Archive for the 'Movies' category

We do not often see the sceenplay of a movie we like. Maybe it’s fortunate because they are hardly exhilarating except when they come from Alfred Hitchcock (the man was a maniac of detailed preparation) or when they describe all about animation movies.

The Wall, the Alan Parker movie created with the eponymous music album from Pink Floyd stays a monument of moving images. But, now, you can look at the pages of Roger Waters and Gerald Scarfe, the original screenplay (in PDF).

Revver.com, the American video sharing web site, seems to have closed its doors on the Internet. We knew that they had some financial difficulties, but we had learned that Brad Greenspan, co-founder of MySpace, founder of LiveUniverse, had just bought the site out.

There is still to see if Brad Greenspan will re-launch the site, modify it, or abandon it as it happen sometimes after such a buyout.

In the mean time, some of the videos appearing on Roumazeilles.net and hosted on Revver are no longer available. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Source: http://www.coreybehnke.com/.

For those who did not notice, a disproportionately large majority of the titles to Woody Allen movies are written in one and only one font: Windsor.

Apparently, this comes from a conversation with Ed Benguiat, famous American typographer, where Allen wanted to know what a good typeface was.

Source: KitBlog.

Most people are amazed by the power of the marine predators that are most sharks. While it is often difficult to cacth them in the act, there are a few occasions where it is possible to see impressive animals. Recently I found some that I wanted to share with you.

Great white sharks feeding on sea lions

Amazing photos found at Telegraph.co.uk.

Enormous six-gill shark

As seen from a deep sea mini-sub, a 16-to-18 ft shark.

Follow-up and post.

Underwater biolumninescence and cephalopods

Without impressive jaws, I finish with David Gallo at TED in March 2007.

Weightlessness produces utterly weird effects. What does it do to an effervescent tablet?

A zoo cheetah cannot be released in the wild if it is not able to hunt. And this is the fastest running hunter - if trained. So, how do you exercise a cheetah in order to prepare it for possible wild life?

One of the greatest minds and authors of the 20th Century just died. Arthur C. Clarke was very well known for some of his highly acclaimed books (think about 2001: A Space Odyssey and the collaboration with Stanley Kubrik on the movie with the same name). Some of them were only known to Science Fiction fans (Rendez-vous with Rama, The Fountains of Paradise, for example).

But Sir Arthur C. Clarke was also the author of significant steps for science like the observation that geostationary satellites would be the practical solution to many telecommunication issues. I can vividly remember my reading of Interplanetary Flight; an introduction to astronautics, where in 1950 he stated very clearly concepts like the multi-stage rocket or the geostationary satellite and why they should be prefered to other technical solutions.

The old man (born on 16 December 1917) was living in Sri Lanka where he appreciated the leisure of all-year-long scuba diving.

Science Fiction can no longer be the same after he left us.

Arthur C. Clarke died at the age of 90 from respiratory complications linked to the post-polio syndrome that forced him into a wheelchair for his last years.

US Rednecks did build a powerful spider mech just “because they could”.

Don’t let your kids wander around this one!

Hollywood! Movies! There’s no other place where:

1. If the hero starts dancing, suddenly, everybody around knows the steps and dance with them.
2. Any car hit by a bullet immediately explodes in a cloud of flames, a mere rivulet of oil turns into a fire ball.
3. An ugly girl only has to remove her glasses and untie her hair to transform herself into an iridescent beauty queen.
4. If you look languorously into the eyes of a woman, music always starts to play (even if there is no stereo in the room). Ain’t it handy?
5. In car pursuits, you only have to zip through crossroads for all others to halt in tire shrieks. No need to check the traffic lights…
6. In car pursuits, you just need to speed up to fly over wide gaping spaces (gravity seems nullified provided that you can push the pedal hard enough!)
7. The first truncheon hit systematically sends the bad guy either to sleep or flying through the room like a ball on a pool table.
8. The hero will only yield to baddies after dozens of hits by a large group of hulking champion weight-lifters.
9. All computers are fifteen years ahead of current technology and blinkingly beautiful (no dull grey boxes, but nice blinking lights or impressive 3D graphics interface).
10. Baddies are always easy to recognize in a crowd. They are ugly, dirty and grimacing (if not with a scar on the face). Why doesn’t the police use this kind of clue in movies while the same kind of profiling is used routinely in our streets?
11. When the hero enters an unknown derelict space ship, he has no difficulty finding and operating the door lock, the ship’s controls and the hyper-space radio.
12. When we see a distant explosion on screen, the sound is never late (is speed of sound as fast as speed of light in movies?).
13. Radio-activity makes objects glow in the dark (it’s useful since we wouldn’t see it - Many scientists including Pierre and Marie Curie would have wanted to know that they just had to switch off the light in their laboratories!)
14. In the void of empty space, sounds are deafening: Shrieking spaceship rockets can be heard from the other end of the galaxy despite the total lack of atmosphere to transmit it.
15. A detective cannot solve a case before he has been suspended for insubordination
16. Even when the road is straight, if you drive a car, you must continuously swing the wheel right and left
17. The wounds of the hero will not make him even wince, except when a gorgeous woman is trying to clean them