Isegoria

Whither the DIY Auteurs of DV? points to one of the few examples of a do-it-yourself digital movie making it:

Roger Ingraham, the film’s director, dropped out of high school, wrote a script and, at age 19, shot Moonshine using several dozen volunteer actors and crew. Total price: $9,200, including the cost of a Panasonic camera, a PowerBook G4 and website hosting.

An agent from the William Morris Agency saw a trailer for Moonshine while surfing the net, and helped usher the film into Sundance.

James Bond car sells for $1.9 million:

A Swiss businessman won the keys to James Bond’s silver 1965 Aston Martin DB5 coupe on Friday with a $1.9 million bid at an annual classic car auction in Arizona.

Falling back to earth, alone describes an unbelievable skydive:

In 1960, U.S. Air Force pilot Joe Kittinger flew 30km straight up into the sky using a pressurized, high-altitude balloon. This very nearly made him the first man in space.

He then jumped.

Kittinger free-fell for over twenty miles — at which point he was moving so fast he broke the sound barrier.
[...]
Luckily, there’s a film.

The famous Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot Film looks a lot less mysterious when you see it stabilized.

In fact, the sasquatch looks more like Homer Simpson than a giant ape.

Disney has decided to bring back the Muppets to promote movies. Check out Statler & Waldorf: From the Balcony.

The Cheapening of the Comics is a speech given by Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes) at the Festival of Cartoon Art, at Ohio State University, on October 27, 1989.

He starts the speech by praising the classics — Peanuts, Pogo, and Krazy Kat:

Peanuts was my introduction to the world of the comic strip, and Peanuts captured my imagination like nothing else. Because it was the first strip I read, its many innovations were lost on me, and I suspect most readers of Peanuts today have forgotten how it single-handedly reconfigured the comic strip landscape in a few short years. The flat, simple drawings, the intellectual children, the animal with thoughts and imagination — all these things are commonplace now, and it’s hard to imagine what a revolutionary strip it was in the ’50s and ’60s. All I knew was that it had a magic that other strips didn’t.

A lot of the magic for me is in those deceptively simple, stylized drawings. For me, the few lines that make up each character, their faces, and gestures are remarkably expressive. Two dots with parentheses around them have become the cartoon shorthand for eyes looking uneasy or insecure. When Charlie Brown’s eyes do that, you know his stomach hurts,

Peanuts has held my interest for many years because the strip is very funny on one level and very sad on another. Charlie Brown suffers — and suffers in a small, private, honest way. Schultz draws those quiet moments of self-doubt: Charlie Brown sitting on the bench, eating peanut butter, trying to work up the nerve to talk to the little red-haired girl — and failing. As a kid, I read Peanuts for the funny drawings and the jokes, and later I realized that the childhood struggles of the strip are metaphors for adult struggles as well.

Peanuts is about the search for acceptance, security, and love, and how hard those self-affirming things are to find. The strip is also about alienation, about ambition, about heroes, about religion, and about the search for meaning and ‘happiness’ in life. For a comic strip, it digs pretty deep.

Of course, the strip has a flair for weird humor, too. Snoopy in goggles, his doghouse somehow riddled with bullet holes, yelling, ‘Curse you, Red Baron!’ is, I submit, as bizarre an image as anything ever seen on the comics page. Peanuts defined the contemporary comic strip.”

Joe Morgenstern on Finding Pixar:

Pixar succeeds where other studios stumble because, within its corporate culture, the collegiality is accompanied by a system of relentless, sometimes even pitiless self-scrutiny. Story artists and animators submit themselves and their work willingly, though not always happily, to daily or weekly sessions of peer — and boss — review in which, as one director put it, ‘we ask them to drop their pants, and they do.’ When problems emerge, they’re met head-on, rather than with the oft-heard remark that ‘we’ll fix it in the editing.’

The most dramatic example of this commitment came in 1996, after the phenomenal success of the studio’s first feature, ‘Toy Story.’ Disney, Pixar’s distribution partner, suggested a direct-to-video sequel. For Pixar, whose staff had already plunged into producing ‘A Bug’s Life,’ the new project required hiring a new crew. For the next two years, the ‘Toy Story 2′ recruits labored on their film, which looked promising enough to be promoted to the status of a theatrical release. In the fall of 1998, with ‘A Bug’s Life’ recently finished, Pixar’s top brass looked closely at what the ‘Toy Story 2′ people had wrought, judged it a fiasco and decided that the wisest course was to shut down production and eat the ensuing losses, rather than release an inferior product.

Disney disagreed, insisting that Pixar continue work on the film in order to meet its release date. Pixar executives, after emergency meetings with the ‘Toy Story 2′ staff, told Disney that the film would be completely redone. To Disney’s dismay, production came to a screeching halt. Much of the new team was fired. Veterans of the first ‘Toy Story,’ still recovering from the intensity of their work on ‘A Bug’s Life,’ were brought back to work on the sequel. The script was rewritten in three months, and animated in seven months. Many staffers worked 100-hour weeks, sleeping under their desks, but the result was an unqualified triumph. By every measure, artistic or financial, ‘Toy Story 2,’ released for Thanksgiving in 1999, was at least as good as the original, if not better.

Andrew Erish describes Ingagi, Illegitimate Dad of ‘Kong’:

All advertisements for the film explained that ‘ingagi’ means ‘gorilla.’ And every ad and article stated that the movie documented an authentic, scientific two-year expedition in the Belgian Congo, produced by Sir Hubert Winstead of the Royal Geological Society, who appeared in the film along with American sportsman Capt. Daniel Swayne.

Congo Pictures, formed expressly to make the film, could afford only one print, and it arranged for a two-week run at a theater in San Diego, where it played to more than 40,000 people. But efforts to interest New York-based film distributors failed, and Congo had to book ‘Ingagi’ theater by theater.

Congo rented Chicago’s Garrick Theatre, advertising the film as ‘an authentic incontestable celluloid document showing the sacrifice of a living woman to mammoth gorillas!’ The Motion Picture News credited ‘lurid lobby advertising depicting a gorilla fondling a near-nude native woman’ for drawing crowds to the Garrick.

‘Ingagi’ was an unabashed exploitation film, almost immediately running afoul of the Hollywood code of ethics created by the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Assn. (MPPDA), a consortium of the major motion picture studios popularly known as the Hays Office. A week after ‘Ingagi’s’ Chicago debut, the Hays Code was modified to state that: ‘Sex perversion or any inference of it is forbidden’ and ‘Complete nudity is never permitted.’

I guess Inagagi was a lover, not a fighter.

IGN Film Force’s Holiday Havoc Day 13 features the Monarch and Henchmen 21 & 24 (from Venture Bros.) singing Hard Candy Christmas.

As Ward at Drawn says,

By all means, please check out Le Papillon, this absolutely gorgeous animated short film by animators Antoine Antin & Jenny Rakotomamonjy. Animated watercolors and sumi brushwork never looked so good.