I saw this video a few months ago on Marko’s blog and was just stoked on it. Seriously, there are few greater action stars then Jackie Chan. Not only do his movies contain fantastically choreographed fights, stunts, and gags, but he’s made his career from being known for doing all of them himself. While I’ve enjoyed some of his more recent Hollywood movies, you really need to go back to his early Hong Kong days to see him perform his most insane and death-defying stunts. That’s where this video spends most of its time.
Oh, and if you’re looking for a great Jackie Chan flick, go pick up The Legend of Drunken Master. It’s one of his best.
Pangea Day is a remarkable idea. It’s happening this Saturday, May 10th all around the world. The goal is to have a global film festival over the course of one day. There are eight official Pangea Day sites along with thousands of user-organized screenings.
In a world where people are often divided by borders, difference, and conflict, it’s easy to lose sight of what we all have in common. Pangea Day seeks to overcome that - to help people see themselves in others - through the power of film.
On May 10, 2008 - Pangea Day - sites in Cairo, Dharamsala, Kigali, London, New York City, Ramallah, Rio de Janeiro, and Tel Aviv will be videoconferenced live to produce a program of powerful films, visionary speakers, and uplifting music.
The program will be broadcast live to the world through the Internet, television, digital cinemas, and mobile phones.
I’m excited to see which films they choose and to how the festival turns out. Here’s a great promotional video that they released a little while back.
A little while back, the Sundance Institute asked six influential independent filmmakers to each produce an original short film intended to be viewed on the small screen of a mobile phone. They’ve put them on their website and you can watch them all here.
My favorite is A Slip In Time by Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton (who directed Little Miss Sunshine). It’s an amazing slow-motion study of slapstick comedy. They take a lot of the classic silent-era movie slapstick gags like getting hit in the face with a pie, slipping on a banana peel, etc. and shoot them with a high-speed camera. The results are beautiful and whimsical.
Altogether, I think my order of favorite to least favorite of the five films is:
A Slip In Time
La Revolucion de Iguodala
Reno
Learning to Skateboard
Los Viajes de King Tiny
So if you get a chance, swing by the Sundance site and check out the shorts.
When I was a kid, the first game I bought for my Nintendo Entertainment System was Donkey Kong. It’s the classic arcade game that put Nintendo on the map and it’s the driving force behind the recent documentary, The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters.
The story revolves around two people: Billy Mitchell, the Donkey Kong world record-holder and Steve Wiebe, the challenger. As the story begins, Billy’s record in Donkey Kong (which is considered the toughest of the classic games) has gone unbeaten for over 20 years. He’s a record-holder in several other classic arcade games and comes across as cunning, devious, and obsessed with winning. Steve is a middle school science teacher who always seems to get the short end of the stick. He discovers a natural ability for Donkey Kong and decides to take a run at the record.
What follows is an engaging, entertaining, funny film that really finds its heart in the strange and endearing cast of characters. And the characters are really what carries this film beyond its premise (I mean let’s face it, a documentary about people playing video games can really only go so far if the people doing the playing are dull). Steve becomes the kind of underdog challenger that you can’t help but root for; especially as Billy pulls out the stops to keep his place on top. The other characters that populate the film’s world of competitive classic gaming are also wonderfully interesting and fascinating to watch.
As I spend this month working on a underdog, against-all-odds sports film, this unlikely story put me in the right mindset as I’m framing the script. The film even has a sequence set to the song, “You’re the Best” from The Karate Kid soundtrack. How can you go wrong with that?
I definitely recommend checking it out. In case you’re interested, here’s the trailer:
When I was a kid, the first game I bought for my Nintendo Entertainment System was Donkey Kong. It’s the classic arcade game that put Nintendo on the map and it’s the driving force behind the recent documentary, 
.