The Kills: The Last Goodbye

The Last Goodbye is a powerfully emotive music video portrait of the rock duo Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince, directed by the Oscar nominated actress Samantha Morton. The Kills celebrate ten years of musical partnership with this poignant and captivating video. The melancholic song The Last Goodbye offsets the usually hard-edged sound that Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince are known for, with haunting vocals and a nostalgic piano loop.

Shot in monochrome on crisp, silvery 35mm film, the video reflects the beautiful simplicity of the track, while using an old-school photo-booth to provide an intimate backdrop for Mosshart’s intense and heart-warming opening performance. Her introduction is followed by a series of touching poses that casts a tender light on the musicians’ longstanding and spirited friendship, as Mosshart and Hince share memories of their first meeting and a decade of collaboration.

The Kills: The Last Goodbye

(Best Viewed in HD Full-Screen Mode)

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Look Homeward, Angel: Park Pretty

Many years ago, during my time as a child and through young adulthood, I was immersed in the (sometimes solitary) lavish joys of nature in rural South Carolina. The memories of the steaming, dusty red clay roads and the smells of downstate piney-woods are now fading away, replaced by years of gritty urban life in Chicago’s inner-city. However, that doesn’t mean that now I’ve become completely blind to the beauty of rural landscapes. I just have to enjoy it from the comfort of a chair, in more climate-controlled conditions. So this video is pretty perfect for me.

Yosemite HD is an amazing four-minute time-lapse short art film, a collaboration between Sheldon Neill and Colin Delehanty. They made numerous trips to Yosemite National Park, where they captured the beautiful landscape it offers for visitors every year. Set to Outro, from M83′s lovely and stratospheric Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, this might be the best music video you could ask for. So stop whatever you’re doing right now, put this video in full-screen mode and breath very deeply during the film’s duration!

Look Homeward, Angel: Park Pretty (Yosemite HD)

(Best Watched in Full-Screen HD-Mode)

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A Lifesaving Passion for Books: The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore is an award-winning animated short film by author/illustrator William Joyce and Co-Director Brandon Oldenburg at Moonbot Studios, which just received a 2012 Academy Award Nomination for Best Animated Short Film. Drawing on inspirations from Hurricane Katrina, The Wizard of Oz and Buster Keaton, the film combines a variety of animation techniques to tell the story of people who have a passion for books.

Moonbot Studios also created the best-selling, interactive Morris Lessmore iPad app, which is available on iTunes in the App Store.

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore

Oscar Nomination Announcements: Moonbot Studios, Shreveport, Louisiana

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The Sordid Sexual Infidelity of A Good Wife

A Good Wife is a brilliant five-minute animated short film by the talented Toronto-based illustrator W. Scott Forbes, featuring the artist’s signature minimalist painterly artwork. The film presents a quiet tragedy of mid-1900′s infidelity, the tale of a woman who is in utter shock over her torrid sexual affair with a man who is not her husband. Tormented by painful regret, she decides not to disclose her infidelity to her family. Thus, the family members carry on as though nothing is wrong, going about their daily lives in blissful ignorance. A Good Wife provides powerful imagery and music to narrate its plot, successfully leaving viewers feeling emotionally invested despite its short five-minute duration.

The Sordid Sexual Infidelity of A Good Wife

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Stop SOPA: Protect Your Online Rights!

PROTECT-IP is a bill that has been introduced in the Senate and the House, and is moving quickly through Congress. SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) gives the government and corporations the ability to censor the internet, in the name of protecting “creativity.” The law would let the government or corporations censor entire sites; they just have to convince a judge that the site is “dedicated to copyright infringement.” The government has already wrongly shut down sites without any recourse to the site owner. Under this bill, sharing a video with anything copyrighted in it, or what sites like Youtube and Twitter do, would be considered illegal behavior according to this bill.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, this bill would cost us $47 million tax dollars a year. That’s for a fix that won’t work, disrupts the internet, stifles innovation, shuts out diverse voices and censors the internet. This bill is bad for creativity and does not protect your rights.

PROTECT-IP/SOPA Breaks The Internet

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Prom Night: A Litany of Sexy Lovers at the Prom

Prom Night is a wild, high-energy eight-minute narrative short film by director/performer/choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall, which premiered at SXSW last year. Rowlson-Hall stars as a/the/your prom-date in this beautiful, surreal, reference-laden piece. The film takes a very simple concept, a look at the cultural trappings that come with dream girls and trips to the prom, and knocks it out of the park.

Hall, who stars in the film, looks straight into the camera and takes the viewer through a dance in an empty school gymnasium decorated for the prom. While The Ronettes’ Be My Little Baby plays, through a series of wardrobe alterations and spontaneous costume and hairstyle changes, Hall leads the viewer through a litany of archetypal lovers: from the holy virginal, to Lolita, to Carrie. Prom Night is such an engrossing dance/performance short film that you won’t dare take your eyes off of it.

Prom Night: A Litany of Sexy Lovers at the Prom

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Prelude to Melancholia: This Is How the End Begins

“The Earth is evil,
We don’t need to grieve for it.”

There are 16 mini-scenes in Lars von Trier’s hauntingly beautiful eight-minute prelude to Melancholia, a movie about love, family and the apocalypse. The soundtrack for the overture to Melancholia is the exquisite prelude to Wagner’s 1859 opera, Tristan and Isolde, an opera Wagner described as “one of endless yearning, longing, the bliss and wretchedness of love; world, power, fame, honor, chivalry, loyalty and friendship all blown away like an insubstantial dream,” for which there is “one sole redemption-death, finality, a sleep without awakening.”

The movie, among Mr. von Trier’s greatest, stars Kirsten Dunst as Justine, a young advertising copywriter who, shortly after she gets married, endures two separate yet related catastrophes. A wedding party at an ocean-side golf resort owned by Justine’s brother-in-law ends with her new husband leaving, which in turn brings on the depression that overtakes her and seems to inaugurate the end of the world or her dream of the same. Many of the movie’s themes are introduced in the overture’s first minutes, a masterpiece in miniature that presents a deep reflection of literary, artistic and cinematic allusions.

Melancholia was named Best Picture at The 2011 European Film Awards in Berlin; the film also won awards for cinematography and production design. Previously, Kirsten Dunst won the Best Actress Award at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival for her performance in Melancholia. Last week, The National Society of Film Critics named Lars Von Trier’s end-of-the-world drama Melancholia Best Picture, and Best Actress honors went to Kirsten Dunst for her performance in the film.

Read more about Prelude to Melancholia in The New York Times here.

Prelude to Melancholia: This Is How the End Begins

Melancholia: The Official Trailer

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All About Eve: The Photography of Eve Arnold

Eve Arnold, who came to be regarded as a grande dame of postwar photojournalism for her bold, revealing images of subjects as diverse as Marilyn Monroe and migratory potato pickers, died on Wednesday in London at the age of 99. Born in Philadelphia on April 21, 1912, Ms. Arnold had lived in Great Britain since 1961.

Her death was announced by Magnum Photos, the photography cooperative to which she had belonged for more than a half-century. She was among the first women Magnum hired to make pictures. Ms. Arnold was a leading light in what is considered to be the golden age of news photography, when magazines like Life and Look commanded attention with big, arresting pictures provided by photographers who included Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gordon Parks, Robert Capa and Margaret Bourke-White.

Acclaimed for capturing celebrities in intimate moments after winning their trust, Ms. Arnold developed a particular rapport with Marilyn Monroe, the subject of a book of Arnold photographs. Foreshadowing the celebrity portfolios of photographers like Annie Leibovitz, Ms. Arnold captured Joan Crawford squirming into a girdle, Malcolm X collecting fistfuls of dollars at a rally in Washington and James Cagney and his wife doing an impromptu dance in a barn.

But other pictures, just as memorable, were of the unfamous. Among the more than 750,000 Ms. Arnold made were pictures in a South African shantytown, a Havana brothel and a Moscow psychiatric hospital. She documented a small Long Island town, Miller Place, and the first minutes of a baby’s life. She was an official photographer on 40 movie sets.

Her many honors include the Order of the British Empire and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the American Society of Magazine Photographers. She was a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society and named a “Master Photographer” by the International Center of Photography in New York, considered by many to be the world’s most prestigious photographic honor.

You can read more about Eve Arnold’s life and work in The New York Times here.

View a slide show of Eve Arnold’s photography here.

All About Eve: The Photography of Eve Arnold

Eve Arnold: Lifetime Achievement Award, The 2010 Sony World Photography Awards

Technorati: Eve Arnold, All About Eve, art, celebrities, personalities, Marilyn Monroe, Joan Crawford, Malcolm X, Margaret Thatcher, England, Great Britain, Britain, London, United Kingdom. images, pictures, photos, photographs, photography, video, culture, cultural, social, society, world

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