• All posts tagged with "film"
ם Linkdump.
Posted on May 29, 2008 at 11:17 pm
- I love Isabella Rossellini. For the Sundance Film Festival, she wrote, produced, directed, and starred in a series of shorts called Green Porno. In each short, she dresses up like some bug, and then explains and simulates their reproduction. It is, in a word, fantastic. Potentially NSFW, if you work in an office full of insects.
- Like the Internet? Watch Weezer’s new video for their single “Pork and Beans” and see how many Internet memes/YouTube sensations you recognize to check your pop-nerd-cred.
- Side effect of the Weezer video: discovering the Daft Hands video and assorted spinoffs.
- Lastly, the geek in me must share this article about Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine, complete with this spectacular anecdote:
We were arguing about what the name of the company should be when Richard walked in, saluted, and said, “Richard Feynman reporting for duty. OK, boss, what’s my assignment?” The assembled group of not-quite-graduated MIT students was astounded.
After a hurried private discussion (”I don’t know, you hired him…”), we informed Richard that his assignment would be to advise on the application of parallel processing to scientific problems.
“That sounds like a bunch of baloney,” he said. “Give me something real to do.”
So we sent him out to buy some office supplies.
That is all.
ם Geek Points
Posted on September 23, 2007 at 4:38 pm
- I went to the doctor and she gave me an inhaler.
- I went to a screening of a documentary about a typeface. (By the way, it was fantastic.)
- I became the President of the NYU Math Club.
geekpoints++; (Oh God, that didn’t help.)
Tonight I was buying some food, and the cashier was whistling a familiar tune.
“Monty Python?” I asked. He told me I was the first person all night to know that, so he gave me a free box of Ritz crackers.
Hooray free crackers! Monty Python, you’ve saved me again.
Remember when this happened? No? Go read it again. I’ll wait here.
Good? Good.
Hoo-ah!
Last night, I went to a (free) advanced screening of Employee of the Month, the latest piece-of-shit blockbuster soon to hit theaters starring Dane Cook (has always sucked, but sucked in this too), Jessica Simpson (sucked), and Dax Shepard (sucked). All in all, good for a few cheap laughs, but definitely not worth the ticket price, and my ticket was free. 
But I write this post with a purpose. In the movie, Jessica Simpson’s Jungian archetype would be that of “the whore.” She’s the romantic interest all the guys are after because she’ll sleep with anything. Her debut is a slow motion walk, with the camera deliberately tightly framed on her breasts bouncing and spilling out of her shirt, and notably, her visibly erect nipples that are in almost every shot that she’s in. I’m not talking about a subtle flash here, they are obviously accentuated and prominently displayed througout the entire movie.
“Okay,” you say. “Big deal, sex sells.”
True. But all this monetary talk, of course, naturally brings us to the movie’s producer. That’s right, the infamous Joe Simpson. Her father.
This is the same man that said of daughter Jessica: “She just is sexy. If you put her in a T-shirt or you put her in a bustier, she’s sexy in both. She’s got double Ds! You can’t cover those suckers up! (MSNBC)”
The same man who approved the photoshoot of his daughter on a bed in just her underwear with a man undressing, only to have it nixed in the eleventh hour by her mother who said it was too “slutty” (same MSNBC article).
The same man who, to capitalize on his daughters, became a paparazzo and as their manager only approves his own images for distribution. So when you saw those pictures of Jessica leaving a nightclub in a see-through top last month (not posted here to retain some semblance of decency), they were probably taken (and sold) by her dad.
Hell, it’s this guy.
So here’s to Joe Simpson, my nominee for Creepiest Dad of the Year.
Brandon Bonfiglio is a dear, dear friend of mine. He also produces music videos. Last night, he won a MTV VMA for Video of the Year! Congrats, Brandon!
More importantly: I get to play with a moonman!
But that’s not where the fun ends with Brandon. He’s been in New York all week because of the VMAs (he lives in LA), so we’ve been hanging out. Note, however, that Brandon looks eerily like Ryan Reynolds, star of flops cinematic gold such as Van Wilder, Blade: Trinity, The Amityville Horror, and Just Friends.
Don’t believe me? See for yourself:
Brandon Bonfiglio, Ryan Reynolds.
Brandon Bonfiglio, Ryan Reynolds.
Ryan Reynolds, Brandon Bonfiglio.
Well, Tuesday night, after a nice dinner of “N3″ at a Burmese restaurant, we were at Doc Holiday’s, a bar in the East Village. While we were standing outside, a thoroughly inebriated 20-something girl with a thick accent recognized my dear friend Ryan Reynolds. She kept trying to take pictures of him, but Brandon kept deferring her to his “manager” to get permission. His “manager” just happened to be a bearded homeless man who was asking for change when she spotted him. Hilarity ensued, and she eventually left angry but pictureless. Apparently just another night for Brandon, who this happens to often.
Now, this would be all fine and well if it ended there. But today, while cruising Gawker, I saw that somebody had Gawker Stalker-ed Ryan Reynolds.
Ryan Reynolds
103 PRINCE ST
Aug 31st, 2006 @ 3pm
I saw Ryan Reynolds (dee-lish) in the SoHo Apple store. God is he tall and handsome, is he still engaged?
I immediately texted Brandon to find out where he was yesterday at 3pm, and sure as shit, he was at the SoHo Apple store. Fantastic.
So, just a note to you, Gawker, “tall and handsome” actor Ryan Reynolds wasn’t at the Apple store yesterday, it was “tall and handsome” VMA winning producer Brandon Bonfiglio.
ם Attica! Attica!
Posted on August 29, 2006 at 12:57 pm
So Deb and I are running errands yesterday, and we head up to the Astor Place K-Mart (she needed a sugar bowl). Just as we’re crossing the street over to the Astor cube (or The Alamo, if you’d rather), Deb tells me to look behind me. Thinking she’s just telling me to watch for traffic, I ignore the advice. So she grabs me and tells me a bit more forcefully, so I look back towards the giant glass Chase building and see some removable van bench seats just sitting out on the sidewalk with people sitting on them.
“Yeah, I guess that’s pretty funny,” I say.
“No douchebag, look who’s sitting on it.”
And there, hanging out on a van bench seat in front of Chase, is Spike Lee.
Only in New York.
But in a strange twist of fate, before we cross over to K-Mart and write this off as just another Gawker Stalker submission, a crew member stops us and asks us if we’re in a hurry. Nope, we say. The sugar bowl can wait.
He points to Spike Lee across the street. “Well, we’ve got a famous director over there, and he’s filming promo spots for next year’s Oscars. He’s looking for Village-y type people to be in them. He’s going to give you famous lines from movies, and you just parrot them back to the camera. You busy?”
Hell no, we’re not busy. Give us the release forms.
So we hang out for a half hour or so, filling out forms and getting Polaroids taken of us, and before we knew it, Deb was standing in front of the Astor Place 6 station, saying:
“I am big, it’s the pictures that got small!”
-Sunset Blvd.
“Every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings.”
-It’s a Wonderful Life
And then I’m shaking hands with Spike Lee, thrown in front of some big lights, and he has me screaming:
“Attica! Attica!”
-Dog Day Afternoon
“You talkin’ to me?”
-Taxi Driver
“I coulda been a contender! I coulda been somebody!”
-On the Waterfront
And my personal favorite:
“All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.”
-Sunset Blvd.
I have now not only met Spike Lee, but have been directed by Spike Lee. Spike Lee has screamed “WITH MORE ATTITUDE!” at me.
If anyone catches this on TV (probably sometime in February), please let me know, and if you catch it on tape, I’ll love you forever.
Only in New York.
YouTube is probably the best thing that’s happened to the Internet since the O RLY owl. Check out this astounding movie trailer mashup, 10 Things I Hate About Commandments.
Absolutely fantastic.
ם Powers of Ten
Posted on June 11, 2006 at 2:43 am
Some kind soul has put my favorite movie of all time on YouTube: Charles and Ray Eames’ “Powers of Ten”.
My neighbor and I would sit around for hours just watching this on loop, and we once even edited the Wikipedia entry to state, “This is the most amazing film ever produced in the history of movie-making. Ever.” (This was quickly edited out by someone less awesome, but it lives on in the history!)
The sound on the YouTube version is unfortunately a bit out of sync, but luckily I have my own copy. Contact me if you’d like a nicer quality version.
Academy Award winner Cate Blanchett will be playing Bob Dylan in the upcoming biopic I’m Not There.
Weird.