sundance

James McAvoy is a First Class X-Man

James McAvoy is a favorite of Sundance’s own guiding light Robert Redford, who cast him in the Civil War drama The Conspirator. Redford clearly has great taste in actors (and bloggers, too, lol).

At a TimesTalk the other evening in Times Square, McAvoy charmed the audience with his thick Scottish accent and self-effacing personality, proving why he’s become one of today’s go-to actors most worth going to.

Asked if he watches American Idol, McAvoy said, “It’s like cocaine to me. I don’t know how to kick the habit.”

Pause. “Actually, I don’t know who the people are! I’m sure they’re very good.”

The audience already wanted to eat the guy up. And they loved him even more when he gave a spiel about how important American culture is, then laughed and said, “That sounded so fake!”

But his takes on his diverse filmography were very real. Here are the highlights:

Mailman photo project

USPS mailman Ryan Bradford has been documenting and snapping photos of the various “friendly” neighborhood pet dogs he encounters during his routes. I doubt this will be optioned any time soon by Disney for a family friendly animated film. [Via]

GoldDerby reports on CARLOS star Edgar Ramirez as an Emmy frontrunner for Best TV Movie/Mini Actor.

We couldn’t be more excited, unless we happened to be Edgar Ramirez, that is. After being recognized as both a SAG and Golden Globe nominee, the CARLOS star is getting a little bit of Emmy love.

Gold Derby senior editor Rob Licuria reports, “‘Carlos’ leading man Edgar Ramirez has already contended for SAG and Golden Globe awards for his audacious portrayal of the notorious fugitive Carlos the Jackal. Now, as the focus of the Emmy campaign by Sundance Channel, he is a frontrunner for Best TV Movie/Mini Actor.”

Designing for tsunami resistance

We hardly need to be reminded that tsunamis in Japan are no joke. Photos showing entire towns leveled by the recent disaster are all too fresh in our memory. Once a tsunami hits there’s only so much we can do, so a big part of Japan’s rebuilding process has been to focus on prevention. Part of this plan includes the spectacular new Tsunami Disaster Preventive Control Center in Minamiawaji City. Designed by the Osaka-based firm Endo Shuhei Architect Institute, “Looptecture F,” as they’ve dubbed it, is a beautifully minimal, two-story circular steel structure. The rust-colored outer walls resemble a “strip of ribbon coiling in on itself;” it’s almost Serra-esque.

Green collar jobs turn blue: water quality in disadvantaged communities

Green collar jobs aren’t just for the mechanically and technically inclined: as we’ve seen, numerous organizations, businesses and local governments have focused on tasks ranging from tree planting and care to herb growing (the legal kind) to energy efficiency consulting and assistance.

Woody Allen’s Paris Adventure

MIDNIGHT IN PARIS, Woody Allen’s latest film starring Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, and Marion Cotillard, opened in the U.S. on Friday May 20th. The film, a romantic comedy set in Paris, is Allen’s forty-first feature film and his sixth film shot in Europe since 2005.

In MIDNIGHT IN PARIS, Gil (played by Owen Wilson) is on vacation in Paris with his fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her parents. From the outset, their polar opposite views on Paris are apparent: Gil, a successful Hollywood screenwriter, has a romantic view of the city while Inez, more comfortable with her California lifestyle, sees it as just another place in the world. After dinner with Inez’s overbearing friends Paul (Michael Sheen) and Carol (Nina Arianda), Gil calls it a night as they hit a club. Lost and a little drunk, Gil finds himself on a quiet street as the bells strike midnight. When a car pulls up filled with English speaking revelers, Gil is pulled into their party and circumstances that he never could have imagined.

This is Allen’s second film in Paris, the first “Everyone Says I Love You,” included Paris in only a portion of the film, but MIDNIGHT IN PARIS is Allen’s cinematic love note to the city.

From the film’s press kit, “Of course I’m partial to New York because I was born there and grew up there,” he says, “but if I didn’t live in New York, Paris is the place I would live.” This feeling echoes the sentiments of the film’s main character, Gil, who looks back with regret on an opportunity he had to move to Paris twenty years earlier but didn’t take. Allen himself had a similar opportunity during the filming of WHAT’S NEW PUSSYCAT in the 60’s. “It was an adventure that was too bold for me at the time. In retrospect I could have stayed, or at the very minimum taken an apartment and divided my time – but I didn’t and I regret that.”

Allen sat down with reporters to discuss MIDNIGHT IN PARIS at a press conference for the film on May 17th in New York.

Cool art: American Ninja

Brooklyn designers Chen Chen and Kai Tsien-Williams recently created these cheeky Bud beer can nun-chucks titled “American Ninja.” Get it at Oh Wow Book Club.

Cy Twombly as sculptor

Though Cy Twombly is best known, perhaps even exclusively so, for his paintings -those ferociously scribbled masterpieces – it’s his sculpture – seven pieces of it – that MoMA has recently acquired and put on exhibition. Almost all of Twombly’s sculptures are made from found materials, scrap wood and plaster that are assembled into composites and then covered in white paint, “unifying the various humble materials and giving them an ethereal presence.” Sure, or he whitewashed them right into the gallery walls and they stand out only because they’re mounted on a pedestal. Yes, his sculptural work possesses an undeniable textural quality – the variations in the monochromatic pieces of wood and fabric are quite lovely up close. From further back, however, they’re about as emotionally exciting as their color palette is varied.

Origins of I Heart New York

I sat down with Milton Glaser last week. Not only am I working with Milton at my day job, I also recorded our conversation for Dwell too. Meeting legends typically don’t phase me. I’ve met them all from design icons to rock gods. But Milton is the quintessential New Yorker. It was quite a joyous event for me. The below statement about “I Love New York/I Heart New York” was particularly fascinating for me as he not only explained it’s design inspiration, something I’d never heard, but also explained how ubiquitous the statement had become. It’s a fun read:

I am sure you have answered this about a million times, but I have to ask about “I Love New York” or “I Heart New York.” I don’t even know what to call it! Love or heart?
What you may not realize that is that the heart, a symbol used as a verb, has now entered into the Oxford English Dictionary. This happened a couple of weeks ago. So heart is now a verb. It entered with an acknowledgement that “I Love New York” was the manifestation that did it, the first symbol ever to enter the Oxford Dictionary. You can call it either one as both are correct.

Kanye music video animated with home-made GIFs

KANYE WEST Power (Unofficial) from WE ARE FROM L.A on Vimeo. This music video for Kanye West’s “Power” by We Are From LA created with home-made animated GIF images is genius! I predict this “organic” and “grassroots” technique will be “borrowed” by a creative director for a commercial coming soon to you.

Lady Gaga paper doll

GQ brings you this brilliant Lady Gaga paper doll. The Etch-a-Sketch bottom piece is hirsute-larious.

Vimeo of the Week: LEGO Technic Super-8 Movie Projector

Lego Technic Super-8 Movie Projector from Friedemann Wachsmuth on Vimeo. Friedemann Wachsmuth’s amazing little film Lego Technic Super-8 Movie Projector is pretty freaking awesome. The filmmaker/designer built a fully functional Super-8 projector using nothing but LEGOs! Ok, wait, I take that back. He did use a lens, reel spindles and a lamp not made of [...]

“Starved for Attention”

Looking through these photographs of happy, bouncing babies, you might think the one thing these children have in common is cuteness. That may be, but all the children depicted in this photo series are also malnourished. Still, these aren’t your typical hungry-baby pictures. “Starved for Attention” is a new documentary project that gives an “uplifting emphasis and reworked visual identity to the underlying causes of the global malnutrition crisis, which affects 195 million children around the world.” 195 million! And that’s just the kids.

What President Obama’s signature looks like

Robert “the Doodler” Alicea at DeviantArt noticed something about President Obama’s signature and brought it to life with the above sketch. His signature is an adorable pup T-Rex playing with a ball of yarn. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. [Via]

Long exposure airplane photography

Terence Chang has a great Flickr photoset of long exposure composite photographs he snapped of take-offs and landings at San Francisco airport from various vantage points around the city. Speaking of San Francisco: I’d pay a lot of money right now for a Mission district burrito, which incidentally has its own Wikipedia page. [Via]

Green tech finds (5/26/11)

Diaper-eating mushrooms, recycled oil booms, and global warming’s effects on your wi-fi signal… this week’s green tech finds.

• Solar and wind power for apartment dwellers: Jonathan Globerson’s Greenerator concept allows apartment dwellers to harvest both wind and solar power from their balconies. (via Inhabitat)
  
  
• GM recycling oil booms into Volt parts: Lots of oil booms left over from last year’s BP oil spill. Instead of letting them get tossed into landfills, GM is collecting these materials and recycling them into air-deflecting baffles for the Chevy Volt. (via Earth 911)

“Drawings from the Film BEGINNERS”

Mike Mills, veteran music video director who turned feature film director in 2005 with THUMBSUCKER says he’s “a graphic designer as much as [he is] a filmmaker.” His latest project, BEGINNERS, may be, first and foremost, a film, but as someone who works across multiple mediums it’s accompanied by “a lot of stuff,” like copious amounts of scribbling, note-taking, journaling and drawing.

Conversations with Bert: Andy Samberg

A droll Bert from Sesame Street sits down with Andy Samberg for a two part interview. Bert’s got a little bit of Charlie Rose and James Lipton going on here. I’m really hoping this is the first of many in a series. I’d like to see the host of Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis [...]

Your brain on porn

There has always been great debate between sex-positive free-speech porn advocates and anti-porn chicken-little moralists. We’ve always fallen somewhere in the middle: you can’t really legislate desire and fantasy, but at the same time all this porn, like too much fast food, can’t be good for you. An interesting site we’ve found that seems to rely heavily on science without any moralistic judgment is YourBrainOnPorn.com — it smartly and succinctly explains how heavy porn use can have unwanted effects on the brain and offers suggestions for reversing those effects. The founders of this site have a blog on Psychology Today called Cupid’s Poisoned Arrow and just this week posted one guy’s account of his “rebooting,” an attempt to rewire his brain circuitry with a porn/masturbation/orgasm fast — pretty fascinating stuff:

270,000 piece LEGO sculpture

Artist Lene Rønsholt Wille spent six weeks and used 270,000 white LEGO bricks to construct this installation at Amsterdam’s Central Hall of World Trade Center. It looks like something that Richard Serra might have built or played around with when he was a kid.

JANE EYRE and shooting the classics

I loved Cary Fukunaga’s recent take on the classic JANE EYRE. (He’s pictured above with his Director of Photography Adriano Goldman.) And in addition to the deft direction, Moira Buffini’s adaptation is searingly concise and dramatic – it never feels like a stuffed-to-the-gills adaptation. But what I really want to talk about here is the cinematography, which is revelatory. The last two ‘classic’ films I’ve seen, this and Jane Campion’s BRIGHT STAR (not classic literature but based on Andrew Motion’s biography of John Keats) have both blown me away in terms of visual approach. (See my post from fall ’10 on BRIGHT STAR here.) Both eschew traditional coverage and framing in service of something more dynamic – a fluid, organic camera approach that plays mightily with depth of field, creative frames, and in short, ways of seeing. (Or, the DP and crew are not just there to document or illuminate the actors. The camera absolutely dances with performance – enhancing, contrasting, participating, rejecting — story.) The effect? Something that feels more modern, more present, more emotionally important – it’s not homework, it’s art.

Student engineers show off human powered vehicle designs

Got a bike? It’s probably nothing like the pedal-powered vehicles brought to Bozeman, Montana a week and half ago for HPVC West, a design competition sponsored by ASME (the American Society of Mechanical Engineers). Student teams from nineteen university engineering departments showed up at Montana State University to display their human-powered prototypes… and, of course, to race them.

Criterion releases THE GREAT DICTATOR

In 1940 the Nazi’s established four new concentration camps at Neuegamme, Gross-Rosen, Natzweiler and Auschwitz; later that year Charlie Chaplin released THE GREAT DICTATOR. As the U.S. was not yet at war, Hollywood was actually worried about offending certain European dictators. Indeed, the film was immediately banned in occupied Europe. But Chaplin had other worries, namely, was this a time to be funny about dictators? How do you make jokes about such a touchy and personal subject without seeming crass or insensitive?

Black Cat open call, 1961

A friend recently complained to me: “Matt, you don’t post enough cat-related things on SUNfiltered.” So here’s a pawesome photo for all you cat people: for the film TALES OF HORROR, which would feature three short Edgar Allan Poe stories including “The Black Cat,” an open casting call was held for the role of the…black [...]

It’s a Wrap — See you in November.

I will admit that I am feeling extra sentimental lately. Yes, because ALL ON THE LINE wrapped its first season but it’s also most likely because I spoke at the commencement ceremonies of the Fashion Institute of Technology, my alma mater, recently. At the graduation festivities I concluded with the turning of the tassels and my parting words of inspiration, motivation and passion. Or at least I hope I did. I told the class of 2011, this was not the end of school. No, in fact, the learning will continue — for the rest of their lives. And I’m speaking from experience. Life education doesn’t end when the instructors have packed their papers and gone home. No, instead, their methods and reasoning will hopefully live on in everything you do. I wasn’t inspired by every instructor I ever had, but the ones that did affect me, stayed with me.

And in some ways, my personal success is a testament to them.

Cut to the AOTL designers.