Oh yes, please. Read the story about this “illegal” trailer at Ain’t It Cool News.

Dedicated readers may know that I’m fascinated by marketing. In particular, I’m interested in the way certain aspects of marketing enter popular culture — how we assimilate fictional entities (such as Ronald McDonald) into our common experience. Fascinating.

The creators of the 2010 Oscar winner for Best Animated Short Film took this idea to the extreme. What if an instance of popular culture — a big budget movie — was completely marketing entities and logos.

Filled with car chases, a hostage crisis, a romance (of sorts) and rampaging animals, Logorama is worthy of the multitude of awards it has won. (NOTE: Some aspects may be NSFW, depending on where you work.)

Logorama from Marc Altshuler - Human Music on Vimeo.

Remember that car ad (maybe it was a truck ad) where they showed the “life cycle” of a gas station? It ran from the vintage sepia-toned early days, though the 1950s, to a hyper-modern one today, with changing styles and renovations all the way through, as vehicles from the various eras pulled up and fueled up?

Then, the kicker at the end was they they tore it down, and replaced the meadow that was there, because future-cars run on lawn fumes or something.

Yeah, well, I hope you’re not surprised if I tell you that they don’t actually do that.

When gas stations close, they just leave ‘em there, to decay. (That’s called a brownfield, in case you’re interested.)

Here’s a gallery of 26 such abandoned gas stations — and Eric Tabuchi has actually found an additional 26, so if you wanted a whole deck of cards, you could kind of go for it.

There’s one of these right by my office, and another one a little further down the street. They’re pretty depressing, I gotta be honest, because you know that no one’s ever going to turn them into a cool restaurant or art gallery or anything. I’ll bet they’ll smell like gasoline forever.

But every time I pass them, a part of my brain remembers being in a Movies & More, gazing with pre-adolescent boy longing at the VHS cover of The Last Chase, which I totally was not allowed to rent, and I knew better than to even ask.

Because my parents eschewed cable television while I was a grower, and because HBO wasn’t available in Canada, anyway, I don’t think I’d ever seen this opening sequence from the 1980s until now:

It was entirely done without the use of computers. I’m trying very hard to learn Final Cut right now, and I am amazed at what it can do, but no matter how difficult Final Cut is to master, I can only imagine how hard it would be to do the same thing with ultra-detailed models and camera work.

The people at HBO saw it as such an achievement, actually, that they produced a little behind-the-scenes film about the making-of:

Crazy cool!

(Via Logo Factory, which calls it “retro logo porn”)

I happened across some retro videos at the Internet Archive today, which totally gave me a nostalgia trip. Growing up, my neighbour was the manager of the Lucky Star Drive-In (now, sadly, the site of a truck stop-n-wash) and my parents used to take us kids there all the time.

I count myself lucky that I was able to experience (many, many times) the pleasure of a drive-in, before they were all shut down. And, if you live kind of near one, I urge you to seek it out, and support that theatre.

This brought it all back:

I can’t believe I missed this trailer when it came out in January. The A-Team was an important part of my childhood, and I’m thankful (and relieved) that it looks like the movie will be a faithful rendition.

There’s still the whole new-character-played-by-Jessica-Biel thing to worry about, though.

Warren Ellis posts a trailer for a movie called Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, in which Michael Cera has to not only live up to all of his new girlfriend’s exes, but in metaphor-becomes-real sense, actually defeat them in combat.

Oh, and it’s comic-book style, so the exes appear to have powers and stuff. They’re villains. Check it:

The red carpet has barely been rolled up from this year’s Oscars and already filmmakers are positioning themselves for next year’s awards.

My money is on this movie:

Sandra Bullock is nominated for an Academy Award tonight, for her role in The Blind Side. I haven’t seen it, so I won’t judge.

She’s also the winner of Worst Actress — the Razzie — for her role in All About Steve. Hilariously, she shoed up to accept her Razzie in person:

If you’re going to be nominated for Worst Actress, accepting it with humour and good grace is the only way to go. Good on Bullock for being able to laugh at herself. And, as Entertainment Weekly notes, it fits in well with her self-deprecating campaign for the Oscar.

Let’s say you wanted to make a downright B-movie. Sort of like Snakes on a Place. Except, that’s been done. Sort of like Piranha 2. Except that’s been done. Maybe giant man-eating fish on a plane? Nah — let’s juice it up: shark vs. plane. No, no: MEGA-shark vs. plane.

Right? Right. Except you can’t build a movie around that, no matter how cool the image is. I mean, where’s the conflict? So let’s add a villain. But who could stand up to a megashark? Perhaps a giant octopus?

Okay, here’s out movie: Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus. It writes itself. Here’s the trailer:

THIS IS A REAL MOVIE.

But here’s the key scene — the over-the-top raison d’etre of the whole thing — where Mega Shark, for reasons known only to Mega Shark, jumps straight out of the water and takes down a jetliner. Oh, yes:

You might say that, at that point, the movie had jumped the shark, but that would be kind of a jerky thing to say. Instead, let’s give the movie the benefit of the doubt.

Assuming that Mega Shark exists. And assuming that Mega Shark is hungry for some Boeing. Just what would have to go on, in order for Mega Shark to take that plane right out of the sky?

Luckily, this doesn’t have to be pure conjecture — the Internet has answered the question for us. In fact, one Stephen Taubman has gone one better, and created an infographic. If you click that link and go to his site, you can download a full-size pdf of it, suitable for framing. But here’s taste right here:

Thank-you, Stivo (that’s really what he calls himself, I’m not being flip). And thank-you Boing-Boing, for bringing this to my attention.

If you haven’t read the Esquire profile of film critic Roger Ebert, you should. But then you should go over to the Deadspin site, and read a different kind of profile.

Writer Will Leitch didn’t talk to Ebert for this story — well, not recently. When Leitch was a younger man, he actually kept up a running correspondence with Ebert, having first emailed him drunkenly to ask about a rumour that Ebert had once had sex on the university newspaper’s desk.

A later drunken moment, though, ruins everything.

Give it a read — despite everything, Leitch does a pretty good job of portraying Ebert as a person. And a pretty nice, caring person, too.

I have this boxed set of westerns sitting on a shelf; shrinkwrapped, it grins at me every time I walk past, daring me to open it, to sit down with the first movie and enjoy. For far too long, I have been averting my eyes, making excuses to myself, the TV, the DVDs themselves.

I’m too busy. I’m going to watch something else first. I’m not ready. I want to be able to savor you.

For the most part, though, my excuses are just that. I’m afraid to admit the real reason I don’t tear into that delectable bit of entertainment — that beautiful Sergio Leone Anthology consisting of A Fistful Of Dollars; For A Few Dollars More; The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, and Duck, You Sucker — is that I’m afraid it will unman me.

There. I’ve said it.

Clint Eastwood is the last of a dying breed. One of the few from old Hollywood that still plies his craft deftly without relying on tricks and gimmicks and technological wizardry. This recent article from the New Yorker (so recent that it is dated six days in the future) underlines his skill and undeniable coolness.

Maybe what I need to do is to sit down with those movies and try to absorb some of that manliness through the cathode rays. A sort of contact high, if you will.

In any case, I’m going to have to resign myself to the fact that I will never be as manly as Clint Eastwood. By doing so, at least I’ll be able to enjoy those movies I’ve been avoiding.

You ‘aught’ to enjoy this!

It’s long been settled that there are comic books for kids, but there’s also a place for graphic novels — graphic in the sense that they include drawn images, but also graphic in the sense that they are for mature audiences.

There’s no reason that the same principle couldn’t apply to animated movies — and yet, animated movies seem to mostly be reserved for family-friendly fare.

Well, not anymore. Check out the teaser trailer for “A.D”, a CG-animated zombie thriller:

Amy left up this wonderful list of the Top 20 Greatest Extended Takes which I have found myself absorbed by.

Extended takes (many people, myself included, mistakenly call them tracking shots) are sometimes a bit of a wank-job by a movie director who is showing off. But sometimes they are integral to the movie themselves, and they can be a virtuoso move that takes a film up a significant notch.

Some of the movies in the list I was familiar with, others I wasn’t. One of my favourite extended takes is on there — the eight-minute opening of Robert Altman’s “The Player”:

As one YouTube commenter notes:

Love how it’s peppered with little comments and encounters that set up the entire plot - the pushy screenwriter who somehow got past security, the upcoming pressure on Griffin to perform in a time of “rolling heads”, mistaken identity, interchangeability of personalities (replacing Julia Roberts with Goldie Hawn in the same breath), and finally the notion that in political thrillers someone always dies - and what else is a Hollywood studio but a huge political pinball machine? Brilliant.

Siskel and Ebert loved it too: