I haven’t reached a fanboy fever pitch yet but I’m pretty excited for the upcoming Avengers movie. It’s basically been in the works for years now, with each of the characters stories being told in order for them to come together in one, epic battle. The line-up of actors are pretty top notch at this point, and the story is being guided along carefully by the Marvel Architects, so that’s comforting. Add to the mix that you have Mr. Joss Whedon directing the film and you’ve really got something with a whole lot of potential.
Be sure to watch through to the very end for a special appearance by a guy some of you may not expect. The film comes out on May 4, 2012, so we don’t have too long too wait, thank goodness.
Wow, I just realized that is a very depressing title of a post. But then again, almost everything director Lars Von Trier puts his hands on has emerged as an assault on our mental stability. Dancer in the Dark, his biggest hit from eleven years ago, focused on the uphill battle of hope in hopeless times. The followup, Dogville, will trash all of your optimism for the goodness of mankind in its cataclysmic ending. And Antichrist, which Danica elegantly reviewed earlier this year, emerges as a horror movie where the enemy is ones psyche. While there may not be a direct link between each film, I find Von Trier to be a director who projects his views of human nature into each of his feature releases. It is an odd juxtaposition. The cinematography is beautiful and the pace near perfect. Yet at times you cannot watch anymore as it scars your psyche with its piercing imagery and tone.
Melancholia, for better or for worse, follows in the same vein. In a year when doomsday films have reigned supreme, Von Trier has taken the risk of tying a romantic, cerebral drama with the end of the world. And I mean a romantic drama in the vein of Tristan und Isolde (referenced early on in the film), where beautiful melodic touches combined with dissonance in a story that challenges the importance of emotions against unforgiving fatality. Under that backdrop, Melancholia appears to be a film not about the end of the world or love. Maybe it is more literal: that untraceable melancholy feeling, despondence when facing the inevitable fate of our lives.
Melancholia comes out, stateside, on 11/11/11. A proper review will follow, but I urge you to get ready for one of the more thought provoking movies of 2011.
It seems to me like it’s a great time to be a movie poster designer, as there’s so many horrible movie posters out there surely they should be able to one up, right? In this case, Jeremy Saunders has elevated this teaser poster for the movie Burning Man to a level of pure art. There’s so much going on in this poster, vegetables strewn around the ground, water reflecting sky… oh yeah, and a dude on fire. It’s all done with a perfectly color palette, with blues dominating the piece so that the red of the fire and the yellow lemons pop so much more. But it’s also filled with some deeper meanings as well.
So I was desperately looking through the stills for inspiration and saw a few (taken by Lisa Tomasetti) of Matthew Goode and Jonathan talking, reflected in the puddle, that for some reason I’d just ignored and was suddenly very taken with them. The strewn foods are from a car crash scene, and it helps to reflect (no pun intended) that Tom’s life is out of control. Plus, you know, he’s a chef, so there’s that.
I haven’t seen the movie Drive yet, but from the reviews I’ve heard it definitely sounds like my kind of movie. Fast, Bullitt-esque driving, the movie takes place and it stars Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan and Bryan Cranston? Yes, please. Another reason to see it though is this track from the movie called A Real Hero, which is by College and features Electric Youth. The song feels like M83′s last album Saturdays = Youth, which I mean in the best way. It’s that weird synthesis between the 80s and now, it feels timeless but new and fun.
Both College and Electric Youth are on an indie record label called Valerie Records, which made it all the more cool to me. You can help support these artists by buying a limited edition 7-inch of the song by clicking here.
You know back in high school when your friends told you that urban tale of putting on Pink Floyd’s classic album The Dark Side of the Moon while you watched The Wizard of Oz? That if you started it the album on the third lion’s roar it would sync perfectly? Bryan Pugh thought the very same thing, so he made it happen and uploaded the results onto Vimeo. I tried this about 10 years ago, and I have to say that there are definitely some weird things that match up between the movie and the music.
An easy example, at 3 minutes in, the lyrics say “look around”, and Dorothy looks back at her family, and then 20 seconds later the lyrics say “all you touch” and she touches the man’s arm. Now, those could just be coincidences, but then skip ahead to 4 minutes in when Dorothy is walking on the pig pen, and the lyrics say, “balanced on the biggest wave, headed toward an early grave”, and then she falls into the pig pen, and the music sways and shifts suddenly. It’s things like that which make you think there’s something to this. The other thing I can remember off the top of my head is when her house lands in Oz, as soon as she opens the door the song Money starts, the color green everywhere around her. I also just happened to skip ahead to about 57 minutes in, and the lyrics say “cause the faithful to fall to their knees” and at that moment the scarecrow tumbles to his knees.
If you have some extra time (and some mind-altering substances) you should totally check this out.
Yesterday, it was discovered that Samsung, in an effort to not get sued by Apple, is attempting to prove a point that Stanley Kubrick created the original form of the iPad when he made 2001: A Space Odyssey. As you can see in the images above, there’s clearly some kind of electric tablet sitting there, and Samsung claims that “two astronauts are eating and at the same time using personal tablet computers.” It’s that last part that I don’t agree with.
Is that really a personal tablet computer? Or is it a personal television? As you can see there are 10 buttons on the bottom of the tablet, and what they do, we can only imagine. The scene which this was featured lasts only two minutes, and they never actually touch or interact with the devices in the scene. Looking up a timeline of the personal computer, in 1968, the same year 2001 was released, Hewlett Packard coined the phrase “personal computer”.
An advertisement in Science magazine by Hewlett-Packard introduces first programmable scientific desktop calculator, which Hewlett-Packard calls “the new Hewlett-Packard 911A personal computer”. (This is claimed as coining the term “personal computer”.)
In another example, you can see the Nova by Data General, which is basically a giant filing cabinet with a tiny monitor on top. So to say that the image is a personal computer seems just a tiny bit far fetched. What’s also funny to me is that you can clearly see a tiny IBM logo on the bottom right of the device. Interestingly enough, IBM launched the first laptop called the IBM 5100, in September of 1975, 7 years after the release of 2001.
Now, I’m not saying there isn’t similarities. Perhaps Kubrick did envision this as a personal computer, and perhaps IBM or a prop guy built something close to his idea? But is there any solid proof that says that’s what this was? Either way, I found the history lesson of personal computers rather interesting. It’s amazing to see how far we’ve come in the last 40 years. Imagine the computers we’ll be using 40 years from now.
