Screenshots identified and connections explained, after the jump. Spoilers for many movies are found below. I don’t want to give away the titles yet, because the reveal is part of the fun… just proceed with caution, all right?

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I got to this from the Onion AV Club’s “videocracy” feature, which tracks the most popular videos on the intertubes.  This means that the odds of any of you not having already seen this are, to say the least, slim.  But I still want to link to it, just to express my intense enthusiasm… both for the clip itself, and for The Soup’s treatment of it.

“Art,” says Leonard Bernstein, ” … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world—the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.”  So yeah.  For lack of a better word, I’d say this qualifies.

The title here is taken from a recent post by mlawski on the difference between [Strong Female] Characters and [Strong Characters], Female.  The image is a painting by the French artist Louis-Leopold Boilly, which (according to the exhibit guide at the museum I saw it in) is a symbolic representation of “the phallic mother.”

More chicks with…you know…after the jump. more »

If you’ve been watching TV at all lately, you’ve probably come across this commercial for the shamelessly sleazy CW show Gossip Girl.

I’ve not watched the show before, and I don’t think I care to.  But what is UP with that music?  The man you’re hearing is Plastic Bertrand, and the song is 1977’s Ca Plane Pour Moi.  It’s way better when it isn’t chopped up into three second clips. more »

… so that I can tell you that there’s a red band trailer circulating the net for the Coen brothers’ upcoming film Burn After Reading.  You can watch it here.

I find it funny that the trailer says “From the makers of No Country For Old Men and The Big Lebowski,” because this one seems to be pretty clearly from the makers of The Ladykillers and Intolerable Cruelty.

Still, a new film from the Coens is always something to get excited about.  And Kee-rist, what a cast!

Not to step on Matt’s toes, but this has been bothering me.

The Indiana Jones franchise has always been about searching for an artifact that is tied into a major world religion.

1)  Ark of the Covenant : Judaism.

2) Weird glowy rocks : Hinduism.  Kiiind of.  While none of the Indiana Jones movies are going to win any cultural sensitivity awards, I suppose I really should pause to mention that Temple of Doom’s depiction of Hinduism is ludicrous and offensive, even if the bad guys were supposed to be a nutty fringe cult.  Still, narratively speaking, the rocks get the job done.

3) The Holy Grail : Christianity.

But then we get to the latest film… more »

Or: Holy plaisire du texte, Barthes-Man!

The plot of The Dark Knight, like that of Batman Begins, is honestly kind of shapeless and waffle-y. And yet, as Memento proves, Nolan is capable of writing narratives that are drum-taught and mongoose-agile. Why is he churning out these behemoths? Why, despite the wafflage, are they so dang good?

To answer this, I’d like to take a minute to consider Batman as a piece of storytelling, to consider the properties of the tale as it’s told. You’re probably taking it as given that there are spoilers for The Dark Knight ahead. But I should warn you that there are also spoilers for Batman Begins, Citizen Kane, The Godfather, Forrest Gump, the Superman comic books, and The Hunt For Red October. Be warned.

In his famous - for a certain value of “fame” - book S/Z, Roland Barthes strip-mines Balzac’s Sarrasine, wringing every scrap of meaning out of the text and classifying his findings into five narrative codes: Hermeneutic, Semic, Proairetic, Symbolic, and Cultural. The wikipedia definitions of these codes are pretty solid as of this writing (I mean, they could be “Taco! Taco! Taco!” by tomorrow), but they’re easier to understand when you see them in action. Like after the jump! Convenience! more »

From Isaac Hayes’ breakthrough 1969 album, Hot Buttered Soul, which remains one of the great achievements in American pop music.  If you only know him as Chef from South Park, you owe it to yourselves to give his music a listen.  If you already know his catalog backwards and forwards, you owe it to yourself to listen again.

He will be missed.

If the greatest trick that the devil ever pulled was convinving the world that he didn’t exist, the greatest trick that Pixar has ever pulled was convincing America that this guy is adorable. Last year’s Ratatouille, which managed to get the people to fall in love with a typhus-infested sewer rat, was only a warm up for the seething cauldron of weirdnesss that is WALL·E.

WALL·E is cute, of course, and he’s also a robot, so that scores him some points.  But he’s also clearly insane.  Let’s look at the facts.  He spends his days going through people’s trash, and don’t say that it’s just his job, because no one is paying him.  He does this because he wants to, or rather, because his “programming” (the voices in his head) tells him he has to. Every now and then, he’ll fixate on a valueless object - a slinky, say - and take it back to his “house” (an abandoned storage unit) where he either A) incorporates it into a giant trash sculpture, or B) carefully files it in a drawer with dozens of identical slinkies.  (It’s this hoarding aspect of his behavior that really pushes his hobby past “charming outsider art” and into “crippling obsessive compulsive personality disorder.”)  Need more proof?  Every night - every night! - he watches the same movie, which doesn’t exactly scream “sane.”   And the first time he meets a woman, he immediately starts stalking her, harassing her at work and even following her back to her house.  Uh, what else?  Oh yeah, his best friend is a cockroach.

But this is all small potatoes compared to one early scene in the film, where WALL·E passes the rusted-out carcass of another Waste Allocation Lifter Loader, Earth-Class.  He looks at the shattered robot.  He looks at his own severly damaged tank treads.  He looks at the other robot’s shiny, perfectly preserved treads.  In the next scene, we see WALL·E happily zooming along on his new legs, without a care in the world.  What does this mean?  Well, it means that WALL·E is, at best, a graverobber.  And at worst? more »

Loyal readers will remember Mlawski’s post from a few months back about the brouhaha surrounding Disney’s upcoming Princess and the Frog.  Well, there’s a teaser trailer now.

So far I’m not seeing anything offensive to African Americans, although I guess the firefly character might end up being pretty DEEPLY offensive to Cajun people.  Anyway, it’ll be fun to see how it pans out.  Stay tuned for further developments.

I find the animation style more interesting than any of the political correctness issues.  This is, after all, the first traditionally animated Disney movie since they claimed to have gotten out of the game following 2004’s Home on the Range.  It seems to me like they’ve made a conscious effort to play up the kind of thing that 2D animation does better than CGI.  I’m thinking particularly of the close-up shot of the frog where its lips distort into an enormous pucker.  That would look weird as heck in CGI, am I right?  (The Incredibles’ Elastigirl was very much a special effect).  But in 2D animation, it blends right in.