In our never-ending quest to find new ways to mock contemporary popular culture whilst celebrating the classics, we bring the first ever (ever!) SpoutBlog Photoshop Contest. We have a George Romero DVD two-pack to give away: a copy of the new Diary of the Dead, and the 40th Anniversary edition of Night of the Living Dead. Here’s the quip from the press release:

The NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD 40^TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION DVD features a fully restored and remastered version of the original 1968 classic film and bonus materials, overseen by the master himself. This DVD marks George A. Romero’s long legacy with great interviews and multiple featurettes that emphasize the quality of this ultimate horror classic. The DIARY OF THE DEAD DVD bonus features include an optional audio commentary by George A. Romero, character confessions, a making of and the top five Myspace contest shorts.

Find out what you have to do to get the discs after the jump.

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Anne Thompson points to the above picture documenting a “viral” Dark Knight marketing stunt described by a tipster thusly:

I saw these guys pull up on a corner, in a van right in the middle of downtown with big signs and bullhorns shouting to people to vote for Harvey Dent as D.A. The van was covered with Harvey Dent posters with Aaron Eckhart’s picture. Of course people had NO idea what they were talking about. They probably thought it was a real campaign.

How far in advance of the movie’s release do you think Warner Brothers will pull the correct strings in order to allow the Dark Knight campaign and the presidential campaign to merge? When can we expect Harvey Dent to endorse McCain? Or vice versa? Now that Warner Brothers is taking advantage of election season to sell their Batman sequel, at what point will real politicians start taking advantage of a new Batman sequel to sell themselves?

In continuing to use his movie blog as a platform for Hillary Clinton hate wrapped in the thinest of pop cultural guises, is Jeffrey Wells doing some kind of brilliant, absurdist theater, or has the presidential election simply driven him insane? First, when Baby Mama was announced as the opening night film for the Tribeca Film Festival, Wells admitted “a certain part of me would like to see Baby Mama go down as a kind of karma payback for [Tina] Fey’s Hillary shilling.” I went to SXSW and ignored Wells’ blog for a week; when I came back, I discovered a post titled “Funny Games = Hillary Campaign.” Note the lack of prevaricating question mark in the headline: this is an unequivocal statement.

So what’s Wells’ evidence that Michael Haneke’s English-language remake of his own 1997 thriller has anything materially or spiritually in common with the troubled campaign of the first serious female presidential candidate? It’s specious, of course––amongst other things, he notes that the antagonists played by Michael Pitt and Brady Corbett “are clearly monsters, a term that has recently been used to describe Senator Clinton by former Obama foreign policy adviser Samantha Power”; they and Hillary also have “similar” haircuts!––but Wells’ balls-out committment to his own craziness is, as always, engaging.

Over the weekend, a video called Jack and Hill appeared on YouTube. The clip strung together clips from Jack Nicholson films (including A Few Good Men, Five Easy Pieces and Tim Burton’s Batman) with white-on-black title cards summarizing Hillary Clinton’s qualifications to be president. Though first thought to be the work of the Clinton campaign, the Politico reported on Sunday that it was the brainchild of a number of Hollywood figures, including Rob Reiner and Nicholson himself, who produced it independently of the Clinton camp.

In the film blog world, the general consensus was that however Jack and Hill was produced, as a campaign video, it was pretty bad. “Just utterly pathetic,” was how Michael Newman put it in a comment on Chuck Tryon’s blog, and FILMMAKER editor Scott Macaulay sighed, “This election is getting too bizarre.” Beyond the obvious ideological problem that the clip has Hillary being endorse by various Nicholson villains, there’s something exceedingly lazy about the way it’s been put together. None of the characters repeat, and there’s barely a connection between their pullquotes and the titles on screen. It seems as though the idea was to stack one clip on top of the next in the hopes that, out of context, they’d play as a series of punchlines. Instead, as Tryon notes, anyone who can bring the context of the excerpted films with them to the viewing experience will be unable to refrain from doing so, and at that point, the whole thing backfires: ultimately, this is a clip in which the implication is that Hillary Clinton is going to make life better for the axe wielding psycho of The Shining, whilst restoring the Joker’s trust in the political system.

But of course, there’s already a reaction clip, one which, in particular, puts scenes from that Kubrick film to good use.

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