Good Is The New Bad – Film Reviews And More

9/365, originally uploaded by Jeffrey723.

Just look at the parking lot, Larry. Just look at that parking lot.

From the gloriously imaginative wizards at WellMedicated.com, a great sample of 25 alternatively designed movie posters and illustrations.

25 Imaginative Illustrations Inspired By Film // WellMedicated.

Note that Justin Reed, the resident artist from the dawn of Good Is The New Bad, is represented here with 3 of his finer pieces.

Many of the remaining works are just as clever. The Highlander novelization is a personal favorite.

The mark of quality for a YouTube video is if it makes you laugh the second and third times you watch it. This amusing clip is really aimed toward the video editing professional, but since that’s exactly what I am, that’s why I’ll share it here:

We Got That B-Roll

Wonder what your neighbors are watching? Wonder about all the various ways your viewing habits are being monitored and tabulated? Or how about if audience stereotypes are true?

Thanks to Netflix and the New York Times, now you know some of the answers. Behold a breakdown of 2009 rentals by zip code:

A Peek Into Netflix Queues – NYTimes.com.

If you ever wondered how safe your personal data is on the internet, here’s a scary object lesson. Sure, it’s anonymized. And even scarier is the conformity among neighborhoods. Play around with the sliders to see which neighborhoods are renting what. The first, biggest, and most embarrassing surprise is the frequency with which everyone in America seems to be renting the terminally tedious Curious Case Of Benjamin Button.

Looking at the patterns of Los Angeles rentals, for amusement check out the rental patterns for two Tyler Perry films – The Family That Preys and Madea Goes To Jail. Guess how frequently the residents of Malibu and Beverly Hills requested them?

Even cooler, and more telling (though only in ways that the ACLU would shit kittens over any meaningful attempt to draw conclusions from), is to drag the slider across the top 10-15 movies in an ersatz time-lapse. Watch the rental patterns – not just the intensity, but the areas where people are renting.

First, just about everybody in the Southland is renting The Shiteous Case Of Benjamin Buttass as their top pick, except for about half of the city of Los Angeles, and the good people of Lynwood. [Read more →]

Chances are you’ve heard of The Hurt Locker, but haven’t seen it. You possibly saw a poster somewhere for A Serious Man. And you’d have  to have been detained in Guantanamo, or maybe a cast member of Jersey Shore to have missed the hype surrounding the new Tarantino movie, Inglorious Basterds. You didn’t see Inglorious Basterds, but you heard about it.

The best film of the year that you didn’t hear about (and should have) is Duncan Jones’ sci-fi flick Moon.

There were better films released in 2009 than Moon, but most of those were obscure foreign films that you weren’t going to see anyway, even if every reputable critic in America wrote you a personal letter explaining why you should see it. Those films probably had war-torn orphans, three hour running times, and deep things to say about the ethereal nature of the human soul. So let’s simplify things and pretend those other movies really don’t count for this award. (Really, they don’t. I didn’t see any pretentious three hour foreign films that were any better than Moon, anyway. And since this is my blog, we go by my rules. If you want to nominate something else, feel free to list it in the comments.)

Moon is a tidy little package, clocking in at what feels like a brief 100 minutes. It’s a simple story, free of pretentions, and yet it has plenty to say about the ethereal nature of the soul. [Read more →]

8/365, originally uploaded by Jeffrey723.

Disorientation.

Manohla Dargis offers up one of the best critical arguments for The Hurt Locker yet:

The Oscars – ‘Hurt Locker’ Offers the Work of War at a Fever Pitch – NYTimes.com.

Her critical assessment is top notch – far better than my own breakdown of the film.

Put another way, like Peckinpah, Ms. Bigelow is brilliant at both delivering and dissecting male violence, which is why “The Hurt Locker” is at once so pleasurable and disturbing.

I suppose my own, more coarse assessment that Ms. Bigelow has a very large member and she’s unafraid to use it gets the similar point across, but with far less eloquence. After a second viewing, I left The Hurt Locker in awe of its lean and muscular construction. Working on a relative shoestring on the edge of a war zone, I didn’t see another movie this year that worked more effectively. Even the false notes and missteps in The Hurt Locker are built with an intensity and a precision that few other films of 2009 can match.