Last Friday, I suggested that the prologue to Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympiabe featured ahead of Olympics coverage. But I’ve changed my mind after seeing this montage created by L.A.’s Cinefamily (the gang behind the recently revitalized Silent Movie Theater) & Pimpedelic Wonderland for a 4th of July event last month. It clearly says everything there is to say about America, and it would certainly pump us up adequately for patriotically rooting for the U.S. teams. Plus, unlike like Olympia, it’s not made by Nazis; like Olympia, though, it has nudity!
The only thing possibly more appropriately American than this video is Entertainment Weekly’s new interviews with Barack Obamaand John McCain about their pop culture preferences, a feature that finally allows us to make up our minds based on things more fun than “important issues”. I don’t know about you, but I’d never vote for anybody who honestly thinks We Were Soldiersis the best Vietnam movie of all time. Thanks, EW, for keeping me from making a terrible mistake on Election Day.
Rich at FourFour has made an amazing discovery. A little over a year ago, a Variety story announced that pop star Willa Ford had been cast in a biopic about Anna Nicole Smith. According to IMDb, Anna Nicole was completed in 2007, but as Rich points out, it apparently never even received so much as a DVD release. But Rich found the film on a torrent site, in a manner which, he says, “leads me to believe that no official release by way of DVD is even in the pipeline. I’m guessing that this thing really was just dumped online for free because no one would take it.” So he did what any upstanding member of the community would do: he edited the film down into seven minutes of pure, golden “campy crapiness.”
See the finished product above. I think it goes without saying that my favorite part is when Anna Nicole returns from the grave to ponder media coverage of her demise. “Hell,” breaths Ford, who, incidentally, is way too well-proportioned for the role. “Maybe they’ll even make a movie about me.” Wink!
Piper at Lazy Eye Theater has started meme challenging bloggers to build a post around the infamous Dramatic Chipmunk clip, with the goal being to utilize the familiar viral video “in new and different ways but not in ways that might attract creepy middle-aged guys.” Alan at Burbanked answered this challenge by inserting the Chipmunk into a lesson on Lev Kuleshov’s Montage Effect. Kuleshov, a contemporary of Eisenstein, argued that shot order matters because each image in a film is imbued with meaning by the image that comes before it. So suddenly, the chipmunk’s drama makes sense–-”It’s as if that piping hot soup is just outside his reach.” More here.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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