The version of Peter & the Wolf most set in my head is the Disney telling, in which the duck isn’t eaten and all the animals live happily ever after — cute, but not much of a story. Suzie Templeton’s stop-motion adaptation is, aside from being visually stunning, a much more complex tale about animals and humans. After capturing the wolf, Peter chooses to release it rather than sell to an animal show, taxidermist, or butcher. Peter himself is trapped by the bleakness of the town where he lives, the high walls behind which he is locked all day long, and the constant threat of unchecked and aggressive soldiers harassing him, and still he gives up the money that would come from selling the wolf — even after the wolf kills his only friend, the duck — to allow the creature its freedom. The kinship suggested between boy and wolf isn’t the puppy dog sort in which the wolf would lick Peter’s face and they’d live on as great friends; it’s the kinship of knowing his own human life is made richer by the presence of wild, even dangerous animals outside the walls of his home.

Spiders on Drugs is great at aping the conventions of animal documentary — the distant narrator and illusion of nature seen in its “pure” state — and using those conventions to highlight the projection of human cultural metaphors, stereotypes, etc. always present but seldom acknowledged in the genre (eg, the domestic dramas of Meerkat Manor). It’s also pretty funny.

I have my own feelings, so why would I watch a movie about someone else’s? But I don’t have my own robot.

In the 1940’s American-born Willard (Kitchener) MacDonald jumped his troop train heading to WWII. Fearing authorities he lived as a Hermit deep in the northern wilderness of Nova Scotia, Canada for more than 60 years. This is the true story of The Hermit of Gully Lake, a man who lived a life that the rest of us could never endure. He was a soul in exile and yet you will discover that he touched the lives of so many, in ways that no one can really explain.

(via Hermitary)

And as long as the user isn’t stumbling into open manholes or trying, all Frogger-like, to survive having waded into multiple lanes of traffic, we can be pretty sure the privileged mode is not the one through which he or she is moving physically: if “cyberspace is where you are when you’re on the phone,” it sure as hell’s also the “place” you are when you’re indulging your Blackberry habit.

@ Speedbird (via blackbeltjones)

Good, Brother is a short film from a story by Peter Markus.

GET LAMP is a documentary about Text Adventures (later Interactive Fiction), the storytellers who created them, and their unique place in the history of computer games.

For me, the choice between city and country life is one very close to home. The seductions of the city have drawn me in but I feel strongly that I deny myself something by living away from the country. Career ambitions often demand city life, while personal happiness takes a back seat when country people are trapped in the city. My film addresses this conflict in everybody, and focuses on one man who faced this conflict and chose unlike anyone else. This project is meant to stir a discussion about our priorities, and the value in simplicity, existence and basic survival.

Toward the end of Wings of Desire, in a nightclub as Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds perform, the angel Cassiel leans against the wall with his eyes closed; he is still, but the stage lights makes his shadow pulsate, expanding and contracting as if something is trying to decide whether or not to emerge (which something is), and it may be the most beautiful moment of cinema ever.