Latest video...

This is our latest video covering the SD Film Festival for Citybeat. The SD Film Festival was a lot of fun this year. There we were sitting on the couch, drinking beer, and watching South Park when we were asked to cover the festival. Two ALL ACCESS PASSES to festival for free baby!!! But we really enjoyed seeing some of the films, checking out the happy shinny people at the parties, and seeing Captain Kirk in person.

Film tip of the day...Fake Blood, bullet hits, and more!!!

Aaand we're back!

Finally! We our soo sorry for the lack of post the last few days. At the last minute we got passes to shoot the SD film Festival, so we spent our weekend shooting and editing the event. It was pretty fun, we got to see William Shatner and check out some cool parties. We'll post the Citybeat video tomorrow and give some more details on the event.

In the meantime, here are a couple new commercials we created for a local salon SD Wax Queen. We actually shot this video a while ago, but we have been overwhelmed with projects so we have finally got the commercial approved and ready to go! The first one is pretty edgy and fun. The ahem, bikini shot, was actually the owner of the salon's idea. How's that for a fun sport! I love it when people are creative with their ideas. Anyways, check them both out and visit SD Wax Queen if you ever need a professional and affordable wax :)

Sorry for the delay in posts...

but we found out last minute that we were going to be covering the San Diego Film Festival for Citybeat this weekend. We will post some footage and film reviews as soon as possible.

Blah blah....its Tuesday

With all of the garbage in theaters right now, I have to admit that I am looking forward to seeing Zombieland, which is coming out in a few weeks. Honestly, besides Michael Moore's film Capitalism a Love Story, there really isn't many movies I want to spend my hard earned cash on these days...hopefully with the Holiday movie season approaching, and when all the studios releasing their best films towards the end of the year to compete in the Academy Awards, we might actually have a couple of good movies to checkout....until then we have the smash hit, Jennifer's Bodyto keep us occupied.

Film tip of the day:How to make sugar glass...

Monday Monday...can't trust that day

Because it is Monday, we stayed in tonight, worked on a video for a client, and made Sin City Breakfast Tacos . And I have to say that this is a great recipe. Definitely check it out. And since we are on the topic of Sin City , the sequel has been going thru a series of delays....check this out.

Predators

Robert Rodriquez is set to make a "reboot" of ahnulds sci-fi classic Predator. Not sure how I feel about this since the last several Predator spin off films, aka Alien vs Predator have been pretty bad at best. But all we can do is wait and see. If anyone can pull it off quickly, cheaply, and keeping it R rated...its Rodriquez.

Michael Douglas as Liberace!?!?

We aren't kidding....according to MTV MOVIE BLOG, its really going to happen. Michael Douglas and Matt Damon are going to star in a film about Liberace. Could be interesting or completely awful....I am leaning towards awful.

This weekend we are finalizing a video that we have been meaning to finish and should have some new clips posted soon. Anyway, have a great Friday and we will talk to you later.

Duncan Jones'

next film Mute is in preproduction but Libert Films has already released some concept art. Very little is know is about Mute but its set in a futuristic Berlin and that it follows a mute bartender as he searches for his missing lady. No release date has been given but filming is set for sometime early next year. We really enjoyed Jones' first film Moon so we are looking forward to checking it out.

Switching gears a bit, we found this interesting contest online called Straight 8 in which they give you a a 3 minute roll of super 8mm film to shoot. The only catch is that you send in your undeveloped, unedited roll of film for them to review. Straight 8 will select the best of the bunch to show on BBC or at the Cannes Film Festival. Sounds interesting. We will probably check this out.

Capitalism: A Love Story...

may be Michael Moore's last documentary. Despite what you may think of Michael Moore, we hope that this isn't the case as most can agree that his films spark a healthy debate and are always interesting to watch. We are looking forward to seeing his latest effort.
And in some more shocking news, Harrison Ford has confirmed that he is interested in making Indiana Jones 5 despite the last movie being as good as The Adventures of Pluto Nash, only made a ton of money due to it riding the success of the previous 3 classic Indy films. I guess Spielberg and Lucas aren't finished milking their successful franchises from the 80s for all they are worth. We will see if this comes to fruition.

Yo HGH!!!

So everyone's favorite roid advocate, Slyvestor Stallone is adapting Hunter by James Byron Huggins into the next installment of the Rambo franchise....aka Rambo 5:The Savage Hunt. Here is the official synopsis provided by Aint it Cool News.

"John Rambo could track anyone - or anything - on earth. Now the military desperately needs him for a mission that his ultrasensitive instincts tell him he should refuse. A beast is loose somewhere north of the Artic Circle. It has already decimated a secret research facility and annihilated a squad of elite military guards. And the raging creature is headed south toward civilization, ready to wreak bloody devastation.
It's a job that Rambo and his 22-year-old hunting partner, Beau Brady, can't turn down, but they and a team of highly-skilled special forces kill team discover that the prey is a terror beyond their wildest imagination - a half-human abomination created by a renegade agency through a series of outlawed genetic experiments. It has man's cunning, a predator's savageness, and a prehistoric power that has transcended the ages. And even if Rambo and Beau survive its unrelenting hunger for human blood, they'll still have to contront the grim reality that it may have grown immortal." I have to admit that I actually kind of liked the last Rambo movie...its sort of a guilty pleasure...but my "ultra sensitive instincts" tell me that Rambo 5 will be awful.

More like Nein..Hahaha..am I right people?!!..anyone? (crickets)

Well we did it. Against our better judgment (and general dislike for modern "edgy" cartoons) we went and saw Tim Burton's Nine.

The movie wasn't that good. As the critics promised, its a visually stunning, but ultimately uninspiring movie. Nine begins in a post-apocalyptic earth. Machines have turned against humans (happens a lot these days in film), and now pretty much everything in the war-torn world is dead, except for a few small rag dolls, who fight against the remaining death machines left. It turns out these little rag dolls are remnants of the last soul on earth and represent what is left of humanity. It is an interesting concept, but the execution leaves much to be desired. The doll characters have very base personalities, and their story just isn't very compelling. They spend the whole movie running from one scary battle with a machine to another. I fell asleep a couple of times, but didn't really miss much. Eventually, the rag dolls win over the machine and inherit the planet (to what end I don't know, since they can't procreate). There are some amazing images, but I think this would have been better as a 30 minute short than a feature length film. But oh well, you live and you learn..take our advice and wait for the DVD :)

Wizards

Ralph Bakshi's post-apocalyptic sci-fi animation film Wizards, as described on its Wikipeda page, is an animated post-apocalyptic science fiction/fantasy film about the battle between two wizards, one representing the forces of magic and one representing the forces of technology. It was written, produced and directed by Ralph Bakshi. This is 20th Century Fox's first animated film and was probably one of the first post-apocalyptic feature length animation films ever released.
Due to budgetary constraints, Bakshi was unable to complete the battle sequences with the budget Fox had given him. When he asked them for a budget increase, they refused (during the same meeting, director George Lucas had asked for a budget increase for Star Wars and was also refused). As a result, Bakshi finished his film by paying out of his own pocket and using rotoscoping for the unfinished battle sequences. According to Bakshi, "I thought that if we dropped all the detail, it would look very artistic, and very beautiful, and I felt, why bother animating all of this? I'm looking for a way to get realism into my film and get real emotion." In his audio commentary for the film's DVD release, Bakshi states that "There's no question that it was an easier way to get these gigantic scenes that I wanted. It also was the way that showed me how to do Lord of the Rings, so it worked two ways."In addition to stock footage, the film used battle sequences from films such as Zulu, El Cid, Battle of the Bulge and Alexander Nevsky for rotoscoping. Live-action sequences from Patton were also featured.
Although it has a somewhat dated animation style (which we like), Wizards is an interesting post-apocalyptic animation worth checking out.

So happy its Friday...

Here is our full Anya Marina's Street Scene interview. Anya, who is a local musician, was an interesting artist to interview and is very approachable and friendly. Enjoy the clip.
As promised, here is a post-apocalyptic themed/1950s zombie uprising Metallica music video All Nightmare Long produced by Robert Schoberfor your viewing enjoyment. I think its probably one of their most creative videos and incorporates animation with mocked-up Soviet archival footage. Check out this article on Promo News. To me, the animation is very similar to the rotoscoping technique employed by Ralph Bakshi in his post-apocalyptic film Wizards, (More on that film and what's next for El Roberto in our next post) but is a combination of stylistic approaches inspired by Fleischer studio's original Superman cartoons. You can checkout more of Robert Schober aka Roboshobo's videos here.

No Age

As promised we are posting our full interviews from Street Scene. Today's clip is of Sub Pop recording artist No Age. Tomorrow we will post the full Anya Marina interview.
Keeping with the post-apocalyptic cinema theme is week, we wanted to post the new Zombieland trailer. As a fans of this film genre, we are definitely looking forward to checking this out. More on this subject later!

9

The Tim Burton produced post-apocalyptic animation opens today. We will be sure to check it out and post a review. Post-Apocalyptic fiction has definitely made a comeback this past decade, with several films/novels being release in the past few years alone. Starting this week we will post some trailers and brief reviews of some of our favorites.

And in case you missed it....here is the complete Cage the Elephant interview from Street Scene we produced for Citybeat.

Gamer...

Yes, I actually checked out the Running Man rip off, Gamer and despite its similarities to the Ahnold flick, I actually liked it. Yes the story is a total rip off and lacked originality and Gerald Butler's character barely has any lines or even character development...but the cinematography, editing, and overall production design made it worth checking out. However, even though Gamer is definitely a film to see on the big screen, I would recommend saving a few bucks and watching it on DVD instead....go see District 9 or Inglourious Basterds instead.

Broken Elbows, Coppola, and bad movies

Sorry for the lack of posts the last couple of days. As you can see from the picture, things have been hectic. The more adventurous half of El Roberto injured his arm in mortal combat with a cave rock in La Jolla shores today. He has a painful broken elbow but other than that, thankfully he is okay and nursing his wound. We decided to have a low-key night at home yesterday and watched Youth without Youth, Coppola's film from 2007. There was a lot of hype surrounding it at the time, since it was Coppola's first film in ten years. Back then the critic's didn't think much of it, and sad to say our experience wasn't much better. The movie lasted three days! Or at least felt like it did. It basically consisted of Tim Roth speaking directly to the camera about existential angst while an assembly line of bad actors in period clothing floated in and out of cliched scenes, getting electrocuted by lightening and making vague Nazi threats. I drifted off into dreamland after the 1st hour and a half, when the movie completely changed its entire plot and purpose. Anyways, I don't like criticizing movies too much in our posts but this one was just too life-sucking to ignore. On a more positive note, we are watching The Salton Sea right now and its pretty good! Interesting plot and fun to watch. We'll be posting more vids tomorrow from some of our Street Scene interviews, so be on the lookout. Happy Labor Day!!

Crazy like a Wes Anderson

Back when it was first announced that Wes Anderson's next project would be an animated film, we were like "huh?" Maybe the critic backlash after Darjeeling Limited had gotten to his head. Maybe he went down the rabbit hole and would now only make weird, esoteric Persepolis-like animation for the rest of his career. Noooo! Fortunately, a small promotional vid for this film just came out and phew, it actually looks pretty cool. Called Fantastic Mr. Fox, it's stop-motion animation with a retro 70's vibe (of course). From what I gather the story is about a kid fox (voice by Jason Schwartzmann) and his dad (George Clooney). And although the film shows some signs of excessive unnecessary budget expenditures (really, you needed to go on location to record movement sounds with the actors themselves, really??), like most Wes Anderson projects it looks funny and original.

Street Scene vid

Greetings All,

Here's the Streetscene video we've been promising for a few days. For some reason, we've been having major issues uploading to youtube from Imovie and its been giving us a major headache. Anywho, the posting drama's over and its ready to go.

We had some very cool experiences over the weekend, one of the best being the artist interviews. We talked with No Age, Anya Marina, Mastadon, and Cage the Elephant, and they were all gracious and fun people, meeting us in random spots to avoid the noise, and working with our schedules to meet up. It definitely defused our trepidation that all artists are divas. Mastadon was an especially cool interview as they invited us to talk in their Star Wagon! We were a little nervous about interviewing Mastadon in their trailer after all the scary stories we've heard about their lead guitarist Brent Hinds. But as their tour manager leaned out of the shadowy doorway of their trailer and waved us over, we pushed back our fears of getting a bottle smashed over our heads and went in. Turns out Brent wasn't around, but we got to interview the bassist Troy Sanders who was an incredibly laidback and fun guy to interview. He talked about everything-their sound, the upcoming tour, the fact he can't dance, etc. and just made everyone feel comfortable. A seriously talented musician without a chip on his shoulder. Cage the Elephant was hilarious and told a disturbing story about the singer performing diy surgery on his salivatory gland before a show. I think we're going to be posting all the interviews on Citybeat's youtube channel tomorrow or Thursday so you can check it out.


One person who was a diva was miss MIA. She had everyone kicked out of backstage before her show for no reason! That was a bit much especially since her set sucked- all she did was half-heartedly rap Bamboo Banga and throw water on the audience (hitting Andrew and our camera in the photo pit-that's expensive!). I'm a fan of M.I.A. but seeing diva behavior like that when putting no effort into her set, kind of puts me off. Anyways that was the only weird artist behavior I saw (although I heard Cake was being obnoxious too). No matter, we had a fun time taking in the experience and filming Street Scene. Hope you all enjoy!