What's All This Then?
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What's All This Then?
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Film and Television
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"In a lot of ways it's the most important way that design affects our lives on a daily basis--where you live and where you work and how you get there." The third film in Gary Hustwit's trilogy (Helvetica, Objectified) is about the design of cities and is titled Urbanized. Our pal Alissa Walker has the scoop for Fast Company. Yay.
"Second only to the film classic Last Tango in Paris in terms of its cutting edge cinemato- graphy and intriguing and highly original plot." User reviews on IMDB of My Little Pony: The Princess Promenade.
A flame thrower vs. a fire extinguisher, all in slow motion. With a combination like that, how could Dancing Pigeons' Ritalin not be the music vid of the moment? Via Doobybrain.
Bird's eye view of the filming of Transformers 3 on Wacker Drive in Chicago. Shot and edited by our pal, Chris Pritchard of the nation's most gracious hosting company, Tilted.
A couple of kids on Cape Cod in the 1970's make a Star Trek film.
Really fascinating look at the sound design for Inception. Saw it this past weekend and just loved it. It is the kind of film you need to see several times and then go out for drinks after and discuss incessantly.
Daniel Kasman's favorite Chaplin gag.
Big ToL news. A script has surfaced. More from The Playlist.
Trailer for the Australian claymation film Mary & Max. Via Doobybrain.
"Life In A Day is a historic global experiment to create the world's largest user-generated feature film: a documentary, shot in a single day, by you. On July 24, you have 24 hours to capture a glimpse of your life on camera." Here is the trailer, Life in a Day. Cannot wait to see how this turns out.
Sweet Gevorg Kerensky directed "Impossible is Nothing" spot for Adidas and a cool visual effects breakdown too.
Chicago icon Superdawg gets used as a music vid location for Kid Sister's Big N' Bad. Love the shots of the staff at 2:03.
"As far as my research shows, there were never any interviews with Douglass or with anyone who worked at his company, Northridge Electronics. The secrecy surrounding his work is Hollywood legend." Mike Sacks chats with Ben Glenn II on the history of the laugh track. Via Liz Danzico.
Trailer for the documentary Vincent: A Life in Color about Chicago's very own brightly-suited dancer. Opens this week at the Siskel Film Center.
An animated infographic trailer for the documentary Waiting for Superman.
An interview with director Sylvain Chomet about his new film The Illusionist and reanimating CP hero Jacques Tati.
Who knew? Impersonations by Kevin Spacey.
Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back in MS Paint.
SD normally post these sorts of things but he is currently in Iowa so I am posting this for him, even though I really have no idea what this is. Sony introduces the world's first interchangeable lens HD consumer camcorder. Wow, cool. Anyone seen my stapler?
"...an unscientific point of view on the beginning and evolution of life... and how it could probably end." Big Bang Big Boom, an animated painted wall. Fab.
Improv Everywhere's Star Wars Subway Car.
Lovely ad for Dulux Walls.
Fun video games-meet-snowboarding video: Gnarcade. Via Doobybrain.
The folks over at Discovery Channel headquarters have an interesting way to promote Shark Week.
Like the best "best-of" lists, this one of 50 must-own DVDs is filled with ones you love, filled in with a few you likely have yet to. Via Large-Hearted Boy.
A list of the 10 most controversial horror movies (if you can bear to look).
"...it feels like Bergman was saying 'look how far we haven't come in 500 years.'" A quick note and screen grabs from Meagan Fisher, about one of my all-time favorite works of art, The Seventh Seal.
Local note: Transformers 3 will be filming skydiving scenes downtown this weekend.
Around the World in 80 Seconds.
What's black & white and anamorphic all over? This Distracted Globe, for the month of July.
A short documentary about Jay Shell's Subway Etiquette project. Via Peachfuzz.
ToL gets a PG13 rating which is no surprise. The news is that someone has actually seen the film.
A spot for Domino's, but also a nice look at the pains of photographing/filming food, which in days gone by, we've personally experienced more than a few of times here at CP.
Via Doobybrain.
Small Streetlife.
"Produced for Maine Farmland Trust, an organization that works to preserve farm land in Maine for farming use, the films offer a glimpse at the many different types of farms in the state." Meet Your Farmer.
Piranha Bar's short film Avatar Days, in which players' in-game characters replace their real selves. Nice.
Related to the last: Playground Politics' Africa and North Korea.
Kids reenact the American Revolution.
Interesting, well-made branded documentary about Jack O'Shea, London's best butcher: I See Steaks in My Sleep. Not to be watched on an empty stomach.
The 100 greatest movie insults of all time. Via Slashfilm.
Music vid of the moment, made entirely from code and Twitter feeds: Robyn's Killing Me. It's also in 3D, so dig out those glasses you used to see the Ref last year. Via Denver Egotist.
100 classic Sci-Fi movies you can watch online for free.
"My name is Talky Tina and now you can buy me."
Ignacio Uriarte's bizarre yet transfixing film History of the Typewriter Recited by Michael Winslow. Via Doobybrain.
Meet Your Farmer, a great series of short films about farms in Maine.
The simple, quirky and beautifully shot music vid for MiCkey[3d]'s Paris T'es Belle.
Weather Tests, a sweet little experimental film project by Savas Ozay. Via Fubiz.
Adorable. AT-AT Day Afternoon.
It appears all is well in the Shire.
For SD, a Venn diagram showing where front doors were located on 1980's tv sitcoms.
"Last night I fell six stories and didn't splatter. Not a scratch." Leap.
Check this video of last night's storm in Chicago from Craig Shimala in which lightning strikes three of the tallest buildings in the city at the same time. Via @simplepretty.
The drummer from OK GO (Danimal) and the drummer for The Muppets (Animal) have a stare-down while Zach Galifianakis watches: "Danimal vs. Animal."
The fairly tame, yet interesting because it caused such an uproar, Jonathan Glazer-directed spot for Flake, which never aired and got the agency responsible kicked off the account.
Amazing home video of Honolulu, Hawaii on VJ Day August 14, 1945. Via Mental Floss.
A short documentary about booze, broads, and bowling. The Bowler.
So you know, 15 great movies that were never finished.
Kubrick vs Scorsese and Tarantino vs Coen Brothers. Via Jason Kottke, who's on fire lately.
The opening scene and credits to the pilot episode of the Ferris Bueller TV spinoff from 1990. Everything about it is uncomfortable.
For $200 you can be animated and have a speaking role in The Hit Squad, the world's first feature length pixel movie.
Stebs Schinerer wakes up and goes for a ride.
Refait (Replay) is a recreation of the last 15 minutes of a World Cup match between France and Germany from 1982, meticulously reshot in an urban French environment. Amazing.
Pitch 'n' Putt with Joyce 'n' Beckett.
Validation.
In memoriam of Mr. Dean who passed away Sunday, Who hasn't had their Jimmy Dean breakfast this morning?
"In March, we asked some of our pals to film their favorite tweets in 30 seconds or less. We had so much fun, we asked them to return for an encore." Yay. Twitter: The Criterion Collection, Vol II.
The elephant in the middle of the Glee club, by Christina Mulligan. Via Waxy.
Mark Bernath from WK Amsterdam, talks about their "Write the Future" spot.
Yellowstone can be a truly magical place. Death by Man.
Here's hoping tomorrow we have No Words.
Irregular Orbit has a great checklist of must-see film noir classics.
David Mamet's new short film Lost Masterpieces of Pornography.
Trailer for Norwegian Ninja. Yep.
For SD, The Making of the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Quidditch, Invisibility cloaks, Sorting Hats, Flying Broomsticks, Magic!
Trailer for The Empire Strikes Back as it would have been in the 1950's. Via DRB.
Trailer for the absurd, Wes Anderson-esque skateboard film, Machotaildrop.
Adidas' Star Wars cantina spot. More technically interesting than genuinely entertaining. Also, why is Noel Gallagher there?
The Danish Film Institute's new comprehensive website dedicated to Carl Dreyer. A great resource. Via David Hudson.
The recurring film prop newspaper.
Excerpts from Todd Rainsberger's 1982 book James Wong Howe, Cinematographer. Howe shot just about every movie made from the early-20s to the mid-60s. Thanks Henry.
Everyone needs a Robocop action figure. But which!?
Had never seen this and it's brilliant: trailer from 1979's Real Life, Albert Brooks' best film.
The design-centric animation/puppetry in the opening video for The Show 'n Tell Show, which as it happens, has their next show this Sunday night.
I am.
Let's Color.
Better enjoy that Russian Hobbit because it looks like it's going to be a while before you see a new film version.
The Calm Before The Tree of Life, by Paul Maher. Not much new information but this is a great summary of the ToL story so far.
100 things you didn't know about The Empire Strikes Back.
Two of mankind's greatest inventions, together at last. iPad + Velcro.
So you know, how to crash Cannes.
Infosthetics on a series of lovely financial spots for BT. The post includes a "making of" vid. Work by Glue Society.
Local note, Something Better Somewhere Else, a film from our friends, written and directed by Ron Lazzeretti and produced by Ed Amaya, screens tonight and Monday at The Siskel.
Everywhere shortly. Nike's Write the Future World Cup epic, directed by Alejandro G. Inarritu, with a classic prog track from Focus. Best. Soccer. Spot. Ever.
I'm a 543621, and I know plenty of 546321s and 546312s and some other combinations too. But I don't know anybody who's number doesn't start with 5. Ars Technica looks back.
"High definition shouldn't just be a name for a resolution. It should mean the level of definition in the image is high." Devin Coldewey's great read about the trouble with camera claims: "When HD Isn't High Definition."
Music vid of the moment by the band who excels at making great moody ones: Husky Rescue's They Are Coming. Strange that all their music vids seem to involve cars: City Lights and New Light of Tomorrow.
Nice little stop-motion story for Olympus, Pen Giant. Via sodaly.
The Empire Strikes Back 1950. A "premake." Via Mefi.
For Lost fans, 14 casting tapes and a collection of deaths from the show.
"Over 1000 unique Federated commercials were created in four years. There were at least 6 new commercials produced every week." If I were in LA on June 15th, without a doubt I would be at Cinefamily's A Tribute to Shadoe Stevens.
"Will make you get back in the water. A reverse Jaws." Trailer for the award-winning documentary Pooljumpers: Catchers of the Ball. Spot on.
The thing in the distance.
FotA and Field-Tested Books contributor Randy 'The Ethicist' Cohen interviewed by Streetfilms about biking in New York.
"I don't make money. I make art." From an interview with
Maxim Zhestkov, whose film Recursion is just about the coolest thing going. Hypnotic. Austere. Spectacular.
For BB and MS: Mozburger. "You are human and you need to be fed."
"I love you Winnie, love, your dad."
Music vid and razor scooter trick video of the moment: We Are Scientists' Nice Guys. Its confused subtitles remind me of Megaforce's excellent work on Metronomy's A Thing For Me.
FotA Ithamar Enriquez was asked to put together an ad for Arizona's Department of Tourism.
A short doc about product placement in films with some words by director Peter Atencio about his experiences with it in his first film.
An interview with director Jean-Pierre Jeunet.
Alexandre Dubosc's stop-motion film celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Annecy Animated Film Festival. Via Doobybrain.
"My life is beyond your comprehension." Confessions of a Hipster.
Did you know that the famous Vulcan salute was invented by Leonard Nimoy and based on a priestly blessing performed by Jewish Kohanim? More things you probably didn't know about Star Trek.
A new beginning of the end, by Christian Annyas. Also, you ought to check for new additions in his Movie Titles Stills Collection once in a while.
Thinking Is Fun, a film by Davis Silis. Futura Bold in all caps is fun too.
Music vid of the moment: the lo-fi one take Motus by Seb Martel directed by the always great Arno Salters.
An interview with Ken Nordine and tour of his home studio.
Michael Stipe interviewed at the Rocky Horror Picture Show in a St. Louis news broadcast from the '70s. Who knew Stipey was a Blue Oyster Cult fan?
Music vid of the moment, featuring some nice illustration/animation by Ben the Illustrator and Broken Antler, with narration by Isabella Rossellini: Maple Mountain Sunburst's LookListenFeel.
Phil Lord and Chris Miller's never-aired PSA, made for ABC in 1988: Brontë Sisters Power Dolls. So great.
Joss Whedon sings a song about director's commentary on DVD, Return to the Scene of the Crime. Utterly brilliant.
From the folks over at CHOW, an Obsessives about seeds.
Patrick Daughters directs this fun spot for the Washington Lottery.
The Black Keys don't want you to watch their latest music videos because they don't find them funny. Instead, watch our favorite of theirs: 10 A.M.
"I thought of that while riding my bicycle." Push Pull, a nice biking film combining footage from a jeep mounted camera and a sweet studio set-up.
A cool film from an EXPO past: Impresssions of EXPO '67.
"This is not cinema. This is the anesthetic aesthetic of the convalescent hospital." Sam Wasson on the sorry state of the romantic comedy.
A job offer from Francis Ford Coppola to Lee Marvin. "It's a good script."
Fab ad for the World Wildlife Fund, Space Monkey.
"Murder should be treated delicately and brought into the home where it rightly belongs." On this day in 1980 Alfred Hitchcock died.
The Lost creators explain it all.
"The Malick project will be Trumbull's first feature credit since Brainstorm. Malick is working on two films, a long-awaited cosmic family drama starring Brad Pitt called Tree of Life, and an accompanying IMAX movie." Rebecca Keegan reports that Douglas Trumbull (2001, Close Encounters, Blade Runner) is working with Terrence Malick.
10 film sequences from stop-motion master Ray Harryhausen.
Related to JC's John Lewis spot below, a similar but far more tragic telling in directing team Happy's Jane Lloyd.
Spectacularly shot, well cast and divinely art directed, this spot for British retailer John Lewis depicts a woman's entire life in 90 seconds. But... the vibe is completely schmaltzified by the music track and the whole thing just feels tired and expected as a result. Via AdFreak.
Visually related to the last, the silhouette.
"I called one of my friends up and said, 'What does an art director do?'" A Filmmaker Magazine
conversation with Jack Fisk on starting out, Terrence Malick and Days of Heaven. Plus, a NYT piece from 2008.
Up There, a film by Mother for Stella Artois on the dying art of painted billboards. Lovely. Thanks Winston.
The never picked-up pilot, Summer of Tears, by the great sketch group of the same name.
Rumors of a Tree Of Life screening. Hmm.
Ghosts in the Hollow, a beautiful short film shot in abandoned Appalachian mining towns. By Jim Lo Scalzo. Via Glass.
Cool ad for Nike, Music Shoe.
Some up-close video of the new RED camera. And now you've been introduced to what I'll be dreaming about for the next six months.
Because it's cool to like Hanson now, and it features a cameo by an enthusiastic, tambourine playing Weird Al, and because it's all bright and charming, it feels safe enough to post this Blue Brothers tribute, the band's music vid for Thinking 'Bout Somethin'.
Related to the last, one of the Petes stared in this music vid for Nada Surf's Whose Authority, which is somewhat similar to the music vid BB and I made for The Breeders' Walk It Off (theirs has fewer dancing genies, so we win).
Some of the famous cameos from The Adventures of Pete & Pete, a predecessor, in our minds, to shows like Arrested Development.
Related to the last, "Sudden Death" was a 1995 fictional redux of the 1992 Stanley Cup Finals, where the Penguins beat our Blackhawks to win their second Cup in a row. Here's hoping for a 2010 rematch!
The Pittsburgh Penguins abandon the storied Civic Arena next season. I'll spare you dozens of cheesy tribute videos, this is how I'll always remember it.
Film lineup for Cannes 2010. Sadly, no mention of Terrence Malick's Tree of Life.
For BB: Incase's Experiment No. 2: Moped Ride spot.
The trailer for Star Wars: Uncut.
And the title for "Most Headaches at the End of a Music Video Shoot" goes to Good Shoes' The Way My Heart Beats.
Music vid of the moment: MC Paul Barman's Owl Pellets.
A music vid for Viimeinen Mammutti by Hevisaurus, the Finnish heavy metal band for kids.
So great, Pixels.
Not much to go on, but we'll know on the 15th if Terrence Malick's Tree of Life will debut at Cannes.
"I am a filmmaker, not a painter. I have a gift for arranging men and horses. It comes easy for me." Ebert on Werner Herzog and the making of Aguirre, the Wrath of God.
The [ahr-tuh-zen] Project's mini-doc on Dave Lefner, the LA-based reduction linocut artist.
The Video Game Car, rigging a camera behind a car with blacked out windows, then running an obstacle course turns out to be not as easy as it is on the screen. Via Doobybrain.
"...sampling a few frames from a massive, interconnected frozen movie." Things Magazine on Google Street View Panoramas, including this series of Street View time-lapse sequences from LA.
Dan & naD: A Palindromic Sketch. "If you played it backwards, it would be identical." Via J-Walk.
Trailer for the documentary Casino Jack and the United States of Money.
Elvis Costello's I Wanna Be Loved begat U2's Numb begat Signals' What Dreams.
FotA Chris Milk has asked fans to help him create a music vid for Johnny Cash's Ain't No Grave one frame at a time with The Johnny Cash Project.
Kevin has a (gorgeous) house to sell. And he's a filmmaker. So he makes a film to help him sell his house. If the martini comes with the house, sold.
Music vid of the moment: Diane Birch's Valentino. "They did 62 takes. The actual video is take 57." Behind the scenes, here. Via Video Static.
Trailer for Pac-Man: The Movie.
Animating photos cut out from skate magazines to create Skateboardanimation. Via Denver Egotist.
A companion to these posters we linked to the other day, the animated version of Tron vs. Saul Bass.
A young Tom Waits on Fernwood 2Nite in the late 70s.
Australia's Hungry Beast show presents If Lady Gaga Wasn't a Popstar.
Very sad news that David Mills, one of the head writers on The Wire, Homicide, and the upcoming Treme, has died. Just saw him Sunday on a panel as part of the Tennessee Williams Festival down in New Orleans.
Clever spot for FITC conferences: The Last Advertising Agency on Earth. Via If This is a Blog.
"This short film by American director Ramin Bahrani (Goodbye Solo) traces the epic, existential journey of a plastic bag (voiced by Werner Herzog) searching for its lost maker, the woman who took it home from the store and eventually discarded it." Plastic Bag.
Trailer for The Square.
J.D. Shapiro apologizes for writing Battlefield Earth and tells the story of how the "Worst Movie of the Decade" happened.
Trailer for Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.
For camera nerds like myself, the first episode of Zacuto's Great Camera Shootout 2010, which finds a batch of DPs pitting film against DSLRs.
Related to the last, a Sandra -Lee-Induced-Seizure. Be very afraid.
Trailer for Exit Through the Gift Shop.
"Crazyass Japanese Commercial of the Day," Milk Seafood Noodles.
Hero Terrence Malick to direct Sir Gawain And The Green Night after ToL? Also, a new transfer of Days of Heaven has been released on Blu-ray and it looks like TTRL is next.
Sam Brosnan took his new D3s home from work, and shot a bunch of footage along the way. Dreamy, via Quipped.
Trailer for Michel Gondry's The Thorn in the Heart.
Behold The Space Nazi! and more from behind the scenes of Iron Sky including the teaser. Yowza.
This is not related to the last, nor is this, although it's pretty cool.
Cargo preview from io90. They think it could be the next big sci-fi thing. Todd Brown says not so much.
In honor of the master's 100th birthday, three minutes of Kagemusha.
Trailer for the upcoming Weird Al Yankovic biopic: Weird: The Al Yankovic Story. Beautifully done.
BB, you should plan to be in the UK next week, when Europe's first 3D TV network, Sky 3D, launches with the Manchester United vs. Chelsea match.
After a month or two of pressuring the label, Megaforce's music vid for Kid Cudi, Pursuit of Happiness, has finally been released and it's great.
Posted without comment: a shot-for-shot remake of the opening of 1995's The Goofy Movie.
Á propos de rien: Anna Karina et Jean-Paul Belmondo.
A clip from We Ruled London: The Story of the Krays and more from a BBC interview with the gangster twins, who were also the inspiration for The Piranha Brothers. "Dinsdale."
The art of UFO, the Gerry Anderson tv series. Fab. Via The Cartoonist.
Just what we need, America's leading 11 year-old film critic hates Alice and loves Extraordinary Measures.
A new timelapse HD film from Philip Bloom Sky, filmed over five days in Dubai. Here's some background and Bloom's copious production notes.
Chat Roulette piano improv.
Sketch group Elephant Larry's pilot episode of The WOW. "Like those 20-minute 'entertainment' shows that you have to sit through in the theater before the movie comes on. Only better, because it's fake."
Next time you need to hire a Clapper, hire Geraldine Brezca: Slates from Inglourious Basterds.
The original creator of Keyboard Cat, Charlie Schmidt, has released a new Keyboard Cat video for this millennium. As BB says, "Rejoice, indeed."
Trying to describe a scene in a movie to a friend and not really doing such a great job? Give up and head on over to Movieclips. Over 12,000 clips to see and the actual movie scene is so much better than your description. Really.
Lovely, Second Wind.
Related. Andy Warhol and Sonny Liston.
For BB: She and Him's new music vid, In The Sun, directed by TV/movie vet Peyton Reed.
Transport for London's clever PSA: "The Bank Job."
Everything is Terrible announces their pick for World's Most Action Packed Action Movie, 1987's Deadly Prey.
The commercial work of director Joachim Back, who just won an Oscar for his short film The New Tenants. Scroll down and start with "Milkman."
Road to the Stars, a 1957 Russian film by Pavel Klushantsev notable for its composite and model shots and heroic tone. Subtitles would be nice, but are not really necessary.
Tron: Legacy trailer.
Satellites: A User's Manual, a terrific series of seven animated films by This is Real Art in London. Johnny Ball is perfectly cast as the voice-over. Via The DDC.
FotA Wakiza Gamez (also known as "The Spaniard" around CP), has created this bit of madness, which has reduced both myself and BB to tears of glee: Loud n Clear Commercial (Remix).
Apples in Stereo presents Exploring the Universe with actor and/or Chair of the Physical Science and Physical Education department of Drain Creek Middle School, Elijah Wood.
Music vid of the moment: DJ Stern's Manouche.
Uncle Jack, a short film-as-promotion for Pentax's new video-shooting DSLR. Directed by Ink's Jamin Winans. Via Denver Egotist.
The Trailer for Every Academy Award Winning Movie Ever, utilizing the overly explanatory speech Steven Soderbergh developed for Schizopolis.
Mike Barzman's slow-motion destruction fest, Pink Terror. Maybe Barzman was the same guy who was throwing all that stuff at the band Tortoise in Salt the Skies.
DEVO's Focus Group Color Study.
The secret code names of 37 sci-fi blockbuster films.
Tokyo Sky Drive.
"We asked some of our friends to film their favorite tweets... The only rules were it had to be a tweet written by someone else and it had to contain the entire tweet and nothing but the tweet." Twitter: The Criterion Collection. Fab.
A short film shot entirely on a flatbed scanner.
Created for the JESS3 presentation at AIGA Baltimore, The State of the Internet. The numbers are astonishing and utterly fascinating.
Terrence Malick's Tree of Life is now confirmed for a November release but "that doesn't mean it won't be ready for Cannes." From Anne Thompson.
Homer Simpson's iPhone and other bits about Mapple.
Will ruin the fun of keeping an eye out for them if you haven't seen certain films, so consider that your warning before watching: Alfred Hitchcock's Cameo Appearances.
Marcel Duchamp's 1926 short film Anemic Cinema, "shot in Man Ray's studio with the help of cinematographer Marc Allegret" and features "a seven-minute animation of nine punning phrases by Rrose Selavy."
Following the success of the stellar Carousel, a teaser for Parallel Lines, a series of Philips-funded short films/commercials by five RSA directors.
OK Go's second music vid for This Too Shall Pass is both an incredible achievement in a Rube Goldbergian way, but also for its amazing Steadicam blocking. Watching the four part "making of" is highly encouraged.
A day in the life of New York City, in miniature. Fab.
Captain America has issues. Via Daniel Wagstaff.
Music vid of the moment: Nobody Beats the Drum's Grindin', an incredible stop-motion piece made from colored bricks. You'll also need to watch the making of to understand the serious, personal tragedies that came in creating the video. Via Doobybrain.
There's something quite beautiful about the quiet pans and sloppy jump cuts of file footage reels. Here's one from Canada's Expo '67.
All That Mighty Heart, a 1962 film about London's transport system. As British a film as ever was made. Via Mefi.
"...a film in which the art direction eats the magic cake and swells to giant proportions." David Hudson rounds up some first impressions of Burton's Alice.
For SD, Death in the Skies, an infographic that uncovers the secrets of Mega Shark.
60 writers, 60 places, one film.
Trailer for Norwegian black comedy A Somewhat Gentle Man. Looks great.
TSPDT? is up to 400 in their slow but steady work of organizing The 1,000 Greatest Films. The list has been determined by aggregating tons of other lists. A fun browse.
I think I remember getting in big trouble as a kid once for doing this at a wedding, but not nearly so beautifully and with lots more breakage.
My favorite tv show ever, in Lego.
Blooper reel for Warner Brothers from 1936. Thanks Michael.
The interview is French translated into German, but you can ignore that if you don't speak either language, and just feast your eyes on the gorgeous hand-drawn animation for the film The Illusionist. Via the always fab Slashfilm.
"Sometimes the only way to get something done is to do two dozen other things first." Procrastination.
Music vid of the moment: Kid Sam's We're Mostly Made of Water. Worth watching a couple of times to try and catch everything.
A trailer for what I'm expecting to turn out to be the greatest film ever made. Via J-Walk.
Just slightly related to the last, a relink of how to move a 100 year old church. Great track, cinematography and editing.
"Nobody does Mrs. Wilberforce." Yowza, a new transfer and Blu-ray release for 1955's The Ladykillers.. It's a Technicolor beauty and hilarious too. Is The Horse's Mouth next?
Jen Sharpe writes, "It's hard to say why this is so enjoyable: people doing stuff."
Music vid of the moment: Kina Grannis' Valentine, which puts to use close to 2000 DVD cases for a flip book/domino effect. It's a shame they didn't use Jewelboxing, but it's still pretty great.
Pink Freud's Dziwny jest ten kraj, "Awarded Best Polish Music Video of 2007."
Wisdom.
After Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus, this only seems natural.
Related to posts from earlier this week: might be tough here in the States, but we're certainly going to give it a try: the newly restored version of Metropolis, which includes nearly an hour of additional, newly-found footage will be streamed live today starting at 8:15pm Berlin time.
The car crumble is a cousin to the end of Jonathan Glazer's Rabbit in Your Headlights, but director Arev Manoukian and Spy Film's Nuit Blanche is pretty great. The making-of here.
A 2002 Israeli spot for Yotvata called "Sleepwalker" placed side-by-side Coca-Cola's recent Super Bowl spot, "Sleepwalker." Copy or Coincidence?
Trailer for a documentary I'd like to see but wouldn't have enjoyed working on: The Solitary Life of Cranes. Via DesignNotes.
Illustrator Josh Holland's 'I Heart Conan' Contest. "To win you must name as many of the Conan O'Brien sketch characters in the illustration as possible." Via Denver Egotist.
Former Guest Editor Joanna Walsh has made an animated self-portrait of what happens when she sits down to try and get some work done.
Related to above and below: some great uses of the Glidetrack and the 5D in Khalid Mohtaseb's Egypt/Lebanon Montage and in Duck Duck Collective's short film/documentary made for Levi's 'Go Forth' campaign.
Trailer for the documentary sure to be watched by most everyone here at CP: Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and The Magnetic Fields.
A collection of mirror scare scenes from horror films. Paul F. Tompkins does a great bit about this particular cliche on his latest album.
Music vid of the moment: St. Vincent's Laughing With A Mouth Of Blood, which co-stars Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein and is set at Women and Women First, "the most feminist of all feminist bookstores." Given that Armisen's a former Chicagoan, it was probably inspired by this.
"With sushi, you need at least 20 years of experience, but that's not enough. My 45 years, not enough." A clip from Nozawa, a documentary about sushi.
Try not to smile, Stella's Day.
Restored Metropolis trailer.
Related to an earlier post. The newly restored Metropolis will be streamed from The Berlin Film Fest on Friday. Yay. Via Ebert.
Trailer for the documentary The People vs George Lucas.
By that, SD means this. Is it wrong to fall in love with a woman sipping juice in a robot suit from 80 years ago?
A batch of great behind the scenes photos of Fritz Lang productions, including the one from Metropolis we've grown so enamored with. Thanks Henry.
"It seems like a fulfilment of my childhood romantic notions of what I wanted to be when I grew up." Facts About Projection, Temujin Doran's ode to his job as a projectionist at London's The Screen on the Green. Via Doobybrain.
That's Why I Chose Yale, "an introduction to undergraduate life at Yale College." It's also a musical. And one that knows how weird that is. Via Doobybrain.
Check the dude over the newsreader's right shoulder.
Music vid of the moment: Massive Attack's Splitting The Atom. Like a cross between that great Philips Carousel commercial and Cloverfield.
Revisiting Jaws' filming locations.
A classic. Let's zoom in right here and enhance that. Thanks George.
After a two year hiatus, Michel Gondry returns to music videos in fine lo-fi form with Mia Doi Todd's Open Your Heart.
38 years of Super Bowl Commercials, the huge collection at Adland.
An interactive timeline of the Lost universe.
Details on what sounds like a promising J.D. Salinger documentary. Thanks Henry.
The polar bear you fell in love with two years ago is back and he's angrier and far more violent: Alaska Nanooks 2010 Hockey Intro. Info on its making, here.
The Open Road London, great color travelogue footage from 1927, two years before Kodak's Sonochrome tinted film and long before standard color film. From the London Screen Archive, an excellent resource. Thanks to Stephen O'Neill, who is partial to things in lovely disrepair.
An interesting look inside the making of reality television from FotA Richard Rushfield: Secret Rituals of American Idol Auditions Exposed.
So you know, here's Charlie Brooker's spot on explanation of How to Report the News. Via Denver Egotist.
AdLand, an animated film filled with references to last year's most popular campaigns in the UK. I only recognized three, but even on its own, it's a fun time. Via If This is a Blog.
Related to the last: as great as Sophie Muller continues to be, she'll never top her vid for Blur's Beetlebum.
Music vid of the moment: The High Road, by Broken Bells (a collaboration between Danger Mouse and The Shins' James Mercer), directed by Sophie Muller.
James Bridle is trying to re-film each shot in Patrick Keiller's 1994 film London for his London 2010 project. Here's a clip from the original to give an idea of what an undertaking this will be. Via I Like.
For BB: Alex Cox has made a semi-sequel to Repo Man. No, not Waldo's Hawaiian Holiday, but another full-length film. Here's the very bizarre trailer for Repo Chick (not that the original wasn't pretty bizarre too).
For the Lost fans, a chart mapping out character's past connections. Via I09.
Vancouver City, ethereal, beautiful timelapse footage. Must see. Thanks Marshall.
The S From Hell, the shocking true story of the most terrifying logo of all time. Nice trailer too.
"Heard your NPR interview and you were boring." A 1998 letter from Harvey Weinstein to Errol Morris, trying to get him to beef up his energy and use more terrible movie similes when the director has to describe The Thin Blue Line.
Lovely, A Day in Paris.
For fellow New Orleans-lovers: Mr. Okra is a short stand-alone character piece that'll be at Sundance, and is also meant to be part of a longer doc, The Other Side of Rampart. Thx for the tip, Charles F.
Mike and his whole family recap the last five seasons of Lost.
A fun, very nicely art directed spot for The Pump restaurant in NYC.
Do you know your aliens?
Ryan Nagata's impressive short film 1945A, made with very little money, stop-motion scale models, in a hole dug in his grandmother's backyard, and "only five helmets to share between actors." Via Atencioblog.
Alex Delany passed along his eerie and transfixing short film: Walking Crowd.
Tangentially related to the above. A compilation of timelapse videos of the MidAmerican power plant just south of Council Bluffs Iowa. The music is from the movie trailer for The Shining." By Jeff Grewe. He, of course, means this trailer.
Nice interview with Danny Yount, the creative director behind the opening and end credit sequences for Sherlock Holmes.
Winner of the 2003 Short Film Palme D'Or, Cracker Bag.
Any amateur theater mishap that is labeled a "fiasco" is worth a look or listen. This recent production of "Peter Pan" falls apart very nicely. But it still has a ways to go to equal the "Peter Pan" production described by Jack Hitt in my very fave TAL of all time.
And while we're on the subject of created characters behaving badly, Here's Rad Omen's Rad Anthem, which is N even a little bit SFW.
The film is one of my favorites, but I'd never seen the trailer: When the Cat's Away. Makes me like it all the more.
In case you missed it, the transcript for Conan's monologue and clips from last night's Tonight Show. And here's his great open letter.
Free Love Forum's awesome Avatar: The Making of the Bootleg, using the revolutionary "Image Capture Helmet" which, it must be said, owes a lot to our patented Rinsecam 9000™ which was used in the filming of Shift Option Rinse and is currently being upgraded for 3D.
If you have something to get done today, don't watch a single one of these late-'70s, early-'80s station promos from WITI TV-6 in Milwaukee or you'll get hooked. Definitely don't start with News Update, We've Got Good News, or You Look Like a Winner.
Teaser for David Simon's new show Treme.
If those 3D glasses give you a headache, skip the theater and just read the whole Avatar screenplay (PDF). Thanks Jamie.
An interesting excerpt from director Eli Roth's forthcoming book All the Gory Details about everything from working for David Lynch to how impossible it is to get a movie made.
Maybe a Cannes premiere for Malick's Tree of Life?
A retelling of that famous scene from the original where C-3PO danced with four Darth Vaders: Star Wars Made in France.
Rambo remade in an apartment. Seriously.
Dave Kehr looks at Oscar winning films from Frank Capra, John Ford and William Wyler. They Really Like Me.
3 months, 300 interviews. From director Jason Reitman, his Up in the Air press tour simulator.
Trailer for and info on The Avon Barksdale Story, a documentary about the Baltimore kingpin who served as the inspiration for the character of the same name in The Wire.
For BB: Two Gentlemen of Lebowski, as written by William Shakespeare. Thanks Henry.
Following the news that Sam Mendes has been hired to direct the next Bond film: An Imagined Conversation with Michael G. Wilson, the producer of the films.
A very funny one-off pilot for the BBC staring David Cross, Will Arnet, and Spike Jonze: The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret (lots of language, so watch the volume).
Chicago politics get a touch more crass as sketch group and FotA Schadenfreude sees footage from one of their live shows featured in a campaign spot: C'mon, if you're gonna steal, at least steal the joke.
Discovering the horrible secret behind Space Raiders brand potato chips.
For KG. Preview of a new Walker Percy documentary by Winston Riley.
Cinema Blend makes their picks for the decade's ten scariest moments in film.
"Natasha!" Wonderfully weird TV spot from the Japanese magazine R25: Movie Dictionary (starts up at around the 1:00 mark). Via Denver Egotist.
Gorgeous aerial film of the Grand Canyon.
"You don't need a power to be a super hero." Trailer for Kick-Ass.
I somehow ended up spending New Years' Eve watching women wrestle giant catfish on the teevee. I'll never forget you, Fostana.
Director Erik Van Wyk creates a human zoetrope in this music vid for Parlotones' Life Design. The whole thing was financed by KFC, which wouldn't make much sense, unless you lived in South Africa where this band is apparently huge.
"Somewhere between a short film and a music video" of the moment: Alexander Wolfe's Stuck Under September. Beautiful cinematography and blocking.
Since BB and I are on a bad movie kick this morning, here's a clip from 1991's Little Marines. "Imagine a scenario in which a group of grown adults are sitting around deciding what to cut and what to leave in the final edit...this scene is deemed absolutely necessary from a creative and commercial standpoint." More info about the film here.
Related to the last: Wired story on The Asylum, makers of Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus.
Between Dragon and the Hawk and War of the Planets, the distribution house Inferno Film Production is clearly releasing the finest movies ever made.
"You know when a movie has a flashback and you see the character as a kid? Sometimes that's awesome." Kid Casting. Via Torrez.
AMC has a bunch of B-Movie classics available to watch online.
"Illustrated with technical pen, frame by frame." A parkour flip book. Via Denver Egotist.
Bob Garfield's annual picks for the best actors and actresses in commercials: The Bobby Awards.
AdFreak's picks for 2009's Best and Worst Agency Holiday Cards.
Near Sighted, beautiful macro, slo-mo and time-lapse video by Renaud Duval. Via Curved White.
Vimeo picks their 25 favorite videos of 2009.
I wish we had a family tradition of watching this every Christmas Eve. What a cast! Via Cranched.
Trailer for Frozen.
Related to the last: the London office of the agency Mother put together this clever holiday offering, The Honest $10,000 Spam.
A few months past its release date, but interesting none the less: an incredibly detailed story about the visual effects in District 9. Via A Damn Good Shot.
Rock 'em sock 'em music vid for Holy F*&k's Royal Gregory, directed and animated by Mirrorshade.
It's not well know, but before George Lucas purchased and revised the script, Star Wars was originally written by a group of environmentalists. Derrick Jensen gives a synopsis of the plot to Star Non-Violent Civil Disobediences. Via Just Seeds.
The idea of the show is better than the show itself but what the heck... The He-Man and She-Ra Christmas Special from 1978.
Related to the last: The Police.
"With the right equipment, the image can be enlarged and sharpened." Let's Enhance, a collection of "enhance" scenes from far too many TV shows and movies.
"You're a very nosy fellow, kitty cat." Jake Gittes in Lego. Thanks John.
Community creator Dan Harmon's Suggested Dialogue Revisions to Original Terminator for Special Edition.
Cute holiday film from Chow: A Gingerbread Home for the Holidays. Imagine that the wrap party was the best part of the whole production.
"...a bottomless movie, almost unspeakably beautiful and formally harmonious." Among the many "best of the decade" lists, I'm with John Patterson, writing about Malick's The New World, A Misunderstood Masterpiece?
BBH Labs' great series of clever, handmade spots for Google Chrome. Via Denver Egotist.
A slow-motion holiday card from our pals at Armchair.
Trailer for the documentary about TJ Jagodowski and David Pasquesi, Trust Us This is All Made Up.
Trailer for the Kids in the Hall's upcoming short run TV series: Death Comes to Town.
A biting, lo-fi music vid for The Joe's You're Cool.
Well done gentlemen, well done indeed.
Everywhere, for good reason. Christmas Light Hero. Via dozens of sites, feeds and emails.
A documentary is just a feature film in disguise. An excellent interview with Werner Herzog.
Phillip got invited to visit Skywalker Ranch and made a lovely short film about it.
We Got That B-Roll!
The 10 Best Long Tracking Shots Ever Filmed.
A short holiday film from CBS from 1966, designed by R.O. Blechman and animated by Willis Pyle.
Nice spot for National Geographic, IF.
Still one of my favorite holiday links: Abbi Crutchfield's Baby It's Cold Outside, The Untold Story. Via Cynical-C.
Unspeakable horrors await: Beautiful Day. Also recommend watching The Big Brown Beautiful Bear.
"12 binders, 3500 pages, and 2 hours and 40 minutes of flipping condensed to four and a half minutes" to make this clever lo-fi music vid for Sea Water Bliss' Clowns.
Cool, simple, dizzying spot for Lakai. Via Denver Egotist.
Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki talking about Terrence Malick not watching dailies, finding truth, working without lights and knowing the sounds of the birds.
If Air's Kelly Watch the Stars taught us anything, and now Metal on Metal's Bastard has confirmed, it's that table tennis is incredibly dangerous.
Tarantino for Softbank. Via Adfreak.
$464 a month. Via PCL.
Fiery Furnaces awkwardly retells the making of Easy Rider in their music vid for Even in the Rain. It'll grow on you about a minute in, so watch at least until Rip Torn shows up.
"If all goes according to plan, it will definitely be weird. But is it art?" Actor James Franco's essay about appearing on General Hospital as performance art. Via Murketing.
A "painter's way of directing." Neil Innes on Terrence Malick, The Reluctant Auteur.
Jules Verne meets H.G. Wells in today's Hark, a Vagrant, and Orson Welles meets H.G. Wells (and plugs "Citizen Kane") on San Antonio radio in 1940.
The best films of the '00s.
Zamboni, a very absurd film I made earlier this week for the terrific The Encyclopedia Show.
"I thought Andreas Nilsson's latest video [for Royksopp's This Is It] was so compelling I wanted to see if it would stand on its own, so I took the music out and put sound effects back in, as if it was a short film." Brilliant idea and so much better without the track.
Related to the last: Cocker's new one seems somewhat similar to Pulp's best music vid, Do You Remember The First Time.
Jarvis Cocker hangs out (with his appealing new greying beard) in a troublesome bit of infinity in this music vid for Further Complications, directed by Stephanie di Giusto.
Panic Attack! Watching it is like being in an alternate universe where Michael Bay and Roland Emmerich made Alive in Joberg instead of Neill Blomkamp.
"The film, shot on a miniscule budget in a tight time-frame - a process one of the producers describes 'as making a near feature-length film, for the budget of a short, in eight days' - and directed by Charlie himself, can be seen as a companion piece to the album, as a visual version of it, or as a piece of work in its own right." A film by Noah and the Whale, The First Days of Spring.
Music vid for OK Go's WTF? is a lot of fun, but even more so is their making-of video, HTF?.
For BB: an animated version of Patton Oswalt's Christmas Shoes. Related, it's also worth checking out Hard N' Phirm's parody of the song, She Named the Pony Jesus.
"For nearly a century Zepped, a 6-minute 1916 film of mysterious pedigree starring Charlie Chaplin, was lost. Now it's found." Some more info here about Chaplin's days working in Chicago.
Timelapse scenes of The Alps at night set to Moonlight Sonata. Only perfect. Make sure to click on the HD.
Lovely little interlude, An Autumn's Tale.
6 weeks on the road with the Flow Snowboarding team, Bad Reputation.
Tacos exploding in slow motion. Nuff said.
IFC picks it's 25 scariest moments in non-horror movies.
60 seconds in the life of Thanksgiving, from IronicSans.
"All the calculator know-how you'll probably ever need."
So you know, the most awesome Lifetime movie titles ever.
Cute stop motion short film/commercial for Orbit: Clean It Up. BB, you'll like the music they picked for it.
A short film that takes a look at the life of one Elvis impersonator, Living the Life.
Creepy. In order to try and get up-and-coming directors to attend their horror film festival, the organizers secretly stalked and filmed them, later sending a DVD of the footage with an invitation to attend.
Several things related to the Heaven Can Wait post below: some great comments about what it all means and finding the original sources, including photographer William Hundley, who isn't very happy. Also, the record label's edit, which is pretty awful.
From The Good Times Kid. Try not to smile.
Think I liked Keith Schofield's first "two musicians together" music vid better, but this one for Charlotte Gainsbourg and Beck's Heaven Can Wait is pretty great too. And super extra weird.
McCann-Erickson Welcomes Sterling Cooper.
Scan Processor Studies by Woody Vasulka and Brian O'Reilly. Created with a 70s Rutt-Etra Video Synthesizer.
Relink just because. Notes from a transcription of a Raiders of the Lost Ark story conference between Spielberg, Lucas and Lawrence Kasdan.
German pro bono commercial "wallows in depravity before finding redemption." Via Steffan Postaer.
The original, of course, was Shynola's triumphant return to music videos, but here's an alternate video commissioned by Coldplay for their song Strawberry Swing, directed/animated by Ross Neil and Matt Clark.
Anthony Burrill's trippy, beautiful motion graphics piece Acid Washed.
So you know, making of the computer graphics for Star Wars (Episode IV). Via Slashfilm.
The 7th Guest must have suddenly returned to the collective consciousness, given that I was just thinking about it and now here's this music vid for Leerone's Empty Houses which looks like it was heavily inspired by the game.
Well, as if we weren't hungry enough already... Composer Alexandre Desplat, speaking in Greece, offers up a few tantalizing morsels on working with Terrence Malick on ToL. Related: cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki.
3000 photographs show how Abigail made her book. Via MeFi.
The trailer for the unauthorized, low-buget, Italian sequel to the original Alien film: Alien 2 sulla Terra or "Alien 2: On Earth." More info here.
Dock Ellis & The LSD No-No, a great animated film about maybe the most famous story of a no-hitter in baseball. Certainly the most fun. Via Peachfuzz.
Kaboom! Blowing Up Toy Cars in Slow Motion.
David Wilson used a Praxinoscope for this music video for Moray McLaren. Here's how he did it. Via Werd.
"8,000 miles from the sun and surf of California, far away at the southern end of Argentina, lies a wild land called Patagonia." Mountain of Storms, a 1968 documentary about surfing, skiing, and climbing Cerro Fitz Roy. Awesome music, footage, and even better narration. Via 2 or 3 Things.
Make A World, a documentary about illustrator Ed Emberly, a longtime favorite of CP and CP's kids. Check out the gorgeous t-shirts from (who else?) Wire and Twine.
Two guys sitting on a couch chatting about various, mostly inappropriate, topics. Think Tank with Matt Ruby and Mark Normand. Also, check Matt's Sandpaper Suit
Atelic, "a motion control test film developed from 'Iatrogenesis' created for Rambert Dance Company's Season of New Choreography."
Related to below: "It was Citizen Kane!"
Trailer for Clash of the Titans.
Dave Bry wonders why Kodak's new Citizen Kane-inspired commercial had to be so creepy. Via AdFreak.
About Elliot Malkin's Home Movie Reconstructions 1974 / 2004, we agree with the first viewer comment, "What this project evokes for me is entirely too complex to encapsulate here." Wow. Via Things.
HDR: The Music Video.
Seizure-inducing music vid of the moment: Two Door Cinema Club's I Can Talk, directed by Megaforce, who have been making some really stellar stuff lately.
"Captured for posterity for Edward G. Robinson completists and Planet of the Apes perverts alike." WFMU posts a sweet test reel for PotA featuring Robinson as Dr. Zalus and some awesome storyboard frames illustrating the plot summary.
For SD, further research for our ongoing pickle debate here at the studio, Pickles.
Not sure how they made the music vid for The Most Serene Republic's Heavens to Purgatory, but I'm glad they did.
This great music vid, Minilogue's Animals, by animator Kristofer Strom, reminds me of Volstok's "'Monsters" films, which are still just about the best thing ever.
"I Love You, Mr. Star Wars." Clips from movies where the actor says the title of the movie they're in.
Another music vid I'd love to read the treatment for: The Main Drag's Dove Nets, directed by Ben & Julia.
Ten unintentionally creepy animated films. Totally agree with #6.
If there were more stuff available we'd likely have a category called "Stuff About Terrence Malick" to go along with our Stuff About Stanley Kubrick archive. But failing that here's cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki talking about TM not watching dailies, finding truth, working without lights and knowing the sounds of the birds.
Emilia Forstreuter's animated trip under the sea: Yonder.
An illustrated short film, The Astronomer's Dream. Not to be confused with the 1898 film of the same name.
After talking about Mike Nesmith for a while just a minute ago, that led to a look at his Wikipedia entry and finding info about his short film collection Elephant Parts, which included this great bit: Large Detroit Car Company. Yep, it was a joke back in 1981, too.
The 25 greatest Coen Brothers movie moments. Via Slashfilm.
David Hudson rounds up thoughts on Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire on the occasion of a brand new transfer and blu-ray release from Criterion. If you've never seen this film your lifetime top 10 may be in error. Read Michael Atkinson's Watch the Skies.
End Scene, animated on a computer, printed out, then scanned and reassembled.
Trailer for The Horribly Slow Murderer with the Extremely Inefficient Weapon.
So that you're fully informed the next time you watch Con Air or Force 10 from Navarone, the Internet Movie Firearms Database is at your disposal.
Prints of Professor Marvel's wagon from The Wizard of Oz.
So you know: the weekly schedule for what's airing on U-62.
The spot we stop the DVR to watch each and every time it's on: "Paid in Gum."
Xkcd, "These charts show movie character interactions, the horizontal axis is time. The vertical grouping of the lines indicates which characters are together at a given time." Great. Love 12 Angry Men. Via Waxy.
"The program shows how four familiar species -- the apple, the tulip, cannabis and the potato -- evolved to satisfy our yearnings for sweetness, beauty, intoxication and control." Botany of Desire.
The Office Vampire.
Dear Norah Jones, instead of watching your new music video, we are going to re-watch Terry Gilliam's short The Crimson Permanent Assurance.
An idea for the plot of the next James Bond film, by yours truly.
Trailer for Nowhere Boy.
Hecq Vs Exillion - Spheres Of Fury, is a short film by Tim Brown and Christopher Hewitt that was shot using the Canon D7 and looks fantastic. It's a balletic send-up of 80's movie violence staged with water pistols and It's Nice That recently chatted with the directors.
Now that everyone everywhere has seen The Room, I need to hunt out a new unintentionally funny film to fall in love with. Judging from this review and this write up, I think 21 and a Wakeup might be a strong contender.
Shutter Island trailer three.
"There's the Weekender, then there's the Bimonthly Ender, the Mid-Bimonthly Ender, and the Weekender Weekender Weekender."
TMN staff and readers share their first scary movies.
Martin Scorsese's fave horror films. A pretty solid list, Don't Look Now is conspicuous by its absence though.
For BB: Mitchell and Webb's Football.
Testing the new 10 foot tall animatronic Gomora suit, to be used in the upcoming Japanese film Mega Monster Battle: Ultra Galaxy Legend.
Fun, seasonally-appropriate stop motion film made on an overhead projector: Zzzzombies. Via Transbuddha.
Certainly a reputable source, but like with most subjective listing of things, it's difficult to agree with (Bat for Lashes at #3?!?) and mostly filled with newer work: Antville's reader picks for 101 Best Music Videos of the Decade. Just happy that Smile Around the Face made the cut. Still my pick for maybe the best ever.
A clip of the 1984 VHS-based $100,000 contest Money Hunt and some information on how it all played out, leading four people to believe they had "won the contest but were screwed out of the prize."
VBS lets Adam Goldberg talk, largely about the things that annoy him about Los Angeles.
The opening scene from Peter Greenaway's Nightwatching. The DVD is now available. Cha-ching.
"Animatronics is like everything there is in the universe, put together." Trailer for The Rock-afire Explosion. Words fail in the face of such awesomeness. Via Cabel.
Trailer for the absurd, animated Belgian film A Town Called Panic.
The odd documentary about fishing by hand, with a score by The Flaming Lips, Okie Noodling, is available for free in its entirety. Via Denver Egotist.
Nice collection of Motor movie posters.
Sad news that Soupy Sales just passed away. Do yourself a favor tonight and try to find a copy of And God Spoke, one of the best/funniest mockumentaries ever made. Sales plays Moses.
A wonderful series of thought provoking and intellectually stimulating films from our friends at Cook County Social Club, talking to the owners of local Chicago businesses: Max Gerber and Borg Warner.
Loving the new Mac ads.
In 2008, Cookie and Paul walked from Mexico to Canada. Here's the finished documentary about their journey.
Darn. Anne Thompson reports Terrence Malick's Tree of Life will not open until 2010.
Looks like Spike Jonze has adapted another children's book.
Fab, Vincent LaForet's Nocturne
I always mix up The Quay Brothers and Kray Twins. There's a good mashup in there somewhere.
Screen Caps. Fab.
"TERRY: Well, I appreciate your interest. I guess I do feel uncomfortable talking about it." Interesting Joe Gillis memoir on Terrence Malick.
Apropos of nothing. Dustin Hoffman for Volkswagen.
Too bad SD is on vacation, he'd probably have a few to add, Arrgh!; the most hated movie scenes ever blog. Add your own.
A possible end in sight in curbing overly loud TV commercials.
Monsters really like carrying chicks.
WtWTA Forts Contest.
Time Out London's 50 greatest animated films with additional commentary by Terry Gilliam.
For SD, 20 actors who appeared on "Law & Order" before they were stars.
Series of spots for the Vancouver International Film Festival: Subtitles, Sexuality, and Disturbing.
"The original title was Where the Wild Horses Are. I loved the title, and she loved the title. It was very evocative. The only problem was, I drew horses so very badly that it couldn't be published that way." Steven Heller chats with Maurice Sendak.
Keith Schofield continues his streak as one of the best music video directors out there with this look at what happens after the credits roll at the end of the movie: Lenny Kravitz + Justice's Let Love Rule.
His Great Device Makes Him Famous is the Chinese translated title for Boogie Nights. Awesome, as is the rest of this list of movie titles that got lost in translation.
Trailer for what looks to be a very funny film about the art world, Untitled. Anyone else find it weird that Vinnie Jones is in this?
If you saw or plan on seeing Zombieland, it's recommend that you check out the daily must-visit blog of its director, Ruben Fleischer. If you're going to live vicariously through someone on the internet, he's a worthy choice.
Amazing video of China's 60th anniversary National Day celebration.
The rejected directors cut of the University of Alaska-Fairbanks Nanooks hockey team introduction hype video deserves your attention.
Unfortunately, you've missed an opportunity to own pieces of film history, as an auction of 339 Ingmar Bergman items happened earlier this week. Among letters, awards, and even his desk, the auction also included the chess pieces used in The Seventh Seal.
Trailer for Chris Rock's documentary Good Hair.
Sam Shepard talks about working on Days of Heaven with CP hero Terrence Malick. Also, see Elbert Ventura's piece for Reverse Shot. "For many of the scenes, (Linda) Manz was asked to view the footage and comment on the action as she interpreted it, words that then became the film's voiceover."
Interesting tech stuff behind the scenes: Saturday Night Live is now shooting its short films and parodies on Canon 7D and 5D cameras. Incredible.
The Old Man and the Seymour.
Related to below: the funny yet completely uncomfortable scene about extras from The Limey, which is not only great, but you have to imagine that it's also where Ricky Gervais got the idea for his series six years later.
For MS: Book Club.
A fun spot for the Red Sox: "Yankees Suck." Via Denver Egotist.
Rotten Tomatoes' collection of the worst reviewed films of the decade.
Movie Poster Mashups.
In Japanese, but don't let your inability to read it stop you from enjoying this very large and fun collection of movie monsters.
Eric Idle Responds to Your Fatuous Comments.
Scribe mundo de papel.
"Related, but more practical subjects, will be the art of lockpicking. Traveling on foot. The exhilaration of being shot at unsuccessfully. The athletic side of filmmaking. The creation of your own shooting permits. The neutralization of bureaucracy. Guerrilla tactics. Self reliance." Werner Herzog's Rogue Film School. Thanks Marshall.
"It was just non-stop anxiety and wondering when I was going to get fired." Behind the scenes look at what it was like to shoot The Godfather.
For BB, the top 50 World Cup Moments.
Directing duo Terri Timely puts together this eerie, extra-wide music vid for St. Vincent's Marrow. As an aside, that "person brightly lit on a dark road with people behind them" has certainly been a popular look lately.
Kitsune Noir visits the new WtWTA Pop-Up Shop at Space 15 Twenty in LA.
"Relive the Pittsburgh Penguins 1991 Stanley Cup Finals clinching game 6 victory in a dramatic reenactment through a pixelated prism." Via MeFi.
Sweet trailer for Let's Get Mystical, a film from Mutinty Bikes about traveling around the world in search of cool places to ride. Via Joachim Baan.
A very sweet and strange spot for Italian car company Seat: "'Cause You Know What Happens to Monsters."
30frames continues their great series, "Maps," which combines Google Maps and famous music vids. This time around, they take a look at U2's Where the Streets Have No Name.
Trailer for the BBC documentary Synth Britannia, about the birth of electronic music in the UK in the late 1970s.
Dear Robert Zemeckis, while we genuinely appreciate your efforts at transforming the way films are made, your characters still look very creepy and plasticized. Also, it might be wise to find a new way to open your movies, because we've seen that object falling to earth thing before.
"Fame stuck to him like glue." King James spot for South African financial-services company Allan Gray.
Simply beautiful, shot right here in CP's hometown, Ghana In Fog.
Now that everyone knows about The Room, we need a new terrible movie to become enamored with. We're thinking Transbuddha's nomination for "worst movie of the year" might have a shot. Here's the trailer for Humanity's End.
Trailer for A Single Man.
HBO's Teddy Bear Chase, directed by Noam Murro. Part of a larger, interconnected promotional push for their fall season under the banner, Imagine.
Regarding a previous post, Markus Amalthea Magnuson writes, "Per Åhlin made the film The Journey to Melonia in 1989, the first feature length animation in Sweden. It's in my opinion one of the finest animated films ever made, both in terms of visual style and narration and is a must see, especially for fans of hand-drawn animation features such as The Triplets of Belleville."
Artificial Paradise, Inc. a film by Jean-Paul Frenay.
Music vid of the moment: Air's Sing Sang Sung. Clearly inspired by Sesame Street's roving pinball.
Digging Cary Fukunaga and Walt Whitman's (!) initial spot for Levi's "Go Forth" campaign.
A visit to Geoff McFetridge's studio where he's working on titles for WtWTA. More on him in this Western State profile.
Noted without comment. Neurosonics Audiomedical Labs Inc. by Chris Cairns. Thanks Meg.
Our favorite documentarian, Gary Hustwit, appears on one of our favorite podcasts, The Sound of Young America. Synergy!
The A.V. Club's Fall 2009 TV Preview: The Year Ambition Died.
How am I only finding this now? 5 Second Films. Incredibly short, wonderfully absurd sketches every single weekday. Once you start in the archives, you won't be able to stop.
It's okay to turn off your speakers for La Roux's I'm Not Your Toy and just watch it for the great art direction and casting. Feels a bit like an homage to Blur's The Universal, which of course was an homage to A Clockwork Orange.
Trailer for and info on the rock poster documentary American Artifact.
The Channel 101 show Ikea Heights. Shot without permission at the Ikea in Burbank.
Teaser trailer for the documentary Year Zero: The Last Year of Polaroid Film.
Utterly charming, 500 sodas. You can visit their site here. Via DRB.
Just put up the sixth in my Regrets series of films: Regrets: Dave Matthews Band. Despite the title, it's probably not the best thing for fans of Dave.
Trailer for and information on The Yes Men Fix the World. If you haven't seen their first film, The Yes Men, you have just been given your assignment for the long weekend. I recently re-watched it and it's still as great as ever.
For SD, The Lord of the Rings vs. Harry Potter.
Spike Jonze's very rough test film for Harold & The Purple Crayon, which he was set to direct before Where the Wild Things Are came up. More info in this NY Times piece.
Five minute teaser for William S. Burroughs: A Man Within.
Fun spot for Rhapsody recreating every Jay-Z album cover.
I don't mind saying that I'm getting a little tired of Eric Wareheim's involvement in music videos, but I was won over by The Bird and the Bee's Diamond Dave because a) someone else directed it and b) that someone was Jake Kasdan.
Amazing time lapse video of the Los Angeles wildfire.
Would Peggy really have called it a Trojan? Mad Men Footnotes.
The Basement Jaxx are more ridiculous than usual in this music vid for Feelings Gone.
If Nick Thune had his way, he'd invent backflip shoes.
"Hey! Baby boomers! Hey there! Stop not understanding the internet for two seconds and look over here!" A fantastic review of the nauseating Taking Woodstock and Woodstock-talk in general.
I thought it was a joke that started and ended with the trailer, but it turns out Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus, starring Lorenzo Lamas and Deborah Gibson, is all too real. It debuts Saturday on (groan) "Syfy."
Another entry in Jim Emerson's excellent occasional series, Opening Shots: The Conversation. Here's the sequence.
"Han Solo, P.I." There, I should be all caught up on what was going around in June now.
Music vid of the moment: The Summerlad's City of Noise. A nice companion to your favorite Peter Gabriel music videos.
"Some actors are so talented and versatile that they could seem credible in virtually any role. Others... not so much."
"While Yugoslav president Tito was in Cuba (1979) settling international matters, a mysterious Phantom occupied the attention and hearts of Belgrade. Every night, he performed spectacular driving manoeuvres with a stolen white Porsche car through the city streets..." Behind the film The Belgrade Phantom and the trailer. Via Joachim Baan.
For DW, Star Trek bloopers.
A very addictive blog written by Tim Nash, a music video commissioner for Atlantic Records in the UK. Via 30frames.
A glossary of screenwriting and filmmaking terms.
Budweiser ad shot on a El train here in Chicago.
"It's moving the camera defensively, rather than artistically." The horrors of pan and scan. Thanks Henry.
Make note, the Criterion Collection edition of The Last Days of Disco comes out next week. Just waiting on Barcelona to get the same treatment so I can buy the whole Whit Stillman box set.
Your demo reel has nothing on Ian Pfaff's Demo Reel.
How bad marketing can lead to a good movie going unseen, the story behind Bandslam. Via Torrez.
Finally, a trailer for the much-hyped James Cameron film Avatar. Unfortunately, I think it looks like a feature-length video game cut scene.
Three great spots for the Canadian non-profit KidSport, "Sports Skills Are Life Skills." The last one with the pool is the best. Via Murketing.
Robogeisha trailer. Weeeeeeh.
What's this film set I just walked by? Would it be worth slowing down to star gaze, or is it just Gossip Girl again?
Got really excited this morning to see a casting call for extras for the movie Bear City, which turns out to be something altogether different than the Bear City I was hoping it was. There have been rumors for years that it was being turned into a feature. What's the deal? While we wait impatiently, here are some behind the scenes photos from the original.
Steven Soderbergh's essay on the evils of cropping 2.40:1 to 16:9 in order to fit people's HD televisions.
Director Jon Watt's bizarre music vid for Folded Light's Train Tracks at Dawn. Would love to read his treatment for this and how he sold it to the band.
Atoi's wireframe-y music vid Julio Jackson.
The New Yorker has Dave Eggers's Max at Sea for those too excited to wait for the movie. Which means me.
What's more terrifying than standing inside "The Ledge" on top of the Willis/Sears Tower? Filming it from the outside. If you're like me, you won't enjoy watching the video.
Related to below: Tati's 1947 short and my all-time favorite of his, School for Postmen.
Today marks the release of Jacques Tati's Playtime on Blu-ray. Can't wait to pick it up. Only The Cinema has some great stills from the film to help encourage my want.
Amelie "The Hater" Gillette on how the trailer for I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell killed comedy and how to cope with the five stages of grief you'll suffer through after watching it.
After my wife sent me this truly wretched, horrible, NSFW collection of scenes where people are cut in half in horror movies, I had to look up where each had come from, which led to this List of Films by Gory Death Scene.
Beyond the understandable fantasy and auteur style, what does Inglourious Basterds really represent?
FotA and former CP Guest Editor Henry Cline passes along some behind the scenes photos from the film Legion, which he was recently shooting. "We shot the movie in Galisteo, NM. It was miserable weather situation. Gusting sand storms up to 35mph."
From Keith Loutit, Origin II.
I adore this, Cart.
A few films from this past week's Antarctic Film Festival, each made in under 48 hours by people stationed in bases across the icy continent.
KCMODERN, "your one stop shop for all things Modern in Kansas City," is helping to put together the terrific-looking REEL Design Film Series.
Trailer for what looks like a painful new adaptation of Dorian Gray. Usually always a better move to just stick with the original.
Nice simple animated recruitment video for Herman Miller. Via Denver Egotist.
Trailer for Lemonade, a documentary about what a group of people did after getting laid off from their jobs in advertising.
Kevin Broome writes, "In anticipation of tomorrow's release of District 9, I have
put together a playlist of Neill Blomkamp's work." Nice. The first time I saw Alive in Joburg I was blown away.
Street art gets animated in this music vid for
Luke Jackson's Goodbye London.
Trailer for Bananas.
Director Neill Blomkamp's film school animation reel from 1998.
Reminded by sketches like "Sack of Money" of how good the short-lived show Exit 57 was. Fortunately, because a DVD release seems unlikely, cast member Paul Dinello has put up a handful of clips from its 12 episode run.
Animated Films That Redefined Box-Office Failure. Haven't heard of a single one of these, except for Powerpuff Girls.
Trailer and info on the mockumentary The Bridge Bash featuring lots of regulars from The State. Thanks Bram.
Trailer for The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.
Haven't quite got the plot all figured out just yet, but if anything, it's beautifully shot: music vid for Mt. St. Helen's Vietnam Band's Albatross, Albatross, Albatross. And here's a look behind the scenes, which shows how they got those impressive helicopter shots.
Trailer for No Impact Man.
The Playlist has some news on CP hero Terrence Malick's Tree Of Life, including a new distributor and hints it may yet be released this year.
News of two upcoming music vids by director Keith Schofield, who can do no wrong in our book. Charlotte Gainsbourg and Beck and Lenny Kravitz and Justice.
We may have the enjoyable Check Please here in Chicago, but it can't even begin to hold a candle to Bronx Flavor, an incredibly fun and absurd show staring Baron Ambrosia who highlights restaurants in the NYC borough. More info here.
Perhaps the greatest television commercial every made. Nobuhiko Obayashi directed this epic starring Charles Bronson for Mandom. More from the series in this Outcast Cinema post.
Maybe the most bizarre bicycle safety film ever made. Just helping you plan ahead for your Halloween video installations.
Forget the Film interview with title sequence designer Karin Fong of Imaginary Forces.
Music vid of the moment: Library Science's Do It To It. Also the frog vid of the moment.
So you know, the 100 greatest sci-fi movies.
Red Rabbit, a animated film by Egmont Mayer.
"In relinquishing the more subtle use of voice-over in television documentary, the film draws attention to the control and directional function of that practice." Artist John Smith's 1976 film The Girl Chewing Gum. More info here.
Art Director Robin Risser's beautiful, quiet short film, Solitude, based on the paintings of Andrew Wyeth. Via Design Info.
An unofficial title sequence for Into the Wild by a 21-year-old Dutch design student.
Trailer for Let's Get Mystical.
"Creepy? Annoying? Or Creepy and Annoying?" A piece about Modernista's unusual spots for the Palm Pre phone.
No fuss movie buzz, Skinni Popcorn.
Trailer for the film/album hybrid from the band Noah and the Whale: The First Days of Spring by director Charlie Fink, who has been responsible for all of their great music vids.
Automatiek, a bittersweet boy meets sandwich story. Thanks George V.
Found on the way to finding something else. Three sweet minutes from Elia Kazan's underappreciated The Last Tycoon, with a script by from an unfinished Fitzgerald novel by Harold Pinter.
Solitude.
Music vid of the moment: Will Sweeney and Steve Scott's incredibly strange, animated work for Birdy Nam Nam's The Parachute Ending, which itself is a very weird song. Via Transbuddha.
Steven Heller on television test patterns. Excellent. Some nice ones from Germany here, courtesy of The MoOM. Also related, "What ever happened to Carol Hersee?"
Gary Busey's 1988 film Bulletproof edited down to three minutes long.
Always fun to catch Bob Garfield at his crankiest: his review of the latest Harry and Louise political ad. "It's still two terrible actors reducing complex issues ad absurdum, in language resembling George speaking to Lennie."
A scratch 'n' sniff version of the 1981 film Gregory's Girl. Via I Like.
Trailer for Tron Legacy.
"I understood that the only way to get the language of cinematography more rich is to leave naturalism and go over to abstraction." Great piece in the Times about Swedish director and CP hero Roy Andersson. Sounds like You, the Living might finally get released in the US. Fingers crossed.
Apologies in advance to JC: Keyboard Cat Does The Shining.
"All future catastrophes will be compared to this film!!!" A far better, much more honest trailer: 2012: It's a Disaster!!!
An interview with Masa Kawamura and Hal Kirkland about creating their much-passed around music vid for Sour's Hibi no Neiro.
Interesting music vid for Gedda Headz' Spaced Out. Worth it for the cool hi-def shots of Hong Kong.
Burton's Alice teaser.
Slate's great take on how annoying TV news would be If Man Walked on the Moon Today. "Tom Foreman is monitoring Twitter. Tom, what are you hearing?"
Duke University's Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History has been linked here in the past as a great resource. Now they've added vintage television to that collection of print materials with AdViews.
The full version of Shynola's triumphant return to music videos: Coldplay's Strawberry Swing.
And the reason for liking Molly Parker so much: all of the episodes of Twitch City.
Mark Lewis' wonderfully fluid and dreamily paced documentary, Cinema Museum. More info about the museum itself, which is very rarely open to the public, here. Also, I don't understand Lewis' film Molly Parker at all, but I like it because it stars Molly Parker.
A movie monster size comparison chart.
Totally great ad for Westwood College.
Creator of The Wire and author of Homicide David Simon on Bill Moyers Journal. No one talk to me for the next hour, please.
Trailer for the documentary Klunkerz, a documentary about the history of mountain biking.
Wow. The Kurishio Sea, the 2nd largest aquarium in the world.
While it's great to see Shynola back in the music vid game with this preview of Coldplay's Strawberry Swing and Warren Fu's teaser for Julian Casablancas' Phrazes for the Young looks pretty great, let's call it quits on the music video trailers already, okay?
All three seasons of The Mighty Boosh are finally being released in the US. Thanks to the Denver Egotist for the good news.
Swell lobby cards and a swinging credit sequence from German and Italian versions of Operation Stardust, a Perry Rhodan film, 1967.
It seems like an appropriate day to re-post the only Harry Potter film I'll ever see: Brad Neely's amazing Wizard People, Dear Reader, now available in its brilliant entirety.
What fast looks like, from Kottke.
Years ago, I made a very stupid short film about video push effect transitions terrorizing people. Clearly the band Franz Ferdinand somehow found a copy of my idiotic, long lost movie and made this music vid: Can't Stop Feeling. Expect a call from my lawyers, Messrs. Ferdinand.
"Or couldn't she have called ahead to let them know the Imperial fleet was on its way with their giant murder ball? At the very least, Leia could've had her underlings turn off all the lights in the base and pretend like no one was home." 7 Classic Star Wars characters that dropped the ball.
The PEN story.
"Below is the entire movie split up into 15 second clips. Click on one of the scenes to claim it film it, and upload it. You can have up to three scenes! When we're all done, we'll stitch it all together and watch the magic happen." Star Wars Uncut. Via Cool Hunting.
New theatrical trailer for District 9.
Looks like Jean Kasem 4-Eva, sadly never got off the ground. Norville, are you listening? The world is ready.
Music vid of the moment: Sour's inventive Hibi No Neiro which puts to use 64 synchronized webcams.
For Hump Day, a Hoedown. Via Fubiz.
Related to the last. The Kinski clip is from My Best Fiend. Thanks Richard.
Burden of Dreams is Les Blank's documentary on the making of Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo. Here's a bit of Herr Kinski going totally nuts. Via The Daily.
Music to be artsy and sad by, with an accompanying video (which is equally as artsy and sad) directed by Spike Jonze and Crystal Moselle: AsDSSka's Hold On.
An art installation in an elevator, but the video alone is mesmerizing: Marco Brambilla's Civilization. Via Ze Frank.
Let's Go Crazy and Penny Points to Paradise, two films shot in the early 1950s staring a 26-year-old Peter Sellers have been discovered after having been lost for decades, along with 28 other films. Though Let's Go Crazy has been reviewed as "It lasts 32 minutes and probably took less time to create" it'd be great to see them. Via I Like.
"It's going to be tough to get fans of the book and representatives of the Fitzgerald estate behind the idea of putting robots in this movie." Storyboards from Michael Bay's The Great Gatsby. Via Czeltic Girl.
When you're done trying to make your own 3D glasses, Chicagoans can stop by Uncle Fun and grab a pair for a buck. Elsewhere, get together with 49 friends for a Ref viewing party.
Art of the Title interviews Jim Capobianco and Alex Woo about the end credits of Wall-E. Via Michael Tsai.
Trailer for the documentary Cat Ladies, about women who hoard cats.
Should make next year's Oscar pool a bit more interesting, 10 best picture nominees instead of 5.
Trailer for the documentary Milton Glaser: To Inform and Delight, which ran here in Chicago...last week. Oops. Via Kate O'Leary.
Clip from Bergman Island, Marie Nyerod's feature-length interview with the director at his home on Faro Island. Cha-Ching.
A collection of reactions to the 24 minutes of footage recently screened of James Cameron's 3D epic Avatar.
A trip through two design students' stop motion animation course that ends with a Samuel Beckett quote using 16ft tall letters painted across their school's winding driveway. Via Denver Egotist.
Here's a first look at Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland.
Teaser for the Jonathan Ames penned HBO series Bored To Death.
In answer to this previously posted spot: Current's GM: For Reals This Time.
Terri Timely's Synesthesia, a beautifully art-directed and enigmatic short film about how our senses are interconnected. Via c77.
Buffy vs. Edward.
Trailer for the new 10-part mini-series produced by Steven Spielberg, The Pacific.
Gottardo Nord.
Seen this weekend: the unintentionally funny spot for Miracle Whip, "Don't Be So Mayo." Man those hipsters like their sandwich spread. So edgy.
"It's a miracle they didn't run out of cash shortly after starting up." The Ghostbusters' Risky Business Plan.
Trailer for the BBC film Creation about Charles Darwin's personal conflicts in writing The Origin of Species.
Lovely, The Chimney Sweep.
From Jamie at 37signals, who is forever trying to get me to watch more science fiction: Which Sci-Fi Movie Should I Watch?
Following that last one, a repost of another great use of that remix of The Ecstasy of Gold: the David Fincher helmed spot for Nike, "Fate." Also, the album whence it came: Ennio Morricone Remixes Vol.2.
Skateboarding NYC 1976, from Zoom! Awesome, thanks Jennifer.
Fun spot for Heinz advertising ketchup without the ketchup.
Trailer for The Goods, which looks like it borrowed its concept from John Landis' fantastic documentary Slasher. Think I may sit the new one out and just see Landis' movie again.
Motion graphics firm Logan and artist collective The Date Farmers team up on this hyperactive, violent, and animated music vid for N.A.S.A.'s A Volta. And a little behind the scenes to go along with it.
The animated short film Onwards, directed by James Jarvis and Richard Kenworthy. And here's some behind the scenes interviews with both. For even more on Jarvis, might we recommend revisiting Jewelboxing Case Study #11, where we interviewed Alex Gould who made the great documentary An Interview with James Jarvis.
The David Fincher helmed spot for the new 3Gs iPhone, Break In.
Music vid of the moment: Grizzly Bear's charming, yet eerie Two Weeks, directed by Patrick Daughters.
"The Way Girls Are, a handbook by Mathias." Little Man, a Danish short film.
Fantastic animated ad for The Beatles: Rock Band video game.
From director Martin de Thurah, a spot for Ikea, Home.
"So The Cleveland Board of Tourism was not happy with the first video that I turned in." Hastily Made Cleveland Tourism Video: 2nd Attempt.
Two scenes from the wonderfully bizarre noir film, 1999's The Woman Chaser, an adaptation of Charles Willeford's pulp novel of the same name. More info here.
An interesting, but a bit lacking list of the Top 10 Rock Star Cameos in Movies. How you can overlook the multiple Guns N' Roses appearances in The Dead Pool is beyond me.
Corey and Rachel's stop-motion wedding invitation.
Scenes from a rooftop.
Trailer for and stills from the upcoming film District 9. Glad to see someone finally gave Neill Blomkamp a chance to develop Alive in Joberg into a feature.
Paper Towels.
Watched and enjoyed last night at the Midwest Independent Film Festival: Joe Avella's very funny Wheelchair Werewolf and Brad DeMarea's excellent An Evening with Emery Long (unfortunately just a clip from the opening).
"A lot of my thinking and my conviction that the cinema was going to be electronic came from sitting in the mud for hours upon hours waiting for the helicopters to arrive." FFC on BlogTalkRadio.
Trailer for the documentary about Ray Kurzweil and his singularity theories: Transcendent Man.
"You're keyeing off a real environment and adapting instead of trying to impose your will on it. And as a result, it makes you realize how constructed most movies are, visually." From a Steven Soderbergh narrated slideshow. Via lonelysandwich.
"Based on True Events." Trailer for Bonnie and Clyde vs. Dracula.
Comparing and contrasting two spots made during hard times: GM's new "Reinvention" and Chrysler's "Be the Best" from 1984.
Trailer for the documentary Goth Cruise which is exactly what it sounds like. Also the service's website. Both via Goths in Hot Weather.
A time lapse scene from DISH Earth, the new all-Earth television channel with "one new image about every 15 seconds" from an orbit 22,000 miles away.
Kick-ass scenes that are in trailers but aren't in the movies.
For DW: Lady Gaga's latest music vid, Paparazzi, directed by Jonas Akerlund (and is very Akerlund-esque).
Sorry I'm Late. Via Fubiz.
A rare tour of IMAX cameras.
*Sigh* True dat. The Vendor Client relationship-in real world situations. Thanks Marshall.
The wait is over. Debbie Gibson and Lorenzo Lamas have finally found a project to collaborate on: Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus.
Cameron Frye is a Red Wings fan, but an otherwise righteous dude, and I've been jealous of his house since 1986. JC, I'm going to need a raise.
Jen Sharpe writes, "Ross Harris makes great little short documentaries, like Bicycle Bullfight." Awesome.
First time I've seen it, Denis Leary's commercial for Hulu made me giggle.
Hi, a real human interface.
Another nugget: Son of Svengoolie and the 84 Olympics. Berwyn 2016!
Chris Milk's Last Day Dream. Brilliant, beautiful and unnerving. Via John Gruber.
Really great interview with our neighbors The Post Family. You can check out their site here.
Ilya Abulhanovs' title sequence for OFFF 2009 in Oeiras, Portugal. Totally fab.
Home, a short film for Ikea by Martin de Thurah. Via Anothersomething .
The always brilliant Frontline does it again, taking on the Bernie Madoff scandal, with The Madoff Affair.
Lovely little video, April (For Pittsburgh).
The Enterprise Project. Tricked out, customized models of the iconic Star Trek ship including this beauty by House Industries.
Stuck for an idea for a tv spot? Get "inspired" by something on YouTube.
Animations projected in a forest and filmed for a music vid for Dominik Eulberg's Sansula.
Relink for Sara. "La Demeure du Chaos is gradually becoming an uncontrollable space." 90 days and nights of work for 20 minutes of happiness. A spectacular film about an amazing place. An absolute must-see.
WtWTA Kubricks.
Watch YouTube videos frame by frame with YooouuuTuuube.
How much do you know about space travel, Vulcans and the "T" in James T. Kirk?
"Here, in other words, is a long-range backstory -- a device that, in the Hollywood of recent times, has grown from an option to a fetish." Like with 95% of the films released each year, it's usually a lot more enjoyable to skip them and instead read his reviews: Anthony Lane on Star Trek.
Director Dougal Wilson, a long-time CP favorite, shoots this spot for Coke: "The Organ Player."
Fever Rays' When I Grow Up directed by Martin de Thurrah.
2 Fists of Iron and a Bottle of Beer from the Church of the Open Tab. Via Murketing.
Following DW's and my trip to Indiana this weekend to catch his stand-up: a trailer for the new TV series The Community, staring the great Joel McHale.
An interview with Melinda Launspach, set decorator for HBO's No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency.
FoTA Jimmy Carrane interviews another FoTA Ron Lazzeretti, who wrote the script for the Michael Keaton-directed The Merry Gentleman.
Real Life Twitter.
An interview with designer Kalina Ivanov who created all the sets for HBO's Grey Gardens (which was the best film I've seen so far this year).
The second episode of the brilliantly stupid Auto-Tune News.
Great, simple, wonderfully written spot seen (and rewinded to watch again) a few times this weekend: Some Words on Progress by Frank Druffel for Post's Shredded Wheat.
"The Cleveland Tourism Board gave me $14 million dollars about 8 months ago to make a promotional video to bring people to Cleveland. As usual, I waited until the last minute." The Hastily Made Cleveland Tourism Video.
New spot for the Honda Insight, Let It Shine. And here's how they did it.
Video shot at a recent rugby competition at Stade de France and other places at 1000 frames per second. Falling Jello too! Via Mefi.
"Trust me. It's funnier when you're there." An interesting piece from a writer's perspective, Earl Pomerantz on laugh tracks.
Okay, I understand Transformers and GI Joe, but this is just weird: "Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights, The Kingdom) is in negotiations to adapt the Milton Bradley naval-warfare game Battleship for the big screen." How Hasbro is Getting Movies Made About its Toys.
Beyond cool promotional film for Phillips Cinema 21:9, Carousel. More info here.
Masayoshi Nakamura and Magico Nakamura's animated paper for the Adobe Records short film competition. Via Jean Snow.
So, the Grandfather of a friend of cartoonist Alex Robinson stumbles on a NYC film shoot in 1964 and takes a couple photos. Check the third one down, two of my personal heroes in one candid shot. Awesome. Via She Blogged By Night.
Videogum asked a freshman high school student with one and half semesters of French classes under her belt to translate the French version trailer for Coco Avant Chanel.
Due to a film print and distribution mistake, depending on where you see Adventureland, you'll either hear INXS or Yo La Tengo over the closing credits.
Great spot for Jotun paint parodying Take On Me, which was also the subject of this recent classic.
"Hell has frozen over" and The State DVD "is actually, for real, no kidding" finally being released on July 14th. Mark your calendars and begin x'ing off the days.
Industrial Light & Magic's process of designing a new Enterprise for J.J. Abrams' Star Trek.
Related to the last. Get ready to have this soundtrack snippet from the original 1, 2, 3 ricocheting around in your brainpan all day.
"Crime was soaring and the economy was in free fall, a situation that the Lindsay administration hoped to disguise by insisting that the filmmakers use a graffiti-free subway car." Some notes on the original and the upcoming remake of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.
Coen brothers to remake True Grit. Via The Daily.
Trailer for The Girlfriend Experience, Steven Soderbergh's latest non-studio film. Is that him drumming at the end? Sure looks like it.
Link o' the week. It's amazing what an alternate music track and a little color correction can do. Disturbing Strokes. Via Catbird.
Love, Loss, and World Building. Thanks Marshall.
If it's really gotta be a TV theme for my funeral, maybe this, or this. But if it could be ANY song, definitely this.
Speaking of TV themes, Quark was my favorite show when I was a kid, but I never noticed how familiar the theme song is.
TCM gives us their list of the top 15 influential classic movies.
Trailer for Lars von Trier's Antichrist with Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg.
Five minutes from Rosy-Fingered Dawn, an Italian documentary on CP hero Terrence Malick.
GreenCine podcast with Nick Dawson, author of the new bio Being Hal Ashby. Via The Daily.
New to me. What's in the Box? Fantastic sfx, sci-fi film demo made by one student, Thibaut Niels, for a couple hundred bucks. Via Serge Jespers.
"It may be true that you can't please all the people all the time, but these commercials show that you can lampoon everyone involved, included the company being plugged." Bravo for Orange's in-cinema campaign.
Film the Blanks, "an ongoing experiment to abstract and/or reduce film posters. Some famous, some not so famous but all cool in their own way."
Great, inventive spot for Loewe, a German electronics manufacturer.
Happy 70th birthday to FFC whose latest project, and his first original screenplay since The Conversation, is Tetro which opens in June. Also, Coppola Now by Jason Sanders. Via The Daily.
The Lost Tribes of New York City, a fun look at the big city using the Creature Comforts model of interviews and animation. Via Denver Egotist.
TV show sets in miniature.
So great, 28 West Side Days Later Story
An interview with Isabella Rossellini about her second round of Green Porno short films. Thanks Claire.
"'No' is a very important word." Hank puts up a great portion of an unedited interview with Gordon Willis from the documentary Cinematographer Style.
All his slow motion clips and video of Nick's appearance at Sunday night's Show N' Tell Show. His time on stage was far more educational than my walkthrough of the making of Handful of Burritos.
Some nights PJ Harvey just likes to go out to the middle of a forest to play in the John Parish bouncy castle: Black Hearted Love directed by the Chapman Brothers.
Trailer and clips from Hoopeston, a documentary about a struggling Illinois town and the locals dealing with a witch school that opens up there. They've also made the whole film available here in four chapters.
Information on the The James Bond Museum, which is set to open in the UK next week. Includes a list of all the vehicles in the collection. BB will be happy to hear that they have the original Toyota 2000 GT from You Only Live Twice.
A video companion piece to the booklet we posted a while back from the Milwaukee Tourism Commission: This Is My Milwaukee. Recommended that you watch only on Black Star approved employee breaks.
Kevin Lee curates reviews and related materials about Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway. Love this poster. Via The Daily.
The first peep out of Shutter Island, Scorsese's next film.
Five great films where nothing much happens. Via .
"...the vibe I'm getting off these Things isn't so much Wild as Sensitive and Nurturing." Lev Grossman is worried about WtWTA.
Trailer for and information on Guest of Cindy Sherman, a documentary about being the boyfriend of one of the world's most famous artists.
Fun one-take music vid for Metric's Gimme Sympathy. Via Video Static.
"Tommy Wiseau's The Room may be the first true successor to the Rocky Horror throne." Finally, The Room is inducted into the A.V. Club's New Cult Canon. It was tearing me apart by not having been included yet.
Director Patrick Daughters' returns to dance numbers, but in far more violent fashion with this music vid for Department of Eagles' No One Does It Like You. Also worth seeing his other new one, the Hitchcockian Wrong by Depeche Mode.
WtWTA trailer.
Zulkey interviews Andy Richter about his former shows, Arrested Development, and coming back to work with Conan again.
The Dirty Garage, "the most independent movie ever made."
Scenes from Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World. More at the film site.
Trailer for Bananaz, a documentary about the band Gorillaz. More info here.
Awesome. "De crazy-fuzz. Fuzz, the, sound, that, manchu." Fuzz, a doc about stompboxes by Clif Taylor. Via Things.
Trailer for Sputnik Mania.
Waverly Films' first Clip of the Week collection is now for sale. BB, what are you waiting for? Pick up the phone!
Bob Odenkirk teams with JetBlue to direct three short films for CEOs only: Welcome Bigwigs. Via Torrez.
No idea what this is or what it's for, but they need to make lots more: Patrick Duffy and The Crab Discuss Facebook and Ringtones.
Father Guido Sarducci on the benefits of art school. Thanks Jason! Related: The Lazlo Letters is still in print!
Very cool interpretation of Little Red Riding Hood.
Great look at the changes to the Batman logo in comic books over the years, from 1941 to the present. Via Transbuddha.
For MS, iTunes trailers on Twitter.
An utterly charming Neil Gaiman visits Colbert.
Mardi Gras in tilt shift video. Fab.
Pythonites take note, from Not the Nine O'Clock News.
A behind the scenes look at the insane production schedule in creating the show South Park each week.
WtWTA. A teaser for a trailer and a poster.
Jeff Desom's beautifully animated music vid and/or short film: Hauschka's Morgenrot.
Movies studio logos that have been changed to fit various films. A la Indiana Jones always using the "mountain of entertainment" to set the opening scene. A big collection that must have a been a lot of work. Great. Clipped from Quipped.
Snow White + Daft Punk = Dwarfed Punk. Via bblinks.
Must have been a blast to make, spot for Aero Feel the Bubbles.
Star Wars Motivational Posters.
For Raegan, the top 10 best video clips from Ghost Hunters.
Brilliant. The Noises Rest.
All Aboard the Freedom Train: the songs of Neil Diamond and Bigfoot.
Building the LEGO Millennium Falcon.
If Watchmen was a Saturday morning cartoon. Via Cynical C.
Opening credits to the Marvel cartoons of the 60s.
Gah! A 125 page transcript of a conference in 1978 with Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Lawrence Kasdan at which they plot out the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark. Via Binary Bonsai.
Daft Punk will be scoring Tron 2. Awesome.
A free idea for 20th Century Fox: the only way to make this movie great is to hire Mamaduke Explained's Joe Mathlete to do a DVD commentary. You're welcome.
For Doctor Who fans: Daleks are real and they are living in our ponds.
AV Geeks have 22,000 edifying, educational, inspirational films for your viewing enjoyment. Note to Isabelle, Grace and Spencer, watch this one. Via Z.
"There's too much to focus on at any given moment, since literally every shot is packed with visual humor and miniature narratives playing out on the fringes of the image." Films I Love #21: Play Time. Via The Daily.
Looks like they took more than a few liberties with the transition from the book, but here's to hoping that extra excitement is enough to have made all that traffic around here last summer when they were filming it worthwhile: Trailer for Public Enemies.
The super-sweet opening sequence of Fully Flared (which I must remember to watch with my son Spencer tonight) and this BBDO Snickers spot. Bastards. Via Murketing.
"After a week of bumping, I had a track which I then rerecorded and ran for Welles. His only comment was 'That's very good.' Orson was not given to exaggerated praise of anyone's efforts." A good story about recording sound for The Magnificent Ambersons.
AICN speculates about The Tree of Life, the next film by CP all-time fave Terrence Malick. Dinosaurs?
New York in slow motion.
Directing team Walter Robot's beautifully illustrated and animated music vid for Death Cab for Cutie's Grapevine Fires.
For DW: 20 Possible Battlestar Galactica Endings, All of Them Hideously Depressing.
Trailer for Song Sung Blue the Slamdance Grand Jury-winning doc about a husband-and-wife Neil Diamond tribute band from Milwaukee featuring Eddie Vedder and directed by a guy I shared a house with 18 years ago.
Fun interactive music vid for Human Highway's The Sound. The broadcast version is worth watching, too.
I remember every single one of these, Top 10 Chicago ads from the 80's and 90's. Via Gapers Block.
Spy Vibe, 1960's Spy Style collected and presented by Agent J, aka Jason Whiton. Bookmarked. Check the most recent posts, all focused on movie sets. Fantastic stuff. Via Things.
Motion Theory cleverly channels Ray and Charles Eames' Powers of 10 film for this music vid: Sara Bareilles' Gravity. Via Video Static.
Two very cute ads promoting De Lijn, the Flemish public transportation system, Pinguins and Fireflies.
This is clearly the music vid of the moment: Kid Cudi's Day 'N' Nite, directed by So Me, the team responsible for the t-shirt motion graphics in the much linked Dance by Justice.
More than a little tired of animal costumes in music videos, but the cinematography is great in Mates of State's Get Better, there's a scooter in it for BB to enjoy, and it could be the first music vid to ever feature a K-car, so those are all merit worthy.
Lovely, Polaroid.
Who Pacs the Pacmen?
"How cold is technology? The temperature drops 40 degrees in some scenes." A painter and instructor of color theory at Pratt Institute, Michael Brennan distributed this list to his students about the use of color in film. Via The Daily.
38 cute animals, 1 cool screen, 8 different uses.
For Matt, Architecture.
The Crisis of Credit Visualized.
Cool animated spot for British Gas, using Blur's The Universal underneath. Though if you want to enjoy the song again, best to instead hit up Johnathan Glazer's beautiful Stanley Kubrick inspired music vid.
Some info on Trust Us, This Is All Made Up, the documentary premiering at SXSW about the masters of long-form improv: TJ Jagodowski and David Pasquesi (star of Regrets: Hobbies).
The gold standard for in-depth reporting, Frontline gives us an utterly fascinating behind-the-scenes look at how we got to where we are in the financial crisis with Inside the Meltdown.
Regarding of a lot of comments on one post, the recently linked Trilogy Meter.
"I feel like certain frames of films should be studied like photographs." Michael R. Neault's Film Stills.
Another great tilt-shift video from Keith Loutit, Bathtub IV.
Love this spot from Seat Ibiza. Via Adverbox.
In case you missed it last night, the new HD main title sequence for The Simpsons.
Burnett London and Outsider's House of Cards PSA.
Post-Retroism: yearning not for 1962 Rat Pack, but rather, for a 1996 homage to the 1962 Rat Pack. Similarly, nostalgic for 1977 liberty spike punk rock, but through the lens of 1994.
Sadly not available on DVD, but what would make for fine (if certainly off-beat) Valentine's Day viewing if it were: a scene from the brilliant film What Happened Was ... Also, a little tough to navigate, but well worth it if you were lucky enough to have seen it: Tom Noonan's detailed notes on how the movie was made.
Related to BB's a couple posts down: Guttenberg's Steak House.
Not sure how I feel about it just yet, but one thing is for sure: U2 bought themselves a lot of stock footage.
"Tell me. Tell me about film making." That lame joke aside, FotA Scott Tobias' great piece about the commentary track for The Limey, wherein Lem Dobbs and Steven Soderbergh battle over writers' and directors' roles in film.
Love this, Lay's Happy ad.
Trailer for the documentary Left Field, "the official story of Chicago's unofficial kickball league."
Music vid of the moment (if just for the cinematography): Sloan's Witch's Wand.
Every %#@&ing swear word from every %#@&ing episode of The Sopranos in chronological order makes for quite a half-hour.
The student made Batman: New Times in all its CGI Lego glory.
38 brilliant monster movies from motion graphics firm Volstok. Set aside the next few minutes because you won't be able to watch just one.
After seeing one of the mysterious boxes they sent out show up here at the office and finding a couple of metal keys on the street, all is revealed: How W+K Marketed Coraline.
Great (but very technical) interview with John Galt of Panavision about the shame of "marketing pixels," the need to move away from 24 frames per second, and developing HDR for moving images.
"I actually worked on the tanks that tried to kill the Ewoks. That was my personal contribution." Transcript of the Guardian's on-stage interview with director David Fincher.
Director Daniel Eskils gets weird for Slagsmalsklubben's Sponsored by Destiny.
Cool New York Times interactive gizmo: slices and dices 20 years of Super Bowl ads.
Found on the way to something else. Woody Allen talks about Ingmar Bergman, parts one and two.
Proof that the economy has been the toughest on the ideas for movies industry: 55 Movie Remakes Currently in the Works. Don't click if you anger easily. Via Transbuddha.
You can do a lot with a cheap Casio camera, a Steadicam Merlin, Photoshop and a pair of roller skates. Just ask Vicente Sahuc.
For MS, the Chicago episode of No Reservations airs tomorrow night.
Music vid of the moment: Air's La Femme D'Argent, shot for the 10th anniversary reissue of Moon Safari.
Trailer for and information about Harvard Beats Yale 29-29, a documentary about the legendary 1968 football game.
4) No Phoenix Cardinal ever performed a ballet on Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood (Fred Rogers is also from Pittsburgh, btw)
"I'm Victoria from Germany. I have an affinity for anything futuristic... especially from the 1960s and 1970s."
Clever and occasionally pretty funny marketing idea to get men to see the film: 10 Chick Flick Cliches That Are Not in He's Just Not That Into You.
"Editors and directors often think on a frame by frame basis when constructing movies, but rarely does an audience have the opportunity to study a movie going frame by frame." A look at films as still photographs.
Is that actually Quark on the 70s sci-fi poster that MS posted? ZOMG IT'S OUT ON DVD!?
Zulkey interviews Ira Glass about producing his radio and TV shows.
In answer to a conversation had a few weeks back in the CP kitchen: it was Werner Herzog who was in the faux- documentary Incident at Loch Ness.
Here's your chance to own a piece of film history and go on holidays by mistake whenever you'd like: the farmhouse used in Withnail and I as "Uncle Monty's Cottage" is up for sale. Via I Like.
A Thousand Words. Lovely.
Science solves Italian Job cliffhanger but not the more pressing issue of how to prevent lame remakes of classic films.
Music vid of the moment: Oren Lavie's Her Morning Elegance. Stop motion with heart.
Information on and a few clips from the forthcoming documentary Louis Sullivan: The Struggle for American Architecture. Can't wait. Here's piece from the Tribune with a few more details.
Star Wars in Bits and Pieces: the original trilogy as retold by someone who hasn't seen a whole Star Wars film. Via Defective Yeti.
Trailer and information on Snakebit, a documentary about architect Samuel Mockbee and Auburn University's Rural Studio.
Say what you will about the band Coldplay, but they make some of the best music vids out there: Life in Technicolor, directed by Dougal Wilson, who is the best in the business right now (proof: 1, 2 and 3).
Director Daniel Eskils channels director Liz Friedlander's music vid for R.E.M.'s The Great Beyond for this spot for Protest.
Music vid of the moment: Adam Freeland vs. Daft Punk's Aer Obama.
The Mid-Century Modernist on the film titles and opening scene from Charade, 1963. Fab.
The opening sequence from Roman Polanski's Tess, a seriously underrated film. Cinematography by Ghislain Cloquet and Geoffrey Unsworth.
The Kinda Sutra, a new short film by Jessica Yu about people's misconceptions about conception.
A brief interview and clips from The September Issue, a documentary that follows Anna Wintour and her staff for nine months as they put together an issue of Vogue, directed by The War Room producer, R.J. Cutler (who also directed an all-time favorite short film, Anita Liberty).
Estelle Getty is wagging her finger at these guys in heaven.
Marry Me.
Liverpool Street Station. 11:00 am. 15th January, 2009.
"If you see only one version of Forrest Gump this year, make it The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons." The Curious Case of Forrest Gump.
Huge collection of cereal commercials over the decades. Via Look at This.
Do you have broken ankles insurance?
Adland has just made 36 years of Super Bowl commercials available. Yowza.
Kustom Kar Kommandos. Link of the month.
Two of the several animated test patterns used in the days before the launch of the Al Jazeera Children's Channel.
Related to the last. Six minutes from the unfinished film starring Johnny Depp.
Terry Gilliam is working on The Man Who Killed Don Quixote script again. There's an awesome doc on the "unmaking" of the original movie. Lost in La Mancha is highly recommended. It's as frustrating as the few minutes of the movie that made it to film are beautiful. Check this NPR interview with Terry Gilliam and documentary filmmakers Louis Pepe and Keith Fulton.
Never mind that last post. This is clearly the music vid of the moment: Mark Gormley's Without You, made via the $99.95 music video package from Katt Productions. Via Video Static.
A little heavy handed, but certainly pretty to look at: the music vid for N.A.S.A.'s Money, which features David Byrne's vocals and illustrations by Shepard Fairey.
Regarding the last, take some time to explore this wonderful resource, Europa Film Treasures.
The trailer for How the West Was Won using the Smilebox feature to simulate the original Cinerama print, from the relatively new reissue on Blu-ray.
Scarlett: "What's my motivation here?" Woody: "Your salary." Allen's set diary from Vicky Cristina Barcelona.
"Bernardo and Jeremy thought, let's try something different, let's have them all do it." David Byrne talks about contributing to the score of The Last Emperor, from a special feature from the new Blu-ray from Criterion. Via The Daily.
"Satellite technology reveals how the network of city streets is being pushed to the edge of capacity. Watch the GPS traces of 380 London taxis over the course of a single day." Britain From Above. Via Mental Floss.
Oh yeah. Mr. Bali Hai's set of Psychotronic Movie Titles. Thanks Dean.
Related to an earlier post, Bram asks "You didn't know there were lyrics to the Star Wars theme?"
Speaking of Colbert, here's Zulkey's interview with Pete Grosz, FotA, star of a Regrets film, and one of the show's writers.
Awesome. Listen in as John Cooper, the Director of Programming for the Sundance Film Festival, makes some phone calls to let filmmakers know they are in the festival line up.
"Tim Palen wants his core audience to feel that a film is theirs, one marketer says: 'He gives them content that feels bloggy and street.'" Tad Friend's excellent piece in the New Yorker about movie marketing.
Top 25 Fictional Ads in Sci-Fi Movies. Say what you will about Paul Verhoeven, but RoboCop still takes the cake, at least for having the most fun with them.
An ad with an interesting POV, to say the least. (Thanks, Elaine!)
Great ads for Dare Iced Coffee, Boss and Girlfriend.
An incredible account of Golden Globe winner Mickey Rourke, Faye Dunaway and Charles Bukowski meeting on the 1987 set of Barfly. Errol Morris makes a cameo, too!
The fabulous Debbie Millman kicked off her fifth season of Design Matters with Jessica Helfand last Friday. Next up: Neville Brody.
"I am as sorry as you are, Dmitri! Don't say that you're more sorry than I am, because I'm capable of being just as sorry as you are." 25 iconic monologues from movies transcribed.
In case you missed it, Neil Patrick Harris performs the theme from Doogie Howser, MD on what was the funniest Saturday Night Live in a long time.
Karaoke's bouncing ball run amok in this terrific music vid: Metronomy's A Thing For Me.
Dick Cavett talks about Stan Laurel from the PBS site for "Make 'Em Laugh," a new series on American comedy that premieres next week.
+KN on a trailer for My Playground, a Danish parkour film shot in a sweet modern location.
Cookie & Paul Do America, a doc on two Brits walking the entire 3100 mile Continental Divide Trail for charity. We followed the trip online and are glad to see it wrapped up in a film.
Related to the last: the Kids in the Hall's My Routine (which years later I realized I had unintentionally copied with my own My Routine, not once but twice).
So you know. How wings are attached to the backs of angels.
You Won't Remember This Either, a beautiful new film by Jeff Scher.
The first three minutes of Tarpon, the early 70s cult fly fishing documentary featuring poet Richard Brautigan and novelists Jim Harrison and Thomas McGuane. Terrific, but I'll stick with the best of fishing docs: Fishing with John.
"The Chaplin Mutual's are unpretentious, unemotional and just a bit smarter and more profound than you might expect." Movies 'Til Dawn on One AM, with clips. Via The Daily.
Audi Q5, Unboxed.
Save Tango.
Hey there folks, exercise can be awesome.
For BB: Slap Chop? All I can say is Sham Wow.
What a difference a music track makes: the :60 version and the :30 version of the great "Lightbulb" spot for the World Wildlife Fund.
Almost seven minutes of Thom Andersen's brilliant Los Angeles Plays Itself. This sections is about Hollywood's war on modernism. Via Daily Dose.
And to go along with the last, a re-post: Dinner for One, the filmed stage piece from 1963 that has become a regular staple of New Year's Eve broadcasts in Germany and Denmark for years. More info here.
Because I will forever be associated with anything ABBA related because of this, Jamie at 37signals just sent me what airs after the fireworks on nearly every network in Sweden on New Years.
I'll never look at ppt. in the same way after watching this. Via superlocal.
Audi's commercial for the Q5, Perfectly Synchronized.
So you know, the best movie posters of 2008.
A nice roundup of 30 unforgettable movie opening title sequences .
From Keith Loutit, amazing tilt-shift videos. Via Veer.
From the folks that brought us the fantastic spot, Working Kids, Electrabel's Happy New Year. Find out how they made it here. Not in English but you'll get the idea.
Great spot for Volkswagen, a retelling of a car ad staple: New Tests. Via Denver Egotist.
"It's a D felony; 2 to 7 years is the maximum term for that. The least you can get is probation. You know Jimmy Stewart, though, he had that hangdog face. He'd be a tough guy to send to jail."
A collection of several reviewers' picks for Most Disappointing Films of 2008. Jurgen Fauth seems to have made his selections just to get an angry rise out of people.
From FotA and Field Tested contributor Andy Ross: "This started out as an accident. I had gone to Madison Square Park to capture a light installation by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. It was going terribly until my autofocus failed."
Yeah, it's an ad but a seriously brilliant idea, Adidas Break Up Service.
Tantalizing Malick rumor here, sparked by a radio interview with production designer Jack Fisk.
"He spent 20 minutes about an inch away from all my sexual organs, lovingly rubbing my unborn child. Talk about a perfect day." Information is hard to come by about CP hero Terrence Malick's new film The Tree of Life but we'll post what we find.
Animated Holiday Apple ads.
The original Modesty Blaise newspaper strips collected. Who is Ms. Blaise you ask? Check the trailer and these stills from the 1966 film.
The full music vid for DJ Pilooski's remix of The Four Seasons's Beggin', which is featured in and completely makes this new Adidas spot.
Creativity's picks for best TV spots of the year. All are great, but Crest's Bulldozer is my fav. Also, Bob Garfield has picked his favorites, which aren't nearly as good, but still have some gems.
AdFreak's best (and very worst) ads of 2008. The good ones aren't so great but the bad ones really suck.
"I think there are freaks out there who are freakier than I am."
A sequence from Alan Zwieg's doc on LP obsession, Vinyl.
Surprising and out-of-character with the movie itself, Chuck Braverman's title sequence for Soylent Green.
MS, you should know that my Nic Cage fandom never went beyond Red Rock West because it's the best film he'll ever make.
The Twilight Before Christmas. Funny, but likely hilarious to people who are familiar with the original source material.
For JSZ: Key West's Earliest Films, shot by Thomas Edison between 1898 and 1900. And also, the pilot episode of Key West, the short lived and sorely missed TV show.
Award season kicks off with this year's Golden Globe nominations.
40 Inspirational Speeches in 2 Minutes, all cut together into one absurdly coherent Act Two climax. Via Denver Egotist.
"We like to call these great and telling tales because they are." Timothy Dickinson and animator Benjamin Goldman's terrific series Great and Telling Tales from History.
A Betamaxmas. Fab.
Sort of tangentially related to the theme of the day, since they nabbed Blago with a wiretap: the difficulties of dubbing The Wire for German TV.
The Prisoner Of Zenda 1937.
For MS and BB, five minutes of new material and interviews for Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.
A contender to replace Dennis Madalone's America We Stand As One as the greatest, unintentionally funny music video: Chris Dane Owens' Shine On Me.
Related by being burned in my memory. On this date in 1980, I attended a double feature of Volker Schlondorff's The Tin Drum and Frederico Fellini's Amarcord. Two great and very different films about Fascism and memory.
Adland was on set in Turin, Italy for the latest Sony Bravia shoot featuring the world's largest zoetrope.
Roger Ebert gives us his list of the best films of 2008.
"I live in a neighborhood in San Francisco that has some pretty interesting things go on every day. This camera is not a reflection of me or my way of life but it's showing the view from my apartment on Taylor Street in San Francisco." 24/7, take a look at Adam's Block. Via Grow a Brain.
This Is Where We Live.
Ho, Ho, Ho. Nothing says Christmas like Star Wars nutcrackers?
Directed by Sofia Coppola, featuring the song Moi Je Joue by Brigitte Bardot, the new spot for Miss Dior Cherie fragrance.
"The crew of Coraline (great looking trailer) has been sending out special handmade boxes as gifts to the bloggers they follow" Man, I wish they were following us. ASIFA shows the 39 they have received.
Diesel's terrifying short film, Pete The Meat Puppet. Via Denver Egotist.
For BB: an interview with Emo Philips from last year's Chicago Sketchfest.
A tour of the Christmas Story house, which is now a museum in Cleveland.
Scott Cudmore's beautifully shot and art directed music vid for 16mm's SOS.
Love this, the LeBron James Nike Chalk commercial. The Candyman is back.
Music vid of the moment: Swedish duo Far & Son's dark, Rube Goldbergian Panik.
A series of idents shot in zero gravity for the National Geographic Channel's Space Week.
Annotated photo essays from Chaplin: A Life by Stephen M. Weissman. Via GreenCine Daily.
Empire gives us their list of the 100 Greatest Movie Characters.
The Toshiba Timesculpture Spot and how it was made.
WellMedicated's Ode To Criterion Box Art. Any collection of anything that starts with Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven is pretty much irresistible to me. Via Kottke.
And somewhat related to the last in regard to time consuming stop-motion animation: Radiohead's Weird Fishes by Tobias Stretch, winner of the band's video treatment contest.
Michel Gondry's new music vid for Dick Annegarn's Soleil du Soir. Don't even want to think about how tedious this must have been to make.
Quillions, a fluid, one-take operetta that was written, composed, choreographed, and directed in just 48 hours. Pretty impressive. Via The Denver Egotist.
The new Sony Bravia ad, Domino City. And here is how they made it.
Finally, what YouTube was made for.
How Much of a Woman. A brilliant short film by Liron Kroll. Her sketchbook is great too.
One hundred movies spoiled in five minutes.
If you have a teenage girl in your life, you are surely aware of the hysteria over the release of the Twilight movie this week. Give her a gift that will make her head explode, her very own Edward.
Thomas Kinkade's 16 Guidelines for Making Stuff Suck. We just can't steal enough links from Chris.
Wow, that is one lucky penguin.
Trailer for We Are Wizards, a documentary about Harry Potter fandom. Have to love a trailer that starts with Brad Neely reading from his Wizard People, Dear Reader, the greatest piece of humor ever known to man.
Where the Things in Cloverfield Happened, all mapped out.
Troubling statistics connecting bikinis to immediate, untimely deaths. "The wearing of a two piece bathing suit in the company of James Bond is just about the most dangerous activity a woman could engage in anywhere on the planet at any time in history."
"These are early storyboards from Star Wars, some from even before the Falcon was changed to its current design..."
Very cool, time lapse video of a ship going through the Panama Canal. Via Mental Floss.
I love this commercial. Electrabel Kids.
Strong recommendation for Rodrigo Garcia's film Nine Lives, which was watched last night. A whole film of incredible single take vignettes. Have to agree with the Times when they said "a film that may be the closest movies have come to the cinematic equivalent of a collection of Chekhov short stories." The trailer is here.
Trailer for Roman Coppola's upcoming, all-puppet web series The Fist of Oblivion.
Imaginary Forces, director Bryan Barber, and comic artist Alex Maleev team up to make this spot for Target (just turn the sound off if you don't cotton to Christina Aguilera).
Crowds' reactions to CNN's Obama victory countdown from around the world. Each video features a magical split second of loud-but-uncertain cheering that bursts into louder screams of ecstatic joy when the CNN graphic appears. Thanks, Chris
Spectacular tilt-shift time-lapse video of San Francisco from dawn to dusk by Bhautik Joshi. Via Laughing Squid.
Circles. A new short film from Hillman Curtis.
Music vid of the moment: NSM PSM's Clap Your Brains Off. And the companion piece of the moment: The Making of Clap Your Brains Off. Via Denver Egotist.
London in over 3000 pictures and under two minutes.
Don't really understand the connection to the product in this spot, but it's certainly nice to look at: Toshiba's Time Sculpture.
"The fast zombie is bereft of poetic subtlety." A great essay by Simon Pegg on why the undead should never be allowed to run. Via Rory's.
Trailer for Hot Chicks, a collaborative film recreating Jack T. Chick's religious tracts. Also, a trailer for God's Cartoonist, a documentary about Chick and his followers.
Following the teaser last week, here's the final, full version of Mystery Man by Gnarls Barkley.
Awesome. Mighty Boosh Toy Figures. For those unfamiliar, spend the rest of the day watching clips.
Clever "watch for cyclists" PSA from Transport for London: Whodunnit.
Long trailer for the documentary about the Canadian street artist Peter Gibson: Roadsworth. Via We Made This.
Music vid of the moment: Belarusian band Lyapis Trubetskoy's Lights. Looks like a more involved version of Royksopp's motion graphics classic Eple.
Animated DuPont spot made with miniatures: Possibilities.
James Carville's final speech from 1992's The War Room. Let's hope Pennebaker and Hegedus have secretly been with the Obama campaign shooting a new one.
"She is so cute I want to run around with her and dance." Bjork talks about her TV. Via MeFi For DW of course.
Shot via a cellphone and using found typography to tell it's story, Mankind Is No Island.
Sweet, video from the New Millennium Paper Airplane contest .
Oh that tomorrow night's election coverage could be more like this.
Now the Red Hot Chili Peppers get the treatment: Under The Bridge: Literal Version. Someone please give this guy a grant so he can quit his job and make these full time.
Love this, What if roadies ran the world?.
A typographical fairy tale.
100 et une faces.
"10 bus tickets, 4,512 miles, 20 days." The documentary The Great American Detour is now available in full, online.
A follow-up to the first series of ads John McCain put together with the help of his famous film friends: Hollywood Director Attack Ads: Part 2. Make sure to stick around for M. Night's contribution.
The Hidden Cost of War.
Good news for fans of The Room. Tommy Wiseau is now working on a sitcom called The Neighbors, which looks promising.
Found among the posters in MS' post below and had to be investigated: a trailer for 1974's very bizarre Zardoz. Ebert's review says it's "a trip into a future that seems ruled by perpetually stoned set decorators."
"And then JFK shows up in their living room? Was he invited? Did they offer him milk and cookies?" Errol Morris on the history of "real people" political tv advertising.
A rundown of the fifteen coolest gadgets from James Bond films.
Teaser for the new Gnarls Barkley music vid: Mystery Man.
War and social upheaval cause spikes in zombie movie production?
Knitted Star Wars Finger Puppets from Ding Dong Design. Via I Like.
Gah! Neil Gaiman is producing a live-action movie of his fab book The Graveyard Book. You can listen to him read the entire book here.
The Simpsons' Mad Men intro from this year's Halloween special.
In my opinion, the best in-depth news program on television, Frontline examines what our next president must face in the war on terror in The War Briefing.
AC/DC debuts the world's first music video in an Excel spreadsheet.
CP hero Errol Morris has just launched his contribution to the political campaign: People in the Middle for Obama.
Related to a post yesterday. Let's collect Polish Star Wars memorabilia.
"The artists manage to sustain a chain reaction of evermore absurd materials and events for 30 minutes." A clip from The Way Things Go by Peter Fischli and David Weiss.
"We asked for those that were poorly executed, dopey, misguided or just plain weird." Politico's 10 Worst Campaign Ads of the Season.
Trailer for Playing Columbine, a documentary about video game controversies.
Awesome spot directed by Harmony Korine for Thorntons retail, 'Stuck.'
"...so cringeworthy is the multi-award-winning 90-minute movie, directed by screenwriter and director Sacha Gervasi, that some journalists have struggled to believe it is for real." Demigods of Canadian metal, This is Anvil.
Apropos of nothing. The babes of Star Trek.
AdFreak's new feature, interviewing actors in popular tv spots. First up is with Jack Ferver, star of Starburst's wonderfully absurd Little Lad spot.
Ron Howard, Andy Griffith, and Henry Winkler go back in time to help make an endorsement.
Script Tease, a site dedicated to preserving cinema's lost classics. With "classics" roughly defined as low-budget, super-cheesy, B, C and D horror and action movies. Don't miss the Trailers of the Week archive including this beauty from 1982 Italy, Tenebra. Via Ze Frank.
An unsurprising, but funny endorsement.
A preview of Make magazine's new show for PBS: Make: television. Via PSFK.
A great collection of current campaign ads from miscellaneous races across the country.
Compare and contrast: Young Richard Ashcroft is a troublesome nogoodnik in the city, where as the Older, Wiser Richard Ashcroft spends his time in a contemplative mood out in the woods. For further discussion, due to the similarities, should we now expect a Fat Les follow-up soon?
Talked about this morning and now in the queue to see again soon: the trailer for Bob Roberts. And here's one of his campaign commercials.
From the March 12th, 1985 episode of PBS' The Computer Chronicles: The Macintosh Computer.
The Times' A.O. Scott on Sullivan's Travels.
For MS: Twin Peaks Locations, now and then, separated by almost 20 years. Via TMN.
Down in the polls, John McCain hires his famous director friends, John Woo, Kevin Smith, and Wes Anderson, to make his new attack ads.
Video of Vincent Perrottet walking us through a Josef Muller-Brockmann exhibition. In French, but the visual language is universal.
James Bond trivia.
The Jewish take on Dexter's morning routine. For reference, here's the original.
NotCot's got a sweet little video of Banksy's Village Petstore and Charcoal Grill.
Trailer for the highly stylized Un Capitalisme Sentimental. Via GreenCine Daily.
Michael Kloft's documentary on television technology and programming developed in Germany starting as early as the 1930s. "Television Under The Swastika."
Alternate movie posters about film brand integration.
The History Channel analyzes a Super Hero. Batman Unmasked; The Psychology of the Dark Knight, I, II, III, IV, V, VI, and VII.
Roddy McDowell, relaxing on set, from the Flickr group Apes Shall Rule Us All.
David Fincher's Nike commercial Fate.
Related to the last. Series of Mego Planet of the Apes action figure commercials. Don't click away after just one or two. Golden.
"...your anxiety is your security." Morrison on Morrison, an illustrated chat with the designer of the title sequences for Brazil, Sweeney Todd and other films. Plus, another longer interview.
A behind the scenes lookat the production of the Goldfinger title sequence, designed by Robert Brownjohn in 1964. Yes, that title sequence. More here.
Related to the last. CP hero and restoration and editing supervisor Walter Murch on the film. "The remarkable thing about Welles's films is that you can turn off either the picture or the sound, and the films are still understandable."
Warning: Film-tech geekery ahead. Great 2006 thread on aspect-ratio and related technical issues relating to the three main versions of Orson Welle's Touch of Evil which have been released over the years. Now finally all available on the well-reviewed 50th Anniversary Box Set. Cha-ching.
Clips and trailers for two documentaries with very similar titles: Scrapper, about people who illegally remove bombs from test sites, and Scrappers, which is about metal scavengers in Chicago's alleyways.
Deep-Focus examines the amazing title sequence of Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books, including references to the paintings that inspired the visuals. Via GCD.
Per his usual style, Baz Luhrmann's beautiful yet slightly creepy Australian Tourism spot. Another one here. Via AdFreak.
A restored clip from The Adventures of Prince Achmed, the oldest survivng feature-length animated film from 1926. Detailed notes on its creation can be found here (pdf).
Hunter Weeks and Josh Caldwell have made the Citizen Kane of Fantasy Football movies called 10 Yards. Pop it into your Netflix queue today. Hunter also signed on recently as an Executive Producer on our over-time and over-budget film project 72° which may help, since he seems to actually get movies finished.
Not to get overly political here, but a great series of pro-bono spots from Goodby & Silverstein and an interview about how/why they were made: Spoofing for Obama. All four spots are here.
The Wachowski Brothers chat about film-tech and Gordon Willis with Ebert.
A Ha's Take On Me, the Literal Video Version. Brilliant.
A documentary hosted by United Reggae, The Story of Randy's, the legendary Kingston record shop and studio. Via gmt+9(-15).
So you know, Empire Magazine's 500 Greatest Movies of all time.
Obsessional on the Icarus, the spaceship from the original Planet of the Apes including how to visit the crash site at Lake Powell.
Adrants has a really great series of ads for the Vancouver International Film Festival.
Ogilvy London's Ford Fiesta "This Is Now" spot.
John Lydon has made his first commercial and it's for butter.
Trailer for documentary Stranded: I've Come From a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains. Yipes.
Ford begins their PR fight against the Flash of Genius film with this Development of Intermittent Wipers infographic.
Kane's tribute to the film One Man Band, which, judging from the screengrabs and clips, looks totally amazing and groovy too.
A French commercial by Claude Miller for Apple, from sometime around 1989. Awesome and completely out of the blue. Found by Michael Preidel.
Trailer for the other Notorious from 1946.
Interesting audio interview by Milos Stehlik with Richard Brody, author of a new book on Godard, Everything is Cinema.
Not sure exactly what this is, but fun nonetheless: Balloons. Stick around to the end.
Speaking of politics, Michael Moore's latest flm Slacker Uprising is available for free today.
The hypnotically animated fan-made music video for Goldfrapp's Lovely Head. Info on how it was created, here.
Behind the Scenes at The Price is Right from 1982. Via Cynical-C.
Creepy trailer for The Descendant.
A BBC documentary in seven parts on Carol Reed's The Third Man.
New work from the very talented Andrew Huang, The Gloaming. He brought us the heartbreaking Doll Face.
Whoa. Ben Kingsley as Ian MacKaye, performing Minor Threat, complete with recreation of the album cover at the start. BB, stop what you're doing and watch this.
5 signs you're watching a Wes Anderson movie.
Mike Wallace interviews Aldous Huxley.
"They reproduced the film with all the grain, with all the blown-out whites of the wedding scene... all the same 'imperfections' that made the studio people want to fire Willis. And help make Godfather the glorious film it is." Awesome. The "Coppola Restoration" Letters, from Some Came Running, Glenn Kenney's flim blog. Parts One, Two and Three.
Per BB's request: made this past weekend, here's He Ate All the Triscuts, Yeah!, which is a take on Sonseed's now-classic Jesus Is My Friend.
For MS: Twiki is from Buck Rogers (not Battlestar Galactica, like I originally said).
30 Years ago, Battlestar Galactica premiered on ABC.
Proof that maybe Peter Greenaway is better suited to directing films and not music videos: Face Tomorrow's Overpowered. Between the type treatment and the multiple windows, it feels like a low-budget Prospero's Books.
Although most of us here tried to watch Mad Men, but just couldn't get into it and gave up, we can still appreciate this: Mad Men Illustrated.
Music vid of the moment: Ting Tings' Be the One, shot inside and out front of Chicago's own, The Hideout.
"All are excellent shots. Who do they shoot?" Game Theory in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Via Cynical-C.
Trailer and information on Freedom on the Fence, a documentary about Polish poster design.
FotA and frequent guest at the bar, John Tolva, can be seen this Sunday night in the premiere of the History Channel's documentary Forbidden City: Revealed, which focuses on John's help in building a 3D virtual recreation of China's imperial palace. More info about it on his site.
Veteran writer Earl Pomerantz' three-parter on the history of the sit-com and why they're not funny anymore, with some obvious exceptions.
Skating down Claremont Canyon. Both terrifying and amazing. Impossible to look away.
Fifty People, One Question.
A bandwagon I have been waiting to jump on, 8mm returns with style in Japan.
Afternoon audio distraction.
Zingers From The Hollywood Squares. Via PCL.
A series of trailers for the big-budget, Russian sci-fi epic Inhabited Island.
Orson Welles last interview, just two hours before he died. Via GreenCine Daily.
Mark, Alex and Noah make their own Star Wars VII.
122 years home. MCBD's ad for Hovis and the making of it. Thanks David.
Strange. Illeana Douglas and the rest of the cast from Supermarket of the Stars is regrouping for a nearly identical series for Ikea called Easy to Assemble.
Most "bands on tour" documentaries are painfully boring, but Part of the Weekend Never Dies, which follows around Soulwax over 120 performances, looks really good.
Posted without comment: The Average Homeboy, with an introduction by the incredibly earnest Denny "Blazin" Hazen.
The opening titles for How The West Was Won with an amazing score by Alfred Newman.
Dave Kehr on the Blu-ray release of How the West Was Won, which was originally shown in Cinerama, three 35mm strips, projected side by side.
Music vid of the moment: director Olivier Chabalier's haunting Pretty Boy Floyd by Kid Loco.
Speaking of Darth Vader.
I was searching for a visual reference for something and Googling surprisingly led me back our own archives. ChittahChattah's "sampling of stills depicting the awesomeness" of the analog audio technology at the heart of Coppola's The Conversation.
Johnny Depp = The Riddler. Philip Seymour Hoffman = The Penguin.
Thank You for Smoking.
The Muppet Show Cake. From Gome, and definitely not Cakewrecks-worthy. Seriously, what's up with cakes lately?
"If you can get Morgan Freeman's and Ashley Judd's heads floating together, God help you." An interview with the designer behind Hollywood's most famous floating head movie posters.
An interview with author and occasional co-conspirator Dan Pink for Melissa Pierce's film Life In Perpetual Beta, Elegant Design For Your Whole New Mind.
"The Wrong Door is a new sketch show set in a parallel universe where the special effects you see in the movies and on TV are part of everyday life." Get a sneak peak at the new BBC show here.
Hunter Weeks and Josh Caldwell have made the Citizen Kane of Fantasy Football movies called 10 Yards and you can download it free. Hunter also signed on recently as an Executive Producer on our over-time and over-budget film project 72° which may help since he seems to actually get movies finished.
The most compelling tv spots are always the most direct ones. Like this American classic and this Dutch one, both of the same era, for the same product.
Kieran Clayton writes, "I saw this music video based on 'The Droste Effect' and after two minutes, I had to pause and wrap my head in a cold towel."
Trailer for I Served the King of England and a review.
For BB: Metallica channels Sam Bayer's Wake Me Up When September Ends by making their own pretentious war-themed music video.
Iconic Los Angeles film locations mapped and listed. Via Green Cine Daily.
"The ground rules: Anybody could call out 'stop!' and discuss what we were looking at, or whatever had just occurred to them." Roger Ebert on the technique of Cinema Interruptus or "How to read a movie."
Skip the network babble, constant interruptions and endless weepy crowd shots tonight and watch the DNC's video feed (still some crowd shots, but not nearly as often nor as lengthy).
"The actors don't swear like sailors with Tourette's syndrome. Our students do." A teacher on Movies Set in Public Schools.
"This is a series of video experiments. The items thrown are: water, ketchup, carrots, corn, peas, jello, beets, flour and confetti." Benjamin M Piety's The Adventure of Lions.
The story of Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp, which ran on ABC for two seasons in the early '70s. Here's a clip from the "Surfin' Spy" episode.
Related to SE's post below: Spencer Tunick and The Bomb, a clip from our documentary in five parts, Laboratory Conditions.
Saint Etienne's languid and hypnotizing Finisterre. "A hymn to London, and an extraordinary record of the city today." Via Sci-Fi Hi-Fi.
Regarding Microsoft and Seinfeld, check this history of celebrity computer endorsements.
Posted without comment: Condom a Cappella.
If you're looking for something to do tonight Warren Buffett, Pete Peterson and Dave Walker are doing a live discussion and screening of I.O.U.S.A. in theaters across the country.
Kottke runs down video from some great past Olympic moments. Nice.
The triumphant return of The Banana Splits. Just promise not to change the intro song too much, okay?
Le Cirque de Calder, the 1961 documentary about Alexander Calder and his miniature circus.
Related to the last, Fassbinder's Third Generation. Here's the original trailer from 1979.
Trailer for Der Baader Meinhof Komplex and some controversy about its pending release.
"Bergman Week is as much about the setting as the artist." He Is an Island, Michael Koresky visits Faro.
I knew all about one Chicago suburb long before I moved here: "I like to shop in downtown Downers Grove"
From a discussion had as soon as we got in this morning: Emo Phillips on Arsenio Hall's "Freak Night" episode. Also airing that night: The Japanese Screaming Man.
Teaser for the new Hillman Curtis film that is included with David Byrne and Brian Eno's new album, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today.
The Unsung Heroes of Star Wars.
Another BBC comedy I wish I'd known about long ago: 2002's 15 Storeys High, sort of like the UK's answer to Swedish director Roy Andersson.
Reporting from the New York Reality TV School.
Fantastic, Death Star over San Francisco.
Just stumbled into a strange world of song parody-based calculus humor: I Will Derive! is the best of the bunch, even better than U Can't Graph This, Sexy Back: Calculus Style, or 99 Problems (But the Math Ain't One).
Yowza. I had completely forgotten about this, and I actually worked at Channel 32 in Chicago while it was going on. The first 10 minutes of the Keyfax Nite-Owl Service from Wednesday August 25th, 1982. Greatness. Thanks to Bill Lambert for the link.
Historia de un Letrero (The Story of a Sign) a film by Alonso Alvarez Barreda.
How the camera that tracks along with Olympic dives works.
Robert Birnbaum on noteworthy films from noteworthy novels for the new Digest at TMN.
The Making The Wire Panel from the Pinewood Dialogues at the Museum of the Moving Image.
CNN concentrated, or more precisely, concatenated. Via Mefi.
Michael Surtees on Rich Watts' graphic summary of Clerks, which does for a film's dialogue what Brendan Dawes' Cinema Redux Print does for its editing and art direction. See also Brendan's The Things Around Us.
"How Alfred Hitchcock and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer put a Frank Lloyd Wright house on top of Mount Rushmore in spite of common sense, Frank Lloyd Wright and the United States Government. Sort of." Via Daily Icon.
Related to the last, Pelham One Two Three is on Hulu.
Awesome original 1965 trailer for Godard's Alphaville. We must use that music track for something, it's right up there with this from The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. Via Facets Features.
This is Hamburg. Takes awhile to load.
The adworkers of Milwaukee say "I Promise." Yay. Thanks Benjamin.
What if there were no stop signs?
Trailer for The Great American Detour, a upcoming documentary about three weeks spent on Greyhound buses while crisscrossing the US "in search of an answer."
The man who makes me swoon was here in town this past weekend and lucky duck Cinnamon happened to run into him.
25 Lessons "The Simpsons" Taught Me About Cheap, Healthy Eating
The Evolution of the Fight Scene. Doesn't get much better than that first one from The Big Country.
Longtime ad man George Parker's wonderfully grumpy "Why 'Mad Men' Makes Me Mad."
Albarn and Hewlett of Gorillaz have teamed up with BBC Sport to create a promotional campaign for their Olympic coverage. Check out the awesome spot here. Via One Plus One Equals Three.
The Wooster Collective looks forward to the debut of Beautiful Losers this week. Check out the posters and an exclusive clip.
Crimes of Carelessness.
The terrific first episode of the animated Get Your War On. Creator David Rees has also spent some time as a Field Tester.
I've been hearing a lot about this film, Man on Wire, but have never thought about it in this way. Nice essay by Michael Bierut.
A case of life imitating art: the news story of parents forgetting their daughter at the airport and my film Regrets: Kid, which is about the exact same thing. Strange.
First aired in 2004, The ups and downs of the desperate race for any clue to help cure Alzheimer's is documented in the fantastic PBS program The Forgetting.
Scott Mark's Image Vault at Emulsion Compulsion. A huge collection of film related stills and other materials. I. II. III. Incredible stuff. Via Green Cine Daily.
Music vid of the moment: Zombie Zombie's Driving, a retelling of The Thing using GI Joes.
Hubs writes, "12 Angry Men + Glowing = 12 Glowing Men. An absolutely beautiful film by Martijn Hendriks."
So you know, a list of films considered the worst ever.
Objectified, a documentary about industrial design, will be the next film project by Gary Hustwit. Via DO.
Creepy trailer for Swedish vampire film Let The Right One Come In.
One last "related to the last." The story of the scene from DLN in which Sutherland and Christie's lovemaking is intercut with them dressing to go out. Rightfully on every hottest scenes list.
Related to the last, Big Audio Dynamite's song about director Nicholas Roeg, E = MC2 and the trailer from Roeg's Don't Look Now.
A clip from Just Looking, a series of DVDs "for shy men to practice looking girls in the eyes."
Field Tester David Rees gets the moving pictures treatment as his Get Your War On strip becomes an animated series.
A peek into the sort of strange subculture you can find yourself stumbling into when you wander around on YouTube for too long: The Choirboys' cover of Tears In Heaven. Though you can't argue with that sidebar text: "the boys sing like angels! damn!"
Movie geeks, start your freak out. Huge auction of movie memorabilia set to go up for auction the end of the month. If I had the dough, I'd buy this and this.
Paola e Bettino, "the Lanza brothers film their parents watching the World Cup." Would be impossible not to be charmed by this.
Neave Television. "Telly without context." Totally random and wonderfully weird. Via Metal Thing.
BB, place your pre-order now for the 10th Anniversary limited edition of The Big Lebowski.
Trailer for Making Faces, a documentary on cutting metal type with Jim Rimmer. Via I Love Typography.
Compulsory Dark Knight link: Chicago actor Danny Goldring, a veteran of many CP TV and radio spots, on his role as "Grumpy," one of the masked henchmen in the fabulous opening sequence bank heist.
Local note. Sunday night at The Music Box, Lawrence of Arabia in 70mm. See you there.
And another Scorsese spot (because apparently that's all he's been up to lately): Airport Lounge.
EveryBlock tells us exactly where The Dark Knight was shot in Chicago. The same goes for Public Enemies, starring Johnny Depp, thanks to a note from Adrian and Wilson. Thanks.
Cinemascope on the remastering of the The Godfather Trilogy.
Director Sam Brown kicks off The Verve's big comeback with his random, slo-mo eye candy music vid for Love is Noise.
"I was the first person to type the immortal words 'I'm so and so and I approve this message.' That was mine." Vinny Minchillo on making political attack ads.
Twitch reviews John Woo's epic Red Cliff and has a long promo reel and trailers available too.
After talking to BB about beloved, but short lived TV shows, found the pilot episode of Key West.
Barney Miller quotes, haphazardly remembered by Barney Miller fans.
An interview with director Keith Schofield about shooting the Toe Jam music vid.
And as follows with any classic: the Lego version of Dinner for One.
Dinner for One, the filmed stage piece from 1963 that has become a regular staple of New Year's Eve broadcasts in Germany and Denmark for years. More info here.
The art of the tracking shot, illustrated with clips.
People on reality TV shows are not here to make friends.
WFMU on How To Be Eccentric: The Films of Richard Massingham.
The 'Malthusian Fear Mongering' and 'Fascistic Elements' prove that WALL-E is evil. Huh. Via One Good Move.
The first six minutes of The Dark Knight. Swiped via an in-theater camera. Wow.
Trailer for Rotten Loves America.
GreenCine Daily on recently rediscovered footage from Lang's Metropolis.
Posted in the past, but never on such a fitting occasion, so it seemed appropriate: Doktor Kosmos' Holiday.
Boba Fett's FlasHDance Audition. Via Cynical-C.
OK, it's official, there's just way too much awesome-but- unnecessary stuff to buy on the internets.
Field Tester, and star of Regrets: Hobbies, David Pasquesi, has a new show premiering this weekend on the Spike network: Factory. It's completely improvised and judging from the first episode, deserves to be a big hit.
Nice collection of spaghetti western memorabilia.
How many sequels were there?
For BB: a three-part interview with Wayne Coyne about finally starting to screen Christmas on Mars.
For Debbie, here's what you're looking for. How to move a 100 year old church. The opening sequence is absolutely sublime. Stay with it til the end, when the chorus returns. Brilliant.
Resume for Troy McClure, who you might remember from such films as The Boatjacking of Supership 79 and Dial M for Murderousness.
Speed Dressing, the Cannes Bronze Lion award winning spot for JC Penney that no one will admit to having made.
Former CPer Eric Helin writes, "Drew and I used to make things and put them on the internet. Some of those things and some new things are posted on our Youtube channel."
Love this, Music is your Soulmate.
The Art of the Title Sequence. Fantastic.
A newly redesigned site and a brand new short film from Hillman Curtis, Bridge.
While we're at it, the second Clone Wars theatrical trailer.
"J. Todd Anderson modestly describes himself as 'a guy who draws for the movies.'" Linda Price profiles The Coen Brothers' favorite storyboard artist for American Artist. Via Green Cine Daily.
The American Film Institute picks their choices for America's 10 greatest films in 10 classic genres.
For MS: Christopher Orr writes about The Happening, "This film is so bad that I feel compelled to make a spoiler-laden list of its most laughably terrible parts rather than review it."
A funny new take on editing trailers: Requiem For A Day Off, mixing footage from Ferris Bueller with the score from Requiem for a Dream.
A film theme for Fathers' Day gifts at the BB house: Jeff Bridges' shirt and Owen Wilson's cap. I'm totally abiding with Kaoru Betto.
The Savannah College of Art and Design created the vaguely sinister but totally fabulous short film, Pencil Face. See how they did it here.
Deliciously stupid. When album covers attack.
Spiritualized's Harmonies: Past & Present, an interesting batch of videos promoting Jason "Spaceman" Pierce's new album.
MS, hold on to this for when you make your gruesome horror film: How to cut an actor in half.
The Harvest. Juicing the creatives. Fab. Via Ze.
New iPhone tv spot. Gee, I'm so surprised at the end. Nice production values. An idea better suited for Dodge.
And to follow, a horrifying vision of the post-apocalyptic Earth: The Mutants of 2051 A.D.
Related to earlier: Remember the episode of the Christian candid camera show, Prank 3:16, when the gang faked the Rapture for an unsuspecting high school girl. That was hilarious. Via DR's Rapture Ready!
Ant writes, "This thing is pretty f-ing dope." I'll say. More Immersive Media demos here.
Fun series of spots out of Argentina for Coke: The Unhuggables.
Joe Mande's The Andy Rooney Game. "Take out everything but the first sentence and the last sentence from Andy Rooney's latest segment on 60 Minutes. Then you put that on youtube." I. II. III. Via Mefi.
Martin Hampton's film Possessed, looks at the world of four hoarders.
"...no chronological order, no genre order or preference, simply the language of film referencing itself." A beautiful montage set to Oliver Nelson's "Complex City,"
Cinema Styles Presents Frames of Reference. Via Jim Emerson.
"I will not be ashamed, to walk the crowded streets alone, in yesterday's outfit and cologne..." By BBDO NY.
Fab opening sequence for the 1966 Italian spaghetti western Arizona Colt.
The old graphic identity of the Chicago superstation was totally forgettable but now that even seems pretty good. I can't help thinking that this rebranding must be a joke. Wow. "WGN America."
A Potpourri Of Production Design: just one of many wonderful posts on a variety of different blogs as part of the Production Design Blog-A-Thon.
The lessons John Tolva learned from Zombiefest, Part the First.
A big batch of notes on Kingdom of the Crystal Skull from GreenCine Daily.
John Beohm's Idents, a weblog devoted to station, network and studio IDs. I. II. III.
A new film from Hillman Curtis, a beautiful profile of iconoclast and conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner.
I am totally adopting him. Seriously, do you really need to make me cry to get me to watch your channel?
Film-tech nerdery, Roberto Quezada-Dardon finds reactions to the Red One camera from two crews who have worked with it.
Intriguing trailer for The Visioneers. Via Green Cine Daily.
Guy Ritchie's spot for Nike: Take It to the Next Level.
Five science fiction movies that got science right.
Nothing To Report.
That Mitchell and Webb Look Bronze Age Orientation Day.
Something about how cycling makes you a better lover. Those Europeans really know how to advertise. Possibly a little NSFW.
Photos from the upcoming GI Joe film are circulating. Snakes Eyes looks sharp and Dennis Quaid as General Hawk? Nice. More photos on IMDB.
Original theatrical trailer for John Boorman's 1967 Point Blank starring Lee Marvin. They don't make 'em like that anymore. Via Rashomon.
Season two of the television version of This American Life returns. Here's a clip of a story animated by the fabulous Chris Ware.
Behind the movie title sequence: Juno. Via Glass.
From the producers of Copy Goes Here, Veer presents a new film by Run Wrake, the spellbinding The Control Master.
Trailer for the Finnish horror film Sauna. Via Twitch.
What Facebook would look like in real life.
Three minute film by director Nuru Rimington-Mkali And I Refuse to Forget. Via MeFi .
Batman vs The Dark Knight trailers. Why so similar? Thanks Dan.
10 great scenes from movie robberies gone wrong.
The allure of being in front the camera is sometimes too strong to deny, director's cameos in films.
As the BBC's site locks out viewing anywhere but in the UK, I was anxiously awaiting for someone to finally put this up elsewhere: Stephen Fry and the Gutenberg Press.
"The 44-minute-long work constitutes a meditative elegy for the approaching demise of a medium specific to Tacita Dean's own practice." Kodak was shot at a film plant scheduled for closing in France. Mesmerizing. Via gmt+9 (-15).
Best part of last weekend: Errol Morris on Bob Edwards Weekend. Highly recommended listening.
The world is just awesome.
Nice VW spot by Outsider, Enjoy the Everyday.
Restoration of the Ecto-1 from Ghostbusters.
More Roy Andersson: the marriage sequence from his film, You, the Living. Beautiful and absurd.
If we had a "Stuff About Hal Ashby" archive category this would be the perfect entry. Peter Sellers' end credits from Being There. Hilarious.
Kitsune Noir serves up an amazing helping of Tarako's Kewpie Pasta Sauce. Wow.
Things David Cairns read off the screen in They Drive By Night. No, not that They Drive By Night, the other one.
In response to an earlier post, Mike writes "Those Swedish McDonald's ads you just linked to are trying to be Roy Andersson commercials, and failing. Ingmar Bergman claimed Anderson made the best commercials in the world." We agree with both Mike and Ingmar.
Cool animated promo by Logan for Kohler's Karbon Faucet.
So you know, 10 best hitmen: why the screen loves deadly assassin. My vote is for Leon.
"It might never have been made inside the system, but being made outside the system created a whole new set of problems, since there wasn't anyone around worrying about whether the filmmaker found a way to give pleasure to many people instead of just himself." Tarsem Singh and the making of The Fall, which, after years of being shelved, is finally being released.
Collection of bizarre McDonald's ads from Sweden. Via AdFreak.
Stuff They Made Me Watch at Publix, a collection of training films created by the grocery store chain.
Martijn Hendriks' Give Us Today Our Daily Terror. Brilliant. Hitchcock's The Birds minus the birds. Via vvork.
Found while looking for something else. A compendium of related websites from the excellent History of the Discovery of Cinematography. Yowza.
VBS.tv sails out into the Pacific to film the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Music vid of the moment: the stop-motion bonanza that is Heart Made of Sound by the Softlightes, the new band fronted by the former Incredible Moses Leroy, who wrote this great song: Fuzzy.
Bogdanovich, Brooks, Capra and Altman, together on Cavett. Via Green Cine Daily.
Cool concept. Intense Guys, "great movie moments, one clip at a time," Here's a post on Thunder Road that sums up the idea pretty well.
What?
Sure to warm the hearts of the ten people who will remember it: a homemade recreation of the The State's 'Taco Delivery' sketch.
Nice casting in this Dacia car spot created by Nordpol Hamburg.
Movie Title Screens Gallery. A huge collection, rightly part of the current MoOM exhibitions.
Strange. Just re-watched Michael Baldwin's wonderful music vid for Travis' Closer and wondered what he'd shot recently. By accident, almost immediately ran into his great new vid: Infidel's Make Mistakes.
Following MS's post below: Trailer for Medium Cool, the inspiration for Battle in Seattle. Read somewhere that Haskell Wexler even came to help shoot for a day and makes a cameo in the film.
Catch it before you can't. Pitchfork TV gives you one week to watch the documentary on the Pixies reunion tour in 2004, loudQUIETloud.
Screengrab's top ten uncompleted movies. No mention of SK's Napoleon, which is my #1 or 72° thank goodness.
This is so a post for SD, Unsold SciFi and Fantasy TV Pilots. Utterly fantastic.
Song and music vid of the moment: Noah and The Whale's Shape of My Heart.
Skunk on the Loose, the real life cousin to my immortal classic, Possum in the House. Thanks Anne.
Madonna's new music vid isn't all that special, other than it seems to borrow the idea of the time-eating Langoliers from Stephen King's short story of the same name.
Long, lovely, single take from the dailies of JCVD The Untitled Van Damme Project. Plus, the trailer, which also looks great. Really. Via Green Cine Daily.
"Long before they got big enough to fill the Beacon, the Stones were already mixing art and commerce with a 1963 spot for Rice Krispies." -Ben Greenman.
NY Times video feature on the making of Bjork's Wanderlust music vid.
Top 10 Great Movies No One Should Have To Watch More Than Once.
Kanye West takes the Wendella Boat Tour in his latest music vid.
Follow up to the post from the other day: Bjork's Wanderlust by Encyclopedia Pictura. Has anyone else noticed that Bjork is weird?
Spike's ad campaign for Star Wars running on their network. Lightsaber bus stop ad is great. Via AdFreak.
Best Film Noir of All Time surveyed in date ranges, 1945-49 is an awfully good crop.
Andrei Tarkovsky: Film and Painting, an essay by Mikhail Romadin from a new book on the influential Soviet filmmaker.
In preparation for the weekend, Tolva examines the genealogy of films spawned by Night of the Living Dead.
Trailer for Fanboys and the lightsaber battle about its final edit.
Six-part BBC interview with 85 year-old Ingmar Bergman. Excellent. Via GreenCine Daily.
For Sarah at 37signals: two clips from HBO's John Adams, proving its unhealthy addiction to dutch angles. Even the first shot in its trailer is all crooked.
Trailer and/or promo clip for The Cool School, a new documentary on the LA art scene in the 50s. Nathan Lee's Voice review.
"The worst film I have ever seen is a low-budget 1969 production called Futz. It was about a man who fell in love with a pig, and even by the dismal standards of the era, it was dismal." Joe Queenan on the worst movies of all time.
Following that last post, here's a clip from Herzog's documentary, and another of its beautiful opening sequence.
While the new music vid for The Raconteurs' Salute Your Solution is kinda cool, it's a copy of a far superior video for a band whose name I unfortunately can't recall right now, which will bug me for the rest of the day. Thanks a lot, Raconteurs.
"I managed to convince a casting agent to ask Simon Pegg and Jessica Stephenson if I could spend a day with them while they worked on the scripts for the second series of Spaced." Photos from Spaced writing sessions.
"I wanted to talk to people, but I only let it out to the camera." Master and Commander, Anthony Lane on David Lean, a must read. Also recommended, Kevin Brownlow's biography of the man who would have been 100 today.
FotA Nick Campbell's two short films: I Hate Balloons. Serves as a nice, subtle plug for Nick's Comic Book Store Poster too.
I've never been a big fan, so you can either go by my answer of "No" or you can use this to calculate Will This Judd Apatow Movie Be Any Good? Via Transbuddha.
I've been using Joost on and off for a while and it's cool and all, but it became totally awesome last week with the addition of Square Pegs.
The Wire Finale's Montage: A Shot-by-Shot Commentary. Beyond wonderful.
Talked about just a second ago, a favorite short film from long ago: Anita Liberty. Still really great.
And, of course: The Making of Barack Obama-sistible!
Music vid of the moment: Barack Obama-sistible! 'Brilliant' doesn't even begin to describe how great it is.
Ross MacDonald does lots of things including creating awesome, vintage-looking movie props.
Movie posters with lego figures. More at The Brothers Brick.
Music vid of the moment: Bomb the Bass' Butterfingers, directed by Perish Factory.
The Top Ten Sci-Fi Films That Never Existed. Via Dark Roasted.
Reel of spots for Space Toys of the 70s. Plus, we'll use any excuse to relink these Mego Planet of the Apes action figure commercials.
On seeing Sean Thornton's (John Wayne) broken wedding bed, Michaleen (Barry Fitzgerald) proclaims it "Impetuous! Homeric!" One of many great lines from John Ford's The Quiet Man, an annual St Pat's Day viewing. Here's Frank Nugent's screenplay and TCM's notes.
Clip from A Life In The Death of Joe Meek, a documentary about the British record producer and character. Background from The World of Kane.
Does Fozzie Bear have a wallet that says "Bad Motherpuppet"?
"Known simply as 'the Monk,' this fully-dressed character played a caddie who liked to break golf clubs with his feet. He also had a wonderful dubbed-in voice that went, 'Heep bop bo! Jiggy de doo doo!'" Famous Monkeys of Filmland.
Great series of tv spots for the Texas Rangers. Via AdFreak.
Okay foodies, start your Tivos! Top Chef returns tonight and it's Chicago's turn this time around.
Terrific new blog by Sounddogs.com, where we buy most of our sfx for film production work: Sound Effects Recording Blog, featuring detailed tutorials like "Recording the Sounds of Helicopters" and "Recreating the Sounds of Boston Harbor, 1750."
"If you watch the TV show, The Wonder Years without the voice over narration, it's 95% people staring at each other." Via Cynical-C.
Trying to not get too political around here, but BB and I have had this song in our heads for days: America con Hillary. Also, from the same group, the Swift Kids for Truth series.
Parking Garage: Beyond the Limit. Cold, hard reality. Into Thin Air has nothing on this. Via SimpleBits.
Untangling The Wire, talking to two critics about the best show ever on television.
From this afternoon's lunch conversation: music video for God Lives Underwater's From Your Mouth.
Some nice local press for former Coudalian, Anthony Vitagliano, for his work on long-form ads for Target: Art Transports and Art Imagines.
Pretty Cool People video interview with Olivier Marquezy, half of French design duo Studio Deubal.
JC, it's probably not too late to cancel your SXSW plans this weekend and instead head to LA to catch 2001 in 70MM at the Egyptian Theater. Thanks Henry.
Noted without comment. You can't tell me what to do, you're not my father. Via Waxy.
"I would argue that Red Harvest is possibly the most influential book never to have been filmed under its original title or with its author's name attached." -David Cairns.
Fantastic, there goes the morning. Forget the Film, Watch the Titles.
In honor of Gary Gygax passing away this week, here's a short film written by comedian Jared Logan that I shot a few months back: Dungeons and Dragons.
Interesting discussion about aspect-ratio for the Criterion reissue of Bertolucci's The Last Emperor.
"I don't consider myself a political artist, but I am aware of one thing: Whatever story you tell, because you are discussing people's lives, you always touch on politics. In art, anything you do is political." An interview with director, Milos Forman.
So you know, 6 Terrible Cameos That Just About Ruined the Movie.
The Making of the HBO Intro from 1983.
Simon Pegg on the American Remake of Spaced.
DVNO, beautiful, 80s-style TV graphics. Via Waxy, who has been hot as a pistol lately. Hmm, maybe there's an idea there for our next Watch Us Now promo?
Supergrass returns in fine form with their music vid for Bad Blood by Keith Schofield. So good it even rivals their work with the Jim Henson Creature Shop back in the mid 90s.
If you've never seen the horror/sci-fi classic John Carpenter's The Thing put it on your list of must-see movies. It's one of my faves so if I had a bunch of cash laying around, I'd bid on this.
It's getting a lot of buzz, but I'm predicting it will be like a Schwab commercial with even more sincerity. Chicago 10.
Original, long-format theatrical trailer from The Graduate.
Super-cute little robot. Found on a WorldTV Tech Channel.
Interview with Susan Bradley, formerly manager of Disney Title Graphics, on Pixar, type and titles. Via tMoT.
I'm Learning To Share on marketing materials for The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T from 1953.
Carrie and Fred leave messages for each other to write the perfect song. Fab. Via Projectionist.
Watched and enjoyed last night a documentary seemingly made just for me: Sandwiches That You Will Like.
Secret Cinema. Great idea. Photos from a recent screening.
Here's that Where the Wild Things Are clip that surfaced and then disappeared last week.
NBC feature on Francis Ford Coppola's City Magazine launch in 1975. Via GCD.
Japanese tv is so much better than ours, Human Tetris. Thanks Matt.
Michele fell into a swoon before she saw the real news in that Time article: George Clooney's guaranteed solid-lock Oscar pool picks.
Noted without comment. Trailers from Nollywood. Thanks Mike.
Aunty Jack Introduces Color TV in Australia, circa 1975. Via 1+1=3.
Shooting No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood in Marfa, Texas. And not just for the Prada store or its mysterious lights.
The Indie Fever PSA, "a public service announcement about the dangers of independent filmmaking." Via Transbuddha.
Philip French on the 1960 debut of La Dolce Vita and Fellini's film's ongoing influence. Via GreenCine Daily.
So you know, return dates for 30+ TV shows.
"Imagine the worst movie you've ever seen. Got it? Now try to think of something worse. That something is this movie." Defective Yeti's Bad Review Revue of The Hottie and the Nottie.
The cast of Spongebob Squarepants redub classic movies.
"Perfectville," a spot for Reebok, shelved after the Patriots didn't win the Super Bowl. Via Transbuddha.
"Painting is like breathing to me. It's what I do all the time. Every day I make art, whether it is painting, writing or making a movie." ArtInfo's interview with Julian Schnabel.
Sure to inspire much debate in the studio, The 100 Scariest Movie Scenes. BB would most likely choose this one, and I would have to go with the one that made me sleep with all the lights on for three months.
"Well I sort of veer between bastards, who are sort of evil, nasty, frightening people, and ineffective nerds. It's an odd niche." The Chicagoist interviews Bob Balaban. Tangentially related, Balabananza.
The greatest scifi dance routines of all time.
"This is a big deal," says Duke, speaking from New York where he spent the month auditioning and recording. Finding the new voice of the Kool-Aid Man. Imagine having to say nothing but "Oh yeaaahh!" for a month straight. Ouch.
Design Observer has put some more thought into the idea of films starring graphic designers. Casting ideas, anyone?
For SD and BB because they love this sort of thing, openings for tv shows from 1986.
O!MSE! links up two classic Fonz-related videos. Yes, that's the King of Pop in the first one.
One of the best game shows ever, Name That Tune.
Trailer for the animated Fear(s) of the Dark. Twitch review.
Matthew Baldwin's Make-Yer-Own Oscar Pool is up. Red carpet not included.
Related to the last. For $13 more you can build a Steadicam rig. Ingenious.
"Resort to dialogue only when it's impossible to do otherwise." The film techniques of Hitchcock simplified.
Mark Ronson's Just, a very funny parody of the greatest music video of all time, Radiohead's Just by Jamie Thraves.
"I try to remember what I've already said and what I still haven't said. For fear of repeating something I've already said, I invent other things." Splendid 1990 interview with Frederico Fellini.
Adland's annual Super Bowl commercials spoiler.
Following a conversation at lunch today:
Donovan Freberg's Encyclopedia Britannica Commercial. Just learned that he's Stan Freberg's son. Had no idea.
For fans of The Wire: Michael K. Williams (Omar) on Fresh Air this morning. Yesterday was an interview with Clark Johnson, the Baltimore Sun editor from the new season.
"Very good, Mr Cooper, if you view Monday through Friday, nine to four daily, you might get through the collection in about nine years."
Stuart Cooper on the making of Overlord.. Via Green Cine Daily.
The story of the real Fawlty Towers.
A richly illustrated post from ASIFA on John Sutherland's Rhapsody of Steel, a 1959 animated industrial film.
Kevin Sharon writes, "Somehow this seems worth linking:
The 'compleat' list of Dr. Zachary Smith's monikers for the robot." Agreed.
A scene from Otto Preminger's seldom seen film from 1968, Skidoo, starring The Great One. Yowza.
What Do Real Thugs Think of The Wire?, from Sudhir Venkatesh, author of the book of the moment, Gang Leader for a Day (a full length version of the most popular chapter in Freakonomics).
Well, I guess that's one way to promote a horror flick.
Obsessional on the score from the animated Spider-Man tv series. We all know the theme-song but this well-researched piece examines the jazzy and uncollected episodic scores. Many of the examples have been taken down but you can get a taste in "Return of the Flying Dutchman" which is still available. For the time being anyway.
Sweet, full size replica of the new Speed Racer car.
"Hillando Clintrissian: Here's the thing. The Millenium Falcon was hers to begin with. She only lost it to Bill on a bet." The Star Wars Guide to the Candidates. Probably the best piece of information to base any and all of your voting decisions on.
If only SD had seen this earlier, catch up on the first four seasons of the tv show The Wire in just four minutes. Via MeFi.
Related to MS' earlier post about Eric Fensler. Here's what he's been up to lately: directing things like Graham Smith's Long Time No Sleep. Via Transbuddha.
"Before I headed out for the night I put a camera in the window and let it record the storm that was going on. Came home and skimmed the hour long tape for the significant strikes." Lightning strikes Chicago, from Craig Shimala. So cool.
Noted without comment. Harry Potter and the Chronicles of the Lord of the Golden Compass of the Jedi. Via io9.
"The tension that came from the quiet." Suspense without music in No Country For Old Men.
Funny and somewhat gross at the same time, a spot for McDonald's. Via Ad Rants.
Heard this weekend: Seeing Sound from the Third Coast Audio Festival, featuring three CP heroes all on one stage, Randy Thom, Walter Murch and Joe Frank.
Arrghh, why did I have to watch this? Be forewarned, it's bad....really bad, the lost intro to Star Wars. Via Kottke.
Why is German television so much better than ours? Thank you Grow A Brain.
Nice ad for Amnesty International by Chezeddy. Via Feed.
The Batcave Home Theater is pretty cool but it's no match for this one.
Probably a repost, but well worth it: The entire Star Wars Holiday Special in just five minutes. Via Chris Glass.
R2-D2 kidnapped from Swiss museum. "According to local police, the theft must have occurred some time between the beginning of the month and Tuesday." With security like that, no wonder.
The "Big Trouble in Little China" theme song, performed by director John Carpenter. And BTiLC fans, there's still four shopping days 'til Christmas.
Our film conversation at lunch started out strong, but went downhill fast: 1, 2, 3, 4.
Wonderfully detailed tech interview with producer Joe Chappelle about cinematography on The Wire, the greatest show ever on television.
Fårö Document, 1979.
CP hero Walter Murch on Youth Without Youth. Plus, here's a too-short clip from Studio Ichioka's Walter Murch on Editing documentary.
Originals vs. Remakes. Film vs. film, point by point. Via Eye of the Goof.
Top 10 Christmas Moments in Non-Christmas Films. Really glad The Apartment made the cut.
Big news for little people.
Music vid of the moment: Super Furry Animals' The Gift That Keeps Giving. Stick around all the way to the gruesome end.
All the trailers from Lars von Trier at Twitch.
David Bordwell on film aspect ratios and Jean Luc Godard. Via Green Cine Daily.
Intro to Automan, the 1983 tv show "loosely and unofficially based on Tron."
Related to the last: The Wheelers from Return to Oz.
From our lunch chat today: Two forgotten 90s films worth checking out: Free Enterprise and …And God Spoke.
Song playing on repeat in my head all morning for reasons unknown to me: HBO's 80s-era intro animation.
Related to the last: Terri Timely's music vid for The Little Ones' Ordinary Song. Via Video Static.
In today's edition of expensive director paired with moving walls, Wes Anderson follows Sam Mendes' series of spots for eBay with a series of spots for AT&T.
Fun interview with director Ruben Fleischer about making the Pro Nails music vid here in Chicago.
"I make things that are very simple looking. Everything I do, I kind of simplify, simplify, simplify." A Pretty Cool People Interview with Mike Mills.
The whispering billboard. Creepy.
If there were an Oscar's category for "Best Cinematography in a Lego Film," Night Owl's The Crucible would be a lock to win.
Where Commercials Come From, an excerpt from a 1974 documentary featuring George Lois. Just great. Via Adland.
Just saw The Golden Compass and was afraid it would be a little cheesy. Surprisingly it was the best film I've seen in quite a long time. Very creative, stunning visuals and a great story line. Two thumbs way up.
Stills from the Wachowski brothers' Speed Racer.
"A lengthy title does not always mean that a movie is unwatchable, though generally this is the case." Joe Queenan on the art of movie titles.
Much missed Freaks and Geeks was one of my favorite tv shows ever. Here's a sort of reunion with James Franco and Seth Rogen in a clip from Judd Apatow's latest The Pineapple Express. Pot smoking and swearing included.
The Hasslein Curve, a timeline of Planet of the Apes. Also, for BB, the musical version.
Music vid of the moment: Plastic Operator's Home 0207 by director Pete Circuitt.
While our documentary about Aesthetic Apparatus is pretty good, it can't possibly compare to the one they made themselves: Aesthetic Apparatus: How We Do.
Bright and colorful? Check. Really weird? Check. Makes you feel kind of dirty after watching it? Check. Ten bucks says David LaChappelle had something to do with this Playstation 3 spot.
Best part of the Scorcese does Hitchock post below was the Thelma Schoonmaker cameo. Here's a great interview with her from 1991.
Scorcese does Hitchcock. The Key to Reserva. Fab. "His film. Not mine." Via Green Cine Daily.
If you read just one guilty pleasure negative review today, make it this one: Larry Dobrow on Quarterlife, "a web-only series that does for whiny 20-something artistes what Thirtysomething did for whiny 30-something yuppieheads: namely, makes me want to punch them in the throat."
So today was our weekly lunch with the 37's and during the course of conversation, I brought up a tv show I used to watch when I was little called "The Magic Door". No one else had ever heard of it and I'm pretty sure they all thought I was nuts. Well, thanks to the internets, my sanity is no longer in question.
Had heard about how great this was, but hadn't seen it yet: Virgin America's Safety Video, by Wild Brain, who also makes BB's favorite tv show, Yo Gabba Gabba!. Via DesignNotes.
More about the previous post here, from the producers, Windfall Films in London.
One of my favorite commercials ever, Richard Burton reads Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood, Nice night for a drive. Brilliant.
Fabulous, 52 of Hitchcock's films reduced down to just 1000 frames each, 1000 Frames of Hitchcock. Here's one of my faves, Strangers On A Train.
You know the Wilhelm Scream. Yes you do.
WFMU on Russell Mulcahy, the director who invented the 80s music video.
Related to the last, from David Thompson, A Fistful-of-Leone, the official Ennio Morricone site and TSWDB.
The Spaghetti Western Orchestra peforms the soundtracks from films scored by Ennio Morricone. Fab. Via 1+1=3.
Once again, Frontline chronicles the truth behind the political quagmire, this time in Darfur. Harrowing, heartbreaking, seemingly hopeless, On Our Watch.
Star Trek's 10 Cheesiest Classic Creatures.
"The videographer had technical difficulties with his wireless mic set and couldn't capture any of the interview questions. This is what we did to salvage the segment." Hilarious.
For BB: Subtitles in pirated copies of Arrested Development.
From the Colbert Report writers, FotA Pete Grosz makes an impassioned plea to consider the executives in this whole writer's strike mess.
"A great American city has been destroyed. Hey, let's sell cars!" A great Bob Garfield zero stars review of a spot for Ford.
Mad Max Filming Locations. Via 1+1=3.
Apparently Spence and I have a lot to learn. Star Wars Episode III: Rise of the Empire (Trailer) and a nice detailed and illustrated behind the scenes document.
Sci-Fi starship size comparison chart. Via Kottke.
A clip from the documentary about a CP hero: Murch.
Jonathan Rosenbaum on Blade Runner, the actual, definitive, ultimate director's cut. Local note, the film closes tonight at the Music Box.
Following an earlier post: Twilight Zone: Planet of the Apes. "Rod Serling also co-wrote the screenplay for Planet of the Apes, which is why the movie plays like a two-hour episode of the show. Thanks to digital video editing, I was able to re-edit the movie as an episode of the show."
Related to the last. 1967 shooting script for PotA.
Gary V. tastes three wines from Costco.
Music vid of the moment (maybe an all time favorite too): St. Vincent's Jesus Saves I Spend by Bucky Fukumoto.
At Noir of the Week, William Hare's three-film analysis of director John Huston; The Maltese Falcon, The Asphalt Jungle and Fat City. Via GCD.
Tag Gallagher's massive volume on director John Ford has been completely rewritten and reconfigured and is available as a download. Wow. Check it, then buy it. Via The Cartoonist.
My favorite horror movie scene ever: Night of the Demons. (NSFW: gore, skeezy goth chick, Bauhaus)
The first report from The Office convention in Scranton, PA. Claire's doing the reporting, I'm taking the photos. It's pretty weird.
A brilliant, sprawling essay by David Bordwell, Do filmmakers deserve the last word?
Composer Danny Elfman picks flicks for NPR. Want something of his stuck in your head? OK you asked for it.
An imaginative mix of cutouts, and shadow puppets inhabits this dream-like animation by Toutine.
The controversial new Terrence Malick-supervised transfer of the unassailably great Days of Heaven is now available. Here's some background on how it came about.
Steven King's novels and short stories are very tricky to adapt to the big screen. Case in point, IT. John Boy Walton? John Ritter? Awful. Or, it can be done well, The Shining. Will be interesting to see what happens here, King's "The Mist" has been adapted for the screen by Frank Darabont, who adapted The Green Mile. Here's the trailer for The Mist.
JC left early to get in line: Stanley Kubrick Directors Series DVD set, out tomorrow.
Rock on Film, nice categorical survey from GreenCine.
Paul Rand Tribute Film, attributed to motion graphics firm, Imaginary Forces, though we're not entirely convinced that that's correct (Update: It is correct and Alissa proves it's so).
Trailer for Monster Road about stop-motion animator and Frank Zappa collaborator, Bruce Bickford. Via 2 or 3 Things.
Kirk and Spock on the bus, from Star Trek 4: all seven alternate versions, including this one, which is clearly the best.
Also Erol Morris related and per our conversation at the bar last night: the Ames Room explained. For more, here's the Wikipedia entry.
Erol Morris' beautiful Full Tilt Poker spots.
A first look at the cast of JJ Abrams' Star Trek.
Department Six produces "limited edition Fine Art Prints of original visuals sourced from the film and TV industry." A great idea, elegantly presented.
"Massive dehumanization, totalitarian government, rampant disease, post-apocalyptic terrains, cyber-genetic technologies, societal chaos and widespread urban violence." Top 50 Dystopian Movies of All Time.
Jeff Scher's Grand Central. Via Green Cine Daily.
This is pretty incredible: Vimeo goes HD. Wow.
Share Louisville, a great tourism campaign, picking on other cities. Via Andy Rutledge.
The Original Must-See Movie Checklist.
I love the internets. This morning's discussion revolved around trying to remember a scary ventriloquist movie from when we were little. Try as we might, BB and I could not think of the name. The issue has now been resolved.
13eme Rue commercial by Bect Euro RSCG Paris. NSFK(ids). Via Ibav.
Yesterday would have been Jacques Tati's 100th birtHDay. Here's the definitive DVD edition of Playtime and the original 1967 trailer.
The FX television network's unnecessarily creepy posters.
"Little piles of films started to aggregate under the overhanging platform of my bed. This was substandard storage in hot weather, as the temperature in my little room rose into the high eighties." An Informal History of Prelinger Archives by Rick Prelinger.
Trailer for Ron Howard's directorial debut, 1977's Grand Theft Auto. Via Dark Roasted.
Apple's 1984 spot gets focus tested. Via AdFreak.
"The handwriting must be neat and finely executed rather than angular chicken-scratch. Someone who spends hours every day writing screeds all over every surface of their room, no matter how batshit crazy, has had plenty of practice and ought to be able to lay down some readable handwriting." Rules for invoking the "crazy person writes all over his walls" film cliche.
Forget the Film, Watch the Titles.
Have been watching the Ken Burn's new documentary about World War 2 playing on PBS, The War. The footage is astonishing, disturbingly graphic and the veteran's stories are amazing. Say what you want, the man knows how to tell a story.
Ridley Scott has finally created the Blade Runner he always imagined.
2.5 tonnes of plasticine. 200 bunnies. 1 30 foot giant rabbit. 40 Animators. Sony and Bravia are up to it again. Here's a sneak peek at the new ad, Play-Doh
Hmm. Tony Scott to remake an all-time CP fave, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. Which is really just an excuse to link this soon-to-be-stuck-in-your-head theme from David Shire's amazing score.
In Search of Steve Ditko, a BBC Four documentary by Jonathan Ross about Spider-Man's co-creator. Via David Thompson.
Vader's labored breathing? Just pausing between sets.
Edward Copeland's The Satyajit Ray Memorial Anything-But-Definitive List of Top 100 Non-English Language Films and how they got there.
Filmtech nerdery. "...running through the same arguments one more time and ending up, once again, at the same conclusion. It all starts when Rainer Werner Fassbinder chooses to shoot Berlin Alexanderplatz, his epic masterpiece, at 25 frames per second."
"It's like when everyone laughed in 24 Hour Party People when we lost money on every copy sold of 'Blue Monday' because of the expensive sleeve. I thought, 'You bastards - that's my life, that is, that really happened!'" How to make a film about the short and tragic life of Ian Curtis.
Absolutely everything about "Daisy," the infamous 1962 Democratic National Committee election commercial. Here's the spot itself.
A Japanese game show as metaphor for life. Via Stan.
Ma'am? Just one more thing…
One take commercial for Brylcreem. Wish my mornings went that smoothly. Instead, I contend with this. No, I'm not over it yet, okay?
Smellovision Attempting a Comeback.
The End.
SE and I are huge fans of the Inspector Lynley Mystery series on PBS. Tonight had a brand new episode and more to come. Be sure to read author Elizabeth George's books that the BBC series is based on, heads up for a great read.
"Hal was out on location, miles from Hollywood. The last thing on earth he needed was to contact the home office to discuss the idea of Chance walking on water." How the last shot in Hal Ashby's Being There actually got made. Here's the Jerzy Kosinski and Robert C. Jones' script for the film, an all-time CP fave.
The 'The End' Pool, a collection of 'The End' title cards from films. Via I Like.
FotA and Field Tested Books contributor George Saunders on Letterman last night.
Todd Haynes's radical, prismatic, exploding Dylan whatsit, I'm Not There, reviewed by Larry Gross in Film Comment. Trailer. Via GreenCine Daily.
UbuWeb Summer 2007.
"It's impossible to calculate the full impact of John Hughes' 1986 feel good flick, but sitting on the steps of Glenbrook North High School in Northbrook, Illinois, I think I'm pretty close to a full accounting." Recreating Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Ferrari and all. Awesome. Via That's How.
Just so you know, the company, CP Productions, that is financing Joust: The Movie, is not us. We are, however, looking into making Dig Dug: The Musical.
Why would you want to submit an entry for the make your own Mitt Romney commercial contest when there's a perfectly good one already made: Think Mitt Think.
A collection of retro production company motion logos. Maybe they could do a re-edit to include the Coudal Broadcasting Corporation promo?
My daughter has been singing Party in my Tummy non-stop for a week.
Sweet resource for small-gauge filmmakers, OnSuper8.
Hipster Olympics.
Beautiful spot for Ikea by Martin DeThurah.
These are the greatest films I ever heard. -Ken Russell.
"Man, was I depressed. I called Terrence Malick and told him of my evaluation. We discussed that we'd most likely have to transfer the original IP (interpositive), but that I was going to try to get Paramount to make a new one. Much to my surprise, they agreed..." Lee Kline on the work going into a new transfer of Malick's Days of Heaven for the Criterion Collection. Great, great news. Cha-ching.
Noted without comment, American Gladiators returns.
We're a couple days late but Ironic Sans wasn't. Dog Day Anniversary.
Saul Bass title sequence from Seconds, John Frankenheimer's superb 1966 thriller. Via David Thompson.
Very funny spot for an New Zealand adult tv channel, Metaphors. And there are seriously too many to count. Via AdRants.
"Hey, this is Henry Rollins. Answer your f**kng phone."
Shaping up to be an album full of great music videos comes Travis' My Eyes, following the equally great Closer, both by director Mike Baldwin.
How Walt Disney Cartoons are Made, from 1950. Via Dark Roasted.
"A spectre is haunting contemporary cinema: the shaky shot." David Bordwell's Unsteadicam Chronicles. Via Scanners.
EW jumps the gun with an early fall movie preview section.
"Widescreen. Black and white. I think we talked about shooting it at lunch one day. We both like the same things. It was an easy decision." Cinematographer Gordon Willis on shooting Manhattan.
Keepon the Robot dances to Spoon's Don't You Evah.
For BB: Jim Jarmusch segments from Blue in the Face, a film that would pair well with Brian Taylor's Smokin' print.
Marc Bruckert's title sequence from Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Delicatessen. Via Calligraphy and Typography in the Cinema at D&T. [translate]
No need to post anything else today. IFC and Nerve.com pick the 50 Greatest Sex Scenes in Cinema. SFW unless you click on "watch the scene".
This collection of fifty local television commercials includes a Chicago favorite for Victory Auto Wreckers, so it must be a pretty good list. Via The Cartoonist.
"A Mediterranean cruise, bright sunshine, in black and white widescreen images unlike anything I'd ever seen." Scorsese on Antonioni and seeing L'Avventura for the first time. Via Archinect.
"Will rot your child's mind, drain her soul and likely encourage early Botox dependency." Defective Yeti's Bad Review Revue of the new film, Bratz.
This could either be incredibly stupid or the most brilliant thing ever, depending on how it's approached: Ridley Scott Talks Monopoly Movie. Via AdFreak.
Following up on a lunch conversation MS, BB and I had three weeks ago, this is this Andy Kaufman parody of My Dinner with Andre I couldn't remember the name of: My Breakfast with Blassie. If you can track down a copy, it's well worth it.
The opening to Mission: Magic!, Rick Springfield's 1973 cartoon. Via WFMU.
Speaking of real dolls... Guys And Dolls is a documentary on the subject.
Trailer for All This and World War II, the bizarre 1976 film featuring a soundtrack of nothing but Beatles covers by people like Keith Moon and Frankie Valli. Super weird.
Bad Spock Drawings. I like that it features both bad drawings of Spock and drawings of Spock being bad.
The peyote trip from The Minor Accomplishments of Jackie Woodman (Season 2 starts Sunday on IFC).
Um, I think we figured out this whole J.J. Abrams Cloverfield movie trailer mystery thing, in case you're curious.
Tarzan lobby card art and lots more about the guy at Greenbriar Picture Shows including this handy way to check how you stack up to Johnny Weissmuller's physical perfection.
Teaser site for Neil Marshall's Doomsday. The end is nigh indeed.
A letter to Roger Ebert regarding Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up from the actor who "ended up as a kiss and a corpse." Via Green Cine Daily.
"I meant exactly what I said: that we are saddled with a culture that hasn't advanced as far as science. Scientific man is already on the moon, and yet we are still living with the moral concepts of Homer." From a 1969 interview with Michelangelo Antonioni who passed away last night. It's a bad week for heroes.
More than one hundred years of film sizes. Excellent overview, found among other things.
Odd but captivating trailer for The Mystery of Picasso, a 1951 documentary by Henri-Georges Clouzot. More information here. Via Rashomon.
The image.
Ingmar Bergman on artistic freedom, from a '71 Dick Cavett interview (wmv).
Ingmar Bergman Face to Face, a great resource including scans from the man's notebooks and other interesting bits and pieces.
Ingmar Bergman 1918-2007.
Wonderfully prehistoric Nissin Noodles spot from Japan. Check out more versions from the series. Via Neatorama.
Airplane! vs. Zero Hour. "The rights to the movie were purchased by the makers of Airplane! and they were able to use the screenplay almost verbatim."
The Yes Men on Bill Moyers. A nice introduction if you don't already know their brilliant work. Via Eyebeam.
Something is Fishy in Hollywood. Perfect for anyone who enjoys Photoshopped movie posters and/or bad fishing puns. Via AdFreak.
Veer's The Skinny has the poster for Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited and in the comments Amanda notes that the most surprising thing about it is that it's not set in Futura.
Titan, A Place Like Home?, BBC doc about the Huygens mission to Titan, which landed in January 2005. Via Cpluv.
"Their task is to explode a stellar bomb, 'with a mass equivalent to Manhattan island,' on the surface of the sun. The effect will be, we are told, 'to create a star within a star,' a plan that has not succeeded since the union of Vincente Minnelli and Judy Garland." Anthony Lane on Sunshine.
The Making of Star Guitar, Michel Gondry's best music vid ever. Via IBC.
The making of the Sprint "Dreams" spot. Stop-motion animation with flashlights. Via Cameron Moll.
Donald Gunn's twelve master formats for televison advertising, at Slate.
The Segway Steadicam. Smoother than smooth.
Montage of screen-caps from Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, 1928. Lovely. By Hans Bacher of Animation Treasures, a site to keep an eye on.
Synopsis of Peter Greenaway's Nightwatching, the film currently sporting our "most-anticipated" tag. Here are a couple scenes from the film and the director writing about the questions he dealing with. Finally, the painting, and why we love Greenaway.
Flocked, an awesome sitcom pilot directed by our own Steve Delahoyde, (and starring Colbert Report writer/Sonic pitchman Peter Grosz), premieres Saturday in the Chicago Comedy TV Pilot Competition. Network execs will choose a winner from 12 pilots. Steve also directed the promo film for the contest.
A Business POV video profile of our very favorite Chicago store, Rotofugi.
One of my fave tv shows, Dinner For Five is selling the first four seasons on DVD. As a promo, Jon Favreau sits down with Robert Downey Jr. to chat. You can see the video here. Via AICN.
Twitch previews the line-up for Fantastic Fest 2007. Screened at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, the festival shows the "best in new science-fiction, fantasy, horror, animation, crime, Asian, and all around badass cinema." Via Green Cine Daily.
Um, maybe SD and I should call our parents.
Gotta stop what you're doing when you get a mail from Hillman Curtis announcing that there's a new short film up. E