I’m not sure if this guy is old news for some people, but Julian Beever is an artist who has done some rather unique pavement drawings in various parts of the world including the U.K., France, The Netherlands, Germany, Australia and the United States. He uses anamorphic illusions in order to create the impression of 3 dimensions in his pictures when viewed from a particular angle. Some of them look more realistic than others, but a few of these just blew my mind. That Coke bottle in particular is insane… I can’t wrap my head around how it would actually look from overhead. Check out a gallery of his work at the link below, some of which include a snapshot of the drawing from an opposite vantage point. Weird and fascinating stuff.

May the DVD gods have mercy on us… it seems the success of Garbage Pail Kids: The Movie on DVD has inspired Paramount Home Entertainment to open up their vaults and dish out even more Garbage Pail Kids goodness/badness in 2006. On April 4th they will release “The Garbage Pail Kids: The Complete Series”, a 13 episode animated series that was produced in 1987 but never saw the light of day. It seems CBS cancelled the show 3 days before its scheduled Saturday morning premiere. There’s nothing quite like waiting 18 years to recoup your costs by hocking an unaired cartoon to twenty-somethings blinded by nostalgia! Still, I have to admit I am somewhat curious about this show. The Garbage Pail Kids cards always were somewhat amusing in their own little gross out way (and continue to sell today). This will be a 2-disc set at a suggested retail price of $27.95 US.

It seems that the rumours about Devo re-uniting to record a new album weren’t false after all, although they weren’t entirely true either. In a strange turn of events, Devo is teaming up with Disney to create a new kid-friendly version of the band called “Dev2.0″, which will perform re-recorded versions of Devo hits sung by 5 kid actors (including Nathan Norman). The album “Devo 2.0″ will be available in stores on March 17th, and will feature two brand new Devo songs entitled “Cyclops” and “The Winner”. One has to wonder if this whole thing was inspired by a video that made the rounds on the internet a while back featuring a group of 5th graders re-enacting the original Whip It video. Now go ahead and check out the new video for “Whip It”, directed by Gerald Casale, and performed by Dev2.0 (linked below).

Over the years we’ve seen the children of some well-respected filmmakers carry on the family name in their own way (okay, so the Coppolas are the only ones coming to mind right now…) and it looks like Jason Reitman, son of Ivan Reitman, is in the process of doing the same. A trailer has appeared online for his upcoming film “Thank You For Smoking”, and while it’s not his first time directing a movie, I believe it is his first feature film. He also wrote the screenplay, which is based on the novel by Christopher Buckley. The movie is a dark comedy about a lobbyist for “Big Tobacco” (Aaron Eckhart), who makes a deal with a Hollywood agent (Rob Lowe) to promote smoking in movies, but has second thoughts when he realizes how he must look to his young son. With a cast that also includes Robert Duvall, William H. Macy, Katie Holmes, Adam Brody, and J.K. Simmons, my interest is piqued. Thank You For Smoking premiered at the Toronto Film Festival this year and will hit theatres on March 17, 2006.

For anyone brave enough to fight Boxing Day crowds this week, there’s a handful of new DVDs on shelves including one of the best documentaries of the year (Grizzly Man), the American remake of Dark Water, the direct-to-video 4th installment of American Pie and a domestic release of Wong Kar Wai’s 2046.

Dark Water: Unrated Edition
Toy Story 2: Special Edition
American Pie Presents: Band Camp
2046
The Shield: The Complete Fourth Season
Undiscovered
Into The Blue
America’s Funniest Home Videos: The Best of Kids & Animals
Grizzly Man
Criss Angel: Mindfreak - The Complete Season One
The Twilight Zone: The Definitive Edition (Season 5)
seaQuest DSV: Season One

Nowadays, experimentation is not limited to drug use, sexuality, or science. It seems that Steven Sodergergh’s attempt at simultaneously releasing his next film ‘Bubble’ in theatres as well as on DVD and cable could make or break the future of the ENTIRE UNIVERSE. M.Night Syamalayan has spoken out against such experimentation, proclaiming it ‘Unnatural’ and ‘Playing God’. Well as Alec Baldwin said in Malice… ‘I AM GOD.’ Now here it is, the teaser trailer for Soderbergh’s BUBBLE, featuring a series of shots of doll heads. Hmmm… at first it seems confusing and pretentious, but this all changed upon reading about the plot of the film: “A murder mystery in a small economically depressed Ohio town. Starring non-professional actors from the location’s surrounding area, the film explores the romantic tragedy that unfolds in a love triangle between three workers in the town’s doll factory.” Knowing that, this is probably the coolest and goriest vision of murder without actually showing any dead bodies. Severed doll parts galore, i’m pretty excited to get to the bottom of this mystery. And i’m equally excited that i’ll be able to pick this one up on January 27th at my local DVD retailer.

Vincent Schiavelli died of lung cancer today. The droopy-eyed actor, who enhanced so many films with his presence, was one of my very favorite “hey, its that guy!” character actors you see hanging in the background of so many films. Whether it was in “One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest”, “The People Vs. Larry Flynt”, “Death to Smoochy” or one of the other approximately 150 television and movie appearances, you could always count on Vincent to be the perfect creep. He was 57.

Munich
Directed by: Steven Spielberg
Written by: George Jonas (book), Tony Kushner and Eric Roth (screenplay)
Starring: Eric Bana, Daniel Craig, Geoffrey Rush, and many more.

In my opinion, the majority of the reviews of Spielberg’s “Munich” have failed their readers. From what I’ve read, so many people are reviewing this movie’s message rather than the film. Like “Fahrenheit 9/11″ or “The Passion” before it, I think some people’s political leanings and/or allegiance to Spielberg (I love Spielberg, but well… you’ll see) is tainting the scores. “Munich” tells the tale of the 1972 massacre of the Israeli Olympic by Palestinians. A group was sent out across Europe, “unofficially”, with a list of names of people supposedly involved in the planning for them to hunt down and kill.

While there are many hailing this as a great film, Spielberg is getting nailed from all directions: Israeli groups say he is naive about terrorism, Palestinian groups are saying it doesn’t humanize them enough or show what their motives really were. There are some that instead say it is too even-handed, that Spielberg has tried too hard to please everyone. If I really had to pick, I’d go more with the latter — it seems the only message of this film is about the haunting price of revenge, that violence only creates more violence no matter who does it. I can deal with that. Neither side has exactly been angelic, and I’ve been attacked so many times for even saying so that I’ve kind of given up on even having an opinion. Did this really factor into my opinion of the film?

No. I found “Munich” to be the worst Spielberg movie I’ve seen (no, I haven’t seen Hook). It’s the least commercial, and the least watchable, and my opinion has nothing to do with politics whatsoever.

A variety of little problems were evident from the get-go. While this movie has the watchword “inspired by true events”, some characters are historical figures I don’t recognize, such as the female Prime Minister of Israel. Some way of pointing out who she was while she was on screen would have been helpful rather than finding out who she was much later. There were no location subtitles despite frequent scene changes. Many scenes feature characters speaking in foreign dialects that in my opinion should have been subtitled. The characters took off on their quest before ever being properly developed, and would fail to be adequately developed as the film progressed beyond generic ‘types’ - the hothead, the smart one, etc. The film is overly quiet and distant, and most of all, bloated, with too much time between anything happening. It feels like we were given a director’s cut DVD of a b-revenge flick that wasn’t good at a regular running length in the first place. So basically, this movie bored the holy hell out of me.

I love Spielberg, and saw this movie not because of any specific interest in the story, but because I trust him to hold my interest. Spielberg has made movies about serious subjects before, and as much as we don’t want to say it, Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan are entertaining films. “Munich” is not.

Despite a cast of people I like including Daniel Craig, Geoffrey Rush and Eric Bana, each character is stone faced and dull, with noone giving a standout performance. Eric Bana in particular is atrociously bland here. When he isn’t staring off into space with dead eyes, he’s required to go into amazingly forced crying fits. The conversations between any set of characters rarely show any passion, and most situations they find themselves in feel really phony. The only tension the entire movie has is the occasional feeling that something is going to go very wrong, because the group is very incompetent in carrying out their cold blooded revenge.

Much has been made of that violence. Yes, it is loud, realistic, and kind of exploitative. But that doesn’t really matter, since these action scenes are also incredibly repetitive, and eventually fail to even work as a tool to wake up the audience. I don’t know if we were supposed to feel all that sympathetic for either side, but some of the revenge murders are vicious enough to make me wonder just what the point was by making them so graphic. I guess this was supposed to reinforce just how nasty killing actually is - that the images can and should haunt you forever - but really all it does it make you feel less sympathetic for everyone. I eventually stopped caring what happened to any of these people, and that’s when I began praying it would end. But it kept going and going and going and going.

I found out that the script was given a run through by Tony Kushner, writer of “Angels In America”, and it is said he had an influence on the set. It shows. “Angels” is probably the one piece of media I’ve hated most of this past decade, as there hasn’t been a movie or series more boring or pretentious. Without saying what it is, there is a scene near the end of “Munich” that is so kitschy, so overblown and ridiculous, I’m sure it was Kushner’s doing.

I’m definitely not alone in my dislike of this film - I’ve got a significant roster of well known, thoughtful reviewers who also hated this movie for the technical aspects of filmmaking alone. So decide for yourself, but don’t make my mistake of going to see it just because it’s Spielberg. — Goon

Wow, what a great year for music. Maybe it’s because of the explosion of music blogs but I can’t remember the last time I heard so many new albums that excited me. It was really tough to whittle 2005 down to 10 essential releases, but I guess we came up with as good a list as any. Surprisingly, our top 10 had a lot in common with Pitchfork this year… I’m not sure if that’s good or bad.
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A trailer has turned up this weekend for the update of Wes Craven’s horror classic “The Hills Have Eyes”. The story is about a family who take a wrong turn on the way to California and get stranded in a nuclear testing area in the New Mexico desert where they are stalked by a group of deformed hill people. The original was a genre-defining piece of 70’s exploitation that had the same gritty realism as the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. A lot of people are upset that this is being remade, but unlike the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake I think this has potential as it is being directed by Alexandre Aja (High Tension), who is clearly not pulling any punches here. The MPAA handed out an NC-17 rating to the first cut of the film, reportedly because of a 10 minute trailer attack scene that is “very intense” and plays out much longer than the original. The Hills Have Eyes remake hits theatres on March 10th, 2006.