Big 6: COMMUNITY appeal, Ken Jacobs 3D, Tim Burton, more

Tweet

RSSS

Tweet

Tonight’s Community: The most insanely self-referential 22 minutes in sitcom history.

Outside of ongoing jokes about the school’s academic haplessness, the show isn’t about education, and I don’t read it as a stand-in for America. Rather, the show is about itself in particular and TV in general, but again with a sort of blank aimlessness that often produces a vortex of jokes about some marginal bit of pop culture, like the rock group Barenaked Ladies, who are debated at length in the context of whether they are worthy of being debated about at all. Read the full Slate article

3D Experiments From Ken Jacobs

Hollywood might do well to learn from Ken Jacobs, who can boast more than 40 years of provocative, demanding and transformative explorations of various permutations of 3-D, putting the primitive, in-your-face assaults of Hollywood to shame. Read the full LA Weekly article

Tim Burton’s birthday finds him looking to his past

Burton’s got plenty more on his plate. He watched a museum exhibit collecting up his art create a sensation in New York and in Los Angeles and he’s also producing “Abe Lincoln, Vampire Hunter” (based on the namesake novel by Seth Grahame-Smith, who also wrote “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies“). Read the full LA Times article

How To Survive Final Destination

Tanning booths: the vessel of choice for vanity driven Oompa-Loompa wannabes, or life-size George Foreman grills? Well, the latter if Final Destination 3 is anything to go by, as Ashley and Ashlyn find out after a toasty time spent trapped in these lean mean grilling machines.  Read the full Total Film article

Time to declare war on the shaky camera

Simply put, this crap is transparently cynical and opportunistic and has become totally played-out since 1999’s “The Blair Witch Project,” arguably the hit that made home video panic-cam an official, approved technique in mainstream productions. Twelve years later, directors who keep treating it as an aesthetic security blanket — especially at the big-budget level — should be required to get a tattoo across their foreheads that reads “Hack.” Read the full Salon post

Vera Farmiga On Faith, Madonna, and Mo’Nique

VV: That sounds very Rocky Horror Show.

Farmiga: Which I think Higher Ground has a potential to become! [She laughs and starts crooning a hymn as if it were a sing-along.]  Read the full Village Voice article

THE BIG 6 is a daily collection of film stories and features from around the web. If you have a something to add, leave a comment below.