| New Jersey
Pandora, I just found a site called Pandora...
posted this | this entry's link | speak your mind | Parody | Web 2.0
Who would think this 1972 Peter Bogdanovich / Barbra Streisand / Ryan O'Neal / Madeline Kahn (with cinematography by László Kovács!) screwball / slapstick comedy would be a hit with the kids? 3.5 stars
| Family Movie Night
I've seen some of these before, but this round up of "Creepy Old Ads" is worth a look. Certainly not the only old badvertising out there -- have you ever seen this Jello commercial? And speaking of badvertising, check out these ads for Internet Explorer 8. Ummmm.... yeah.
posted this | this entry's link | speak your mind | Microsoft
Our database is made up of literally hundreds of thousands of individual recommendations from dozens of former video-store clerks. Check out their 36 "genomes" for movies.
posted this | this entry's link | speak your mind | Web Tools
"Lurid. Weird. Fantastique." Your source for Eurotrash, Gothic Horror, Mad Science, Movies Needing An All Drag Remake, Lesbian Fashion Photographers, and Nunsploitation. You know, the good stuff.
posted this | this entry's link | speak your mind | Scary
Via Cynical-C.
posted this | this entry's link | speak your mind | Donny & Marie | Star Wars
Sort of Michael Gondry meets Crockett Johnson. Via Colin.
posted this | this entry's link | speak your mind
Go on, I dare you not to cry. Via Fark.
posted this | this entry's link | speak your mind | Pixar
Which is the more frightening vision of NYC in the 70s? The social commentary of The Wiz went completely over my head when I saw it in the theater, although I do remember being freaked out about the Evil Columns in the subway. The boys didn't really like it, so not the best Family Night movie. The Warriors is definitely not family fare. Favorite design-geek Tufte-Alert line, as the gang tries to read the Massimo Vignelli subway map to figure out how to get back to Coney: "Ah, forget that, no one can figure that out anyway." Can you dig it? 3.5 and 3 stars, respectively.
| Action | Family Movie Night | Musicals | New York City
"Wuxia + Southern gothic + Monster movie + Pre-Revolutionary France" says Debbie. A naturalist and his Indian blood-brother are on the trail of a Beast that's laying waste to the French countryside. And they get to kick ass. What's not to like? 3.5 stars.
| Action | France | History of Science | Monsters
Cool idea, I just with they didn't call them "MobMovs". Via Fark.
posted this | this entry's link | speak your mind | Flash Mobs | Guerrilla Theater | Site Specific
I remember some of these from when I first read Poe as a kid.
Via Cynical-C.
Also: James Mason + Poe = Cartoon madness.
posted this | this entry's link | 1 comment | Edgar Allen Poe | Harry Clarke | Illustration | James Mason
What? What?! What?!? Does the word "duh" mean anything to you?
Please, Hollywood, try to use some original ideas. Like, say, board games.
posted this | this entry's link | speak your mind | Joss Whedon
An essay on Tex Avery, and his last cartoon, Sh-h-h-h-h-h. Via Fark.
posted this | this entry's link | speak your mind | Cartoons | Tex Avery
Well, at least I know what that They Might Be Giants song is about. Amusing, but as Debbie points out, the film puts Lucille Ball in funny situations, instead of just letting her be funny. And now here is Ethel May Potter and Company.
The University of Minnesota researchers who run movielens (collaborative filtering for movies) have an interesting twist on tagging:
Dubbed "Tag Expression," this new approach to tagging will add more feeling to your tags. When you add a tag, you now have the option of specifying if the tag represents something that you like about the movie or something that you dislike about the movie.
Here's what it looks like:
You'll have to imagine the AJAXy drag and drop. Size here indicates tag frequency for that movie, and color indicates collective mood. The redder the tag, the more the users dislike that aspect of the movie; the bluer the better.
A ways back I thought there should be two kinds of tags -- "left-handed" tags that were subjective, and "right-handed" tags that were objective. (Yes, sort of like whuffie.) So, for example "Sean Connery" and "Science-Fiction" and "giant floating head" might be right-handed tags for Zardoz, while "fantastically bad" and "LSD substitute" would be a left-handed tag. But I think I like this method better, since it adds the dimension of feeling.
Incidentally, while tagging a movie I ran across one referring to the Bechdel Test for films, which goes as follows:
The strip popularized what is now known as the Bechdel test, also known as the Bechdel/Wallace test, the Bechdel rule, or Bechdel's law. Bechdel credits her friend Liz Wallace for the test, which appears in a 1985 strip entitled "The Rule", in which a character says that she only watches a movie if it satisfies the following requirements:
- It has to have at least two women in it,
- Who talk to each other,
- About something besides a man.
There is, of course, a blog dedicated to the test. Our regular readers will, of course, have already noted that Bechdel Test follows Stigler's law of eponymy.
| Collaborative Filtering | Movielens | Semantic Web | Tagging | Tags
That being the plot of Star Wars, in Uncomfortable Plot Summaries. Via Cynical-C. Contains a few spoilers, naughty words.
| Mashups | Science Fiction
Peanuts comic. As Saturday morning cartoon. As cupcakes. (First one is from Colin.)
Still trying to avoid reviews until we see it this weekend. LALALALALAICAN'THEARYOU!
But it's OK, I already know that Rorschach is a sled.
posted this | this entry's link | speak your mind | Cartoons | Comics | Peanuts | Watchmen
