Yet another 100 Best Films list from AFI. The genres they chose are kinda odd, but there is a great interview clip with Harold Ramis in which he explains the duration of Phil's existential stay in Punxsutawney in Danny Rubin's original script. He also explains Phil's ingenious mechanism for keeping track of how many Groundhog Days he's lived through.
Harold Ramis talks about how much “real” time passes for Phil Conners.
I got a cryptic e-mail last week from Lo asking of I'd read Batman Villains Secret Files and Origins 2005. She also made me swear not to attempt to find it or research it at all. Um...OK.
I got a call from Beca today telling me that a package from Lori arrived with a comic book shaped parcel inside...plus Trader Joe's 73% dark chocolate!
When I got home and opened it up, there indeed was Batman Villains Secret Files and Origins 2005. Lori had also mailed me with instructions to skip the first story. I flipped open to look at the contents and see which page to start on, and my eyes landed on this double-stuff credit:
Pg. 27 IF A MAN BE CLAY!
Steve Purcell: Script
Mike Mignola: Pencils
"Oh my god! Look at this!" I exclaimed holding out the book to Beca. I had the pleasure of working with Steve on the ill-fated Frankenstein feature at ILM, and was a fan of Salmon Max and Gumby's Winter Fun Special before that. And Mike Mignola - well hell, you know who he is...
What can I say? Pure awesomeness! Complete "day the mail-away Boba Fett action figure arrived" awesomeness!
Best. Batman. Story...Evar.
But wait, there's more!
I finally found Scott Pilgrim, a comic I've been looking for for months after seeing a review on TRS which reminded me that Scott McCloud featured it in is epic lecture tour and told everyone to read it immediately. After finishing my Batman comic, I dove into the Canadian-style manga, and was blown away! More pure awesomeness!
I got the same feeling reading these comics tonight that I got watching Spaced the first time:
"Hey, someone went to the trouble of making this just for me. Kind of a small audience, but...thanks!"
I'll be reading Volume 2 of Scott Pilgrim later tonight and I'll be trying desperately to find Volumes 3 and 4 in Singapore this weekend!
Yay! Awesome stuff from awesome friends written by still other aweome friends and Torontonian manga masters! And now I've shared them with you...go get all this stuff right now. Go! I mean it. Admit it, your life could use some extra awesomeness right about now.
Gee whiz, I haven't even had the chocolate yet!
I've only had to wait a few months to be able to tell folks about the game that's being developed at Lucasfilm Animation Singapore, but my friends on the game team have been toiling away for over a year in secrecy!
In any public presentation about the studio, we've all had to dance around our video game IP, usually joking about the fact that all we could tell folks was that it was a game for a handheld platform and that they had a 50% chance of guessing which.
So here's where you can find out all about it:
Official Star Wars: Clone Wars Website at LucasArts
Interview with Project Lead (and fellow giant dog owner) Feargus Carroll on IGN
"New Star Wars: The Clone Wars game coming to DS" at Pocket Gamer
This is really exciting news and the game team has been working really hard to make this an awesome game!
We finally had part of our fence replaced in the front. It was leaning at abou a 30 degree angle ever since the winds hit last year and we think it was mostly being help up by the passion flower vines on top. Our neighbor decided it was time before we did and called the fence people and we just paid our share. Four more neighbors to go. The fence people were good and we will probably use them for the remainder of the perimeter. Pictures will come later.
I finally got some gopher cinch traps to deal with the gopher problem. Right around that time Grover killed one (and ate half of it before I stopped him). Using the cinch traps has been effective and after not seeing any new gopher activity for a few days we decided to clean up and put down a new layer of mulch/bark. The next morning in the areas we worked on there were four fresh gopher mounds. I think as they are being taken care of new ones are moving in from the 1/2 acre lot next door. More trapping took care of that one though. Still there are still a few lurking elsewhere in the yard. I'm trying to get them in the neighbor's yard too (with permission) to stop the exodus.
Today we were going to excavate the flagstones making up the front patio to put gopher wire between them so the gophers won't mess that up in the future. Starting on the first one was ok until I saw a bee fly to the ground and disappear down a hole next to the flagstone. I stepped over for a closer look and within a few minutes there were a number of bees looking for the holes in the dirt I had just cleared away. Looking around the rest of the flagstones I now see a lot of these holes. I stopped because I don't want to be uncovering a nest and pissing off all the bees inside.
Unfortunately, Cinefex is not quite the magazine it used to be. Throughout the 80s, each quarterly issue concentrated on the effects of one or two movies and was not afraid to get very technical in its descriptions of advances in optical compositing or miniature construction.
Back then, there were only a handful of big effects-driven films a year to report on. These days, in order not to exclude anyone, Cinefex often reports on five or six films in each issue, and often the short articles that often feel like they might as well simply read: "So, they used computers to do the effects." Needless to say, I'm enjoying cracking open the vintage issues.
For my current research, I'm starting with issue #7, which is entirely dedicated to Willis O'Brien and has some of the best information on the effects in King Kong, Son of Kong and Mighty Joe Young.
Found some great material for my chapter on the frequent inability of on-set puppets to live up to the expressive range of stop-motion or CG creatures that are intercut or share the screen with them. The full-sized Kong s great, but he won't make you cry. The next Cinefex issue on the stack has an article on Little Shop of Horrors, which is the stunning exception to the rule about weak puppet performances. Of course, they wrung a bit more fidelity out of Audrey II's performance by undercranking the camera...but I'm getting ahead of myself!
i just uploaded more kitten pictures, of the two remaining girls, to my flickr.
they are super cute.
i think a lot of us could use some cute today.
this is probably one of the most awesome things i've ever seen.
A woman ovulates during surgery for a partial hysterectomy, and it's caught on film.
Totally amazing, and a little icky (like all things related to being a mammal)!
i have finished all the work on my plate (until a meeting i have in an hour) so let's have some house porn!
It has a studio space on the first floor that i have no use for, but i want it!
I think, though, that I would feel like I was not classy enough for my house if I lived here.
This is actually the house where our Brownie Troop Leader lived last year, before they moved to Vancouver. It is freakin' gorgeous.
Just down the street from one of Sophie's BFFs.
Gah, I need a cigarette now.
Anyway, it's not the quantity of Singapore's censorship that I want to address, but the quality. This past Friday night we went to see Sex and the City and even after all the signs and warnings about "no one under 18 being admitted," it was clearly censored.
While we don't know exactly what was cut, we know exactly where it was cut from. The edit was almost comical. In the middle of a sex scene, there was a jump in the soundtrack and the image went a few sprocket holes out of frame for a second. What the...?
Then, 45 minutes later, it happened again. Start sex scene and...pop...jump. Ugly, ugly splice.
Yes, I object to censorship. But, if you have been to see a movie with me, you know I am super-sensitive to theatrical presentation. I was way more offended by the poor quality of the splices than the fact that material had been excised.
Cut between the frames people! Between the frames! I wonder where those sections of film are now and I wonder if they get put back when the prints are returned to the studio.
