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Death Star Over San Francisco!
For those who prefer to remember the old real Star Wars films, you might just enjoy seeing the Death Star Over San Francisco which features some fairly nifty compositing, in the style (if not tone) of Cloverfield.
Update: Check out a brief interview with the guy who made this clip, Michael Horn.
Links for August 15th 2008
Interesting links for August 15th 2008:
- Ancient Free Gardeners – flying the CC banner [Creative Commons Australia] – “… Ancient Free Gardeners, a Melbourne-based indie band who use CC licences to distribute their music. We’re very pleased to announce that AFG have released their new single, Innards Out, under a CC BY-NC-SA licence, which allows it to be freely distributed and even remixed. And they’re getting quite a bit of attention from it.”
- Internet becomes Iraq’s new matchmaker [The Age] – “Young Iraqis in Baghdad are surfing the internet to search for partners to tie the knot as violence and sectarian tensions take their toll on more traditional forms of socialising. Dating has fallen victim to the insecurity that has reduced the capital to a sullen network of rival neighbourhoods, leaving little space for men and women to meet other than in cyber chat rooms. “I think the Iraqis are looking for love on the internet because there are no other places for them to meet,” said Mustafa Kazem, a 20-year-old engineering student who found his soulmate on a university chat forum.”
- Brands line up for Bond sequel [Variety] – “James Bond is bringing back some familiar brands in “Quantum of Solace.” Sequel to “Casino Royale” will again be backed by Ford Motor Co., Heineken beer, Smirnoff vodka, Omega watches, Virgin Atlantic, Sony Ericsson cell phones and other Sony electronics. These brands all have products placed in the film and each will shell out tens of millions of dollars as a promotional partner of the pic. Sony Pictures, which is distribbing the movie, declined to disclose how much the brands are ponying up, but returning partners spent up to $100 million worldwide on ad efforts around “Casino Royale,” industryites estimate. The same is expected this time around.” [Via The Frodo Franchise]
- Italy blocks The Pirate Bay [The Age] – “An Italian judge has ordered the country’s internet service providers to block access to The Pirate Bay, a Swedish file-sharing website, as part of a probe into copyright law violation, officials said on Thursday. Since last week, Italy’s anti-fraud police have been informing providers they must heed the order of a judge in the northern city of Bergamo, police Col. Alessandro Nencini said.” (Apparently the impact of this ‘ban’ has been to increase Italian traffic to The Pirate Bay!
Links for August 11th 2008
Interesting links for August 10th 2008 through August 11th 2008:
- having “exclusive rights” in a region is a remnant of the twentieth century’s mass media [jill/txt] – “The tyranny of digital distance is most often experienced by people outside of the United States. … Another aspect of these cultural blockades where being outside of the US has been an advantage is baseball. In the US, if you’ve moved away from where the team you support is based you often won’t be able to watch their games because the local television stations won’t broadcast them. So MLB.tv lets you subscribe to watch all baseball games – except local ones, because the local television stations have exclusive rights to them. If you live outside of the US, you have no local games – so you can watch every baseball game live, no holds barred.”
- Wizard People, Dear Reader by Brad Neely (NOT Harry Potter) [Illegal Art] – Brad Neely’s hilarious “unauthorized re-envisioning of Harry Potter and the Philosophers/Sorcerer’s Stone”, released in 2004. It’s a long audio parody to be played at the same time as the DVD of the first Harry Potter film. Like a DVD commentary for evil! [YouTube Version] [Script] [Wikipedia Entry]
- 1.8 million hits in four days for grocery pricing website. [WA Today] – “The new GROCERYchoice website received 1.8 million hits in its first four days, showing consumers are interested in the information it provides, federal Assistant Treasurer Chris Bowen says. GROCERYchoice was launched last week by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to provide consumers with more information about grocery prices.”
- How to Get Your Indie Film on iTunes (…It’s Not Easy) [CinemaTech] – Scott Kirsner’s really useful guide to distributing independent films via iTunes and (more feasibly) via their main competitors like Amazon Unbox. For the upcoming filmmakers of tomorrow, this is essential information! (Especially if you’re already planning your own Dr Horrible!)
- Amazon Adds Universal Wish List [Micro Persuasion] – Amazon.com’s Wish List feature has been around a long time – over 10 years in fact. However, recently the e-commerce site expanded it with a new feature called The Universal Wish List. Using a simple bookmarklet … you can now add any item to your list from anywhere on the web.” (I use Amazon’s wish lists a lot, both for purchases and to fill out bibliographies of new books, so this looks like a really useful little addition to me!)
Links for July 30th 2008
Interesting links for July 28th 2008 through July 30th 2008:
- Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog [Hulu] – Joss Whedon’s 3 Dr Horrible webisodes – availble for one week only – are now back – for 4 months – on Hulu. Only, of course, if you live in the US. Or know how to circumvent Hulu’s region locking.
- Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince – Trailer [Moviefone] – The new trailer for the Harry Potter 6 film looks amazing. The embedded version seems geo-locked to the US, but the HD versions should load anywhere (or, at least, they loaded in Australia). Evil Young Lord V looks very creepy!
- Conroy welcomes ISP filtering [Australian IT] – “The federal Government will embark on the next step of its internet filtering strategy after initial trials proved successful, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said. … today released the findings of a recent … ISP-level internet filtering trial…
- Scrabulous pulled from Facebook in US and Canada [ABC News] – “The creators of online Scrabble knock-off Scrabulous say they have pulled their application from US and Canadian Facebook pages due to a lawsuit filed by game-making giant Hasbro.”
- Google enrolled for schools email deal [The Age] – “Google has snatched what is believed to be its biggest single client in the world – the NSW Department of Education – away from its rival Microsoft to claim up to 1.3 million new users of its free email product.”
- Joss Whedon’s online musical comedy Sing-Along Social Media Blitz [Chief Marketer] – “WWJWD. What Would Joss Whedon Do. Marketers looking to capitalize on the power of social media could do worse than keep that mantra in mind next time they want to launch a campaign.” (A look at the success of Dr Horrible.)
- China becomes biggest net nation [BBC NEWS | Technology] – “China now has the world’s largest net-using population, say official figures. More than 253 million people in the country are now online, according to statistics from the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC).”
- Indiana Jones and the Temple of Absurdly Implausible Excess [NYTimes.com] – Has the phrase “jump the shark” jumped the shark? Or, more to the point, should we be saying that it has “nuked the fridge”? …which emerged from a 1980s dorm-room discussion of a particularly ridiculous episode of the TV show “Happy Days”…
Links for July 23rd 2008
Interesting links for July 23rd 2008:
- WarGames: A Look Back at the Film That Turned Geeks and Phreaks Into Stars [Wired Magazine 16.08] – To celebrate it’s twenty-fifth anniversary, Wired has a good overview of the place of WarGames in videogame and geek history.
- What’s In It For Doogie Howser? [Jeffrey McManus] – McManus takes an educated stab at the economics of Joss Whedon’s Dr Horrible web experiment. (Joss himself notes that these figures aren’t that far off.)
- Xbox 360 users to build and sell own games [The Age] – It’ll be interesting to see how well the coming “Xbox Live Community Games” take off and, most importantly, what terms and conditions Microsoft force game creators to accept in order to sell their work to other Xboxers.
The Darkest Knight
So The Dark Knight certainly lives up to its promise of being dark. Disturbingly so. The film is an outstanding collaboration on pretty much all fronts, cast and crew, but it’s already destined to be remembered as Heath Ledger’s swan song, and rightly so: Ledger is not only the best villain a superhero film has ever had, but his performance excels simply because he could because he’s not a super-villain at all. Ledger’s Joker is psychotic, but in an eerily believable way. Unlike the over-the-top efforts of the camp 60s tv show and films, or Jack Nickolson’s caricature under Tim Burton, Ledger plays a Joker that really could have emerged from the nastiest corners of contemporary society. It’s a performance to be seen and experienced – if not necessarily enjoyed – and at this stage of the year Ledger’s posthumous Academy Award looks a certainty.
Credit has to go to Christian Bale, Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman who all give strong performances but are accommodating enough to play second fiddle to Ledger’s deranged centrepiece. Gary Oldman steps up in his role as Lt Gordon, and newcomer Aaron Eckhart seems to play Harvey Dent a little too smugly until the latter section of the film where his inevitable downfall really hits home in contrast to the earlier scenes. While not really a weak link, Maggie Gyllenhaal really has the misfortune of being the least impressive in the cast, although she has the difficult task of stepping into the only role where the actor has changed (previously Katie Holmes).
Visually, the film is once again spectacular, both inside Gotham and in the scenes set elsewhere, especially an unexpected visit to the soaring heights of Hong Kong’s skyscrapers. For comic book fans, there are plenty of knowing nods along the way, but these are subtle enough not to intrude on the film for everyone else. That said, certain character arcs are a lot more tragic when you can see them coming, especially the emergence of Two-Face. There are plenty of doors left open at the end of the film for a third in the Batman series, although the tone left hanging suggests the next film would be even bleaker and its hard to imagine anything much darker than The Dark Knight being palatable at the multiplex.
The Dark Knight: Why So Serious?
The new poster for the 2008 Batman Begins sequel, The Dark Knight, looks really good!
As you might imagine, the lead villain this time is the Joker. [Via]
Update: Read my review of The Dark Knight here.
I’m Making Waffles in The United States of Sparta!
I’m entrenched in marking first-year Flash animation projects today, and so have been thinking about creativity in various ways, but without much time to blog. So, I thought I’d share two YouTube clips which have made me laugh this morning, instead.
The first clip is 1776… … which is what the US War of Independence would look like if produced by the creative team behind 300. Apparently this was created by the Robot Chicken folks. It’s very funny. “Tonight we dine in VIR-GIN-I-A!” [Via Cynical-C]
The second is a wonderful mashup of Shrek and The Queen which tells the tale of a most unlikely romance:
Thanks to Gregg Rossen for the link to this Queen and Donkey clip!
Blade Runner: The Final Cut
The US release date for the much anticipated Blade Runner: The Final Cut DVD has been set at 18 December 2007 (I hope the same date will be true for Australia, but I can’t find anything to confirm that yet). There are sets from 2 to 5 discs in size, including the package pictured, which comes in briefcase in the style of one holding the the Voight-Kampff test in the film. It all looks very exciting, and, unlike, say, George Lucas’ Star Wars Special Editions, the Blade Runner sets will contain all the versions of the film, from the 1982 release, the first Director’s Cut, the new Final Cut and, for those getting the 5-disc pack, a work-print (which I’ve never seen) which has all sorts of changes that never made it to any cinema screens at any time.
One of the best parts of this collection will have to be the new ‘Dangerous Days’ documentary which seeks to be a ‘definitive’ look at the film, but really will just add more to the film’s ongoing mythology. Yahoo! has a few preview clips up, which include footage showing new interviews with most of the cast and crew, including James Edward Olmos and Harrison Ford. I thought the previous Blade Runner documentary put together by Mark Kermode was pretty good, so I’m hoping to be dazzled by ‘Dangerous Days’ if it has even more to show about the film and its cultural impact.
I’m quite pleased this set is on its way – when I was lecturing earlier this year on Blade Runner I was really starting to think it would be the last time this film would seem relevant to students, but I think this re-release will spark further interest in the film, its peppered production history and the importance of the questions it provokes. Yes, I think Deckard is a replicant in every cut, but I’d be pleased to hear why you disagree … or agree! 🙂 [Via AICN]
For Harrison Ford fans, you can also check out the Comicon report from Ford, Spielberg and others from the set of Indiana Jones 4!
Update: Blade Runner: The Final Cut will get a cinematic premiere on September 1st at the 64th Venice Film Festival!
Five Second Films!
I confess, I’m addicted to short, sharp edits that are representative of whole films. The ‘Re-Enacted in 30 seconds with bunnies” series, but I think I’ve not found a new addiction … the 5 second film. So far, my absolute favourite is the 2001: A Space Odyssey re-cut:
But, I must admit, the Fargo effort is pretty funny, too:
What’s your favourite?