The long-awaited follow-up to Fernando Meirelles’s 2002 Brazilian crime thriller, City of God, opens in about 75 theaters nationwide today. Cinematical has a full review of the film,” which is mostly positive.

A few excerpts: “Though City of Men is far less violent and shocking than City of God, it does feature its share of action…However, City of Men is neither as stylistically fresh nor as powerfully raw as City of God.”

The trailer is below.

Improv Everywhere is at it again this week with another agonizingly cute “flash mob”-style public stunt. This time, they’re targeting Starbucks laptop users and imitating them, as IO “agents” haul their old desktop computers from home into the coffee shop and use them as if they were laptops (one girl even goes as far as to prop the clunky monitor on her while using it).

Towards the end, they interview one particularly troubled patron who isn’t in on the joke: “They’re schlepping!” he says with a sense of bewilderment. “But what is the benefit, though — I don’t get it. The most that can happen, what is it — you save electricity? But that’s, like, minuscule.”

Ok, this week we’re on a bit of a music video kick, so check out this cool animation to Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good”. It was created by visual arts student Tamara Connolly for a class assignment in Adobe After Effects. According to Tamara, “the assignment was to create a music video using just type and typographic elements in black and white”. I give it an A+!

We’ve been going a little overboard with the Obama coverage today, but this video from Slate V’s Torie Bosch is too good to resist. Bosch shows some striking similarities between Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and the fictional campaign of Matt Santos (Jimmy Smits) on The West Wing. Bosch isn’t the first to note the similarity; Politico’s Jamal Simmons wrote basically the same thing last week, but it’s a bit more compelling to see the clips of Obama and Santos side-by-side.

Turns out, not only were Obama’s advisers paying attention to The West Wing, they were helping to craft the plot. David Axelrod had even consulted with West Wing writer Eli Attie while working on Obama’s 2004 senate campaign, and Attie later admitted that Obama directly shaped the Santos character. Continue Reading…

Entertainment Tonight took a break from stalking Britney Spears to do an exclusive interview with Barack Obama that aired last night.

The Illinois senator chewed the fat with Jann Carl, and they talked about Michelle (”she’s a stylish person, and she’s tall and elegant”), his fave movies (The Godfather, Lawrence of Arabia), and he even picked out the actor that he would want to play him in a biopic: Will Smith.

‘‘Will and I have talked about this; because he has the ears, he might have an inside track on the role,’’ Obama explained. “He’s better looking than me, but we both have those,” he said, as he tugged on one of his ears with his index finger.

And to play Michelle? “Oh, nobody’s that beautiful — she’d have to play herself,” Obama said without hesitating.” Carl responded, shaking her head: “You are good; you are really good.” Continue Reading…

If you’ve ever wanted to play rock star (or sound engineer for that matter), the Montreal-based indie rock band Arcade Fire lets you take a crack at it with their interactive music video “Black Mirror“. The surreal and dramatic video, which was directed by Olivier Groulx and Tracy Maurice, allows visitors to create their own mix of the song in real time by toggling the numbers 1-6 on their keyboard. Of course, no matter which combination of tracks you choose, the sound and images remain gorgeous. [A little hint: Hit the space bar for an unusual “negative” effect!]
And if you can’t get enough, check out Arcade Fire’s other interactive music video Neon Bible.

Special thanks to Matt W. for the tip!

Produced by Hassan S. Ali

Comic book nerds rejoice: This year’s convention season is finally under way. And in Chicago, that means yet another year of Wizard World.

It’s the second largest comic convention in the country, and last year, we got in on the action.

YouTube service was restored to Pakistan this morning after a turbulent 48 hours in which a government-imposed YouTube ban caused an accidental worldwide shutdown on Sunday night.

The New York Times is reporting that Pakistan “lifted its restrictions on its citizens’ access to YouTube after a video that it deemed blasphemous was removed,” although it’s unclear whether YouTube pulled them in Pakistan only, or if they are supposed to be off the site entirely. Either way, those videos are going to be hard to suppress (they can be found here and here).

We’re not certain that those two are the culprits, but the second one certainly fits the AP’s description: Continue Reading…

Have you ever wondered what goes on in an artist’s studio before any work is shown to an audience? Painter and video artist Cherly Donegan addresses this very question in her interactive web project, “Studio Visit” (see link below) - a collage of images, sound and animation that lets us glimpse her creative space, albeit a virtual one. The site is part of the Dia Art Foundation’s artists’ web projects and was launched with the intentional use of low tech web devices such as gif animations, frames, refreshes, and mouse-overs. With colorful images like detergent bottles and multiplying fingerprints, Donegan’s quirky and playful web project is definitely worth a visit: http://www.diacenter.org/donegan/home.html

This week, two different storylines have emerged in the convergence of web TV and traditional television drama. One is a classic tale of redemption and overcoming the odds, while the other is the story of an anachronistic TV dinosaur’s tragic fall (sort of).

On the one side, there’s the hugely successful (and over-hyped) web series — Quarterlife — that will make history when it premieres tonight on NBC. It will be the first web TV series to make the leap from the internet to primetime television, and in doing so, it will be converted from eight minute “webisodes” to a full hour-long program.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, though, there’s HBO’s In Treatment, which might actually be HBO’s least popular show ever. In an attempt to breath some life into the show’s feeble ratings, HBO started airing the first 15 episodes of the show in YouTube, for free. Continue Reading…