Wes Anderson seems to be on a bit of an adaptation streak. His most recent release, a stop-motion remake of Roald Dahl’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox managed to garner $260,000 in its first weekend, despite having only been released to four theaters. We hear there may even be a comic book spin-off in the works. The film is one of 20 submitted for Oscar consideration this year in the category of Best Animated Feature.
Now word comes that Anderson has finished the script for his adaptation of Patrice Leconte’s 2006 French film, Mon Meilleur Ami, or My Best Friend. His version, titled The Rosenthaler Suite, closely follows the original tale of a workaholic art dealer who doesn’t know the meaning of friendship, and much less care about it.
With Wes Anderson’s film adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox coming out this weekend, every Zissou-loving, B.F.G.-worshiping and Bill Murray-enthusiast cinema go-er is salivating with anticipation. Anderson, a master of whimsical dark comedy, chose to adapt the beloved children’s story into his first-ever animated feature film.
The medium? Stop motion. A meticulous animation technique that links hundreds of individual photos to create an illusion of movement, stop motion has been around for decades and continues to mesmerize viewers. In the past few years, the music industry has grown hip to this classic technique and has begun employing it in many a music video. Some of our favorites are after the jump.
You may recall back in the summer of 2008 when Of Montreal released their album Skeletal Lamping in the form of buttons, paper lanterns, decals, tote-bags and t-shirts. Each of the items served as a port-key of sorts, transporting the audiophile on deck to a little place called the internet where albums are downloaded. With the demise of the physical album predicted by just about every modern-day Nostradamus, professional musicians have begun to get creative with their packaging.
Back in October the White House released a list of 45 artworks on loan to the Obamas from Washington museums. The artists selected vary in age, race, gender and geographical roots, reflecting the administration’s continued celebration of diversity. One particular painting, Watusi (Hard Edge), by African-American woman Alma Thomas (1891-1978) and on loan from the Hirshhorn Museum, caused quite the controversy. The 1963 painting, it turns out, is extremely similar to a 1953 piece entitled L’Escargot by Matisse, a maestro whom Thomas openly proclaimed an inspiration to her evolution as a painter.
We all know to be weary of critters when taking from the curbside fairy. Furniture company The Blu Dot has just taken it to a whole new level. In cahoots with PR Agency Mono, Blu Dot has placed 25 of its Real Good Chairs throughout New York City and they’re all bugged — as in secret spy bugged, not bed bugged. The chairs, which you can track here, are GPS enabled.
“These are unique times to be living though,” declared a winded Saul Williams (aka Niggy Tardust) to a packed house at New York’s Blender Theater. Decked out in his signature silver face paint, with long blue feathers staked throughout his hair, Williams thrashed around the stage rhyming and wailing into his microphone as a mosh pit gathered below. The crowd was eclectic and the mood electric. Artists swirled paintbrushes across a mural on the floor as Williams sang songs from his Trent Reznor-produced album The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust, eliciting punk rock riffs passionate enough to rival the artists’ own famed slam poetry. Between songs, the crowd was treated to these poems; they roared back in unison when Williams proclaimed that “music is our alchemy.”
Flavorpill spoke with Williams as he relaxed with his daughter Saturn between stops on his national Afro-Punk tour.
For a mere $81.99, you can pre-order the new Palm Beach Sugar Daddy Ken Doll. Mattel has been known to release special edition toys from time to time and if you’ve ever wished for a Ken doll to complain about Ponzi schemes with while gettin’ your tan on, your time has come. Even if you haven’t wished for this, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without the diminutive socialite. Come April 2010 you can be the proud owner of this dashing Daddy, and his little dog too! [via BuzzFeed]
The extended trailer for Tim Burton‘s Alice in Wonderland premiered during Spike TV’s Scream Awards on Tuesday night, and it sure is eerie. We catch our first glimpse of the White Queen’s palace and a grinning Cheshire Cat, all through a bizarre mix of live action, animation and stop motion. Burton’s Alice takes Lewis Carroll’s imaginative prose and injects it with CGI-infused ‘roids, the screenwriting skills of Linda Woolverton (The Lion King) and, of course, a heavy helping of the director’s notorious goth hallucinations. Watch it after the jump.
Resurrecting musicals of yesteryear seems to be in vogue these days, with revivals such as Hair and West Side Story blowing newbie Broadway contemporaries out of the water. Just in time for Halloween, Varietyis reporting that the legendary 1988 Broadway flop Carrie, a musical whose mere mention sends chills down the backs of fanatics, is being dug up from its grave.
In a move that seems more abnormal than paranormal, British psychic Jayne Wallace has created Tweance, the world’s first Twitter-based séance. The interactive event will go down on Halloween. Her otherworldly target of choice: Michael Jackson.
