Rewind Kindly – Inspired by Be Kind Rewind, Austin based Filmmaking Frenzy is putting on a contest for people to “complete an up-to-five-minute, homemade, low-budget remake of a popular hollywood film”. Much love to Star Wars.

The Appeal of the MacBook Air – John Gruber proselytizes for the MacBook Air a bit more, comparing it to a sexy convertible coupe (not unlike the iPod Mini or Nano). I pretty much agree with Gruber, and am still surprised that there is a strong group of people who foresee the MacBook Air failing. Would I buy it? No. But it is a good machine for a lot of people besides me. (Then again, this is a lot more than $50 we’re talking about; analogies only go so far.)

Things I have learned from mostly linkblogging for more than 10 years – Ben Tesch has been speaking to my heart lately with all of his ideas.

It makes sense that a video post and a photo post and an audio post look different, but why is there only one type of text post? Why is a Tweet handled in the same way as a 2,000-word essay? Where is the book or movie review type? Jason has done this kind of stuff for years, and had to manage entire multiple blogs just to do it. Why can’t I take a feed, create a new post template specifically for it, and plug the feed into it? And if I can, why is it so difficult?

Alltop.com – Like popurls.com except organized by topic. Click a topic and find the newest stories from at least thirty related sites. For example, click Science and get the top stories from New Scientist, Nature, New York Times, ABC, and more. Or in their own words:

We help you explore your passions by collecting stories from “all the top” sites on the web. We’ve grouped these collections—”aggregations”—into individual Alltop sites based on topics such as celebrity gossip, fashion, gaming, sports, politics, automobiles, and Macintosh. At each Alltop site, we display the latest five stories from thirty or more sites on a single page.

In honor of the recently departed Groundhog Day (February 2), I would like to dwell for a moment on a film that with a premise as absurd as the holiday itself: Groundhog Day with the dashing Bill Murray.

Though lasting a mere 101 minutes, the film follows Murray as he repeats the same day an almost immeasurable amount of times over. Exact numbers are still out of reach, but some crafty sleuth work by Jamie Zawinski sets the span at a minimum of FOUR YEARS. (The director, for what it’s worth, puts it at about ten years.)

# How long does it take to learn ice sculpture, if that’s all you do? Six months? A year?

# How long does it take to become a good piano player, if you begin in your early 40s when you have your first lesson? Concensus among those present at casa del jwz was “at least two years.”

Mind numbing.

More contemporary (and inspired no doubt by the film the United States National Film Registry thought fit to deem “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”), Jason Biggs stars in a comedy short entitled “The Glitch”. Bill Murray should be thanking the flying spaghetti monster he got to repeat an entire day.

Last week, Warner Bros proclaimed its support of Blu-ray over HD DVD. Some still see hope for HD DVD, but CNET is doubtful. Their Blu-ray vs HD DVD guide now has an editor’s note, saying, “Because of the recent news that Warner Bros. Entertainment will be exclusively supporting Blu-ray, CNET recommends refraining from purchasing an HD DVD player in the near future.”

Of course, who cares about the mainstream movie studios?. What really drives the wonderful format industry is pornography. The porn industry’s support of HD DVD last year seemed to spell doom for Blu-ray, but with major porn companies now producing DVDs in both formats, the end of the war is still up in the air.

Still, I don’t think anyone watching porn in high definition on their 50″ LCD TV will have much to complain about for long.

Since the trailer for the new Batman movie was released about a week ago, I have watched it maybe 10 or 300 million times (and a few dozen more since I’ve started this post). Indeed, I have watched it so often that I have had time to do little else (not even blog about it). What I didn’t see until now was MTV’s shot-by-shot analysis of the trailer.

The makeup job done on Heath Ledger is horrifying. The high-angle shot at 58 seconds of Ledger staring tiredly up at the camera is all I needed to believe The Dark Knight is going to be a fitting sequel to the fantastic Batman Begins. I predict director Chris Nolan is going to prove yet again how much raw vitality he can pump into this once-dying franchise.

Of course, actually utilizing the stunning source material is a good start for any director translating a comic book into a film. (Nolan and screenwriter David Goyer did similarly with Batman Begins.)

After seeing the movie Juno last night, I am happy to report it has taken the #1 slot in Roger Ebert’s ten best films of 2007 (and other shenanigans).

Juno is, as Ebert says, an extremely wonderful, heart-warming film, and absolutely reaffirms the moviegoing experience. It manages to be consistently hilarious despite (or, I should say, in spite of) its serious topic. The half-Kimya Dawson soundtrack and almost pretentious obsession with punk and b-movie horror keeps pushing the film toward being a generic, forgotten indie flick, but the comedy, superb acting, and delicately crafted characters propel Juno far from the grasp of humdrumness.

Make it through the first ten minutes or so of forced one-liners, and you’ll be rewarded with this year’s finest film.

More here, here, and (of course) here.

I’ve said it before, and I shall say it again: Apple Trailers is pretty much the love of my life. A boatload of trailers were just added, inspiring me to present the following collection of sweet trailers. There are so many wonderful looking movies being released, it is difficult to not post every single one of them, but for the reader’s sake, I’ll keep it reasonable.

Of the ones below, let me just say that In Bruges is bound to be hilarious, Teeth is ridiculous, Youth Without Youth will no doubt reaffirm Coppola’s power as a director, Persepolis is thankfully animated, The Band’s Visit might be this year’s “#1 Movie That I Regret Not Seeing” on account of it oh-so-assuredly not being released anywhere near me, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly looks to be as gorgeous visually as it is uplifting emotionally.

In Bruges – Bruges (pronounced “broozh”), the most well-preserved medieval city in the whole of Belgium, is a welcoming destination for travellers from all over the world. But for hit men Ray (Colin Farrell) and Ken (Brendan Gleeson), it could be their final destination; a difficult job has resulted in the pair being ordered right before Christmas by their London boss Harry (two-time Academy Award nominee Ralph Fiennes) to go and cool their heels in the storybook Flemish city for a couple of weeks. Very much out of place amidst the gothic architecture, canals, and cobbled streets, the two hit men fill their days living the lives of tourists.

Teeth – TEETH tells the story of High school student Dawn (Jess Weixler) works hard at suppressing her budding sexuality by being the local chastity group’s most active participant. Her task is made even more difficult by her bad boy stepbrother Brad’s (John Hensley) increasingly provocative behavior at home. A stranger to her own body, innocent Dawn discovers she has a toothed vagina when she becomes the object of violence. As she struggles to comprehend her anatomical uniqueness, Dawn experiences both the pitfalls and the power of being a living example of the vagina dentata myth.

Youth Without Youth – Francis Ford Coppola’s Youth Without Youth stars Tim Roth as Dominic Matei, and aging professor of linguistics who survives a cataclysmic event to find his youth miraculously restored. Dominic’s physical rejuvenation is matched by a highly evolved intellect, which attracts the attention of Nazi scientists, forcing him into exile.

Persepolis – Based on the comic by Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis is the poignant story of a young girl in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. It is through the eyes of precocious and outspoken nine year old Marjane that we see a people’s hopes dashed as fundamentalists take power – forcing the veil on women and imprisoning thousands. Clever and fearless, she outsmarts the “social guardians” and discovers punk, ABBA and Iron Maiden.

The Band’s Visit – Once, not long ago, a small Egyptian Police band arrived in Israel. They came to play at an initiation ceremony but, due to bureaucracy, bad luck, or for whatever reason, they were left stranded at the airport. They tried to manage on their own, only to find themselves in a desolate, almost forgotten, small Israeli town, somewhere in the heart of the desert. A lost band in a lost town.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly – THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY is the remarkable true story of Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric), a successful and charismatic editor-in-chief of French Elle, who believes he is living his life to its absolute fullest when a sudden stroke leaves him in a life-altered state. While the physical challenges of Bauby’s fate leave him with little hope for the future, he begins to discover how his life’s passions, his rich memories and his newfound imagination can help him achieve a life without boundaries.

And so on and so on and so on.

I recently saw No Country for Old Men, which was quite excellent. I doubt one could bring your kids, both because there is some intense violence, but also because as a very direct interpretation of a Cormac Mccarthy novel the movie has a very philosophical (read ambiguous) resolution. The Coen brothers, though, are master filmmakers and, as AO Scott notes, you can’t help but feel a deep respect for their craft. Great performances from all involved, especially Javier Bardem who really scares the hell out of you whenever he is on screen.

As Robert Ebert notes the cadence and timbre of the actors translating the novel’s words are mesmerizing:

The movie opens with the flat, confiding voice of Tommy Lee Jones. He describes a teenage killer he once sent to the chair. The boy had killed his 14-year-old girlfriend. The papers described it as a crime of passion, “but he tolt me there weren’t nothin’ passionate about it. Said he’d been fixin’ to kill someone for as long as he could remember. Said if I let him out of there, he’d kill somebody again. Said he was goin’ to hell. Reckoned he’d be there in about 15 minutes.”

These words sounded verbatim to me from No Country for Old Men, the novel by Cormac McCarthy, but I find they are not quite. And their impact has been improved upon in the delivery. When I get the DVD of this film, I will listen to that stretch of narration several times; Jones delivers it with a vocal precision and contained emotion that is extraordinary, and it sets up the entire film, which regards a completely evil man with wonderment, as if astonished that that such a merciless creature could exist.

The story is simple enough. Llwelyn Moss comes across a great deal of money when he stumbles on a drug deal gone wrong. Anton Chigurth is hunting him for the money and is a cold killer. As Moss puts it in the movie “What would you stop at to get back your two million dollars?” Chigurth speaks in bemused riddles as he murders people fairly indiscriminately across Texas. Some of the dialogue throughout the movie is as funny as it was terrifying. An example:

Anton Chigurh: [indicating bag of cashews] How much?
Gas Station Proprietor: Sixty-nine cent.
Anton Chigurh: This. And the gas.
Gas Station Proprietor: Y’all gettin’ any rain up your way?
Anton Chigurh: What way would that be?
Gas Station Proprietor: I seen you was from Dallas.
Anton Chigurh: What business is it of yours where I’m from, friendo?
Gas Station Proprietor: I didn’t mean nothin’ by it.
Anton Chigurh: Didn’t mean nothin’.
Gas Station Proprietor: I was just passin’ the time.
Anton Chigurh: Just passin’ the time.
Gas Station Proprietor: Well sir I apologize. If you don’t wanna accept that, I don’t know what else to do for you. Will there be something else?
Anton Chigurh: I don’t know. Will there?
Gas Station Proprietor: Is somethin’ wrong?
Anton Chigurh: With what?
Gas Station Proprietor: With anything?
Anton Chigurh: Is that what you’re asking me? Is there something wrong with anything?
Gas Station Proprietor: Will there be anything else?
Anton Chigurh: You already asked me that.
Gas Station Proprietor: Well… I need to see about closin’.
Anton Chigurh: See about closing.
Gas Station Proprietor: Yessir.
Anton Chigurh: What time do you close?
Gas Station Proprietor: Now. We close now.
Anton Chigurh: Now is not a time. What time do you close?

Scenes like the one above are some of those I enjoyed most in the movie. These random actors who have to interact with Chigurth, confused looks on their faces with some murdered and some not. The looks of absolutely confusion that they experience scares me, because it is how I would act if presented with the circumstances. Some find this disturbing to the point of disliking the film, as one reader of the Times notes:

If the viewer enjoys seeing the innocent fear for their lives, and those who go out of their way to help a stranger be summarily executed for it, then this is the film for them. I saw no justification in the making of this film. Rather, the Coens play a well-meaning audience the way the psychopath in the film plays with his victims. A waste of time for anyone sucker enough to watch.

“This movie is a masterful evocation of time, place, character, moral choices, immoral certainties, human nature and fate,” say Ebert, and Scott concludes with “And the minutes fly by, leaving behind some unsettling notions about the bloody, absurd intransigence of fate and the noble futility of human efforts to master it. Mostly, though, No Country for Old Men leaves behind the jangled, stunned sensation of having witnessed a ruthless application of craft.”

Movies galore!

Apple movie trailers is pretty much the love of my life. I’ve been checking the RSS page daily since the website redesign (which, for awhile, wasn’t showing the newest trailers properly), and let me just say that now is an exciting time for cinemaphiles. Well, at least, now may be boring, but the near future is going to be great.

Case in point, a new Wes Anderson movie AND a new Coen Brothers movie are on the way.

Respectively,

The Darjeeling Limited:

No Country For Old Men:

And if that wasn’t proof enough, The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, a documentary on the epic battle between a middle-school science teacher and a hot sauce mogul as they vie for the Guinness Book World Record on the arcade classic, Donkey Kong.

Also notable:

The Golden Compass
Rocket Science
3:10 to Yuma
Death at a Funeral
Into the Wild
2 Days in Paris
Gone Baby Gone (directed by Ben Affleck, surprisingly enough)
Margot at the Wedding
The Ten
30 Days of Night

Holy shit.

J.J. Abrams, creator of Lost and Alias, has a new film to be released next January. Shrouded in secrecy, the film hit the public in the guise of a (terribly teasing) preview before Transformers. The preview was certainly one of the finest and most exciting I have seen in a long time. This is definitely something you should be seeing on the big screen with no conception of what awaits you, but if you’re an impatient bastard, read on.

The greatness of the trailer lives and dies by its twist ending, so it’s really impossible to describe it without ruining it. So, again, GO SEE THE DAMN TRAILER IN THE THEATERS. Or, if you’re still with me, a description of the trailer from firstshowing.net:

It starts off at a party in a loft in New York City for this guy around his mid-20’s who’s leaving (the city). It’s filmed on home video cameras and looks just sort of like another independent drama comedy about this guy. This goes one for a little while when all of a sudden there’s a big earthquake and people start to go a bit crazy and they all run up to the roof to see the lower half of Manhattan, and one of these buildings, erupt into a huge ball of fire after this unidentified object from the sky comes flying down and hits it. Then people really start to go crazy and the camera is dropped and blacks out. Then it comes back up and they’re out running on the streets and all of a sudden this huge flaming object comes flying through the air and lands on the street and it’s the ripped off head of the Statue of Liberty. You can hear this odd freaky roar in the background as more huge flaming/smoking things fly through the air and it ends with people running and screaming.

As for the trailer, Paramount forced Youtube to take down all the videos of the trailer (God knows why), but it persists on Google Video (ha! take that, same company!). If you’ve come this far in the post, then my pleas have fallen on deaf ears anyway, so take a look:

After you hear the roar in the distance, there’s a quick line asking “what animal is that,” further cementing the giant monster idea. And, of course, Ain’t It Cool News has the scoop: “Well, word from inside the company is that CLOVERFIELD is a giant monster movie, featuring something that’s being referred to internally as ‘The Parasite’.”

Other details are sketchy at best, but hopefully a full trailer will be released in the coming months. And hopefully this isn’t some disappointing Lost tie-in.

I am so excited.

UPDATE: The teaser has officially been released. Go to http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount/11808/ for the HD versions, or check out the trailer on YouTube below:

Haruki Murakami has long been one of my favorite authors, and I’ve always been excited by the thought of his stories being adapted into film. However, the sort of dreamy separation from reality that would make his stories so intriguing as film is the same thing that presents a hurdle when trying to make an adaptation. Tony Takitani (IMDB, UK trailer) was the first attempt, an adaptation of a short story by the same name. It was good (don’t get me wrong), but was more of a “literary video” (as in “music video”), with voice-over narration reading the story as the video portrayed the narration.

Murakami’s getting a second chance now as Robert Logevall adapts All God’s Children Can Dance. The trailer shows great promise, although we’ll have to see it how it turns out. IMDB also shows Robert Logevall as the director on another Murakami adaptation also being released this year, K-Town Super Frog, but I am skeptical about Logevall having (a) two Murakami adaptations coming out in one year, or (b) two good Murakami adaptations coming out in one year. Either way! Me! Excited!

In today’s UTI: the power of the porn industry is finally acknowledged, the Stencil Revolution is upon us, and NASA creates a beep pop video. And there’s still over half a UTI to go!

UNDRESSING THE INTERNET EXTRAAAAAVAGANZA!

To start, NASA recently put out a movie of the Huygens probe landing on Saturn’s moon Titan. Lots of bells and whistles, literally, and a very interesting movie for those interested. Let me just add on a big GEEK ALERT, just to warn those who might be tricked into thinking it’s a “cool” movie.

And from there we go to the Stencil Revolution. These guys have put up a tutorial on creating stencils in Photoshop. Nothing too exciting, but remember, things are just warming up.

For everyone who was pissed off when the price of stamps was raised a little while ago… well… a recent proposal included another raise of 3 cents (to 42 cents). Also in the proposal? Forever stamps. These stamps would be sold at the same price as first class stamps, and be good forever. Why the government would do this I don’t know, but it sounds good to me.

There are a lot of websites out there that generate things. Webcomics, pictures with captions, pictures with word balloons, names, and so on. Luckily, they have been collected in The Generator Blog. Waste your day away.

And now a sharp turn toward the freakonomics of prostitution. An ABC News article discusses the economics of prostitution. Sexonomics, as they call it.

The sex business is also in the news lately because of the neverending battle between Blu-ray and HD-DVD. The competition between these DVD formats does not seem to be dying soon, but a decider might choose sides before you know it. Who’s that decider? The porn industry.

Let me take some time out of your busy schedule for just a moment and introduce a couple sites for which I will create their own little subsection…

THE CUTE ZONE

Introduced to me by a special lady out there, the San Diego Zoo has a panda cam for their six giant pandas. The feed never stops, and you can even watch past feeds. Cute!

The other cute site of the day? This one shows us a side of our little feline friends: their sink side. Cats in Sinks is exactly what it sounds like. It’s pictures of cats. In sinks. Doubly cute!

And back to the education.

Hang your books in style! Invisibly
Reference and Outline Maps of the United States!
Convert HTML pages to PDF!
Search for lyrics without the crappy popups!
Host and share up to 5GB of files!

Ahem.

Google purchased, as they often do, a software company which made SketchUp, a 3D design program that easily allows you to create conceptual sketches of anything you could imagine. Generally, 3D software is very expensive, but Google has released a personal use version for absolutely free. See, they still have the whole “Don’t be evil” thing under wraps.

2006 SUMMER MOVIEs

The general opinion of movies this summer: Why bother? At least, so says The Onion with it’s 2006 summer movie preview. For all who don’t know, The A.V. Club is (generally) serious, so don’t ignore it just because it’s from The Onion. The New York Times (below) also came out with a summer preview, but the conciseness, humor, and blatant honesty of The Onion makes it a much better read.

Still… Looking for something a bit more high brow? The New York Times has also come out with a preview of this summer’s movies.

This summer might be a terrible one for blockbusters, but doesn’t it always seem that way? Pajiba.com reflects on the ten worst blockbusters of all time. Number 1 goes to Batman & Robin… as it should.

That’s it. I’m done. It’s 2:34 AM and I’m tired. You get one more link, but only because I’m hungry.

The World’s 50 Best restaurants. I wish I was rich.

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