July 23, 2008
Firefighters Turned Away From Exclusive Nightclub Blaze
Watch promo for More4's Kubrick season
Promo, shot from the point of view of Stanley Kubrick, to promote a More4 season of the director's films. Made by Channel 4 Creative Services.
Scripts, letters, designs, props, photographs – as many as 900 boxes of material belonging to one of the greats of cinema have been made available to a wider audience. Stanley Kubrick's widow, Christiane, has donated the auteur's paperwork to the University of the Arts, and the collection, carefully sifted for this Kubrick retrospective by Chris Hastings, gives us a fascinating insight into the public and private worlds of an inspirational film-maker:
July 22, 2008
July 21, 2008
How Not To Fake A Heart Attack
Horror Movies: Why Big Studio Releases Are Rare to Scare - By Stephen King
While walking back to my Boston hotel after a surprisingly well-attended Tuesday afternoon showing of Bryan Bertino's horror thriller The Strangers, I found myself musing on what's scary and what's not. Whatever it is, The Strangers had enough of it to do incredibly well at the box office. But what makes such a little film with only one star (Liv Tyler) work in the first place? That the question interests me shouldn't amaze anyone, since I've worked in the scare-'em-silly field for years. And it must be of vital interest to Twentieth Century Fox, which this summer releases two movies in the genre with much higher budgets: The Happening and The X-Files: I Want to Believe. The Happening was better than I expected, but it wasn't as scary as The Strangers. As for The X-Files (out July 25)? Children, I have my doubts.
One thing that seems clear to me, looking back at the 10 or a dozen films that truly scared me, is that most really good horror films are low-budget affairs with special effects cooked up in someone's basement or garage. Among those that truly work are Carnival of Souls, Halloween, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Night of the Living Dead, and The Blair Witch Project. All cost almost nothing to make and earned millions, while their sequels and remakes were crap (Dawn of the Dead in both its incarnations being the exception that proves the rule).
Horror is an intimate experience, something that occurs mostly within oneself, and when it works, the screams of a sold-out house are almost intrusive. In that sense, a movie such as Blair Witch is more like poetry than like the ''event films'' that pack the plexes in summer. Those flicks tend to be like sandwiches overstuffed with weirdly tasteless meat and cheese, meals that glut the belly but do nothing for the soul. Studio execs, who not only live behind the curve but seem to have built mansions there, don't seem to understand that most moviegoers recognize all the bluescreens and computer graphics of big-budget films and flick them aside. Those movies blast our emotions and imaginations, instead of caressing them with a knife edge.
The scariest sequence I can remember is in Night of the Living Dead. The cemetery-visiting heroine, Barbara, is chased back to her car by a lurching zombie with white hair and dazed eyes. She locks herself in only to discover her brother has taken the keys. The zombie reaches down, finds a rock, and begins to bash it strengthlessly against the car window. The first time I saw this (and twice after), the scene reduced me to jelly.Of Fox's two summer creepshows, give the edge to The Happening, partly because M. Night Shyamalan really understands fear, partly because this time he's completely let himself go (hence the R rating), and partly because after Lady in the Water he had something to prove. And, happily, Happening plays as a relatively small movie. The new X-Files movie, on the other hand, looks big...but horror is not spectacle, and never will be. Horror is an unknown actress, perhaps the girl next door, cowering in a cabin with a knife in her hands we know she'll never be able to use. Horror is the scene in The Strangers where Liv Tyler tries to hide beneath the bed...and discovers she can't fit there.
One more problem: Big movies demand big explanations, which are usually tiresome, and big backstories, which are usually cumbersome. If a studio is going to spend $80 or $100 million in hopes of making $300 or $400 million more, they feel a need to shove WHAT IT ALL MEANS down the audience's throat. Is there a serial killer? Then his mommy didn't love him (insert flashback). A monster from outer space? Its planet exploded, of course (and the poor misunderstood thing probably needs a juicy Earth woman to make sexy with). But nightmares exist outside of logic, and there's little fun to be had in explanations; they're antithetical to the poetry of fear.
That's why I can't imagine that anything in X-Files will match Liv Tyler's exchange with one of the masked home invaders in one particularly terrifying scene of The Strangers.
''Why are you doing this to us?'' she whispers.
To which the woman in the doll-face mask responds, in a dead and affectless voice: ''Because you were home.''
In the end, that's all the explanation a good horror film needs.
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July 20, 2008
Holy collections, Batman!
Article by Bill Spurr / Photo by Jeff Harper [Via The Chronicle Herald] Halifax, Nova Scotia

THE ONE THING that would make Ben Jeddrie’s collection more impressive is a Bat-maid. Jeddrie’s collection of Batman memorabilia, and assorted other superhero stuff, has taken over his Halifax apartment so completely that even Alfred the butler couldn’t keep it all straight. There’s a Batmobile, a Hall of Justice, a Bat-copter hanging from the ceiling, untold numbers of action figures. And comics. An amazing pile of comics.
"I have a collector’s mentality so when I’d get a new comic, I’d hang on to it and that just sort of amassed over the years. So much of it is Batman, not because I’d go looking for it, but because there is so much Batman stuff and so much cool Batman stuff," Jeddrie said.
"I’ve been reading comic books for so long, it’s always been a part of my awareness of the world. I’ve always known who they were and what they do, just like you know what a fireman is, what a cowboy is, cars and trucks, Batman, Superman, Spider-Man."
Jeddrie doesn’t know how many pieces are in his collection and when he says "I have tons of the comic books," the people in the apartment below should be concerned. He was just a kid when the Batman movie was reborn in 1989, and since friends and family knew of his devotion to comics, it was natural that when they saw Batman merchandise, they bought it for young Ben.
"Right now, I’m really gravitating toward the same Batman that I liked when I was a kid, very tall Batman in the blue and grey, very ’70s-early ’80s style, very athletic, not so mean," he said.
"Oftentimes they draw him very beefy these days. That’s one of the great things about Batman, though. He’s so much more open to interpretation than most. That’s also one of the reasons that there’s Batman stuff that you might not like, that someone took this tack on it. It’s the same thing with all the different movies that they’ve done."
Director Tim Burton made four Batman movies, and The Dark Knight is the second by director Christopher Nolan. Batman first appeared in comics in 1939 and on the big screen in 1943, evolving into the campy version of the mid-’60s.
The character has gone through so many incarnations, Jeddrie said they’re almost impossible to count.
"Every year, 12 new issues of Batman come out, 12 new issues of Detective Comics, and there’s always lots of side ones, special graphic novels, a new toy, and sometimes they’ll do a new toy because someone thought, ‘Hey, let’s do a Batman like this,’ so there are almost limitless variations," he said.
"A lot of the appeal to me is the variation on him. Sometimes he’s a brightly coloured cartoon character who has gone on adventures to other planets, and sometimes he’s a shadowy figure of the night that you don’t even know exactly what he looks like. He never comes out into the light, he doesn’t talk to anybody. There are so many things that can be done with him."
An employee at the Halifax comic book shop Strange Adventures, Jeddrie scored a ticket to an advance screening of The Dark Knight, which opened Friday. He didn’t have high hopes for it.
"I’m still a bigger fan of the Adam West version, just because there’s something really entertaining about those. They’re really silly but they kind of knew it. They played it like they didn’t, but they knew they were making a big comedy based around these silly comics. The second Tim Burton, Batman Returns, is a very good movie but from my perspective it’s not much of a Batman movie. It doesn’t take a lot of cues from any of the comics that were around before. It’s much more just a Tim Burton movie. It’s a similar thing with the ones they’re doing now, where it’s very much about what the guy making the movie wants to do."
Anyone who was a kid when the Batman and Robin television series was on (BIFF! ZOWIE! KA-POW!) remembers the theme song and the gadgets the dynamic duo had at their disposal, like the Bat-cycle and the Bat-poles. Or, how when they returned to the Bat Cave, the floor rotated the Batmobile into position so it didn’t have to be backed out into the driveway with the drawbridge-style hedge.
Jeddrie said it’s tough to pick his favourite piece of Batman equipment.
"The utility belt is great because, theoretically, it has whatever he needs in it, and it’s always been a stylish accessory," he said.
"I like a lot of the stuff he has in the Bat Cave. If you get a good look at the Bat Cave, there’s a big dinosaur there, there’s a giant penny and these are actually from pretty obscure stories from the early days of Batman."
"Batman, out of all the superheroes, appeals the most to people who don’t have any interest in reading comics. You’ll find more people who don’t read comics have Batman shirts and Batman hats or a picture on the wall. I’ve been wondering about that for a long time, and I don’t know if I’ll ever figure it out."
- BEN JEDDRIE: Collector
July 19, 2008
July 18, 2008
Watchmen Trailer Hits The Web
The Plot:
A complex, multi-layered mystery adventure, the film is set in an alternate 1985 America in which costumed superheroes are part of the fabric of everyday society, and the “Doomsday Clock” – which charts the USA’s tension with the Soviet Union – is permanently set at five minutes to midnight. When one of his former colleagues is murdered, the washed-up but no less determined masked vigilante Rorschach sets out to uncover a plot to kill and discredit all past and present superheroes. As he reconnects with his former crime-fighting legion – a ragtag group of retired superheroes, only one of whom has true powers – Rorschach glimpses a wide-ranging and disturbing conspiracy with links to their shared past and catastrophic consequences for the future. Their mission is to watch over humanity…but who is watching the Watchmen?
July 17, 2008
More Basic Photoshop Tips
Curves: Learn How to Use the Basics of Curves
Vanish Objects with Clone Tool
20 Examples of Awesome Geek Art
This unidentified individual is clearly a big fan of html. For the uninitiated, the </head> and <body> tags are used to define areas of a web page.
This ‘futuristic motorbike’ called ‘Unlimited Drive’ is made entirely of computer and VCR parts. Created in 1995, this piece measures 18” x 7” x 7”. The wheels are magnetic discs from old computer hard drives. It was created by Alex Andromeda, who has also made dozens more sculptures of recycled computer parts.
Like ASCII graffiti, ASCII art consists of pictures created from 95 printable ASCII characters and also loosely refers to text-based art in general. It can be created with any text editor, though ASCII artists now often use programs to convert pixels to ASCII. This image, showing Ian McKellen as Gandalf in Lord of the Rings, was created by ‘Yet Another Language Geek’.
These two paintings depicting Mario and Luigi from ‘Super Mario Bros.’ Are called ‘Rough Night Out’ and ‘Rougher Night Out’, respectively. They’re by artist Bob Dob, who seeks to give his woesome bad-boy characters a sardonic aura of humor and pain.
Glasgow, Scotland based artist Klingatron reflected the sentiments of millions of geeks worldwide with this bit of graffiti, ‘I’m only popular on the internet’. Klingatron only recently got started with stencil graffiti after buying a book on the subject in 2004.
This giant VHS sculpture pays tribute to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Seattle artist David Herbert created this 2×4x8-ft sculpture of foam, plexiglass and latex paint.
You have to be a pretty big Trekkie to get your entire back covered in portraits of Spock, Kirk, Picard and Data, from left to right. Then again, Star Trek fans tend to be a pretty devoted bunch. Few people would argue that this qualifies as a very geeky piece of body art.
In another Star Trek-themed work, artist Deborah Sperber has created this piece called ‘Spock, Kirk and McCoy Beaming In (Barely There)’. The truly amazing thing about this is that each character is actually a beaded curtain. Sperber threads thousands of colored beads onto threads to create the portraits.
There’s nothing quite as geeky as a giant portrait of Stephen Colbert made of 768 Rubik’s cubes. Artist David Litwin says, “What does one do with 768 cubes once you’ve made your company logo? I spent way too much time getting them stickered properly to just leave it at that. No, you move on to doing other pictures. I had considered great works of art (Mona Lisa, etc.), but thought a tribute to Stephen Colbert would be more fun.”
This tattoo adorns the chest of one ‘MC Router’, the ‘queen of nerdcore’. The 22-year-old from Texas also has ‘geek life’ tattooed across her knuckles. Nerdcore, in case you’re wondering, is a subgenre of hip hop characterized by themes relating to nerd life including Star Wars, computers and science.
There have been literally thousands of interpretations of the Mona Lisa, but none that pay tribute to Princess Leia of Star Wars quite so artfully as this one. Artist Jim Hance said that as of late June he was still working on this painting, but it looks great to us already.
If you’ve ever wondered what the skeletons of cartoon characters like the Roadrunner, Tom & Jerry or Bugs Bunny look like, artist Hyung Koo Lee has created a series called ‘Animatus’ that imagines exactly that. The sculptures are made from resin, aluminum, stainless steel wire, springs and oil paint. Pictured is ‘Anas Animatus’, which you may recognize as Dewey, Huey and Louie from ‘DuckTales’.
Paul the Wine Guy found this instance of Mozilla Firefox-inspired graffiti while working on his ‘IT everywhere’ photo series. IT graffiti is getting more and more common, with everything from Microsoft references to pixelated hourglasses and cursors being spray painted on all manner of surfaces.
Mike Rea creates these awesomely weird sculptures including a space capsule, a time machine and this ‘Suit for Steven Hawking’. His sculptures are made primarily of wood with a little foam, rope and burlap thrown in here and there. Of his work, Mike says, “My goal is to create the idea of an object that remains a dream. The objects I create are based on fictions, rather than realities.”
Mark, the proud owner of this math tattoo, wrote to Carl Zimmer’s Science Tattoo Emporium, “This tattoo is the Zermelo-Fraenkel with Choice axioms of set theory. These nine axioms are the basis for ZFC set theory, which is the most commonly studied form of set theory and the most well known set of axioms as well. From these nine axioms, one can derive all of mathematics. These provide the foundation of mathematics, a field that you can likely tell that I love dearly.”
German artist Aram Bartholl created this 3-D Google Maps marker of wood, fabric and paper and made it into an art installation. Bartholl said of the project, “The project “Map” questions the red markers of the location based search engine Google Maps. The size of the rebuilt red Marker in reality corresponds to the size of a marker in the web interface in max zoom factor of the map.”
Pixiles are interactive digital sculptures that turn static objects into an ‘interactive illusion’. Virtual scenes are projected onto spheres on a mobile, which then move and seem to interact with each other and their environment. They respond to touch, body movements, sound and even wind blowing. The resulting holographic illusion makes it seem as though the objects are reacting to gravity and friction.
This is an example of ‘DNA Art’, a visualization of an individual’s DNA on canvas. Customers have their DNA swabbed and it’s then analyzed in a laboratory, and made visible through a special process involving special coloring matter and ultraviolet light. A special camera is then used to take a high-resolution photograph. DNA Art UK, which created the picture above, claims to use the .10% of DNA that makes each person unique to create their DNA art.
A graffiti artist who calls himself ‘Invader’ has been plastering tiles in the shape of characters from first-generation arcade games all over the walls of cities around the world. Invader is, as you can see, especially fond of the classic ‘Pacman’ game. Invader has put up his creations in 35 cities around the world.
The Graffiti Research Lab (GRL), kings of the light graffiti movement and unquestionably geeky graffiti artists, used a high powered projector, computer parts and a camera to ‘write’ on the side of a building with a ‘mega laser’, which has a beam that can reach 5 miles away, for their ‘L.A.S.E.R.’ project.
[Via weburbanist]
The Truth About Plastic
marketing coordinator was concerned about what the chemicals leaching out of some common types of plastic might be doing to her body. She was also worried about the damage all the plastic refuse was doing to the environment. So she hopped on her bike and rode to the nearest grocery store to see what she could find that didn't include plastic. "I went in and barely bought anything," Haegele says. She did purchase some canned food and a carton of milk--only to discover later that both containers were lined with plastic resin. "Plastic," she says, "just seemed like it was in everything."She's right. Back when Dustin Hoffman received the most famous one-word piece of career advice in cinema history, plastic was well on its way to becoming a staple of American life. The U.S. produced 28 million tons of plastic waste in 2005--27 million tons of which ended up in landfills. Our food and water come wrapped in plastic. It's used in our phones and our computers, the cars we drive and the planes we ride in. But the infinitely adaptable substance has its dark side. Environmentalists fret about the petroleum needed to make it. Parents worry about the possibility of toxic chemicals making their way from household plastic into children's bloodstreams. Which means Haegele isn't the only person trying to cut plastic out of her life--she isn't even the only one blogging about this kind of endeavor. But those who've tried know it's far from easy to go plastic-free.
"These things are so ubiquitous that it is practically impossible to avoid coming into contact with them," says Frederick vom Saal, a biologist at the University of Missouri.
Vom Saal is a prominent member of a group of researchers who have raised worrisome questions in recent years about the safety of some common types of plastics. We think of plastic as essentially inert; after all, it takes hundreds of years for a plastic bottle to degrade in a landfill. But as plastic ages or is exposed to heat or stress, it can release trace amounts of some of its ingredients. Of particular concern these days are bisphenol-a (BPA), used to strengthen some plastics, and phthalates, used to soften others. Each ingredient is a part of hundreds of household items; BPA is in everything from baby bottles to can linings (to protect against E. coli and botulism), while phthalates are found in children's toys as well as vinyl shower curtains. And those chemicals can get inside us through the food, water and bits of dust we consume or even by being absorbed through our skin. Indeed, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 92% of Americans age 6 or older test positive for BPA--a sign of just how common the chemical is in our plastic universe.
Scientists like vom Saal argue that BPA and phthalates are different from other environmental toxins like lead and mercury in that these plastic ingredients are endocrine disrupters, which mimic hormones. Estrogen and other hormones in relatively tiny amounts can cause vast changes, so some researchers worry that BPA and phthalates could do the same, especially in young children. Animal studies on BPA found that low-dose exposure, particularly during pregnancy, may be associated with a variety of ills, including cancer and reproductive problems. Some human studies on phthalates linked exposure to declining sperm quality in adult males, while other work has found that early puberty in girls may be associated with the chemicals.
Does that mean even today's minuscule exposure levels are too much? The science is still murky, and human studies are few and far from definitive. So while Canada and the Democratic Republic of Wal-Mart are moving to ban BPA in baby bottles, the Food and Drug Administration maintains that BPA products pose no danger, as does the European Union. Even so, scientists like Mel Suffet, a professor of environmental-health sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles, say avoiding certain kinds of plastics is simply being better safe than sorry.
As researchers continue to examine plastic's impact on our bodies, there's no doubt that cutting down on the material will help the environment. Plastic makes up nearly 12% of our trash, up from 1% in 1960. You can literally see the result 1,000 miles (1,600 km) west of San Francisco in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a swirling mass of plastic debris twice the size of Texas. The rising cost of petroleum may get plastic manufacturers to come up with incentives for recycling; current rates stand at less than 6% in the U.S. But the best way to reduce your plastic impact on the earth is simply to use less.
Here's how. You can avoid plastic bottles and toys labeled with the numbers 3 or 7, which often contain BPA or phthalates, and steer clear of vinyl shower curtains and canned foods--especially those with acidic contents like tomatoes. Vom Saal counsels that the cautious should also avoid heating plastic in microwaves. But get rid of the stuff altogether? "It's hard to go all the way," says Haegele, who, 10 months into her experiment, is leading a mostly plastic-free life. Although she still uses a plastic toothbrush, she's experimented with her own toothpaste (made of baking soda, cinnamon and vodka; for the recipe, go to her blog, lifelessplastic.blogspot.com She has used vinegar for conditioner and is searching for a decent shampoo that doesn't come in a plastic bottle. She has tried soaplike bars of shampoo, but they make her hair feel sticky. Plus, they sometimes come wrapped in--you guessed it--plastic.
[Via time.com]

















