You are browsing the archives of 2009 May.

Silly as his movies are, there’s something about the self-deprecating humor of Jackie Chan that makes us like him way more than, say, Jet Li. That same humor, in fact, makes his ridiculous stunts more fun to watch, because they’re stripped of all the self-serious “drama” of other stuntmen and instead incredibly enjoyable. Now that [...]

Sure, athletes do incredible things with their bodies, but in these days of augmented performances (drugs, sci-fi swimwear and rocket shoes) aren’t our most iconic athletes actually turning into fictional heroes? We think so, hence InGameNow’s listicle of the Top 10 Fictional Athletes of All Time. We’re tempted to take issue with some of the [...]

Long thought to be the province of renaissance fairs and silly time travel medieval movies (Black Knight anyone?) and restricted to the leisure class that could afford horses, armor, assistants and those long wooden swords, jousting has made a mini-comeback with various web-ready DIY iterations. Some examples: office chair jousting, electric wheelchair jousting, bike jousting [...]

The 35th American President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was born 92 years ago today, which makes this the perfect occasion to count down memorable screen incarnations of the nation’s favorite playboy head of state and mysterious martyr. Enjoy John in all his forms and incarnations with our 7 Stately Screen Versions of JFK.
Clone High

Having him play [...]

Remember those really crazy but incredibly effective anti-smoking TV commercials for Truth? Well, since they’ve fallen off our radar it seems like every other anti-smoking group has moved into similarly clever and creative advertising strategies. After all, competing with tobacco companies for people’s attention is no small task, but we’re continually impressed with campaigns like [...]

Tattoo listicles have long been among our favorite varieties of listicle, as have celebrity lists, so imagine our joy when not one but two listicles appeared (with significant overlap, admittedly) devoted to the subject of celebrity tattoos. No, not the tattoos on celebrities, but tattoos of celebrities’ likeness on regular folk.
The master list in this [...]

Today is Whale Day, on which occasion we’d love to go see some whales, but there are rarely any in New York’s polluted and traffic-heavy waterways (sometimes, but rarely). So we’ll do the next best thing, go to see some of our favorite fictional whales talk, jump, fight and kill their way through the ocean [...]

We’re suckers for cool and cute animated images, which is why we couldn’t pass up this image of 18 Really Fast Superheroes. We also wanted to make you think, with our choice of title, that this would be a dense, comic book lore-heavy listicle of superheroes endowed with the ability to achieve extreme speeds. Did [...]

Of the many things the Internet deities provide that we should be thankful for, their capacity to provide much-loved fictional characters with a rich life outside their conventional narrative confines is clearly in the top 5.
This is especially true of nerdy favorites like Star Wars characters, as our good friends at Urlesque demonstrated with their [...]

The Golden Gate Bridge celebrates its 72nd birthday today, and to celebrate we’ve rounded up some of its most memorable big screen appearances. As our colleague Henry Stewart wrote recently, San Francisco has become the go-to movie disaster site, so you’ll notice a slew of very recent films in the mix. Our favorite of The [...]

We all make mistakes when coming up with brand names, that’s just a fact of our product-saturated lives. For instance, a few months back (just over five months, to be exact) we had what we thought was a brilliant idea for a weblog where we would aggregate and create lists (because everybody loves lists). People [...]

In the cine-essay The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, popular Lacanian cultural critic and philosopher Slavoj Žižek makes the point that toilets are a rather loaded symbol, a kind of terrifying portal to some secret and disgusting underworld and cultural subconscious that we know exists yet want desperately not to think about.
Following that logic, bathroom signs [...]

As you may have heard, a Starbucks on Manhattan’s Upper West Side was bombed very early in the morning yesterday. The coffee shop’s windows shattered, but nobody was hurt. To prove that clever graphic design can be a more effective form of protest than terrorism, we’ve rounded up these 14 Remixed Starbucks Logos.

Creepy, not unlike…

We remember that, as kids, we were over-excited for every stupid new action movie that came out and eager to buy the accompanying toy line. Accordingly, we were very disappointed whenever a new movie didn’t come replete with its attendant merchandising blitzkrieg. “Why couldn’t every movie be an elaborate toy ad like Transformers?”, we wondered.
Well, [...]

Hey, it’s Memorial Day, and if you’re not cooking up a delicious slab of beef today in our nation’s great outdoors (ie. a backyard, stoop or fire escape somewhere), well, you’re un-American (and girlie). There, I said it.
Fear not, however, young hesitant and confused patriot, there’s still time to put your country where your mouth [...]

When describing our process in interviews and lectures (which we’re constantly giving because, you know, we got it like that), we tend to describe ourselves as versatile over-workers who are slightly neurotic and occasionally derivative. In so doing, we would be checking off a third of the options on Olly Moss’s visual listicle of 12 [...]

With the NBA playoffs reaching their climax (although without the Celtics, which saddens us), what better time for a symbolic purge of all the crappy play we don’t want to have to deal with in the weeks ahead? Happily, Screen Junkies has done just that with their listicle of The 10 Worst Basketball Scenes in [...]

You’re probably too young to remember this (in truth, so are we), but during the run of the original Batman series (1966-68) there was a recurring joke that whenever the caped crusader and his birdy assistant Robin were climbing up a building, someone famous would poke their head out to say high. It was pretty [...]

Today is Buy-A-Musical-Instrument Day (catchy, right?), which makes us feel guilty about all the dusty instruments we’ve bought over the years and never used – we realize, now, that we probably didn’t need a church organ, but there you go. At least we don’t buy musical instruments with such callously destructive ends in mind as [...]

As several past lists have proven, making a decent album cover is about as challenging as making a good album. Even worse, if you make a really good album cover you can make people forget (for a moment) how crappy the music behind it is. Every so often, though, a truly spectacular album and an [...]