Well, I guess I have to post "Malice in Wonderland" (NSFW or the timid)

You can't tell me this wasn't Cyriac's first classroom project.

Cats seem pretty freaked out by space travel

Sorry, Robert A. Heinlein, cats just aren't a good mix for space-faring cultures.

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Three random bursts of brilliant insanity from Jan Svankmajer

That's Jan Svankmajer - stop-motion animator who was one of the inspirations to Terry Gilliam of Monty Python fame - in case you couldn't tell.

Stumbled on Star Wars in animated GIF form. The entire movie.

It appears to have been done entirely in MSPaint, to boot. What an artifact! Wonder how old this is? The domain shown at the end, www.barbelith.co.uk, is dead.

Science fiction film biology

 

A site at the University of Chicago speculates on the "what-if"s of sci-fi B movies, from King Kong to tiny shrinking people:

"When the Incredible Shrinking Man stops shrinking, he is about an inch tall, down by a factor of about 70 in linear dimensions. Thus, the surface area of his body, through which he loses heat, has decreased by a factor of 70 x 70 or about 5,000 times, but the mass of his body, which generates the heat, has decreased by 70 x 70 x 70 or 350,000 times. He's clearly going to have a hard time maintaining his body temperature (even though his clothes are now conveniently shrinking with him) unless his metabolic rate increases drastically.

Luckily, his lung area has only decreased by 5,000-fold, so he can get the relatively larger supply of oxygen he needs, but he's going to have to supply his body with much more fuel; like a shrew, he'll probably have to eat his own weight daily just to stay alive. He'll also have to give up sleeping and eat 24 hours a day or risk starving before he wakes up in the morning (unless he can learn the trick used by hummingbirds of lowering their body temperatures while they sleep).

Because of these relatively larger surface areas, he'll be losing water at a proportionally larger rate, so he'll have to drink a lot, too. We see him drink once in the movie--he dips his hand into a puddle and sips from his cupped palm. The image is unremarkable and natural, but unfortunately wrong for his dimensions: at his size surface tension becomes a force comparable to gravity. More likely, he'd immerse his hand in the pool and withdraw it coated with a drop of water the size of his head. When he put his lips to the drop, the surface tension would force the drop down his throat whether or not he chooses to swallow."

Terry Gilliam's very first deranged animation

Storytime is an animated short by Terry Gilliam, showing the same brand of bent humor and whimsical animation that would one day become a staple of the Monty Python series. Gilliam having done a number of mind--blowing films in the years since, this belongs here.

David Lynch started a real club based on Silencio from "Mulholland Drive"!

How arty can you get? The club is in Paris, and it really is modeled after the "Silencio" set from David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, along with numerous elements from other Lynch works. Awesome full story here.

What do you want me to do with the rest of Charlie Brown's body?

"Bring Me the Head of Charlie Brown" - from the guy who later brought you all of The Simpsons. This exists. It even exists so hard that it gets its own Wiki page. Painful, wasn't it? Watch it again.

The Insect World Is An Alien World

Fantastic art video of a praying mantis and the predatory world it lives in.

Prie Dieu from Cokau on Vimeo.

If you've ever encountered a paying mantis in real life, these things impress you with how alert they are. They'll land right on your hand and turn around and look you right in the eye, challenging you to prove your sentience to them. If we didn't have praying mantises on our home planet, we'd be astounded to find them in space and instantly convinced of their intelligence.

Hopefully Blogger will cooperate with a non-YouTube video, but the thing is aparently only available on Vimeo.

Your Word For The Day Is "Aneuploidy"

Aneuploidy is the condition of having an abnormal number of chromosomes. One of the more common types of aneuploidy is Klinefelter's syndrome, in which a person is born with an extra chromosome, resulting in anomalies like an XXY pair in males. This frequently causes the male to have reduced fertility, and sometimes even to result in an intersexed individual.

One such individual is the famous Caroline Cossey, who was born male but got gender reassignment to female after a troubled childhood and the revelation that she had Klinefelter's. She went on to become an actress and model, and even to be one of the female companions to James Bond in the movies.

Here's a photo of Cossey to help you remember "aneuploidy":

Simpsons Fans, Your Day Has Arrived

Somebody else thought of a live-action Simpsons show first, so that I would not have to. Thank you!

First Men In the Moon

A movie poster from the film adaptation of H.G. Wells' work of the same title.

Notable to think how, in 1964, such speculation as this poster makes was still viable in the popular mind. Cities? Little moon men? Canals? Ray-gun fights? Sure, why not?

Made by the same stop-motion animator, Ray Harryhausen, who was also behind 20 Million Miles to Earth, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, and Jason and the Argonauts.

In Lunacolor!

Ten Idiotic Audience Consumer Reactions To Movies

Swingline had to manufacture a red stapler to meet demand after the release of Office Space.

The price of amber quadrupled after the release of Jurassic Park.

CB radio culture suffered an "Eternal September" after the release of Smokey and the Bandit.

Plumbing fixture stores remarked upon the decline in demand for showers after the release of Psycho.

Beach attendance went down after the release of Jaws.

Injuries and deaths from playing Russian Roulette spiked in 1981 after the release of The Deer Hunter.

Thousands of people wrote in demanding to know where they could buy a hoverboard after the release of Back To the Future.

Investment in plastics went up after the release of The Graduate.

The demand for caller ID tripled after the release of the film Scream.

And finally, demand for any breed of animal goes up after said animal is in a popular movie. (e.g. 101 Dalmatians)

UPDATE 5/19/12: For a recent example, Hundreds of pet owls were abandoned after Harry Potter movies stopped coming out.

A Silly Simulation Of A Robot Woman, circa 1968

This was a futuristic "booth babe" at the Instruments, Electronics and Automatic Exhibition in London in 1968. At the exhibition by Honeywell Controls, LTD.

Anybody remember Honeywell? They're still around, but they've been long gone out of the computer business. Those of us who were running around "dinosaur pens" in the 1980s remember Honeywell logos in the vicinity of a Halon dump switch, and also stuff related to the aerospace industry.

A nightmare vision of industrial hell: MetaChaos

Darn, I wasn't even going to post today, being Easter and all. But I got bored by night and moseyed around and stumbled upon this. Least appropriate thing I've ever watched on Easter.

Apocalypse Miau

The Internet keeps taking cat-worship to new heights... Along with extra-extra-cheesy '80s retro kitsch. Where will it all end?

Fall In Love With Marika Rokk's Interpretation Of Space Cabaret

Marika Rokk was a dancer and singer of German film. Unfortunately, she was at the height of her popularity right during the Nazi era, so she became indelibly linked with it. Nevertheless, as seen by the campy, original style of this production, she's worth a second look.

This film from 1958, titled "Mir Ist So Langweilig" (It means "I am so bored") shows a moon-woman spying an African tribe on Earth and blasting down to be frolic with them for the sheer novelty of it. Despite the racist overtone (she even draws her finger across the chest of one dark man to see if it would rub off, but is promptly laughed at for this), it's full of charming touches like the swaying astronauts and a cute rocket with a gyroscopic cockpit.

This was done after her pardon from her post-WWII professional ban. For a while there, they didn't let her perform because she was so associated with the Nazis, which, let's face it, is hardly her fault since she couldn't help who buys a ticket to her shows.

The Film Pi Contains Math Errors

In Darren Aronofsky's 1998 film Pi, there's a scene where Max tells the Kabbalah that he's sure that they've completed their search for a number that is 216 digits long. He tells them,

"It's just a number. I'm sure you've written down every two hundred sixteen digit number. You've translated all of them. You've intoned them all. Haven't you? But what's it gotten you? The number is nothing!"

The problem is, this is impossible. There's 9.9*(10^215) 216-digit numbers. For comparison, recorded human history IN SECONDS is only 60x60x24x6000, about 1.8*(10^11). One billion computers, spitting out one number every second night and day since the dawn of human history, would not have generated every possible 216-digit number by now.

Numerous other math goofs at the IMDB page.

Bill and Coo - A movie for the birds

In 1948, producer Ken Murray was sitting around with a lot of time on his hands and thought "Hey, I'll just make an entire film about birds! Not a nature documentary, no, I mean birds as actors, telling a story, putting on a SHOW!" And this was the result.

Had enough? If not, view the entire 61-minute Bill and Coo here.

Admittedly, this is the corniest idea you've ever seen go into a feature film, and they don't spare one kernel while they're at it - gag signs, lame puns, and endless gawking at the cute widdle birdies ensue. For being birds, they're pretty clever and do little tricks while the typicalmid-20th-century narrator yammers on and on about what the birds are doing since the birds don't actually talk - they really missed out not getting Alex the grey parrot - alas, it was before his time.

Just, y'know, don't expect A-list acting. It's just enough to sit through this thing in jaw-dropping astonishment that it got made.

Zardoz: The Review Is Evil But The Gun Is Good!

Zardoz speaks to you!

Zardoz (1974) is one of the top five cult films ever made, defining "cult" as "with extreme appeal to a very narrow audience". I love the goofy big lug. It's flawed and crazy and fried out of its gourd, but I have to admit that on the second or third watching, it still never fails to keep my attention.

You can buy the complete dorm-decorating kit from Hot Topic for $29.95.

And while such iconic images as the flying stone head and Sean Connery in his day-glo orange Pampers Pull-Ups are all over the web and memed to death, I wonder how many members of the modern web audience have actually watched this movie, actually trying to follow it. I can... up to a point. It's really not that difficult.

Who the hell designed this set?

Spoliers ahoy!

In a post-apocalyptic future, we start out with Zed and his band of brutal savages (the Exterminators) worshiping the great rock-face (who looks like he was peeled off the cover of a lost Led Zeppelin album) vomiting guns to his followers, who are just police for controlling the population. Understand that the whole stone-head religion hugger-mugger was invented by the Eternals. Zed stows away in the stone head and confronts these Eternals, who are immortal, and have one of two possible fates: either be punished for crimes against their own by being aged until they live forever in senility (the Renegades), or be good citizens but live forever until they are so apathetic that they're breathing statues (the Apathetics). Eternals can kill themselves, but the damn Tabernacle just brings them back to life.

The acid begins to kick in.

Zed goes on a magical-mystery tour within this isolated world of the Eternals, who bicker endlessly about what to do with him. Zed is pulsing with raw, juicy life-force which the Eternals have had pulped out of them, you see, so among other things they're mystified and intrigued by his sexuality. Zed decides, for God knows what reason, to free the Eternals from their existential hell by destroying the Tabernacle, a tiny glass pyramid that talks to people through diamonds and holographic rings.

Don't worry, Sean Connery doesn't understand this story either.

Right about here is where the story loses me. Things dissolve into an acid-fried psychedelic trip for about half an hour, during which things happening might be symbolic, real, dreamed, hallucinated, or metaphorical. But after all that crap, Zed destroys the Tabernacle, his Exterminators swarm the city and shoot all the Eternals, Apathetic and Renegade alike, and Zed takes a wife and has a kid with her and they all age time-lapse and die, for absolutely no reason except to tack on a happy-ish ending.

This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius!

Of course, even as can be seen from the screen shots, I've left out a ton of details. but that's the gist of the whole thing. And you never saw an ending in which everybody's dead, yet works out to be so happy.

Yes, you must give us all a good spanking!

The intriguing aspect of this film is that trapped inside it are about three and a half good science fiction films fighting to get out. Hardcore science fiction fans will notice that in fact Zardoz simply seems to have eaten science fiction themes at random and presents them half-digested:

I am the walrus! Koo koo kah-joo!

• Future overpopulation requiring killing off - reference Soylent Green.
• False god used to keep people in line - reference a half dozen original Star Trek episodes, countless science fiction stories, and not to mention a certain children's fantasy which gives this movie its MacGuffin.
• Division of society into elites and savages - reference the Eloi and Morlocks from The Time Machine.
• Plants cultivated in bio-domes - reference in Silent Running.
• Sex (ther penorz) is evil - reference the "Junior Anti-Sex League" in 1984.
• Giant face controlling population - 1984 again. The film posters even mention that Zardoz is "beyond 1984".
• Immortality sucks after awhile and will drive you mad - Geez, where to start? Asimov, Heinlein, Tolkien, and even Arthur Conan Doyle took a shot at this.
• Computer (the Tabernacle) controls human population, keeping them alive but miserable - Once again, countless SF stories - I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream for instance.
• Society of cruel psychics turning into a mental Big Brother dystopia - Again, half a dozen Star Trek episodes.

Please let this movie end soon!

I could go on all day. But it becomes obvious when you consider that writer/director/producer John Boorman reportedly wanted to film Lord of the Rings first and only came up with Zardoz when that fell through: Boorman (flush from his success with 1972's Deliverance) spent from 1972-1973 smoking hash and watching TV from dawn 'til dusk, along with randomly cramming science fiction paperbacks, and came up with this mish-mosh on the fly. You can even see where Boorman missed the opportunity to build upon these themes he plunders; for instance, no co-relation is drawn between the Tabernacle's control of the Eternals and Zardoz's control of the Brutals. There's also lazy plot holes, like how Zed, for a man who's educated through reading an entire library, sure seems to approach both jack-in-the-boxes and hologram-communicating rings with equal, caveman-like astonishment.

For my next trick, I will pull the entire plot out of my ass.

Yet there's still a lot to love about this pitiful and deformed witch-baby, because while it's biting off so much more than it can chew, it's also getting some big themes onto the screen that don't normally make it this far. Science fiction geeks love it, just so they can sit through it and analyze it.

...and the White Knight is talking backwards...

I, too, have bad news for the future: Zardoz will be re-made some day. Given the way Hollywood auto-cannibalisticly consumes its own tail year after year in recycled remakes, it is inevitable that some producer will re-discover Zardoz, notice its long-standing cult status, and try to fix it. It's only a matter of time. When that happens, it will be a disaster. The appeal of Zardoz is that it's goofy and wacky and insane and incomprehensible - any producer trying to remove that will wipe out the core audience's attraction.

But... wait... but how did... what the... ?