Okay, if you haven’t seen this you are in for a treat. “Adventure Time” was a short kids’ animation created for Nickelodeon’s “Random! Cartoons” – a stand alone animated episode that has since outshined its series competition (just check out the number of views on youtube!). It concerns the adventures of boy wonder Pen and his magical dog friend Jake and without further ado, please check it out:
Cadbury Dairy Milk Chocolate is the unlikely product behind a brilliant new advert launched during the Big Brother 2008 UK final. Like most good adverts it is simple and poetic, featuring an emotional gorilla drumming along to the Phil Collins song “In The Air Tonight”. It is written and directed by Juan Cabral, the creative mind behind the award winning Sony Bravia advert.
Don’t read too much in to it, in Cadbury’s words “There’s no clever science behind it – it’s just an effort to make you smile” and make us smile, it does. A higher res version can be found on the campaign’s official site.
Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze up the ante with “Adaptation” a bonkers self-referential splurge on writers’ block and orchids (as a metaphor for passion).
Kaufman includes himself as a character in this script, and his portrayal is everything a screenwriter should be: self-deprecating, overweight and hopelessly timid. His character is wonderfully offset by a fictitious identical twin brother, an equal parts loveable and infuriating character who typifies the awful amateur screenwriter, with banal, idiotic and overused ideas, who to top it all off is excepted in to the industry by blind luck. Both characters are brought to life by Nicolas Cage who, while I generaly dislike, shows his ability as a half-decent actor during some of the more tender scenes between the two characters.
“Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.” – Ingmar Bergman.
“I have always admired him, and I wish I could be a equally good filmmaker as he is, but it will never happen. His love for the cinema almost gives me a guilty conscience.” – Steven Spielberg
Okay, “Elephant” is a film inspired by the Columbine shootings, and shows a regular high school day ending in a similar harrowing incident. The film is shot beautifully, with some huge (and technically amazing) tracking shots, that follow several different students on their individual journeys throughout the school. They serve to build up a picture of a vibrant high school full of life, and really put you in to the shoes of some of the characters.
The fantastic Warp Films has brought us some more goodies with a fantastic new(ish) music video and more promised to come. Richard Ayoade (who acted in and directed the hilarious and underrated “Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place”) directs an awesome video for the Arctic Monkey’s “Fluorescent Adolescent” in which a gang of clowns and some East End gangsters beat each other up in a burnt out industrial estate. There is something poetic about slowmo violence, particularly when it involves clowns.
Kind of reminded me of those classic Trigger Happy TV sketches with the guys dressed as dogs who beat each other up. Absurd Violence.
Tatsuyuki Tanaka is a big animator in Japan – he worked as a key animator on Akira (pretty much the biggest Japanese animated movie ever), and has done work on music videos, short films and adverts.
Prewarning: This article contains spoilers for the film “True Romance” – watch the film before reading this, as obviously seeing the scene within the context of the entire film is very important. Also this movie uses some fairly strong racist language (much of which is within this scene) but is not, in any way, racist (the context, and reasoning for the language is revealed in this scene analysis if there were any doubts!). If you’ve already seen the movie then great – give the scene a rewatch and lets have a closer look at what makes it so great.
The upcoming adaptation of “Beowulf” is easily my most anticipated film of the moment. For a start it is about time this story had a decent adaptation, a major feature production that ISN’T rubbish. Decent adaptations of the classic Old English saga have been very thin on the ground – the only one I remember enjoying was the “Animated Epics: Beowulf” version for TV. But it was a TV short, not a feature. Beowulf is dark, epic fantasy before fantasy even existed, and it has heaps of potential to be an all round awesome feature film (potential that has not yet been realised). It also looks like they are including the third act of the story, a section that has been frequently omitted from past adaptations, which is great, as cutting it out is like cutting out the last book of “Lord of the Rings”.
“Imprint” is Takashi Miike’s entry to the “Masters of Horror” series that ran in early 2006. His entry was banned in America, but aired over here in the UK on a little channel called Bravo - however not wishing to line Rupert Murdock’s pockets (and not being able to afford to, even if I did) I missed it. Finally, and with great anticipation, I managed to seek it out.
