)
• 42. Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray, 1955)
• 42. Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959)
• 42. Gertrud (Carl Dreyer, 1964)
• 42. Pierrot le fou (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)
• 42. Play Time (Jacques Tati, 1967)
• 42. Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami, 1990)
• 48. The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966)
• 48. Histoire(s) du cinéma (Jean-Luc Godard, 1998)
• 50. City Lights (Charlie Chaplin, 1931)
• 50. Ugetsu monogatari (Mizoguchi Kenji, 1953)
• 50. La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962)
•  
• The Directors’ Top 10 Greatest Films of All Time
• 1). Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953)
• 2). 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968)
• 3). Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)
• 4). 8 ½ (Fellini, 1963)
• 5).Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1980)
• 6). Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979)
• 7). The Godfather (Coppola, 1972)
• 8). Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958)
• 9). Mirror (Tarkovsky, 1974)
• 10). Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948)



The new master of films...