Monsters and Rockets: February 2010

MUSIC FROM SPACE: Radiohead - LIKE SPINNING PLATES

Sunday, February 28, 2010

The same Metafilter post that hepped me to that great Tom Waits video the other day also hepped me to the amazing Radiohead video you see above. The first 20 seconds or so are a pixelated mess, but stick with it. Things get crazy, in a good way.

The comments on that thread also offered up this fun and clever video by the Mountain Goats.

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SHATNER SUNDAY: William Shatner(s) in SEVEN

In this unforgettable sketch from an MTV Movie Awards show some years back, Captain Kirk, T.J. Hooker and Rescue 911 William Shatner come together for a strange and troubling (and hilarious) road trip. Shatner has made an art of self-mockery in his later career, and this bit just might be his Mona Lisa.

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MUSIC FROM SPACE: Tom Waits - COME ON UP TO THE HOUSE

Saturday, February 27, 2010

Yesterday this terrific Tom Waits video was posted on Metafilter. I'd never seen it before, and if you haven't either it's time that you should. Apparently the strobing effect caused by the stop-motion animation here is problematic for epileptics, but for the rest of us this is pretty sweet.

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J.D. Salinger reviews RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK

The Letters of Note website has posted an interesting letter that J.D. Salinger, the recently-deceased author of The Catcher in the Rye, wrote in 1981. In it, the reclusive writer offers his take on Steven Spielberg's hit of the day, Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Have seen no good movies, except The Last Metro, which wasn't exactly indelibly fine, but Deneuve herself maybe was, or came close. I got hooked into seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark, which might be excused for its unwitty, unfunny awful socko-ness if it had been put together by Harvard Lampoon seniors. I'll coast on the Deneuve performance the rest of the summer. She was always a good actress, but had never seen her with all this much restraint and finesse.

Salinger's remarks have gotten the internet nerdosphere all stirred up. "God forbid it not properly stimulate his cerebral cortex and just entertain him," writes a Catcher-hating commenter who calls himself Holdensucks. "When did this country become such a bunch of whiners?" (Actually, you're sounding pretty whiny there yourself, Holdensucks.)

Personally Salinger's opinion of Raiders doesn't really affect me much. But reading the rest of the letter would seem to suggest that Jay Mcinerney was right when he suggested those unpublished stories that have been languishing in Salinger's vault for all these years might not live up to fans' expectations. Salinger's later fiction just gets weirder and wordier, and I've always had the feeling he stopped publishing just in time. Reading that letter, I could all too clearly picture it being written by Buddy Glass as a cranky old man.

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TIM BURTON'S WEEKEND AT BERNIE'S

Relax, it's just a parody... But it's kind of scary how much they make this seem like an actual Burton movief. Let's hope Burton gives up on the freakin' remakes before it actually comes to this...

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Huge, ugly/cool tattoo of Disney's ALICE IN WONDERLAND

Friday, February 26, 2010

It's not a Photoshop trick. This lady really has had the entire story of Alice in Wonderland tattooed forever into her flesh. And not just any Alice in Wonderland: the Disney version.

Look, I'm as Burning Man as the next aging Gen-X'er and I'm all for wacky haircuts, artfully hideous clothes and so on, but I must confess that I've never really been big on tattoos. Even as I can admire her guts and the artistry of the design, I can't get over the feeling that this woman has basically turned her torso into a Hot Topic t-shirt that she can never take off.

Here's hoping she doesn't regret that DRINK ME on her elbow, when she's 75. In 30 years or so, we are gonna have some very colorful rest homes.

(Via Neatorama.)

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PULP MUPPETS

The original trailer for Pulp Fiction, except everybody has Muppet heads. No, really, that's the whole thing. Somebody had this idea, they meticulously realized it, and they posted it online. And now you're going to watch it. Pulp Fiction. With Muppet heads. Yep.

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R2D2 chorus line

12 R2's bust a move!

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The original music (and lyrics) for Bill Plympton's YOUR FACE

your face

scandinavia | MySpace Video

As a follow-up to our post the other day about Bill Plympton's classic 1987 cartoon short Your Face, blogger Rick Unger has posted an MP3 file featuring the cartoon's music in its original form, before singer/songwriter Maureen McElheron's voice was slowed down to sound (sort of) male. Heard without the distortion, it really is a lovely song. Weird and creepy, but lovely. Unger has also transcribed the lyrics thusly:

Your face is like a song
Your sweet eyes whisper
And I want to sing along
Your features are in tune
Let's sing together
And turn every month to June

Your face hums
Makes me a happy fella
No more singing a capella
No longer lonely
Lovin' you only

You lips with mine will rhyme
And when they touch me
It's a symphony divine
Your cheeks, you ears, your hair
Weave me a melody
Of melodies so rare

Your face hums
Makes me a happy fella
No more singing a capella
No longer lonely
Lovin' you only

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LIFE IN QUARANTINE by Fully Sick Rapper

Thursday, February 25, 2010

Fully Sick Rapper is a luckless Australian fellow who has contracted a serious form of TB and spent a couple of months quarantined in the hospital. Going more than a little crazy from the isolation, boredom and stress, he has been posting funny, 1980s-style rap videos on YouTube about his situation. This clip arguably runs a little long, but I feel so sorry for the guy that I'm willing to indulge him the extra minute or so. Get well soon, Fully Sick Rapper!

(Via Metafilter.)

Pogo Van Gogh?

Painting with pogo sticks! This is a very silly business indeed, and the results aren't too beautiful to look at, but it's fun to watch and I'm impressed that they actually paint something reconizable.

The Who's BABA O'REILY played with Think Geek gizmos

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

In this clip, the Who's Baba O'Reily (AKA "Teenage wastelaaaand...") is performed using a working guitar shirt, one of those little singing musical note puppet toy deals and other gizmos from Think Geek.

(Via Wil Wheaton.)

LA LINEA INTERACTIVE

La Linea was a series of weird cartoons that originated in Italy and became popular all over the world. In America they never quite caught on the same way, but they are fondly remembered by Gen-X'ers today from being featured on the 1980s kids show, The Great Space Coaster. (These cartoons were carefully selected to eliminate the more adult material. Some of La Linea's cartoons can get pretty raunchy.)

Animator Patrick Boivin has made an impressive, interactive La Linea cartoon, seen above. Now you can decide the indignities that will befall this strange little gibbering cartoon man. (Note that some of the paths you choose will lead to material that is not safe for work.)

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STRANGE TOONS: Bill Plympton's YOUR FACE

your face

scandinavia | MySpace Video

I first saw Bill Plympton's short Your Face as part of an animation festival when I was a kid, and I don't think I have ever laughed so hard at anything since. And I wasn't the only one in hysterics; the audience around me was shrieking with laughter, people were this close to dropping dead in the aisles.

The cartoon is still weird and gross and funny today, but it wouldn't shock audiences like it did when it was new. For one thing Plympton has done plenty of commercial work since then, so he's hardly an unknown quantity. You see a Plympton cartoon, and you already know that his characters are probably going to squish around and transform in cheerfully disgusting ways. But beyond that, the kind of grotesque facial transformations that were so novel in this cartoon can now be accomplished by any kid with a good morphing program. Plympton did it all with pencils and paper and his work is still technically dazzling, but we're no longer freaked out by the sight of somebody's head inflating like a balloon or turning into a cube and spinning around. We see that stuff in flash e-cards we get from grandma.

Actually, the most unsettling part of the cartoon today is arguably the title song. Written and performed by Maureen McElheron (with her voice slowed down to an androgynous warble,) Your Face is sweet and confusing and utterly creepy, like a lullaby sung by the monster that lives under your bed. Your face hums...

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Chinese transfer press

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

It looks like some bizarre steampunk contraption out of Terry Gilliam's Brazil, but apparently this footage depicts Chinese workers using an actual factory device. No matter how much your job sucks, I think these guys have it worse. Imagine having to duck your head down out of the way every five seconds or so, or the ceiling of your office would crush your skull.

Quay Brothers return with SANATORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS

The Brothers Quay are the brilliant (if divisive) twin directing team who brought the world a string of dark and influential stop-motion shorts and the perplexing features Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life and The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes. Now the pair are set to return with Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, a feature based on the work of writer Bruno Schulz. The Quays previously adapted Schulz's work into the 1986 short Street of Crocodiles.

The clip above features a typically unsettling sequence from Institute Benjamenta. And yes, that is the Borg Queen getting very, very excited about the saplings.

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Movie bloopers from 1936

This is a fascinating selection of movie bloopers from 1936, worth watching even if you're not much of an old movie buff. While we're used to seeing clips of modern actors forgetting a line, breaking character and cracking up the crew, it's downright surreal to watch Edward G. Robinson drop the tough guy pose and make silly faces, or to hear some dignified actress of yesteryear blow a line and then swear like a sailor. (Although it's pretty endearing how a couple of them mutter "Aw, nuts!")

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STRANGE TOONS: THE SAINT INSPECTOR

The Saint Inspector is a terrific and creepy stop-motion short from The Bolex Brothers, the English animation studio that brought us the unjustly overlooked The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb (and the very justly-overlooked Doogal.)

It's mildly unsafe for work, mostly because the titular Saint is naked throughout and you can see his little clay naughty bits. But really, that's probably the least disturbing element of the whole short.

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LA PUERTA

Monday, February 22, 2010

This is just neat. In this short film collaboration between SAM3 and LIMOW, a young man stretches doorways and spins entire building like they were racks of paperback books at the drugstore. It's pretty easy to tell how it was done, but that doesn't make it any less impressive or clever.

(Via Neatorama.)

New Matt Smith DOCTOR WHO trailer

Sunday, February 21, 2010

A new trailer is online for the upcoming season of Doctor Who, featuring a bit more of the new Doc in action. (Yep, he's still Matt Smith, and not David Tennant. Eventually that will probably stop seeming weird and wrong.) We also meet his new lady companion, and get a glimpse of some of the bad guys he'll face, including the inevitable Daleks and the sinister angel statues from the episode Blink.

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STRANGE POWERS

As the clip above shows, Stephin Merritt's fans range from Peter Gabriel to Sarah Silverman to Neil Gaiman, but he still can't get recognized by cab drivers. As the frontman for The Magnetic Fields, Merritt creates unique and often beautiful songs that are funny in a sad way and sad in a funny way. Strange Powers is an upcoming documentary that looks at Merritt's life and career.

To give you a taste of Merritt's work, here's Smile! No One Cares How You Feel, a song from his side project, the Gothic Archies.

SHATNER SUNDAY: Shatner vs. Shatner in WHITE COMANCHE

In his many years as Captain Kirk, William Shatner took on such seemingly unbeatable foes as Khan, V'ger, Trelane and no less than Apollo himself, and he bested them all. But in the 1968 spaghetti Western White Comanche, Shatner finally meets his match: another William Shatner. Canada's favorite son plays a dual role, as the feuding twin sons of a white man and a native American woman.

By all accounts the film is pretty bad, but this clip takes us right to the Shatner vs. Shatner action. This town ain't big enough for two Shatners, and one 'em has gotta go!

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THE KNOWN UNIVERSE

Saturday, February 20, 2010

Courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History, here's a short but rather spectacular video that takes us on a tour of the universe. We begin in the Himalayas and zoom out to the farthest known reaches of space.

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SON OF MOVIE MARQUEE MASHUPS!

Friday, February 19, 2010

Some months back I did a post about movie marquee mashups, where the titles on a movie marquee seem to combine to tell a little story. Well, I saw a beauty yesterday:

Valentine's Day
From Paris with Love
Precious
Dear John
It's Complicated
Edge of Darkness
Crazy Heart

So, it's Valentine's Day, and some guy receives a letter from his sweet precious in Paris. But it turns out to be a Dear John letter - "It's complicated," she writes - and soon he has gone over the edge of darkness and he's suffering from a crazy heart! (Actually, the last movie on the bill was The Wolfman, which doesn't really fit... Unless maybe the guy who got the dear John letter was so upset that he turned into a werewolf.)

HIGGLETY PIGGLETY preview clips

When I previously posted about the upcoming short film based on Maurice Sendak's classic book Higglety Pigglety Pop!, the clips online weren't embeddable. Now they are, so I have embeddified them above for you to enjoy. That's Meryl Streep as the voice of Jenny the dog. I know Forest Whitaker also plays a role, but I don't hear his voice in the clips. I'm guessing he's the voice of the lion.

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Ancient skyscrapers - the "Manhattan of the desert"

The seemingly modern skyscrapers in the clip above are actually over 500 years old. Shibam, the so-called "Manhattan of the desert," is a city in Yemen with ancient mud-brick buildings standing 5-16 floors high. Originally made to protect the inhabitants from invaders, today the structures require constant maintenance to protect them from erosion.

This clip, taken from the same documentary as the clip above, provides a more extended look at the town.

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The Evelyn Evelyn controversy

Eva and Lyn Neville are allegedly conjoined twin musicians discovered by Dresden Dolls singer Amanda Palmer and her musician pal Jason Webley. Together the sisters (who just happen to bear an uncanny resemblance to Palmer and Webley in drag) are known as Evelyn Evelyn, and they have a world tour planned to support the release of their self-titled CD. The cute (but very much not safe for work) cartoon above is a music video for Evelyn Evelyn's song Have You Seen My Sister Evelyn, which should give you a taste of the pair's weird but toe-tapping style.

Evelyn Evelyn has been a very controversial project, with feminist bloggers and disability rights activists accusing the pair of being callous and tasteless. Palmer and Webley are both doing some rather desperate damage control, but as of now the CD and world tour are still scheduled to go ahead. It has been said that no PR is bad PR, but at this point I believe that Palmer and Webley would beg to differ.

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The sun always shines on TV

You probably had no idea how ubiquitous Chromakey technology has become on TV shows. These days, almost every exterior you see in a TV drama is either completely faked or tweaked quite a bit, as this special effects demo reel for Stargate Studios illustrates.

(Via Boing Boing.)

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MAS*H Saturday morning cartoons? And TOYS?

Thursday, February 18, 2010

In the 1970s, almost anything that was popular enough got its own Saturday morning cartoon series and licensed toys. But some properties were better suited for this sort of exploitation than others. While there's nothing that shocking about a Happy Days cartoon and Fonzie dolls, M*A*S*H would seem to be far too adult to try to sell to kids like that. But that didn't stop Hollywood from trying.

The clip above is from MUSH, a truly wretched cartoon that re-imagined the doctors from the 4077th as a bunch of dogs working in an arctic fort. (MUSH stood for "Mangy Unwanted Shabby Heroes.") If for some reason you feel compelled to see more, you can do so here.

You can really sense the despair of the people working on this cartoon. It's like they knew this was a horrible idea, but they had to go through with it because their boss said so. So you get some really ugly and awkward character designs, and a Trapper John stand-in who is always channeling John Wayne for some reason, and a Radar O'Reilly dog who starts every other sentence by going "Glm! Glm!" The folks behind this cartoon were obviously desperate for anything to do with these stupid, hideous characters, and as soon as anybody had any idea at all, it immediately went into the cartoon. ("The guy who works in the mailroom suggested that we make the Radar dog says 'Glm! Glm!' all the time..." "That's totally stupid and makes no sense. Let's do it.")

The M*A*S*H action figures seem even less likely, but they actually happened. Kids could play with their own Charles Emerson Winchester the third and Col. Sherman T. Potter, and there was even an entire M*A*S*H military base. It featured "high impact plastic buildings" - presumably so you could recreate those very kid-friendly episodes where Hawkeye and company desperately tried to operate on wounded soldiers while shells were raining down outside.

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STRANGE TOONS: Jim Trainor's THE BATS

Jim Trainor is a fine artist, teacher and animator who makes charmingly ugly little short films that are surreal while also being educational while also being weirdly personal. In The Bats, he takes us deep inside a bat cave, where a chatty bat explains the ways of bat life. We learn about bat mating, bat cannibalism, the bat God, and many other bat things. These creatures of the night are easy to relate to in some ways, profoundly alien in others. Trainor doesn't sentimentalize his animal characters, he simply gives them voice and allows us to draw our own conclusions.

This short features some really appalling business involving bat poo and some NSFW bat sex, but if a bat was going to tell you about his life, I bet it'd sound a lot like this. (The DVD at left, Cartune Exprez 2008, features the work of Trainor and other contemporary experimental animators.)

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The time travel timeline

Author David McCandless and designer Alice Cho collaborated on this colorful graphic showing the intersecting paths of various time travelers in various movies and TV shows. (Click the image to enlarge.)

On his own site, Chandless explains the complex process of creating the graphic.

(Via the Onion AV Club.)

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STRANGE TOONS: MADAME TUTLI-PUTLI

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

As a follow-up to our earlier post on Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski's upcoming film version of Higglety Pigglety Pop! on the Where the Wild Things Are Blu-ray, here's the pair's earlier short film, Madame Tutli-Putli. It's a fantastic piece of work, moody and scary and gorgeously animated, with an ending that will have you on the edge of your seat with your nose pressed against your monitor, fogging the glass.

I strongly advise that you watch the short full-screen. This thing is absolutely packed with fascinating details, and you'll want to see every single one. (If you're curious about the film's production, the pair discuss the film in a series of clips on YouTube.)

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Film version of Sendak's HIGGLETY PIGGLETY POP coming

The folks at /Film bring word that a 23-minute short film is in the works based on Maurice Sendak's classic book, Higglety Pigglety Pop! Or, There Must Be More to Life. Directed by Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski, the pair behind the Oscar-nominated short Madame Tutli-Putli, Higglety Pigglety Pop! is a mix of human actors and artful puppetry and features the voices of Meryl Streep and Forest Whitaker. There are some gorgeously strange clips on /Film but they're not embeddable, so instead I'll direct you to this clip from a 1980's stage opera adaptation of Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are that also features an excerpt of a Higglety Pigglety adaptation at the end. (This show was as fun to look at as it was painful to listen to.)

Higglety Pigglety Pop! Or, There Must Be More to Life was one of my favorite books when I was a kid, but it's one of those books that reads one way when you're a child but has a very different tone when you go back to it as an adult. The story follows Jenny, an endearingly selfish and vain little dog who grows bored with her easy life with a loving master and runs away in search of adventure. It's all incredibly charming and silly in the best way, but when you read it as a grown-up, there are new and bittersweet resonances to Jenny's story.

Jenny was Sendak's actual dog, and he wrote the story as a tribute to her after she died. His love for her and sense of loss is there in the book, just beneath the surface of every page. After many trials and dangers, Jenny loses her way in the night and ends up falling asleep alone in a dark and cold forest, with a pile of leaves her only blanket. But then an unlikely turn of events sends her to a fabulous place, where she is surrounded by old friends, all of her most unlikely dreams come true and she is the celebrated artiste she always knew she could be. As a child you accept this happy ending without question. But as an adult, Jenny's fate is much more ambiguous. Did that sweet, dreamy little dog ever really leave the forest? Even as Sendak conjures up the perfect ending for the dog he loved so, you can't escape the feeling that Jenny's dream never ended.

Even as part of me wonders if the story needs to be adapted at all, the clips go a long way toward convincing me that the filmmakers know what they're doing. Higglety Pigglety Pop! will appear as an extra on the Where the Wild Things Are blu-ray.

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STRANGE TOONS: Tobias Gundorff Boesen’s OUT OF A FOREST

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Out Of A Forest from Tobias Gundorff Boesen on Vimeo.

Tobias Gundorff Boesen’s Out of a Forest is a remarkable short film featuring stop-motion animation that was apparently shot on location in a real forest using character models that were life-size. There's a little more information about the shoot here. But apart from being technically impressive, this is a lovely, unsettling, cute, scary and sad little film, featuring an effective use of the song Slow Show by The National.

Get ready to blow a couple of paychecks on Mego toys

I'm not really the toy collector type, but those folks at Mego are suddenly putting out a flurry of things that I must have. If you're geeky enough to be reading this blog, I can pretty much guarantee that you're gonna be jonesing for this stuff too. Get ready to spend way too much of your hard-earned cash on some hunks of plastic with little polyester pants!

Not only are they making figures based on The Venture Brothers (including the Monarch and Rusty Venture himself) but also The Twilight Zone and Lost. (Although it must be said that their "Man in Black" looks a lot more like Christian Slater than Titus Welliver.) They even have a Dude Lebowski!

(Via Mego Museum.)

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Andy Serkis to star in Nick Cave's THREEPENNY OPERA

Musician/author/screenwriter Nick Cave is a highly unpredictable artist, but his next project could be his most surprising yet. He's planning to direct a motion-capture animated film based on Bertold Brecht and Kurt Weill's pitch black, 1928 Marxist murder musical The Threepenny Opera, with Lord of the Rings star Andy Serkis in the lead.

The original work was very bold and experimental for the time, featuring zestfully amoral characters, downbeat (but catchy) songs that fused German cabaret with American jazz, and characters stepping away from the action and directly addressing the audience to make political points. The most famous song from the show, Mack the Knife, was subsequently transformed into an unlikely jazz standard and eventually featured in McDonald's creepy Mac Tonight ad campaign of the 1980s. The clip above features Cave's own snarling performance of the song, which probably offers a clue as to what he's planning for the new film's music.

(Via Slashfilm.)

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THE BOLT WHO SCREWED CHRISTMAS, narrated by Jonathan Harris

Jonathan Harris had a long and happy career - mostly playing endearingly fussy comic villains - but he is best known for his role as Dr. Smith on the camp classic 1960s TV series Lost in Space. (If you've never seen the show, this clip, featuring a montage of Dr. Smith getting upset about various space creatures, will give you a small sampling of Harris' unabashedly hammy awesomeness.)

The Bolt Who Screwed Christmas is an animated short that features Harris narrating, in what was apparently his last role before he died. It looks very cheap and silly but kind of fun, which is sort of perfect, really. Cheap and silly were no obstacle to Harris, he thrived on cheap and silly, bringing the same obvious glee to every role. This was a guy who just loved to act, and it's sweet to hear that wonderfully sly voice one more time.

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FINAL FLESH: A surreal art comedy starring porn actors

Monday, February 15, 2010

Vernon Chatman is the co-creator of such abrasively strange comedy experiments as Wonder Showzen and Xavier: Renegade Angel, but Final Flesh just might be his weirdest and most provocative endeavor yet.

Chatman discovered companies where people could pay a smallish fee and have their sex fantasies shot on video with porn actors, no matter how bizarre those fantasies were. The results weren't exactly professional quality, but Chatman was fascinated by the whole process. He proceeded to write a script that was full of surreal, shocking images and ideas without ever actually being porn, and then he sent it off to be filmed. The result was the new direct-to-DVD film Final Flesh, and you can watch the trailer above. (Note that while there's no porn and only mild swearing in the clip, it's disturbing stuff and potentially not safe for work.)

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Winsor McCay's "Hell House"

Winsor McCay was the legendary cartoonist behind the surreal, classic comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, and an animation pioneer who created short films in the 1910s and 20s that were literally decades ahead of what anybody else was doing. (His 1914 short Gertie the Dinosaur is his best-known work.)

Sadly, Brooklyn’s Sheepshead Bay news blog now reports that McCay's impressive former home has fallen on very hard times indeed. It is filled with insects and has become such a neighborhood eyesore that locals have dubbed it the "Hell House" and scrawled "WELCOME TO HELL" and "BED BUG PARADISE" on the front of it. The current owners hope to knock this historic building down and build condos on the spot.

(Via Cartoon Brew.)

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THE CABINET: A puppet show CALIGARI adaptation

In Robert Wiene's silent, expressionist classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, an evil hypnotist (Werner Krauss) roams from town to town using his somnambulist slave (Conrad Veidt) to commit a series of murders. Wiene employs supremely distorted sets (when the buildings don’t look like they’re about to flop over and melt, they look like they could eat you alive), kooky camera angles and exaggerated makeup that leaves the actors looking like walking expressionist paintings. The result is one of the strangest and most haunting films of all time.

Perhaps the idea of a stage puppet show version of Caligari sounds ridiculous, but there's nothing hokey or comic about the production mounted by Chicago's Redmoon Theatre. The show doesn't attempt to hide the puppeteers, and the various sets fold out like pop-up books and then snap shut for the next scene, making the somnabulist's tortured existence even more surreal. He is literally a puppet dangling from strings, in a world that never stops shifting around him.

(Via Super Punch.)

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SHATNER SUNDAY: Shatner unveils his likeness at Madam Taussaud's

Sunday, February 14, 2010

In today's installment of Shatner Sunday, shot at Madam Taussaud's late last year, our man unveils a wax duplicate of his 1980-something self. He makes a few strained puns and seems generally happy to be there, but it's obviously kind of an awkward moment for the guy. Imagine encountering not just a lifelike replica of yourself, but an idealized you from 25 years and a couple dozen pounds ago. Posing the real Shatner alongside his portrait was inevitable, but it invites an unfair comparison. Captain Kirk is maybe nine inches taller than the man who played him, and the actual Shatner is aging fast, as are we all.

Seeing his double inspires Shatner to half-kiddingly contemplate his mortality, and it forces us to confront Shatner's mortality too. It must be strange indeed to have lived for decades as both an icon and a walking punchline, enjoying (and sometimes clearly resenting the hell out of) a fame like no other, and to now find that people are planning for your absence and using your old spaceman boots to dress up the waxwork men and younger actors who are all set to take your place.

MUSIC FROM SPACE: Barnes & Barnes - FISH HEADS

Saturday, February 13, 2010

By the time he was a teenager, Bill Mumy had already earned his pop cultural immortality as a child actor, with several unforgettable appearances on The Twilight Zone (he was the omnipotent demon child in It's a Good Life) and his gig as Will Robinson on Lost in Space. But while a lot of former child stars turn into pathetic drug addicts when they grow up, Mumy thrived, continuing to act, doing some writing, and co-founding the long-running comedy art rock duo, Barnes & Barnes.

Barnes & Barnes' biggest "hit," 1979's Fish Heads, features sped-up chipmunk vocals and a repetitious, maddenly catchy chorus. It's right on the border between Frank Zappa sonic assault and Dr. Demento novelty tune, with a creepy video directed by none other than Bill Paxton. If you've never experienced Fish Heads, I apologize for what's about to happen to you... And you're welcome.

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GHOSTBUSTERS 3 still "not a reality"

Friday, February 12, 2010

Ivan Reitman, the director of the original Ghostbusters, now tells SCI FI Wire that despite all the news that a sequel is in the works, Ghostbusters 3 has yet to be greenlit and is still just in the idea stage.

"There seems to be a lot of enthusiasm from everybody," Reitman said. "We'll see. It's still not a reality. There are no deals. There's no real finished script."

As for Bill Murray's recent remark that he would only return if he played a ghost, Reitman did not confirm or deny if that's the plan for Dr. Venkman.

"We're well aware of (Murray's) interest," Reitman said ("with a chuckle") "I've had some wonderful conversations with him—and that's all I'll say.

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THE WIZARDING WORLD OF HARRY POTTER site online

A tricked-out new website is now online for Universal Orlando's The Wizarding World of Harry Potter attraction. The Universal Orlando people obviously spent several tons of cash on this part of the park, creating an entire castle and village. But all of that expense appears to be justified, because Wizarding World has got the whole internet abuzz.

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The bizarre, gender-bending fiction of John Hughes

Before John Hughes became the guy who produced Home Alone, Beethoven and all of that early 1990s, mainstream family comedy crap, before he was the writer/director of beloved '80s teen comic-dramas like The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles, before he even broke into screenwriting with Vacation... He was a writer for National Lampoon magazine, back when that really meant something.

These days National Lampoon survives only as a promoter of cheap and sleazy fratboy comedies, but back in the 1970s it was a razor sharp satirical magazine that employed a lot of great talents before they became famous. (Saturday Night Live, for instance, was staffed by a lot of former Lampoon folks in its early days.) The magazine specialized in a kind of misanthropic, Ivy League shock humor, smart but sometimes frighteningly vicious. Its influence, for good and ill, is inescapable in the comedy of today, and Hughes was there to help set the magazine's acidic and unforgiving tone.

His best-known pieces from this era are the bizarre, gender-bending and very, very not safe for work stories My Penis and My Vagina. (The site hosting those stories seems to be a collection of transgender fiction from various media, so it's probably not too safe for work in general.) Published in 1978, My Penis tells the story of a teenage girl who awakens one day to find that she has mysteriously sprouted a male member. While funny at times, the story turns very dark indeed, with some unfortunate sexual stereotyping and an act of truly appalling sexual violence treated like a joke. (You have been warned.) My Vagina, published a year later, is a sequel where a high school jock is appalled to discover that he has developed lady parts during the night. Like the original story, it has some laughs but also features a rape played for laughs and leaves you feeling dirty and kind of depressed.

These stories feature the same good ear for teen talk that Hughes would later put to good use in his films, which makes it all too easy to picture Molly Ringwald as the mortified leading lady of My Penis and Emilio Estevez as the emasculated protagonist of My Vagina. Without trying to delve too deeply into Hughes' psychology, I think I can say that these stories were either written during a very unhappy time in his life, or he was a man with more demons than we knew. While the stories are fascinating historical curios for Hughes fans, you definitely need to prepare yourself psychologically before reading them. Some Kind of Wonderful they ain't.

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Dame Darcy on BLIND DATE

Dame Darcy is the sometimes-brilliant cartoonist behind the long-running indie comic Meatcake. She is also a rather deliberately peculiar person, and she's made something of a second career for herself as a reality dating show kook, appearing on such highbrow fare as Blind Date, Third Wheel and Flavor Of Love 3: You Cast It!

The clip above feature's Darcy's spot on Blind Date, a show that ran in syndication for much of the last decade. (I actually used to watch this show, and seeing it now makes me weep for all those half hours I wasted with Roger Lodge.) It's an absolutely cringe-worthy segment that sees Darcy bringing a talking dolly along on her date and generally trying to be as weird as possible.

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MARS

Thursday, February 11, 2010

MARS - The Movie [HD Trailer] from Geoff Marslett on Vimeo.

Mars is an upcoming, indie sci-fi picture created with the same sort of rotoscope animation used for A Scanner Darkly. I don't know much about the film, but it has an interesting look and the technique clearly allows them to create the kind of special effects that would normally be impossible on an indie budget.

The biggest name in the cast is probably musician, comics artist and self-proclaimed superstar James Kolchalka. In addition to acting in the film, the titles are lettered with his charactertist font.

The film premieres at SXSW in March.

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STRANGE TOONS: LOGORAMA

Logorama
by siglo3000

Logorama, one of the animated short films up for an Oscar this year, is an imaginative, profane and pitch-black satire set in a world in which everything everywhere is an advertising logo or character. Created by the French filmmaking collective H5 (Francois Alaux, Herve de Crecy and Ludovic Houplain), Logorama is a beautifully made but very angry film that reminds me of some of Alan Moore's best '80s work, particularly the seldom-seen gem In Pictopia. It's not unlikely Logorama will get yanked offline sometime soon, so see it while you can.

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BLACK HOLE will be a "re-imagining", not a sequel

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Tron Legacy director Joseph Kosinski tells MTV that his upcoming version of Disney's The Black Hole will be a "re-imagining" but will feature many elements from the original film.

I saw 'Black Hole' as a little kid. What sticks out most is the robot Maximilian. The blades and the vicious killing of Anthony Perkins. That freaked me out and that's definitely going to be an element that will be preserved. The design of the Cygnus ship is one of the most iconic spaceships ever put to film. From a conceptual point of view, we know so much more about black holes now, the crazy things that go on as you approach them due to the intense gravitational pull and the effects on time and space. All that could provide us with some really cool film if we embrace it in a hard science way.

I suppose a sequel wouldn't have worked. (After all, where do you go after the trippily ambiguous ending of the original film?) But I'm boycotting this movie unless they have one ugly floating robot that talks like Roddy McDowall and another that talks like Slim Pickens. VINCENT and BOB are a part of this thing, Kosinski, or no deal!

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THE CAT WITH HANDS

Start your Wednesday off with a nightmare, watching this most peculiar short about a most peculiar cat.

Murray says he'll play a ghost in GHOSTBUSTERS 3

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

In what we can only hope is a joke, Bill Murray now says he'll only return in Ghostbusters 3 if he gets killed early on and turned into a ghost. Watching Peter Venkman die sure doesn't sound like a hilarious way to start the movie to me.

It's weird, the fans have made it pretty clear that they want the film to star Murray, Dan Aykroyd and the rest of the original gang, but all you hear from Murray and company is how they're too old now and it's time for a new generation to take over the franchise.

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HI-FI PIZZA OF THE APOCALYPSE 7: The STRETCH ARMSTRONG movie

Inspired by this apocalyptic moment from an old Daniel Clowes Eightball comic, Hi-Fi Pizza of the Apocalypse is a Monsters and Rockets feature where we chronicle the Hollywood rehashes, recyclings and recombinings that serve as ominous portents of the End Times.

Today's ominous foreshadowing of Armageddon: the upcoming Stretch Armstrong movie, starring that wolf boy from that one Twilight movie. At this point, I don't think there are many toys left to base movies on. What's next, Weebles: The Motion Picture?

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