The new trailer for Where the Wild Things Are is such a phenomenon today that I’ve even seen celebrities excitedly Tweeting about it (and by celebrities, I mean specifically Rob Corddry). Actually, I think the majority of people I follow on Twitter have squeezed out a gushing statement in 140 words or less. That is, except me (don’t I technically follow myself?). Sure, I’m looking forward to the movie, as a fan of Maurice Sendak and a fan of Spike Jonze and a fan of Dave Eggers, but I don’t think the trailer looks that incredible. And the parts that do look really great remind me of how amazing the trailer for Benjamin Button looked. Remember what happened with that?

Maybe it’s my usual distaste for computer-generated characters; yes, I’d honesty be happier if the Wild Things were made by the Jim Henson Company and all looked like Sweetums from The Muppet Show. I do believe the film includes “suitmation” and animatronics, in addition to CG, but much of what I noticed in the trailer was the computer stuff, and I’m sad to say that, unlike all the commenters at FirstShowing.net, I can’t yet label this as an “instant classic.”

Let’s see if there are any bloggers who agree with me after the jump:

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In a couple of weeks it will have been 25 years since Ridley Scott’s hammer-tastic 1984 commercial introducing the Macintosh was seen during Super Bowl XVIII. Though it wasn’t seen on television again until popular demand brought it back years later, it wasn’t for lack of quality. Ridley Scott was just coming off of Blade Runner, and the spot, which cost over a million dollars to produce, has been named the best television commercial of all time. Not too shabby.

But in a day and age of TiVos and DVRs, are commercials still relevant? In fact, it’s hard to remember more than a handful of commercials that have had the cultural impact of Scott’s 1984.

Ad agencies often turn to big talent to try and draw attention to a commercial, and the pendulum often swings the other way when Hollywood taps a commercial director to direct a feature. That’s what launched the careers of David Fincher, Michael Bay, and many other high-profile filmmakers. While 1984 might be the most famous commercial by a famous director, there have been a slew of others that have been equally as strange, from artists ranging from Spike Jonze to the Coen Brothers. Here’s a look at a some of the better ones, including both Ridley Scott’s 1984 (and it’s updated 2003 version, along with the Hilary Clinton version from last year’s Presidential race).

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A post from Big Screen Little Screen turned me onto a music video created by Kanye West’s editor, Derrick Lee, using footage of 2046 for Kanye’s “Flashing Lights.”

It’s almost sacrilege to not watch this in High Definition, but the video remix still shames the original Spike Jonze helmed spot.

I couldn’t say it better myself. Wong Kar Wai’s 2046 is a long, visually indulgent meditation of love in bad timing, grief and the futility of anything else in life to play love’s substitute. In some way, Derrick Lee’s editing was able to grab the essence of love lost in what you might call a world of “affluent dystopia.” A hyper-realized city, like Tokyo or LA, where lives and opportunity are crammed together so tightly it would seem that making connections would be easy, but it’s only become harder. Human intimacy is the new luxury nobody can afford, but people spin their wheels faster. They collide but never connect. In short, repurposing footage from 2046 for “Flashing Lights” brought new meaning to a song I’d normally switch off.
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Last week, a clip from (or, maybe more accurately, “from”, since its derivation is totally up for debate) Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are “leaked” onto the internet. I didn’t write about it at the time, because I watched it and thought it was kind of stupid, and I couldn’t think of anything better to say about it than “This looks kind of stupid.” Then AJ Schnack wrote this blog post shaming bloggers who posted the clip without bothering to consider whether or not it was real.”[I]t’s clear to this Angleno that the things is a badly conceived fake.” he wrote. “That rounded thing in the upper right corner? LA’s Griffith Observatory! And where is the movie being shot? Australia.” Whoops!

But the plot thickens: today, in response to wide-spread internet mocking and speculation, Jonze issued a statement confirming that the clip IS for real…sort of:

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Brandon Soderberg has a great post on No Trivia about the Spike Jonze/Kanye West video that debuted last week, “Flashing Lights”, and how it relates to the director’s other music videos for hip hop artists. There’s a lot of great analysis in the post, but I thought it was interesting that, in what’s essentially an auteur analysis of Jonze as an anti-Hype Williams, Soderberg give authorial credit for one of “Flashing Lights”‘ key elements not to Jonze, but to Kanye:

The model in the video, Rita G, is gaining an insane amount of press- which in and of itself, shows how “exploitation” of women for videos is way more complicated than old-fashioned feminists would have us believe- and is a kind of sprucing-up of the classic video chick. She has the thicker body, which is way more attractive than the classic rock image of the rock video chick or the sexless but cute and super-safe “hot” but not too hot indie chick staple, but Kanye puts her in lingerie instead of underwear and gives her actual poise and confidence. The video girl now takes actual center-stage, no longer being only ass and titties but the thematic and emotional focus of the video too. It’s a kind of “revenge of the Gold-digger”, as Rita G’s modern mixed with vintage lingerie were first seen in Hype Williams’ video for ‘Gold Digger’, Kanye’s most explicitly negative song about women (and one of his biggest hits…surprise surprise).

The video is so much about costuming (everyone’s talking about what happens with the shovel, but it seems even more significant that before the model enacts her revenge, she shrugs off a fur coat and what appears to be a designer dress, only to set them on fire before returning to the car to perform the video’s violent climax) that Soderberg is totally spot on to read what the model wears as a vehicle for the clip’s ideology. But how are we to know that this was a decision made by the author of the song and not by the clip’s ostensible director?

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Fimoculous points to “Part 1″ of “Flashing Lights”, Spike Jonze’s method of paying the mortgage whilst struggling to finish Where the Wild Things Are/new music video for Kanye West. Rex brands it as “basically hip-hop’s ‘November Rain’”, but I see it more as a Colin Farrell-less Miami Vice. So, yes––even though I’m no Kanye fan, I totally love it.

Empire reports that a Jim Henson biopic is on the way, and few people could be more excited than yours truly. However, like Empire, I would hate to see a generic biography directed by somebody like Penny Marshall. Yet I’m not so sure if I like their idea of getting Michel Gondry any better. Maybe Spike Jonze, but not Gondry. No matter what, though, this movie has got to have a creative edge. It doesn’t have to be too crazy. It doesn’t even have to confuse the real world with the Muppet world in a Dreamchild sort of way. Of course, it should feature Muppets playing real-life people from Henson’s life. Maybe take Robert D. Slane’s already completed screenplay for the biopic and cast all the parts with Kermit and the rest. But have a real actor portray Henson.

That would be the most logical and appropriate way of making a Henson biopic, but here are some other ideas, just in case Empire Film Group wants to throw out Slane’s script and start fresh: follow just one night in the life of Henson, specifically the night he went through hundreds of takes of a seemingly simple shot for Emmet Otter’s Jugband Christmas (see the blooper reel above to see what I’m talking about); follow Henson’s after-life, specifically giving us two-hours of him spinning in his grave due to the poor handling of the Muppets since his death; follow my conspiracy theory that Henson was killed by a CGI assassin; or just have Jonze loosely remake his own puppeteer-based Being John Malkovich with a Henson portrayer in the Cusack role and Kermit in the Malkovich role. OK, I’ll stop before I get any sillier/stupider. Anyway, you see what I’m getting at. Henson really deserves something more than your typical everyday biopic. And it has to be anything but serious.

Vulture has a review of Dave Eggers and Spike Jonze’s script for the latter’s next directorial project, Where the Wild Things Are. The verdict? “It is really, really good.”

Eggers and Jonze — mostly, we suspect, Eggers — touchingly sketch this troubled family unit and carefully track the rising frustration and alarm Max feels as his world becomes darker and more unhappy, until, on page 21, he runs away, climbs aboard a boat, and sails to the island of the Wild Things.

There Jonze’s influence begins to be felt, as the enormous creatures — with names like Carol, Alexander, and K.W. — look to Max as their King, and in a series of marvelous adventures, wrestle tornadoes, eat mud, and tame hawks. Always, though, there’s a subtle undercurrent of menace, and it becomes clear that while spinning a yarn, Jonze and Eggers are also taking us on a tour of Max’s psyche, as he works out so many of the issues that plague his young life.

More here. No real spoilers to speak of.

At Slackerwood, Jette Kernion has a fully illustrated report from opening day of Fantastic Fest, which runs through next Friday in Austin. Of the Gore Cannon, pictured above, Jette writes: “I don’t know exactly how it worked, but it shot bloody gore through the air in a spectacular way.” Good enough for us. Jette also says she’s heard rumblings of an unannounced Fantastic screening of Spike Jonze’s long-awaited Where the Wild Things Are.

I don’t care how tired of Iraq documentaries you think you are–you need to see Heavy Metal in Baghdad. Executive produced by Spike Jonze in conjunction with VBS.tv (the online video venture of VICE Magazine, of which Jonze is creative director), the film tells the story of four years in the life of Acrassicauda, allegedly the first (and probably the only) Iraqi heavy metal band. It’s the first piece of media I’ve seen that potentially has the power to break through “Iraq fatigue” and actually get American kids to care about the decimation of Iraq and the ensuing refugee crisis.

Suroosh Alvi and Eddy Moretti (co-founder of VICE Magazine and head of VICE Films, respectively) had been following the Acrassicauda saga for three years before ever meeting the band members. MTV’s Gideon Yago wrote a story on the band for VICE in 2003, and two years later, the magazine sponsored an Acrassicauda show in war-torn Baghdad. At that point, the situation in Iraq was already so epically bad that between death threats, blackouts and US military red tape, the show almost didn’t happen, and when it did, Alvi and Moretti found themselves locked out in Lebanon. A year later, fully aware that the violence in Baghdad was escalating on a daily basis, the filmmakers embarked on a trip to Iraq, “to see if [the band members] were still alive.” The week they departed, a TIME Magazine cover story on the war ran with the headline, “Life in Hell.”

Before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the boys of Acrassicauda were reasonably fun-loving, apolitical kids (in an early scene, the drummer says he changes the channel every time something about the war comes on TV), who were more or less able to eat their metal hearts out–as long as they respected Saddam and steered clear of head-banging, which can be mistaken in the Muslim world for Jewish prayer. But as the war drags on, their real-life circumstances begin to imitate heavy metal mythology: separated from one another by streets full of fire, corpses and (maybe most dangerously) justified paranoia, in five years the band is only able to play six shows. By late 2006, these educated, middle-class twentysomethings are “rock n’ roll refugees,” struggling to hang on to a less-than-zero existence in Syria after literally running for their lives from Baghdad.

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