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Some of the works that would have been entering the public domain this year, were it not for the 1976 Copyright Act:

• Lord of the Flies
• Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers
• Horton Hears a Who!
• “On the Waterfront”
• “Rear Window”
• “Seven Samurai”

Click through for more. (via Davextreme)

More analysis of “Inception”. The movie itself is about making movies and the fine line that a director like Christopher Nolan is walking when he takes $160 million of someone else’s money to make an intellectually engaging action movie.

That a big-budget movie director is going through the eye of the needle every time he or she makes a movie doesn’t need to be belabored. Ridley Scott famously suspends the ordinary rules of human politeness and self-consciousness during the process. (That many directors take this mantle of ruthlessness as an excuse to be petulant and tantrum-prone need hardly be mentioned either.) These types of directors, especially, know what is expected of them. Lee ‘Roll-em’ Sholem is probably the studios’ paragon here. Get it in the can, fix it in post, Always Be Closing, etc.

Reconciling this required talent with some kind of artistic backbone has pretty much always been the schizophrenic affliction of good, famous directors. It’s hard to achieve, and it’s very easy to lose. Cf., Later Kurosawa, when Coppola and George Lucas had to swoop in from the eaves with the money for Ran, after Japanese studios had all but abandoned their prodigal son.

I think Nolan sees the taut demands of a heist movie as a metaphor for these studio demands. You’ve got to get in, get out without getting burned. You’ve got to take the big risks for the enormous reward. If the thief blows it, it’s not like the person behind it all ever goes to jail or has his career ruined. Nolan knows that if he fails in his heist of moviegoers’ wallets, he’s the one with the black mark on him; his backers are just out a bunch of money. That Ken Watanabe’s moneyman-character tags along begins to look a lot like the on-set junior executive whispering notes into the porches of Nolan’s ear. In Nolan’s world, this guy gets shot almost immediately (though by the end of the story, he’s rescued by the protagonist, and, significantly wiser, emerges from the experience with a newfound respect for the intricacies of the process. It’s a neat little bildungsroman just for studio executives. 

Interesting analysis of “Inception”.

Let’s take a look at the various discussions surrounding the film. We’ll start with a run down of interpretations as to what really happened, followed by an examination of any plot holes that may have gone unexplained by the various interpretations. It should go without saying, but everything below the jump is going to be positively riddled with Inception spoilers.

John Scalzi applies the Bechdel test to some recent sci-fi films.

Have you ever heard of the Bechdel test? It’s a test, popularized by cartoonist Alison Bechdel, that asks three questions of movies:

1. Are there at least two women characters in the film?
2. Who talk to each other?
3. About something other than a man?

If a film fulfills all three, then it passes the Bechdel test. If it doesn’t, then it doesn’t. The point of the Bechdel test, among other things, is to note that even here, in the twenty-first century, the role of women in film is very often to be support for the male roles or to keep the story and audience focused on the male protagonist. Whether that means something to you or not is really up to you, but, as a creative person myself, I do find it an interesting test to apply to my own work.

I was curious to see how some of the most popular science-fiction films of the last decade fared when the Bechdel test is applied to them. Below, for your conversational delight, are the results. Two things to know: I’m excluding 2010 films from the list because I don’t want to spoil them for people who haven’t seen them. And, for the purposes of this exercise, I’m going to say that the female characters have to be named — i.e., significant enough to the plot that the audience knows their names. So, for example, the big-eyed doctor telling Captain Kirk’s mom to push while she’s giving birth in the shuttle in the opening sequence of Star Trek doesn’t qualify. Got it?

The results are abysmal.

Opens tomorrow.