Bees Love Truth

I am so completely and thoroughly psyched for Madame Tutli-Putli. Film Board of Canada is animation's saviour nowadays, as it has honestly been for a pretty long time.
This is seriously the best animated thing I've seen in years. The animators apparently worked with a human actor to develop the personality of the protagonist, which, from the small clips available, looks freaking insanely excellent. The granularity of the movements is amazing on its own, and the movements themselves are so well-observed and wonderful. Here's another little clip; little bits of footage here and there.

Only the best necklace ever made by human hands. Except it's plastic. If it were sheet metal or something, man, hang the cost and the fact that I almost never wear jewelery.

Hey, I've just finished putting up a set of photos I took at the Ravensburger publishing-house museum. They're of some really awesome-looking old print materials, here. There is a lot of good stuff in there, and I'm not just saying that because I'm really tired and am sick of repeatedly fixing levels of photos.

Schwa linked to a freely-available extra-long clip of Scanner Darkly (the first 24 minutes, including don't-copy message fore and aft). So of course I had to sit through it. I don't really see a lot of promise, esp given nick's capsule review. At the very end of the 24 minutes it was sort of getting snappy, but before that the pacing was sort of a mess, and the visual effect was, as I predicted, transparent (except for the suit, which was not working well for me). Also, did Keanu disappear at the end? I don't want to watch it again to check.

Here, to make you hate me, is my degenerative process, time-stamped for your convenience.

( I guess I will cut. )

Why not go look at the Big Snit instead. It's like, the golden epitome of the Canada Film Board.

Mefi lunk this messageboard thread in which a russian guy talks about and posts photos of the fishing cat (maybe twice the volume of a domestic cat; lynxish-sized) that he and his wife own (I think they bought it from a zoo? It's a little hard to tell, what with the babelfishing). It's awesome, really (they fostered it on a housecat, and seem to feed it deer carcasses and non-scaly fish, which it catches in the bathtub), but one of the best bits is sifting through the babelfishy translation and trying to work out what's going on. At one point someone asks how 'hard' the cat's 'language' is, and from context you can tell that it's meant to be about its tongue instead, which is awesome.

Also, the guy often starts a post with 'How do you do everything!' which I eventually realized meant 'How do you do, everyone!' not 'How are you able to get everything done!' 'Everyone' must be gender-neutral, or else the word being used is more like 'all'. The cat's always referred to as a 'tomcat,' so boy-cat must be a term on its own. I'd almost say that cats-plural is masculine, too?
There is a good bit of conspicuous subject-object-verbing, which I just enjoy on its own.

Often a '4' will show up in sentences, and I don't know what that means. Just being a 4-number isn't right; maybe russian has a construction like 'a few' that literally translates to '4'? That doesn't even necessarily work, though. Oh - I think it's 'the', or some particle of that sort.
There's something that I assume IS 'a couple' or 'a few' that keeps getting rendered as 'pair-troika.'

Oh, and I think russian must have a word for animals-eating which is also used for eating-like-an-animal (as in german) because it's always rendered as 'gorging'.

It's possible there's a construction like in latin where you begin and end your 'thing and other thing' or 'thing or other thing' with a signifying word, too, given the structure of the title of this post. Sort of like 'both thing and other thing,' where 'both' and 'and' are the same word?


Anyway, it's strangely enjoyable. I love this sort of thing.

This video is just beautiful. Cecil sent it to me, as an example of modern puppetry, but it's not just that; it's a portion of that wonderful/terrifying line-walking that I love so much.

Part of that reaction may be due to a dream I had sometime in college, which the scene in the operating room really yanked out of deep storage and into conscious memory. I'd written it down back then.

( You can read it, should you wish )

zusty: That floaty hips-up and hips-down motion at the end in the operating room is really making me think of that puppet operating room dream I had
zusty: I just love it.
zusty: The gurney shot is the pinnacle though
zusty: his horrible teeth
zusty: and the multi-axis mouth motion

The way the puppeteers keep encouraging your suspension of disbelief, but then crushing it when the puppet's mouth opens too wide and abnormally deforms the face, and the way the body in the close-ups never wavers but then a cut directly to a nerd-dancing long shot-- this kind of stuff is suddenly awesome in the usually predictable world of music videos. I think there are three - possibly more, but probably not - separate puppets.
Closeup one, as seen at the beginning. Has eye, eyelid, tongue, and several mouth controls.
Full-body, as seen at the beginning and at the end. Has no finer controls.
Closeup two, as seen toward the end. Watch the way the mouth and jaw deform, and look closely at the brow, and tell me if you think it's the same as closeup one. I think it's different; maybe there was damage to the original puppet. [Addendum: two is definitely a new puppet; it has the eyebrow controls.]


Also, I can't help but think of Daleks while watching this video for Cish Cash, which I didn't even know _had_ a video. The delicate way the tanks move their little gun barrels is extremely Dalekly to me.

This is a terrific little list of Harry Potter hilarity, which is welcome because after the last book I don't care about the series any longer. Wait, was that the last book? I can't remember.
(See also this post.)

More seriously, here's a good page on locations from The Conversation. The Conversation is so goddamn good you will fall over, if you haven't seen it yet. Actually maybe if you have. Unlike the Godfather, The Conversation actually does a good job of showing you a detached person (often in direct contrast with people who aren't), and focussing closely upon him. Just think if instead of the decentralised third-person-autistic viewpoint of Godfather if we had stayed always with Pacino and been able to gauge his reactions to things as reasonable and/or understandable. Ah, the very idea. Anyway, the one big fat (sonic) flaw that occurs at the end of Conversation is not enough to mar the whole piece, although it comes close. We watched it several times in our sound class in college, and indeed its soundtrack is impeccable (and also its score is highly excellent; if anyone wants a few tracks, squeak loudly). Worth it in that regard alone. An arbitrary little written bit on the movie here, although, spoilers.
Spoilers of movies for me are not as important as they are for some people, but usually it is a good thing to develop your own ideas about what's on screen. Knowing events beforehand does irrevocably change things, not necessarily in a negative way, but the thing you're watching is not the thing you would have been watching spoilerless (You know to look for events or characters; your understanding is deeper than the director counted on, on first viewing. Instead of assessing what you're shown independently, you are bound by the structure you already abstractly know). The Conversation is a good movie to watch non-presciently; some of the ideas I've read in writeups had almost no bearing on what I myself remember seeing, and although it's possible to start with what another sees and through multiple rewatchings arrive at another viewpoint, seldom do people want to put in the time and effort on this.

Boingboing pointed out this page with old hokey horror movie trailers, but they failed to mention that a whole mess of them are Vincent Price movies (they have the trailers for _both_ Dr. Phibes films, which I love to small lumpy bits). Also there's the Raven, The House of Usher, (they do mention) the Pit and the Pendulum, and the Tomb of Ligeia. Maybe there's more, but those are the ones I've seen and recognise as Vincent Price pictures.
Hm, watching said trailers, the sound on Dr. Phibes Rises Again craps out about a fifth into the file.
Anyhow, I am disappointed at the absence of Theatre of Blood and Twice Told Tales, but I guess this is supposed to be a Serious Horror Only list, and oh well.