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The War On Twitter
"Just noticed Twitter keeps prompting me to "Add a location to your tweets". Not falling for that one."
I'm loving the official Al Qaeda Twitter page (unverified).
2nd Oct 2010 - Add Comment - Tweet
RIP Stephen J Cannell
RIP 80's TV uber-producer Stephen J. Cannell, who has just passed away - most likely after seeing the big screen adaptation of his show the A-Team. His production company logo is a staple of childhood TV.
Via AICN
2nd Oct 2010 - Add Comment - Tweet
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Promo Promo: Misunderstanding
Another slice of literal translation into video form, with Phil Collins having some kind of Misunderstanding in 1980's LA. It's now a nostalgia piece, featuring a bearded, Hawaiian-shirt-wearing Phil singing in the rain down a telephone, plus many sites of LA - including the demolished drive-in where DeNiro and his gang had a shootout in Heat.
28th Sep 2010 - Add Comment - Tweet
Promo Promo: Everyday Is Like Sunday
Morrissey's classic single Everyday Is Like Sunday is back on the digital record shelves today, in support of the upcoming Bona Drag re-issue. So, here's the classic video that accompanies the track - featuring a literal depiction of nearly every line in the song, with added walkman-sporting-moody-teenager and freeze frame ending. Love it.
27th Sep 2010 - Add Comment - Tweet
Song Of The Day: Love Is In The ICA
A special Team Chimpomatic shout-out to Mr & Mrs CSF...
24th Sep 2010 - Add Comment - Tweet
Congratulations CSF
Congratulations to Editor-In-Chief CSF who gets married today. The Chimps are looking forward to some "eat/drink/be merry" action. All the best from the team and the readers of Chimpomatic.com
24th Sep 2010 - Add Comment - Tweet
True Mud: Sesame Street Takes A Bite Out Of True Blood
do they expect their target audience (you know, 5 year-olds) to get it?! Love the Lafayette dude who walks past at the start
23rd Sep 2010 - 1 comments - Add Comment - Tweet
RIP Leonard Skinner (aka Lynyrd Skynyrd)
the PE teacher who inspired Lynyrd Skynyrd to come up with their name (after telling them to cut their hair in high school) has died...
22nd Sep 2010 - Add Comment - Tweet
Matthew Herbert's One Club Launch
Wednesday 22nd September at the Hoxton Bar and Kitchen, (with special guest support from Rowdy Superst*r).
17th Sep 2010 - Add Comment - Tweet
Trailer park: Back to Back To The Future
Back to the Future is getting a re-releases in UK cinemas next month, in honour of its 25th Anniversary. It's a digital print, re-mastered especially for the upcoming Blu-Ray release by the sound of it - and it has been described as 'breathtaking' by writer/producer Bob Gale. Need I say more?
Via AICN
10th Sep 2010 - Add Comment - Tweet
Ad Nauseum: Ikea's Cats w Mara Carlyle
New Ikea cats ad soundtracked by the lovely mara carlyle.
10th Sep 2010 - Add Comment - Tweet
Blade Runner revisited
for all of you who thought you were Blade Runner fans... an intense re-edit from François Vautier:
"An experimental film in tribute to Ridley Scott's legendary film Blade Runner (1982)
This film was made as a unique picture with a resolution of 60.000 x 60.000 pixels (3.6 gigapixels) It was made with 167,819 frames from Blade Runner."
10th Sep 2010 - Add Comment - Tweet
NYT v Murdoch SharkMan!
Taiwan's news animators do it again. wish all news was like this
10th Sep 2010 - 1 comments - Add Comment - Tweet
Viral Exorcism
Check out this clever/creepy viral promotion for The Last Exorcism. The viral played on the potentially dirty minds of users of Chat Roulette - a webcam site that hooks you up with a random other user...
8th Sep 2010 - Add Comment - Tweet
Come Around Sundown
Those Kings of Leon are nothing if not productive. In between their never-ending London gigs, they still manage to record new albums. Come Around Sundown is due on October 18th, first single Radioactive should be hitting the radio waves today.
The identity crisis continues however. That's the US cover above, UK below.
8th Sep 2010 - Add Comment - Tweet
Promo Promo: The Hair Song
Black Mountain may be edging towards the mainstream with their release of new album Wilderness Heart, with their recent Jimmy Fallon appearance heading the charge.
They are now filming promos with actors and everything.... though the 'boy meets girl and watches Black Mountain in ruins vibe' is still keeping it real. Or was it all in his mind?
7th Sep 2010 - Add Comment - Tweet
MosKeyTo
Check out this tiny USB drive - so small you can leave it plugged in all the time without worrying about it catching the cat's tail as it cruises by the sofa. Available in up to 16GB sizes.
7th Sep 2010 - Add Comment - Tweet
Steve Albini Speaks
Steve Albini is perhaps one of only a few musicians who could challenge Jeff Tweedy at an open mic night at the Stand Up Comedy Club. Great interview over at VBS.tv showcasing his many unique viewpoints on music and more.
Via Sound Theory
Also, check out two previous Albini classics:
Steve Albini Has A Problem With Music
6th Sep 2010 - Add Comment - Tweet
Crowdsourced Radiohead
Nice fan-made Radiohead concert up at YouTube, filmed in Prague by 50 fans armed with HD Flip pocket cameras. Radiohead liked the project so much, they donated the soundboard recording for added fidelity....
3rd Sep 2010 - Add Comment - Tweet
Detective Twitter
Following her arrest for drug possession, Paris Hilton claimed that the purse with the drugs in wasn't hers - but an archived post on her own Twitter feed suggests otherwise.... Gawker has the details.
3rd Sep 2010 - Add Comment - Tweet
Pingu iTunes 10
anyone annoyed by the new "Album By Artist" heading in iTunes Pingu can turn it off under View > As List
and PS, no iTunes, I don't want to follow Lady Gaga or Yo-Yo Ma. thanks
PS2: anyone worked out how to turn the colours back on?
3rd Sep 2010 - Add Comment - Tweet
Promo Promo: Arcade Fire - The Wilderness Downtown
taking pop videos to a whole new level thanks to some HTML5, Arcade Fire's latest interacts with your home town address for a personalised (ish) experience
#chimp71
#Music
#PromoPromo
#Tech
2nd Sep 2010 - 2 comments - Add Comment - Tweet
Black Mountain v Jimmy Fallon
Old Fangs, live on US TV. can't wait to see these guys again.
2nd Sep 2010 - Add Comment - Tweet
Apple TV 2
Apple's Apple TV product is getting a re-vamp in an attempt to kick start sales of the under-appreciated device. For starters it's now only £99, but the main drive of the redesigned model is in its simplification. By dropping the hard drive, it's now essentially a simple way of streaming content from your Mac/iPad/iPhone onto your HDTV.
2nd Sep 2010 - Add Comment - Tweet
CSI: CSNY
CSI: CSNY "When veteran TV producer Larry Bruckheimer went looking for a new angle for his smoking hot CSI: Crime Scene Investigation franchise he had no idea it would be this good.
After meeting with the members of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young to discuss using some of their music in a future episode, Bruckheimer was surprised when he learned that the Grammy Award winning artists were not only huge CSI fans, but were also all licensed private detectives.
Bruckheimer's creative juices started to boil over. He had an idea."
1st Sep 2010 - Add Comment - Tweet
Trailer Park: Drew - The Man Behind The Poster
interesting looking doc about Drew Struzan, film poster artist
31st Aug 2010 - Add Comment - Tweet
Unseen Mickey Mouse
Interesting article over at AICN featuring an unfinished Mickey Mouse cartoon that was shelved for being an awkward length (6m 52), followed by an open letter from Harry to Pixar's John Lasseter with a plea to finish it - along with other hidden treasures in the Disney archive.
31st Aug 2010 - Add Comment - Tweet
The robots are coming
more advances in the world of Cylon-style robotics
30th Aug 2010 - Add Comment - Tweet
RIP Corrine Day
Sad news that photographer Corrine Day has passed away.
#CSF
#CurrentAffairs
#Photography
28th Aug 2010 - Add Comment - Tweet
Trailer Park: 127 Hours
Exciting trailer up for the new Danny Boyle movie 127 Hours, with the ever enigmatic James Franco.
25th Aug 2010 - Add Comment - Tweet
Rubicon coming to BBC4
BBC4's autumn schedule includes AMC's new 70- style conspiracy thriller Rubicon - heavily influenced by The Conversation, Three Days Of The Condor and other all-time chimp-paraonia classics apparently. looking forward to this one.
25th Aug 2010 - Add Comment - Tweet
The Great Lost Squirrel Baby Mystery
well, some discrepancies over the prop on sale at the recent Lost auction anyhow... via wired
23rd Aug 2010 - Add Comment - Tweet
Promo Promo: Ratatat - Drugs
great video by Carl Burgess, great piece over at Creative Review on the making of - all taken from found footage in the Getty Archive
20th Aug 2010 - Add Comment - Tweet
Cineroleum
new pop up cinema in disused Clerkenwell petrol station nice idea.
20th Aug 2010 - Add Comment - Tweet
Promo Promo: Cloudbusting
Stellar slice of epic 80's promo action for Kate Bush's hit Cloudbusting. Terry Gilliam conceived the clip, Julian Doyle directed and Donald Sutherland stars. I remember this one getting a screening in the cinema before a feature in 1985, which would make BTTF a contender for the feature.
19th Aug 2010 - Add Comment - Tweet
Trailer Park: Monsters
Monsters is picking up a lot of buzz recently for it's old-school shocks and clever premise - aliens arrived back on a NASA probe and have been mutating and growing for 6 years.
The movie is a firt-time directorial effort from effects man Gareth Edwards. It's not quite on the same clever-with-the-budget page as Panic Attack, 28 Days Later or Blair Witch, looking more like a low(er) budget version of Cloverfield or even the Dawn of the Dead remake, but certainly attention worhty.
Via Empire
17th Aug 2010 - Add Comment - Tweet
Young Neil
More Neil Young Archives are on the way, but maybe don't get your hopes up just yet as Volume 1 took years to materialise. Volume 2 promises three lost studio albums from the 70's: Homegrown and Chrome Dreams, plus Oceanside-Countryside - which I've never even heard of.
No mention of uber-classic Time Fades Away, which would certainly be covered in this period - although Wikipedia mentions Time Fades Away II, from the same period.
Details on Neilyoung.com, via Soundr.
16th Aug 2010 - Add Comment - Tweet
May The $$$ Be With You
In possibly the first bit of exciting Star Wars news for 10 years, Darth Lucas has announced that the original trilogy will be released on Blu-ray in Fall 2011.
The unaltered original trilogy is now being referred to as the 'classic trilogy' by Lucas, in a not dissimilar way to how Coke back-pedalled out of their new recipe fiasco in the 80's. He has previously put them down as 'workprints' for the eventual grand-vision cartoony versions he released in the 90's and re-tweaked in the 00's.
Of course it was obvious that he would re-jig the films back to their 'classic' state at some point, so if the franchise hasn't been poisoned for you too much this may hopefully be the first time you can get the original films in any kind of decent format. Or more decent than the 90's Laserdisc box at least.
All this info is coming from the Star Wars Celebration V convention being held this weekend, which is providing all sorts of tidbits, articles, links and clips:
- Great article about producer Gary Kurtz vision for a darker Return of the Jedi
- Great Today Show footage from 1980 with Mark Hamill, plus Harrison Ford discussing how much he likes Empire.
- Revelation that Harrison Ford has only seen Empire once.
There was also a screening of one of several deleted scenes that will appear on the Blu-Ray as bonus material. The originally planned opening for ROTJ (below) shows Luke receiving bad vibes from Vadar, while building his own lightsaber and hiding it inside R2D2 - a trick that paid off later in the film. Back when kids couldn't watch the films whenever they wanted I was sure this was the opening to the film - probably as it was in the novelization of the film that I had as an 8-year-old geek. The same goes for Luke watching the space battle at the start of Star Wars through his binoculars.
Nearly all via La Times or AICN
UPDATE: Woodward & Bernstein might suggest a second source on this. AICN is talking original, original trilogy. No one else is that specific. Lucas just talks about the 'highest picture and audio quality' and how the old versions needed a lot of re-mastering, but StarWars.com doesn't actually specify if Han shoots first.... Whatever. Pick 'em up in the 2012 HMV Biggest Summer Sale Ever.
15th Aug 2010 - Add Comment - Tweet
Promo Promo: The Postal Service
Loving the love-in-the-microchip-factory vibe of this video for Such Great Heights by The Postal Service from back in 2003. Bands of this size just don't get MTV-Ready videos like this any more.
13th Aug 2010 - Add Comment - Tweet
Phone Sex
iPhone users get laid more. And that's a fact. Apparently.
12th Aug 2010 - Add Comment - Tweet
Re-Branded
Lovely video up from creative agency Johnson Banks to document their re-branding of Virgin Atlantic;s fleet. Doesn't look like the cleanest place to work, but the results are certainly shiny.
Via Brand New
11th Aug 2010 - Add Comment - Tweet
Hurley Burly
Weezer are out of their major-label contract and are now signed to Epitaph. Surely this means they have just been fulfilling their obligations to the label for the last 2+ albums and will now return to Pinketon-era awesomeness.
Their new album is already ready to drop on September 14th and it's called Hurley, not unlike the now-famous fat bloke off that TV show Lost. Uh oh, maybe this doesn't bode well, as the cover is that fat block from Lost, cropped from a photo of Jorge Garcia and Rivers Cuomo. Irony doesn't even abound.
10th Aug 2010 - Add Comment - Tweet
Devour
Devour.com is an attempt to curate YouTube, getting rids of the dancing cats and just leaving the fancy stuff. Not bad, if a little snooty.
6th Aug 2010 - Add Comment - Tweet
Expendable
Sly Stallone's certainly pulling out all the stops on the PR machine for The Expendables. Check out their amusing custom YouTube page.
Here's the trailer again. In classic 80's style I'll be renting the VHS of this one.
4th Aug 2010 - Add Comment - Tweet
H.B.O.V.A.
Forget watching any HBO shows legally in the UK unless you've got satellite. Sky has snapped up all of HBO's current and past output, which will become exclusive to the pay-TV channel as current deals expire - for the next 5 years at least.
Scorsese's upcoming Boardwalk Empire looks like a future highlight for the channel, as well as the return of Curb and Bored to Death, but with ITV failing to renew their deal on Entourage and Treme failing to be picked up by anyone yet, Sky is going to be the place you have to go.
With Sky also rolling out their video-on-demand system this looks like a Monopoly-power-play move to add more value to their offering, as they push past the 10,000,000 subscriber mark.
29th Jul 2010 - 1 comments - Add Comment - Tweet
Superchunk
Arch indie slackers Superchunk are back in business after a near 10-year hiatus. Not that thye've been sitting around - Laura Ballance and Mac McCaughan are the honchos of @Merge Records
"Majesty Shredding telescopes two decades into 41 indelible, action-packed minutes. It is the sound of youthful exuberance fine-tuned with grown-up confidence."
Sold. As long as they play Slack Motherfucker on tour.
Pre-order here. Majesty Shredding is out October 4th.
28th Jul 2010 - Add Comment - Tweet
BBC Apps
The BBC has finally got the nod from its Trust to release its highly praised iPad/iPhone Apps. The BBC News app has been available in the US for a while, but had not been available in the UK. That's in the App Store now. BBC iPlayer and Sport apps to follow...
Via BBC (who else?)
23rd Jul 2010 - Add Comment - Tweet
This Is England '86
Interesting sequel concept from Shane Meadows - a TV series follow-up to his excellent movie This Is England, set a few years later with the same actors reprising their roles. No big deal maybe, except that star-of-the-show Thomas Turgoose was only 13 in the original and now he's 17. See Channel 4's site for more info.
Although that's got nothing on Richard Linklater's forthcoming movie, which has been 12 years in the making....
23rd Jul 2010 - Add Comment - Tweet
Film A Day In Your Life
Ridley Scott is flexing his advertainment muscles again, this time with the help of Kevin MacDonald for an LG-Sponsored project with YouTube: LIFE IN A DAY.
It's a pretty neat and simple concept - film your day and the 'most compelling and distinctive footage' will be assembled into a film documenting 24 hours on Earth, which is slated to be screened at The Sundance Film Festival. Not bad.
The only problem is what to do during your day in order to make it into this crowd-sourced Koyaanisqatsi. I had a day in front of the TV pencilled in, but that isn't going to impress anybody. I just might have to fake doing something interesting.
Some FAQs here.
#CSF
#AdNauseum
#CurrentAffairs
#Film
22nd Jul 2010 - Add Comment - Tweet