STREAM.

The first teaser for The Princess and the Frog, Disney's fabled (ahem) return to "traditional" animation is live. I'm reserving judgment until more of the content becomes available, save to say I'm rooting for this project on principle. It's fucking retarded that some people within and without the industry think "2D" animation has been categorically superseded by full-blown CGI. I'm using quotation marks to acknowledge how problematic such distinctions are in the first place, since there's considerable overlap between modern cel and computer-generated features at the production level, and the contrast between the two approaches is best defined aesthetically rather than technologically. Kudos to the comparatively recently installed Pixar brain trust for seeing that.

Posted by R. at 06:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Yet through the smoky haze of self-aggrandizement and fuzzy memories a few intriguing tidbits slip through. Chong asked Terence Malick to direct the follow-up to Up In Smoke. Malick very diplomatically said that since Chong had written the screenplay he should direct the film himself, which is a polite way of saying 'Are you fucking kidding me? I'm Terrence Malick! Oh God no! No, no, a thousand times no!' I guess Malick acolyte David Gordon Green directing Pineapple Express is as close as we're ever going to get to a Terence Malick-directed Cheech and Chong movie."

Posted by R. at 08:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"It's easy to deride celebrity perfumes. Writing about his friendship with Robert Redford in The New Yorker, James Salter said that 'when I went into restaurants with Redford, eyes turned to watch as we crossed the room—the glory seems to be yours as well.' But celebrity came with a cost; Salter remembered Redford’s saying of movies: 'My presence in something is enough to give it an aura of artificiality.' If people buy celebrity perfumes, it is precisely because the glory seems to be yours as well. Yet the celebrities don't make the perfumes; professional perfumers do. Celebrity inexorably lends an aura of artificiality, and not just to the celebrity scent; it extends to us as well."

Posted by R. at 02:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Asimov's Third Law of Robotics is observed in the wild ... on Mars. (Okay, not really. But the strenuous anthropomorphism of the linked article's title speaks to our collective yearning for the robots we manufacture to become as kick-ass as the robots that haunt our android dreams.)

Posted by R. at 12:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

No clue as to its feasibility (probably null-ish) but this suggestion that the International Space Station be boosted to a lunar orbit is, at the very least, intriguing.

Posted by R. at 01:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There's a beat at the end of the Meet Dave trailer, where the Eddie Murphy robot-spaceship (seriously, who's coming up with this stuff—Steve Urkel?) emits the refrain from "Stayin' Alive" in a high-pitched alien squawk followed by a mechanically abrupt grimace that reminds me of something Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman once wrote about Murphy's similarly radioactive Adventures of Pluto Nash:

"A space-comedy bomb that would hardly be worth mentioning if not for the rictus grin at its center: Eddie Murphy, doing his zomboid impersonation of a Carefree, Spontaneous Comedy Star, an act of such terrifying falseness that it has become the single most joyless image in showbiz."

Those sharp words may have seemed ungenerous back in 2002, but in 2008 they're almost elegiac.

Posted by R. at 07:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)