Incredimarc

pwilkes: Lady Gaga - Telephone - Unreal…what an amazing brand...

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:29:43 -0700

pwilkes:

Lady Gaga - Telephone - Unreal…what an amazing brand they have created for her (via @amylamb)

Should I be embarrassed that we watched the “world premier” on “E!”? I should be, but I’m strangely proud.

I just called Dianna DeGette’s office to encourage her to...

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 12:25:38 -0700

I just called Dianna DeGette’s office to encourage her to vote for healthcare reform. We’re almost there! Let’s do it!

comedyworksdenver: Conan O’Brien Presents “The Legally...

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 12:21:53 -0700

comedyworksdenver:

Conan O’Brien Presents “The Legally Prohibited From Being Funny on Television Tour” - coming to 30 cities…tickets on sale now!

We bought our tickets today!

explodingdog: disappointed elephant I just rediscovered...

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:31:26 -0700

explodingdog:

disappointed elephant

I just rediscovered Exploding Dog yesterday with the help of the Tumblr Directory (thanks guys!). The last time I was into a web “comic” like this (exactly this) was in early college, hrrmmrhrhmm years ago (not that many years ago).

What’s old is new again. How delightful!

I finally got my first email from Church=State! I first heard...

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:34:17 -0700

I finally got my first email from Church=State! I first heard about this campaign back when The Denver Egotist caught wind of the bilboards down in the springs. I thought it was utterly sarcastic, to be honest. The wording on the “web site” is so terrifying, that I couldn’t imagine real people saying such things. I had to sign up to find out what the hell is going on.

Obviously, this is not a really smart, progressive action group gag. This is for real. By the looks of the email, my soul is at stake because I live in a country that has a representative government.

Hang on tight, Colorado. I’ll throw myself on the train tracks and keep receiving these emails for now (I guess I have to since they don’t comply with CANSPAM requirements for an unsubscribe link). I might find out that my commie-, homo-, “human rights”-loving lifestyle is against the 1st Amendment. Or something.

(via @maddow)

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 13:21:14 -0700

(via @maddow)

When you watch this video, change the CC to...

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 12:53:47 -0700

When you watch this video, change the CC to “interpret audio”. Magic.

I guess I don't read enough internet comments.

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 11:06:00 -0700

Is this pretty common? (You can click through to observe these very real comments in the wild)

"When President Bush two years ago failed to name members to a federal board to monitor the..."

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 15:13:49 -0700

“

When President Bush two years ago failed to name members to a federal board to monitor the protection of civil liberties, Democrats and activist groups were duly outraged, seeing it as one more example of his administration’s indifference to the subject.

But more than a year into a new presidency, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board—created by Congress in 2007—remains as much a cipher under Barack Obama as it was under George W. Bush. The White House has yet to nominate a single person to sit on the five-person board. It has no members, no staff and no office.

”

- Isikoff, “Civil Liberties Board Goes Vacant under Obama” (via newsweek)

We should be pretty outraged about this.

My cat’s name is Tuesday, but she is mostly called Ponyo...

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 11:56:00 -0700

My cat’s name is Tuesday, but she is mostly called Ponyo in the morning when I use sliced ham in breakfast prep, or when making a sandwich for lunch. She seriously goes batshit for ham. Also, while Katie was staying up until 3:00-ish last night writing her paper, she definitely looked up the difference between the Noah Cyrus/Frankie Jonas/Disney/auto-tune version of the Ponyo song and the original Japanese version. Grad students! P.S. Ponyo hits shelves today.

(via fourfour [worth a click])

I hadn’t seen this yet. Best Rube Goldberg ever....

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 09:00:11 -0700

I hadn’t seen this yet. Best Rube Goldberg ever. Period.

(via Nerdist)

Who has a “mac station” in their dining room?...

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 20:39:54 -0700

Who has a “mac station” in their dining room? (I’m trying to be supportive to the one who is entering finals week. I guess that means proximity.)

I couldn’t not post this.

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 20:36:34 -0700

I couldn’t not post this.

I’ve heard of The Secret of Kells for a while now. They...

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 18:00:15 -0700

I’ve heard of The Secret of Kells for a while now. They screened it at Pixar last year, and all of my animation idols were raving about it. I can’t wait until I can see it. I read a review with some clips that is excellent.

SNL 2/27/10

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 12:24:00 -0700

I caught the second half of SNL last night, but I want to post about the cold open, and how it made me feel inside.

Excellent idea on paper.

Okay, this could be pretty good.

Eh. This impression doesn’t make me want to buy an HP computer, but impressions aren’t Kristen Wiig’s strong suit.

Yes!

Pretty standard, but good. The current momentum is encouraging…

Pitch perfect (given that we don’t really care about vocals at this point). Also note the Vince Vaughn setup.

AHHH! I know we haven’t been caring about good singing impressions, but we do care about our aural health! Jason, this was so so so so so bad. I already forgave you, but please don’t do any more Adam Lambert impressions! What? I can’t hear you. My ears have been run over by a Roland Emmerich movie or something.

Pass.

Pretty good! But doesn’t Melissa Etheridge look like this? (Melissa Etheridge and I have the same home town. Pride!)

There’s hope for this sketch after all!!!

Where were the screen-time allocation department’s priorities! These could have been perfectly decent impressions!

Best joke of the sketch, but the studio audience didn’t think so. I’m laughing (if you’re reading this, SNL writer with a good handle on forgettable early 2000’s pop-culture)!

I’m going to have to agree with Quincy Jones on this one. But at least we got another installment of this (even J-Lo can’t mess it up too badly)!

Wowza.

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 23:05:21 -0700

Words absolutely fail me after seeing this movie, but I’ll give it a shot.

Waltz With Bashir has been floating in the 8th to 12th-in-line range on my Netflix queue for a long while now. It turns out that I have a habit of putting critically acclaimed, ground-breaking, indie and foreign films at the top of my queue, and then slipping Drag Me To Hell, or something, in at #1 each time I mail back Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. Recently I decided to quit monkeying with my list and let the top 20 movies just come in order. It turns out that I have good taste, if I don’t screw it up.

There’s pictures to see, so I’m putting my first ever blog “jump” here (for your sanity).

This movie is great. Easily one of my favorites that I’ve ever seen. You won’t like it much, but I love it. The micro-backstory is basically that Ari Folman is a live-action film maker who ended up putting a handful of interviews with people involved with the Israeli 1982 Lebanon War to animated sequences. Folman, himself, is a veteran. It’s 95% true interactions captured as story as the main character travels to see his present-day war buddies, trying to reconstruct his memories of the Sabra and Shatila massacre.

Start to finish, I was riveted to the story-telling style. It’s like these guys started with the color palette as the main plot device and worked backwards. Every detail is accounted for to deliver the most emotional punch with the subtle easing of the tweens in the experimental Flash animation. The scenes flow in and out of bright yellows and muted blues and then snap to a scene with the whole spectrum shoved in your face.

The convincingly candid interviews provide the dialogue for the duration of the film. Occasionally there are animated “talking head” scenes, but most of the story-telling is done with flashbacks accompanied by voice-over.

Because the animation is a mix of Flash, 3D, and traditional 2D, every frame feels fresh and exciting. You are actually watching a few thousand beautiful illustrations strung together. Even when the movement is slow, methodical, or Where’s Waldo subtle, there is an energy in the images that constantly adds to the momentum of the story.

War is awful. Waltz With Bashir has an acute awareness of the gravity of its grizzly subject matter, but it pairs that looming dread with warmth and innocence. The Israeli soldiers are all barely 20 when these events took place, and to hear the weathered voices of aging men in 2006 recalling the details is fascinating. As dark as the imagery may seem at first glance, it is certainly missing a lot of context when called out by itself. One of the most important characters is the superb score.

Some of the animation is surreal, bordering on mystic. Given, the characters are trying to dig through 25-year-old memories (not to mention the recurring dreams that they describe to each other). Point being the convention-bucking choices that are made at every step in this movie are kind of overwhelming. This came out of nowhere, it seems. The film makers were working in a vacuum, with no one to give them advice on what’s “usually done in this case”. Thank god for that.

The story moves so well, and builds to be so big, that the ending literally had me sitting straight up, clenching my couch’s armrest and my own knee. I can’t really describe what I was feeling when the credits hit. All I know is that I discovered my open jaw and realized I had been through a formative experience. Seeing the little girl in the red coat in Schindler’s List is salted peanuts compared to the emotional strike that Ari Folman has set you up for.

Rent this movie. Like I said, you won’t like it, but you might love it. I can’t stop thinking about it. I’m obviously not a critic, just a guy who likes serious movies and cartoons, and believes that those aren’t separate buckets for movies to fall into. I won’t be posting like this very often (if ever again… it took me an hour and a half to do all this!), but I just got really caught up in what I consider a high-art, modern masterpiece.

p.s. Long-form blogging is hard work! See if I ever watch a movie I’m in danger of loving again. News Radio season 3 disc 2 here I come!

This is my sister, Debi. She just got a job in Tokyo! Congrats...

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 20:40:25 -0700

This is my sister, Debi. She just got a job in Tokyo! Congrats Debi!

Sanjay Patel Interview on grain edit.

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 07:16:10 -0700

Sanjay Patel Interview on grain edit.

Total curveball.

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 15:02:51 -0700

Total curveball.:

Huh!

(via julieklausner)

(via The Black Harbor (One of my new favorite design blogs that...

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 16:57:11 -0700

(via The Black Harbor (One of my new favorite design blogs that I found via +KN))