An awesome mashup showing the darker side of the beloved Mary Poppins. It never ceases to amaze me how some music and a bit of selective editing can make the good look evil (and vice versa).
Archive for the 'Mashup' Category
Chevy has teamed up with The Apprentice and created web site that allows you to design your own SUV commercial. Not only is the video mixing tool a lot of fun but it’s an excellent means of culture jamming as a slew of anti-SUV commercials have been created:
Thanks to Lorraine for the link to the site and the links to all of the anti-SUV commercials. Be sure to check them out before Chevy tries to censor them. Happy jamming!
A few months ago I blogged about a remixed trailer for The Shinning and how easily our perceptions can be altered by a voiceover, a bit of music and some selective editing. Around the same time I also blogged about how an innocent hug between mother and son could be transformed into an erotic embrace by simply changing the speed and frequency of frames in the Alone. Life Waste Andy Hardy film piece. So naturally I was pleased when I came across the following two trailer mashups for Brokeback Mountain - Brokeback to the Future and Top Gun Brokeback Squadron. Not only are they hiliarous but they also touch on the deeper issues of how editing effects (and potentionally distorts) our percpetions.
Ever wanted to hear George W. rap? While now you can thanks to this fantastic cover of “White Lines” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five featuring carefully selected and organized sound bytes spoken by W. himself. The clip provides some insightful and timely commentary, but most importantly it is great for a laugh and worth a listen just to hear Bush channel LL Cool J and sing “something like a phenomenon”. Thanks to the Toronto Star’s Anti-Hit List for October 15 for the link.
Every so often I come across of a piece of art that challenges my most fundamental beliefs. The most recent piece to do so is Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy by Martin Arnold, an experimental film which remixes several clips from the clean-cut 1940s Andy Hardy series staring Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland. Arnold painstakingly takes the frames, speeds them up, slows them down and repeats them turning a wholesome movie about family values film into an erotic Oedipal musical. The effect is quite shocking - it absolutely blew my mind that that an innocent hug between mother and son could be transformed into an erotic embrace by simply changing the speed and frequency of frames, while still maintaining the general structure and narrative order. The level of manipulation, although laboriously intensive from the artists point of view, was relatively low yet the effect of this manipulation was staggering in that it changed the accepted and widely endorsed meaning and message of the piece. Arnold states that “the cinema of Hollywood is a cinema of exclusion, reduction and denial, a cinema of repression. There is always something behind that which is being represented, which was not represented”, and believes that as an artist he is merely bringing forth what is actually, and unconsciously, latent within the piece. I’m not sure that I totally agree with him, and as with any type of Freudian analysis it is equally hard to credit or discredit such an interpretation. Whether it is there or not seems irrelevant - what scares me the most is that it can be made to appear as though it is there.
Unfortunately, the full film can only been seen in screenings and exhibits, but there is a short clip available on the artists web site. This clip isn’t one of the best from the film, however it does provide a feel for the technique used. For a more in-depth description and analysis of the film, check out this insightful review by Michael Zryd.
Wow - this alternate trailer for The Shinning blew me away! I don’t know what is scarier - the movie itself or how easily our perceptions can be altered by a voiceover, a bit of music and some selective editing. Watch the trailer from the source or a local mirrored copy. Via Kottke.org.