BY KELLY CONABOY |
Kelly's Curated Internet: Oculus Rift, 'Star Wars,' & 'Mean Girls'
Also: tiny hamsters eating tiny burritos!
The 13th annual Tribeca Film Festival has come to an end. Aww. I know it's sad, but think of it this way: the countdown to the 14th annual Tribeca Film Festival has just begun! But if you're still pining for TFF 2014, go ahead and take a look back at this year's award winners and Heineken Audience Award Winners. Then take a look forward on what we have to offer you from this week on the web!
- Shutterstock shared nine of their favorite TFF 2014 films. Do they match up with yours?
- "Determining the boundaries of the window of visibility has been an exciting leap forward in understanding the limits of visual perception. But to make this knowledge useful to filmmakers, Gepshtein has been enhancing it with other findings from vision science." Neuroscientist Sergei Gepshtein dreams of a future in cinema where quirks of visual perception are incorporated into standard filmmaking, giving the audience a shared, immersive experience, in which the events seem to unfold all around them. (WHAAAT!)
- Craig Ferguson announced earlier this week that he will step down as the host of CBS's Late Late Show in December. CBS Entertainment chairman Nina Tassler told the Hollywood Reporter that CBS doesn't have anyone lined up to replace him yet, but rumored contenders include Aisha Tyler, Michael Ian Black, and Joel McHale.
- You can count Louis C.K. out, though -- he spoke with New York Times TV reporter Bill Carter at the Directors Guild on Tuesday night and revealed, regarding David Letterman's exit from the Late Show, that he would never want to host a late night show.
- "Is it possible to propose a software canon? To enumerate great works of software that are deeply influential—that changed the nature of the code that followed?" Paul Ford proposes and tackles these questions.
- The special-effects demo reel for Wes Anderson's Grand Budapest Hotel was released this week by LOOK Effects, the visual post-production house that worked on the film. It, like special-effects reels often do, serves to remind you that movies comprise more layers of make believe than you even realize.
- "Well, before I go into it, I worry about saying something like, 'You should see this.' I don’t want to make it seem like I’m any authority—or that we’re any authority—on what movies you should or shouldn’t see. I just want to preface it by saying that. But with that said, it is a perfect movie." Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein on the indispensability of This Is Spinal Tap.
- As you may know, this week marked the tenth anniversary of the release of Mean Girls. Fetch! Richard Brody wrote for the New Yorker about why the teen comedy is a classic.
- Is Twitter entering its twilight years? Adrienne LaFrance and Robinson Meyer think so.
- The first trailer for Richard Linklater's incredible-looking Boyhood was released this week. Mark Blankenship takes a look at its use of indie band Family of the Year's song "Hero" over at "Trailer Tunes."
- "If you’ve never really noticed the absence of women in Star Wars (or movies at large), consider yourself living proof of how the limiting narratives of culture and media can warp our expectations, to the point where the presence of one woman in a cast of dozens of memorable male characters can seem like perfect equality." Laura Hudson writes for Wired about Star Wars' (and Hollywood's) woman problem.
- A Palo Alto-based startup has been building a platform that allows filmmakers to use the virtual-reality headset Oculus Rift.
- Noel Murray wrote for The Dissolve about immediacy in the filmography of William Friedkin, director of The French Connection and The Exorcist.
- And finally, I'll leave you with one of the best things I've seen all week: tiny hamsters eating tiny burritos. You're welcome!