I’ve featured Nelson Boles’s work before, specifically his trailer for non-existent film Orfeu. His newest is called, simply, Little Boat and features the same painterly style that I find so endearing about his work. Little Boat is also far more minimalist than Orfeu, something he uses to great effect. Beautiful, beautiful stuff.

Via Cory Schmitz

Three day weekend coming up for us Americans, so this has to be a quickie, seeing as I have to amass the alcohol and ammunition that every holiday celebration here requires. Today’s FAM is “Inside the Labyrinth”, an hour long behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of Labyrinth.

Labyrinth, for the one or two readers who don’t know, is the 1986 Jim Henson film starring pre-rhinoplasty Jennifer Connelly, David Bowie, a whole mess of puppets, and David Bowie’s package. While short, the documentary does provide a look into the complexity of the creatures that Henson and company were building, exemplified by the image of a severed, yet moving Hoggle head speaking lines whilst perched on a wooden post. (Bonus for Star Trek: The Next Generation fans: Hey look, Dr. Crusher was also a choreographer.)

Thorough as it is, it does not address the decision to pour David Bowie into nut-hugging spandex for a children’s film; something that, for now at least, remains a mystery.

I almost loathe posting this video, purchase produced, sickness as it was, by a production company calling themselves The Viral Factory. It kind of makes me feel like a sap, duped into doing exactly what they wanted. Regardless of such inane, personal trepidation the video they produced for the soon-to-be open Westfield Stratford City is pretty impressive: A history of East London fashion over the last hundred years, set to music by Tristin Norwell. If it lacks anything it is, perhaps, some sort of indication of the decades as they rush by for the fashion ignorant, such as myself.

Via My Modern Met : The Daily What

Impossibly skinny and perpetually bored, Finnish artist Laura Laine’s figures are the epitome of fashion illustration. Or, perhaps, they are a parody of it. I haven’t quite decided yet. (Judging by her bio and client list, however, it is probably the former.) Her line work is beautiful, regardless of the intentions behind it, with each morose scarecrow piled high in intricately patterned fabrics, some so heavy their fragile frames seem to buckle and threaten to completely collapse under the weight. They are the chicest of emaciated mannequins, topped off with a scowl.

Today the FAM presents John McNaughton’s 1986 low budget cult classic Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Released in 1990 after years of battling with various censors over its content it is, perhaps, one of most effective horror movies of the past two decades, forgoing piles of gore for a documentarian approach to the genre.

The titular Henry, played by Michael Rooker, is a drifter, who just happens to leave a trail of bodies behind him. Indeed, the first thing we see is the body of a nude woman in a field, after which we see Henry as he goes about his day with scenes from other crime scenes interspersed throughout. It is only later, when our other two main characters show up, Becky (Tracy Arnold) who has left her husband to stay with her brother, the incredibly creepy Otis (Tom Towles) in Chicago, that we are formally introduced to Henry or, at least, the Henry that presents himself to the world.

Rooker’s performance here is excellent, displaying a strained awkwardness that serves as a mostly successful veneer for the terrifying person underneath. It’s a cover that completely disappears when he’s out looking for victims. Towles, for his part, manages to play a character who is actually creepier than the psychopath he is paired up with. Arnold may be the weakest link among the three. Her character is too direct, her dialog too on the nose, but there is just enough there to get the audience to care about her. Her penultimate scene in Otis’s apartment is completely expected and yet that makes it no less horrifying.

Made for a $110,000 in less than a month, Henry was inspired by real life killer Henry Lee Lucas who, at one time, was thought to be one of America’s most prolific serial killers. (It was later revealed that while Lucas had confessed to over 600 murders, most of them he could not have committed and was simply confessing to whatever cold case was put in front of him in exchange for improved accommodations in prison.) Interestingly, Henry’s story of his mother is surprisingly close to that of Lucas’s who also was a violent prostitute who often forced him to watch her while she had sex with clients. She would also make him wear girl’s clothing and dresses and his father actually did lose both his legs, after being struck by a freight train.

Due to the budget constraints, many of the actors were close friends of McNaughton. One of them, Mary Demas, appears as three different dead (or soon to be dead) people: the dead woman in the field, the dead woman in the bathroom, and one of the prostitutes Henry kills with Otis. The street scenes are devoid of extras as, again, there was no money to hire any, so the two men having an argument in front of the subway that Becky emerges from were not acting, they just refused to move. Rooker apparently stayed in character on and off set for the entire 28 days and was so unsettling to be around that his wife, after have found out she was pregnant, waited until after shooting had ended to tell him.

It’s a a tour de force of low-budget film-making. Shot in 16mm, it’s a film that feels strangely real. Watching Henry is like watching an unmarked video found along the road, evidence hastily disposed of. You are watching something you weren’t meant to see, and so are absorbed by it and, in some ways, complicit in the events that unfold. It almost feels like something you should turn in to the police.

It’s a sentiment very much echoed in the scene of Henry and Otis (having been taken under Henry’s wing) watching a video they shot (using a camcorder acquired earlier through less than legal means) of the pair during a home invasion in which they kill a man, woman, and their son. As the video ends, Otis hits rewind causing Henry to ask “What are you doin’?” To which Otis replies, simply “I want to see it again.” Watching it again he goes over the segment of himself assaulting the wife and mother frame by frame, as much an indictment of their voyeurism as ours.

Eran Amir creates a fantastic piece of animation by photographing 500 different people around Israel holding 1500 photographs. Set to “Malinkovec Valzer” by Maxmaber Orkestar.

Via Dangerous Minds

How many of us are truly happy with the shape of our noses? Judging by the number of rhinoplasty procedures performed in this country every year, not many. Fixing your abominable proboscis with surgery can be expensive, and in an economy like this, most people don’t have that kind of money. Instead, I say we bring back the Zello, a wondrous piece of medical equipment/fetish gear/torture paraphernalia designed to sculpt your unsightly schnoz into shape. At only 20 marks it helps you avoid the long recovery from surgery, but does make you look as though you’re on your way to a midnight screening of the newest installment in the Hellraiser franchise. Such is the cost of convenience.

Via Vintage Ads

I don’t know who is behind YouTube username cookiewaits but he/she realized at some point, something that had never occurred to me: Tom Waits really sounds like Cookie Monster sometimes. Almost to the point that, while watching this video, I though it was someone doing Waits’s song “God’s Away On Business” in a Cookie Monster voice. Turns out that, no, that’s Tom. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to listen to this song the same way again.

Via Cynical-C

Israeli animator Ori Tori’s fantastic, but unofficial, video for “Alsatian Darn” by Panda Bear, off of their album Tomboy, featuring a mesmerizing mass of swirling, pulsating shapes, like a strange, amorphous creature, stretching and folding along with the music. It’s a visually dense and stunning piece of work.

Via The Fox Is Black

I would say there are few people that could have ruffled Groucho Marx’s feathers. Mr. Albert Hall would certainly place on that list. A contestant on You Bet Your Life he was selected by the audience along with Mrs. June French, a messenger who was 21 going on 40. None of them could have known just what a good pick they had made with the Kansas born Hall, a man possessed of such a bizarre demeanor, such a strange repertoire of facial expressions, and lilting, creaking speech, that it must be seen to be believed. Marx, unsurprisingly, recovers quickly and together they produce one of the funniest segments in the entire run of the show.

Via MeFi : The Daily What