12 Films In 12 Months

If you haven’t seen Susan Boyle’s performance from a recent “Britain’s Got Talent”, I recommend clicking here to check it out.  It is a remarkable and stunning clip.

I absolutely love Lisa Schwarzbaum’s commentary on it over on the Entertainment Weekly PopWatch blog:

In our pop-minded culture so slavishly obsessed with packaging — the right face, the right clothes, the right attitudes, the right Facebook posts — the unpackaged artistic power of the unstyled, un-hip, un-kissed Ms. Boyle let me feel, for the duration of one blazing showstopping ballad, the meaning of human grace. She pierced my defenses. She reordered the measure of beauty. And I had no idea until tears sprang how desperately I need that corrective from time to time.

Thank you Susan Boyle for reordering the measure of beauty for us this week.

This is fantastic.  Someone somewhere came across a 125 page transcript of the story meeting between George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Laurence Kasdan when they first sat down to brainstorm and create “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and the character of Indiana Jones.  That same someone then scanned it all to a pdf and posted a link to it here, so that the rest of us could enjoy it.

I’m still working my way through it, but it is wonderful to be a virtual fly on the wall as Lucas & Spielberg dream and plot their way through the characters and story ideas that would become “Raiders” (as well as a bunch of ideas that got cut from “Raiders” and then used in the later Indiana Jones films).

For a few highlights from the transcript and a great analysis of it from a screenwriters perspective, check out this post from the Mystery Man on Film blog.

I saw this video a little while back & it came to mind this morning.  It’s beautiful, odd, playful, sad, & strangely tragic all at once.

A little post-Easter chocolate bunny video art for you:

I saw this wonderful stop motion mixed-media short in the collection of 50 Incredible Stop Motion Videos that I posted a while back.  I think it’s sweet and beautifully made:

Tom Pollard, who was part of several of my short films last year is one of five finalists in the “Sing In The Shower” contest put on by Garnier.  He needs your help to win!  To view the video of Tom performing Madonna’s “Material Girl” while being accompanied by himself &…himself, click here & then select the “Online Video Contest” (the “hot” shower handle on the left).  Be sure to vote for Thomas P.!  You can only vote once in the contest & if you do, you’ll be entered in a contest to win a 8GB iPod Nano!  So head on over and vote now!!!

This trailer is absolutely wonderful.  I’m very excited for this movie:

In celebration of today, here’s last April’s film, “April Fools Day”.  Now in HD! (click here & then click the “HD” button to watch the larger version)