Statistician Nathan Yau of Flowing Data put together this infographic presenting famous movie quotes as data charts. You can view eight more at the link.
Link via Popped Culture
Many people watched the Academy Awards last week and noticed that Best Actress winner Sandra Bullock never changed her expression. New York Magazine asks the question, if you can’t move your face, can you still act with it? Aging Hollywood stars have always resorted to plastic surgery, but Botox injections are faster, cheaper, and less invasive -and they have become almost required for an actress to look young enough for starring roles. How has this affected the art of acting?
Some actors appear to be underplaying their characters, consciously making them cool, without affect. If you can’t move your face, why not create an undemonstrative character? Others have taken the opposite approach: On two cable dramas starring actresses of a certain age, the heroines are brassy and expansive, with a tendency to shout and act out, yet somehow their placid foreheads are never called into play. Usually, when a person reenacts a stabbing or smashes a car with a baseball bat, some part of the face is going to crease or bunch up. Not so with these women. As though to compensate for their facial inertia, both perform with stagy vigor, attempting broad looks of surprise or disappointment, gesticulating and bellowing. If you can’t frown with your mouth, they seem intent on proving, you can try to frown with your voice.
The bright side is that public opinion may eventually turn to a preference for naturally aged thespians. Link -via Metafilter
(image credit: Hannah Whitaker)
Laz Marquez
There’s a certain familiarity to modernizing and re-envisioning posters for Alfred Hitchcock’s wonderful films, and Laz Marquez has these sizzling contributions. After he did The Birds, he took suggestions from his followers on what else to do.
I sincerely hope you all enjoyed seeing this project come to life as much as I loved creating them. It’s great to see the set together and working as a whole. Thanks again for all the support & keep your eyes peeled for the next set (Starting very, very soon)!
I hear the next set will be Stephen King themed. Link
The comedy duo BriTaNick created this trailer for a hypothetical movie that would be guaranteed to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards. All of the dialogue is replaced with common movie tropes.
via Urlesque | Official Website
The Web is Agreement by Paul Downey
The Wonderful World of Early Computing
Mom Always Liked You Best: Mismatched Siblings
Artist Chris Domino made this cuckoo clock inspired by the horror movie The Shining. Every hour on the hour, Jack Nicholson’s head pokes through the door and says “Here’s Johnny!” Then the Shelly Duval figure screams.
If not, then you’re just not as talented as this teenager. Sophia Heesch claimed to be able to identify eighty Star Wars minifigs is this manner, and this German language video demonstrates a test of that claim. Would any German speaking Neatoramanaut care to translate?
via Geekologie
Neatoramanaut Dennis wrote to us about the set of furniture that his girlfriend (who is studying mechanical engineering in Germany and is apparently very, very handy) made for their apartment:
[Everything was] created by my girlfriend Judith for her apartment. We both love video games, especially Super Mario. She’s currently studying Mechanical Engineering in Germany and has also built an incredible lightsaber for my birthday. She’s a hardcore Super Mario Land (Game Boy) gamer and we both are fans of the whole franchise.
I designed the shelf for our growing collection of videogames (almost 200 Wii games) and I thought the boxes would be perfect with the backround [of hills] and a cloud (all made of wood). Beside the shelf was a small table for the phone and the Internet and I thought it would be cool if we could have a warp pipe too. So she’s created the warp pipe based on a garbage can [that] big enough to hide all the cables.
We’ve bought the figures and the mushroom to make it perfect. I designed the Game Boy clock [to include] the Super Mario Land scene with objects as numbers, because it is her favorite game … It works very well with the wall color and it’s not too colorful …
Currently she’s working on a small Koopa shell (the same size as the mushroom) for the shelf. So I’m just the guy with the ideas and she’s my Super Judith! ;o)
More pic of the fantastic Mario furniture (and the super cool lightsaber) over yonder at the Neatorama Spotlight blog: Link – Thanks Dennis!
The spelling challenges in today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss will not be found in your local school bee! However, if you are really familiar with American TV and movies, you should do well. Luckily, it’s a multiple-choice quiz. I scored 75% -try to beat that! Link
Filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock made cameo appearances in all of his movies. YouTube user royvanderzwaan, a collector of Hitchcock films, assembled (almost) all of these cameos into one video.
via Nerdcore
via Dark Matters
Pre-Oscar night means Razzie awards, and although Megan Fox was denied an acting award, Michael Bay scored a hat trick. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was awarded the high honors of Worst Picture, Worst Director, and Worst Screenplay.
In other shocking Razzie news, my movie wife, Sandra Bullock, vowed in an interview to personally accept the award should she win for Worst Actress (All About Steve). This is especially cool because she’s heavily favored to win the award for BEST Actress tomorrow night (for The Blind Side), and she indeed won the award for Worst Actress tonight, and accepted it.
With the new Alice in Wonderland making its debut recently, I thought it would be appropriate to revisit one of the old ones. It’s not the original – Alice has been made many, many times – but the Disney version is definitely one of the most well-known. Enjoy the trivia, and if you don’t, well… off with your head!
Walt Disney had already had some success with Alice in Wonderland. Combining live action and animation, Walt had a little girl named Virginia Davis star as Alice in a series of shorts called “The Alice Comedies.” From 1923 to 1927, Davis starred in 57 of these short films, including titles like “Alice’s Egg Plant,” “Alice Chops the Suey,” “Alice the Whaler” and “Alice Rattled by Rats.”
Based on this earlier success, Disney thought he might do a full-length live action-animation combo movie. When the movie was in its early stages, Mary Pickford did some color screen tests as Alice. By 1945, Disney thought he might like Ginger Rogers to star as the precocious little girl. This fell through, and by 1946, work had begun on an animated version that would have art design quite similar to the Tenniel illustrations from the original Lewis Carroll book. This version even get as far as storyboards, but Walt ended up hating it and had changed his mind back to a movie that would combine live action and animation. As you might have guessed, this idea also fell through, and by the late ‘40s, animation was started for the movie we know today.
If you love the bright colors and modern design of the movie, you have Mary Blair to thank. Blair’s distinct style can also be seen in Peter Pan, Song of the South and Cinderella. She is probably best known for art not in a movie, though – Blair is responsible for the design of the famous (or infamous) ride It’s a Small World. She also made a 90-foot mural for the Disney’s Contemporary Resort.
If you’ve read the book, you know that there were a large number of songs and poems written by Lewis Carroll that didn’t make it into the movie. But it wasn’t for lack of trying. Disney hired more than 30 songwriters to try to transform Carroll’s whimsical words to music, but it was simply impossible to cram them all into a 75-minute movie. Still, the movie boasts the most songs ever used in an animated Disney film. Because some of them are just snippets of songs, though, most people don’t really realize this.
Alice was supposed to sing a ballad called “Beyond the Laughing Sky” that would be somewhat similar to Dorothy’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” in The Wizard of Oz. It wasn’t well-suited to Kathryn Beaumont’s (the voice of Alice) vocal range, though, and it seemed to drag the movie down a little. The lyrics were later changed and it was repurposed for Peter Pan under the name “Second Star to the Right.”
The movie was kind of a flop. It wasn’t a total disaster, but just like with any book-to-film adaptation, there were literary fans waiting to pounce on inaccuracies and omitted scenes they felt were vital. It wasn’t a big hit until the 1960s and ‘70s, when it became associated with drug culture. This wasn’t exactly how Walt pictured the film succeeding, but Disney eventually rolled with it – the company re-released the movie in 1974 and again in 1981.
Do the voices in the movie seem slightly familiar? If you watch a lot of Disney movies, there’s a good reason for that. Walt was loyal to his actors and would use them in multiple movies. Alice’s voice, Kathryn Beaumont, was also Wendy in Peter Pan and still provides the voices for both today (she has been featured in the Kingdom Hearts video games and in the rides at Disney Parks). Ed Wynn, the Mad Hatter, can also be seen in Mary Poppins as the giggly Uncle Albert and as the toymaker in Babes in Toyland. Sterling Holloway, the Cheshire Cat, might have found the most success with Disney, though: he was the voice of Winnie the Pooh, the voice of Roquefort in The AristoCats, Kaa in The Jungle Book, and had bit parts in Bambi, Dumbo, The Three Caballeros and Snow White.
The movie is actually a combination of two books – the original Alice in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking Glass.
Alice was originally going to encounter the Jabberwocky as she does in the books, but that scene was cut (rumor has it the beast was too scary). If you pay close attention, though, you can catch a couple of references to the creature: the Cheshire Cat sings a stanza from the poem, and there’s also an appearance by the Mome Raths, which are mentioned in the Jabberwocky poem.
So are you looking forward to the new movie? Think it can’t possibly top the original? Or are you strictly a book purist?
Barman made a cool helicopter from the movie Avatar out of Lego pieces for the February competition at Brickshelf. Link to pictures. -via Wacky Owl
The Academy Awards will be given out Sunday night. Every year we compare this year’s winner with past winners and find they have certain similarities. The first page at the link lists the roles most likely to win an Oscar. Continue with the slide show for overwhelming evidence of each scheme’s success. Link -via YesButNoButYes
This video will give you a detailed description of how to apply a makeup that looks very much like the one The Joker is wearing in the Batman movie The Dark Knight.
Link [YouTube] – via Cakehead Loves Evil
In what I hope will be an ongoing series, Samurai Frog of Electronic Cerebrectomy has just posted a new "Godzilla Haiku": Link – via The Zeray Gazette
Tavis Coburn of the British design firm Dutch Uncle created some nify old-timey movie posters for movies nominated for the British Academy Film Awards. As you can probably guess, the one on the right is Avatar. The one on the left is Hurt Locker.
Link – via The Litter Box (Happy Birthday, Johnny Cat!)
This montage nicely blends a musical score with excerpts from movies of the film noir genre. The resolution is good enough for full-screen viewing.
This is the sort of tribute that will make film buffs want to see the movies they’ve missed, so thankfully RubyTuesday717, who assembled the clips, has listed the 35 component films in the sidebar at the YouTube link.
Via J-Walk.
Al Pacino as Han Solo? John Travolta as Forrest Gump? Animator Dan Meth presents clips from classic movies, if actors once considered for important roles had been selected.
With people creating action scenes like this with toys and a computer, maybe Hollywood can go back to making movies with great acting and dialog. This light saber battle is a creation of Fancy Pants Productions. Link (embedded YouTube video)
Anthropologist Michael Rakowitz has an upcoming exhibit at the Tate Museum in London. In it, he proposes that Saddam Hussein may have consciously or unconsciously been influenced by Western science fiction, particularly Star Wars. In New Scientist, Jessica Griggs writes:
You may have heard that when US troops stormed one of Saddam’s palaces they stumbled across lurid posters by fantasy artist Rowena Morrill. But did you know that she’s a close friend of Boris Vallejo, the artist who drew the iconic poster for The Empire Strikes Back depicting Darth Vader with two lightsabres crossed over his head?
Does the poster’s image sound familiar? It is remarkably similar to Saddam’s Hands of Victory monument commemorating Iraq’s victory over Iran. The arch in central Baghdad consists of two bronze casts of Saddam’s forearms holding two 43-metre-long crossed steel swords melted down from the weapons of slain Iraqis; the helmets of vanquished Iranians litter the base of the hands.
On inauguration day in 1989, Saddam rode through the arches on a white horse, declaring “The worst condition is to pass under a sword which is not one’s own or to be forced down a path which is not willed by him”.
Could this all be coincidence? Perhaps, but you’ll be convinced otherwise once you’ve read about Saddam’s private militia’s uniform. Before his son, Uday, handed over control of the Fedayeen Sadaam (translation: “Saddam’s Men of Sacrifice”) to his younger brother he wanted to give his father something to remember his work by. So he presented Saddam with their new uniform: black shirt, black trousers and a ski-mask over which a strikingly Darth Vader-esque helmet was placed.
Link via Technabob | Exhibition Information | Images: New Scientist
From the British Film Institute Archive comes this first-ever film adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s book.
Made just 37 years after Lewis Carroll wrote his novel and eight years after the birth of cinema, the adaptation was directed by Cecil Hepworth and Percy Stow, and was based on Sir John Tenniel’s original illustrations… With a running time of just 12 minutes (8 of which survive), Alice in Wonderland was the longest film produced in England at that time. Film archivists have been able to restore the film’s original colours for the first time in over 100 years.
If you don’t have the requisite time to view the video, you can view a summary at this tattoo.
Via Metafilter.
Forget Alice in Wonderland! This is Tim Burton’s masterpiece remake of the year. Behold, Weekend at Bernie’s. I’d give it an 8.3.
Hit play or go to Link [Babelgum] – Thanks Matt!
Yesterday, students at the University of Mississippi voted to update their image with a new mascot. The previous mascot Colonel Reb, who resembles a antebellum plantation owner, hasn’t been seen at a game since 2003, due to his Confederate symbolism. Who, or what, will the new mascot be? The athletic teams at Ole Miss are the Rebels, so the logical symbol would be Admiral Ackbar, the highest ranking member of the Rebel Alliance in the Star Wars universe. Only time will tell if the students and administration at Ole Miss will embrace the campaign. Link -via Geekosystem
Here’s a site where you can look up character actors by their pictures, because you don’t know their names.
Have you ever been watching TV or a movie and pointed to the screen and said, “Hey! It’s That Guy!”? Well, here is where you’ll find him. This page is dedicated to the character actors collectively known as “That Guy”.
That Guy is easy to recognize and difficult to place. You can describe him but not name him.
You’ll know a lot of the faces, and now you’ll know their names as well, and each is linked to their Internet Movie Database (IMDb) page. Pictured is Ed Lauter, who has appeared in 193 movies and television shows! Link -Thanks, Holistic CPA!
A collection of Warner Bros. movie bloopers from 1936, featuring Humphrey Bogart, Joe E. Brown, James Cagney, Bette Davis, Kay Francis, Leslie Howard, Paul Lukas, Barton MacLane, Fredric March, Paul Muni, Pat O’Brien, Claude Rains, and more.
Link [YouTube] – The Retronaut via Stuart Witts
Web and graphic designer Christian Annyas sure watched a lot of movies over the years. To prove it, he collected screenshots of the movie titles (and many trailer and "The End" titles as well). His collections include movies made int the 1920s to today’s films, but for whatever reason I gravitated to movies from the 50s.
Link – via The Litter Box
Previously on Neatorama: Stills
Artist Shaenon K. Garrity (of Narbonic and Smithson fame) discovered that Edward Gorey was a Trekkie, so naturally she created what might have been: a Star Trek comic in the style of the late macabre children book illustrator.
Link – via The Zeray Gazette
An 88-year old man was caught videotaping Avatar in the movie theater … for his wife who couldn’t come to see it for herself. The police were called in, but the ending was different than you’d expect:
Police described the alleged film pirate as being 88 years old, about 152 centimetres tall, wearing large glasses and carrying a walking stick.
He said his wife couldn’t come to the cinema, so he was recording the film for her to watch later. Police deleted the file from the video camera and let the man stay.
What? Discretion and compassion by the police? What has the world come to?! What happened to LAW AND ORDER!!! RAWR! RAGE!!1!!ONe
Nick Waters watched a “chick flick”, or a movie targeted to women, every day for 30 days with his wife, and wrote a review for each one. He says he did it to better understand the opposite sex. His wife of seven years, Nicci, was thrilled. So what did he learn?
“Love is tender,” says Waters, summing up what he took from the 30 films. “And any real relationship is based on forgiveness, compassion and vulnerability.”
Unfortunately, the movies he chose to watch are no older than 2007. Link to story. Link to movie reviews. -via Buzzfeed
Late last week, film director Kevin Smith pulled an anti-Silent Bob by unleashing a barrage of HateTweets (Is that a word? No? It should be!) against Southwest Airlines for kicking him off a plane because he was too fat. Although they later apologized, Southwest stuck to its gun by labeling him as a "safety concern."
I don’t know about you, but looking at the photo above, Southwest may have a point here.
Just kidding – actually that’s just Kevin Smith "avatized" by Robert Paulson, who has now avatized a bunch of other celebs:
Hey all, I’m the Avatizer. Yeah, that one. I started doing these photoshops the weekend Avatar came out cause I liked the movie and thought it’d be fun to do a few of these. Well people seemed to like them and requested more and soon a few became a dozen and and then a bunch until I ended up with over a hundred of these things seemingly overnight.
As you can probably tell, my early ones are very rough, mainly because I didn’t have much experience with photoshop when I started so I’ve had to essentially learn how to do this as I go along. Each manipulation can take as little as 20-30 minutes to as much as 4 or 5 hours (especially when I wasn’t quite sure how to do it). Now each one takes roughly an hour and a half to do, depending on how detailed the resolution is and whether their are arms/hands/legs to do too. If you want a general idea of how I do it, check out this timelapse video I did for my Ellen Page edit.
Links: Avatized Pics Flickr Set | Kevin Smith on Twitter
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