"Nobody bothers me!" Classic Tae Kwon Do commercial

This 1978 commercial from the Jhoon Rhee tae kwon do school in Washington D.C. is a stone cold classic. I stumbled on it a few months back and I just found an adorable tribute by the band OK GO. And who was the original song performed by? Nils Lofgren, guitarist for Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band! It's even mentioned on his website. Crazy, man.

Here's the commercial and the tribute.

Walter Cronkite dead at 92

If you're even remotely into American history, as I am, Walter Cronkite was a big part of it. He was the voice of 20th century American history in a lot of ways, the voice that reported on so many of the seminal events of our times, so that even though he was well before the time of my generation, it's almost as if we all grew up with him. When a man's name is synonymous with integrity and truth, well that's something we should all aspire to.

Watch the CBS story here.

Hot Naked Skydivers, "No stripping alive", Sonny J, Beat Box Master and Marlo Stanfield

This post sorta jumps around a bit but here goes ....

Hot naked skydivers!

Disturbing ad ... with a stripper!

Sonny J - "Can't Stop Movin'"

A Beat Box Master

And fantasy gets a little too close to reality for the actor who played drug kingpin Marlo Stanfield on "The Wire".

I'm a simple man ... and stuff like this just makes me grin. He wasn't really in Hall & Oates but he should have been!

TCM super sweet movie posters

Turner Classic Movies has produced some pretty cool movie posters for their "Summer Under the Stars" series this year, including THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN and THE GRAPES OF WRATH. Check out the details of the series and the rest of the posters at the Rope of Silicon website here.

(500) DAYS OF SUMMER review

Full disclosure here: I'm not a big fan of romantic comedies, especially current ones. Whenever I see a trailer with Kate Hudson or Matthew McConaughey or Jennifer Aniston or Ryan Reynolds in any combination, my brain just shuts off and waits for them to Go Away. For me, those movies are a lot like Mariah Carey's songs - I know they exist, I know some are huge hits, but even with a gun to my head I could not name a single one. It's like a sanity safety feature: my brain just doesn't absorb them. The last "romance" movie that really got me was TRULY, MADLY, DEEPLY (Anthony Minghella RIP) and though it was funny it was faaaar from a straight-up comedy. Having said all that, I like to think of myself as a pretty open-minded guy where movies are concerned, and I'm always willing to be converted by any movie if it's something of quality.

Which is why I was very intrigued when I read that Joseph Gordon-Levitt, star of such brilliant indie fare as MYSTERIOUS SKIN and BRICK, and Master of Quirky Cuteness Zooey Deschanel were doing a romantic comedy together. (500) DAYS OF SUMMER is exactly the movie I hoped it would be: funny, smart, and really, really charming. The film traces all the ups and downs of the 500 day romance (not a spoiler! it's right there in the title!) between Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Summer (Deschanel). Deschanel does the charming, quirky girl role she's already perfected in movies like ELF and HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY but it's Gordon-Levitt who really shines here. It's nice to see Gordon-Levitt, whose film resume is made up of some deeply damaged characters, loosen up and have some fun for a change. He's been in so many dark films it's easy to forget he got his first big break in the sitcom "Third Rock From The Sun", and here he proves he hasn't lost any of his comedy chops. Both leads do have a natural chemistry onscreen and ground even the most comic moments with an authenticity that brings the whole thing to life. Geoffrey Arend and Matthew Gray Gubler as Tom's best friends and Chloe Moretz as Tom's 10 year-old relationship mentor bring the requisite sidekick laughs, with Arend as a particular standout. Screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H Weber and director Marc Webb use a lot of tricks - a fractured chronology, splitscreen images, an omniscient narrator - that can often torpedo a flick in the wrong hands, but here they work brilliantly and enhance the natural charm of their two leads. The movie does in parts veer close to being "too clever for its own good" territory (*cough*JUNO*cough*) but the sense of fun in the script, the direction and the performances are palpable, and even while it doesn't exactly plumb the emotional depths of a doomed romance, what it does it does with real laughs and genuine charm. And hey, any movie that can use Hall & Oates AND the Pixies to such great effect is my kinda flick! Highly recommended.

WEDNESDAY COMICS with the Strange Pope

I had no idea what the above image (click it to see larger version) was supposed to be when Paul Pope posted this on his Flickr page - a two-page Adam Strange story? - but this week I found out. It's a new DC anthology called "Wednesday Comics" with a very unique format. Every page is the first chapter of an individual story, each with its own writer and artist, using a who's who of DC characters including Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Hawkman and more obscure characters like Kamandi, the Metal Men and Adam Strange. It's printed like an old newspaper comic strip, all folded up on actual news stock paper (very unusual in this age of glossy paper comics), the upside of which is that the pages are HUGE, 14" by 20". The format is very evocative of the good old days of superhero comics when they were less about the angst and more about the fun, more for kids in other words, and the stories themselves have the same sense of sweet superhero excitement. And the art is spectacular: I only know about half the artists - Mike Allred, Jose Luis Garcia Lopez, Joe Kubert, Kyle Baker (who does for his Hawkman story the single best page I've ever seen him do) - but even the ones I don't know are really good, Ryan Sook's Kamandi and Lee Bemejo's Superman stand out in particular. The whole thing has a surprisingly consistent high quality, not always the case in an anthology, and it's no mean feat to make an impression with a single page and almost all of these stories do. This is one of those high-concept projects - single page, cliffhanger stories printed on newspaper - that could easily have fallen flat on its face, but instead they pulled it off in spectacular fashion. There are going to be 12 issues of this book, and I'm almost tempted to wait for the inevitable collection, except that it might not be full-size and that's the best part of this thing! Here's hoping that this will pay off in the end.

Read the interview with editor Mark Chiarello about the project here.

BBC documentary THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES and Peter Bagge too.

Just watched a documentary about terrorism and it reminded me of a superb BBC documentary series called "The Power of Nightmares", which parallels the rise of the Muslim extremist movement in the Middle East and the Neo-Conservative movement in the U.S. from the 50's to the present day. Given how strenuously they placed themselves in opposition to each other religiously, politically and ideologically, it's fascinating how much they have in common and how dependent they are on each other. It's easy to see why this series did not air in the U.S. when it originally came out in 2004. Watch all three parts (they're each an hour long) here.

Or if you want a more lighthearted look at the sorry state of our messed-up world, just pick up the book "Everybody is Stupid Except for Me and Other Astute Observations" which just came out this week, a collection of ten years of "cartoon reporting" by the one and only Peter Bagge. With chapter titles like "Sluts for Jesus", "Your Friendly Neighbourhood Tyrant" and "Do Your Own Thing Unto Others", it's no surprise that it's really really funny. And self-described Liberatarian Bagge is an equal opportunity offender too, taking pretty accurate shots at both the conservative right and the liberal left. Some humourists just have the Gift of the Rant (Evan Dorkin, take a bow) and Peter Bagge has one of the most informed, common sense rants in comics today. Check it out!

Utagawa Kuniyoshi, the Baddest Mofo of Ukiyo-e

Everybody has an old fart in their life who goes on and on about the "good old days" and how much better things were when they were young, and as I, slowly and none-too-gracefully, enter my declining years, I don't agree with the "good old days" rant per se (maybe I'm not old enough), but I do in some way understand that feeling, because for most people, as you get older it gets harder and harder to find things that excite you the way things did when you were young. My personal theory about this phenomenon is that when you are in your late teens and early twenties, it can feel like you're being bombarded with cool stuff because everything is new to you: it's the first time you watch CHINATOWN or APOCALYPSE NOW or TOUCH OF EVIL or M; the first time you listen to "Kind of Blue" or "London Calling" or "Blood on the Tracks"; the first time you read Tropic of Cancer or The Basketball Diaries or Watchmen - it's an embarrassment of riches! But as you get older those moments of discovery get further and further apart, and eventually you begin to rail about the kids today and how they don't know about good "music/books/movies/whateverelseyoucanthinkof", and before you know it, you're the old fart who isn't interested in new things anymore. But if you're a pop culture junkie like me (and you have loads of free time), you haven't given up yet and you're always on the hunt for the next fix, the next thing to get your juices flowing, be it something brand new or something very, very old.

I just found my next fix. I read the name Utagawa Kuniyoshi for the first time a little over 24 hours ago in a monograph of his prints that was made for an exhibit of his work at the Royal Academy of Art in England this past spring, and he has instantly become my favourite Japanese ukiyo-e artist of the 19th century. Most people know Hosukai and Hiroge, and I love their landscape prints, very serene and lyrical, but I've always been more interested in the more turbulent, violent aspects of ancient Japan, the samurais, the mythical monsters, the warlords battling for supremacy, that kind of stuff. And there are loads of samurai and monster images from that era out there, but there never seemed to be a particular artist, that I knew of anyway, who made that stuff his stock-in-trade.

Until I stumbled on Kuniyoshi. This guy is the Jack Kirby of ukiyo-e art: men fighting crocodiles, samurais wielding giant rifles, soldiers being shoved face first into exploding landmines - it's awesome!!! It's easy to see why he's often referred to as the godfather of manga; his work has the same kinetic, visceral kick of the best Japanese action comics. I don't think I've seen any art from any country in any era that looks as contemporary as his work; this stuff could easily be right out of a modern comic book. And not just his subject matter is modern, but his style too, his line and his colours seem in some cases almost like some psychedelic "pop art" painting. He does other images, landscapes, geishas, they're just as accomplished, but for me the warrior prints just leap right off the page. I would have killed to see the exhibit in England, these things are eye-popping on a computer screen, can't even imagine what they'd look like up close and personal. And this may sound strange, but it's also a real thrill to discover that there is a specific name - be it an artist or a genre or whatever - that perfectly sums all the things you like about an artform (sorta like when I couldn't understand for the longest time why I was indifferent to country music but still liked banjos and fiddles until I found out the stuff I liked was called "bluegrass"). Now whenever someone asks who my favourite ukiyo-e artist is - because this comes up all the time when I'm gettin' hammered with my friends - I can say "Kuniyoshi" and they'll know exactly what I mean. Or they'll shrug indifferently, whatever, their loss!

I always suspected there was some samurai artist stomping some serious ass in 19th century Japanese art ... and his name is Utagawa Kuniyoshi.

You can see a whole lot more of his work here.

New animated shorts - CONTROL MASTER, BLOOD TRAIL

Some interesting tidbits...

Control Master

Trailer for Blood Trail, nice 'n' gross (NSFW)

Philip Scott Johnson's Men in Film for all the film lovers out there.

And a much funkier trailer for 2012.

Toronto Nerd Alert! THE WRIGHT STUFF is back ... for one special night.

For six Sundays this spring, the Bloor Cinema was taken over by director Edgar Wright (Hot Fuzz, Shawn of the Dead) for "The Wright Stuff", a weekly double feature of some of his favourite flicks (with some great flicks I've never seen on the big screen before, including Buzby Berkeley's "Dames", "Ricky-O: Story of Ricky" and Walter Hill's "The Warriors"). Wright is in town shooting "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World" with cinematographer Bill Pope, who was the DP on a little indie film you mighta heard of called "The Matrix" (AND "The Matrix Reloaded" AND "The Matrix Revolutions" AND "Spiderman 2" AND "Spiderman 3", oh yeah and also the pilot episode of "Freaks and Geeks", one of the greatest TV shows EVER).

On the last Wright night (his Canadian double bill "The Brood" and "Last Night"), Wright mentioned that he might have one more Wright Stuff screening before the end of the summer, a suuuuuper sweet one. Well, it looks like it's gonna happen: The Bloor has released its July schedule and on Sunday July 26th, they're doing the drool-worthy Bill Pope double bill of, deep breath, "Army of Darkness" and "Team America: World Police"!! Insert fist-pumping and air humping here. I hope Wright and Pope will both be there (please please please!!!!!) but even if they're not, that is one wicked double bill which should definitely be seen with a hootin'-and-hollerin' audience. I still have my "Wright Stuff" pass, can I still use it?? Stay tuned!