No more meetings. Not one more. If you have to attend one more meeting today you’re going to scream. One more boring, monotonous PowerPoint presentation and you’re going to beat someone to death with their laptop. You’ll feel bad, sure; I mean, it wouldn’t be their fault necessarily, after all no one likes doing PowerPoint presentations — well, everyone except for Tim, that is, but he’s pretty fucking weird to begin with. I mean, remember that time when you walked into the break-room and he was standing there, whispering to the coffee machine and he didn’t even notice your presence because he was so intently whispering and so you cleared your throat and he finally realized there was another person in the room but he didn’t seem embarrassed or anything, just annoyed that someone had interrupted him, and he just sort of gave you a dirty, sideways glance which he kept trained on you for the endless seconds you spent deciding whether you really still wanted coffee, and until you finally backed out of the room at which point you could here him begin whispering again and you were fairly certain you heard your name and the word “whore”? Yeah, that was weird. — it’s just that, if you have to look at one more graph or here the word “actionable” again, you’re gonna snap.

Well relax. Meetings are over for the day. It’s time to chill out, put aside those thoughts of murderous rage, and just wait for that sweet, sweet weekend to roll around. In the meantime, why don’t you take a load off. Take off your shoes, maybe plug in that lava lamp that you got from your secret Santa last Christmas, because now is the time for The Floyd. This week we have Classic Albums: Pink Floyd – The Making of “The Dark Side of the Moon” or, at least, the shorter version for television. Not much to say about this one. It’s the story behind one of the great rock albums of all time as told by Those Who Were There. Containing a bevy of interviews, demo reels, and old footage it’s a journey through the labyrinthine inner workings of manufacturing an album. Bonus clip at the end with an extended look at the single “Money”.

It’s been a long, long day. When you haven’t been in meetings you’ve been at your desk alt-tabbing between solitaire and Excel, rearranging your budget so that you’ll be able to afford those sweet zebra-print seat covers you saw on Jalopnik the other day. Well, just stop it. You’ll never be able to afford them and Jalopnik was being ironic anyway. Also, anyone can win at solitaire if they pull one card at a time. Yeesh, have some self-respect. Close Excel and prepare for Friday filmage.

Today: Jesus Camp, a documentary about the now defunct “Kids On Fire School of Ministry”, a Pentecostal summer camp in North Dakota. It follows three children who attended the camp in 2005 where they are taught how to become part of God’s army. A lighthearted tale of willful ignorance and homeschooling, this is the film to show your atheist friends if you wish to see them become apoplectic and jittery with spittle-flecked rage. Or to pass the time while avoiding the siren call of compulsive spending.

Seriously, zebra-print isn’t going to make that ’89 Camry any cooler.

An intriguing historical artifact found floating on YouTube like driftwood. Helen Keller — inspiration to generations and inspiration for an entire genre of schoolyard humor — and her teacher and friend Anne Sullivan in a clip from 1930 in which they describe the way in which Helen learned how to speak. I’m always delighted when I find things like this as, many times, these people exist in a time that I feel is so far removed from my own that I cannot conceive of them actually existing in a real living, breathing form; which may or may not be due to an imagination stunted by an over-saturation of electronic media. It’s a fascinating little clip which pays homage to a woman who, even beyond her amazing circumstances, was a radical socialist, suffragist, and supporter of birth control, who was friends with the likes of Mark Twain and who worked tirelessly to champion the rights of both the downtrodden and the physically disabled.

It’s Friday once again and you are mere hours from another glorious weekend of coke and Thai lady-boys. Still, it might as well be days as summers are slow and your cubicle is, unfortunately, adjacent to Carol’s. This is unfortunate as Carol talks, ceaselessly, about her eight (yes, eight) Pomeranians; a torrent of gibberish spewed in an unyielding stream in your direction. All day it’s stories about anthropomorphized facial expressions, idiotic tricks, and unfortunate bowel movements punctuated by requests for you to look at a funny picture she took of one of them wearing a doggie sweater or galoshes. You wonder how Carol’s husband feels about living with a yammering pack of fur with teeth; maybe he too looks forward to cocaine fueled weekends. You also wonder how long until the little bastards get tired of those sweaters and revolt, rending poor Carol limb from limb.

There are better things to occupy your mind with than thoughts such as these. There are movies and I am here to help you drown out Carol before you turn to her and slowly, deliberately puncture your ear drums with a letter opener. This week, its Snow White: A Tale of Terror the 1997 horror movie based on the Grimm Brothers’s tale. Starring Sigourney Weaver, Sam Neill, Monica Keena and the greaser guy from The Shawshank Redemption, this is a bloodier and more realistic version of the classic tale, adapted most famously by Walt Disney (and less famously by Rammstein), by which I mean that no one spontaneously bursts into song. Despite its slightly over the top subtitle, it’s actually not that bad, bearing more of a resemblance to the source material than the animated film, by which I mean that there is a fair amount of violence while simultaneously lacking the dwarf spanking and drugs angle of Rammstein’s version.

Regardless of which is your preferred Snow White, watching Sigourney Weaver get her evil on has got to beat listening to the story about how dog #2 shit on the carpet yesterday, right?

Anne Ramsey, perhaps best known for her role as Ma Fratelli in Goonies, was born today in 1929.

The night was sultry.

The daughter of East Coast bluebloods, Ramsey attended elite preparatory schools in Connecticut, making her social debut the same season as Jackie-O. Later in life, she would be seen in all manner of television shows playing bag ladies, gypsies, cab drivers and housekeepers.

She married TV actor Logan Ramsey in the 50s, and together they made 5 films. In 1987, only three months before her death from throat cancer (removal of part of her lower jaw and tongue gave her the slurred speech she became known for in her later films), she received a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her role in Throw Momma From The Train. No offense to Olympia Dukakis, but I wish she’d won.

She’s just head-explodingly awesome –the ultimate lady curmudgeon– and I’d happily endure Alf for her any day.

Hughes with the cast of The Breakfast Club, 1985.

“I always preferred to hang out with the outcasts, ’cause they were cooler; they had better taste in music, for one thing, I guess because they had more time to develop one with the lack of social interaction they had!” ~John Hughes

Hughes died suddenly today of a heart attack, age 59. At his best, he made movies that celebrated freaks, weirdos, underdogs, misfits, wallflowers, basket cases... and the humanity of teenagers in general.

A moment of Otis Redding and Duckie (cherished anti-dreamboat) for a deeply intelligent, funny and empathetic storyteller; the man who gave us The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, Pretty In Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Weird Science, among others.

Via DJ Dead Billy.

This exquisite short –watch it full screen in high def at the Vimeo site– is described by director Xavier Chassaing as “an experimental film made up of over 35,000 photographs. It combines an innovative mix of stop motion and live projection mapping techniques.” The score, a haunting, slightly ominous sample-based piece by Fedaden called “Contrecour”, has been on repeat in my headphones for an hour. (Can anyone identify the ubiquitous classical piece from which that looping, opening strain is taken? Gah, it’s on the tip of my brain!!)

Related items of interest:

• “Hauschka” music video by Jeff Desom
• 1st Ave Machine: Manipulating Time Space Biology
• Keith Loutit’s Tilt-Shift films
• Fever Ray music videos

HOLY SHIT. I just discovered the website Everything Is Terrible (which should really be called Bad Touch Central, or Kill It With Fire). JACKPOT. I kind of feel like a kid who’s just come downstairs on Christmas morning and discovered grandma giving Santa a hummer a living room filled to the brim with goodies.

A bit of background: long, long ago, I’d obsessively make bootleg VHS comps (later, DVDrs) of all of the funniest, awesomest, creepiest, most fucked up shit I could find, and share or trade them. Everything from Pinky the Cat to Sex Education For Trainables to obscure Italian giallo to The Terror of Tinytown to Death Bed to unsanctioned blooper reels to questionable commercials to Raping Steven Spielberg to crazy shit from foreign lands to “Blue Peanuts” to … well, you get the idea. It was this bone-deep, swap-and-curate compulsion that’s never really died.

Be warned: at about 1:45, this clip gets downright demonic.

After discovering stuff like RE/SEARCH, those Incredibly Strange Music comps, zine culture, and wandering the specialty video store booths at the (then much smaller, homegrown) San Diego Comic Convention, I realized there were entire fringe communities of weirdos compelled to do exactly the same thing! I was so excited! We were all trading these grainy, janky 4th generation bootlegs of our favorite oddball material. Pre internet, those communities were more localized. One the internet kicked in, it went global. Of course, now we have YouTube [and better yet, Vimeo]…

…and Everything Is Terrible –bless their black, festering hearts– has a channel chock full o’ madness. These are only a few of the more soul-rending clips they’ve culled from the etherstatic for our pleasure. If you’ve got an hour (or several) to kill (as violently and memorably as possible), you should probably head on over there. Or, if you quailed upon viewing these clips, click here instead.

More Everything Is Terrible curated gems after the jump.

EDIT 1 2009/08/04 1:50pm: Oh no! YouTube just suspended EIT’s account. “[You] won’t be able to watch most of our videos until we find a new home for them. We’re working hard to rebuild, but it’s going to take a little while. Sit down, breathe into a paper bag, and try to relax. We will keep you updated. Don’t worry, we will continue to post new videos.”

Sheesh. There sure are a lot of cynical snarkmuffins out there, rolling their eyes, quick to dismiss an entire genre out of hand: “Oh, that whole zombie thing? So over, man. Played out. Vampires are the new cosmonauts are the new ninjas are the new unicorns are the new zombies are the new pirates. NEXT FAD, PLZ. KTHXBYE.” Jaded much? Bite me, guys. You shall pry my love of the living dead from my cold, dead, grabby hands.

Decades before movies like 28 Days Later and the Dawn of the Dead remake reanimated the genre, before the rise of zombie flash mobs, or the obvious necrotization of Joaquin Phoenix, an immense zombie canon had long been informing, inspiring, and most definitely infecting swarms of Fulci and Romero obsessed nerds the world over.  And just because the culture at large has had their fifteen-minute-fill of brain-eaters doesn’t mean we have!

A still from I Love Sarah Jane.

In my opinion, the visceral metaphors are as culturally relevant now as they were back in 1968, when “they’re coming to get you, Barbara” first became a household phrase. It’s deeply sad that due to short attention spans and media over-saturation, a lot of potentially fascinating zombie-related films have never gotten off the ground. For instance, the scrappy, long-struggling DIY project, Worst Case Scenario. (Check out these stunning trailers, sporting undead nazi balloonists and an original score from J.G. Thirlwell!) The producers of “the greatest zombie movies never made” finally conceded defeat in May 2009.

Why write something off just because it’s a certain genre? “Oh, I’ve seen it all before.” What if you haven’t? Hell, what if I haven’t, and I don’t want you cockblocking me?! Besides, if the tale being told is engaging, who cares what overused pigeonhole it goes in? At the heart of good storytelling, whatever the medium, is a solid narrative and compelling cast of characters. Case in point, the following short indie film from Australia, I Love Sarah Jane.* It’s a riveting coming-of-age vignette with a richly implied back story that just happens to take place the middle of a zombie apocalypse. The wonderful cinematography, AD, editing, and truly disgusting gore effects are all gravy:

I Love Sarah Jane. A short film from Australia, written by Spencer Susser & David Michôd. Directed by Spencer Susser.

While it stands well on it own merit, I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing the story of Jimbo and Sarah Jane expanded. Or those of Max Brooks’ World War Z characters. Shit, just give us a proper a theater re-release of Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, and we’ll call it a day!

*Thanks to Ed Brubaker for the heads up. Speaking of great storytelling, Ed’s pulp thriller webseries, Angel of Death, is now available on DVD. Go get some. Y’know, unless you’ve had your fill of Zoe Bell kicking ass and cracking wise. In which case, you must be brain dead.

Like any good, nerdly child of my era I was enamored with the Ghostbusters. The original film is a hallmark of my early years, though I will admit that the cartoon, which would eventually be called The Real Ghostbusters, probably exerted a greater pull on my psyche. It was these representations of the quartet of spirit exterminators whose merchandise adorned my room. These were the faces on the action figures and posters. They were the ones whose proton-packs were emulated by hollow plastic, complete with child-safe foam beam. Wherever I went, a cartoon-themed trail of plastic detritus followed.

The brand has its hooks embedded deep in me, then, so one may understand why I would be so bewitched by this alternate past version of Ghost Busters from Columbia Pictures starring Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Bob Hope, and Fred MacMurray. A Frankenstein’s monster of various films and television shows expertly edited and stitched together to form a pitch-perfect trailer for this horror/sci-fi/comedy from an other-dimensional 1954, featuring a number of subtle references and skillfully hidden nods to a much loved, childhood touchstone. It’s almost enough to make me dig out the old charged particle accelerator.