I've seen some pretty amazing "samizdat" movies over the years, cheekily lifting characters and situations from existing films or tv series and dropping them into an entirely unofficial plotline, but Sandy Collora's 2003 mini-epic Batman: Dead End ranks as one of the best. Of course, it kinda helps that Collora is a professional sfx designer (he worked on Predator 2 and with Kevin Smith on Dogma).
Whilst I wouldn't suggest Matthew Doll's 2005 short Captain Jack Maximum in "The Reich's Metal Man" is particularly innovative, I do find interesting its attempt to echo the manner in we interact with traditional comic books. How much this is down to Doll and how much to his lead animator, Aaron Cripps, will possibly become clearer when this former student at Rochester Institute of Technology unveils his next project.
Edit: There seems to a problem with the sound on this (not the first time Vox hasn't loaded a working file properly. The link's above.
YouTube's just launched Horrorfest 2006, and is soliciting entries from amateur film-makers, among them Spike and Raychul Moore, whose Carpenter clone Halloween Thriller scarcely sets the bar very high. Strip away the tech and little to choose between it and the cliche-drenched fanboy videos which proliferated in the mid-1990s, aside from the fact that few of those guys had access to a flesh-'n'-blood woman prepared to parade around in her panties. I'll be keeping an eye on the contest over the next month, but there's certainly bugger all to get excited about at this stage of the game.
As mentioned in an earlier posting, this weekend's Delta Award shortlist included the first instalment in Trey Stokes' latest Star Wars parody, Return of Pink Five, with Amy Earhart back as feisty Jedi valley girl Stacey. Hopefully, he'll have wrapped the third and final chapter by next year's festival, but the second is already playing selected events in the United States. Enjoy the trailers.
The one thing you could never accuse the British director Mike Figgis of is getting stuck in a rut. One moment he's working on a Newcastle gangland drama, the next it's a Los Angeles police thriller, a portrait of human decay or playing with real time via the latest video technology.
His latest project sees Figgis following in the footsteps of Baz Luhrmann and the 2004 Chanel No.5 advertising campaign, although I doubt 4 Dreams of Miss X has anything like the multi-million-dollar budget Luhrmann wangled. Nor is Kate Moss quite as striking a screen presence as Nicole Kidman, but her fans will no doubt be tuning in for the third instalment this January, in which - rumour has it - the model will perversely promote Agent Provocateur's lingerie by neglecting to wear any.
Edit: Curiously, Vox appears to have stripped the audio stream out of the file during uploading.
I'll be commenting in due course upon the various events in Manchester this weekend, during the 17th Festival of Fantastic Films (of which Ann and I have attended at least fifteen), but I'll content myself for a moment by posting a selection of pix from the closing night's quiz, when our team (collectively known, for reasons far too odd to recount, as "Barrie Holland's Satanic Love Children") came a very creditable fourth out of seven.
Ann's and my team-mates were: Mark Redfield, Baltimore-based director / star of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, with his delightful companion and Death of Poe co-star Jennifer Rouse; freelance horror journo Calum Waddell and FAB Press boss Harvey Fenton (just back from a fruitless attempt to get home via the M6); Dawn of the Dead star Ken Foree and festival co-chair (together with Tony Edwards) Gil Lane-Young.
Much as I enjoy a healthy dose of originality in my movie-viewing, there are occasions - such as Scott Quigley's 2001 spoof of the long-running Barclaycard ad campaign, Indecent Proposal - when even the oldest gag benefits from a little dusting-off and shining-up...
Edit: There appears to be a problem with uploading video to Vox at present. I may have to try this again later; in the meantime, it's available to watch here.
Edit 2: I've now replaced my file with a YouTube version of the same ad.
Fellow LiveJournalist Dave O'Neill has kindly brought to my attention a fascinating article by Thomas C Greene in The Register which cuts through the bullshit and analyses whether it's actually possible to construct a binary weapon (specifically, triacetone triperoxide) powerful enough to bring down an airliner. Well, the answer seems to be "yes", but only if you can convert the toilet into a mobile laboratory and keep the other passengers queuing in the corridor for three or four hours. Not that John Reid & Co will allow mere facts to be dragged into the equation, of course.
As evident from the briefest comparison between, say, the superlative Toy Story and the workmanlike but ultimately tiresome Madagascar, a successful animation depends even more upon creative flair and heart than the latest computer technology. The French short Vampz (directed by Adrien Annesley, Adrien Barbier-Lambert and Lam Le Thanh) has all three, with more than a nod to Charles Addams' classic New Yorker cartoons.
