Song: Otherside
Artist: Red Hot Chili Peppers
Director: Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris
Year: 2000

Again, the directing team of Dayton & Faris produce a video which takes a contemporary song and puts it in a visual style of classic film. They paid tribute to Melies in Tonight, Tonight and here they pay tribute to early German expressionist films, specifically, The Cabinet of Dr. Calgari (put that peace of obscurity in your netflix queue). Read the rest of this entry »

Title: How They Get There
Director: Spike Jonze
Year: 1997

I’ve always liked Spike Jonze’s music videos and commercials. And his venture into feature films and documentaries has been excellent. I loved Adaptation. and Being John Malkovich.

This is one of his short films. Read the rest of this entry »

Year: 2006

The people who do the marketing for Gap are incredible. They have a long series of outstanding commercials that are always very fun, very memorable, and usually influential in pop culture. This one is my favorite. Not only because Audrey Hepburn is a delight to watch, but she also embodies classic and simple style, I don’t know who else this commercial could have been done with. The motion graphics work is also top notch. From the keying and masking (I shudder thinking about how long that must have taken), to the animated backgrounds, to the kaleidoscope effect, it all fits together very nicely into an ad that is alive with energy and classic style. The footage of course comes from the musicalFunny Face, which stars both Hepburn and Fred Astaire.

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Song: Sex Beat
Artist: The Gun Club
Director: N/A
Year: ?
Editor: ?

I came across this video by chance, in case you didn’t notice it is actually just a great big editing session showing dancing scenes from some classic movies. While I don’t think it is anything special, I do love trivia games so here we go, in order:
Read the rest of this entry »

I had the chance to go to a pre-screening of the upcoming movie The Wrestler, by director Darren Aronofsky. Needless to say I am a huge fan and jumped at the chance to sneak in with the press to catch this movie about 2 months before it is released nationwide. I had an impossible time finding a trailer for this movie before hand, and I arrived to the screening knowing about 4 things: Mickey Rourke, Marisa Tomei, Darren Aronofsky, and wrestling.

The only thing that disappointed me about the movie was that Aronofsky seemed to have completely switch gears here. The movie is gritty realism, it’s washed out in it’s look and cold like the New Jersey setting it takes place in. All the visual appeal of Aronofsky’s previous movies is completely gone here, the meticulously composed shots and symbolic imagery is replaced with handheld tracking and everyday framing. This disappointed me, but on the other hand it does prove that Aronofsky can Read the rest of this entry »

This is one of my favorite short films of all time. It won the 1990 Oscar for animated short, and launched the Lauenstein brother to make a couple of really cool commercials and shorts in the early 90’s using their trademark style, which is reminiscent of Tim Burton’s animation. Nothing more to say about the film, the beauty of it is how simple it is. But you can also dive into it pretty deeply when you start looking at it as a metaphor for political and social systems.

A small bit of trivia, the climactic “balancing platform” sequence from National Treasure: Book of Secrets was directly inspired by this movie. I have not seen that but I’m sure they bastardized the concept.

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