Extremely Loud and Incredibly Stupid (Video)
This movie (parody) should be nominated for an Oscar:
Hollywood Stars Sign On For 9/11 Truth Film
Howard Cohen writes for Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth:
“A Violation of Trust” (formerly titled “Confession of a 9/11 Conspirator”) is a feature film project that is willing to do what the world’s governments and legal bodies are unwilling to do – open a real investigation of 9/11 for the entire world to see. It dramatizes the first day of “The President’s New Investigation of 9/11”, with actors performing from a tightly-written, factually-accurate script that pits the 9/11 Commission Report and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Reports against the work of 9/11 researcher Dr. David Ray Griffin and the scientific research highlighted by leading 9/11 truth organizations, including Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth.
The filming of “A Violation of Trust” will be performed on a single set, depicting the investigation’s public hearing room. The single-set approach provides the most intense platform for the actors and the script…
Blindfold: A 9/11-Themed Short Film
Blindfold is a short film by Teace Snyder about the strained relationship between Tim, a widower father, and Eve, his pre-teen daughter, as they try to reconcile the emotional devastation 9/11 has caused their family.
Psychopathy: A Misunderstood Personality Disorder
Via ScienceDaily:
Psychopathic personalities are some of the most memorable characters portrayed in popular media today. These characters, like Patrick Bateman from American Psycho, Frank Abagnale Jr. from Catch Me If You Can and Alex from A Clockwork Orange, are typically depicted as charming, intriguing, dishonest, guiltless, and in some cases, downright terrifying.
But scientific research suggests that psychopathy is a personality disorder that is widely misunderstood.”Psychopathy tends to be used as a label for people we do not like, cannot understand, or construe as evil,” notes Jennifer Skeem, Professor of Psychology and Social Behavior at the University of California, Irvine. Skeem, Devon Polaschek of Victoria University of Wellington, Christopher Patrick of Florida State University, and Scott Lilienfeld of Emory University are the authors of a new monograph focused on understanding the psychopathic personality that will appear in the December issue of Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a journal of the Association…
Batman: Occupy Gotham
Don’t you love it when pop culture reflects real life? From the Wall Street Journal:
In addition to the morally ambiguous Catwoman and the enhanced strongman Bane, it appears the new Batman movie will tackle income inequality, according to the below trailer.
In the clip, a whispering Anne Hathaway (Catwoman) can be seen telling Bruce Wayne, Batman’s billionaire alter-ego: “There’s a storm coming, Mr. Wayne… when it hits, you’re all going to wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us.”…
Is Lisbeth Salander a Cyberpunk Hero?
Author Sasha Mitchell compares how cyberpunk is defined by Stieg Larsson, by Hollywood, and by Google. Mitchell compares Lisbeth Salander to William Gibson’s heroines (arguing that she’s a combination of Gibson’s female and male protagonists), but saying the ultimate message of her archetype is “screw labels”. (”Does she really need to be sexualized to the extent … Hollywood illustrators would have her be?”)
In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Lisbeth “spreads resistant messages despite powerful mechanisms of top-down control,” which is ultimately a more empowering message than what you get from searching “cyberpunk” on Google Images. (”Note, if you will, how many topless, pantsless, or pigtailed schoolgirls you see here.”) But even Gibson himself once argued the cutting-edge of cyberpunk is too unfamiliar to be defined.
Dau: The Biggest, Most Insane Movie In Cinema History
From GQ, Michael Idov visits the cult-like set of the Ukrainian film Dau — an enclosed bubble where thousands of actors have been living the lives of their characters 24 hours a day, ever since production began in 2006, using Soviet passports and money, in a world that is exactly as things were in the 1950s, while their real lives recede into the past:
Five years ago, a relatively unknown (and unhinged) director began one of the wildest experiments in film history. Armed with total creative control, he invaded a Ukrainian city, marshaled a cast of thousands and thousands, and constructed a totalitarian society in which the cameras are always rolling and the actors never go home.
The rumors started seeping out of Ukraine about three years ago: A young Russian film director has holed up on the outskirts of Kharkov, a town of 1.4 million in the country’s east, making…something. A movie,…
The Neverending Will Shakespeare Conspiracy Theory
Randy Dotinga writes for the Christian Science Monitor that despite theories like those in the new movie Anonymous that William Shakespeare was someone else entirely, drama professor Scott McCrea says conspiracy theories surrounding the playwright are all false:
This weekend, thousands of moviegoers will get their first glimpse of the theory that the playwright and poet named William Shakespeare wasn’t a balding guy named William Shakespeare. “Anonymous,” starring Vanessa Redgrave, suggests a grand conspiracy obscured the true identity of the Bard of Avon. (Well, make that the Bard of Not-Avon.)
The Will-wasn’t-Will idea isn’t ancient, but it’s not entirely new either. Ever since the 19th century, skeptics have been questioning whether an upper-middle class man with a rather ordinary background could have become one of the most influential humans of all time.
Recent books have debunked the doubters, including 2010’s “Contested Will,” by Shakespearean scholar James Shapiro (you can read my review here) and 2005’s “The…
Was Shakespeare A Fraud? Is Hollywood Officially Out of Ideas? (Video)
Is Hollywood officially out of ideas to tackle the Shakespeare authorship question in film called (Nudge, nudge, wink, wink …) Anonymous?
Product Placement Reaches New Heights
Wondering how out of control product placement in film has gotten? Check out this reel of highlights from The Marine, a crappy Twentieth Century Fox action flick from a couple years ago which apparently stars Miller Genuine Draft. It points to an emerging form of cinema — the low-quality, low-budget Hollywood movie that serves as an extended two-hour commercial.
Samsung Claims That iPads Are Stolen From Kubrick
It’s fascinating to examine the point at which an element of science fiction actually comes true. Apple is in a legal struggle with Samsung to prevent it from selling tablet devices that resemble the iPad. Samsung’s defense: The iPad is in fact ripped off from a tablet design created by Stanley Kubrick for 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. FOSS Patents writes:
Late last night, Samsung filed its opposition brief to Apple’s motion for a preliminary injunction in the United States.
One element of Samsung’s defense strategy is interesting enough that I wanted to report on it beforehand. Ever since Apple started to assert the design of the iPad against other manufacturers, many people have been wondering whether there’s actually prior art for the general design of the iPad in some futuristic devices shown in sci-fi movies and TV series. And indeed, Samsung’s lawyers make this claim now in their defense against Apple’s motion…
Washington Health Sec.: Contagion Movie Is Very Real
[Note spoilers below and in the link.] Josh Kirns amps up fear of contagious diseases for Mynorthwest.com:
Talk about a horror movie. The global outbreak thriller “Contagion” topped the weekend box office and it prompted a lot of extra hand washing and increased hesitance to touch door knobs, hand rails, or just about anything else we all come in contact with. Of course it’s prompting many to ask if the fictional story of an unknown virus spreading around the world in a matter of days can come true.
“What was rolling around in my mind was when SARS happened,” Washington Secretary of Health Mary Selecky told Seattle’s Morning News on 97.3 KIRO FM. “And then of course, there was H1N1 (commonly known as Swine Flu,) it was an unknown novel virus just like in the movie.”
She said just like in the movie, we didn’t know what it was or how to treat…
Should All Human Beings Pop the (Theoretical) ‘Limitless’ Pill?
Yes, a pop culture way to ask a “Brave New World” question. Rahul Parikh poses on Salon:
The film’s “miracle” drug may seem far-fetched, but it’s based in a medical reality: Taking certain medications, specifically those developed to treat psychiatric and neurological disorders, can boost cognitive performance in otherwise healthy people.
Many of us instinctively recoil from such an idea for moral reasons. Sculpting our brains, unlike, say, sculpting our noses, seems like cheating. But consider this: 7 percent of surveyed college students (and some 25 percent of those on elite campuses) have taken an unprescribed Ritalin — or a similar drug used to treat attention deficit disorder — to boost their performance on an exam.
And the phenomenon is not restricted to college students trying to raise their grade point averages: The military has a history of encouraging — and sometimes even ordering — soldiers to take Ritalin or Provigil, a drug that…
Preacher Protests The Midnight Harry Potter Screening
“You have stuff on your head, Jesus has stuff in his heart.” A bible-loving preacher, AKA comedian Paul Gale, ruffles feathers when he comes out to protest the deviance of the New York City midnight premier of Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows Pt. 2. His voice sounds like a soft Southern wind:
Willy Wonka States: Enjoy Your Room of Half-Rooms (Video)
This is NOT a kids’ movie, at least in the first part of this scene. Yes, I admit, it has the hopeful message for the children in the end. Sure beats that crap that Depp and Burton did.
The First Science Fiction Film
Dreamy and surreal, it lives up to its name:
A Trip to the Moon (French: Le Voyage dans la lune) is a 1902 French black-and-white silent science fiction film. The film was written and directed by Georges Méliès, assisted by his brother Gaston. It is based loosely on two popular novels of the time: From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne and The First Men in the Moon by H. G. Wells.
It is the first science fiction film and uses innovative animation and special effects, including the well-known image of the spaceship landing in the moon’s eye.
