Lost in Japan

Well, this is simply brilliant. This is the trailer for “The Shining, Redux” so to speak. A post-production house arranged an in-house competition where the challenge was to create a trailer for a famous movie and make it seem like a *totally* different movie. The winner is the trailer posted below.

So what was originally something along the lines of this:

Becomes a happy coming-of-age story like this:

Click here to check out the trailer over at Tattered Coat

Thanks to Waxy for this great link.

[EDIT] After some searching I found two more entries into this competition; West Side Story and Titanic. I haven’t watched them yet, though – but the “Scary Titanic” description sounds interesting! Click here for more info.

[EDIT] I thought I’d post the link to the follow-up post to this with more information, in case you haven’t found it:
little-more-about-the-shining-redux-et-al

[EDIT] If you are interested, I just added another brilliant mashed up movie trailer Toy Story 2: Requiem.

[EDIT] I decided to add the trailer directly here, thanks to the wonderful YouTube.

Oh, how could I have missed to write about the Tokyo International Film Festival until now?

Thanks to 3yen for reminding me of this yearly event….which I have yet to ever attend!

Is it time this year? There are some interesting foreign movies on the lineup (I won’t bother with the Asian ones, because I cannot follow the Japanese subtitles well enough to fully enjoy them)

The Brothers Grimm
Bee Season
Oliver Twist (Roman Polanski can do almost nothing wrong in my opinion)
Conversations With Other Women (Anything with Helena Bonham-Carter is worth seeing!)
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (Tommy Lee Jones’ feature-film directorial debut!)
Reincarnation (aka ‘Rinne’ – the new film by Takashi Shimizu who made the Ju-On movies)

…and if it weren’t in Chinese, I’d love to see Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles by Zhang Yimou.

When I was in Yokohama the other day, I saw the following sign outside the elevators at Landmark Plaza and it just cracked me up!! Talk about top notch Engrish!!

Suffice to say, I rode the elevator, and on this particular day, there were no legs or hands pinched in the elevator!! Would have been pretty scary if there were, though!

This might just be the funniest (in a sad way) video found on the Internet this year so far:

Will You Go To Prom With Me!!!!?

After soom googling I found out that she is lipsyncing (or karaokeing, or making a fool of herself; whatever you want to call it) to Go To Prom Anyways! by Jesse Buy Nothing. The best bit is when what I think is her grandmother comes in and dances in the background! Hilarious!

You go girl! Way to make “fool of the year 2005″ !

OK, moving along. This last part I will dedicate to some of the smaller, lesser known products which I found kind of exciting.

First off is the Mini 2004 Stereo Integrated Amplifier (2 x 12 W Ultralinear Class AB) from Hong Kong maker Audio Space which is one of the largest Chinese makers of high-end vacuum tube amplifiers. I listened a little to a demo of one of their amplifiers, but the room was crowded and I was far outside any sweetspot, so I couldn’t really judge the quality. The Mini’s were awfully cool looking though!

Next up is the Assam polyhedric speakers from Solid Acoustics. Check out the picture below! These were demoed in a very open space so I really couldn’t judge the quality of these either, however they looked radically different from any other speaker I’ve seen, so I’d love to take a closer listen to them at some point!

And finally one interesting product was the CA-S3 micro-size integrated amplifier from Flying Mole (great name!) which is really tiny at only 130 x 54 x 142 mm in size! The minimalistic design was really sweet (just one big volume knob and a power button in a sleek silver casing) and it will fit just about anywhere. When demoing this, the company had connected it to an iPod, so there is no way in judging the quality but the specs looked very good on paper… (Hooking up iPods to high-end amps seemed to be the latest fad, I even saw a company hook one up to a $1,000+ tube amp!) It wasn’t extremely expensive either, the SGRP was 70,000 Yen.

(sorry for the bad picture, I never took one myself)