Looks like Virgin Atlantic again. Would have taken an X Wing, but not sure they’re welcome under the current administration:

No idea how the final film will pan out, but there’s a lot to love in the trailer. It seems to be heading towards Joss Whedon musical territory, which is a nice angle to raise some online geek awareness with, but I’m particularly interested in how (in the trailer at least) the menace moves from traditional shambling monsters to the sadly timeless terror of a woman given a voice.

That’s very fucking clever.

Not much up on the IMDB yet aside from a brief synopsis:

Reminiscent of “Pleasantville”, in this Gothic comedy heroine Abigaile Archibald suddenly develops a speaking voice in a world that is otherwise silent. Delighted, she secretly indulges in the joys of talking and singing — until the townspeople launch a witch hunt to find the source of the mysterious sound.

But the trivia section reveals some crowd sourcing success and that actress, Katie Ritz, is a trooper.

I hope this is good. Anyone know anything else about it?

Via The Manchester Morgue where I get a LOT of cool soundtracks from.

This is gonna be a lot more fun for those of you who’ve read Watchmen already. I’ll try not to spoil anything for those of you that haven’t…

It’s debatable who kicks the most ass in the book, but Rorschach tends to be a firm fan favourite. Think Batman without the restraint (ie. he’s less of a tool). As a diarist in 1985 and with more than a few chips on his shoulder I’m gonna go out on a limb and say he’s also a proto-blogger. One of my favourite sections of the graphic novel is about the Rorschach under the mask. I always felt in terms of casting he was probably going to give Zack Snyder the biggest headache.

Before the trailer was revealed I avoided most mentions of the movie online because despite knowing the story back to front I wanted to see the movie raw, in the same way I had with Dawn of the Dead and 300. With Dawn I was expecting Snyder to crash and burn spectacularly. I was so wrong on that score that when 300 came around I just shut the fuck up and took a seat.

But I did dip into the Watchmen casting and couldn’t help scan the IMDB for the actor playing Rorschach: Jackie Earle Haley.

Being me I actually got a kick out of trying to remember him in The Bad News Bears and The Love Boat, but it was his first break back in 1972 that sent me to YouTube. Do you remember this?

Here in the UK Wait Till Your Father Gets Home was never given a decent chance, but it left quite an impression on me. When Family Guy first aired and everyone was screaming ‘Simpsons rip off’ I couldn’t get Harry Boyle and his communist hating neighbour out of my head rather than Homer and Marge. But I digress…

The kicker here is that THIS then is Jamie Boyle Rorschach:

Is Zack Snyder this fucking good?

I’m not sure what it is exactly that I find so appealing about snowbound movies. Maybe it was seeing John Carpenter’s The Thing at an early and impressionable age or just that I like the idea of the elements conspiring against the protagonists as much as the threat outside… but I’m always eager to see something that promises a splash of red on white.

Twitch gave me a little buzz by covering some of the promotional material for upcoming Norwegian Nazi zombie horror comedy, Dead Snow. It also taps into schlock like Zombie Lake and Shock Waves (which I quite like), but it’s mostly the idea of frozen Nazi zombies played for giggles that appeals.

It won’t have to try too hard to be better than 30 Days of Night (which, axe scenes aside, was annoyingly dull) but will have some way to go to compete with the sublime Ravenous.

Speaking of snow…

I have it on good authority that Far North, one of my favourite films at last year’s London Film Festival, is getting a suitably chilly December release here in the UK. While not really a horror movie, it is equally beautiful and disturbing and without a doubt my favourite movie of Sean Bean’s to date. It also falls into that tricky little pigeon hole: movies you’re not allowed to talk about the ending of…

Here’s the trailer:

Bonus: Skip back 5 posts for the best Thing homage I’ve seen and then sing along to the blinding whiteness of the tuuuuuundra.

Which kid is having the most fun? Batkid or the one with lollipops and knives?

Thankfully Nolan recognises what a knob Batman is and keeps him off screen for most of the movie. Having Bale rasp his lines in that ridiculous get up for the first time on set must have lead to a similar revelation as Spielberg’s when he realised that Bruce wasn’t going to float…

Back now

I’ve always been very vocal about my feelings towards Facebook even at times when I’ve been in danger of adopting the Kevin “I never knew fear until I kissed Becky” McCarthy plan of running into oncoming traffic. But I did enjoy the Facebook News Feed Edition of Hamlet by Sarah Schmelling:

Polonius says Hamlet’s crazy … crazy in love!

Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Hamlet are now friends.

Hamlet wonders if he should continue to exist. Or not.

Hamlet thinks Ophelia might be happier in a convent.

Ophelia removed “moody princes” from her interests.

Hamlet posted an event: A Play That’s Totally Fictional and In No Way About My Family

The king commented on Hamlet’s play: “What is wrong with you?”

Polonius thinks this curtain looks like a good thing to hide behind.

Polonius is no longer online.

Looking for a David Warner as Hamlet pic lead me to the Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project. Man, I love the Internet. So now we have Philip as Hamlet and a bonus link to Canadian Shakespeareans in Space which has this revealing quote from the original Adama, Lorne Greene, about his role in Bonanza:

“They told me that they wanted a new series, a one-hour weekly western. They wanted it to have a strong father-and-son relationship because they were concerned that American soldiers’ defections in Korea had been traced by some psychologists to Momism, the strong identity of U.S. kids with their mothers. Also, they were sick of American movies in which fathers were depicted as bumbling dolts.”

You learn something new every day. Or to put it another way: There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio…

Probably some video on one of my hard drives too. That’s a job for another day. Also noticed that it’s been over a month since I uploaded anything to Flickr :/

That means I’ll have over a month’s worth of photos to sort out tomorrow on the train…

Brilliant video, brilliant music and something a little special. Not quite a sequel to John Carpenter’s The Thing, but far better than a simple homage:

Way better than 30 Days of Night too.

Music: Zombie Zombie (MySpace link)

These days I jump from one video platform to another and because it was Seesmic that first wooed me to the possibility of online video I’ve tended to ignore YouTube. I’ve just become convinced that this was a mistake. I did have a little alarm bell go off a while ago when I found out about this project to use a community to make a zombie movie. YouTube having a community was news to me. All I ever saw were a handful of good videos, a lot of mess and a truly anti-community inspired comment fueled torrent of badly spelled abuse. And yet here was Bryony tapping into her community on YouTube. I had to wait for Seesmic to come along and get in there early to find something similar.

One of several videos that I did first appreciate through YouTube was The Machine is Us/ing Us. I’ve been following Mike Wesch’s work since, as it taps into the reading I’ve been doing around Ken Robinson (I never bother linking directly to Ken Robinson’s website because ironically it’s hideous and a pain to use), the Network of Networks I’m involved with, the Cool Curve and a small large stack of notes I’ve been making. Today I saw a new video go up on the Digital Ethnography website and it’s a keeper.

It’s not short though. In fact it’s almost an hour long, but trust me. If you only watch one thing today watch An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube. Don’t be put off by the length or title. It’s important, funny and heart warming.

It covers the impact of YouTube and the importance of how we connect, the importance of Creative Commons and self generated organisation as the new model for a distribution network that we’ve created.

It also points out how all that money ($3.6 million) spent on Super Bowl ads was beaten by a guy in his basement in Kansas collaborating with another guy on the Ivory Coast for no money at all. This I think is key to what everyone involved in Web 2.0/New Media/Social Media is attempting to do. It’s not rocket science, it’s simply bringing the right people together at the right time regardless of geogrpahy and timezones, ignoring the traditional routes which usually hemorrhage money.

Mike defines media as the mediating of human relationships and that line alone made me happy to be working in this field. That he went on to talk about networked individualism and the importance of the invisible audience leading to context collapse was just gravy. This is really important observational work into a medium that is largely ignored, treated like traditional TV or just ripped off my marketeers.

Mike understands and more importantly manages to reveal the paradox that with online video everybody is watching at the same time that nobody is there, that the most private becomes the most public and how wonderful that can be. He also offers a very concise explanation of the ‘go die in a fire’ comment storms that put so many people off YouTube.

And despite the length and that this could have been a very traditional style TED conference video, Mike roped in his students and broke the talk up into endearing but important work culled from YouTube itself (and he even finds a way to allow his students some fun, extra credit and thanks).

I decided to forgo the PowerPoint and instead worked with students to prepare over 40 minutes of video for the 55 minute presentation. This is the result:

Crossposted on Network of Networks