Archive for ‘We love’

How to Be Alone is the first film from writer/director Kate Trefry, who worked on Stranger Things. It’s a horror/psych thriller short. Via Short of the Week:

How to be Alone, the directorial debut from Stranger Things staff writer and Blacklist-honored scribe Kate Trefry, is one of those kinds of film—horror in form, but psychological thriller in theme. It’s a very personal kind of horror, one that turns the neat trick of transplanting a woman’s interior anxieties into the real world—mental demons brought to life. It isn’t particularly scary per se, though it is a gorgeous film filled with incredibly creepy imagery, but instead it shines as a thoughtful character examination of a young woman in a crisis of identity. Artfully borrowing from touchstone classics, the short bridges the classic horror archetypes of the “final girl” and the “dysfunctional mother” as these warring identities collide on the battlefield of her own neuroses, allowing for a fascinating interplay between victim and badass warrior—a rich characterization that does not have to submit wholly to either.

The Dead Don’t Die is a promising-looking zombie survival apocalypse film with a lot of deadpan humour, starring Adam Driver and Bill Murray. Via Ars Technica:

The peaceful town of Centerville finds itself battling a zombie horde as the dead start rising from their graves in the first trailer for The Dead Don’t Die, director Jim Jarmusch’s deadpan foray into the zombie-comedy genre.

It’s an interesting new direction for Jarmusch, but based on the trailer, the genre is tailor-made for his idiosyncratic style and deadpan wit. His career took off in 1984 with his first major film, Stranger Than Paradise. Shot entirely in black-and-white (a signature of the director’s early work), the film won the Caméra D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival that year and established the director as a darling of arthouse cinema.

Movies like Dead Man, Mystery Train, Down by Law, Night on Earth, and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai further cemented his auteur status. In 2005, Jarmusch won the Grand Prix at Cannes for Broken Flowers, which starred Bill Murray as middle-aged man searching for the mother of the son he never met. And Jarmusch is no stranger to unusual takes on traditional horror stories, as evidenced by his 2013 “crypto-vampire love story,” Only Lovers Left Alive.

Game of Thrones has been upping its publicity ante, this time with a huge water display in Las Vegas, at the Bellagio casino-resort. Via SFGate:

Fire-breathing dragons held court over the world-famous fountains at the Bellagio casino-resort Sunday, as familiar elements from the TV phenomenon “Game of Thrones” were projected on the rising water. The jets danced to a score incorporating the recognizable theme song before one of the colossal beasts lit up the lake along the Las Vegas Strip in a blaze of pyrotechnics.

The 3½-minute spectacle that left a crowd of onlookers cheering debuted two weeks ahead of the scheduled premiere of the HBO fantasy series’ final season.

The streaming water formed the show’s iconic throne and crown. A towering 800-foot-long (244-meter) wall of water emerged from the lake.

The display, however, intentionally did not reveal any elements of the new season.

“We didn’t just want to portray literally scenes from ‘Game of Thrones’ here, not like a teaser or a preview of season eight,” said Mark Fuller, CEO of WET Design, the company that created the fountains and show. “We want to bring you the emotion.” At the heart of the fountain show is the giant wall of water. It represents the ice wall that defines the TV show, but also serves as a surface onto which the creators project falling snow, the series’ logo and the silhouettes of the dragons breathing orange and blue flames.

The company worked with the series’ composer Ramin Djawadi to create a special score that along with the dancing water aimed to capture the excitement of the TV hit.

The fountain show begins by dropping musical hints of the TV series, using Djawadi’s “Winter is Here” from the seventh season. It comes to full force as the show’s recognizable “Main Titles” theme song comes on.

Starting April 1st (No, it’s not an April Fool’s joke), Burger King will be selling the Impossible Whopper, which is plant-based. Via Vox:

Plant-based meat just went mainstream.

Starting April 1, Burger King is selling a new kind of Whopper that it claims is identical in taste to its traditional beef patty, with just one difference: It contains zero beef.

No, that’s not an April Fools’ joke (though some people, including in the Vox newsroom, wondered if it might be).

The new beefless burger is a partnership with the startup company Impossible Foods, which will supply patties made with heme, a protein cultivated from soybean roots that mimics the texture of meat — convincingly, by the sounds of it.

“People on my team who know the Whopper inside and out, they try it and they struggle to differentiate which one is which,” Fernando Machado, Burger King’s chief marketing officer, told the New York Times. This is a huge deal for those who want to see meat alternatives replace actual meat because of concerns over animal cruelty or climate change. If this scales up, it could help save hundreds of thousands of animals from suffering on factory farms, and it could fight global warming by reducing the number of methane-producing cattle. It could also combat other problems like antibiotic resistance.

This Wind in the Willows trailer is actually a Wildlife Trusts environmental PSA, featuring VO work from Sir David Attenborough and Stephen Fry. Via the Drum:

Sir David Attenborough, Stephen Fry, Catherine Tate, Alison Steadman and Asim Chaudhry star in The Wildlife Trusts’ Wind in the Willows campaign that aims to stop the rapid depletion of the UK’s natural landscape.

The UK’s countryside told a far different tale when Kenneth Grahame wrote The Wind in the Willows over a100 years ago.

Since Grahame put pen to paper, a bewildering 97% of lowland meadows and the wildflowers, insects, mammals and birds they supported have completely disappeared, while 80% of purple heathlands have vanished – along with the blaeberries, sand lizards and nightjars that grew and frequented within them.

To raise awareness of the plight of the UK countryside, The Wildlife Trusts and Don’t Panic have pulled together the star-studded cast for a Wind in the Willows trailer that calls for a wilder future.

The film opens within the world of Wind in the Willows. Thick with foliage and fresh with wildflowers; a snoozing Ratty gently floats along the steam in his little wooden boat.

Produced in the manner of a movie trailer, the opening reads: “This Spring, it’s time to go back to the riverbank” and a montage of familiar earthly scenes unfold, featuring our favourite wildlife quartet: Badger, Ratty, Mole and Toad.