"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!

Stevie Wonder in Montreal .... for FREE!! TONIGHT!!!!!!!

Okay, Toronto has the better film festival, but as far as jazz festivals are concerned, Montreal has it all over us. Our jazz fest is going on right now and there have been a few interesting shows the last few days, Sonny Rollins, Sharon Jones, the Sea and Cake, the Heavy, Alice Russell, and a great double bill of Beausoleil and Buckwheat Zydeco (jazz?? who cares, both great bands). But in one fell swoop, Montreal has trumped us yet again. There is a free concert tonight at the Place des Festivals in Montreal with, yes!!!!, the one and only STEVIE WONDER!!!!!!

Saw him for the first time two years ago at the Air Canada Centre in Toronto in the fall of 2007, an amazing show, classic after classic after classic sung by the man who made them famous. Since I was a teenager, I've always had huge love for the old blues and r & b acts from the 50's and 60's and I saw as many of them as I could live. The thing was, though, that when you saw these guys live you were never sure what kind of show you were going to get. Typically they'd either be amazing, real road veterans who knew how to put on a great concert, or they'd be seriously showing their age. Now Stevie ain't quite that old, and his music is a lot more contemporary-sounding than say Sly Stone or Otis Redding (two huge favourites of mine), but he's not exactly a pup either AND he doesn't tour very much, which is why it took me 20 years to see the man and why I was a tiny bit concerned about the show. But from the first note he sung, well, it sounds dumb to say it, but he sounded exactly like Stevie Wonder! His voice is incredibly well-preserved, and not only that, but with every song you could hear the overwhelming influence he's had on so many singers who've followed him. So That Voice plus his huge catalogue of stone cold classic hits added up to one of the best r & b shows I've ever seen.

And tonight's show in Montreal, post Michael Jackson, has the potential to be a once-in-a-lifetime concert. At his Toronto show two years ago, he spoke very eloquently about his recently deceased mother and people were in tears then. So if he cooks up some tribute to Michael - his Motown contemporary, another childhood star like him - tonight, that place is gonna be a giant puddle by the time he's done.

So if you're in Montreal, what the hell are doing reading this? Go! GO NOW!!!!

AVATAR in Amsterdam

James Cameron has finally given the world a taste of his eagerly-awaited-mega-ultra-groundbreaking new film "Avatar". 24 minutes of the film were screened at the Cinema Expo in Amsterdam with cast members Sigourney Weaver, Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana and Stephen Lang in attendance. Read the Comingsoon.net review here. 

NXNE is a joke in yo town! And some Sigur thrown in...

I go to a lot of concerts, everything from huge classic rock megabands to teensy little indie bands, and I have a long history of checking out bands that I don't know too much about, fingers crossed, hoping that whatever little tidbit of info that made me curious about them would pay off in a new musical experience, or at the very least a good rockin' time. I've been reading about Austin's legendary SXSW festival for years, and even though it does sound like quite the zoo, it also sounds like a music lover's dream and I'd love just once to check it out. Despite this, I've never tried the local version in Toronto, NXNE, in all the years they've had it. I was always a bit suspicious of how the whole thing works ... and now I know why.

I got an all access wristband for this year's NXNE and yet despite this, I missed both Matt & Kim at the Whippersnapper Gallery and Band of Skulls and Spinnerette at the Mod Club because of the festival's "suckers-who-bought-wristbands-get-in-last" policy. It seems to me that a festival like this is supposed to be a showcase for smaller up-and-coming bands, basically a way for them to create buzz since they're not doing full sets for the most part (most shows are an hour tops), and also a way for music fans to sample a lot of different types of music over a five-day period. So theoretically, for the musically curious like me, it's a way to check out a number of different bands that you don't know much about and you wouldn't necessarily pay full price to see, which sounds like a pretty cool idea to me. But how the fuck does that happen if the "all access" wristband doesn't give you all access??? And the added bonus at a festival like this is that basically you're fighting against legions of hipster douchebags who desperately want to be the first ones to see the hip new band and really don't give a shit about the actual, y'know, MUSIC or anything. I will likely check out both Matt & Kim and Spinnerette next time they come to town for a solo show, which is what I would have done anyway based on what I already knew about them prior to the festival. But if the purpose of NXNE is to give the audience a LIVE sample of each band and then deny the audience access, then what's the friggin' point??

The only NXNE-related thing I managed to see was a short film about Icelandic band Sigur Ros called "Vid Spilum Endalaust", ostensibly a document of the tour for their last album, but ultimately just a half hour arthouse home movie. I mean "home movie" literally, since the bulk of it looks as if it was shot on an old Super-8 or Super-16 camera, with some Sigur Ros music thrown on top. There are a few tantalizing behind-the-scenes glimpses of the band, but they're few and far between. If you're one of those people who think of Sigur Ros as epically pretentious rock weirdos, well you'll have plenty of evidence here. (Check out this classic Sigur Ros non-interview on NPR for more proof. Note to the Sigur Ros dudes: if you don't want to do interviews, that's fine, just don't agree to do them!). I'm a huge SR fan but this short film is more arthouse film than anything else, and a must see for hardcore fans only.

If you want to see a great Sigur Ros film, check out "Heima" (trailers here and here), a concert film that follows their tour of free concerts in their native Iceland in 2007. The film is packed with amazing live performances in a variety of venues, including an empty grass field (an all acoustic set to protest a hydroelectric dam being built), a rural community centre, an abandoned warehouse space, and a good old fashioned full-blown rock concert stage in Reykjavik. A great music film isn't just about concert footage, however, it's about the ever-elusive trick of marrying image and sound, and with a notoriously enigmatic band like Sigur Ros, it seems almost impossible. Director Dean Deblois (the director of animated feature "Lilo and Stitch" .... seriously!) pulls it off beautifully and finds the perfect visual metaphor for Sigur Ros's music in the stark, majestic landscape of Iceland and in the faces of its people, gorgeously shot by cinematographer Alan Calzatti. In my personal canon of concert films, this movie is up there with "Woodstock", "The Kids Are Alright" and "The Last Waltz" not just for the great tunes but for capturing a time and place so perfectly. Iceland does not look like a particularly warm inviting place, but after watching this flick, I so want to go there ... with Sigur Ros as my guide!

Two great apocalyptic trailers 2012 and ZOMBIELAND

The end is really f#@ing nigh..

2012

Zombieland

HARDKOR 44 .... What is it???

Is it crazy to get excited about a movie from a single image? Probably, but when I see this still from the new Polish (short? feature?) film "Hardkor 44", my steampunk-robot heart skips a beat. But until I can read Polish, this puppy's gonna be a mystery.

Genius Party DVD release - finally!

After bitching mere days ago about the fact that the anime DVD anthologies "Genius Party" and "Genius Party Beyond" aren't available in North America, they announce that at least one of them "Genius Party" has a DVD release date June 24th. And hey, only took them a couple of years to do it. Powers That Be, please please please don't wait so long for "Genius Party Beyond"!!!

Kevin Smith interview

Nice little piece with filmmaker/raconteur Kevin Smith responding to some reader-submitted questions at Decider.com here. I went to three of the Bloor Cinema screenings ("Clerks", "Chasing Amy" and "Dogma") in Toronto that he references in the interview (I used to liveon Bloor St. right next door to the theatre, hence the name of this blog) and it's the only time in my life that I got a contact high in a movie theatre from all the people sparking up! 

And a month after the Smithfest, director Edgar Wright, in town shooting "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World", held his own film festival, dubbed "The Wright Stuff" - every Sunday for six weeks - showcasing some of his favourite flicks, including three of his own, "Shawn of the Dead", "Hot Fuzz" and a marathon screening of every single episode of his stone-cold geek classic TV series "Spaced". I got the pass for the entire festival, and finally got to see a movie I've wanted to see on the big screen since I was a kid, "The Warriors" - sweet! (And if you want to check out Wright's "Picture a Day" of his Scott Pilgrim shoot, check out his website.) 

So in other words, it was a great winter and spring for movie freeks at the Bloor!!!

Japanese robots - the Big ones and the Sexy ones!

Giant robots in Tokyo - for real! My inner 10 year-old has a big fat grin right now. Check out all the pictures at Pink Tentacle and details at Bouncing Red Ball.

Gundam never really grabbed me, but there's a great 3D image of one of my favourites Mazinger by animator Jose Liebana here.  

And while you're at it, check out these NSFW photos of some classic robot toys in 1977 at Gallery.com. The creepy/cool thing about these pictures for me is that I actually had these toys when I was a kid!! Two of them anyway, Raydeen and Mazinga, about 18 inches tall as I recall, and Mazinga's fingers shot out like missiles ...  just sayin'....

"Dimension Bomb", anime awesomeness

"Dimension Bomb" is a mindblowing, techno-sci-fi-psychedlia-run-amok short film directed by Koji Morimoto and is the last sequence in the anime anthology "Genius Party Beyond". He's also the guy who did the "Beyond" sequence in "The Animatrix", veeeery different in mood to this one, very lyrical and gentle, but an equally amazing piece. I saw a double feature of "Genius Party" and "Genius Party Beyond" at the Toronto Worldwide Short Film Festival in 2008, great to see on the big screen, a lot of gems in both films, but "Dimension Bomb" was hands down my favourite ("Moondrive" was pretty funny too). I've been watching anime since I was a kid in the 70's (back when they were just plain ol' Japanese cartoons) and this is one of the best pieces of Japanese animation I've ever seen. Why oh why are these movies not available in North America?????

Dimension Bomb Part 1 and Part 2

And speaking of great anime that's not available here, I recently discovered the work of Masaaki Yuasa. The few clips online of his stuff - the movie Mindgame and the tv series Kemonozume and Kaiba - are head and shoulders over most of the generic stuff out there. Why a snoozefest like "Sky Crawlers" (a movie about fighter pilots that has no dogfights in it) gets a big DVD release in North America but Yuasa's stuff is not even available here is beyond me. His very rough, very kinetic style has a very unique sensibility and a great handmade quality to it. Even this children's clip is amazing, no subtitles, no idea what it is, but it's crazy fun.

Cool commercial shorts

OFFF 2009 opening credits, OFFF 2007

(What's OFFF? Peek here)

A couple by director Carl Erik Rinsch: surreal Sprite ad, Saturn 

Cops vs. Clowns.

And finally the trailer for Where The Wild Things Are You've likely seen it before, but it is so orgiastically good, it's worth many many looks. I just pray the movie can measure up!