In the course of my work as a documentary filmmaker, I sometimes find hidden gems. Samuel Fuller’s “The Naked Kiss” is one of them. Read the rest

It's not quite "Gibberish rock song written by Italian composer to sound like English", as it is in English. Sort of. It's the Englishiness of it all that makes it so good. Who put the ram in the ramalangadingdong? Warning: blackface.

Here's part 2:

Read the rest

Producer Tony Visconi insinuated that British singer Adele, whose voice has sold more than 100m records, used digital trickery to hit the hard notes. Read the rest

“I designed and animated this piece as an homage to my favorite show of all time, HBO’s The Wire,” says animator Elliot Lim.

What an absolutely stunning piece this is. One of my new year's resolutions is to watch the entire series, start to finish, in one big binge.

[Laughing Squid, animation stills via elliot-lim.com]

Read the rest

A beautiful piece of writing by Schabse presents the history of Web authentication as a series of conversational gambits and ripostes between someone who wants to let users prove their identity online, and someone who wants to impersonate those users. It's a great way to present a subject that's both esoteric and vital, and I've never seen it before. Read the rest

Kevin McFarland reviews episode 5 in season 1 of HBO's crime drama "True Detective," starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. If you're new to the show, start with our introduction here. This post contains spoilers.

Kevin McFarland reviews the fourth episode of HBO's crime drama "True Detective," starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. Contains spoilers. If you're new to the show, start with our introduction here.

What separates HBO's crime drama True Detective from other series that obsessively catalogue dead female bodies or attempt to find the human side of serial killers is the show's ambition in style and scope.

The Whitehorse City Council meeting will be the most dramatic, tension-filled television you'll experience all week. It airs every Monday evening on Whitehorse Community Cable in Yukon, Canada. (Thanks, FP!) Read the rest

Rachel Bublitz's four year old Audrey wrote her first play:

Characters: Scare People, F, very tall, wears a mask, growls, 18 years old. She goes to scare people school. She is an octopus monster with wings.

Audrey, F, 11 years old. Wears monkey pajamas.

Synopsis: Audrey tries to get Scare People out of her house.

AUDREY SCARE PEOPLE PLAY

(Thanks, Ashley!) Read the rest

Two local ABC news anchors, Cindy Michaels and Tony Consiglio, "shocked viewers and colleagues" by quitting on-air Tuesday. No reasons were given for their sudden departure beyond Consiglio saying "some recent developments have come to our attention, though, and departing together is the best alternative we can take."

Their boss, however, was less mysterious: "Sometimes people leave before they're officially told to leave." Read the rest

Happy Read Comics in Public month! In honor of the world's fourth favorite made-up geek holiday (August 28th -- happy early birthday, Jack Kirby!) here are some picks to help you get started on your outdoor sequential art consuming skills. This time out, we've got something for the history buffs, something for the kids, something for the metal heads and, of course, something for the unemployed turtles.

The Hypo: The Melancholic Young Lincoln By Noah Van Sciver Fantagraphics Books

That’s short for “hypomania,” Lincoln’s self-prescribed melancholy, a lifelong battle with depression that hit like a ton of bricks in the young lawyer’s mid-20s. For those who have had some trouble accessing one of the most mythologized figures in American history (a category I'd imagine applies to most of us), Noah Van Sciver offers a pretty good place to start -- a young Lincoln moving to a new city, confused and awkward in love and life, given to bouts of darkness and moody poetry. It’s a short small snapshot of the future president’s life -- and it’s in this limited scope that the book finds its success, not beholden to the birth to death summations that often entrap graphic biographers. Instead, The Hypo's relatively limited scope afford the cartoonist the ability to approach the historical giant as a human, offering an empathetic examination of a troubled individual destined for greatness. Read the rest

Encyclopedia Dramatica, a bizarro-world Wikipedia that aims to amuse and offend, has few peers in the internet outrage game. With almost nothing off-limits, the content runs from parody to ax-grinding, and anyone can join in. No surprise, then, that it's at the top of authoritarian governments' censorship hit lists: accused of being a laundering shop for libel, racism, homophobia and other shitcockery, its moderator explains the idea. Says owner Joseph Evers: "Here's to the hidden costs of freedom." [Ninemsn. Thanks, Weev] Read the rest