Watch: 3 Must-See Trailers

Ryan Gosling stars as a stunt driver who moonlights as a wheelman for criminals.  When he agrees to help the husband of his beautiful neighbor (Carey Mulligan), matters go awry and he must protect the neighbor and her son.  Christina Hendricks, Bryan Cranston, Ron Perlman, Oscar Isaac, and Albert Brooks also star in Drive, directed by Nicolas Winding Refn.

Release date: September 16, 2011

Our take based solely on the trailer: Steve McQueen’s Bullitt x The French Connection x Playstation’s Driver x Winding Refn’s dark directorial style + one angry Gosling = cinematic gold

Sidenote: If you’ve never seen any of Winding Refn’s previous films we highly suggest watching Bronson, The Pusher Trilogy and Valhalla Rising. 

In Another Earth, Rhoda Williams (Brit Marling), a bright young woman accepted into MIT’s astrophysics program, aspires to explore the cosmos. A brilliant composer, John Burroughs (William Mapother), has just reached the pinnacle of his profession and is about to have a second child. On the eve of the discovery of a duplicate Earth, tragedy strikes and the lives of these strangers become irrevocably intertwined.

Release date: In select theaters now

Our take based solely on the trailer: This sci-fi drama that focuses on parallel worlds as it relates to Multiverse theory should stir both your heart and head.

The first full trailer for season 2 of AMC’s The Walking Dead, which premiered at the show’s Comic-Con panel, gives us four intense minutes of footage. At the panel, producer Frank Darabont said that season 2 will pick up right where season 1 left off, with no time jump, and Walking Dead comic creator Robert Kirkman promised “it will blow your mind.”

Premiere date: October 16, 2011

Our take based solely on the trailer: Let’s just hope the zombie apocalypse doesn’t hit before the second season of The Walking Dead is over.

Watch: The Murder of Fred Hampton (documentary)

The Murder of Fred Hampton began as a film portrait of Hampton and his leadership of the Illinois Black Panther Party, but half way through filming, Hampton was killed by Chicago police. In an infamous moment in Chicago history and politics, over a dozen armed officers from Illinois State’s Attorney’s Office, in conjunction with the Chicago Police Department and FBI, burst into Hampton’s apartment on December 4, 1969 while its occupants were sleeping, killing Hampton and fellow Panther Mark Clark and brutalizing the remaining occupants including Hampton’s pregnant girlfriend. In ten minutes, 99 rounds were fired by the police during the raid, two of which were point blank shots to Hampton’s head. Filmmakers Mike Gray and Howard Alk arrived a few hours later to shoot film footage of the crime scene that was later used to contradict news reports and police testimony.

The pre-dawn raid was organized to serve a warrant for illegal weapons. Originally the officers claimed self-defense, stating the Panthers fired multiple shots at the officers first. The only shot fired by the Panthers was later determined by a 1970 Federal grand jury to be a reflexive reaction in Clark’s death convulsions after being shot by the raiding team while he was holding a shotgun. The same grand jury concluded that the original investigations by the Chicago Police internal investigation division and the Cook county coroners’ office  were complete shams, with each officer being asked questions which had been previously written up and given to them, along with a set of answers. The 243 page report would go on to say, “Physical evidence, standing alone and unexplained, is sufficient to establish probable cause to charge the officers with a willful violation of these survivors’ civil rights.”

Read more about Fred Hampton’s death here

Read the declassified FBI files on Hampton here

Style Watch: “Natural Beauty”

Via NOWNESS:

Cheeky directors Lernert & Sander embrace the urge for cosmetic overkill in their surreal short Natural Beauty. Makeup artist Ferry van der Nat and his assistant Vanessa Chan helped to execute the vision, slathering a host of Ellis Faas products on  Belgian beauty Hannelore Knuts, who was recently named the new face of Swiss fashion house Akris. Lernert & Sander began collaborating in 2006; since then they’ve done everything from melt a chocolate bunny with a hairdryer to repurpose household appliances as sex toys in the name of video art. We asked the co-conspirators to break down the shoot in detail.

STATS FROM ON SET

Mission Statement: We wanted to apply 365 layers of makeup in one day to see how much is needed to go from a natural look to an outrageous one.

Production time: It was a relaxed shoot but it took us nearly nine hours non-stop to apply all the layers to Hannelore’s face.

Magic ingredients: Seven bottles of Foundation S103; two bottles of Creamy Eyes E107; three Milky Lips L205 pens; and two bottles of Blush S301. All together 228.40ml of makeup.

Lunch menu: Hannelore was fixed between panels for the whole shoot, so everything she ate or drank came from a straw: juice, and a granola and yogurt mix. I think she had sushi on her train back to Brussels.

Soundtrack: No music on our shoots! Unless we do a music video and the artists need to lip-sync. But we don’t like lip-syncing, so that never happens in our videos. Music distracts.

Prep work: We tested a 100-layer session a few days before on our intern, who is a man. We wanted to make sure that this amount of makeup wouldn’t kill a person. It didn’t kill our intern so we trusted everything would be fine on Hannelore.

Crisis averted: There was always the “we’ve run out of makeup” stress. But Ellis Faas has her office right around the corner so we could call and get more [Foundation] S103.

Souvenirs: We saved the white construction for Hannelore’s face, so if we plan to do a “two years of makeup” we already have the perfect face frame.

Watch: “Darwin’s Nightmare” (documentary)

Some time in the 1960′s, in the heart of Africa, a new animal was introduced into Lake Victoria as a little scientific experiment. The Nile Perch, a voracious predator, extinguished almost the entire stock of the native fish species. However, the new fish multiplied so fast, that its white fillets are today exported all around the world. Huge hulking ex-Soviet cargo planes come daily to collect the latest catch in exchange for their southbound cargo - Kalashnikovs and ammunitions for the uncounted wars in the dark center of the continent. This booming multinational industry of fish and weapons has created an ungodly globalized alliance on the shores of the world’s biggest tropical lake: an army of local fishermen, World bank agents, homeless children, African ministers, EU-commissioners, Tanzanian prostitutes and Russian pilots.

From the director Hubert Sauper:

The old question, which social and political structure is the best for the world seems to have been answered. Capitalism has won. The ultimate forms for future societies are “consumer democracies”, which are seen as “civilized” and “good”. In a Darwinian sense the “good system” won. It won by either convincing its enemies or eliminating them.

In Darwin’s Nightmare I tried to transform the bizarre success story of a fish and the ephemeral boom around this “fittest” animal into an ironic, frightening allegory for what is called the New World Order. I could make the same kind of movie in Sierra Leone, only the fish would be diamonds, in Honduras, bananas, and in Libya, Nigeria or Angola, crude oil. Most of us I guess, know about the destructive mechanisms of our time, but we cannot fully picture them. We are unable to “get it”, unable to actually believe what we know.

It is, for example, incredible that wherever prime raw material is discovered, the locals die in misery, their sons become soldiers, and their daughters are turned into servants and whores. Hearing and seeing the same stories over and over makes me feel sick. After hundreds of years of slavery and colonisation of Africa, globalisation of african markets is the third and deadliest humiliation for the people of this continent. The arrogance of rich countries towards the third world (that’s three quarters of humanity) is creating immeasurable future dangers for all peoples.

It seems that the individual participants within a deadly system don’t have ugly faces, and for the most part, no bad intentions. These people include you and me. Some of us are “only doing their job” (like flying a jumbo from A to B carrying napalm), some don’t want to know, others simply fight for survival. I tried to film the personalities in this documentary as intimately as possible. Sergey, Dimond, Raphael, Eliza: real people who wonderfully represent the complexity of this system, and for me, the real enigma.

Read more about the film here

Watch: The Wanna-Be Oddie in “The Krazy Vending Machine” (animation)

“The Wanna Be Oddie” is a short animated film made by Ben Lam Jun Bin as his MFA project at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. The film is a wonderful mixture of character design from Max Fleischer’s black and white cartoons, the slapstick comedy of Chaplin and Keaton, the wackiness of Animaniacs, Transfromer-style technology and well-executed 3D graphics. Call it retro-futurism…or even better, just plain awesome.

Check out Lam’s production diary here

Credits:
design, story, modeling, rigging, animation, texture & lighting, rendering & compositing by Ben Lam
extra rigging help from abAuto Rig
visual effects by Wayne Lai & Ho-Jung Hong
background painted by Ting Chian Tey
vending machine robot designed by Hoi Mun Tham