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The Eternal Box /  by Jose Barbosa

Back in 1962 in the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland they were selling this ... Capture1

(via boingboing)

While in 2013 Thinkgeek is hocking off these ...

Capture

The thing I like about this is back in the sixties the monster angle was needed to sell the gadget, but today it's safe to emphasis, in an ironic way, its total redundancy.

Movies of 2012: A Year of Jewelled Fragments /  by Jose Barbosa

Mark Ruffalo as the Hulk in Avengers Assemble

"Other jewelled fragments of note, all of them more glittering than their settings: Mark Ruffalo as the Hulk in “The Avengers,” shy and half-embarrassed by the knowledge that he would, despite himself, turn green; Anne Hathaway, red-lipped, black-clad, and perfectly content, for so much of “The Dark Knight Rises,” with the pleasures of straight theft, before even she was overwhelmed by the dreary moral errands of the plot; and, along similar curved lines, Eva Green in the otherwise lustreless “Dark Shadows,” emitting more witchy pheromones than either Johnny Depp or Tim Burton could possibly handle."

Anthony Lane hits the nail on the head. So many pompous, bloated films this year containing more intriguing nuggets within their lumbering mass (although I enjoyed the majority of The Avengers).

This Needs to Be Fixed /  by Jose Barbosa

This is the Parks & Recreation season one opening sequence. http://youtu.be/XWOZVz9OVnk

This is the opening titles from season three onwards.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXNDJnwpvig?list=PLigNkoGEdaWmXpIznkoDHbWyKMBpCyRJ9&hl=en_US&w=560&h=315]

Note how the title of the show no longer syncs with the music. IT'S FUCKING PISSING ME OFF.

I just needed to get that out there. Feel much better now.

"Blimey. Carnage." /  by Jose Barbosa

"We landed in bright sunshine at Dulles, and as usual, I had my two phones out and switched on as we were descending, ready to pick up the latest from London. Not that I was especially obsessed, but I could guarantee Gordon’s first question as we walked off the plane would be: “What’s the news?” If we’d ever been taken hostage by the Taleban in Kabul, rescued by the SAS, and dragged into a helicopter, Gordon’s first question to me when they took the hoods off would have been: “What’s the news?” The news was that Tony Blair wasn't going to stand down for Gordon Brown before the 2005 election. A behind the scenes account by Brown's former special advisor Damian McBride. It's fascinating not only as a description of how it all went down, but also as a look at how McBride rather brutally dealt with leaks from inside. That is he fingered potentially innocent team members so the real culprit would sweat through the guilt. That's some old school shit.

He segues into the "seven year theory" which suggests that after that amount of time the public tire of their political leaders and want something new. God bless the electorate, if that's true.

Incidentally, McBride resigned in 2009 after it was revealed on a right-wing blog that he'd prepared a bunch of emails smearing a number of conservative MPs.

Media7: The Greatest Hits /  by Jose Barbosa

Last week the final episode of Media7 aired. The channel it was broadcast on, TVNZ7, stopped broadcasting a few days later. This is a little "best of" package, compiling the work of myself, Simon Pound, Sarah Daniell, Sam Mulgrew and Sacha Childers. The full show can be viewed here. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdtkLM5YsKA&w=560&h=315]

They're Dolls, OK? /  by Jose Barbosa

My latest "thing" is collecting dolls, specifically superhero dolls made by Hong Kong outfit Hot Toys. I'm a newcomer to the collectibles game, but Hot Toys stuff just seems to go the extra mile. My Michael Keaton Batman comes with a whole arsenal of itty-bitty bat toys and a detachable bat signal in the packaging you can shine a torch through. I'm pretty damn pleased with the Iron Man Mark VI Avengers "Promo" doll from Sideshow Collectibles: glorious detail, LEDs and interchangeable missile pod thingies. It's probably not as kitted out as some of the other Iron Man dolls, but I'm happy.  They seem to have stopped orders from outside of the US and Europe, so I'm glad I got in quickly.

Time permitting, future posts will feature a full Batman Vs Iron Man rumble.

[slideshow]