Great little video from the surprisingly interesting Barnes & Noble Studio website, featuring John Gall, Art Director at Vintage Books, in which he shares his ”The 5 Rules of Book Cover Design”. In short, they are:
May 23, 2008, 9:32am
“Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.”
May 22, 2008, 10:28pm
PRIMER may be the most ingenious movie I have ever seen. Here’s a brief synopsis, from the film’s website:
PRIMER is set in the industrial park/suburban tract-home fringes of an unnamed contemporary city where two young engineers, Abe and Aaron, are members of a small group of men who work by day for a large corporation while conducting extracurricular experiments on their own time in a garage. While tweaking their current project, a device that reduces the apparent mass of any object placed inside it by blocking gravitational pull, they accidentally discover that it has some highly unexpected capabilities—ones that could enable them to do and to have seemingly anything they want. Taking advantage of this unique opportunity is the first challenge they face. Dealing with the consequences is the next.
In many ways, the film is a fine example of the beauty of contradiction. It’s science-fiction without special effects. It genuinely puts the science in science fiction. Actually, it comes of more like “engineering-fiction.” Any explanation beyond that would spoil the fun. Let’s just say that it may be the only movie that has ever made me start drawing diagrams in an attempt to keep track of what’s happening.
There’s a great moment early in the film where one of the main character is telling an old engineering urban legend about the Cold War space race. While NASA was spending millions on creating a pen that worked properly in zero-gravity, the Russians decided to simply use a pencil. In this moment, you realize that they aren’t only talking about the events taking place in the plot, they are talking about the film itself. Shot for a paltry $7,000 dollars, it looks and feels like exactly the movie it needs to be. Had another dime been spent on the film, it may have very well ruined things. Don’t take my word for it. Here’s a great (though spoiler prone) Onion A/V article, the MetaCritic evaluation (a hearty 68), and the Roger Ebert review.
It’s worth watching. Maybe twice.
May 22, 2008, 10:21pm
