With the feature film version of PIXELS arriving in theaters this week, I looked at a few other options for video game nostalgia, including the short on which it was based. But what has French director Patrick Jean been up to since the 2010 short went viral?
Well, for one thing, he directed this music video for German electronic musician Boys Noize, which was one of my favorite music videos of 2013, as a man without super powers moves into an area populated entirely by caped crusaders.
His inventive short film MOTORVILLE may not tap into the same nostalgia factor as PIXELS, but it's still a hell of a lot of fun, even if the metaphor ends up being a little messy.
PIXELS opens today, and if the reviews are to be believed, it's somewhere between "pointless" and "awful," and probably not worth spending eleven bucks on. Instead, why not sate your 8-bit nostalgia for free with ten perfectly good, and genuinely entertaining, short videos? Save a few bucks and get WHY DON'T YOU PLAY IN HELL? on streaming instead, and then you can just stay in your home and not have to deal with the type of people that would willingly spend the cost of a meal on an Adam Sandler movie.
1. PES's impressive stop-motion animated short that reimagines a number of video game classics
2. Lily Tomlin talking about Pac-Man addiction from a 1982 episode of "Saturday Night Live"
3. The incredible video for Royksopp's "Happy Up Here" about video game-related intruders
4. A 1982 animated short about a video game invasion
5. Alex Varanese's nifty stop motion short tribute to R-Type
6. A promotional film for the laserdisc game "Cliff Hanger" (using footage from Miyazaki's CASTLE OF CAGLISTRO)
7. Pac-Man reimagined as first-person driving game
8. Eight minutes of commercials for food featuring video games
9. The vintage arcade game-inspired music video for The Montauk Project featuring a character called "Dookie-Poo"
10. Patrick Jean's original short film that inspired the feature you probably want to avoid
Throughout his decades in the show business industry, Clint Eastwood has become an cultural icon, playing a vast variety of tough guy characters, ranging from cowboys to cops to curmudgeons to chair yellers. Meanwhile, actor Joe Dimmick has become an icon in his own right, playing a vast variety of Clint Eastwoods.
Dimmick is the owner of "Dimmick's Doubles," a celebrity lookalike company he founded in 1979 and of which Dimmick himself is the biggest draw. Dimmick's Eastwood impressions, beginning in 1977 when he answered a "Variety" ad, have led him to a certain degree of squinty-eyed fame and fortune, as Dimmick has portrayed Clint characters in commercials, television and even films, playing Eastwood archetypes in Mel Brooks' ROBIN HOOD: MEN IN TIGHTS and the action comedy ACES GO PLACES 2. (In the latter, his character of "Filthy Harry" is hired by a Henry Kissinger impersonator.)
But his biggest role as "Clint Eastwood" is in the 1987 film FILTHY HARRY, a feature-length epic Dimmick wrote, produced, directed and starred in that serves as an excuse to both parody DIRTY HARRY and give brief showcases to many of "Dimmick's Doubles" themselves, as impersonators of Joan Collins, Tom Selleck, Burt Reynolds (as "Slick") and more show up in minimal-to-supporting roles.
FILTHY HARRY is, as you can probably guess, not a "good" movie. The jokes are stale and terrible, the impersonations are only vaguely convincing (Stallone is laughable) and the performances are, to be kind, amateurish. But it also has a strange likeability about it -- there's nothing mean-spirited about the impersonations, and there's nothing in the film other than some comic violence that would give it anything more than a "G" rating if the MPAA ever touched this thing.
Mike Sullivan pretty much nailed it in his "Shock Cinema" review when he called it "an abject failure" as a comedy, but "any film where a Yamaha keyboard actually receives an on screen credit during the opening...has earned the right to be watched sober at least once." It's a ridiculous vanity project that's basically just an advertisement for a company that allows you to hire a mediocre Whoopi Goldberg impersonator, but it's about the most affable mindless monstrosity that you could imagine.
(This 2003 article even suggests there was a sequel, called MAGNUM FARCE, but this may have just been an offhanded comment Dimmick made. Anyone have any ideas if this exists?)
Christmas Eve, 1982, was a time filled with wonder and mystery, as children across the country eagerly anticipated being able to play along with E.T., their new best friend.
I don't like to be one who longs for the "good old days," but I do think the idea of a major network airing something as low key as this in 2014 is pretty unlikely.
When you wake up Thursday morning and check out your goodies from Santa, be sure to start your day off with a bunch of terribly cereal that will destroy your gums.
Before Cleese actually joined the Bond franchise in 1999's THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH, he "spoke out against unnecessary violence in the cinema" in an ad campaign for Schweppes in this Bond-influenced promotional short that appeared on the 1989 VHS release of LICENSE TO KILL.
Everybody is very excited about possibly winning this contest that ties into the 1979 sci-fi flick METEOR. Presumably, this is because none of them have seen METEOR, one of 1979's most notable duds.
Today would have marked the 106th birthday of the comedian, songwriter and "The Dick Van Dyke Show" regular, so here's a commercial in which he plays a virus. (Here's a better example of his talents, with frequent collaborator Rose Marie.)
Believe it or not, until 1990, you didn't have the option of seeing ROCKY HORROR at home, making rehearsing for the midnight shows virtually impossible unless you had a raggedy, third-generation bootleg. The film's long-awaited release on VHS was controversial, partially because die hard fans feared that this would be the end of the midnight movie circuit (it wasn't), but also because the VHS wasn't released at a sell-through price, causing thousands of fans to shell out $90 for a VHS tape. But, heck, at least there was a new mini-documentary on the tape.
Sure, "Let's Do It" makes sense to come out of the mouths of those in the animal kingdom, but I don't quite know why advertisers thought that frogs covered in flies would be the best way to sell "Frank Sinatra's Twenty Golden Greats." Happy 99th birthday, Ol' Blue Eyes!
The FLASHDANCE star looks forward to reconnecting with old friends. The commercial doesn't really sell the city, so maybe it's just geared towards people that already have memories of growing up there? Or maybe people that know Jennifer Beals?
Gould went from fake boxing kangaroos to instructing people to participate in a bizarre, cult-like opening of coffee cans in a decade. The time goes by so quickly.
Today marks the 90th birthday of Jack Davis, one of the founding cartoonists of Mad Magazine and a talent who has made his mark on the comic book industry for over six decades, drawing comics for EC (Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror) and designing the poster art for countless films, including the iconic art for IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD. Here are six minutes worth of commercials designed by Davis, mostly from the '70s and '80s.
The New York City Porn Film Festival is currently seeking content for their festival to be held next February, and while they're touting it as the "first annual New York City Porn Film Festival," it's hardly the first of its' kind. The New York Erotic Film Festival was held for several years in the early '70s, and this (SFW) trailer hosted by producer Ken Gaul hypes a compilation of some of the best of the fest, including Chuck Vincent's THE APPOINTMENT and the animated BURIED TREASURE and EYETOON.
