Hell yeah, Edgar Wright!
Another great essay from Tony Zhou, this time about why most modern comedy films are terrible except for everything by the great Edgar Wright.
from the Failed Policies Department
Hana Beshara helped operate a website that streamed "pirated" movies and TV shows. She was caught as part of a sting by the Department of Homeland Security. She went to federal prison for almost a year and a half. This and other arrests of similarly hardened criminals has stopped movie "piracy" in its tracks. Wait, um, no, not stopped...what's the phrase? Oh, yeah: had absolutely no effect on movie piracy whatsoever.
You can say, The law is the law and If you can't do the time, don't do the crime. Except that the law has been written by giant media corporations and their lobbyists to protect their own decades-old business models. The history of entrepreneurship—particularly in the media industries—is essentially a story of one "illegal" assault on old technologies and outmoded business models after another, trademark wars, intellectual property "theft," and rampant bootlegging that then turned into, say, the motion picture business, or radio, or cable television, or the VCR. Funded Ivy-league prodigies become billionaires doing this. Less gilded kids go to federal prison.
Rites of Passage
"Detasseling work is usually performed by teens; as such, it serves as a typical rite of passage in rural areas of the Corn Belt of the Midwestern United States."
I, An Actress by George Kuchar
Kutiman's Give It Up
Great mashup artist, or the Greatest mashup artist?
A Pitch for Terminator 6
I don’t know what Terminator 5 is going to be about, of course, since it won’t be out for a year, but here’s what I think should happen in T6:
A Terminator is sent back in time to kill John Conner when he’s like, whatever, 30, or something. (I know, the world ended in T3. Big deal, it’s time travel, blah-blah-blah, magic.) Anywho, the robot succeeds, in the first ten minutes of the film. Bam, Conner’s dead, mission accomplished. (Bonus if this time the adult Conner is played by Edward Furlong.)
Now the Terminator has to adjust to just hanging around in the present with nothing to do. He has to “live his life.” So he does stuff, meets people, becomes a member of the community, goes to college, falls in love, whatever. Eventually, he develops empathy for human beings and comes to regret what he’s done.
So he puts himself in deep-freeze or something and waits for the rise of the machines, then he hops back in the time machine, goes back in time and stops himself from killing John Conner. The End.
You’re welcome, Terminator producers.
Satoshi Kon: Editing Space & Time
Every Frame a Painting’s Tony Zhou is back with an excellent essay on Satoshi Kon’s editing style. Four years after his passing, we still haven’t quite caught up to Satoshi Kon, one of the great visionaries of modern film. In just four features and one TV series, he developed a unique style of editing that distorted and warped space and time. Join us in honoring the greatest Japanese animator not named Miyazaki.
Satoshi Kon (今 敏) was a Japanese anime directer, writer, and manga artist. His artistic vision and penchant for blending reality with dreams and the subconscious made him one of the few modern artists pushing anime forward. Mr. Kon is best known for directing Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, Paprika, and Tokyo Godfathers. He also directed the psychological horror anime series Paranoia Agent. Mr. Kon was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in May of 2010, and passed away at the age of 46 on August 24, 2010. You can read his final words here. Mr. Kon was working on a new film called The Dream Machine at the time of his passing. It has recently been announced that production on the movie will continue, though doubtless the completion of the movie will be bittersweet for both the fans and those at Madhouse Inc. —Fuck Yeah, Satoshi Kon
I knew I'd seen him somewhere.
Bayhem
This is a brilliant primer on the uses and abuses of the cinematic frame.
Nobody Beats the Woz
Bloom + (GoPro x Drone) = Whoa
Another impressive short by the great Phillip Bloom, all the more so for being shot on a fucking GoPro attached to a $1000 quad copter.
Flip-O-Dex
Standis
Ruined Anime Landscapes
Back to the Welles
A bad selfie of me and (my hero) Kyle MacLachlan (AKA Special Agent Dale Cooper)
Green Ninja
The Straight Way Was Lost
Kool-Aid is Awesome
"There’s no more drinking or not drinking the Kool-Aid, in other words. The Kool-Aid is raining from the skies and seeping into the groundwater. You can argue that the world’s most entertaining and subversive infomercial is still just an infomercial, but it will only make you sound like a spoilsport. (Isn’t “Star Wars” really just an ad for toys, too, in the eyes of Lord Business?) Maybe most of us no longer care about such distinctions. Movie or toy ad, critique or paid advertisement, party or promotional event, it’s all the same, so why bellyache over such trivia?"
from this article by Heather Havrilesky
This is an interesting piece—the above quoted segment reminds me of the way I hear the kids today using the word “hater.” A “hater,” you see, is someone who criticizes something. I enjoyed The Lego Movie quite a bit, but I would never argue that it was truly subversive or that it wasn’t essentially a commercial. I suggest that anyone who can’t see that replace the word Lego in the title with the word Chevron or Coca-Cola.