The film focuses mostly on Lovecraft's influence, and includes interviews with luminaries like Guillermo Del Toro, Neil Gaiman, John Carpenter, Caitlin Kiernan, Stuart Gordon, Ramsey Campbell, and Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi.

Learn more via the Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown official site.

In 1967, Desmond Morris wrote The Naked Ape, a book that described human beings in terms of their similarities with and differences from other apes. In The Human Animal, Morris travels all over the world to examine human culture and behavior, and look for commonalities, or at least common roots across the species. Part one is below (male and female nudity ahead) and the entire documentary is available on Google Video.

[The Human Animal via Metafilter]

The line of for this year's Tribeca Film Festival has been announced, and it includes two films we're all excited about.

The first one is TiMER, starring Emma Caulfield (best known as the demon Anya) as Oona. In Oona's world, everyone wears an implant on their wrist that counts down until the day the wearer finds true love. But Oona's is blank, which means her soul mate doesn't have his/her device implanted. So instead of waiting for the timer to kick in, Oona falls for the young supermarket clerk John Patrick (Gossip Girl) whose timer is set for four months from now. The flick is both directed and penned by Jac Schaeffer.

The non-fiction film the Transcendent Man follows futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil, as he speculates on the future of artificial intelligence. Directed by Barry Ptolemy, the film follows Kurzweil as he discusses what he believes is the next phase of evolution, while diving into some tech-heavy examples. When will the robot-human merging happen? According to Kurzweil, in about 30 years. So you make the call: is he a crackpot, or a visionary?

Transcendent Man Trailer:

Check out the rest of the Tribeca festival line over at their site. The festival runs from April 22 until May 3.

Zombie Girl, which is currently at the Slamdance film festival, follows Emily Hagins as she makes her full length horror movie, complete with bleeding tweens and slow-walking zombies.

Oh and the kicker: her mom is her agent, sound tech., props wrangler, gaffer and all of the above, because Emily is too young to drive. Awesome job, Emily — can't wait to see the whole thing. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go yell at my mother.

[Zombie Girl Movie]

As our "experts" tell us, the Earth was created for a billion people on bicycles, not 7 billion in SUVs. Wow, really? Good to know that biking to work was all part of why the Earth was created.

Even better is knowing, as our second expert explains, that ancient Mayan prophesies can be explained with references to what happens to VCR and microwave clocks after a power outage. Seriously, I love that this guy tells us so seriously that he's talked to Mayan shamans, and they explain this massive galactic eclipse as being like a VCR clock. Really? Because the VCR clock blinking 12:00 forever does sound like an apocalypse. Especially because everything is Blu-Ray now, so I won't have any movies to watch after the world ends. I really want to know what the Shamans make of DVRs.

Brought to you by the dementoids at Disinformation Video, this flick is a nice mix of freak philosophy featuring some pretty interesting guys waxing weird.

2012 [via Amazon]

Everett has previously explored his family tragedies in the Eels album Electro-Shock Blues. But here he traces the path of his late father's research, meeting with Hugh Everett's friends and colleagues to gain a deeper understanding of Everett's work and why it was so significant. He also learns why his father eventually left theoretical physics for defense work, and how devastating the elder Everett found Niels Bohr's rejection of his ideas.

The documentary originally aired last year on BBC Four, and airs tonight at 8pm on PBS's Nova. In preparation for the show, PBS has made Hugh Everett's original dissertation online.

Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives [PBS]

In Part One, Moore discusses the shift from the public perception of comic books as a childish diversion to the acceptance of comics as a culturally relevant artform, and his own attempt to portray the struggle between mankind and nature through Swamp Thing. Incidentally, the line "television, movies, comics," which is said towards the end of the video, is sampled in the Pop Will Eat Itself song "Shortwave Transmission":

In Part Two, which features Moore's ornithophobic tune "March of the Sinister Ducks," Moore admits to a Messiah Complex and laments that more children from his hometown didn't grow up to be artists:

In Part Three, Moore addresses criticisms about the inclusion of political content in comic books:

And in the final segment, he discusses the inspiration behind Watchmen:

[via Mikl-em]

Turns out he'd been a KGB agent all along, and had to return home to get back to work on his surveillance devices. He was imprisoned for many years, and forced to work on listening devices, when it seemed that all he really wanted was to build weird musical instruments. While in the U.S., he had set up an electronic music lab and hung out with Einstein and dozens of famous modern composers. He also romanced the young Clara Rockmore (who later became a theremin virtuoso) in the geekiest way possible. He designed a device (pictured) that moved when her body came close it it, then put her birthday cake on top. So when she approached the cake he'd gotten her, it slowly spun around.

This documentary is completely fascinating, and also incredibly depressing. Theremin really just wanted to be a music geek, and his life was torn apart by Soviet politics. Still, he reported later that one of his proudest moments was teaching Lenin to play the theremin (apparently Lenin was pretty good at it). You can read an interview with Theremin that gives a lot of backstory on his life here, though it's sad that he's forgotten almost everything — and had some of his own life brainwashed out. Or you can watch the documentary. [Theremin via Amazon]

The film features people like Robin Williams and Neil Gaiman talking about the impact Harlan has had on the world of writing, and there's a great amount of attention to the idea of writing as a real job where you have to roll up your sleeves and dive in,. And we see that work. Even at 73 years old, he still sits down at a manual typewriter and pounds out a daily living. While Ellison claims not to be rich, he does live in a spectacular house he calls The Lost Aztec Temple of Mars on 200 acres in the San Fernando Valley, so he ain't suffering.

However, the film doesn't touch on many of the controversies surrounding him, barely mentioning two of his many lawsuits, the fact that he was fired from Disney on his first day on the job, or the controversial boob-grabbing during the World Science Fiction Convention two years ago. In fact, the hardest line of questioning comes from Robin Williams at the beginning of the film, who runs through a laundry list asking Harlan if some of the things he is credited with doing are true or not.

There's no question about the impact of Harlan's writing, and the sheer firehose pressure of material he's been able to output over his lifetime, but we would have liked to see a more objective look at the man that didn't attempt to just hero-worship him for an hour and a half. It's a decent look at his current life and lifestyle, but it breezes over his early days as a writer. You may come away feeling like you've just gotten a better look at the "Harlan Ellison" that he presents to the world, almost like an act he puts on for others. Is there a real Harlan Ellison behind this guy? The film sure doesn't let us know.

We also attended the "A Conversation With Harlan Ellison" panel earlier in the week, which was mostly a chance for people to watch Harry Knowles from Ain't It Cool News attempt to interview Ellison. Eventually things got interesting when Ellison started ranting. While he was mostly all bark and no bite, he did leave us with a lot of choice quotes which we've compiled below. Fortunately he didn't break anyone's pelvis, although he did bleed all over himself at one point.

He spent a good amount of time talking about the William Friedkin film Sorcerer, which is one of his favorites. In fact, he's written an entire book of movie criticism called Harlan Ellison's Watching, which compiles 25 years of his film writing.

When asked if he enjoyed the documentary, he said "Well, I thought to myself 'That's a weird funny old guy that I'd like to be friends with!'"

He also noted, "I've only been an asshole to assholes!"

When Harry Knowles confessed he was one of those kids who loved Star Wars back in the 70s (which Ellison hated), Ellison said "I didn't hate people like that, I just didn't want to be around them!"

He loves the Coen Brothers, but hated the movie Fargo, which he said was "Deifying morons."

Once at a book signing when a woman asked for a special favor, he said no and she refused to buy the book. He told her "I'd make more money if I killed you and sold your body parts!"

He said screenwriter Ron Bass was "a whore among whores."

When asked who were the top five public figures he currently hated, he said "George Bush and Dick Cheney (they count as one), the head of ABC Programming, Jerry Falwell, Ann Coulter, and Bill O'Reilly.

However, later he said "Who do I hate? What time is it?"

One of his favorite works for film or tv is the Outer Limits episode "Demon With A Glass Hand."

He says that he has a "great fucking life" and is glad that he owns his own house, has a ton of books and music, and has a great wife. Plus, "They just made a fuckin' movie about me, so I can't be that goddamn obscure!"

Harlan hopped down off the stage at one point to show off a book he was selling at the panel, and when he went back to the stage he tripped and fell onto his knees, and then did a "BIlly Barty impression" (according to Harlan) as he walked on his knees back to his chair. However, one of his knees started bleeding and when someone from the audience offered a band-aid, Harry remarked on how amazing it was that he had a band-aid on hand. Harlan said, "No Harry, amazing would be if he had a yak." Touché.

Today we're not impressed unless our science fiction involves explosions, boobs, mutants, or all three, but back in the 60s when science fiction became science fact, it seemed like the country could unite to do anything. I caught this film last year at Sundance sandwiched between melancholy indie art films that make you pray that you might choke on your own tongue, and I was blown away. It's a great testament to the entire space program, and what might be one of the last memorable looks at the surviving men who have walked on the moon.

If you're looking for a trippier moon experience, however, pick up the Brian Eno scored For All Mankind, which was culled from the massive amounts of film that NASA shot on flybys of the moon. You'll recognize the "Deep Blue Day" track immediately from the time Ewan McGregor had to go diving in that shit-encrusted toilet in Scottish junkie flick Trainspotting to fetch his opium suppositories.

io9: the only place that will take you from the surface of the moon to a feces-covered toilet in Scotland. Sorry, it had to be said.

The documentary is produced by Shadowsnake Films, and can be purchased in a much cleaner looking DVD edition with 5.1 surround sound here. We're not saying it'll help you understand how Moore's brain works, but it's definitely fascinating and well worth watching.

Free Online Alan Moore Documentary [Comic Mix]

Ellison wrote the classic Star Trek episode "The City on the Edge of Forever" along with many other classic works of speculative fiction. He was also an early booster of Doctor Who in the United States, and wrote a classic introduction to the 1970s Who novels when they came stateside.

Dreams with Sharp Teeth screened in May of last year in Los Angeles, although apparently that print was a "work in progress" and they'll be showing the full version in Austin at SXSW. We'll be there — will you?

Dreams With Sharp Teeth, a documentary about Harlan Ellison [Quiet Earth]