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 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.

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.

Watch it in HD over at Apple Trailers.

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.”

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?

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.