An interesting look at Tokyo juxtaposing a car-ride on the Tokyo Metropolitan Expressway taken from Tarkowsky‘s 1972 film Solaris with the same ride filmed in 2005.

http://www.fischerelsani.net/kelvin/tme_v.html

Via vvork.

A great collection of time lapse clips from the PinK Tentacle .

I have always really loved these simple, yet expressive Stop Motion Studies from David Crawford.

In David’s own words:

“It is said that 90% of human communication is non-verbal. In these photographs, the body language of the subjects becomes the basic syntax for a series of animations exploring movement, gesture, and algorithmic montage. Many sequences document a person’s reaction to being photographed by a stranger. Some smile, others snarl, still others perform. Some pretend not to notice. Underneath all of this are assumptions and unknowns unique to each situation.”

The Weinstein brothers say their Asian Film Fund is good to go, presently filming a chop-socky blockbuster w/Jet Li AND Jackie Chan in China now, with plans to remake Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and make a live version of Mulan. Yawn.

I listened to a great interview this morning with New York Asian Film Festival Director, Grady Hendrix about the move (his blog here), and he had several interesting things to say. My favorite quotes:

On the basic image Americans have of Asian cinema:

“It’s either a big, posh, glamorous martial arts epic where everyone dresses in six miles of billowing silk, or it’s a low-brow, grotty horror movie where pissed-off dead wet girls with long black hair crawl out of sewers and television sets.”

On wire-fu fatigue:

“When you’re sitting in a theater with a bunch of people and someone flies across the screen and chops someone’s head off, and everyone just yawns, you know a genre may be in trouble.”

His recommendation to distributors? Forget about twentysomethings and older – concentrate on the American teens who already read their manga right-to-left. Once they figure that out, he says, someone’s gonna make a lot of money.