EdificeComplex

CanisPugnax

CanisPugnax

Here are the details on the flick, which is currently making the festival rounds:

ANALOG is Ebbëto's 2nd short film. His first, Lagartija Nika, can be seen online at Tokyo's CON-CAN Film Festival site.
ANALOG is a 27 min, black and white, Science Fiction film made in 2009. This short extract features the music of OIL 10 "Passagen", by the French electronic music composer, Gilles Rossire.

The film tells the tale of a machine travelling in deep-space which has as a primary function the preservation of a living organism: a man.
Strange events with biblical analogies begin, disturbing the machine and making it rethink it's priorities.

ANALOG is probably the first authentic Brazilian Science Fiction film and it's currently competing in world wide short film festivals.
The film was made under an extreme low-budget condition and was only made possible do to the dedication of a hand full of people that believed in the project and gave their hearts and souls to make it come to life.

Analog evokes the black and white psychological strangeness of Pi and Tetsuo: The Iron Man. Good stuff.

[via Quiet Earth]

Patrick Kelso

Bill-Lee

[Waffyjon's Flickr via
Coming Attractions Of The Past]

And here's the intro to The Amazing Spider-Man. This theme song makes it sound like Peter Parker takes a bath in Jovan Musk every morning.

Illundiel

geesejuggler

I can feel your stares of disdain from here, but they won't change my mind. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the Uber-Questions about the show ("What is the Island?" "Who are Jacob and FakeLocke whose real name I've forgotten if I ever actually knew it in the first place?" "Why is Michael Emerson just scary all the time?") but they're not what makes the show for me, and I can't quite get behind the idea that Lost will somehow be a failure if it doesn't manage to solve every single mystery it's raised throughout its run so far.

(If nothing else, I'm not sure every single mystery has an answer anymore, if they ever did, and for every question the show has raised to be answered, I feel as if the show would have to become exposition central for the remaining episodes, and even then, many would be left unsatisfied.)

I keep thinking back to the finale of Battlestar Galactica, and what worked for me and didn't in that episode. I remember watching for the first time, and feeling completely caught up in the moment, and (for the most part) satisfied with what I was seeing - It was a purely emotional response, a feeling of closure and farewell to characters I'd spent many hours watching and thinking about, and it worked for me, until I started to pick apart everything after the initial rush had gone. Upon distant reflection, a year later, what didn't work for me was the dotting of is and crossing of ts in terms of plot and mythology - the opera house, Starbuck being revealed as an angel of sorts, the epilogue that hammered home that all of this had happened before and would happen again - and I felt as if my initial reaction and subsequent disappointment mirrored the way the story had been put together: Built around larger emotional finales, and the details awkwardly inserted at a later point to provide closure for those who needed those answers. Would the finale have been better if it hadn't tried to explain those things, but just focused on the characters themselves?

(Another example of that might be the end of Grant Morrison's The Invisibles. As someone who followed the original run as it was released as single issues, I found myself so emotionally invested in the characters that it doesn't bother me that, plotwise, a lot falls apart at the end. The emotional throughline, and payoff to a narrative of intent that somehow goes beyond plot detail, felt - and feels - satisfying enough to let Morrison slide on all that was left unsaid and unfinished.)

This isn't, necessarily, an argument for the "But consider midichlorians" school of thought that some things are better left unsaid - That said, how many people are steeling themselves for the reality that Lost's answers won't live up to the ones they've been working on while watching the show for the last five years? I'm already kind of disappointed at the reveal about the numbers, if there's not going to be any more said on the subject - but more one that, like Charlie said the other day, suggests that even a show that relies on mystery and raising questions as much as Lost is really about character. Without our becoming invested in the characters, you're left with something like FlashForward, which tries its hardest but is nonetheless glossily hollow and weightless (Sorry, Joseph Fiennes), and Lost is, at its best, something more than that.

I agree that some payoff for the larger questions is necessary for Lost's finale to feel complete, but I worry that anything more than that will come at the cost of what the show is really about, which is the people onboard Oceanic Flight 815 and those they've met as a result of the crash. Easter Eggs and Fan Service is all well and good, but if Jack, Hurley, Ben, Jacob and the others - even Locke, as dead as he is - don't end up with the ultimate fates they deserve and something that feels right, then the whole thing will be for naught. Lost may have been one of the more thought-provoking shows on television, but personally, I'm pulling for an ending that goes for the heart instead of the head.

Even though the Chinese search engine Baidu's 58.6% share of Chinese searches eclipses Google's 35.6% stake in China's search engine wars, Google's withdrawal is still a setback for the company. The company had announced in January 2010 that it would stop censoring searches on google.cn, much to the chagrin of the Chinese goverment. Relations between Google and China frayed this January when the Gmail accounts of human-rights advocates in China had been hacked. No one's explicitly pointing fingers at the Chinese government, but Google appears to be initiating the pull-out regardless.

[via Variety and Business Week]

Log1c

The planet, given the catchy name of Corot-9b, is only one of more than 400 found that orbit other stars, but the first whose temperature can be studied as it makes its eight-hour transit across its sun in the Serpens constellation. According to Claire Montou, one of the scientists at the European Southern Observatory that made the discovery, that's big news:

This is a normal, temperate exoplanet just like dozens we already know, but this is the first whose properties we can study in depth... It is bound to become a Rosetta stone in exoplanet research.

Fellow researcher Hans Deeg explains:

Corot-9b is the first exoplanet that really does resemble planets in our solar system... It has the size of Jupiter and an orbit similar to that of Mercury.

Scientists plan to study Corot-9b during the all-important eight hour window when it appears every 95 days. We're hoping they discover a race of evolved aliens not too unlike our own as they do.

New planet Corot-9b has Earth-like temperatures [Independent.co.uk]

firstofnormalin

Illundiel