Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009: The 50th Post

Wow, fifty posts. I would be proud if anybody read this, but now it stands as one of the many monuments of my lowly stature in society, an insomnia-ridden cinephile blogger. I still quite enjoy the blog, so let's just dive right in. Mike Judge's latest film Extract premieres on Friday, and in honor of the occasion, Judge has released a new clip from the upcoming flick to the Interwebs, with an introduction courtesy of the characters that made Judge a household name for slacker, perverted children that enjoyed Metallica and AC/DC, Beavis and Butt-head. The clip makes the movie actually look funny, but watch it mainly to have an excuse to pull out your Beavis and Butt-head DVDs.

'Extract' Film Forum with Beavis and Butthead @ Yahoo! Video

So, who's ready for today's dose of 3-D overkill? First, AICN reports that Iron Man 2 could possibly be 3-D next summer. Harry Knowles tells us that there is currently a one minute snippet of film that Marvel and Fox are looking over to decide if they want to turn the entire thing into 3-D. (Note: if you choose to click the link, Knowles uses the frightening analogy of Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger's 9 1/2 Weeks sex scene to describe this entire ordeal). The article also ends with the factoid that the original Iron Man film could possibly be up for a 3-D transfer to be re-released before the sequel. Don't get me wrong, Iron Man in flight, Scarlett Johansson and the cockatoo that was casted to keep Rourke company all have wonderful possibilities when put into the 3-D medium, but if we keep this up, (I'm talking to you Jon Favreau) there will eventually be weird films in the third dimension, like a new modernization of The Three Musketeers by somebody a few steps below Uwe Boll... like say Paul W.S. Anderson.

Damnit... via The Hollywood Reporter, that is exactly what will happen. I'm not saying it can't succeed, as The Three Musketeers is a tried and true formula, and if the adaptation is mindless, at least it could be swashbuckling fun. But does everything have to be in 3-D for Christ's sake? I just hope that Avatar is ground-breaking, and we don't look back years from now and take the academic stance that My Bloody Valentine was the big game changer in this new age of 3-D.

DreadCentral has some stills up from a new horror flick called Human Centipede: First Sequence, which looks terrible. However, the pics are to a level of disturbing that requires checking out.

Courtesy of TheSuperficial, Megan Fox is the cover girl for the latest edition of Wonderland magazine, and among other topics discussed, compared her two-time collaborator, Transformers director Michael Bay to Adolph Hitler. Not trying to shine a forgiving light on Hitler or anything, but I'm pretty sure the Fuhrer could have made a better film... just saying. Oh, and he wouldn't even consider making a Bad Boys 3, even he would have known that is just too much.

Cinematical linked to the best guessing game on the web, based on entertainment characters in movies, television, comics and videogames (at least that I've attempted so far). The site, Akinator, has guessed almost everything I've thought of correctly, except things I've pulled out of my hat so far into my childhood subconscious that I couldn't remember enough about it to properly answer the questions.

Finally, a pretty awesome featurette from The Fantastic Mr. Fox, narrated by Jason Schwartzman. Unfortunately it won't embed, but here is the link, via Apple. Enjoy.

Sunday, August 30th, 2009 (Short Film Sunday: Rejected)

Next week Mike Judge's latest live action film Extract makes its theatrical debut. I began my post for Short Film Sunday by looking up Judge in hopes to find a good animated short, possibly from his Milton series that ran as segments on Saturday Night Live, and would eventually go on to inspire 1999's cult comedy Office Space, or possibly something he done for The Animation Show, a traveling animation festival that tours the country, co-created with Don Hertzfeldt. Of course, after reading Hertzfeldt's name, I knew where this blog had to go, and that is his wonderful short from 2000, Rejected.

The hand-drawn, stick-figure-esque animated flick came slightly before the YouTube boom or Cartoon Network's alternative programming night-time block Adult Swim, but became a huge influence on both popular mediums. The film was released, debuting at the 2000 San Diego Comic Con before showing at the Sundance Film Festival and going on tour with Spike and Mike's Twisted Festival of Animation and Bill Plympton's travelling The Don and Bill Show and currently on Hertzfeldt and Judge's The Animation Show. The short would air uncut and commercial free on Adult Swim two years after its initial release. After a successful release, which gained a cult audience due to the lack of similar humor at the time, with Something Awful even being quoted as saying that the short was causing a miniature Rocky Horror Picture Show effect with fan quotes and celebrations during screenings, came the ultimate honor for an offbeat sensation that would come to embody the web cartoon, a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film, losing out to the eight minute Dutch drama toon, Father and Daughter, directed by Michael Dudok De Wit. The little film is still quoted a bit, and featured on a few comedy blogs here and there, see the above snowman recreation of a Rejected scene I found on Google Image, but it seems that most people don't have a clue on how much impact the little animated gem had on YouTube and Adult Swim.

Other than Rejected, Hertzfeldt has had a number of other popular shorts, including Billy's Balloon, created before Rejected during his time as a film student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. After the success of Rejected, Hertzfeldt would follow it up with the short The Meaning of Life, which debuted at Sundance and was lovingly compared to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey by Bob Longino of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Following that, Hertzfeldt's current project is a three part series on a character named Bill, with 2006's Everything Will Be OK, 2008's I Am So Proud of You and a yet-untitled upcoming short.

According to Hertzfeldt's Wikipedia page, the director has approximately 130 awards at film and animation festivals. He is also continuously mentioned on blogs by the current adult animation elite. Also, if you want to check out any of the other shorts I mentioned in the above introduction, you can check out Bitter Films' official page. Now, without further adieu, here is Rejected... Enjoy.