Puppies and Flowers

A wide collection of opening title sequences. Great stuff.

Link to submarinechannel and thanks to Miss Cellania at Neatorama

An interesting article by Adam Savage (MythBusters) on the sci-fi classic.

I'm still such a big Blade Runner fan that I watch it at least once every 18 months. I also own pretty convincing replicas of the "blade runner blaster" wielded by Harrison Ford's world-weary former cop Rick Deckard. The source material was a Steyr Mannlicher .222 target rifle magazine cover, with a Bulldog .44 carriage underneath. I can't get enough of this prop. Now, I want a working one.

The European Union has turned to shock tactics in its latest bid for self-promotion... making its own dirty video. In a bid to boost interest in the workings of the EU, the communications commission have made a video of 18 couples having sex.

Link to Daily Mail article, link to YouTube clip

From product website:

A great conversation piece for the wannabe wise guy who has everything, and whose wife won't let them own a revolver. For that matter, something for the authentic wise guy with a soft side for the well being of animals. A great home theatre accessory as a tough guy's Teddy bear, aimed squarely at those with a diabolical sense of humor. Fans of the mob's harsh brand of communication can now unite and rest comfortably, if not uneasily. Send someone a message they will never forget without the risk of facing prison time for it.

Link to Kropserkel

Link to YouTube

From thedudeiseverywhere.com, you might be a dude if:

1. You wear your dressing gown to the supermarket.
2. You have begun writing cheques for less than £1 (or $1).
3. You are partial to Thai Stick and a good ‘caucasian’.
4. You have a habit of using the royal ‘we’, you know, the editorial…
5. Your car has developed some rust ‘colouration’.
6. You enjoy the occasional acid flashback.
7. You have been known to occupy various administrative buildings.
8. You hate the Eagles, no, you really hate the f-ing Eagles.
9. You have no idea what day this is.
10. You are unemployed.

Lebowski lexicon

via Grow-A-Brain 

Over the last few weeks I've been running into articles on this topic including an excellent documentary by Channel 4.

Link to documentary 'Guys and Dolls'.

This phenomenom is not to restricted to Japan, if you've watched the video above you'll see Americans and an Englishman.

c-r-e-e-p-y 

From Reuters article: 

Real love is hard to find for one Japanese man, who has transferred his affection and desires to dozens of plastic sex dolls.

When the 45-year-old, who uses a pseudonym of Ta-Bo, returns home, it's not a wife or girlfriend who await him, but a row of dolls lined up neatly on his sofa.

Each has a name. Ta-Bo often watches television with his toys before bathing them, powdering them so that their skin feels more human, dressing them in lingerie and then taking them to bed.

"A human girl can cheat on you or betray you sometimes, but these dolls never do those thing. They belong to me 100 percent," says the engineer who has spent more than 2 million yen ($16,000) over the past decade on the dolls.

"Sometimes it takes too much time before I can have sex with the person I meet. But with these dolls, it's just a matter of a click of the mouse. With one click, they are delivered to you."

Link to Reuters article 

Ingmar Bergman in a 1981 photo. Bergman died on Monday at the age of 89, local news agency TT reported, citing his daughter Eva Bergman. (REUTERS/Jacob Forsell/File)

From article:

When the news broke that Ingmar Bergman had died on the lonely and windswept island of Faro, off the coast of Sweden, it seemed like an appropriately tragic spot. Bergman spent a lifetime creating lonely and windswept movies: a cinema of inner life in which man was tormented by his relationship with women and with God.

He was sort of a poet of anguish (his first screenplay, written in 1944, was called Torment), whose best-known movies were existential meditations on the meaning of life. The most famous scene in a Bergman film was in the 1957 religious allegory The Seventh Seal in which Max von Sydow -- part of a Bergman repertory company, along with Liv Ullman, with whom he had a daughter -- portrays a knight who plays chess with Death. It’s a scene that sums up the tragic symbolism of Bergman’s oeuvre, and it defined his public image for many years: in one of a number of parodies, the heroes of Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey play Twister with Death.

Bergman himself may have enjoyed the satire. Despite the austerity of his movies, he had a puckish side. When a Swedish film magazine published an "anti-Bergman" issue, Bergman himself contributed a critical piece, under a pseudonym. Near the end of his career, he acknowledged that he was depressed by his own movies and couldn’t watch them any more.

Link to article 

Photos: idealterna 

From article:

Shielded by bodyguards and away from the sight of curious beachgoers, Woody Allen started shooting his new film in Barcelona on Monday.

Allen shot some scenes at a restaurant in a fishermen's neighborhood in Barcelona with actress Scarlett Johansson, who plays a tourist in the film.

The American film director and actor said last week at a news conference in Barcelona he hoped to create a portrait of the northeastern Spanish city on par with his 1979 masterpiece "Manhattan."

The veteran director said he aimed to picture Barcelona "the same way I presented Manhattan to the world through my eyes."

Barcelona would be the second European city to feature in a full-length Allen movie.

The film, yet to be named, is due to headline Johansson, Allen's latest muse and star of his recent London-based films "Scoop" and "Matchpoint," and Spanish actors Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem.

Continue reading 

Michelangelo Antonioni, the Italian maestro new word whose films of modern alienation captured aspects of human consciousness previously unexplored by cinema, died at his home Monday in Rome. The director of such classics as "L'Avventura" and "Blow Up" was 94.

His death, coming a day after the death of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, served to remind film lovers of the richness and invention of European cinema in the 1960s and '70s and how very little that has followed can match that era, both for its sheer ambition and for its faith in the possibilities of film. 

Continue reading article 

This clip is hysterical! via 416Films

Equally as funny via growabrain 

Link via 

This is a very cool resource… 

Los Angeles Pop Art involves an art form commonly known as Micrography. This art form has been around for centuries and has primarily been used by artists of Israeli decent; it is the style of creating an image strictly using the words that tell the story of that specific image. 

LA Pop Art

Copy: Horror Film Festival 10-11 Feb. 2007

If traditional methods of advertising don't work, try scaring people into trying your product. In this case, for the horror film fest, it seems to work. These blood transparencies were placed under doors to make people think they're living their own nightmare, if only for a few seconds. Scary good work by Rediffusion Dyr, Bangalore, India.

Link via

From the Wired article: 

Wired: You started working on this movie more than 25 years ago. How does it feel to be talking about it again?

Scott: It never went away, so I'm used to it. It kept reemerging, and that's when I realized that it had really unusual staying power. It's all very well to say, "Well, I knew it had." But I didn't, really, at the time. I knew I'd done a pretty interesting movie, but it was so unusual that the majority of people were taken aback. They simply didn't get it. Or, I think, better to say that they were enormously distracted by the environment.

Wired: What do you mean by that?

Scott:I was touching on possibilities like replication. It's now quite commonplace, but 25 years ago they were barely discussing it in the corridors of power. Now, the film is not really about that at all, it's simply leveraging that possibility into one of those detective film-noir kinds of stories. People were familiar with that kind of character, but not with the world I was cooking up. I wanted to call it San Angeles, and somebody said, "I don't get it." I said, "You know, San Francisco and Los Angeles." It's bizarre: People only think about what's under their noses until it comes and kicks them in the ass.

Wired: How did you decide to tell a 21st-century story in a 1940s style?

Scott:Well, people want a comfortable preconception about what they're seeing. It's a bit like 20 years of Westerns and, now, 45 years of cop movies. People are comfortable with the roles. Even though every nook and cranny has been explored, they'll still sit through endless variations on cops and bad guys, right? In this instance, I was doing a cop and a different bad guy. And to justify the creation of the bad guy, i.e., replication, it had to be in the future.

Link to Wired article

Thanks Faisal 

The film will make its US TV premier on the Sundance Channel next week Tuesday, April 1, 2008.