Imagine James Bond meets Get Smart meets Austin Powers meets The Jetsons meets Gilligans Island meets Elvis meets Tom Jones meets Sin City meets Bikini Bandits meets Martinis meets Chevrolet meets Bewitched meets Space Age meets Tiki Lounge meets Formica meets Stereorama meets Spaceports meets TV Dinners, all in the city of Lost Vegas in the year 2025.

Well this is what Atomic City is, or will be if it ever gets produced. For now this is a project of Markus Rothkranz a Hollywood computer graphics artist (Die Hard and Total Recall) who wants it to be a TV show and, why not, a movie. I don’t know if this will ever be or if it has already been turned down, but the concept and the retro-cool image of the website are awesome.

Don’t miss the trailer and the cast pictures. (with Sean Connery and Tom Jones impersonators included). Didn’t we all think that the future would look like this?

Via atomiccity.net

ATOMIC CITY is a fun high concept family entertainment science fiction television show (and possible movie) set in what we thought the future was going to be like in the fifties and sixties (60s, 60’s, 1950’s, 1960’s), kind of like a live action Jetsons but with a more silly twist like Austin Powers and the Simpsons. For everyone who grew up with shows like Gilligans Island, Get Smart, Bewitched and James Bond, this has that magic innocent charm that shows from the sixties had. Fasten your jetomatic spacebelts baby, because this is designed to be the HOTTEST SHOW UNDER THE SUN! A campy, kitschy show for all ages, this is a worldwide pop culture phenomenon waiting to happen. Tune in your coolarama tv space remote, sit back with a martini and laugh your butt off!

Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which will celebrate its 50th birthday in 2007) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives.

All the info about the upcoming Helvetica The Movie at helveticafilm.com

Peter Jackson has been so faithful to the original 1933 King Kong that he’s even set an intermission to the 3 hour long movie. The main titles and the credits have a special art déco flavor and so does the recreation of a 1930s Broadway. Everything is so well recreated that you wouldn’t be surprised if a Vaudeville act came on stage during the intermission.

In the credits (yes I’m one of those annoying people who read them) after the army of CG designers and animators I spotted two more details that make me realize how true to the original the remake was: the Kong chant by the Skull Island natives was the same used in the original 1933 movie and one of the credits read “dialects specialist”.

I assume the dialects specialist had a key part not only in the various English dialects spoken by the sailors (Australian, Newzealander, Chinese) but on the language spoken by the American characters in a 1930s New York. This is especially visible (or audible) at the beginning of the film in the slumps of New York and when the movie producers argue with the director of the movie within the movie.

CG graphics are stunning particularly in the recreation of New York (although too much lit for the 1930s) and in Kong himself. The CG hair, dirt and scratches and the superb facial animation and gestures by Andy Serkis (The Gollum) make the character so believable that it conveys human emotions to the audience, to the point that half of the movie you feel sad for the impossible love and for the sad end to come. Gone are the days of lifeless CG characters.

At some points though, the overuse of CG makes you think you’re watching a full-feature animation movie and the overpopulation of dinosaurs in Skull Island makes you think you’re watching Jurassic Park I, II and III all at the same time.

Adrien Brody’s strong facial features, the 30s dress style and the fact that he plays an intellectual playwright are too strong arguments not to bring “The Pianist” into mind.  Also in both movies, Brody’s characters spend most of the time playing hide and seek, and are saved in the last minute from certain death.

But after all and in spite of all the CG, or thanks to them, the story is still about love, about differences and about how bad things turn if we mess with nature. A lesson that after 3 remakes we haven’t quite learnt.

As I said, sad.

THE END

I was lucky enough to get an invitation to the avant-premiere of Tim Burton’s “Corpse Bride” at the Art Futura festival in Barcelona. The film pushes puppet stop motion to its limits with features like fluid animation, cloth animation and lip-sync. In fact, animation is so well done that you can’t help wondering if it wasn’t done with 3D computer graphics.

The feature film was preceeded by a short introduction of the people who designed the characters, the typography and the graphic image of the movie. What?! They addressed the audience in Catalan, they didn’t wear any adidas-retro-cool gear and the typography designer was well over his sixties!

They are Barcelona based Grangel Studio and they’re shattering all stereotypes with their innovative work in the animation field with they participation in such films as Shrek, Sinbad, Shark Tale and Madagascar.

Also this week Barcelona’s Mayor Joan Clos was in an official trip to India trying to close a deal for the shooting of a Bollywood blockbuster in Barcelona. This would promote the city in the asian film market. Not a bad if you think that India produces more films than Hollywood for a market of 3.000 million.

I can’t wait to see hundreds of indian actors dancing with their colorful saris and their moustaches in front of the Sagrada Familia. I’m sure it could be featured on Art Futura too!

While shooting “The Return of the King” Peter Jackson approached actor Andy Serkis who played the virtual character “the Gollum” and showed him some pictures of an albino gorilla. As Andy recalls it: “Peter started showing me pictures of this gorilla named Snowflake one day. It dawned on me why he was showing me these pictures, and by the end of the conversation he said, -We’d like you to come and work on King Kong”.

Floquet de Neu (Snowflake), the only known white gorilla, was rescued from certain death in 1966 in Equatorial Guinea by zoologist Jordi Sabater Pi and brought to the Barcelona Zoo where he died of skin cancer in December 2003.

Peter Jackson’s has been publishing his production and post-production notes in a weblog called KongIsKing.net where you can get all the behind the scenes material. The film will be released by Christmas and it features Naomi Watts, Jack Black and Adrien Brody.

Here’s a picture of the animation team for Peter Jackson’s upcoming movie King Kong with some pictures of Floquet de Neu (Snowflake) on the production board in the background.