Film is a big-budget industry, but sometimes even multi-million-dollar projects can use a dose of DIY ingenuity. Usually featured in movies where fantasy or dreams play a major role, arts and crafts can introduce surrealism into a narrative and lighten even the darkest of tales through cut-paper sets, felt sculptures, and cardboard cities. While some directors get their craft on through creative characters that fashion homemade treasures of their own, others incorporate it into their production design. Check out some of our favorite films that boast an arts-and-crafts aesthetic, from such auteurs as Michel Gondry, Miranda July, Spike Jonze, and Wes Anderson, after the jump. Read More »
If you’re feeling nostalgic for childhood stories, then Jayme McGowan, the creative spirit behind Roadside Projects, is the artist for you! Drawing inspiration from fables, novels and fairy tales, the Sacramento-stationed illustrator creates gorgeous, kaleidoscopic-hued 3D illustrations. For her Paper Dahls series, McGowan tears the magical worlds of Roald Dahl off the page, depicting scenes from Matilda, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and more. She has also taken on Where The Wild Things Are, dabbled in fairy tales with Little Red Riding Hood, and produced odes to Disney’s Snow White and Alice In Wonderland. Relive your adored childhood book memories after the cut.
If you’ve ever wondered what your favorite literary characters might be listening to while they save the world/contemplate existence/get into trouble, or hallucinated a soundtrack to go along with your favorite novels, well, us too. But wonder no more! Here, we sneak a look at the hypothetical iPods of some of literature’s most interesting characters. What would be on the personal playlists of Holden Caulfield or Elizabeth Bennett, Huck Finn or Harry Potter, Tintin or Humbert Humbert? Something revealing, we bet. Or at least something danceable. Read on for a cozy reading soundtrack, character study, or yet another way to emulate your favorite literary hero. This week: Maurice Sendak’s ultimate wild child, Max.
1. Bill Murray will play FDR in an adaptation of the BBC radio play Hyde Park On the Hudson, which recounts the story of the president’s love affair with his distant cousin, Margaret Stuckley; the film will be directed by Morning Glory’s Roger Michell. [via Vulture]
2. Charlie Sheen and Snoop Dogg have reportedly laid down a track together. Maybe this means that Snoop will be coming along on Sheen’s live tour? [via Perez Hilton]
3. Daily Show correspondent Jason Jones will play Heather Locklear’s “younger hunky husband” in a new CBS comedy about life in Hollywood called The Assistants. [via Deadline]
4. Where the Wild Things Are author Maurice Sendak has reached an agreement with HarperCollins to publish Bumble-Ardy, the first book that he has both illustrated and written since 1981. If the title sounds familiar, it might be because it’s based on an animated segment for Sesame Street that aired in the early 1970s. [via UnBeige]
5. MTV has released the first official trailer for their Teen Wolf, and it’s just as angst and drama filled as you might have feared. [via io9]
With his Maurice Sendak opus Where the Wild Things Are set for DVD release on Tuesday, Spike Jonze took an evening to promote its splendid companion piece, Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait Of Maurice Sendak, due out the same day courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories. The fleet, 40-minute documentary, which originally aired on HBO last fall, is all about the octogenarian Sendak, eliding conversations that Jonze and co-director Lance Bangs had at chez Maurice over the past couple of years. It feels like a running dialogue with the illustrator extraordinaire, engaging you with the this-and-that of a remarkable life (his childhood, his obsession with death and the Lindbergh baby, his late, half-a-century-long partner Eugene Glynn) as well as how the personal seeped onto the page.
Last year was chock full of great adaptations of children’s literature, from Fantastic Mr. Foxto Coraline. And while we’re always curious to see how Hollywood handles the books that defined our youth, they fail at least as often as they succeed. For some reason, perhaps because we made our parents read them to us over and over or because we adored them in our most impressionable years, we take it personally when some director neglects to do them justice. So, in hopes that the filmmakers of the future will learn something from the mistakes of the past, we’ve listed five movie adaptations that were an insult to our childhood and analyzed what we think went wrong.
If you’re like us, then the best part of going to see a movie — aside from the excuse to eat as much calorie-laden butter topping as you want — is watching the trailers. Sure, your friends may think it’s OK to skip out on them, but you know better than that. Trailers are how we know what movies to get excited for next, and when those great expectations aren’t met, we get upset. Here, a look back at the trailers for what appeared to be some of the best movies of the year, but turned out to be some of the worst.
Remember when you were a kid, and whenever you wanted to get away from it all you could just build yourself a nice little couch-cushion-bedspread fort and nestle on in? Wasn’t it nice to escape the pressures of reality for your own private space that could be whatever you wanted it to be? Yeah, we think so too. And now that we’re (arguably) grown-ups, and we’ve learned what the pressures of reality really are, we’re thinking that we need our forts more than ever.
So here are our picks for the best forts for grown-ups: there’s one for every type of fort-builder, so snuggle in, make yourself comfortable, and dream of a world without Glenn Beck. Plus, we bet the rent is cheaper than that one-bedroom you’ve been hanging on to. Just a thought.
Okay, we get it. “Hipsters” like American Apparel, Pabst, going to underground venues, wearing vintage clothing, being apathetic blah, blah, blah. We’ve seen it all before in the Hipster Olympics, we’ve looked at it endlessly in Look at the this F*cking Hipster, we’ve even criticized hipster criticism! Alas, the joke just won’t die — hence, we are given Where the Dirty Hipsters Are, a Spike Jonze parody featuring mix-tape toting, fedora-flaunting hipsters. Alright, maybe it’s kind of funny. [via Cinematical]
1. This morning the US filed papers asking the Swiss authorities to hand over Roman Polanski so that he can be tried in LA. [via WaPo]
2. Julian Casablancas says there is a “disagreement” among the Strokes over whether the new songs for their upcoming album are complete. [via NME]
3. Eyes on the pies: Comedian Soupy Sales has died at 83. [via LAT]
4. Screw the critics: Obama has given Where the Wild Things Are his presidential seal of approval. [via EW]
5. Philadelphia video artist Ryan Trecartin has won the first $150,000 top award in the Wolgin International Competition in the Fine Arts; view his YouTube channel here. [via Philadelphia Inquirer]
