Italian band I Cani has produced a music video inspired by the movies of Wes Anderson:
For the video, Lumaca decided to build a story around the concept. “I thought of people suffering from a disease that leads them to believe they are the protagonists of his motion pictures,” he says. “The band liked the idea and I was able to make it.”
Patients affected by the strange disease include a boy who thinks he’s Rushmore‘s Max Fisher, three members of the Royal Tenenbaums family, Steve Zissou, the three brothers who rode The Darjeeling Limited, the star-crossed lovers of this year’s Moonrise Kingdom, and even Fantastic Mr. Fox.
Though apparently not a fan of Bottle Rocket, Lumaca managed to nail some of the key style choices, the symmetrical perspective of shooting, and the color palette that are all Andersonian trademarks. He knew the filmmaker’s work well enough not to have to re-watch the whole back catalog again before filming, but there is one of his movies Lumaca wishes he had seen first, however. “I had to improvise the Moonrise Kingdom scene based on the trailer,” he says, “because the film won’t be released in Italy until December.”
Grantland‘s Brian Phillips just stole my thoughts on Felix Baumgartner’s truly incredible space jump:
A hundred years ago, before we took it for granted that we could all live on the moon if Congress would only raise taxes, a large public cared intensely about speed records, air races, parachutists, and feats of aerial daring. The morning newspaper brought the results of the latest sensational exploits. At the start of the 1911 Paris-to-Madrid air race, during which Louis Train crashed his monoplane into the prime minister of France, hundreds of thousands of people turned out just to watch the fliers take off. When Charles Lindbergh landed at Le Bourget Airport after flying from New York to Paris, navigating by the stars, the crowd pulled him out of the cockpit and carried him over their heads for half an hour. It was the era of zeppelins and astonishment. Flight, which had been a crazy dream for nearly all of human history, was suddenly something we could do. The fascination with stunts and records was partly scientific: In the same way that gaps on the map were filled in by intrepid individual explorers, our sense of what was possible in navigating the sky would be defined by solo daredevils, inventors, and balloonists. But it was partly born of wonder: Each new accomplishment was a fresh reminder that people could fly.
128,000 feet is: the stratosphere. I mean literally.
Maybe the most incredible thing about Baumgartner’s jump was not that he did it successfully but that, for a short while, he brought the world back to that old daredevil wonder. Yes, he was sponsored by Red Bull and broadcast live on YouTube, but that’s actually kind of the point: He pushed the limits of human flight so far that he made the whole Internet remember that flight is like magic. He took social media’s constant search for the next big distraction and funneled it into old-fashioned amazement. In that way, his jump resembled the landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars in August. But where the NASA mission recalled the popular-scientific inquisitiveness of an earlier era of flight, the response to Baumgartner echoed the other part of the equation: the sense of purposeless glee people felt at the sight of a brave deed splendidly done. Baumgartner’s jump might lead to some scientific progress, in the form of space suit advances and so forth. But that’s not why we were all memorizing the numbers and freaking out when his visor fogged up and tweeting about every second of the fall.
128,000 feet is: a record that exists for no reason, and therefore one of the best reasons of all.
One of the fascinating aspects of the three debates so far (two presidential, and one vice presidential) has been to watch how the candidates have handled their alleged vulnerabilities. In each debate, one or both of the candidates had a significant weakness or flaw that was ripe to be exploited by his opponent.
The thing is, everyone knew this. And that means the candidates — and more importantly, their debate prep teams — knew this even better. So perhaps it should come as no surprise that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, the candidates have had some of their strongest moments on issues that were expected to trip them up.
In the above video, President Obama takes Mitt Romney to task for his criticism regarding the consulate attack in Benghazi, leaving the former Massachusetts governor flailing a bit in his response. This was supposed to be Romney’s trump card, and Obama — who had clearly been waiting to respond to this — instead turned it into perhaps his strongest moment of the night.
We saw similar dynamics during the vice presidential debate. Most expected Joe Biden to dominate Paul Ryan on foreign policy and for the opposite to occur in relation to Medicare. But in truth, something a little closer to the opposite took place: Ryan opened fire very early on regarding the attack in Libya, leaving Biden to issue a less than reassuring rebuttal about America’s resolve. Meanwhile, Biden proved perhaps more convincing on Medicare than Ryan did, never allowing the Congressman to drag the conversation into the weeds.
In the first presidential debate, the largest elephant in the room was Mitt Romney’s 47% comment, which Obama — in his dazed and confused performance that night — never managed to bring up. But assuredly Romney had a response all cued up beforehand for that as well. (Interestingly, Obama managed to work in a reference to the 47% issue on the last question of last night’s debate, a phenomenal tactical move that denied Romney the chance to use a prepackaged and rehearsed rebuttal.)
As the upcoming final debate next Monday is on foreign policy, technically the subject should be moving back onto Obama’s turf. But if there’s anything these first three debates have taught us (other than the enormous versatility of the common binder), it’s that waiting to pounce on your opponent’s weakest point does not always pay dividends.
Instead of simply live-blogging the presidential debate, I hope to live-tweet it. But they won’t be my tweets (or at least, not primarily): instead, I’ll be updating the blog post with the best tweets from around the Internet (or at least, from my Twitter feed).
I’m doing this because my viewing experience for the vice presidential debate last week was significant enhanced by the collective humor of the Internet hive mind. Thus, why not share that experience with all of you?
(Disclaimer: There’s a very good chance I won’t be able to do this because of work-related or other distractions — in which case please ignore all of the above.)
However overhyped you think Tuesday’s presidential debate is, the real cold hard truth is that it cannot be hyped enough. The stakes are impossibly high—not just for who gets to be the most powerful person on Earth, but also for the people who get paid to talk about the most powerful person on Earth, which is a powerful though considerably lesser position.
Just try imagining the stakes right now. Are you thinking about the stakes? They’re really high, right? Like these are some of the highest stakes you’ve ever seen. Well scratch that. It’s an optical illusion. The stakes are actually even higher. Unimaginably high stakes even in your imagination. These stakes might be so high they’re overwhelming.
Later:
Combatant: The media’s Drama Club
Mission: The opposite of the “everything sucks” caucus — the drama club must say this matters immensely. Members must have the most extreme reaction to debate, and make the most concrete prediction based on it — an extremely dangerous move because you could be proven wrong in just a few weeks.
Strategy: Express your shock and horror that the debate was the most indisputably consequential moment in the presidential election for your candidate — because he blew it. The Daily Beast’s Andrew Sullivan had a widely-noticed freakout after the first debate. He’s already previewing an eruption following tonight’s that could rival the first. “The ground Obama has lost in Oct. is vast, underscored by new #s on lost female voters. Everything hinges on tonight,” he tweets. Variant: Express rapturous joy at your guy’s victory. WARNING: Joy must be rapturous for your reaction to get attention, since it’s expected you’ll be biased toward thinking your team’s awesome.
Courtesy of Thomas Peterffy, founder and CEO of Interactive Brokers, who’s spending millions to run a new political ad warning against socialism in the United States (and thus endorsing Mitt Romney). He intended it to run in swing states only, but I just saw it on CNN in New York, so he appears to misunderstand the concept of geotargeting as badly as he does socialism.
Anyway, here’s the spot. Watch it and weep, or laugh, or whatever it is you do when you see ridiculous things:
