51 minutes ago
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Two Short Films Shot Where All Men Fear to Tread
Short film: Out of Order from Flabber TV
Short film: Love Hurts
I love the internets. Was too lazy to go out tonight to rent horror films (or really blog extensively) so went online instead and found these. Short films and tall leggy women from the Netherlands. Winning combination for me regardless of genre. I must admit I didn't get either ending, but then again I might have missed something in the wordless translations.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
The French Make the Best Commercials
This clip is not from the movie Madagascar: Escape to Africa. This is an actual French commercial produced several years ago that I stumbled upon last night while reading a post about Dan Ackroyd signing crystal skulls (filled with vodka) in Madison, Wisconsin. I can't make stuff like this up. If I could, I'd be working at this very moment as a paid writer and not as the itinerant cleaner of cat boxes I list myself as on Craig's List.
I have no idea what's being sold here other than it is a beverage of sorts, but I'll take a year's supply of it.
For those who really care about how a commercial like this is made, here are the behind the scenes tricks. The technique is called performance capture, used spectacularly in both Robert Zemeckis' film adaptations of Polar Express and Beowulf.
Addendum: Could Henri Rousseau be the inspiration for the animal design of the commercial? I'm not sure but at least I can end this post on an intellectual note far less provocative than images of God's creatures pole dancing for refreshment.
I have no idea what's being sold here other than it is a beverage of sorts, but I'll take a year's supply of it.
For those who really care about how a commercial like this is made, here are the behind the scenes tricks. The technique is called performance capture, used spectacularly in both Robert Zemeckis' film adaptations of Polar Express and Beowulf.
Addendum: Could Henri Rousseau be the inspiration for the animal design of the commercial? I'm not sure but at least I can end this post on an intellectual note far less provocative than images of God's creatures pole dancing for refreshment.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Oh Canada, Let Me Explain
Darkblack is a Canadian blog of infinite visual stimuli, as well as one of my favorite sites not affiliated with the XXX-Nation. If I could Photoshop this well, I would be employed at The Daily Show or be creating graphics for the New Adventures of the Trailer Park Boys. Darkblack's stuff is that good.
So imagine my consternation when I checked out a recent post and came across this:
Before you Canadians who make the darkblack blog so entertaining go ballistic and threaten to cut off cheap supplies of pharmaceuticals to health-starved Americans, halt the supplies of Edmonton shale oil you export to us, or deny us access to Whistler during ski season, let me "do some splainin" about Red Eye. Drum roll, please!
Fox News -- a comedic organization of shiny-teethed teleprompter readers, a network so rife with factual inaccuracies that it would make Joseph Goebbels cringe -- produces a late, late night comedy of errors called Red Eye. This show actually should be called "one eye," since most of the humor on it is based on the only male muscle with its own brain. Red Eye means to be the Fox News answer to The John Stewart Show. It has most of us muttering, "Who asked the question?"
How dumb is Red Eye? It's so dumb that the Indian Head Test Card pattern scored higher in its SATs. Rimshot!
This show is so boring death row prisoners would rather watch their own sentencing. Bada Bing!
This show is so bad Khalid Sheikh Mohammad preferred waterboarding to watching Red Eye when offered a choice of torture methods. Canned laughter, anyone?
Program executives filled the airwaves with this Romper Room of the Wretched because the ab-roller or ShamWow infotainment spots were too cerebral for the normal Fox late night viewer. "I'm here all week. Try the brisket!"
Red and Eye are monosyllabic, much like the typical Fox News report, thus making this seamless programming in the parlance of the business. "Wanna buy a duck?"
The show's premise has always been as simple as the mis-reading of the Second Amendment. Round up guys so insufferable that Quakers would enjoy beating them up, surround them with giggling, bone-dense sorority chicks whose cup sizes match their IQ's, and then drool out knuckle dragging, dirt eating nonsense to an audience simultaneously producing its own red eyes with shots of Jagermeister and Red Bull.
Red Eye specializes in right wing humor, which means the weak, the poor and the infirm deserve the same kind of "light belittling" the barbarians inflicted upon Rome. Like all other programs on Fox News, a dress code of tin foil hats and wife-beater shirts is mandatory. The jokes shoot out with all the ferocity of a clogged sphincter and tend towards the same hipness as eight tracks and pet rocks. Punch lines sink faster than the moral reputations of revelers Larry Craig and David Vitters. The writers are all graduates of the All Children Left Behind for Good Cause School of schlock and yawn. They work in crayon, because pencils and felt tip pens have points far too sharp for their dull minds. The show's graphics are meant to reassure the viewer that there are other reasons to learn to read besides following the directions on home pregnancy tests and signing domestic disturbance police reports.
Don't take Red Eye seriously. None of the comedy clubs in this country do -- otherwise you would see its participants working the rooms rather than busing the tables. You have the pretty currency, so let us have our loonies.
Anyway, get off of our backs. You Canadians had the opportunity to arrest Bush in Calgary (in an earlier posting I said Ottawa by mistake--me bad, especially in geography) when he gave his first post-1600 Pennsylvania Avenue speech. Perhaps you were hoping he'd take Harper back to the States with him. Up there, Bush was quoted as saying he was writing an authoritarian book on his 12 toughest decisions. Obviously, working his act on foreign soil made him even dumber. I didn't know our ex-president could count to double digits.
This Bushism is not Red Eye humor, unlike their tasteless jokes about Canadian deaths in Afghanistan. The word "authoritarian" has far too many syllables for anyone on the show to pronounce correctly. Secondly, malapropism sounds like a disease that can only be cured through faith-based intervention, and that's far too sacred a subject to joke about. Finally, what's so hilarious about the truth? Eight years of authoritarian rule could only produce an authoritarian book.
Watching Red Eye tends to produce in foreign viewers who are not familiar with our Athenian-like culture, a tendency to pee directly onto the television screen or take a claw hammer to the boob tube. Don't fall into that trap of hating all of us because Fox News produces more crap than an army on laxatives. The cretins on Red Eye are just that. They laugh at their own half-liners, ending each show with a rousing rendition of erectile dysfunction jokes. Even in the smallest bit of witless humor, signs of autobiography exists. Cue the drum roll and the rimshot please!
So imagine my consternation when I checked out a recent post and came across this:
Before you Canadians who make the darkblack blog so entertaining go ballistic and threaten to cut off cheap supplies of pharmaceuticals to health-starved Americans, halt the supplies of Edmonton shale oil you export to us, or deny us access to Whistler during ski season, let me "do some splainin" about Red Eye. Drum roll, please!
Fox News -- a comedic organization of shiny-teethed teleprompter readers, a network so rife with factual inaccuracies that it would make Joseph Goebbels cringe -- produces a late, late night comedy of errors called Red Eye. This show actually should be called "one eye," since most of the humor on it is based on the only male muscle with its own brain. Red Eye means to be the Fox News answer to The John Stewart Show. It has most of us muttering, "Who asked the question?"
How dumb is Red Eye? It's so dumb that the Indian Head Test Card pattern scored higher in its SATs. Rimshot!
This show is so boring death row prisoners would rather watch their own sentencing. Bada Bing!
This show is so bad Khalid Sheikh Mohammad preferred waterboarding to watching Red Eye when offered a choice of torture methods. Canned laughter, anyone?
Program executives filled the airwaves with this Romper Room of the Wretched because the ab-roller or ShamWow infotainment spots were too cerebral for the normal Fox late night viewer. "I'm here all week. Try the brisket!"
Red and Eye are monosyllabic, much like the typical Fox News report, thus making this seamless programming in the parlance of the business. "Wanna buy a duck?"
The show's premise has always been as simple as the mis-reading of the Second Amendment. Round up guys so insufferable that Quakers would enjoy beating them up, surround them with giggling, bone-dense sorority chicks whose cup sizes match their IQ's, and then drool out knuckle dragging, dirt eating nonsense to an audience simultaneously producing its own red eyes with shots of Jagermeister and Red Bull.
Red Eye specializes in right wing humor, which means the weak, the poor and the infirm deserve the same kind of "light belittling" the barbarians inflicted upon Rome. Like all other programs on Fox News, a dress code of tin foil hats and wife-beater shirts is mandatory. The jokes shoot out with all the ferocity of a clogged sphincter and tend towards the same hipness as eight tracks and pet rocks. Punch lines sink faster than the moral reputations of revelers Larry Craig and David Vitters. The writers are all graduates of the All Children Left Behind for Good Cause School of schlock and yawn. They work in crayon, because pencils and felt tip pens have points far too sharp for their dull minds. The show's graphics are meant to reassure the viewer that there are other reasons to learn to read besides following the directions on home pregnancy tests and signing domestic disturbance police reports.
Don't take Red Eye seriously. None of the comedy clubs in this country do -- otherwise you would see its participants working the rooms rather than busing the tables. You have the pretty currency, so let us have our loonies.
Anyway, get off of our backs. You Canadians had the opportunity to arrest Bush in Calgary (in an earlier posting I said Ottawa by mistake--me bad, especially in geography) when he gave his first post-1600 Pennsylvania Avenue speech. Perhaps you were hoping he'd take Harper back to the States with him. Up there, Bush was quoted as saying he was writing an authoritarian book on his 12 toughest decisions. Obviously, working his act on foreign soil made him even dumber. I didn't know our ex-president could count to double digits.
This Bushism is not Red Eye humor, unlike their tasteless jokes about Canadian deaths in Afghanistan. The word "authoritarian" has far too many syllables for anyone on the show to pronounce correctly. Secondly, malapropism sounds like a disease that can only be cured through faith-based intervention, and that's far too sacred a subject to joke about. Finally, what's so hilarious about the truth? Eight years of authoritarian rule could only produce an authoritarian book.
Watching Red Eye tends to produce in foreign viewers who are not familiar with our Athenian-like culture, a tendency to pee directly onto the television screen or take a claw hammer to the boob tube. Don't fall into that trap of hating all of us because Fox News produces more crap than an army on laxatives. The cretins on Red Eye are just that. They laugh at their own half-liners, ending each show with a rousing rendition of erectile dysfunction jokes. Even in the smallest bit of witless humor, signs of autobiography exists. Cue the drum roll and the rimshot please!
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