Speaking of otherworldly creatures, check out these Golden Age Mexican lobby cards:
Popularity: 55% [?]
I found this incredible image of Stanley Kubrick directing Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ while sifting through the Internet this morning. I wonder what they did with that set afterwards. It would be so awesome if they just rented that rotating drum out as a studio apartment, so that when you walked to the living room from the bedroom the apartment rotated, but you stayed still …
Popularity: 12% [?]
I can’t look out my office window on a grey rainy day like today without imagining Spinners weaving through the buildings, crowds of people with glowing umbrellas and shady eyeball craftsmen working their frigid magic on the streets.And as the 21st century grinds on, I’m more and more convinced that Blade Runner is coming true. It’s like some window in an alternate future was left open, just a crack, and all that alternate reality is whispering through, one invention at a time.
Listening to the Blade Runner soundtrack really helps this vision coalesce, too. Vangelis’ haunting ambient score over the sounds of busy, rainy city life are mixing really well with the view outside. A great geek friend of mine hooked me up with the motherlode too, a while back: a collection of ambient background noise and sound effects from Blade Runner.
And of course, I wouldn’t have mentioned it if I didn’t want to share … help yourselves to ambient background sound and effects from Blade Runner, as well as Vangelis’ score, laid over sounds from the film:
Vangelis’ Blade Runner Soundtrack, Part 1
Vangelis’ Blade Runner Soundtrack, Part 2
If any of you are motivated to mash up or remix these sounds into something, please share …
Popularity: 25% [?]
Those great big billboard ads you see on the subway are nothing but giant peel-and-stick Coloforms, really. I love the accidental collages you see when people randomly pick and peel those thing like they’re great big scabs, and I just knew it was a matter of time before someone started making art out of them.
Then I saw this ad for Star Wars that had been chopped and remixed with bits from a beer ad and a poster for a Takashi Murakami exhibit and I heard a horde of angels singing a song titled “Shit Yeah!”:
You can see the whole billboard and a gold-bikini Princess Leia mixed with Iron Man after the jump …
Popularity: 57% [?]
It starts with a simple, relentless drumbeat, punctuated with a catchy, almost tribal woodblock sound. Then the pulsing synth starts and you just feel the whole rollercoaster lurch away from your feet and you drop into a throat-hitching freefall, esophagus rippling while your heart screams with ecstasy.
It samples a bunch of the awesomest movies ever like Blade Runner, A Clockwork Orange, Scarface.
Maybe it sounds like steam rising off a jungle or a low, purple-red sun rising in a time-lapse movie of a highway jammed with traffic, fog burning away. It sounds like aerobics, but the cool kind. Like the aerobics in a montage from a very inspirational Hollywood movie about training to whip somebody’s ass in a dystopian future. There’s one thing that’s very clear about the hidden message in this song, though: there’s a great big busy productive world happening out there, and just for this one day, you want no part of it.
Popularity: 23% [?]
Godzilla Witch Project. Nothing more, nothing less.
Popularity: 15% [?]
Here’s a real gem: an excerpt of From Beyond, a film I’ll be moving to the top of the Netflix queue immediately.
Tip of the hat to AMC’s SciFi Scanner for the clip and the copy below:
Lightly pulsating beneath the skin of your forehead, Descartes’ third eye, the pineal gland. Properly titillated by sonic vibrations from a machine built by a mad scientist, this seemingly superfluous organ can awaken, offering a glimpse of the ectoplasmic horrors of the world beyond our five senses. Needless to say, once your third eye opens? You start eating brains. And they can make you very sick.
From Beyond is another incredibly gory Stuart Gordon H.P. Lovecraft adaptation that came out in the early 80’s, shortly after the release of Re-Animator. It’s never quite gotten the same love, but it shares many of the timeless qualities of that horror sci-fi classic: Lovecraftian monsters, lots of gore, Jeffery Combs and Barbara Crampton’s exposed breasts.
I hate to be the one to point this out here, but if someone’s eating brains out of the trash can, they’re probably already very, very sick.
Popularity: 9% [?]
Metalosis Maligna is a fictitious documentary by Floris Kaayk about a rampaging bacterial infection that affects people with metal medical implants. Reminiscent of Cronenberg’s earlier, sci-fi works and Chris Cunningham’s Aphex Twin videos, the piece can be interpreted as a compelling commentary on mankind’s increasing dependence on technology. You could say that it elliptically asks if that dependence is an entirely good thing.
Alternately, you could just say it’s really freaking sick, send it to all your friends and enjoy yourself. Up to you, really.
Here’s a higher-res Quicktime link, Youtube embedded below.
Popularity: 6% [?]
Blade Runner: The Final Cut opens this weekend at exactly two theaters in the United States: The Ziegfeld in New York and the Landmark in Los Angeles. It’s got me salivating with excitement, and my friend Kim — who owns a copy of the Blade Runner script, signed by all the cast members — she’s been sleeping in a transparent raincoat all week, a stuffed boa constrictor clutched in her twitching fingers.
Popularity: 11% [?]
