Ever wanted to play a zombie sim? How about one that let’s you unleash hordes of brain-eating undead on Washington DC? (Insert zombie-and-politician joke here.) Then this website is for you.

It’s more like a demo for now, with limited functionality, but still fun. You can mess around with several different variables such as the number of zombies, how long it takes for the infection to manifest, and so on. And the sound effects—complete with screaming victims and creepy horror music—are great.

With the promise of more to come, this could very well be the Greatest. Website. Ever.

See the preview trailer:

I established a completely fictitious DC, one in which 2nd Amendment rights were fully respected—every citizen was armed and had 100% shooting accuracy. The zombies didn’t stand a chance and the brave, gun-toting public wiped them out in less than a minute.

Naturally, an armed citizenry is our best defense against a future zombie uprising…

http://daugustyn.wordpress.com/2009/12/23/why-the-internet-was-created

The “if only…” implications of David Lynch directing Return of the Jedi (instead of that infamous sci-fi abomination a year later) have caused my cranium to cave into the gaping maw of my slack-jawed mouth. It’s not a good feeling.

Lynch also offers an interesting outsider’s perspective of George Lucas’s Hermit Kingdom.

Lynch has said elsewhere that RoTJ was so much a part of Lucas’s imagination that him directing it wouldn’t have made that much of a difference anyway. Still, I bet he would have made Darth vader sexier, the Emperor crazier, and turned the Ewoks into some sort of pagan tribe of vicious little rodent people.

It’s said that there’s nothing original in film (or art, for that matter), that its DNA is a never-ending string of inspiration, a continuum of antecedents. Certainly, every person who creates can point to one piece of music, a particular film, or an unforgettable painting that set fire to their ambitions.

The Independent has published excerpts from Screen Epiphanies: Filmmakers on the Films that Inspired Them in which directors talk about the films that inspired them. The results are intriguing. For instance, Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, Slumdog Millionaire) talks about how Coppola’s Vietnam War opera, Apocalypse Now, is inextricably linked to his relationship with his father, an RAF veteran.

What’s interesting is that this connection some of these directors have to a film is often borne of what was happening in their lives at the time.

One of the grooviest effects sequences in Star Wars is during the rebel pilots’ briefing that that lays out the attack plan on the Death Star. We see for the first time exactly what information R2-D2 was carrying inside him. Through groundbreaking use of computer effects, the sequence quickly offers expository information, while effectively setting up the danger our rebel pilots will soon be in. It’s a great storytelling moment.

This video, which has been on YouTube for two years but for some reason making the rounds now, explains how the graphics were created. The narrator and man behind the magic is Larry Cuba of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL!) at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The narration can be painfully dull, but the video is fairly short and it’s incredibly fascinating to see how the sequence came together. Thirty-plus years later, it still looks cool.

Movieline has a sit-down with Werner Herzog to talk with him about his recently founded Rogue Film School, as well as his upcoming remake of The Bad Lieutenant (though don’t tell Herr Herzog it’s a “remake”).

Man, Herzog has got to be the oddest film director to enjoy a modicum of success—and more of his share of notoriety. He’s certainly without peer, although I’ve not been too enthralled by the handful of his films that I’ve seen. If nothing else, he’s an artist with a very unique perspective of his art. Somehow I can’t see Spielberg or J.J. Abrams or (fuck no) Michael Bay ever spinning thoughts like this:

As [Bad Lieutenant] gets more and more vile and debased, Nicolas Cage enjoys himself even more. I said to him, “There’s such a thing as a bliss of evil. Go for it and enjoy it, and that will be the joy of the audience.”

I highly recommend seeing Grizzly Man, his documentary about wacked-out bear activist Timothy Treadwell. Herzog narrates the film and is even on camera for a scene or two. You definitely get a sense of the mental vibe resonating inside his Teutonic head.

Or you can watch this BBC interview during which he gets shot. No kidding:

The wizards wankers of WordPress (see update below) have added a feature that lets readers rate each article. I thought to give it a go—perhaps it’ll be a good way to gauge reactions to a blog that sees moderate traffic, but few comments.

The downside to having a ratings feature is what I call “drive-by starring” when visitors rate stuff that they didn’t even read.

The debasement of people’s reading comprehension when online is a whole other topic; suffice it to say Something Awful almost hit the nail on the head with their “The Internet Makes You Stupid” mantra. I’d argue that it makes it easier for the already stupid to share their idiocy on places like YouTube and Yelp. Yay Internets!

Update: Turns out to see the little rating starts and actually rate something you have to be viewing only that post, usually by clicking on the title, instead of viewing all the posts on a given page. So fucking stupid, I’m thinking on disabling the feature now. Nice job, WordPress. Internet dumb asses.

If Charlie Chaplin starred in The Matrix:

Even without dialogue Chaplin is a million times better than Keanu “I know kung fu” Reeves.

From a few months ago. Art of the Title takes a look at the end title sequence for WALL-E and interviews the geniuses behind it. As with other films like The Incredibles, Pixar uses the end titles to illustrate key story points in a style that departs from the rest of the movie. It’s like watching another version of the film.

Here’s the sequence:

The Unknown Screenwriter has an awesome post about perfecting the art of the elevator pitch. Now, I hate coming up with loglines and taglines are a total mystery me. Maybe it’s because I have a hard time thinking in brevity. It’s definitely a skill.

Anyway, he talks about what he calls a “compass logline” to be used as a guide as you write the script. Compass lines are intended to pique interest in your story, to make the reader go, “Holy crap! How’s that going to happen?” And then have to actually read the script to find the answer.

For months now, the film world has been alight—with what little information there is—about Ridley Scott’s planned Alien prequel. Yes, as in, “What the hell happened before humans became part of their food chain?”

Early speculation revolved around the derelict ship seen in the first two films, and the fate of the mysterious “space jockey” whose corpse seems fused to the ship’s tech. But Ridley (kind of) dispels that notion with this interesting tidbit he shared with Empire magazine:

“It’s a brand new box of tricks,” said Sir Ridley. “We know what the road map is, and the screenplay is now being put on paper. The prequel will be a while ago. It’s very difficult to put a year on Alien, but [for example] if Alien was towards the end of this century, then the prequel story will take place thirty years prior.”

But will a prequel even have humans in it? Conventional understanding is that the Nostromo incident marked the first encounter between humans and the xenomorphs (aka the scary aliens). Or was it? Perhaps there’s more to explore regarding the mysterious motives of Weylan(d)-Yutani, the corporate villain of the franchise.

Whatever Scott and company decide for the story, I eagerly await to see what comes from his box of tricks.