First Daughter and the Black Snake (Trailer) from Keri Pickett on Vimeo.
Affinity
Art, Fun, & Nonsense.
Okay, that looks utterly silly, in every possible way. Those who know something about Norse mythology and cherish that knowledge, you might want to skip this. Looks like the World Wrestling version of Ragnarok. That said, it looks like silly, fun popcorn time.
Spirited Away. Chihiro eats an onigiri.
If you’ve never been to the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, out in the Western suburbs of Tokyo, now would be a good time to plan your trip. The museum is planning an upcoming, year-long special exhibition that will focus on the many food-related scenes from all of Studio Ghibli films.
Meals and food play an incredibly important role in almost every Studio Ghibli film. In Laputa, Pazu splits his egg on bread in half and shares it with Sheeta. By doing so, the two become closer. In Spirited Away, Chihiro eats an onigiri and gains the courage to face her uphill struggle. In Howl’s Moving Castle, the characters become like family when they surround a dinner table over a meal of eggs and bacon.
Taberu wo kaku (which roughly translates to Drawing Eating) begins May 27, 2017 and will be on view through May 2018 so you’ll have plenty of time to see it. The exhibition will be largely separated into 2 sections – one on eating and one on cooking – and will detail the many ways Studio Ghibli animators brought their foods to life.
Via Spoon & Tamago.
Designer Mark Noad.
The triggering of Article 50 last week means that Brexit is a certainty – and that the UK will need a new passport. Luckily last week also saw the judging for our unofficial Brexit passport design competition… here is a look at the nine proposals shortlisted by our judges.
We received over 200 entries from 34 different countries. The youngest entrant was 12 years old and the oldest was 83. Most submissions were from architects and designers but there were also entries from non-designers, students, retired people and unemployed people. Below are the nine designs that most impressed our judges ahead of the announcement of the winner on 11 April: [Click on over to see all the finalists, or watch the video below.]
Images are by Achilleas Souras and Alessandro Paderni.
Images are by Achilleas Souras and Alessandro Paderni.
Artist Achilleas Souras used hundreds of discarded life jackets to assemble an igloo for Moroso’s SOS Save Our Souls installation at Milan design week.
The 16-year-old, who has already shown a similar igloo at the Maritime Museum of Barcelona, used jackets collected from the shores of Lesbos – the Greek island that has become a regular landing place for refugees entering Europe.
While his first igloo used 52 jackets, his SOS Save Our Souls structure is made from 1,000 abandoned garments. Souras cut and folded the jackets to resemble blocks of ice before assembling them together.
The resulting waterproof structure is intended as both a shelter and a welcome point for arriving migrants.
“The refugee crisis was simply a set of numbers on the news,” said the artist, who was born in London and now resides in Barcelona.
“But when I picked a jacket up, it stopped being just material. When you hold the jacket in your hand and you smell the sea, you look at things through a different prism and you realise that every jacket represents a human life.”
“The refugees, the homeless, and the less privileged cannot be ‘out of sight, out of mind’ anymore,” added Souras, who hopes his igloos could eventually be used in rescue operations.
“These are global issues that affect us all, and we must try to solve them for everyone’s sake.”
You can see much more here.
Screengrab.
Enter SlayTV.
Slay was founded by Sean Torrington, a former Goldman Sachs project manager, and his husband Terry; after Torrington lost his job in 2010 , he decided to follow his passion for filmmaking by creating some YouTube web series based on the lives of black and brown LGBTQ people. They then created an app to curate content from Youtube and the web onto one platform. And Slay has been growing ever since.
SlayTV officially launches on May 15 online, on iOS and Android devices, as well as on Roku, Apple AirPlay, Google Chromecast, Amazon Fire TV, and other services.
Torrington hopes to empower content creators to become “sustainable entrepreneurs” who generate their own revenue. “Slay is not only digital TV, it is a production company and an ad agency,” he tells Out. “We will build campaigns around content on our network to get it branded.”
That content includes a wide variety of programs in various formats, for and by queer people of color, such as: the docu-series Other Boys NYC, a 50-part series exploring narratives of queer and transgender men of color; No Shade, inspired by Torrington’s coming-of-age in New York; and the romantic sitcom Love @ First Night, based loosely on Sean and Terry’s relationship.
Out has a nice introduction video. SlayTV. SlayTV on youtube. Great content, wonderful people, go explore!
Via Entertainment Weekly.
Okay, having a moment to go through this list, I watched Bobby Yeah, which I hadn’t heard of, being under my rock. It’s wildly creative, and I recommend it, but if you are at work, maybe save it for later, the film is a more than a bit, uh, fappy in nature. Oh, and watch full screen if you can. It’s also on youtube, if you have trouble with Vimeo.
Spirited Away is one of my long standing comfort movies, and who doesn’t love Kaonashi (No Face)? I absolutely must have this.
OMG guys — Studio Ghibli is releasing a Kaonashi coin bank!
The official name of this why-hasn’t-this-been-done-sooner contraption is Spirited Away Kaonashi Musha-Musha Coin Bank. And it’s a coin bank (we can stop calling them ‘piggy’ banks, right?) modeled after the Kaonashi character, also known as No Face, from the beloved 2001 film Spirited Away.
Similar to the way that great Itazura Kitty Coin Bank worked, it’s activated when you place coins on the sake saucer. Kaonashi’s arms then raise that saucer to its mouth and your coins fall into the depths of its stomach. It even makes that “ah” sound when it’s activated, and then burps once the movement is complete.
It’s set to go on sale online and at Donguri Kyowakoku shops, the official retailer for Studio Ghibli goods, on May 20, 2017 and will retail for 4800 yen.
Eeeeeeeeeeee. Must. Have. Via Spoon & Tamago.
Taste of Cinema has an article up: 20 Weird Movies from the Last Decade No One Talks About.
It’s a very interesting look at movies, lots of stuff I’ve managed to miss, being under my rock. Go have a look, and if you’re a cinephile, see how you rate on this list of neglected cinema!
Courtesy Roaring Fire Films.
Fans of Kent Nerburn’s book Neither Wolf Nor Dog, will be thrilled to know the movie has finally been made, to great acclaim so far. This was David Bald Eagle’s final role.
It has taken twenty years for the bestselling novel, Neither Wolf Nor Dog to get made. And Indian Country was the venue as the independent film opened up Friday February 24 at the Yakama Nation Heritage Theater in Toppenish, WA, in theaters in Bemidji and Rochester, MN, and in South Dakota, where much of the film is set. These were the four sites to host the film’s theatrical premiere and they provided a very successful opening as the film was held over for another week at most of the venues.
Based on Kent Nerburn’s 1996 bestselling novel of the same name, Neither Wolf Nor Dog is the story of a well-meaning white writer (Nerburn himself, played by Christopher Sweeney) who is drawn into Native culture when a Lakota elder asks him to turn a box full of notes into a book. The elder — a man named Dan is played by 95-year-old David Bald Eagle — uses the opportunity to poke holes in Nerburn’s — and the audience’s — assumptions about Native people.
David Bald Eagle walked on his journey to the spirit world this past July at age 97, but was able to view the film and said, “It’s the only film I’ve been in about my people that told the truth.”
[…]
This is Scottish director Steven Lewis Simpson’s third feature film made in South Dakota. Christopher Sweeney, Richard Ray Whitman, Roseanne Supernault, Tatanka Means, Zahn McClarnon (seen in ‘Fargo’, ‘Longmire’ and ‘Mekko’) and newcomer, Harlen Standing Bear Sr. make up the rest of the outstanding cast.
[…]
Simpson ran a grassroots operation distribution, telling indie filmmakers on Facebook how he self-distributed, hand delivered prints and paid an absolute minimum for a Facebook ad, as Neither Wolf Nor Dog premiered in 3 states. It’s successful opening now sets the stage as the initial audience ratings should help for a wider release around the nation.
In the multiplexes that showed Neither Wolf Nor Dog, the competition was all Hollywood films of the moment, and Simpson’s beat them all comfortably, only the top 3 films in the US that weekend had a better screen average attendance. And it was all word of mouth, local media, grassroots support and very much with the help of Facebook. The audiences have given the film a 9.3/10 rating on IMDB so far and the reports from people have been extremely complimentary.
[…]
The films world premiere was at the oldest continuously running film festival in the world, the Edinburgh International Film Festival, where it’s first review was 5 stars, receiving an incredible audience and critical response. And fans of Nerburn’s novel gave the film a standing ovation at a special South Dakota Book Festival screening.
ICMN has the full story. Be sure to look out for the film wherever you are!
Hulu.
Think Progress has an article about the challenges of costume design for Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
What would you wear to the end of the world? What about the start of a brave new one?
If you’re prepping your end-of-days attire, the best person to consult would be Ane Crabtree, the costume designer for the highly anticipated Hulu adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. The novel, first published in 1985, is now one of several dystopian classics to climb the bestseller charts in the wake of the 2016 election; the Hulu series premieres on April 16.
For the uninitiated, The Handmaid’s Tale imagines an America ruled by a puritanical patriarchy — the Constitution was suspended and ultimately discarded amid mass disease, infertility, and panic — in which women, all prisoners in their own way, are divided by caste. Handmaids are, in theory, the most valuable resource left: They’re the only women who can still bear children. After a violent initiation-slash-brainwashing period, each is assigned to Commanders with infertile wives, forced to conceive and bear children they must immediately give away, or be killed.
Atwood has said one of her rules in writing the novel was to “not put any events into the book that had not already happened in what James Joyce called the ‘nightmare’ of history, nor any technology not already available. No imaginary gizmos, no imaginary laws, no imaginary atrocities.” The story continues to captivate because of how possible it all feels, how prescient and close.
Crabtree had the formidable task of outfitting the world of the novel, known as Gilead, one that readers had already imagined and that plenty of viewers have already seen in some format or another; The Handmaid’s Tale has been adapted many times over since its publication over 30 years ago on film, in theater, even as a ballet, and that doesn’t even include the movie each reader imagines as she experiences book for herself.
She spoke with ThinkProgress by phone about designing for the series, the thinking behind each uniform, and why she thinks men who attempt to control women will be “foiled at every turn.”
Very interesting article! I was going to include more photos, but as my horribleshittygodsdamnfuckingverizon pos is barely connecting today, you’ll have to click over for more!
Published on Jan 7, 2017Support it on Kickstarter! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/…
“Attack of the Cyber Octopuses” is a retro-futuristic cyberpunk short film. The aim is to recreate the look and feel of the Eighties Sci-fi classics, without using CGI nor chroma key.
official website: http://www.chaosmonger.com/aotco/
making of blog: http://cyberoctopuses.blogspot.com
facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cyberoctopuses/
instagram: https://www.facebook.com/cyberoctopuses/
twitter: https://twitter.com/CyberOctopuses
Make has an interview about how the Cyber Octopuses were made, which makes for fun and interesting reading!
Excitement!
A remarkable story. You can read about it at Out, and the website for the forthcoming documentary is here.
There’s nothing more frightful than coming out for the first time, and it’s a fear that most LGBTQ people face early in their lives. But imagine spending more than 90 years in the closet. What does coming out feel like then?
In a recent video, Roman Blank sat down with YouTube darling Davey Wavey to talk about his coming-out as gay last year—at the age of 95.
“I told [my family] the whole tragedy of my life, and then they understood,” Blank said. “Can you imagine 90 years in the closet?”