The Birj Birdmen

This video has been getting a bit more buzz than others, mainly because of its sheer amazing-ness. Comparisons to the 2008 doc Man on Wire have already been made, but they are apt. Basically, two guys climb to the top of the tallest building in the world, and jump off.

 

The Burj Birdmen from Buzz Films on Vimeo.

"COMBO a collaborative animation by Blu and David Ellis (2 times loop)"

It didn’t sink in for me just how cool this piece is until around the minute mark. But after that I saw it for what it is – a brilliant stop-motion artwork that treats the viewer to a different way of experiencing time.

PS The film repeats starting at about the halfway point.


COMBO a collaborative animation by Blu and David Ellis (2 times loop) from blu on Vimeo.

The Irritating Optimism of “Happy-Go-Lucky”

originally written and published by me sometime in the late-2000s. This is one of the first movie essays I've ever written for my blog.

Mike Leigh’s film Happy-Go-Lucky had been sitting in my Netflix cue ever since it came out last year. I wasn’t really in a hurry to see it. While Sally Hawkins was getting rave reviews for her lead performance as Poppy, the movie itself was not exactly getting a huge amount of praise from critics.

When I watched it, I was skeptical at first. For the first 20 minutes or so I thought I was being subjected to the same trippy magical realism of Amelie, a film that’s not on my all-time favorites list. Right away I could see why others would find the main character so annoying. But after watching the entire film, it left an impression on me, and I’ve been thinking about it off and on ever since.

Separating the Art From the Artist

[originally written and posted January 2014 by Clarence Ewing]

Despite the tabloids’ best efforts, it appears that the general public’s interest in Michael Jackson’s death has pretty much run its course. Although Jackson’s musical and cultural influence had been on the wane for the last few years, mainly thanks to his self-imposed semi-exile to exotic lands, his passing brought up a lot of feelings from both pro- and anti-Jackson camps in the US.

To his fans, Jackson was a musical genius and one of the best entertainers the world has ever seen. There are a lot of people, though, for whom Jackson’s tumultuous personal life, especially his alleged involvement with young children, outweighs anything he did on stage or in the recording studio.

13 Rule-Breaking Films

written by Clarence Ewing

For all the creativity and innovation that goes into making Hollywood films, there are also a lot of ideas that get recycled time and time again. I’m not referring to stock characters or the "sequalitis" that hits multiplexes every summer. I’m talking about the basic building blocks of storytelling that are ingrained in the movie-going experience.

Every once in a while, though, a film will come along that takes an assumption about how movies are supposed to be made and changes it, sometimes resulting in something truly memorable.

Producers who want to make a film that breaks one of the unwritten rules of mass-market entertainment risk a lot – studios might not want to fund the film, theaters might not show it, audiences might not respond to it. The reward for taking the chance, though, is recognition for being a really interesting experiment or, in some cases, taking your place among the greatest films ever made.