“The Open Road London”, a wonderful color film of London shot in 1927, from the London’s Screen Archives of Film London.

London was the final stop in a marathon journey around Britain filmed as a series of cinema travelogues. Pioneering filmmaker Claude Friese-Greene brought these picture-postcard scenes to life with a specially-devised colour film process.

via Boing Boing

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Here’s the trailer for the new “Clash of the Titans”, a remake of the classic 1981 film that fetured stop-motion animation by Ray Harryhausen.

It’s scheduled for release on March 26th, 2010.

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Videogum has created a really great montage featuring scenes from movies where the actors are saying the title of film they are in.

via Waxy

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“Fly In A Bottle”, a documentary about the avant-garde jazz trio Medeski Martin and Wood directed by their drummer Billy Martin, is scheduled for release on November 24th as part of the Radiolarians: The Evolutionary Set, now available for pre-order.

As an amazing finale to the entire box set, Billy Martin directed the first feature film in Medeski Martin & Wood’s history entitled Fly in a Bottle. Tirelessly working through footage of MMW in the studio and on the road, the film provides an extremely intimate portrait of the band. It highlights the trio’s intricate relationships with each other and with the music they have worked to create over their past 19 years as a band.

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The latest xkcd comic features several insanely detailed Movie Narrative Charts showing the character interactions in various films. Here’s a larger version.

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Internet Movie Firearms Database (IMFDB), started by user Bunni in 2007.

The Internet Movie Firearms Database is a website that allows users to find which guns were featured in certain movies, television series, video games, and anime, as well as contribute to the site in a wiki format.

via Neatorama

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CollegeHumor remixes Movies by the Numbers.

via Nick Douglas

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An Alien Squid makes an appearance in the trailer for the new Japanese film “It’s On Me” (Watashi Dasuwa) by Yoshimitsu Morita. The film was shot in Hakodate, Japan, a city known for its obsession with squid. The Alien Squid cameo is part of a promotion for Hakodate’s Giant Robot vs. Alien Squid tourism campaign.

via Pink Tentacle

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CollegeHumor has created a parody of the intro that is shown before Pixar films.

via Streeter Seidell

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Joe Sabia, with a little help from Pulp Fiction, shows us how to use Google Wave.

via Robert Scoble

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The 8th annual San Francisco Documentary Festival takes place October 16-29 at the Roxie Cinema. Here’s this year’s schedule, features, shorts and ticket info.

Proving that truth is often stranger than fiction, the 8th SF DocFest presents 60 new documentaries from around the world October 16-29 at Roxie Cinema in San Franicsco. The festival visits rabbit competitions, cat ladies, war photography, obsessive artists, paper folding, crazy West Virginians, the early days of Burning Man, plastic surgery, Lucha Libre, Johnny Cash, personal stories of birth and family, rock poster art, Big Oil, indie record stores and much much more.

The Roller Disco Costume Party takes place at CELLspace on October 23rd.

What does Roller Disco have to do with documentaries? Absolutely nothing! But who doesn’t like dressing up, drinking cocktails, and skating around CellSpace to timeless disco tunes? Dig out your Halloween Costume early and join us Friday October 23, 8p-2a, at CellSpace. Tunes and skate rental courtesy of Black Rock Roller Disco. 21 up. Admission: $10, $5 in Costume, FREE with any DocFest ticket stub! IndieFest not responsible for alcohol influenced roller skating wipe outs!

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guest post by mikl-em

photo by Geof Teague

For the second year in a row, a group of San Francisco theatrical mavericks are transposing a triumvirate of cinematic thrillers to a small San Francisco stage. Last year’s trio of B-beginning movies include The Blob and The Birds.

This year it’s Blue Velvet, Bride of Frankenstein, and Barbarella. A diverse set of B’s indeed. You can blame the fine folks at Foul Play Productions for that.

I have one piece of bad news and two bits of good: Blue Velvet has come and gone. But Bride of Frankenstein and Barbarella still await your attendance.

Bride is up right now (Thurs-Sat until October 17th) at StageWerx Theater, and it is quite an achievement. The play is presented in Black and White: costume, set, props, lighting, and skin tones are all painted, covered or otherwise adapted to a silver screen tone reminiscent of the 1935 original.

Featuring the original Franz Waxman score, and combining puppetry, shadowplay and myriad other theatricalities of a bygone era, Bride of Frankenstein is a perfect October offering, with showmanship and genuine thrills throughout!

With the dramatic lighting design and pointed use of shadows through the production, there’s a definite call-back to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. While he’s technically filling Boris Karloff’s tremendous shoes as The Monster, the remarkably named Fennel Skellyman physically evokes the gangly, alien-headed horror of Nosferatu–the true O.G. of cinematic killer creatures.

Played for fun and style, not for horror, The Bride is a blast and the entire cast is wonderful including Jim Jeske, Gerri Lawlor, Jordan L. Moore, and director Flynn De Marco. I can’t do justice to the ingenuity of the props, lighting, and staging here, but suffice to say it’s great.

You can buy tickets online for the last two weekends of Bride of Frankenstein.

Barbarella will open on October 22 and run for 9 shows only. Starring the remarkable Khamara Pettus, in the role that Jane Fonda could no longer play, and with projections, animation, and puppetry, this show promises to make up for the color deprivation of the Bride’s run.

The film is a cult classic space romp from 1968, an outrageous one-of-a-kind, sexified carnival from the 40th Century. It was co-written by Terry Southern (Easy Rider, Dr Strangelove, Casino Royale) and features Marcel Marceau in a speaking role. It is the film from which the band Duran Duran took their name. I’m just saying.

photo by Geof Teague

Tickets are on sale now for all nine performances.

Five-Star Astro-Navigatrix Barbarella (Khamara Pettus) is on a mission to find and recover Duran Duran (Fennel Skellyman), creator of the abominable Positronic Ray. To track her quarry, she must penetrate the City of Night where the Great Black Queen (Gerri Lawlor) and her Leathermen hold power supreme.

Between the Bride of Frankenstein and Barbarella, you can bookend your Halloween appropriately between the scary and outrageous.

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guest post by Violet Blue

Comedy is truth: While some of us scratch our heads and wonder how an environment for jobs like “social media guru” and pay-per-Tweet advertising can exist, others create scathingly brilliant and hilarious videos about an environment that is so very ripe for parody. As of today, no one’s done it better than Markham Nolan and his public service announcement video The Social Media Guru. It’s also a promo for Xtranormal Beta, text-to-video moviemaking software that we hope will be available for Mac users sooner than later. Still, the truth hurts. Telling us he’ll gladly give us a special offer for advice on our Twitter accounts (translation: “I’ll sit on your Facebook and whack you up the Twitter. Financially.”) Nolan peels back the rich tapestry of bullshit and delivers line after line of painfully familiar, nonsensical promises that the douchiest of exploitative social media consultants seem to be offering. We OH, and we weep.

We hope you watch this video and learn many ways to monetize your Twitter followers.

via edrabbit

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“The Wanderer” is a surreal 16mm short film made in 1981 by Joel Fletcher featuring the amazing hand walking adventures of Mark Daniel in Madison, Wisconsin.

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“Artificial Paradise, Inc” by Jean-Paul Frenay

Artificial Paradise, Inc is an experimental film anticipating a future where a major corporation has developed an unique software, based on organic virtual reality, which holds all the lost memories of humankind. A user connects to this database of the forgotten…what is he searching for?

via Warren Ellis

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“Visual Effects: 100 Years of Inspiration” features visual effects highlights in films over the last century.

via Jamie Wilkinson

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photo by Todd Heisler

Oliver Stone is working on “Wall Street 2″, a sequel to his 1987 film “Wall Street”, which is scheduled for release in April 2010.

“Greed Is Bad, Gekko. So Is a Meltdown.” (Tim Arango, New York Times)

via MG Siegler

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guest post by mikl-em

From the finishing what I started department…

The original “Chessboxing” is not the weird sport I posted about a few months back. Are you surprised that there’s more than one way to crossbreed Boxing and Chess?

Mystery of Chess Boxing is a Kung Fu film from 1979 (aka “Ninja Checkmate”) and it has everything you want in a 70’s Kung Fu flick, and nothing more. All the hallmarks of the genre are here: bad dubbing, slapping-tin-pan-fight-sounds, zooming closeups on the eyes of the villian, and some mad eyebrow hair in the bargain. It also features something called “double horse style”, which sounds smutty (though there’s also a hybrid astrological equivalent).

The movie is also an inspiration for the Wu-Tang Clan rap group (whose Da Mystery of Chessboxin’ on the album Enter the Wu-Tang features samples from the film). Wu-Tang member Ghostface Killer even took his name from the film’s villain.

Here’s the video for the Wu-tang tune:

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“The Textinator” by Jesse Lefkowitz, the latest t-shirt on Shirt.Woot.

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Basic Emoti-Khans, as portrayed by Star Trek’s Khan Noonien Singh, in this lovely illustration by Brock Davis, from his Make Something Cool Every Day series.

via Rocketboom

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