Roger Ebert’s 10 Greatest Films of All Time
- Aguirre, Wrath of God (Herzog)
- Apocalypse Now (Coppola)
- Citizen Kane (Welles)
- La Dolce Vita (Fellini)
- The General (Keaton)
- Raging Bull (Scorsese)
- 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick)
- Tokyo Story (Ozu)
- The Tree of Life (Malick)
- Vertigo (Hitchcock)
The accompaying essay is worth reading.
Super Mario Bros as surrealist art
Eating a flower gives you the power to spit fireballs. Bullets have faces. Stars make you invincible. In addtion to being video game, maybe Super Mario Bros is a surrealist masterpiece
A video compilation of deaths from old school video games, from Pong and Space Invaders right on up to Afterburner.The music is a MIDI version of Mad World.
A University of Kansas theater professor and his students are putting on a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the original pronunciation.
“American audiences will hear an accent and style surprisingly like their own in its informality and strong r-colored vowels,” Meier said. “The original pronunciation performance strongly contrasts with the notions of precise and polished delivery created by John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier and their colleagues from the 20th century British theater.”
Meier said audiences will hear word play and rhymes that “haven’t worked for several hundred years (love/prove, eyes/qualities, etc.) magically restored, as Bottom, Puck and company wind the language clock back to 1595.”
“The audience will hear rough and surprisingly vernacular diction, they will hear echoes of Irish, New England and Cockney that survive to this day as ‘dialect fossils.’ And they will be delighted by how very understandable the language is, despite the intervening centuries.”
Sounds more Irish to me than anything, but neat nevertheless
Short documentary about a grocery store in LA that sells only soda….500 different kinds and very little high fructose corn syrup.
This is fascinating. The history of soda and tidbits on the industry are neat, but really makes this a must watch is the portrait of the owner, John Nese, who clearly has a deep, passionate love for soda. I always think people with such powerful obsessions are so captivating.
It remains of that old quote, “Anything topic is interesting, once you get into deep enough.”
Three Minute Philosophy - Immanuel Kant
“YouTube user CollegeBinary does a video series called Three Minute Philosophy. Each episode describes the views and beliefs of a noted philosopher: Galileo, Kant, Descartes, Locke, and more.”
These are hilarious and informative. Hilarformative!
Graphic of the level of collaboration on many of their songs.
Follow the link for information and more graphics
via Kottke
A neat little post about how various media works have aged/are perceived to have aged.
When I was a kid, “oldies” music and movies seemed ancient. The entertainment that I watched and listened to in my youth still feels pretty recent to me. Raiders of the Lost Ark wasn’t all that long ago, right? But comparing my distorted recall of childhood favorites to the oldies of the time jogs my memory in unpleasant ways.
Watching Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) today is the equivalent of watching Singin’ in the Rain (1952) in 1981.
This seems weird, but it’s true. Related to this may be my odd mental habit of using the year 2000 as reference point when figuring out how long ago something was.
I feel like once this phenomenom goes on long enough, we’ll turn into our parents, forever out of touch.
Why the Phantom Menace sucks
This is the best 70-minute video critique of The Phantom Menace that exists in the world.
Here’s Lost’s Damon Lindelof’s reaction:
Your life is about to change. This is astounding film making. Watch ALL of it.
I was deeply skeptical, but it’s the real deal. Just watch the first 5 minutes.
Via Kottke
Zombie 101 by Matt Zoller Seitz
The video essays at The Museum of the Moving Image are really fantastic. They’re 10min-ish mini-documentaries about different topics in film. Above is the one on Zombie films (the origins, themes and history.)
All of them are pretty great, especially the ones by Matt Zoller Seitz. If you haven’t seen his look at Wes Anderson, it’s a real treat. Like the rest of them, they are smart, funny and educational.
via Kottke
![He popped out that door, and when the door opened and he came through it, the look on his face was like no look I’d ever seen on George Bush’s face in my life. […] And I said, “If he wasn’t just back there behind that door crying, I don’t know what that look on his face is.” Because he just looks absolutely devastated as he comes through this door after essentially ending his eight year presidency. And it’s just really striking. He just looks absolutely devastated.
via Kottke](http://25.media.tumblr.com/Ko3DxEG1hj7bldxqu66uNJ6co1_500.jpg)
He popped out that door, and when the door opened and he came through it, the look on his face was like no look I’d ever seen on George Bush’s face in my life. […] And I said, “If he wasn’t just back there behind that door crying, I don’t know what that look on his face is.” Because he just looks absolutely devastated as he comes through this door after essentially ending his eight year presidency. And it’s just really striking. He just looks absolutely devastated.
