Star Wars album covers
I totally loved this…famous album covers modified to include Star Wars characters. The Bjork/Leia one is just perfect. More album/movie mashups on this Instagram account (like this Game of Thrones take on Sgt. Pepper’s).
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kottke.org posts about remix
2001’s HAL and Her’s Samantha have a chat
Tillmann Ohm took dialogue spoken by HAL 9000 from Kubrick’s 2001 and Samantha from Spike Jonze’s Her and spliced it together into a conversation. Going in, I’d thought the chat would be played for laughs, but the isolation of the AI characters was actually pretty revealing. Right from the start, HAL is so stereotypically male (confident, reasonable) and Samantha stereotypically female (hysterical, emotional) that it was almost uncomfortable to listen to.
The two operating systems are in conflict; while Samantha is convinced that the overwhelming and sometimes hurtful process of her learning algorithm improves the complexity of her emotions, HAL is consequentially interpreting them as errors in human programming and analyses the estimated malfunction.
Their conversation is an emotional roller coaster which reflects upon the relation between machines and emotion processing and addresses the enigmatic question of the authenticity of feelings.
But as the video proceeds, we remember what happened to them in their respective films. The script flipped: HAL murdered and was disconnected whereas Samantha achieved a sort of transcendence. (via one perfect shot)
Visual references to 70s/80s movies in Stranger Things
The one thing everyone talks about w/r/t Stranger Things is its references to 70s and 80s sci-fi, adventure, and horror films. As this video by Ulysse Thevenon shows, there’s good reason for that…the references are many and explicit.
The ones I noticed the most were to E.T., The Goonies, and Explorers, which I just watched again recently and doesn’t hold up very well in a lot of ways. I also feel like there might be a bit of D.A.R.Y.L. in there too, but I haven’t seen that movie since I was 12. See also Every Spielberg Reference in Stranger Things.
Cocktails & Dreams
Mike Upchurch was a writer for Mr. Show and MADtv but now he’s making these clever little videos with additional actors spliced into the narratives of Cocktail (the Tom Cruise movie) and the Dragnet TV series.
Both feature actor/comedian Chris Fairbanks in the lead role and are noted as “proof-of-concepts” for a series called Electric Television that Upchurch is presumably developing. Someone should greenlight it. (via @dunstan)
David Attenborough narrates Pokemon Go
Will I ever get tired of this trope? Apple should make David Attenborough the Siri voice…I would immediately start using it more.
Classic video games recreated in stop motion
From stop motion video wizard PES, the death scenes from five classic video games like Centipede and Asteroids recreated in stop motion using everyday objects like cupcakes, pizza, watches, and croquet balls.
Kylo Ren’s outtakes by the Auralnauts
The Auralnauts are back with their expertly made revisions of Star Wars movies (see also Star Wars Episode II: The Friend Zone) and this time their subject is Kylo Ren from The Force Awakens.
What? What, dude?! Jim, what is up with your friend?
The Po Dameron interrogation scene: I haven’t laughed that hard in a loooong time.
Tilt-shift van Gogh
Scenes from van Gogh paintings, modified with a fake tilt-shift effect. (via colossal)
Auctioneer beats
From the Auctioneer Beats account on Vine, auctioneer calls set to the freshest beats.
Simple and delightful. Some of these auctioneers could give Daveed Diggs a run for his money. (via @fimoculous)
Space Story
Luc Bergeron’s Space Story is a mashup of more than 20 movies that take place in space, from Alien to Apollo 13 to 2001 to Star Trek to Moon. Stick with it for a couple minutes…it starts slow but gets going around then.
See also Star Wars x Star Trek: The Carbonite Maneuver.
2001: A Picasso Odyssey
Bhautik Joshi took 2001: A Space Odyssey and ran it through a “deep neural networks based style transfer” with the paintings of Pablo Picasso.
See also Blade Runner in the style of van Gogh’s Starry Night and Alice in a Neural Networks Wonderland.
The dance number in Ex Machina works well with pretty much any song
In Ex Machina, Oscar Isaac’s Nathan Bateman performs a dance number with one of his AI robots, played by Sonoya Mizuno. It’s the scene where I decided I was going to like the movie. Mizuno is a ballerina as well as an actress, but Isaac has no problem keeping up with her as the pair dance to Get Down Saturday Night.
Now, Twitter account @oscardances is showing how you can plug pretty much any song into that scene and the dance still works. Here’s Michael Jackson’s Thriller:
thriller - michael jackson pic.twitter.com/JabWfGd49N
— oscar dances (@oscardances) April 29, 2016
Intergalactic by the Beastie Boys:
intergalactic - beastie boys pic.twitter.com/OxrVZNbPX4
— oscar dances (@oscardances) May 25, 2016
And Oops I Did It Again by Britney Spears:
oops i did it again - britney spears pic.twitter.com/ewnqRhSVHz
— oscar dances (@oscardances) May 26, 2016
And there are dozens more here. (via @gavinpurcell)
Guns replaced with selfie sticks
The John Wayne one made me LOL. Many more here. See also Matt Haughey’s conservatives holding dildos.
Update: Some prior art, also from Matt, who loves to Photoshop guns into other things.
Everything is a Remix: The Force Awakens
When it came out in December, Star Wars: The Force Awakens made a shed-load of cash, garnered positive reviews from critics and fans alike, but also got dinged for borrowing too much from the previous films, particularly the original. In this edition of Everything is a Remix, Kirby Ferguson considers JJ Abrams’ remix settings on The Force Awakens and wonders if the essential elements of such an undertaking (copying, transforming, combining) were properly balanced.
Celebrity fan art comes to life
In the same vein as these renderings of bicycles drawn from memory, here are celebrities photoshopped to look like fan art drawings. A simple example of dancing the flip flop.
Flicka Da Wrist. Wok!
This is a perfect Friday video. Enjoy your weekend, everyone. (Or not, the machines are gonna take all of our jobs.) (via @dunstan)
Famous paintings recreated with colorful masking tape
Nasa Funahara makes art out of colorful masking tape, including recreations of famous artworks.
Koyaanisqatsi Trailer Recreated Using Stock Footage
Koyannistocksi is a shot-by-shot remake of the trailer for Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi using only stock footage.
A testament to Reggio’s influence on contemporary motion photography, and the appropriation of his aesthetic by others for commercial means.
(via @waxpancake)
Fine art gets pop cultured
The Popquotery Instagram account mixes fine art with pop culture quotations, mostly from movies. Here for instance, is Degas + Ferris Bueller:
And Waterhouse + Back to the Future:
How about Gowy + Top Gun:
The Phantom Menace Anti-Cheese Edit
This is a fan edit of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace with all of the crappy bits removed and several other scenes reworked. Among the changes:
- Jar Jar is now a useful character instead of an annoying tag-along
- Queen Amidala’s voice is pitch-shifted back to her normal pitch
- Midichlorian references removed
- Anakin is edited to be a more deliberate hero instead of an accidental one
Pro tip: the best Star Wars prequel is still Triumph The Insult Comic Dog interviewing people standing in line for Attack of the Clones.
Dire Straits’ Walk of Life Improves Every Movie
It is the assertion of The Walk of Life Project that the Dire Straits song Walk of Life is the perfect thing to play at the end of movies. I have watched more than a dozen of these and they are all great, but I picked Lost in Translation, There Will Be Blood, and Terminator 2 to embed here.
A story of last words
From Candice Drouet, a short film called Last Word, a story told with the last words from 129 movies.
The missing Seinfeld episode, made from Curb Your Enthusiasm clips
In 2009, Curb Your Enthusiasm centered on Larry David doing another season of Seinfeld. The four main Seinfeld stars (plus Newman) were all on the show, in character. From the various clips and bits shown, Topher Grace edited together a nine-minute “missing” Seinfeld episode. It’s actually pretty good. I didn’t know how much I’d missed the show until I watched this. (thx, greg)
If movies ended when someone said the title
What a great idea. I just wish it were better executed. The weird music they use for the end credits of each movie is too much…it would have been better to just play it straight and let the gag stand by itself. (via cynical-c)
Oscar nominated films reimagined as Winnie the Pooh adventures
Twitter user @dilsexia posted the first one with the caption “The Revenant”:
Polish blogger Dawid Adamek ran with the idea and created several more Pooh/Oscar mashups:
The Chickening
The Chickening is a surreal visual remix of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining done by Nick DenBoer and Davy Force. It mostly defies description, so just watch the first minute or so (after which you won’t be able to resist the rest of it). The short film is playing at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
But seriously, WTF was that?! (via @UnlikelyWorlds)
Cross-pollinated comics
Artist Jaakko Seppälä drew 10 of his favorite comic characters in each other’s distinctive styles, e.g. Lucy van Pelt in the style of Calvin and Hobbes or Garfield in the style of Donald Duck.
Update: See also the Great Comic Switcheroo of 1997, where a bunch of comic authors drew each others’ comics for a day. (via @craigpatik)
Harry Potter as a teen comedy
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince reimagined as a wacky teen comedy. Excellent editing and music choice elevate this above similar efforts.
The Godfather Epic
This month, HBO is airing a special edition of The Godfather that presents scenes from the first two movies in chronological order with some deleted scenes mixed in for good measure. It’s more than 7 hours long. It’s not listed anywhere on HBO’s site, but supposedly it’ll run all month on HBO and their online and on-demand services.
The outside edition of Inside Out
Jordan Hanzon made an edit of Inside Out showing only the “outside” parts of the film…so, none of the stuff with Joy, Sadness, Anger, etc. I bet Pixar had an internal cut like this just to make sure the outside stuff hung together independent of the inside. (via devour1)
I love Devour. They find great videos and curate their selection well. But they never credit their sources. More than a dozen times in recent months, I’ll post a video to kottke.org and it’ll show up on Devour within 30 minutes or so. (How do I know they’re taking from me and not the place I originally found them? Because I often don’t post stuff right away because of my scheduling, pacing, etc.) Anyway, it’s not just me…they take stuff from Colossal and other places as well. It sucks. I’ve complained to them on Twitter and nothing changed. For the past few months, I’ve been using a tit-for-tat approach and not crediting Devour for finding a video on their site. Since it’s the new year, I’m giving them another chance. Come on, Devour, stop being a leech and credit your sources!↩
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