Allthyngs

Edgar Wright, the director behind Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, is at it again. Recently, the teaser trailer for his third film, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, hit the internet, and although it lacks a certain lovable British duo, it looks awesome. If you’re not already excited for this movie, you should be. Early reviews have been almost unanimously positive, praising the film’s genuine originality. Hell, Keven Smith even went as far as to call it “spellbinding,” among other things. Hopefully this summer will have plenty of good movies like this to make up for my Transformers 2 lobotomy.

Buddy Rich is an animal, and Animal is a Muppet. In this retro video clip from the classic Muppet Show Animal and Buddy Rich have a little drum battle. It’s excellent puppeteering and percussion.

Sometimes, it’s just so damn clear that we don’t understand nearly as much about the universe as we think we do. Watching this video, which shows how certain mathematical patterns and models show up so precisely in nature, makes it clear that there must be something fundamental about the way stuff works that we haven’t figured out yet. Why else would people like Dane Cook? Check out the video after the jump (click “read more”), it’ll blow your mind.

In the world of Atheism there are weak Atheists, who don’t believe in God, strong Atheists, who believe there is no God, and Sam Harris, who believes even if there were a God but he’d be retarded and not worth worshiping. Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens make some pretty strong arguments for why Atheism is the only reasonable theism, but only Sam Harris has the balls to flat out call religious people wrong and stupid. In this TED talk, he argues that not only can science answer moral questions, it’s the only thing that should. Maybe I’m biased, but I think he’s dead-on. Check it out for yourself after the jump (click “read more”).

Thursday night, Jon Stewart spent almost 15 minutes doing a spot on impersonation of Glen Beck. It was wild, scary, and hilarious. Fan’s of the Daily Show are use to Jon’s characters, but this was a whole new level. He really showed his command of acting this time. If only he could have given as good a performance in the Faculty.

Check it out at Thedailyshow.com

This Oscar-nominated short film has all of the best parts of those three to five minute sequences that precede every Disney/Pixar movie: really good animations, humor, an original storyline crammed into a very short amount of time, and a warm and fuzzy aftertaste at the end.

When one of the first moving pictures (nothing more than a series of everyday occurrences captured on film) was premiered almost a hundred years ago, people ran screaming from the exhibit at the sight of a train barreling towards the camera. Nowadays it’s a little harder to shove movie magic down our cynical throats. Enter the age of special effects. Special effects are like roofies: if you don’t notice them, that means they’re working. With movies like Avatar, it’s easy to forget that there was once a time when movies like Jurassic Park, Star Wars, and even The Wizard of Oz blew people’s minds. Here’s a video to give a little perspective of how far we’ve come, and how much more magical movie magic (holy alliteration Batman!) has grown from its humble black and white beginnings. Music is Rods and Cones by The Blue Man Group.

Remember those movie trailer mash-ups that were really popular a few years back? Well french video company AMDS took the idea one step further with a series of nothing-but-action movie fight scene mash-ups. Check out Robocop vs Neo and the epic three-part Robocop vs Terminator after the jump.

Band of Brothers, for those of you who missed it, was an epic WWII miniseries on HBO that came out a few years ago detailing the immortal bond between soldiers, and the intense Hell of the battlefield. Now HBO is begining to air a follow-up series called The Pacific, taking the Band of Brothers formula and switching the setting from Nazi-occupied Europe to, you guessed it, the Pacific. I think this is an awesome idea because the Pacific side of the war hasn’t seen as much coverage as the Hitlerey part, aside from Clint Eastwood’s also-notable Letters from Iwo Jima and Flags of our Fathers.

For another reminder why our generation is so much worse than the one with the title of “The Greatest,” check out The Pacific on HBO (new episodes air Sunday at 9), or watch episodes online here. (there’s a short registration process, but for those without HBO it’s definitely worth it).

Wade Davis seems to be a little out of breath, uses unnecessarily big words, looks unshakably like Tim Robbins, and is named after a piece of legislation from 1864, but this talk is mindblowing. He paints a picture of the world exactly the way you have to see it. As he puts it, “there’s no pyramid with Victorian England at the top and all the primitive people at the bottom.” The world is the story of a bunch of different threads going in a bunch of different directions, and each one leads to something profound and amazing. Ours is only one of those threads. This is what “open-minded” is supposed to mean.

People have been playing music in basements for a long time. Most of the time it’s crappy, but every once in a while good bands get back to their roots and play in underground spaces. From the Basement is a website that has high definition videos of performances by some awesome bands like Radiohead, Beck, Damien Rice, and Gnarls Barkley just to name a few. The bands play with no audience in small spaces that displays their talent. You can tell that they are having a lot of fun playing. Click around the videos there are a lot of good ones.

Check it out at Fromthebasement.tv

The movie Predator changed my life. Before seeing Predator, I had no idea anything could be as awesome as Predator, and after watching the movie… well let’s just say life’s been a gradual series of disappointments since. Now there may be light where once was darkness, as Robert Rodriguez is rebooting the franchise (producing, not directing unfortunately) with the help of Adrian Brody and Morpheus. Here’s a two-minute first look at Robert Rodriguez’s Predators. All I can say is that I hope this reboot is more Batman Begins than Punisher: War Zone.

I’m not ashamed to say that I enjoyed Jackass. I also enjoyed Wild Boyz. And Viva La Bam. Sue me, I like watching people do crazy shit. Anyway, Nitro Circus trumps all of these shows. Travis Pastrana, the guy who should have died about 18 times by now, somehow convinced MTV to give what seems to be an unlimited budget to do whatever he and his friends think is cool. The results are television gold, and all the episodes are available here. Also, there’s not nearly as much male nudity or gross out stuff like in Jackass, and the lack of this is always appreciated.

Check out all the episodes on Nitrocircus.com, and my favorite, the first episode, in which Travis Pastrana jumps out of plane without a parachute, a guy misses a foam pit on a motorcycle front flip, and they build the greatest slip-n-slide of all time, is here.

No, it’s not porn. Pink Terror is a video by video artists (apparently that’s a thing) Mike Barzman and Christian Swegal, who filmed awesome looking things in slow motion and edited the footage to an audio track of Stephen Hawking explaining why we’re all fucked to a catchy beat. I still don’t think I “get” this, but it sure is cool as hell (roll with it) to watch.

I go to Bowdoin, a small college in New England, and we have a lot of bizarre stereotypes. The first time I walked on campus I noticed that a lot of the boys rolled up their jeans a little too high so that their Tevas would poke out. We also have a lot of lacrosse bros who listen to too much Dave Matthews for anyone’s good. This video is technically about Middlebury, but the stereotypes it points out definitely apply to all of the other tiny liberal arts colleges in the area. Bowdoin doesn’t have a Quidditch team, but we are still G’s throwin some free granola.

Connected is a short film about two men who silently wander through a post-apocalyptic future, tethered together by a shared oxygen supply. Described by the film’s creators as a “sci-fi western,” this intriguing short isn’t one to miss. Check out the rest of the official website for an interesting and well-done look behind the scenes.

Watch the film at ov43.com

This is the movie that Hollywood thought was so important it would be worth making Scarlett Johansson ugly for, and it’s got a Robert Downey Jr, so I have some pretty high expectations for Iron Man 2. Oh, and then there are those Samuel L. Jackson, Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle, Mickey Rourke, Sam Rockwell, and Paul Bettany guys too. This movie clearly has all the right parts, so I’m seriously hoping Jon Favreau can put them together the right way.

You probably know what a Rube Goldberg machine is — one of those contraptions where a ball slides down a slide and hits a windmill which triggers some other mechanical event. This OK Go video features what is basically the mother of all Rube Goldberg machines and even inspired me to think about making one of my own.

This speech is from the year 2000, and it’s been floating around the internet for a while now, but that doesn’t mean it’s not one of the greatest speeches of all time. This speech proves Conan is as wise and enlightened as he is ridiculously hilarious. I’ve watched this speech a half dozen times over the last half dozen years, and every time it leaves me feeling like a better person. Let’s see Jay Leno pull that off. Watch the video, bookmark it, and then watch it a few more times down the road.

God damn, this is what the iPad should’ve been. Ever since the iPad was unveiled, I’ve been trying to figure out how I want technology to work in the future, how I want to interact with it and all that, and this is EXACTLY what I want. Microsoft has unveiled yet another in their recent line of extremely awesome and futuristic things that has totally restored my confidence in them. This one, called “skinput,” lets you use your arm as a touchpad. Check out the video because it’s insanely awesome, especially the part where a guy plays Tetris on his hand. Only one problem… how do I masturbate with it?

Read more about Skinput on Engadget.