What will the world look like in 2019? io9 posts a video interview with visual futurist (a title I’d kill for), Syd Mead, that aims to answer this question.
2019: A Future Imagined from Flat-12 on Vimeo.
I think what I enjoyed most was Syd’s advice for doing good work – being the creator, the technician and the observer. This is kind of the core of my job and has been since I started at 19, so it’s good to hear it from such a visionary. Thanks, Syd!
What was it about the casting of Ghostbusters? It seems all of the most eccentric people somehow made their way into the 1984 film. We have Dan Akroyd serving up diamond filtered vodka in crystal skulls and ranting about UFOs and now Bill Murray giving a 1982 speech that sounds like something from the Unabomber:
I guess we know that the right actors were chosen, at the very least. And that Bill Murray’s apparent befuddlement over the high tech world of Lost in Translation was authentic.
Artist François Vautier decided to create still of every frame in Blade Runner, lay them out in a grid and then film them all with a virtual camera. The end result (set to Vangelis, of course) is nothing but stunning. I especially like that Deckard’s photo manipulation scene dialogue was included to great effect.
(io9)
Okay, this is finally a dance movie that looks worth seeing. No 3D gimmicks, no ridiculous whitewashed hip-hop culture. Just Natalie Portman losing her mind to a haunting score, trippy cinematography and mutant ballerinas. Oh, Aronofsky…you are excellent when you are twisted.
(Thanks, io9)
Apparently this is Gagra, on the Black Sea. According to io9, it used to be a Soviet resort town until military action and political instability brought it to the edge of ruin. Now it just sits there, beckoning a director to make it the backdrop for her next post-apocalyptic summer blockbuster.
artist interpretation
I surrender to your mighty pollen, trees of Chestertown. You win. I cannot think today. I cannot breathe. I have a headache that starts directly behind my eyes, thunders across my entire skull and rampages down into the middle of my back via a brittle spine. My eyes water and burn. And I give up.
Name your terms and you can have my surrender. I shall never again attempt to breathe your rightfully owned oxygen. I will avoid standing in the shaded areas near you because I clearly deserve to be scorched by the Maryland sun.
And if I go berserk and come up with Mouse Trap-like ways to kill myself, don’t be surprised. I mean, you have seen The Happening, right? (I know, Zooey Deschanel again.)
Just don’t say I didn’t warn you when the trees are your new overlords.
Sometimes a creative endeavor falls entirely flat for me – all of the checkboxes for being something I’d like are filled in, but the end result just does not work. Oddly, nearly all of Radiohead’s work falls into this category. A more recent example is Tomorrow, In a Year.
This album, an opera based on Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, should be spectacular given that fact alone. Add to the list of things going for it the collaboration between The Knife and Planningtorock – both huge favorites – and I really did expect to be in love.
And then I listened once while in the bath and have never gone anywhere near it again. That being the case, it’s a bit of a stretch to remember exactly what the offensive aspects were but I’m pretty sure it was a shrieky, warbly mess of weirdness (in itself something I’d be just fine with on a good day.)
Thanks anyway, Tomorrow, In a Year.
I’ve been watching my way through the History Channel series Ancient Aliens (which I didn’t realize had become a series, instead finding myself wondering why the special was on again and again) and I keep thinking to myself what I always think when we depict aliens in media: why would they look anything like us?!
Luckily, io9 steps up to the plate with an essay entitled “We’ll Only Find Extraterrestrial Life If We Know What We’re Looking For” that points out just how limiting it is to think that any sort of non-Earth entity would share much in common with life as we know it at all. We really need to stop depicting aliens exclusively as greys, bugs or slightly altered people (Star Trek, I’m looking at you.) Quoth the post:
This would be especially true of lifeforms that aren’t based on carbon or don’t use water as solvent, whose biochemistry would be nothing like ours. For these, we would have to fall back to the highest-order definition of life: an open system with negative entropy, emergent properties and ability to adapt and evolve, with an inner code which ensures that there will be strong continuity of form and function as the organism reproduces.
Check it out if your inner science fiction geek gets belligerent about this topic, too.
By now, if you follow my blog, you have probably realized my small crush on Zooey Deschanel. To quote a post on summer movies of 2009:
500 Days of Summer – Okay, I’m not as excited about this one, but still. Zooey Deschanel is in it. Really, she could just stand on screen for two hours and stare and I’d probably still go to the theatre, plunk down $8 and come out loving it.
And, though not mentioned here – but discussed over at a work blog – I am also a really big fan of Ada Lovelace, the “mother of computer programming” following my exposure to her in The Difference Engine.
I just found out via Gizmodo today that not only is there a movie in the works about Ada Lovelace entitled Enchantress of Numbers but Zooey is possibly on board to play Ada. Holy hell!
This gorgeous short film is apparently well on its way to becoming a full length movie. I have no idea what the budget was or how long it took to put together, but the five minutes of action were more enthralling than most blockbusters I’ve seen of late. I really want to see more ASAP.
(Thanks, Flicksided)