Superman? In Turkey? You’ll be a believer, thanks this great moment of Turkish cinema! And Superman will remind you more of Jason Voorhees than Christopher Reeve!
Here, this is Borat arriving in town for the Toronto Film Festival atop his wagon pulled by six peasant women. I don’t think he could have arrived in anything else.
Sacha Baron Cohen is undoutebly the funniest man on the planet. Da Ali G. Show is a testament to his versitality and uncompromising style, he was the best part of Madagascar as the lemur king, and if you haven’t seen Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, then you don’t know how much of a scene stealer he is.
With Borat, he plays the culture shock card perfectly as the uncouth, uncultured, misogynistic (and fictional!) reporter for Kazakhstan. The dark side of our grand Western principles get challenged to the very core as he goes around naively, trying to figure out what makes America so imitable while attempting to fit into our “strange ways” all throughout.
I can’t wait to see Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Here’s the preview if you have no idea what I’m speaking about:
Via Cove Blogger.
Joseph Stefano, motion picture writer and the man credited for scripting the big twist in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, passed away in California, after a heart attack at the age of 84.
One of his earliest jobs in the industry was serving as a supervisory writer and producer for The Outer Limits back in in 1963, helping to set the eerie tone of the show. He got his big break with Hitchcock by writing the screenplay adapatation of Psycho, and is credited with adding crucial elements to the story, such as Marion Crane’s fugitive background in the film, so as to make her early death all the more shocking. As he noted:
“Killing the leading lady in the first 20 minutes had never been done before.”
He went on to write other horror and suspense flicks such as the much-emulated Eye of the Cat, Snowbeast, and The Kindred, and even scripted an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation as well as for the modern rebirth of The Outer Limits. He was consulted for Gus Van Sant’s re-make of Psycho and wrote the made-for-TV movie Psycho IV: The Beginning.
Via Cryptomundo
There are numerous reasons why many people are looking over to Japan, and not the United States, to see the future of animation. Movie studios can continue to obsess over their CGI wannabe blockbusters and Disney can continue to implicitly claim that traditional animation is dead, but perhaps it isn’t the medium that has died. Perhaps imagination and craftmanship, in our north american lands, are.
Anyone who has ever seen a Studio Ghilbi movie knows exactly what I’m talking about: whimsical and imaginative stories within fantastic worlds where breaking down reality, instead of trying to replicate it, are de rigueur, concocted withpen and pencil in hand, pushing ever forward the possibilities of (what is now called) 2-D animation. And they do it all the while refusing to take children for fart-loving idiots. If you have never been exposed to Ghilbi, the folks over at Lukira have compiled a collection of the 10 first minutes of 10 Studio Ghilbi movies for you to watch, enjoy, and perhaps even get a little excited about. And if you have seen the movies, it’s a great way to remember just how magnificent they are.
It’s a nice list, which glaringly omits one of my favourites, Porco Rosso, but hey, I guess when you have to trim, you have to trim somewhere. No harm done.
Talk about your niche crowd: indie film producer Gary Hustwit (who produced the excellent Moog documentary a couple of years ago on Bob Moog and the cultural impact of his synthesizer) is plopping himself into the director’s chair for the first time to tackle another discreet albeit omnipresent member of modern culture: typography. And he’s going to do it through an examination of the Helvetica typeface. That’s right: a documentary on the Helvetica typeface.
Here is the entire Gluemeat comic archive.
