The leaves are turning, the air is crisp, it could only mean one thing: the time is now for the best Simpsons episode of the year, The Treehouse of Horror Halloween Special. They’ve done a good job this year of building buzz, especially around the portion of the episode that spoofs Mad Men. The episode airs Sunday, November 2, and 8 pm on Fox.

In the above video we get a glimpse of the segment’s title, How to Get Ahead in Dead-Vertising. This is fantastic news: it means that the piece will be properly ghoulish, and it also means that it may not be only an homage to Mad Men, but also to the classic 1989 advertising satire How to Get Ahead in Advertising. In that film, a successful ad executive suffers from a horrible boil on his neck. One day he wakes to find that the boil has developed into a face, which becomes his evil alter-ego. I would love to see that scenario played out with Homer on the Madison Avenue of the 1960’s.

This also gets to the point of why The Simpsons Halloween episodes are always the best: there are way more movie references than usual. I was an obsessive Simpsons fan as a kid, and the Halloween episodes alone upped my pop culture literacy by several notches. The segment based on The Shining is a favorite of mine, and the Frankenstein spoof where Mr. Burns’ head ends up grafted on Homer’s shoulder gave me nightmares for weeks.

Today’s video is a brilliantly simple mash-up: The Nightmare Before Christmas meets the song “Halloween”, by everyone’s favorite goth-punkers, The Misfits. The attempts to sync the lyrics with characters’ mouth movements are only so-so. But what makes the clip really work is how the tempo of the song highlights the kinetic energy of the film.

The Nightmare Before Christmas, while being a widely-loved family film, never betrays its spooky aesthetic. “Halloween” by The Misfits is decidedly less kid-friendly, with lines like, “This day anything goes / Burning bodies hanging from poles / I remember Halloween.” But there is an undeniable kick to the beat that makes it feel celebratory.

For more upbeat Misfits fun, check out the video for their cover of The Cryptkickers’ classic The Monster Mash. It’s cut together with stop-motion animation from the 1969 Halloween special Mad Monster Party.

In 2006, the Wes Anderson-directed AmEx commercials that preceded each film at the Tribeca Film Festival sadly topped most of the films themselves. That’s probably more of a dig at Tribeca than legit praise for Anderson, but regardless: the reigning king of quirk has a new side gig directing adverts for AT & T. I’ve embedded one above, and you can find four more here. I don’t think Anderson’s obsession with tableau has been put to better use since Rushmore, but until I see The Darjeeling Limited next week at the New York Film Festival, I’ll withhold final judgement.

Several of our favorite blogs have noted the passing of British music impresario Tony Wilson. Manchester tastemaker Wilson (who was played by Steve Coogan in Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People) founded Factory Records, and is generally considered at least partially responsible for launching the careers of The Fall, OMD and Joy Division (and later New Order).

Wilson is portrayed by Craig Parkinson in Anton Corbijn’s upcoming Joy Division film Control, which will screen at the Toronto Film Festival before opening in the States in October. This gives me the excuse I’ve been waiting for to make the Control trailer our Clip of the Day. It’s embedded above.

Meetings and podcast experimentation have kept me away from the computer screen for much of the day, so I’m just now getting around to watching a clip that Scott Kirsner posted early this morning at CinemaTech. It’s an interview with Mark Stern, who owns and operates a budding chain called the Big Picture Theaters. Located in a Seattle mini-mall but inspired by the “hip boutique hotels” of Studio 54 impressario Ian Schrager, the Big Picture reflects an attempt to revitalize the exhibition business by offering a luxury option. Stern’s screening rooms are equipped with Tempurpedic seats and digital projectors; you can order a martini from your seat, and hang out in a lounge and play pool after the show.

Stern’s got a lot of interesting things to say, but my takeaway was this quote about how he’s able to compete with the Cineplex Odeon across the street: “It’s like having two girls. One is pretty fair-looking, and one is beautiful. Cineplex Odeon, you look at it, and it’s a fair-looking girl. And if you go to the prom, and you have your choice between the two girls, would you rather have the beautiful girl, or the fair-looking girl? They’re both sitting right next to each other, and you can actually have your choice.”

While we’re on the subject of Ingmar Bergman, let’s talk about Bergman parodies. To gauge the Swedish’s master’s impact on 20th century culture, one needs to look no further than YouTube, where you’ll find “Bergmanesque” clips from Mystery Science Theater 3000, French and Saunders and an Alamo Drafthouse video contest. Then there’s the above clip, which appears to be an NYU student short. Titled simply Thirst, its YouTube summary reads in part: “What if director Ingmar Bergman did a commercial for Coca Cola? Written and directed by Leslie Chase, the film is set in the late 50’s and follows the thirsty, lonely lives of two Swedish sisters.” It’s tribute, it’s dead-on parody, and it’s genius.

Two quotes:

“I love images of people smoking, and I think [others] find it attractive, even if they don’t smoke — they find it sexy in old movie images. It’s so iconic, not only for film noir but for old movies. What’s better than a femme fatale with a cigarette dangling out of her mouth? What better image?” — Bruce Goldstein, curator of the NYC Noir festival which begins this Friday at Film Forum, quoted by The Reeler.

“We discourage depictions of cigarette smoking in Disney, Touchstone and Miramax films. In particular, we expect that depictions of cigarette smoking in future Disney branded films will be non-existent.” — Disney president and CEO Robert Iger, quoted in a press release announcing that Disney will no longer include images of smoking in films released under the Disney label.

Other than that, today’s clip should speak for itself.

New Hairspray director Adam Shankman is responsible for some of the most profitable/least watchable films of the past decade. But he started out as a choreographer, and below you’ll find his best work: the disco dance scene from Boogie Nights:

The latest incarnation of Hairspray had its New York premiere last night, and it was an apparently uneventful evening– pity the poor celeb blogs, who have nothing to pump other than the “Katie Holmes Left The House, Possibly Pregnant” vein. But back in 1988, the premiere of the first Hairspray took Baltimore by storm. This amazing clip (from Jonathan Ross‘ late-80 cult film documentary series The Incredibly Strange Film Show) features interviews with John Waters and a tuxedo-wearing Divine, as well as a brief history of Waters’ pre-Hairspray output.

Towards the end, Ross, interviewing Waters weeks after Divine’s death, asks the filmmaker to define his late muse’s appeal. Waters sighs and answers, “He represented to any kind of rebel somebody that could win.” THAT’s what’s missing from this new version of Hairspray–it’s an incredible crowd pleaser, but it’s got nothing on the original film’s spirit of insurrection.

You know about that Cloverfield thing, right? The mysterious trailer for the mysterious J.J. Abrams movie that debuted last weekend in front of the not-at-all mysterious Transformers movie? I honestly haven’t been paying much attention, until a little birdie pinged me about the clip embedded below, which “answers” the mystery of what kind of monster is responsible for the destruction of Manhattan. I’ll give you a hint: the same cultural construct figures prominently in one of my favorite movies of all time (and it’s not Judy Garland).

According to Scott Kirsner, today is the 25th anniversary of the release of Tron, the groundbreaking Disney film that served, as Kirsner puts it “as the “shot heard ’round the world” for computer-generated visual effects.” Kirsner recently interviewed Tron director Steven Lisberger, who notes that in spite of the innovation Tron represented, at the time Disney compared his film unfavorably to another 1982 release:

Tron was nominated for two Academy Awards, in sound and costume design. But it wasn’t nominated for Best Visual Effects.

“We found out that the statement that was made was that we had cheated when we used computers,” [Lisberger] said.

[...] Lisberger said that when ET came out a few weeks before Tron, Disney executives told him they wished ‘Tron’ had turned out more warm and fuzzy… like ET. (ET won the Best Visual Effects Oscar for 1982.)

In honor of Tron, feast your eyes on this infamous deleted scene from the film, in which Yori takes Tron back to her “very illegal” private quarters, where they can “talk.”

I finally met Lance Weiler at SXSW this year after a couple of years of reading his blog and Festmobs. Lance’s first film, The Last Broadcast, was the first feature to be distributed via digital satellite (it was also thought by some to have been plagiarized by The Blair Witch Project). His second film, Head Trauma, premiered at LAFF last year and is now available on DVD.

Weiler has basically spent the past year using Head Trauma as a starting point for a number of experiments in film exhibition, marketing and distribution. I’m super-excited about a Head Trauma event coming up next weekend at The Museum of the Moving Image (which, weirdly, is the closest thing I have to a neighborhood movie theater here in southwestern Queens). Weiler calls it his “cinema ARG”, or, alternate reality game:

It consists of three core parts. There is a pre-screening event which plays out across a number of city blocks surrounding the museum, the screening mashup which is NEW and improved, and a post screening leg that follows audience members home. The home version of the cinema ARG will involve user-generated materials, remixing, emails, SMS and phone calls.

While you await my full report on that, check out the above clip, in which Weiler explains another Head Trauma spinoff, in which he invited a number of bands to compose an alternate score for the film.

With Michael Bay’s Transformers hitting theaters (and possibly TV screens) next week, Jake Coyle reminds us that the first Transformers movie was relatively star-studded, featuring the voice talents of Judd Nelson (at the peak of his career right after St. Elmo’s Fire), Eric Idle, and, of course, Orson Welles.

In the above clip, from a documentary shot for the Transformers DVD, the director and producers of the 1986 movie explain how the Hollywood legend came to voice the villainous robot/planet Unicron. Welles is described as a fallen giant–literally, a 400-pound man in a wheelchair who, despite his formidable reputation, was too frail to deliver the lines as powerfully needed. Director Nelson Shin describes having to run Welles’ tapes through a synthesizer in order to make the voice of Unicron “gigantic and strong.” The director/star of the alleged greatest movie ever made died a couple of months later.

Transformers was typical of the paycheck work Welles took throughout his career in order to independently finance his personal projects. It’s such an easy thing to mock, but still — I laugh out loud every time I watch this: