I first found this through woostercollective.com, a great site for street art. There are links to several youtube clips from different angles. What is apparently seen is a giant puppet walking through the streets of Reykjavík, operated by large helicopters, a stunt pulled off by a jeans company I’m intentionaly not going to name.

But I quickly became intrested in how many commenters thought this episode was some sort of CGI fakery. Everything from the type of helicopter used not being available in Iceland, obvious saftey issues, to the names of the people posting on youtube sounding fake were used in the argument. So presented here are several angles linked from youtube (certainly you can find more if you want). And first, here’s a link to one of the debates you can find surrounding this stunt which went down only a few weeks ago.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56jr2RZej18

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akHq3p5QlCk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UznxqvJJ80g

I’m scratching my head as much as you, but I’m not thinking CGI, or if so, the wrong people are working for Lucasfilm… Anyway, advertising is getting more intense, and while on the one hand I feel like a chump for ‘fueling the fire’, this sort of creativity and execution I feel is worth commenting on.
Also special shout out to Robot and her buddy who were recently visiting Iceland, but if they knew anything about this, I haven’t heard about it yet. I think it happened before they arrived and started enjoying the $8 beers-

Nothing like the joys of the modern era to migrate a silly old VHS short you did and put it on youtube for God and all the real cops to see… This is a project from my acting days, and has finally moved beyond the litigation phase that I might be able to share it with you (fuck Horny Midget productions is all I have to say…). Music cred goes to Trans AM, and The Fucking Champs (not that either band actually gave us permission but I’m passing on the cred and 45% of the profits anyway). ‘Drinking Cop/narrator/Casey’ is played by Chilly Casey, ‘Non-Drinking Cop/Parker’ by Jasonaut, ‘Female Victim’ by (…name removed by H.M. productions), ‘Male Victim’ by Brian Collen, ‘Psycho Statue Worshipper’ by Xian ?, direction, camerawork, special effects and calls for a script by Alameda Punkass (not her real name, but she actually has a job in the ‘industry’ and thus must distance herself from this opus), editing by CC and AP. The ususal audio problems I’m afraid, and don’t be surprised if it’s a ’slow’ or ‘troubled’ load.

The bar has been raised, people! Now for some fun trivia for the ‘RockyHorror style’ play along at home. When ‘Parker’ approaches the door in the kitchen and asks “What’s in here?”, yell “A cat!” and fill in your own cat humor as ‘Casey’ unguardedly watches Vader the cat run by off camera. Watch the ‘hung corpse’ smile slightly at the mention of spontaneous ejaculation. Yell “WTF?!?” as multiple endings are spliced together. “Don’t let him get away!” can also be yellled at most points near the end. “My officer, what a huge piece you have…”, at various points throughout. ‘Magic knife’ cuts without touching etc etc. Oh, how I bare my soul for you people!

I had expected A Scanner Darkly to be my ‘film of the summer’, but unfortunately didn’t get to see it until well after Labor Day. I wasn’t disappointed, but coming from such a solid novel and in the hands of a compitent director, there was no surprise there. My only minor complaints are hair related – first of all, Woody H. in that wig, and secondly why have Winona blonde when she could already be Philip’s classic, nefarious ‘dark haried girl’? Anyway, the film speaks for itself. I assume the clip here will be included in the DVD extras, a rare PK Dick interview where he talks about a home invasion in the 70’s where much of his archives where stolen. And this act upon a guy who already had enough paranoia in his life.

I sort of thought Scanner would have been a bigger film, but don’t mind that it wasn’t. Spielberg and Cruise doing an adaptation of one of Dick’s stories was a bit too close for comfort. I don’t necessarily want to see one of my favorite SF writers become Hollywood fodder, and he has dozens and dozens of brilliant short stories, surely more films adaptations are to come. May they all be done as tastefully as Blade Runner. The biggest I’d say still to look for, and I could handle an animated version, is The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

So I’m behind the curve on this one: but I am officially obsessed with this NY woman of Jewish-Russian decent. She first got into my consciousness from a NYTimes popcast a few months ago, and there’ve been several times when I’ve heard someone and gone “Is that the girl from the interview?”, so she sort of kicked around in the back of my mind for a while, until finally I got around to full investigation, and wow. I haven’t been moved by a songwriter like this in a long time – I feel like some kind of gushy schoolgirl (‘Golly, I wonder what she’s doing right now…’) and can’t rule out the possibility that Kabbala majik may somehow be at work. Here’s the cool animated video for ‘Us’, directed by Peter Sluszka.

Title : Year of Release : Director

• Rashomon ‘50 Akira Kurosawa
• Seven Samuri ‘54 Akira Kurosawa
• Yojimbo ‘61 Akira Kurosawa
• The Insect Woman ‘63 Shohemi Imamura
• Youth of the Beast ‘63 Seijun Suzuki
• Woman in the Dunes ‘64 Hiroshi Teshigahara
• Gate of Flesh ‘64 Seijun Suzuki
• Tokyo Drifter ‘66 Seijun Suzuki
• Double Suicide ‘69 Masahiro Shinoda
• Blind Beast ‘69 Yasuzo Masumura
• Lady Snowblood ‘73 Toshiya Fujita
• Sexy and Furry ‘73 Norifumi Suzuki
• In the Realm of the Senses ‘76 Nagisa Oshima
• The Ballad of Narayama ‘83 Shohemi Imamura
• Ran ‘85 Akira Kurosawa
• Tampopo ‘85 Juzo Itami
• Testsuo the Ironman ‘89 Shinya Tsukamato
• Black Rain ‘89 Shohemi Imamura
• Tokyo Decadence ‘92 Ryu Murakami
• Angel Dust ‘94 Sogo Ishii
• Audition ‘99 Takashi Miike
• Battle Royale ‘00 Kinji Fukasaku
• Ichi the Killer ‘01 Takashi Miike
• Pulse ‘01 Kiyoshi Kurosawa
• Suicide Club ‘02 Sion Sono

I have listed only films I have personally seen and can vouch for, though clearly I’m on a quest to check out more from the catalogs of each director. Also, I have given English titles here, which should be OK for database searches – but many of these films had several English titles. Multiple genres are represented here: horror, suspense, sexploitation, classics, experimental (also for any who don’t realize – lots of ‘Adult Situations/nudity/blood and kooky fucking’ represented here), but it’s all ‘live action’ I have excluded anime – perhaps that’s another list for another time. The idea is: films I consider to be worth seeing – but to sit and watch this list over a long weekend, there would be a lack of continuity in ‘overall quality’. I’d like this list to grow so please post others you find noteworthy and I’ll check them out.

*Akira Kurosawa is considered a ‘master of world cinema’, most all of his films rule. I have only mentioned what I consider to be the MOST important/possibly overlooked*

So that guy in the clip who looks like he won the “Jethro Tull: Ultimate Fan” contest is in fact Alan Moore, creator of the graphic novels ‘V for Vendetta’ (from which the recent film was made) and the far more impressive ‘Watchmen’ (which part of me hopes will never appear on the big screen, unless an animated verison, and a very indie production if that).

Thanks Hashtoker for ‘unlocking the code’.

note complete lack of computer generated imagery…

Some folks in Britan have made a film depicting a future fictional assassination of President Bush (the younger). Wow.
This is weird on a number of levels: first of all that they feel the technology is at such a point that they can realisticly pull this off (for any who don’t know, I have CGI “issues”); and secondly that someone would gel this fantasy to the point of making a film of it. Rights have been secured for a US release – which I predict will be a small run, not a wide release or a film seen by a large portion of American filmgoers, at least on the big screen. Obviously, the conservatives are pissed that such a thing would ever be conceived, much less produced, then granted release in their own country. Welcome to the zone where the 1st amendent and ‘terroristic threats’ (fantasies) meet.
If a kid writes a story in a creative writing class about going nuts and shooting up his school, the odds are very high someone will hit the ‘Columbine’ panic button and hot water will ensue for the writer – which I think is screwy. The difference between a story, words on paper/text on screen (a creative outlet, no matter how morbid or twisted the subject matter) and murder, in whatever form or fashion (an unethical, irreversible act for which one should be held accountable by their society) is vast and extreme. But I think it’s obvious that Americans today are confused about these blurry lines: celebrity, entertainment, emulation, ‘respect’ at any cost, fiction/reality. And there is plenty of evidence for the trueism: Fear spawns Results.

Jeez, and just when I was trying to figure out how I felt about all the 9/11 films, continued ‘hero worship’ at the 5 year anniversary, and a vaguely defined reactionary war (in multiple theatres…no pun intended) that has no end in sight-