Encounters At the End of the World, the new Werner Herzog documentary film about the community of American scientists in Antarctica, is coming to Pittsburgh. Roger Ebert gives the film four stars, saying:

It is a poem of oddness and beauty. Herzog is like no other filmmaker, and to return to him is to be welcomed into a world vastly larger and more peculiar than the one around us.

Here, the film is showing alongside, but sadly not a part of, “Life on Mars: New Perspectives”, a series of films every Sunday during August co-sponsored by the Carnegie Museum of Art. The series of movies “explores similar themes of alienation, dystopia, and new ways of seeing the world,” themes begging to be explored in a film covering the world’s largest desert. And though Encounters is ostensibly about the people living in that cold world, it is ultimately about the cold world itself.

Over the course of Herzog’s journey, nature-in-the wild shares equal time with human nature. His encounters are alternately surreal, absurd, profound and sometimes, all of the above.

Hopefully, Herzog takes us through not only the beauty of Antarctica, but also the unflinching desolation lying just below a thin, cracking layer of ice, or in the midst of a blinding snowstorm. That thick mix, hardly separated from one moment to the next, is where Antarctica’s real wonder comes from.

Objectified – (uhb-jek-tuh-fahyd) n., the new documentary film on industrial design by Gary Hustwit, the filmmaker behind Helvetica.

Objectified is a feature-length independent documentary about industrial design. It’s a look at the creativity at work behind everything from toothbrushes to tech gadgets. It’s about the people who re-examine, re-evaluate and re-invent our manufactured environment on a daily basis. It’s about personal expression, identity, consumerism, and sustainability. It’s about our relationship to mass-produced objects and, by extension, the people who design them.

Through vérité footage and in-depth conversations, the film documents the creative processes of some of the world’s most influential designers, and looks at how the things they make impact our lives. What can we learn about who we are, and who we want to be, from the objects with which we surround ourselves?

Read Hustwit’s post about the film.

Take a movie scene, add a completely inappropriate soundtrack, and ruin the scene:

Well, ripersnifler might have just turned 2001 into the greatest music video, but you get the idea. It started on Something Awful, Kottke has a few more, and YouTube has them all.

WATCHMEN TRAILER MARCH 2009 OMG PONIES

Watch it in HD over at Apple Trailers.

Great thread over at Ask Metafilter about actors going overboard.

Famously, Dustin Hoffman kept himself up for days and made a wreck of himself to play his part in “Marathon Man.” When Laurence Olivier saw the state he was in, he said, “Next time, try acting.”

The full version of Pixar’s animated short “Presto” that precedes Wall-E in theaters. Great little short about a rabbit dealing with his pet magician because he’s not being properly fed.

SPOILER ALERTS! Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: The Abridged Script:

CATE takes the skull and places it on a THRONE. It then turns into an ACTUAL ALIEN and makes her head explode. The ALIENS pile into a GIANT UFO and fly off into SPACE.

HARRISON FORD

Wow. Considering that the first movie revolved around a magical box made by God that melts faces when opened, it’s really astonishing that this movie managed to be so incredibly stupid by comparison.

JOHN HURT

I can’t believe that the crystal skull wanted you to return it to the city just so that aliens could have blown your head up. Those aliens are total assholes.

SHIA LABEOUF

Seriously, what kind of jerks would intentionally trick people into thinking they were going to get something awesome, but then give them something so awful it makes their brains melt instead?

GEORGE LUCAS AND STEVEN SPIELBERG

Rich jerks! Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!

END

Did I mention this movie was terrible?

Das Rad is a German animated short chronicling the history of mankind…from the perspective of a couple of rocks.

Pulp Shakespeare:

ACT I SCENE 2. A road, morning. Enter JULES and VINCENT, murderers.

V: And know’st thou what the French name cottage pie?
J: Say they not cottage pie, in their own tongue?
V: But nay, their tongues, for speech and taste alike
Are strange to ours, with their own history:
Gaul knoweth not a cottage from a house.
J: What say they then, pray?
V: Hachis Parmentier.
J: Hachis Parmentier! What name they cream?
V: Cream is but cream, only they say la crème.
J: What do they name black pudding?
V: I know not;
I visited no inn it could be bought.

More here and here.

My fellow abbot whom I’m soon to break.
My drainage hath consumed your whole milkshake.

The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane with a less-than-favorable review of Sex and the City, which is getting similar reviews across the board.

The women in “Sex and the City,” by that standard, are little better than also-rans, and their gallops of conspicuous consumption seem oddly joyless, as displacement activities tend to be. “When Samantha couldn’t get off, she got things,” Carrie says. Look at the beam in your own eye, sister. Mr. Big not only buys her a penthouse apartment (“I got it”), he offers to customize the space for her shoes and other fetishes. “I can build you a better closet,” he says, as if that were a binding condition of their sexual harmony: if he builds it, she will come.

Dear Hollywood: STOP TRYING TO KILL ROBERT DOWNEY JR.!

Downey has noted that his recreational drug use in the 1980s did not spiral into a full-blown debilitating addiction until he played an addict in Less Than Zero. As the star recently told Starpulse, “Until that movie I took my drugs after work and on the weekends. That changed on Less Than Zero. The role was like the ghost of Christmas Future. I became an exaggeration of the character.” Downey’s subsequent addiction resulted in arrests, incarceration, and the near-demise of his acting career. Nobody wants anything like that to happen again, right?

And yet Downey’s next roles included injured on a ton of painkillers in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Substance D abuser in A Scanner Darkly, drug and alcohol abuser in Zodiac, alcoholic in Charlie Bartlett, and finally alcoholic again in Iron Man.

Seriously, guys: Please cut it out. Downey is a terrific actor and seems to be a nice guy. Find him a role as a yoga instructor or the owner of a health food store. Let him play a vegan FBI agent or a Seventh Day Adventist shock jock. Make him Captain Frickin’ America. But this has got to stop.

(If only here was not so good at these roles, you know?)

New Dark Knight trailer:

New York Times Sunday Magazine interview with Morgan Spurlock, director of Super Size Me:

What about “Super Size Me,” your foray into the world of fast food and weight gain. Didn’t that make a fortune?

Yeah, I’m a hundredaire. It’s still a documentary film.

Why did no one tell me Ben Stiller is directing a film with blackface?

Robert Downey Jr. plays Kirk Lazarus, a very serious Oscar-winning actor cast in the most expensive Vietnam War film ever. Problem is, Lazarus’s character, Sgt. Osiris, was originally written as black. So Lazarus decides to dye his skin and play Osiris, um, authentically.

”If it’s done right, it could be the type of role you called Peter Sellers to do 35 years ago,” Downey says. ”If you don’t do it right, we’re going to hell.”