New Music Video: Sandwitches “Back to Sea” (aka Women Who Bowl)

San Francisco’s Sandwitches have been plugging away at their craft for a couple years now, sprinkling their barbed, alluring electric folk briars across unsuspecting gardens in the Bay Area and beyond. Previous releases, such as the swampy ecstasy of How To Make Ambient Sadcake and last year’s more expansive EP, Duck Duck Goose!, captured distinct sides of the trio.  Their latest album Mrs. Jones’ Cookies, which features the single “Back to Sea”, continues to unify their uniquely whimsical and creepy vision.

Mrs. Jones’ Cookies is out now via Empty Cellar Records

From the video’s director Caitlin Durlak:

Last season my Grandma’s bowling team called it there last. I was lucky enough to be there with my video camera and capture a bit of history. This Friday Gram turns another year older and I made her this music video as a gift. I hope that it brings a smile to your face, I know it helps cheer me up!

Watch: “Gulp” – The World’s Largest Stop-Motion Animation

Aardman, the British animation studio best known for their work on Wallace and Gromit, follows up their “world’s smallest stop-motion animation” with another record-setting stop-motion promotion for the Nokia N8.

‘Gulp‘ is a short film created by Sumo Science at Aardman, depicting a fisherman going about his daily catch. Shot on location at Pendine Beach in South Wales, every frame of this stop-motion animation was shot using a Nokia N8, with its 12 megapixel camera and Carl Zeiss optics. The film has broken a world record for the ‘largest stop-motion animation set’, with the largest scene stretching over 11,000 square feet.

Watch: This Is Modern Art (documentary)

This Is Modern Art is a series written and presented by the English art critic Matthew Collings for BBC.

The series, originally released in 1999, won several awards including a BAFTA. It became popular both because of its sometimes jokey and sometimes thoughtful explanations of the work and attitude of a new wave of artists that had been publicized in the British mass media, and because of its author’s witty and irreverent, though highly informed, commentary style.

Collings focuses on the current state of modern art, and looks back at Picasso, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol to see how they changed the definition of art, and reveals the ways modern art attempts to shock the audience.

Collings also investigates whether the once accepted view of art as merely a thing of beauty prevails today, examining the works of various artists.

We’ve embedded all six episodes into one youtube playlist for your viewing pleasure.

Episode 1 – “I am a Genius”, shortlists Picasso, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol for the “genius” category.
Episode 2 – “Shock! Horror!”, opens with Damien Hirst’s vitrines of cut-up cows and goes on to an in-depth and welcome discussion of Goya.
Episode 3 – “Lovely, Lovely”, examines the idea of beauty: is it still a valid idea in Modern art?
Episode 4 – “Nothing Matters”, is devoted largely to Minimalism, starting with Martin Creed’s roomful of white balloons…
Episode 5 – “Hollow Laughter” is all about Modern art jokes or perhaps jokes used in Modern art.
Episode 6 –  ”The Shock of the Now”, asks: “Could it be indeed that the Modern art ‘we’ have chosen is vacuous or empty?”

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