Empire Magazine celebrated their 20th birthday with a special photo collection of leading actors re-creating some of their more famous and iconic roles. This Mel Gibson one is pretty great.

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I previously featured Patrick Boivin’s entertaining stop-motion toy figure fight between Bruce Lee and Iron Man. Boivin is back with another installment that animates a twirling Michael Jackson in a dance off against Mr. Bean, who’s got his own trick up his sleeve. Boivin perfectly captures the inane imaginative battles I used to conjure up with my own action figures when I was just a 27-year-old child.

THE FANTASTIC MR. FOX is Wes Anderson’s best movie since BOTTLE ROCKET. (Read Perrin Drumm’s previous coverage of this film.) And boy is that fox foxy. Scoring George Clooney and Meryl Streep was truly a coup, as their interactions subtly and richly mine the dynamics of marriage, life expectations, and negotiating “bad” behavior in a relationship.

How did Wes arrive at this place? My response to most of his films has been that they certainly are fun to look at, but waaaaaaay less satisfying story-wise, a cotton-candy sugary disappearance from the consciousness almost instantly after viewing. (My husband always says, “He should have been a graphic designer.” Ouch.) The magic bullet here, the big difference, seems to be Noah Baumbach, co-writer, who is clearly bringing additional nuance to the table.

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Don’t let the action-packed trailer lead you astray; THE ROAD is true to the book. All the details of Cormac McCarthy’s barren, burnt out landscape are fully realized by director John Hillcoat (THE PROPOSITION), who you can tell took great pains to do right by the author. Instead of creating a street of abandoned, weather-beaten houses in a studio, for example, or hiring a big team of CGI experts to imagine what a decaying, post-apocalyptic shipyard would look like, Hillcoat and his crew actually sought out those environments, mainly in post-Katrina New Orleans.

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The Story of Cap & Trade from Story of Stuff Project on Vimeo.

With the Copenhagen Climate Conference just around the corner, world leaders, environmentalists, and economists are all debating the best mechanisms by which we can combat global climate change while continuing to grow the world economy. Most of these discussions (though not all) center on the concept of “cap and trade.” If you’re a little fuzzy on the idea, or know it but have a tough time explaining it to others, you’re not alone: it’s fairly complex on its face, and presents policy makers with a range of choices for harnessing market forces to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

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Art house or fun house, which compendium are you?

Every so often someone comes out with a compendium – an ultimate, definitive, last-say collection of anything from food to design to language itself (think the OED). It’s an intimidating idea, and maybe an even more intimidating gift, not to mention an expensive one. The latest of these is the “90th Anniversary Prestige Collection,” ($870) courtesy of United Artists, which means that while there are 90 films in this “book” (it’s over a foot wide and deep) they’re all produced by UA. Of course, when you’re talking about every major film from SOME LIKE IT HOT to MANHATTAN, who cares? Some of UA’s more recent releases are included too, like HOTEL RWANDA, but I was a little surprised to see PIECES OF APRIL sharing space with Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne.

I started looking around to see what other film compendiums were out there and I finally landed on “Essential Art House – 50 Years of Janus Films.” It’s not much cheaper (the list price is $850, but you can find it for less) and you get 50 DVDs instead of UA’s 90, but you only have to read the first few titles to know it’s a better deal: L’AVVENTURA, BLACK ORPHEUS, JULES AND JIM, M. HULOT’S HOLIDAY, PANDORA’S BOX, THE 400 BLOWS and WILD STRAWBERRIES are just a few. Of course, if you like big Hollywood musicals and black and white subtitled films, Amazon gives you the option to buy both and save, a bargain $1,555.

Lee Daniels wants you to look. He wants you to look at the horrific abuse in the personal history of his protagonist, Precious Jones. As an audience member, I wanted to look too. In fact, I think one reason people have flocked to this film involves the extremely human desire to stare in the face what is most repulsive, most sick and most grotesque – about as bad as you can imagine it — in human domestic familial life. And he’s got it here – it’s a home-based horror show.

But Lee Daniels also conspires so that you may not look. Oddly, and a little unnervingly, at a few points in the film Daniels actually takes the act of looking away.

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Hope can be a precious commodity in developing countries like Haiti. With 80% of the population living below the poverty level, residents will likely welcome any economic opportunity, regardless of social or environmental consequences. The documentary film BLOOMING HOPE: HARVESTING SMILES IN PORT-DE-PAIX documents efforts by a few Haitian citizens, community leaders, and aid workers to build financially, socially and environmentally sustainable business models in one of the country’s poorest region.

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Major Lazer “Keep it Going Louder” from Eric Wareheim on Vimeo.

My obsession with music video director Eric Wareheim continues with yet another disturbing, yet fantastic video. Once again the band Major Lazer gets Wareheim’s freakish video treatment. The song is called “Keep it Going Louder” and it features your usual rap video girls shaking their booties. This time though Wareheim’s manipulated their faces to make them horribly ugly. Throw in some ridiculous other worldly animation and you’re left with something original and just not right. Two things I simply adore.

An amusing animated short about a tendency we are all guilty of at times: procrastination. Creator Johnny Kelly describes the different ways we spend our time doing things to avoid doing what we should be doing.

Most sports movies will try to convince you that it’s not about winning, it’s about how you play the game. Not DOWNHILL RACER (1969). In fact, one of the primary reasons Robert Redford struggled to get this film made was because no one had made a sports movie with a protagonist whose amorality and arrogance had no effect on his winning streak. He chose to center the narrative around downhill racing pretty much because baseball and football were already taken.

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