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| Wednesday, December 21, 2005 05:34 PM |
| Jungle Gyms and Coffee Breaks |
 by Fëanor |
- Maybe it's just that I'm now primed to expect the weird and the questionable from Mel Gibson, but there are a couple of things that I find quite creepy about the trailer for his new film, Apocalypto. The first is the disturbing implication of the trailer's epigram - that the Mayan people somehow brought upon themselves the destruction of their civilization by the Spanish. The second is the very odd, one-frame snapshot of Mel Gibson inserted into the footage near the end of the trailer, in one of those choppily-edited onslaughts of scenes that every trailer seems to end with these days. If you don't feel like digging through the trailer to find it yourself, just check out the Cinematical post about this; they've included the shot of Gibson at the top. What happened to this guy, anyway? He used to just be your regular old action film star. Now he's approaching Michael Jackson-level kookdom.
- Thanks to Yagathai for this fun video about the various Japanese customs that have developed around going out to eat sushi. I suspect that most of these "customs" are actually fake parodies of real Japanese traditions, and that this video would be much funnier if I were more knowledgeable about Japanese culture, but it's quite amusing enough regardless.
- Unable to give the titual star of Peter Jackson's King Kong a Best Actor award (due to various obvious technicalities), the Broadcast Film Critics Association settled for creating an entirely new award specifically for him called the Distinguished Achievement in Performing Arts Award, which he will accept at their awards event next month (in entirely new footage) along with animation director Christian Rivers, animation supervisor Joe Letteri, and the amazing actor who portrayed him in the motion-capture studio: Andy Serkis (who also gave life to Gollem). I applaud heartily! As I said earlier, Kong is the most amazing computer-generated character I've ever seen, and I'm sure Serkis and the animation guys are a big part of why he works so well.
- I seem to remember posting about this way back when Tarantino was first talking about the possibility, but apparently he's still planning to re-cut Kill Bill, volumes one and two, into one gigantic film, and release it in the theaters and on DVD. Unfortunately, we won't see it until late next year (!), but it sounds pretty cool. And maybe by then I'll have forgotten everything about the movie and it will seem fresh to me again.
- Kung Fu Monkey makes the case for escaping to Canada even stronger.
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