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BMW Bubble Car… old school ad animation

Watching David Lynch is good for our brains

According to research by psychologists at UC Santa Barbara and the University of British Columbia, exposure to the surrealism in, say, Kafka's "The Country Doctor" or Lynch's "Blue Velvet" enhances the cognitive mechanisms that oversee implicit learning functions.

They call it "meaning threat", and say it motivates us to reach outside our comfort zones to manufacture meaning and sense. It makes us work harder... which is, apparently, a good habit to get into.

Top 100 foreign-language films

Film (in fact, arts) blogger Edward Copeland balloted experts, fans, readers for a list of their favourite foreign-language films. Nothing more recent than 2002 was eligible, and they had to be dramas (rather than documentaries) and feature-length. He's counted up, created a list of one hundred and - if you like lists - it's a good read. The top ten (starting at 10, and counting down, Top Of The Pops-style):

• The 400 Blows
• The Battle of Algiers
• Aguirre, The Wrath of God
• Grand Illusion
• Persona
• Bicycle Thieves
• 8½
• M
• The Seven Samurai
• The Rules of the Game

See the whole list here.

Spike Lee to judge online film festival

According to this in Variety he's using his Venice time to promote Babelgum, a Joost-style TV-over-IP service that's positioning itself at the quality-end of broadcasting by launching a film fest for high-end short films. Lee will be judging, and Babelgum appears to be walking the difficult fine line between Web 2.0 democratisation and trash. Babelgum insist they're not in the user-generated content business and their rules for submission even specify a short needs to have been shown at a bona fide realtime festival to qualify for the online festival (although Spike Lee has apparently made noises about having this changed). Submissions are open from September 15 to February 15. Online viewers will vote through the first selection, before Spike Lee and other jurors take over. Meanwhile Babelgum's showing material from the Rushes Soho Shorts Festival. Can't comment on content since it's Windows XP-only and guess what? I'm on a Mac.

On adaptation

For a number of different reasons, I've been thinking a lot about the nature of adapting novels into screenplays recently, and came across an interesting piece by Jeremy Leven, whose credits include THE TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE and THE LEGEND OF BAGGER VANCE. If you're interested in the challenge of moving narrative from page to screen, you'll find the piece here.

Jeremy Paxman "should be taken out and shot"

The words of outraged British film director Stephen Frears, spoken during a film-making masterclass in Edinburgh, and sparked off, apparently, by an exchange between director Richard Eyre and Paxman aired shortly after Ingmar Bergman's death. From the Times:

In the Newsnight interview, the theatre and film director Eyre had said that he judged Bergman to be one of the three or four greatest artists of the 20th century, prompting a withering response from Paxman: “He wasn’t exactly box office.”

A stupid comment? Possible. Standard journalistic devil's advocate aimed at getting the best out of an interviewee? Well, that's possible, too. And if Paxman was simply doing the interview equivalent of playing Eyre's straight man, then he might feel a little aggrieved at Frears' outburst. Who knows? But ten out of ten for Frears' (who directed THE QUEEN), for this:

“I wish he had taken me on,” said Frears. “I would have asked him what his book on the Queen grossed. Or indeed how he would justify Newsnight in the age of Blockbuster video.”

Movie mashup mayhem

In today's Times, I talk to PR guru Steve Rubel (of Microspersuasion), film critic Mark Bell (of FilmThreat.com) and gifted film editor Mike Hindes... the man behind the amazing Toy Story 2: Requiem trailer mashup. The mashup - the combination of one film trailer with footage or sound from another - is an interesting area right now - and rapidly turning from renegade art form to essential marketing feature for the studios. The piece has just gone online, here.