Next week holds the promise of the US release of the first film by Banksy. Last week, an extended teaser for the film was released which begins to out­line Thierry Guetta’s (aka Mr. Brain­wash) pur­suit of the mys­te­ri­ous artist. Check it out:

A list of venues and show­times across the US is avail­able on the film Web site.

Back by pop­u­lar demand, another install­ment of tips for life. Enjoy!

Have you seen Danny Yount’s titles for Guy Ritchie’s Sher­lock Holmes? Wow!

Read Art of the Title’s inter­view with Yount here and see the evo­lu­tion of his work on this project as well as the full cred­its themselves.

Image: Art of the Title

Unless you live under a rock or more likely, are one of my read­ers from abroad you might not know that this week­end brought Bal­ti­more an his­toric blizzard.

So this after­noon once the snow had stopped, I helped my fam­ily dig out. My mum was kind enough to sup­ply the fol­low­ing video of my father and I shov­el­ing their mas­sive drive:

Ok, so my sense of humor is espe­cially punchy today– we’re all a lit­tle batty from the miles of sparkling white everywhere…

Today finds Charm City buried once again, in a blan­ket of sparkling white. The effect is beau­ti­ful, bewil­der­ing and even a lit­tle inspir­ing though at some point after hours of shov­el­ing, the snow will become less than charm­ing. In the mean­time, here is a piece of visu­ally stun­ning eye/brain candy straight from Japan for you, dear read­ers, snow­bound or otherwise:

Doesn’t this just make your eyes smile and the snow a lit­tle more fun?

You know, women work­ers can be sur­pris­ingly good pro­duc­ers.…

And remem­ber, this all boils down to four things:

• 1) Don’t mix plea­sure with business
• 2) Women can be awfully jeal­ous of one another
• 3) Avoid undue familiarity
• 4) Women are more sen­si­tive than men

This gives me flash­backs to Oakland…

A mod­ern ver­sion of the last film, nar­rated by Stephen Col­bert:

Remem­ber: Girls who park in cars, are not REALLY pop­u­lar…
and home, par­ents and per­son­al­ity ALL help boys and girls to be pop­u­lar… really…

I drink a lot of tea and cof­fee, thus mugs are one of the items that tend to join me in my fre­quent trav­els; but I wasn’t always a mug user.

Thanks to this handy instruc­tional video, though I was able to mas­ter the del­i­cate art of mug use and ownership:

Oh Pee-wee, how I’ve missed you:

Per­son­ally, I’m pretty sat­is­fied with my MBP and iPad Nano so far, but we shall see…

It’s just one of those days; we all have them– you wake up and the world feels grey and unwel­com­ing. You scuff around and feel sorry for your­self and maybe mope a lit­tle. Well today, I’m hav­ing one of those days.

BUT instead of mop­ing about like a fool when I feel like this, I rally my inner troops and forge ahead. This gen­er­ally involves a longer visit to the closet– pulling out espe­cially fun shoes and a col­or­ful jacket, a big­ger than usual cup of cof­fee, a longer lunch break and a tight­en­ing of the cir­cle of dear­est friends. When the world feels unwel­com­ing, I find it best to sim­ply become the ulti­mate host­ess– wel­come the unwel­com­ing and just out­shine the grey.

One of my longest stand­ing friends from child­hood, loved the Bea­t­les when we were kids; count­less week­end hours swam by to the sound­track of the fab four and today my mind has drifted back to those days:

Watch­ing this clip from the movie Help!, the semi-sad lyrics of the song mixed with the sub­tle silli­ness of Paul and George perks me up and makes me smile.

How about you, dear read­ers? How do you perk your­self up when you’re feel­ing down?

When I was an under­grad in design school , I was one of the weak­est draw­ing stu­dents among my peers our fresh­man year. My pro­fes­sors, patient and inspir­ing though they were, seemed to remain con­cerned about my weak­nesses in the fields of draw­ing and craft; it was the final pin-up dis­cus­sions at which I shone.

When the sec­ond semes­ter of my fresh­man year came along and my draw­ing skills still fell short of my peers, one of my pro­fes­sors, who held a master’s in draw­ing, pulled me aside and gave me some advice. He gave me a few tips on how to improve the qual­ity of my work, but above all advo­cated sim­ply for prac­tice. One of the exer­cises he rec­om­mended was to draw sim­ple shapes over and over again– to draw until they were com­ing out of my ears. By so doing, I would be train­ing my hands to be more skilled at qual­ity of line and form. So for weeks I drew obses­sively– cir­cles, squares, cones, pyra­mids, tri­an­gles, lines, lines, lines; it was the mad hatter’s geom­e­try and it was explod­ing inside my sketchbooks.

By the time I grad­u­ated with my BFA, I was selected as the designer of the year, so some­thing must have clicked along the way; the mad hatter’s geom­e­try had pushed me fur­ther. Today, sim­ple forms like those from my professor’s exer­cise tend to creep into the mar­gins of my sketch­books and meet­ing notes– an uncon­scious habit, it now seems.

When I came across the above video from the Design Coun­cil, one of the first things that came to mind was that exer­cise of draw­ing sim­ple shapes over and over and over.

Why be good when you can be bet­ter? What do you wish you could do bet­ter, dear read­ers? And how do you plan on get­ting there?

Ever the type-geek, I couldn’t resist shar­ing this TERRIBLE (ter­ri­bly AWESOME, that is) video parody:

Kind of makes you want to grow a well-kept beard, n’est pas?

With the new year upon us, now seemed like an appro­pri­ate moment to share this short film:

Forever’s Not So Long, by Shawn Mor­ri­son and Gar­rett Murray

How would you want things to end?

A few months ago, I had the plea­sure of watch­ing a doc­u­men­tary about the work and career of early French film­maker, Georges Méliès.

His work is the sort of early silent film many of us have seen with­out real­iz­ing who the names behind the work were. He is the cre­ator and mind behind the A Trip to the Moon (Le voy­age dans la Lune):

Y’know that one… the one Smash­ing Pump­kins appro­pri­ated as a con­cept for their 1996 video Tonight, Tonight sin­gle?

Yeah, THAT one.

Méliès began his pro­fes­sional life as a stage magi­cian in Paris and in 1895, after a demon­stra­tion of Lumière broth­ers’ cam­era, became fas­ci­nated with film. Within two years, he had estab­lished his own film stu­dio and was cre­at­ing elab­o­rate films. In the eigh­teen years before his com­pany went bank­rupt, he directed over five hun­dred films.

Here is an amaz­ing piece from 1903, Le Mélo­mane– a mar­vel of multi-exposures:

Le Mélo­mane, 1903

Le Cake-walk infer­nal, 1903

Lately, I’ve been on a French film kick. Ever the Fran­cophile, it has been a nice change of pace to come home and lis­ten to the sooth­ing sounds of a lan­guage I know and love, acted beau­ti­fully as is so rarely seen these days. Recent favorites have been Port of Shad­ows (Le Quai des Brumes) and La Grande Illu­sion, both star­ring Jean Gabin and both made within a few years of one another (~1936–38, give or take).

When­ever I bump into friends and neigh­bors these days, con­ver­sa­tion inevitably turns to what one another has been up to lately. And for me, it is gen­er­ally what work I have on my desk at home and what movies I have watched recently. Often times, my most recent movie view­ings com­prise of an odd assort­ment of detec­tive sto­ries and oldies but good­ies from a bygone era. And very often the lion’s share of the movies I men­tion are a com­plete MYSTERY to my friends and neigh­bors. As such, per­haps it is time that I start shar­ing the movies I come across with you, dear read­ers, so that you may enjoy the ben­e­fit of a richer movie night.

And so tonight, I rec­om­mend you con­sider adding Port of Shad­ows and Grand Illu­sion to your list of must-see movies. Both are avail­able on Net­flix, so there’s no excuse. Not a Net­flix sub­scriber? I could write a whole blog post on the mer­its of Net­flix, but I’ll spare you– their ser­vice is fast, con­ve­nient and eco­nom­i­cal and they even have free tri­als, so give it a whirl.

What’s so great about old, obscure, black and white French movies from the 1930s, you ask? They tell sim­ple, beau­ti­ful sto­ries which are acted by peo­ple who cap­ture the ten­der human­ity that is so often MISSING from con­tem­po­rary cin­ema. This is not to say that there are not good movies com­ing out today, but the sto­ries direc­tors and actors told in decades past, like the 1930s, were dif­fer­ent for myr­iad rea­sons than the ones we tell today.

Still need a rea­son to check out these films? Grand Illu­sion is one of the first prison-break movies and con­sid­ered a genre clas­sic, if you were moved at the end of The Great Escape, you should see this movie. Port of Shad­ows, like Grand Illu­sion is an excel­lent exam­ple of poetic real­ism and fol­lows a sin­gle man’s jour­ney through the lonely fog of des­tiny; rent it!

Images: The Cri­te­rion Collection

One of best movies I’ve seen in the last decade has to be The Fall directed in 2006 by Tarsem Singh. Late last sum­mer, it played for a few weeks at the local inde­pen­dent movie the­ater and we were for­tu­nate enough to see it on the big screen.

Right from the begin­ning, the movie draws you in with gor­geous pho­tog­ra­phy and art direc­tion. Based on the screen­play of a Bul­gar­ian movie from 1981, Yo Ho Ho the film shifts between the real­ity of two patients in a 1915 South­ern Cal­i­for­nia hos­pi­tal and a dream world of ban­dits. Shot in 18 dif­fer­ent coun­tries and cos­tumed by the Oscar-winning designer Eiko Ish­ioka, The Fall is a visual gift to the audience.

If you haven’t seen it already, here is the trailer for the 2008 Amer­i­can release:

I wish the trailer were more sim­ple, leav­ing the viewer hun­gry for more rather than show­ing as much as it does. Since the above trailer leaves some­thing to be desired, here is a copy of the open­ing cred­its I found on YouTube. This scene acts as a pro­logue for the movie and is stun­ning on the big screen, espe­cially the last shot with Tarsem’s credit.