Quartz City

“I Drink Your Milkshake” scribbled on the sidewalk in Larchmont.

Congratulations guys!

Occasionally something wins that utterly deserves to. Outside of There Will Be Blood, Once was the only movie that I unequivocably loved. No arguments with the winners, but Jeff Daniels really should have been nominated for The Lookout and The King Of Kong and Deep Water should have been nominated in Best Documentary.

I also discovered that I’ve seen 53 of the best picture winners.

The promotion for the Simpsons Movie DVD release in the UK reenacts a certain famous album cover…

The poster for Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited is out and the world’s typophiles are on the case to figure out exactly what font it is. Shockingly, it’s not Futura.

Hell, I’m excited just to see the trailer (and get ready to fish out your copy of The Kinks’ Lola vs. Powerman and the Moneygoround)

A couple of worthy stories over on Airminded. The first comes from a DOE atomic bomb test in 1957 to see what would happen if a Navy airship was used to deliver a nuclear depth charge.

In short, the bomb wins:

The second story concerns the latter days of Hammer Films in the early 1970s and an unmade film with the working title Zeppelin vs Pterodactyls.

The story was along the lines of THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT, with a German Zeppelin being blown off-course during a bombing raid on London and winding up at a “lost continent”-type place.

The Land That Time Forgot is still essential viewing here whenever I run across it, but Zeppelin vs. Pterodactyls would have obsoleted it instantly. Hammer only got as far as commissioning up a poster to attract investors, but holy cow what a poster!

Microgramma font is instant Stendhal syndrome for me.

…going to a lecture about futurist city design and architecture inside a re-purposed wind tunnel owned by an art school while a brush fire threatens to burn the city down.

Yet another good BLDGBLOG event though I wish there was more time to lift it out of the show-and-tell blitzkrieg. The one question I wanted to ask the panel was if they considered and/or incorporated the temporal nature of city evolution. As a sci-fi artist for movies, it seems the tendency would be to tilt toward ground-up master planning, but cities aren’t hegemonic areas, they grow, go broke, get blighted, get hit by deorbiting star destroyers, get rebuilt, attacked by Godzilla, new stuff built on top of old stuff, etc.

The last couple of Star Wars movies hinted at that evolution, but not nearly as thorough as portrayed in Blade Runner or perhaps A.I.

The Hot Dog Show of Toluca Lake (as seen in the original 1956 Invasion Of The Body Snatchers)

And how it looks now.

It’s called Papoo’s Hot Dog Show now, but it’s still standing at the corner of Rose and Riverside in Toluca Lake since it opened in 1949. Good dogs too!

(Snatchers photo from Nostalgia Party No. 2)

It’s not the opening to a TV show, but the opening to one of the films in the Torakku Yaro (a.k.a. “Truck Guy”) movie series from the late-1970s. This may just be one of the best opening sequences ever…

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TV In Japan (where I found this clip) notes:

This is a movie I feel I need to learn a lot more about.

It’s also the kind of thing that Quentin Tarantino probably has memorized.

I absolutely concur with that statement. A YouTube commenter notes that the opening song is by Ryuudou Uzaki and is titled “Ichibanboshi Blues.” Presumably there’s a helpful otaku out there who’s compiled all the music together.

I dug around on the net and turned up some info on what looks like the best film in the ten film series. In the fifth installment Sonny Chiba is the leader of the “Jaws Army Corps” truck gang. Sonny’s truck (a.k.a. Jaws I) is decorated as follows:

Yowza!

A little something I noticed in the latest trailer for Grindhouse:

An Alpine White 1970 Dodge Challenger with the license plate “OA 5599.” There’s only one of those…

Something had been bothering me about the last four James Bond films and my irritation had nothing to do with Pierce Brosnan (who was a perfectly capable Bond, even when elements of the movies, well, weren’t). I was put-off by the mix-up of Serpentine italic and Britannic bold italic with the traditional sans serif caps used in the opening titles. To illustrate:

Ugly. Not just ugly, but tremendously ugly. At best, they’re suitable for a video game box but fundamentally they’re about as striking and iconic as a direct-to-DVD E-list action movie. Worse, they clash with the font used for the rest of the credits. Now compare these with some earlier ones from the Maurice Binder era:

Consistent and elegant typography. As outrageous as a typical Bond movie is supposed to be, you at least feel like you’re about to see something better than your average spy/action/comic book flick. Which brings us to Casino Royale:

That crap ItalicBoldMetallic title font is finally tossed for a sans serif (I think it’s Century Gothic) that’s familiar enough, but honestly I didn’t notice that much because the opening credit sequence is so bloody great. Congrats to Daniel Kleinman for making us forget how lousy Chris Cornell is. Note to Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson, please hire Hooverphonic or Alison Goldfrapp for the next movie. k thx bye.

As for the movie itself. Casino Royale and Daniel Craig wisely sidesteps the entire “how does he compare to Connery” issue that a zillion armchair critics have saved into their blog draft folders and goes completely off-axis to a third Bond-archetype that isn’t Connery or Moore. Something about Craig’s Bond was naggingly familiar when about two-thirds of the way through, I figured it out. These are the two actors people should be comparing together:

All the online reviews are pretty spot-on, so I won’t waste your time with running through them again. The best thing I can say about it is that after it finished, I immediately wanted to see the sequel. It’s also the only movie this year I’ve paid to see twice.

You can watch the opening credits to all of the Bond movies here. Typotheque has a lengthy essay on the title design to From Russia With Love and Salon looks at Maurice Binder’s work.