YouTube Tuesday

Got back from our tour of the Labor & Delivery tour at Kaiser. My wife is now scared of epidurals and seems very concerned about making sure the boy will be circumcised. I'm sure it can only get better the closer to the due date right? Anyway, since I'm not in the mood to come up with anything clever or original, I've decided to make to night movie night. Tonight we will be featuring the awesome short films of on Neill Blomkamp.

I first heard of Blomkamp about three years ago when rumors of a proposed Peter Jackson Halo movie were running rampant. Jackson wanted Neill, a South African filmmaker with no major motion picture directing experience, to direct the film. I suppose its understandable that the studio balked at the idea of handing a major franchise Halo to a first time director, but he did have the backing of Oscar winning director Peter Jackson and Microsoft as well as some very impressive short films and commercials, including one that would lead to a major box office success and my favorite film of the year so far.

First up is a commercial for Citroen, which features a car turning into a robot that looks like a robot for an amount far below what Michael Bay paid for his overblown Transformer designs:


HOW DID HE NOT GET A CONSULTING JOB ON TRANSFORMERS?!!!

I think this next one is my favorite of his and I hope he adapts it into a full length picture. If it bombs here it would definitely make a bank in Japan. Its called Tetra Vaal which has to be Afrikaans for ASS KICKING POLICE BOTS:

Its Robocop for the 21st century.

Here's the film that inspired a little film that's out in theaters right now making all sorts of money and basically saying "F*CK YOU!" to Hollywood for having so little in his abilities despite his obvious talent:


So whats a guy to do when a major studio gets cold feet and starts pulling back from making a film adaptation to one of the best shooters of all time. You get together with Microsoft and create a series of promotional videos to tease the release of a new Halo game and to show the studios how much ass a live action Halo film would kick if they would just let him do it. Seriously, I want him to make Halo after seeing this:

Ah, what could have been.

Well I hoped you enjoyed this look at the talented career of Neill Blomkamp. I'm positive you'll hear more from him in the years to come. If you want to look at some more of his early stuff go check out spyfilms.com. Also, go out and see District 9, you won't regret it, unless you take little kids with you. They might not go to sleep ever again, or turn into lame bloggers who have obsessed about the short films of a South African filmmaker for the past three years, hoping to one day see the big screen exploits of one of their favorite video game heroes, but ultimately getting hurt and betrayed by a movie system would rather get a shitty movie made by a shitty director with more Hollywood experience then a truly visionary new talent.

Oh, and Ted Kennedy has died.

Keep watching this space.