Getting a project past the gatekeepers of Hollywood tends to hinge on amalgamating several tried and true money-making formulas, distilled into a catchy logline like: “It’s Harry Potter meets Twilight in the post-apocalyptic year of 2013!” or “Picture Transformers 2 but with all the drama and twice the awards potential of Crash!” Pitching a movie that’s basically The Battle of Algiers meets Snow White would never fly. Luckily for us, that didn’t stop Nickelodeon animator Nick Cross from creating just such an insane hybrid in his spare time, and the result is the brilliant film below, Yellow Cake.
…The idea for the film came to me in 2003, around the time of the build-up to the war in Iraq. There was a lot of talk about ‘yellow cake’ uranium being sold in ominous tones, but I always thought of yellow cake as being a delicious dessert treat. I thought that the contrast was really funny and that got my creative juices flowing. I always enjoy the idea of blending cute things with something horrible; it’s just such an extreme contrast that I can’t resist going back to that well over-and-over again.
Just to be clear, here’s what’s at stake in the Wild Things’ Forts contest: An extremely limited edition Xbox 360 sporting a lovely Where the Wild Things Are design, PLUS an awe-inspiring bus stop-sized poster! And all you have to do? Build a fort and take a photo of it. Make a video. Send us an illustration. Anything goes! You have all weekend, so put your thinking caps on and make something beautiful! Check out some amazingly rad entries over at Booooooom and stay tuned to We Love You So for more inspiring submissions!
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Things are heating up in the Wild Things’ Forts contest! Send us your entry in either photo, illustration, or video form– whatever you think will best display your fortitude (sorry). If you need motivation, just picture the custom XBOX you will be able to play all day, deep inside your fortress.
The thing about Canadian stereotypes is that they’re all complimentary. Examples: Canadians are nice, they eat delicious foods such as poutine, and are a little weird (in a good way). They are also known to enjoy hockey and maple syrup. Frank Gehry is Canadian, as is Leonard Cohen. What’s not to love?
Fitting neatly into the overlapping categories of Awesome and Canadian is ecojot, a line of delightful paper goods made of recycled materials and biodegradable inks and glues. Like many Canadian exports, the products are slightly kooky in the best possible way. Our favorites, the notebooks, are sturdy and jumbo-sized––like kid’s sketchbooks–– and fronted with designs that look like nothing else in the art store. In the ecojot cosmos, dogs are hot dog-shaped and wear pinwheel caps, birds are peppermint-colored, and whales have freckles. It’s hard to know whether to use the books or cuddle with them. One point for Canada!
Last weekend’s press junket for Where the Wild Things Are was like an extended debutante ball– a strangely rigid and somewhat superfluous ceremony by which a crowd of adult strangers decide when a girl has become a woman. To help shepherd their baby into the world, Spike and his band of cohorts fielded questions from a deluge of revolving journalists for three days in a dimly lit nook of the Beverly Hilton.
With many of these interviews lasting no longer than 3-4 minutes, it’s unsurprising that variation was scarce. “What was it like working with Spike?” became a nauseating refrain in the endless hours of Max Records’ interrogations. Sometimes there’d be curveballs, like when a bald Scotsman posed pseudo-esoteric questions dancing around the periphery of awkwardness, like this one: “Where does Spike end and Adam begin?” On the other end of the odd question spectrum, we scratched our heads as a spaced out Japanese lady muttered almost (but not quite) poetic non sequiturs about Spike being a 39-year-old man in a 9-year-old boy’s wolf suit. Spike, I have to say– you handled it all with admirable charm.
At least the set-up was comfortable– Warner Brothers hired the fantastic crew behind Space 1520’s pop-up shop to construct a fantasy haven of barren branches and dry leaves for the occasion. Led by Stephen Hill (seen above, sticking his face in a Wild Things comic foreground), the pop-up boys whipped together a glorious woodsy environment that magically obscured the sterile conference rooms playing host to this unique set of alien interactions.
When I swung by on the press event’s final afternoon, lunch was a fancy buffet (a contradiction that Shawn Records reveled in) where Spike’s dad, Arthur, told us how he’d posed as a studio executive during several interviews, until his cover was blown by an intrepid journalist who recognized him as the elder Jonze. Max loaded up on exotic desserts before heading over to Catherine Keener’s place for a sleepover with her son, Clyde, and everyone parted ways as the ceremony finally came to an end. Where the Wild Things Are had undergone the media’s rigorous rite of passage and was finally on her way to the world at large.
Okay, it’s never nice to start with such a direct comparison– but it’s hard to ignore the fact that some of Alvin Band’s songs sound a lot like Animal Collective. That’s not a detriment at all. The sound is similar, but not identical, and even if it were identical– that would be rad! Two Animal Collectives are better than one, right? Having just released a debut record entitled Mantis Preying, Alvin Band (the musical moniker of Rick Alvin Schaier, who also drums and sings in Miniature Tigers) has room for growth, and the project is certain to evolve in unique and exciting directions. Plus, this music video is just incredibly fun. I can’t not love something that pays homage to the glory of Let’s Paint TV.
No one is safe in Al Columbia’s world. Not the kittens (they get decapitated) nor the children (they get baked into pies) nor the bunnies (they carry scythes). Correspondingly, no one is innocent. Grandmothers are evil, grandfathers are greedy, and trees grow baby heads instead of apples and oranges. What a wonderful world it is.
That’s not an entirely ironic evaluation of Pim & Francie, a collection of sketches, strips, stills and other valuable ephemera from the mind of Columbia (creator of the 1990s cult classic Biologic Show). The twisted narratives and characters are presented so deftly––with such humor and visual panache–that their wrongness becomes right; and thus is the singular charm of Al Columbia.
Paul Karasik summed it up well: “Pim & Franciemay appear to be a book of random jottings, but don’t let that fool you. Treat this barbed landmine like a book and you will be richly rewarded. Treat it like a sketchbook and end up with your hands lopped off and your mind empty. You have been warned.”
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