Things of note for the weekend ending July 4th, 2014.
1. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Early reviews of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes are in and it’s beginning to read like one of the best sequels ever made.
You can read a bunch of SPOILER-FREE reactions over on Screenrant but here’s the quote that won me over –
Not quite the intimate parable of the first movie nor a balls-to-the-wall battlefield extravaganza, Dawn is pitched somewhere in the middle, with much of its two hour-plus running time powered by the simmering, expertly sustained tension both between and within the two species. The key to selling this knife-edge friction, of course, is the ability to buy into the apes as fully fleshed-out characters.
Yeah, I’m in.
2. Testing the ORION Space Launch System
KA-POOOOSH!
I picked this up from Tab Dump (a great news source) earlier this week. The Atlantic put together this amazing photo essay of NASA’s test of its new Space Launch system – and it is gorgeous.
3. The Slap
Another week, another Max Landis thing – The Slap – is a [somewhat late] response to the viral clothes marketing video from a few months ago, First Kiss. Both are worth watching.
4. Sink Hole Corvettes
I don’t know if you caught this at the time but back in February a 40-foot sinkhole opened up underneath the Corvette Museum in Kentucky and the poor guys lost a couple of beautiful cars to the Earth below.
Well, after dragging the smashed up beauties out of there, the museum’s board got together and tried to work out what to do with the gaping hole in the middle of their building.
The museum’s board felt that it had three options available: completely repair the sinkhole, leave it as-is or modify it slightly to be somewhat smaller. In a vote, the members decided on the third option, which would reduce the cavity’s size to 25-feet by 45-feet wide and 30-feet deep. That might be further modified after studies into how having an open hole in the Skydome will affect the humidity and heating costs. Regardless, the hope is to leave enough room to display two Corvette models down there, possibly the ones most badly damaged in the collapse.
Yup, that’s right, the AMAZING folks at the Corvette Museum decided to not only keep the sinkhole, but also display the damaged cars therein! Apparently, since the sinkhole occurred, attendance shot up by 59% so obviously it makes complete sense to keep it.
Brilliant.
5. Cutting costs? Nah, let’s make more money.
I read Scamp quite often and it’s pretty much nearly always a damn good read. This latest post, looking at why it’s not always the right idea to save money but instead just make more of it (it makes so much sense when you write it down like that) is a very good read and might make think everso slightly differently next time you’re going into the FD.
-Whatley out.
________
Bonuses
One bonus this week – an awesome 8min long video on what the ‘one take’ in film really means and how the person you’d least expect is truly the one and only master.
Apes was goooood