Undergoing Maintenance
As you can probably tell, my blog is currently undergoing some down(ish) time to make things prettier.
YouTube Video Panic Attack! Lands $30 Million Movie Deal
So you put a video on YouTube and years later you score big-time with a sweet ass action movie with a possible (outside) shot at a Best Picture Oscar nomination. So is the case with Neill Blomkamp and his short film Alive in Joberg which lead to that bad ass flick known as District 9.
Not too effin' shabby, but even more impressive is independent filmmaker Fede Alvarez’s “Ataque de Panico” (Panic Attack), a 5 minute clip that shows the city of Montevideo, Uruguay being seized by giant CGI robots.
How'd he one-up the Disrtict 9 guys? By scoring a movie deal with Ghost House Pictures (responsible for vile tripe like Boogeyman and The Grudge while at the same time responsible for good vile tripe like Drag Me to Hell and 30 Days of Night) just a few days after posting his video on YouTube. For $30 million. For a short film that cost him around $300. A short film that's already had over 1.5 million views. That's how.
"I uploaded [Panic Attack!] on a Thursday and on Monday my inbox was totally full of e-mails from Hollywood studios," he told the BBC's Latin American service BBC Mundo.
Mr. Alvarez's film-to-be will boast a brand new story from scratch and be shot in Uruguay and Agentina. Oh, and Sam SpiderMan Raimi will produce.
And for reals, this short film is rockin'. It's like Ghostbusters II meets Cloverfield by way of Transformers thrown in for fun. Enjoy!
Precious Moments: an Accurate Depiction
I really love the movie Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire. This parody reinforces doubts and condemnations that many have attributed to the movie's press and hype. Not entirely unfounded (I mean have you seen the trailer? It reads like a Spike Lee directed Hallmark Channel movie.), but the movie in my opinion really overcomes its possible badness with earnest direction, good writing, and fantastic (!) acting.
But still, this video is effing hilarious.
Precious Moments - watch more funny videos
2 Shots from Wall-E Worth Discussing: Seurat, Sondheim, and Art
While in the process of compiling my list of the best movies of the 'aughts,' I had to take pause on certain occasions to further emphasize the brilliance that is Pixar's Wall-E.
This first shot comes at the end of the first act of the movie. It's almost identical to an earlier shot that shows Wall-E in his day to day activities working. It is also my favorite shot in the entire movie.
The shot the second time evokes isolation and, in context to the story, loneliness (subjects touched on in Sondheim's musical "Sunday in the Park with George."). Wall-E drops the trash bundle and existentially faces a revelation: since the discovery and loss of love, work is meaningless for the first time. Furthermore, since Wall-E's sole purpose was to work, existence itself is rendered meaningless.
Furthermore, the credit sequence drives home the ideas of creation, isolation, art, and science and their effects on humanity. These themes crossover into Geroges Seurat's pointillist painting "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" and more poignantly in Stephen Sondheim's "Sunday in the Park with George."
Wall-E's tribute to Georges Seurat's "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" in the closing credits (that conceptualize the progression of technology by referencing major eras in art history with the evolution of human society) also reflects themes explored in Stephen Sondheim's musical "Sunday in the Park ...with George," itself inspired from the original painting.
Seurat developed pointillism as a more scientific style to mimic technological progress when Impressionism had grown too mainstream and failed to address the changing industrial world or the populist leftist politics emerging with the rise of the modern middle class. While less political in concept, the film's subjects of science, art, creation, and human society (both historically and economically) run parallel with objectives in pointillism and ideas in Sondheim's modernist musical.
These two shots express major themes and ideas that are explored in the film itself. Now take the whole movie into context and you have yourself a helluva picture to contemplate.
This first shot comes at the end of the first act of the movie. It's almost identical to an earlier shot that shows Wall-E in his day to day activities working. It is also my favorite shot in the entire movie.
The shot the second time evokes isolation and, in context to the story, loneliness (subjects touched on in Sondheim's musical "Sunday in the Park with George."). Wall-E drops the trash bundle and existentially faces a revelation: since the discovery and loss of love, work is meaningless for the first time. Furthermore, since Wall-E's sole purpose was to work, existence itself is rendered meaningless.
Furthermore, the credit sequence drives home the ideas of creation, isolation, art, and science and their effects on humanity. These themes crossover into Geroges Seurat's pointillist painting "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" and more poignantly in Stephen Sondheim's "Sunday in the Park with George."
Wall-E's tribute to Georges Seurat's "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" in the closing credits (that conceptualize the progression of technology by referencing major eras in art history with the evolution of human society) also reflects themes explored in Stephen Sondheim's musical "Sunday in the Park ...with George," itself inspired from the original painting.
Seurat developed pointillism as a more scientific style to mimic technological progress when Impressionism had grown too mainstream and failed to address the changing industrial world or the populist leftist politics emerging with the rise of the modern middle class. While less political in concept, the film's subjects of science, art, creation, and human society (both historically and economically) run parallel with objectives in pointillism and ideas in Sondheim's modernist musical.
These two shots express major themes and ideas that are explored in the film itself. Now take the whole movie into context and you have yourself a helluva picture to contemplate.
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