Graffiti at the Movies

Wicked street art... (see more at /film)



See more pictures after the jump

Happy Birthday PTA

Paul Thomas Anderson is 38 today. To celebrate, here's a scene from Punch Drunk Love...



This movie is freaking hypnotic. I dare you to watch just this one scene.

PTA's Unimpeachable Filmography:
Hard Eight (1996)
Boogie Nights (1997)
Magnolia (1999)
Punch Drunk Love (2002)
There Will Be Blood (2007)

Yowza! Thems some serious flicks.

The Master of Views

Yogi arrives in fashion in this awesome old Hanna-Barbera 3D ViewMaster slide.

Only question I have is how he fit in his car....

Check out more old slides at Bob Logan's blog.

Antidotes: Meat Falls Off The Bone

Lately i've become more and more enamored with the comedic profundities of BBQ food. This clip further attests to the finger licking hilarity that no other cuisine can provide. Almost as funny as when people shove their fingers in their mouths when they eat potato chips.



via Ladyhawk's Blog

Super Question:

Update! - I just realized that Angelina Jolie's Wanted is based on a comic as well, which almost makes it a superhero movie. However, Wanted looks like such freakin' crap that it doesn't deserve to be on this poll. From the director of one of the stupidest movies I've ever seen (Timur Bekmambetov of Nightwatch fame) with two of the most annoyingly self-infatuated actors around these days - Angelina and James McAvoy, this movie deserves to be on a poll with Jumper, Catwoman, and Elektra.

Great Length

According to Hollywood Elsewhere (via BOF), when it hits theaters on July 18, The Dark Knight will clock in at 152min - yes, that's 2 hours and 32 minutes of Batman goodness.

Compare that to Batman Begins' 140min running time or Tim Burton's Batman's 126min.

I'm all for it in this case, but it definitely speaks to an overwhelming trend in the last decade or so. The practice of stretching out simple action-adventure pictures over the 2 hour mark seems to have really gained traction around the time the first Lord of the Rings movie was released in 2001 at 178minutes long (followed by the next two at 179min and 201min).

Read more and check out the research after the jump.


For my money, I prefer a tight 90min running time, but that's definitely not the style these days. 90min to 120min seemed to have been the standard for a while outside of biblical epics and art house fare. Lately you'd be hard pressed to catch a summer movie in under 2 hours.

To figure out if this is just my impression, I did a li'l research, and it seems that running times have indeed bulked up, especially as far as popcorn movies go. Maybe it's a justification of the high ticket prices, but I think it's probably more a symptom of the crazy budgets of these films. How do you chop out a sequence that cost $15 million of the special effects budget?

Anyhow, check out an abridged (and very unscientific) evolution of the running time:

2008 Top 5 Grossing Movies (So Far) [Average Running Time - 127min]

• Iron Man - 126min
• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull - 124min
• Horton Hears a Who - 88min
• The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian - 147min
• Sex and the City - 148min

1998 Top 5 Grossing Movies [Average Running Time - 125min]

• Saving Private Ryan - 170min
• Armageddon - 150min
• There's Something About Mary - 119min
• A Bug's Life - 96min
• The Waterboy - 90 min

1988 Top 5 Grossing Movies [Average Running Time - 112min]

• Rain Man - 133min
• Who Framed Roger Rabbit? - 104min
• Coming to America - 116min
• Big - 104min
• Twins - 105min

1978 Top 5 Grossing Movies [Average Running time - 118min]

• Grease - 110min
• Superman - 143min
• Animal House - 109min
• Every Which Way But Loose - 110min
• Jaws 2 - 116min

Looks like titles have gotten longer too...

Humid Cyborg Of The Loud Window

Sick of lazy computers not helping you name your new "rock, punk, or emo" music project?

Now you can have the internet randomly generate a name for your band at bandnamemaker.com. I got mine from entering "cyborg".

Came across this through the band Sunny Day Sets Fire, who apparently used it to come up with their name.

And if you don't have a band, try to help this guy name his neoglam-mathcore group.

Summer (Meh)vies

Only 34 days left 'til Batman...
The underwhelming summer blockbuster season continues. This weekend the movie monotony takes the form of The Happening and The Incredible Hulk.

Nothing worth watching has come out since Speedracer and Iron Man, and this weekend's much hyped offerings seem utterly inconsequential. But audiences will show up regardless, and so will I, because people like going to movies in the summer and these are the movies we're supposed to be excited about this particular June weekend.

Both Hulk and Happening are total studio contrivances that don't serve or represent any audience desire or cultural trends. And not surprisingly, Hulk is receiving ho-hum reviews and Happening is getting ripped by critics. We're all just waiting for The Dark Knight.


Metacritic scores so far:








Retaliation for perhaps the worst film title ever:

Song of the Week

Le Tigre - Deceptacon [mp3]

This song just kills. Like New Order's Age of Consent minus the grey clouds and 10x the pink lemonade.




Recently featured in the film Reprise, which is incidentally one of the coolest and most inspiring films I've seen in a while.

Originally released on Le Tigre's 1999 self-titled debut, the song almost plays to its entirety in the movie when a character uses it to accomplish a very necessary party hijack.

Also, check out the trailer to Reprise, Joachim Trier's first film.

Photoshop Shmotoshop

Ever find yourself in a photo editing jam without the resources to acquire Photoshop? Well, Adobe's Photoshop is not the only game in town any more.

And luckily for us, the great design website LifeClever has been so kind to list some free web based alternatives.

There's also free downloadable programs like Gimp, Image Well, and Google's Picasa that can help fulfill your simple image fiddling needs.

I just tried out Picnik. Check out the results:
Voila! In less than a minute, Polar Bears stranded on disappearing iceberg... becomes Polar Bears stranded on iceberg from stoned Green Peace guy's perspective.








Tip on this post via Drawn!

Doomsday Laughs

Seth Rogen (Knocked Up, "Freaks & Geeks") and Jay Baruchel (Tropic Thunder, "Are You Afraid of the Dark?") are set to star together in a post-apocalyptic comedy feature, obviously titled Jay and Seth vs. the Apocalypse.

The Apatow Empire is officially out of control.

The feature is based on a short film the two worked on with Rogen's Superbad co-writer Evan Goldberg.

Check out the trailer for the short.



Variety has the details.

Bosh on Leno

In case you missed it last night, Chris Bosh of the Toronto Raptors served as a special correspondent on the Tonight Show. Pretty funny stuff.

We are like this only...

Finally, a vegetarian cowboy with a fashion sense.

This comes courtesy of Kaiju Shakedown via Twitch.



The upcoming Murugan feature film looks to have a pretty ordinary plot though...

"The film tells the story of Quick Gun Murugun - a South Indian karmic cowboy whose duty is to protect cows. When faced with a world-conquering arch villain restaurant owner who wants to create the ultimate McDosa chain using beef, Quick Gun enters into an epic battle of vegetarianism vs. non-vegetarianism that spans time and space." (from IMDb)