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This is a guide to the famous Lorne of the Rings trilogy of movies. All your favorite characters are here, from Samsclub Gunjeans to Starman to Flowbee the Haddock to Aerosmith, daughter of Lord Efron to Gumball, son of Groin.
This is one of those that goes from “oh how can this predictable thing actually be funny” to “oh my pants are wet because I peed in them because laughing” very quickly. (via waxy)
Using images found on the internet through Google’s visually similar images feature, NASA, U.S. Geological Survey, and various mapping services, Kelli Anderson recreated part of the Eames’ iconic Powers of Ten as a flipbook. Watch a video here:
Or play around with a virtual flipbook at Anderson’s site. This could not possibly be anymore in my wheelhouse. Here’s the nitty gritty on how she made it happen.
The inspiration for making discontinuous-bits-of-culture into something continuous goes back to 2011. Some of my friends camped out on a sidewalk to see Christian Marclay’s The Clock. Like a loser with a deadline, I missed out-only catching it years later at MoMA. In the day-long film, Marclay recreates each minute of the 24-hour day using clips from films featuring the current time-on a clock or watch. It runs in perfect synchronization with the audience’s day (so: while a museum crowd slumps sleepily in their chairs at 6am, starlets hit snooze on the clocks onscreen.)
Every day, a program written by Julien Deswaef selects a war-related news item from the NY Times, formats it in the style of the infamous Star Wars opening crawl (complete with John Williams’ score), and posts the results to YouTube.
Published yesterday, the crawl for Episode XXVII was taken from a NY Times article about an Obama speech about the Iranian nuclear deal.
Here’s how the project was made and if you’d like to try it yourself, grab the source code. (via prosthetic knowledge)
If you want to see what Leo Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Neymar might have looked like if they played in the 1950s/60s, Paladar Negro photoshopped some Barcelona & Real Madrid players onto old timey trading cards.
They previously did a similar project with Argentinian players…this one of Angel Di Maria is amazing:
(via @craigpatik)
Clips of Peggy Olsen from Mad Men set to Drake’s Started From the Bottom.
(via av club)
All six films1 from the Star Wars series played at the same time, superimposed on top of each other.
Watch this while you can…I imagine it’ll get taken down in a few hours/days.
Until Disney decides to reboot episodes 1-3 in another 10 years, we are stuck with six Star Wars films in the canon. As Yoda once said, “Death is a natural part of life. Rejoice for those around you who transform into the Force.”↩
Derelict is a feature-length black & white film that splices about an hour of Alien and 90 minutes of Prometheus together into a single narrative.
‘Derelict’ is an editing project for academic purposes. ‘Prometheus’ wasn’t exactly an Alien prequel, but this treats it as such by intercutting the events of Alien with Prometheus in a dual narrative structure. The goal was to assemble the material to emphasize the strengths of Prometheus as well as its ties to Alien.
(via ★interesting)
Magisterial. The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Katsushika Hokusai, modified by Reddit users Put_It_All_On_Red and photosonny. (via @craigmod)
From The Flintstones to Band of Outsiders to Miller’s Crossing, here’s a look at some of the films referenced in Quentin Tarantino’s movies.
(via devour)
If you take Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel and mix in elements of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, the result is pretty good.
(via devour)
Turns out, if you take Junkie XL’s soundtrack to Mad Max: Fury Road and pair it with a train chase scene from Buster Keaton’s silent film masterpiece The General, it works pretty well.
Alexey Kondakov takes figures from classical paintings, places them in contemporary scenes, and posts the results on Facebook. Think of cherubs riding the subway, that sort of thing.
(via colossal)
A cleverly constructed mashup of all the major Hollywood studio intros — MGM’s roaring lion, Disney’s castle, Paramount’s flying stars, Miramax’s skyline — into one mega-intro.
(via @pieratt)
From an alternate universe in 1985, a Star Wars crossover with Star Trek that never happened in which Lord Vader has the Genesis Device.
Paging JJ Abrams. Mr. Abrams to the white courtesy phone please. (via @khoi)
Really enjoying this chill remix of Radiohead’s Reckoner by Cubicolor this morning.
The band hasn’t shared anything in over three years, but Radiohead does have a Soundcloud account full of remixes of their stuff, including this remix of Bloom by Jamie xx:
Speaking of Jamie xx, a new track from his upcoming album dropped yesterday. I’ve been wearing out his preview album on Rdio for the past couple of weeks. Good Times. (via @naveen)
Artist JK Keller has digitally widened1 episodes of The Simpsons and Seinfeld to fit a 16:9 HD aspect ratio. Watching the altered scenes is trippy…the characters and their surroundings randomly expand and contract as the scenes play out.
Keller also HD-ified an episode of the X-Files and slimmed an old episode of Star Trek into a vertical aspect ratio. (via @frank_chimero)
At least I think that’s how they were created. The videos were posted without explanation — aside from their titles “LEaKeD TesT footagE frOM seiNfelD RemaSter In hiGh-defiNiTiON” and “animAtORs rEdraw old SimPsons epIsodeS fOr hdTv” — so it’s hard to say for sure.↩
WQXR took 46 performances of a selection of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and spliced them together into one piece, highlighting the how varied the performance of the notes on the page can be.
Terry Urban’s 8-song mashup album of FKA Twigs and Notorious B.I.G.
Why not FKA Biggs? Or Notorious T.W.I.G.S.? Twiggie Smalls? (via @frank_chimero)
This is magnificent. The little floppies!
And you can totally build your own with these instructions. Case is 3D printed and the chip & software run on the Arduino platform. So cool! (via devour)
Funny or Die digitally inserted the singer Michael Bolton into Office Space, where he plays Michael Bolton, the Initech programmer.
(via devour)
Someone edited the courtroom scene from A Few Good Men and took out all the dialogue, leaving just the reaction shots. It’s surprisingly coherent and dramatic.
See also Dr. Phil without dialogue and musicless music videos. (via @pieratt)
From Dissolve, a video that recreates scenes from some Oscar winning movies using only stock footage.
The recreated movies include Gladiator, The Social Network, Jurassic Park, and 2001. See also their first effort at this sort of thing.
From Steven Benedict, a short video essay featuring the characters from different Coen brothers’ films talking to each other. According to Benedict, the dialogue reveals three main themes of their movies.
While other essays have assembled several recurring visual tropes: elevators, dogs, dream sequences, bathrooms etc., this essay has the characters talk to one another across the films so we can more clearly hear the Coens’ dominant concerns: identity, miscommunication and morality. Taken as a trinity, these elements indicate that the Coens’ true subject is the search for value in a random and amoral universe.
(via @khoi)
Wooper is a Robot Chicken parody of Looper, in which cartoon characters like Elmer Fudd are sent back in time to be killed because they can’t show guns in children’s cartoons anymore.
(via @gruber)
If you take the vocals from The Perfect Drug by Nine Inch Nails and match them to the beats from Taylor Swift’s Shake It Off, you get this little bit of magic:
Update: I totally forgot I’d previously featured this awesomeness: NIN’s Head Like a Hole vs. Carly Rae Jepsen’s Call Me Maybe. Also of note: Mark Romanek directed the videos for Shake It Off and The Perfect Drug. (via ★interesting, @sarahmakespics, and mark)
From the Russian Space Agency, a video of what the sky would look like if the Sun were replaced by some other stars. It starts off with the binary star system of Alpha Centuri, but watch until the end for Polaris, which has a radius 46 times that of the Sun.
See also the view from Earth of different planets replacing the Moon and imagining Earth with Saturn’s rings.
What if the Busy Busy Town Richard Scarry wrote about was Silicon Valley circa 2015? Meet the fine citizens of Business Town. Great stuff, but did someone forget to credit Ruben Bolling’s comic strip Richard Scarry’s 21st Century Busy Town Jobs for the inspiration?
There a lots of videos of movies reimagined as 8-bit video games out there (Kill Bill, The Matrix, Pulp Fiction), but I’m posting the Guardians of the Galaxy one because of the excellent chiptune rendition of the Awesome Mix Vol. 1 soundtrack.
Hooked on a Feeling, beep beep doot doot… (via devour)
So. Steven Soderbergh has cut his own version of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Like, !!!1
I haven’t had a chance to watch this yet, so I don’t know what’s different about it aside from the shorter runtime of 1h50m. If someone watches it and wants to report in about the differences, let me know. Soderbergh also guessed that Kubrick would have liked shooting on digital:
let me also say i believe SK would have embraced the current crop of digital cameras, because from a visual standpoint, he was obsessed with two things: absolute fidelity to reality-based light sources, and image stabilization. regarding the former, the increased sensitivity without resolution loss allows us to really capture the world as it is, and regarding the latter, post-2001 SK generally shot matte perf film (normally reserved for effects shots, because of its added steadiness) all day, every day, something which digital capture makes moot. pile on things like never being distracted by weaving, splices, dirt, scratches, bad lab matches during changeovers, changeovers themselves, bad framing and focus exacerbated by projector vibration, and you can see why i think he might dig digital.
See also Soderbergh’s B&W edit of Raiders of the Lost Ark. (via @fengypants)
Update: Reader and 2001 fan Dan Norquist watched Soderbergh’s edit and reported back via email:
I love everything Soderbergh does and I love the fact that he cut this film. It’s fun to see it in a more concise form. Really, there’s no choppy edits or anything that doesn’t make sense (except the whole movie of course!). I did miss some of my favorite parts. I love when the father is talking to his daughter on the video phone. Also, if you weren’t around in 1968 it’s really hard to describe how scary the Cold War was. There was always this thing hanging over our heads, that the Russians really had the means to destroy us with nuclear weapons. So you really need the full scene where the American meets the Russians (Soviets). The forced, unnatural politeness is so brilliant and helped to give the film context in its time.
All the important stuff is there — the apes, the monolith, HAL turning evil, astronaut spinning away, the speeding light show (shortened?), old man pointing at space child — and it’s all recut by a master.
Finally, there is something about the full length of the original film that is part of its strength as a piece of art. There is no hurry, no cut to the chase. It’s almost as if you have to go through the entire journey before you can earn the bubble baby at the end.
No surprise that he tightened it up into something less Kubrickian and more Soderberghish. Dan closed his email by saying he would recommend it to fans of the original. (thx, dan)
Update: I’ve seen some comments on Twitter and elsewhere about the legality of Soderbergh posting the 2001 and Raiders edits. The videos are hosted on Vimeo, but are private and can’t be embedded on any site other than Soderbergh’s. But any enterprising person can easily figure out how to download either video. The Raiders video has been up since September, which means either that Paramount doesn’t care (most likely in my mind) or their lawyers somehow haven’t caught wind of it, even though it was all over the internet a few months ago (less likely). We’ll see if whoever owns the rights to 2001 (Time Warner?) feels similarly.
An interesting wrinkle here is that Soderbergh has been outspoken about copyright piracy and the Internet. From a 2009 NY Times article about a proposed French anti-piracy law:
In the United States, a Congressional committee this week began studying the issue. In a hearing Monday before the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives, Steven Soderbergh, the film director, cited the French initiative in asking lawmakers to deputize the American film industry to pursue copyright pirates.
Deputizing the film industry to police piracy sounds a little too much like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse. I wonder if Soderbergh feels like these edits are legal to post publicly, if they are fair use for example. Or rather if he feels it’s not but he can get away with it because he is who he is. (thx, @bc_butler)
Update: Soderbergh has removed his cut of 2001 from his site “AT THE REQUEST OF WARNER BROS. AND THE STANLEY KUBRICK ESTATE”. So, that answers that question. (via @fengypants)
I also found out that apparently I had jury duty last week on the same day in the same room as Soderbergh. Total embarrassing fanboy meltdown narrowly avoided. ↩
Finally, courtesy of the Auralnauts, we get the Terminator trailer that we deserve. Time travel is hilarious.
I wish we could send you back with pants, but the technology just isn’t there yet. So as soon as you hit the ground, you’re going to want to find some pants. I know you can do it…because you already did it.
Like the old wives’ tale says, if you want to fix the future, just keep sending Terminators back in time. (via @mouser_nerdbot)
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