I just saw an add for Sukiyaki Western Django in this month's LA Weekly, and based on the over the top trailer, I'm adding this to my movie watchlist. Named after the famous Japanese dish, Takashi Miike wants to do to the western what Sergio Leone did in the 60s. This time it's out with the spaghetti, and in with this strange blend of Samurai-slash-Cowboy, equal part Kurosawa and Leone in this re-imagining of Django.

After centuries of war, the rival Heike and Genji clans have been reduced to little more than scrappy gangs of ill-kempt stragglers. The Heike led by hot-tempered Kiyomori (Sato Koichi) and the Genji led by criminally cool Yoshitsune (Iseya Yusuke) both catch wind that there's gold to be found in the small, remote town of Yuta. Showdown in little Yuta is inevitable when both clans come rolling into town at the same time. Joining the fray is a mysterious, nameless cowboy (Ito Hideaki) with the fastest guns in the east. Both clans are eager to enlist the ronin into their ranks, but he will only offer his services to the highest bidder.

Sukiyaki is currently playing in LA at the Landmark, but if I miss it, I'll probably get a copy from my favorite source of Asian cinema, YesAsia.

Sukiyaki Western Django

Between Natasha's reading habit and mine, we are always on the lookout for shelves. Here's an interesting one from designer Nils Holger Moormann named Insert Coin Shelf System.

Vaguely reminiscent of shoe racks which use vertical rather than horizontal stacking, this shelf system uses trays, inserted randomly at different levels on a colorful base, to accommodate just about everything you want on display. Designed by Nils Holger Moormann, Insert Coin provides potential for just about every look: from higgledy piggledy to extremely straight and narrow.

[via SwissMiss]

The Chainsaw Maid starts with a cute little girl, her father, and of course the maid. Add half a dozen zombie, a chainsaw and copious amounts of red clay, and you have a great little Japanese claymation short from Takena.

THEY are coming for your FLESH and BLOOD!Now the last hope of the family rests on a sexy faithful MAID! The most brutal clay-animation you've ever seen! ご主人様と少女を守るため、メイドさんがチェーンソーでゾンビ軍団に立ち向かう！ポッ プな色彩の中で展開する衝撃の人体破壊内臓グチャドロのウルトラ・スプラッター・ゴア ・クレイアニメ！ 邦題：チェーンソー・メイド

Video after the break..

I'll admit to a weakness for typographic toys like Fontpark 2.0. This Flash application lets you use characters from the Morisawa font collections to create a drawing. The fact that Morisawa is a japanese company means you get to play with Kanji characters.

Better yet, every typographical mark wiggles and bends as you manipulate them, and swoosh around as drawing in the gallery get re-created before your eyes.

Fontpark 2.0 was created by Yuugo Nakamura of tha ltd.

Just in case this whole career in Computer Graphics doesn't quite pan out, there is always the option for Natasha and I to enroll ourselves in a Circus. In that case, taking Flying Trapeze lessons at the Trapeze School New York is probably a good idea.

The TSNY just opened a new branch at the Santa-Monica pier, and is offering courses all summer. You can either take the Flying Trapeze classes, or the Silks.

So, why do I have this nagging urge to throw myself off a platform 23 feet in the air, you might be asking yourself? Answer: because some part of you is yearning to be more alive, to fly. If the thrill of your first few swings only whets your appetite for this exhilarating sport then it's time to start coming regularly to classes and learning everything you can about the skills of flying, the trapeze apparatus and the people who love to fly. Aerial silks, or tissue, are two long pieces of soft and often stretchy fabric that hang from a single point. Using strength, grace and flexibility, you climb the pieces of fabric and move your body into amazing and beautiful poses. Drops and rolls are an exciting and fun part of learning silks.

Each class lasts about 2 hours (enough to get a decent workout) and cost $47 per person during the week, and $65 on weekends.

Chris Peters paints skeletons. Happy skeletons, going about their business, watching television at home, or skeleton lovers tenderly holding each other. These are my favorites. I saw one of his paintings last year, showing  two skeletons in a loving embrace, and a similar painting caught my eyes again this year.

The Germans have a word "unheimlich" that is difficult to translate into English, although a blur between the words "uncanny" and "eerie" perhaps comes the closest to providing a definition. In each of my paintings, I am trying to find the beauty in that uneasy twilight place between life and death, between reality and unreality, between self and what writer H.P. Lovecraft called "the others". The objects in my paintings draw from the classic symbolism of Vanitas still life and Catholic religious paintings; all refer to the cycle of life, death, and the promise of resurrection.

His current show, The End and After just opened at the Copro-Nason Gallery this weekend, which thankfully is just a few block from my house.

LushPad is a marketplace dedicated for modernist furniture, perfect for the hardcore collector looking for that elusive original, or simply aficionados with DWR tastes but an IKEA budget.

Lushpad is a unique online marketplace and resource that is intended to provide a service that has been missing from the collecting community since Modern design crossed the threshold from everyday to vintage a few years ago. Authentic originals, licensed originals and unlicensed lookalikes all vie for our attention. Lushpad hopes to clear through the clutter and help people make beautiful homes and impressive collections.

[via notcot.org]

Created by San Francisco-based Typographers Fontshop the community-driven FontStruct portal lets you create, exchange and modify fonts.

FontStruct, which was opened to the public in April, is a free, online tool that lets users quickly and easily create fonts by arranging geometrical shapes in a grid pattern, much like tiles or bricks. Working one letter at a time, users add and remove shapes including blocks and dots to achieve a look they like. Once they're done building, FontStruct generates high-quality TrueType fonts, ready to use in any Mac or Windows application. Users can keep their "FontStructions" private, or they can share them with the FontStruct community for discussion, rating and downloading. They can also display them on other websites or blogs through the FontStruct widget. Several Creative Commons license options are available to allow varying degrees of sharing. The site is supported through links to San Francisco-based FontShop for sales and downloads of its professional, non-modular fonts.

I didn't really have a chance to play with their Fontstruction interface, but the whole idea behind their brick based font creation interface seems very interesting.

[via Springwise]

I just saw a post about Mathieu Kassovitz new movie Babylon A.D. (or here for the us version of the site)which is set to release in France on August 27th and in the USA the next day. The futuristic trailer, starring Vim Diesel, but thankfully supported by Michelle Yeoh for the action bits, and an amazing cast of French actors like Gerard Depardieu, Lambert Wilson, Charlotte Rampling and Melanie Thierry.

A cult novel in France, this sci-fi thriller is now being made into a movie by Mathieu Kassovitz. Set in the hidden "flesh and chip" breeding grounds of the first cyborg communities and peopled by Serbian Mafiosi, Babylon A.D. has as its hero a hard-boiled leatherneck veteran of Sarajevo named Thoorop who is hired by a mysterious source to escort a young woman named Marie Zorn from Russia to Canada. A garden variety job, he figures. But when Thoorop is offered an even higher fee by another organization, he realizes Marie is no ordinary girl. A schizophrenic and the possible carrier of a new artificial virus, Marie is carrying a mutant embryo created by an American cult that dreams of producing a genetically modified messiah, a dream that spells out the end of human life as we know it.

I'm a big fan of Mathieu Kassovitz's work, both as an actor and as a director, from the seminal La Haine to Les Rivieres Pourpres, and I'm curious to see what he did with Babylon Babies by French punk rocker turned novelist Maurice G. Dantec.

I know this is not the most recent, and I probably only find this funny because I'm still breathing the fumes of the last weeks of a bit of crunch at work.

Watching the Designer//Slash//Model promo piece from the Digital Kitchen agency made me laugh. If only my co-worker could match the vacuous good looks of Chaz, Chrissy, Fernando, Veronica and Gunther.

As the lack of posting in the last few weeks can attest, I haven't had a lot of time for the bloggie-thing lately, mainly because I'm in the last weeks of delivering a test of our crazy hybrid game + animated feature project to the studio.

So for another few weeks, don't expect many posting, just as I won't expect to make it to Comic-Con, or going to the Hollywood Bowl to see Feist eventhough I had box seats tickets, or even be able to sleep in on saturday morning, and take the bicycle to the Santa Monica farmer's market for breakfast.

oO

Here's a few musical suggestion from our resident graphics programmer Osiris Pérez, who got really excited when I told him I was going to see Los Amigos Invisibles along with Federico Aubele, Bebel Gilberto and headliners Thievery Corporation at the Hollywood Bowl last weekend. Based on that, Os suggested two more bands he thought I would like, Famasloop, and Masseratti 2lts, which I bought as soon as I got home last night.

Los Amigos Invisibles - Superpop Venezuela

It turns out that Os was right to get excited, because Los Amigos Invisible were probably the best part of the concert, with the sextet from Caracas obviously having a great time on stage, from the crazy antics of the keyboard player (I've never seen someone put so much energy into playing with one or two fingers at a time) to the guitarist, who had the best set of curly rock hair this side of the 70's.

Super Pop Venezuela is probably the most ambitious project the Venezuelan super group, Los Amigos Invisibles, have embarked on. What they accomplish on the new album is making hits that inspired the band their own. Listening to the interesting selection of tracks, it's clearly evident that it is a diverse selection of music that comes from all spectrums of Venezuelan music. Everything from the indigenous music of the Native Venezuelans, to merengue and of course, pop!

Los Amigos Invisibles Superpop Venezuela

Famasloop - Tres Casas

With a great blend of jazz, electronica, pop and the usual bossa-nova flavorings that are becoming more and more a staple of my music collection, Famasloop is currently my favorite Venezuelan band. Formed by Alain Gómez, Gabo Millán and Rafa Urbina, Famasloop's only album so far is the brilliant Tres Casas. Don't miss the following tracks: Pararrayos, for a vocoded melody that vaguely reminds me of a Pink Floyd's anthem but with the annoying progressive rock replaced by a great groove, or Avion A which explores the downtempo side of the trio.

Famasloop Tres Casas

Masseratti 2 lts - Cuentos de Ada 6 +

Masseratti 2lts (Masseratti Dos Litros) is two Venezuelan brothers, one living in Caracas, the other in Paris. Encouraged by the simplicity of Amazon's 1-click shopping, I ended up buying two of their albums, their latest release Cuentos de Ada 6, and the previous one titled Coctel #5: Cacao, Mujer y Beats.

Appropriately named The Downtempo Venezuelan Project, their music was a perfect background to a lazy afternoon, chilling out at home for a day, before jumping back into another 180 hour week before we deliver our project. This being said, I can't think of a particular track that stood out for any reason.

Masseratti 2 lts Cuentos de Ada 6
Masseratti 2 lts Coctel #5: Cacao, Mujer y Beats