Okay, hyped or not, everybody cares about this movie.
I think the original film is better, but it doesn’t come with this incredible title sequence. And oh, OH, NO BIG DEAL, JUST TRENT REZNOR AND KAREN O FINALLY WORKED TOGETHER ON A SONG. It’s forgivable that it’s a Led Zeppelin song too (just go with it).
Blur did the effects for this sequence, led by creative director Tim Miller.
The books seem like a waste of time, but the Swedish films are pretty damn entertaining. David Fincher’s films are always pretty, so those are worth a look.
So this Weetabix cereal commercial makes me really, really stoked. Stoked on life. Stoked on bears. And dancing. And cereal. And commercial production.
The ending with the last bear made my face go like >_< then O_O
SO CUUUTE!
Here’s the awesome behind-the-scenes video for the commercial. Bear costumes what! No Furry jokes plz! Pedobear free-zone too, gawd, gosh, srsly.
Performed at the European Culture Congress, Wroclaw, Poland, 2011
Original composition by Krzysztof Penderecki
The video and sound qualities are shit, but those didn’t stop me from geeking out hardcore. This original piece by Penderecki is famous for a lot of reasons, but also because it showed up in films like THE SHINING and CHILDREN OF MEN.
I just wish I was there to witness Richard D’s remix and to get a better look at the video art going on behind the musicians.
Tipping the geek scales to Very – here’s a video from Kotaku, where some dudes (Machinima Respawn E3 2011 LA Noire Landmark Tour Part 1 w/ Sark, Hutch & Seananners) visit all of the historical landmarks in Los Angeles that appear in L.A. NOIRE.
I haven’t bought that game yet, but it’s on my to-do. Hours of film noir stories and visuals will make any film geek…excited? Wait, aren’t film geeks excited a lot, anyway? Anyway.
DUDE! I’m obsessed with this LA boutique, BLOOD IS THE NEW BLACK. I’ve been rocking their shit for a straight year-and-change now.
I admit, their company name got my attention first. The comfy, original print t-shirts kept me callin’ back. I recommend the boyfriend cut style for girls.
This is my new favorite piece:
New Order x Black Flag?
Fuck yeah.
(I didn’t get the ombre one, and they sold out on the boyfriend cut because it rules)
JUST KIDS won the National Book Award last year, and though I don’t and wish I read more books, I’m quick to agree with that pedigree.
The book is about the life Patti Smith shared with Robert Mapplethorpe, while the two of them grew up and became artists in New York City in the 1960s and 1970s. Interspersed are a few photos of them together, first as a couple of 19 year olds hanging out, evolving into the first batches of photographs that Mapplethorpe took as works of art.
I couldn’t put this book down, because it was a joy to be lost in Patti Smith’s romanticized NYC, to feel her anxiety as a growing artist clamoring for her voice, and to feel that I was striding those cold streets in her skinny bones and Caprezios.
It’s wonderful to fall in love with Robert Mapplethorpe through Patti Smith’s poetic words.
I always thought Patti Smith was kind of full of it, but it’s fun to read her references to obscure literature, to pedantically namedrop her and Mapplethorpe’s famous and infamous friends, foes and patrons, and to continue her wide-eyed, fan girl fever for the artists she admired and emulated.
I’m deep in the rabbit hole of the Smith & Mappethorpe friendship-affair-companionship. I finished the book on a sunny but chilly Sunday in April, lying in the grass and I let myself cry when Smith finished her biography with an elegy.
I’m glad everyone complained and rallied against the idea that this show might not exist this year due to deal negotiations. The fact that there will be an AMC cut 45 minute episode, followed by a “director’s cut” 47 minute version aired a week after the original, is uh, weird.
Oh, well. Let’s hope the MM crew gets to work for a winter Season 5 premiere.
GREAT EXPECTATIONS, released in 1998 and directed by Alfonso Cuarón, is a film that sometimes comes up in a drunken conversation among film school colleagues. Sure enough, a few weeks ago over libations, my friends and I agreed: “GREAT EXPECTATIONS is a fucking great movie. Nobody ever talks about that movie anymore!” And I was all like, “I’ll blog about it!”
So, I’ll blog about it.
GREAT EXPECTATIONS is a minor work by Cuarón by now. At its release, it generally carried a teeny-bopper-magnet reputation, with Paltrow and dreamboat Ethan Hawke driving the star vehicle.
The film is gorgeous, and notably well-designed.
Here’s a short list of the great things in GREAT EXPECTATIONS, subjects in no quality order:
1. The Green. It’s So Literally Green.
Did you need an example of color as motif? Did you need to get your geek on, with color-theory-as-seen-in-film? Then you need to watch GREAT EXPECTATIONS. Cuarón is/was known for using green a lot, as a personal visual preference – the color also has a strong presence in THE LITTLE PRINCESS (1995). It seems to be used simply as a style device.
Since the color green is omnipresent, it has no emotional or narrative significance within the film. The enforced color palette does lend a dream-like quality to the mise-en-scene.
