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Bouncing Cats Brings Hip-Hop Horror to Television

Forget torture porn and zombies. Bouncing Cats, a documentary about hip-hop in war-ravaged Uganda, is a horror film with a human heart that manages to beat even as it records madness most of us see only in our nightmares.

Video director Nabil Elderkin’s 2010 film makes its television premiere Saturday on the Documentary Channel, giving those who missed its circuit run last year a chance to think twice about their comparatively comfortable lives. Ask the Rock Steady Crew’s legendary breaker and president, Richard “Crazy Legs” Colón, who — along with native Ugandan Abraham “Abramz” Tekya , founder of Breakdance Project Uganda — anchors Bouncing Cats’ exploration of transformative art therapy in a real-world dystopia.

Narrated by Common, Bouncing Cats funnels proceeds to Breakdance Project Uganda in hopes of catalyzing solutions outside the conflict box. Still, it’s going to take much more than hip-hop — and President Barack Obama sending in 100 troops to tackle Joseph Kony’s pseudo-religious “rape cult” (otherwise known as the Lord’s Resistance Army) — before normalcy is restored to the African country. But Bouncing Cats is another moving reminder of what an enormous waste of life and time post-colonial resource wars can be, when there’s so much unrestrained creativity to be had instead.

Bouncing Cats airs at 8 p.m. Saturday on the Documentary Channel.

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Neil Gaiman, Homer Bring Trolls to The Simpsons

In Sunday's episode of The Simpsons, Homer enlists the help of Neil Gaiman to create a tween fiction book, which they take to a publisher voiced by Andy Garcia.
Photo courtesy Fox

Only Homer Simpson would take his daughter’s disillusionment with the tween books she loves and try to cash in on it. And only The Simpsons would ask fantasy author Neil Gaiman to make a guest appearance to help out with Homer’s potentially lucrative literary project.

On Sunday’s episode, titled “The Book Job,” Lisa Simpson learns the dark truth behind the tween-lit phenomenon and loses faith in her favorite fantasy-novel characters. When Homer discovers that Lisa’s fascination with young-adult novels is an opportunity to make some dough, he hooks up with the Coraline writer to create the next tween craze.

Gaiman said his part on the show amounts to more than just a quick gag.

“Truthfully, what I’d expected was the normal kind of Simpsons celebrity cameo: You know, Homer Simpson says something like, ‘Not even Neil Gaiman could come up with something as weird as this!’ and then you cut to me stroking my chin going, ‘You’re right, I couldn’t,’” Gaiman said during a conference call with reporters Friday.

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Batman Bows Out With Brave, Bold, Metafictional Finale

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Bat-Mite says goodbye to his memorabilia, including his signed Diedrich Bader photo, in Batman: The Brave and the Bold's witty series finale.
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For three excellent seasons, Batman: The Brave and the Bold has skewered The Dark Knight’s seriousness. The animated series bids television adieu Friday with a multilevel satire on Batman’s mythos, cartoons and fandom.

In Batman: The Brave and the Bold’s genius final episode, “Mitefall!” — previewed in Wired.com’s art and video gallery above, and in our exclusive clip below — the impish, transdimensional prankster Bat-Mite morphs the program into something terrible enough to warrant cancellation.

All kind of metafictional hell breaks loose once The Dark Knight starts donning everything from board shorts to too many axes, prompting a dismissive appearance from Warner Bros. Animation itself. Throw in a crappy Scrappy-Doo, a cyborg John Wilkes Booth and more smart, snarky pop-cultural allusions than even the most hard-core fans can probably count, and you might have the series’ greatest episode ever.

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Video: Robert Downey Jr. Shows Off Ridiculous Sherlock Holmes Disguise

Sherlock Holmes, master of disguise? Not really. Amid all the bare-knuckle brawling, slow-motion explosions and metaphorical chess play, the new behind-the-scenes clip for Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows sandwiches in a sight gag in which Robert Downey Jr. looks more like London’s shrewdest crime-fighting rabbi than the dapper sleuth he played last time around.

The clip also points to a bigger role for Professor Moriarty (played by Jared Harris) in the story, which Holmes calls the “single most important case” of his career. Holmes’ archenemy barely appeared on-screen in Downey’s first collaboration with director Guy Ritchie, and Downey calls the upcoming film “probably the closest [Sir Arthur] Conan Doyle, Holmes-versus-Moriarty story that’s been depicted yet.”

Downey said The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo actress Noomi Rapace — who plays sexy fortuneteller Sim in A Game of Shadows — serves as the “lynchpin” of the solving the sequel’s complex mystery.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, co-starring Jude Law as Dr. Watson, opens Dec. 16.

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The Twilight Issue: Why Geeks Should Get Behind Breaking Dawn

Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart star in The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn -- Part 1, opening this weekend.
Photo courtesy Summit Entertainment

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 1 is not for everyone. The movie’s plot is a little start-and-stop, a good portion of it won’t make sense to the uninitiated, its visual effects border on cartoonish, and — despite the best efforts of its cast — the characters are nearly impossible to relate to.

Which is to say, it’s a nerd movie if there ever was one. And geeks should get behind it.

Because, really, what’s more geeky than allowing someone to nerd out with something that not everyone understands? With the arrival of Breaking Dawn at midnight Thursday, we are reminded again of the obsessive nature of Twihards. There are fans occupying theater sidewalks awaiting the film’s premiere, copious merchandise tie-ins and the kind of online buzz that is already leading to $140 million opening-weekend predictions.

Remove Twilight from the above description and you could just as easily be talking about a Star Wars prequel (I could go further with this metaphor, but this is a Wired blog and I value my eyeteeth.)

Yet there is little support from the broader nerd community for the Twilight films. In fact, a bit of the reaction can be downright hostile. For example, when Harry Knowles at Ain’t It Cool News posts something as innocuous as a casting note and praise for director Bill Condon, the comments immediately devolve into varieties of “How the FUCK is this COOL?” The same is true when that moment of tension hits Comic-Con International each year as Twilight fans encounter folks in head-to-toe Cylon gear.

Breaking Dawn was made for a certain type of geek and it succeeds wildly at appealing to their needs.

But why? Is wearing a Team Edward shirt so much different from donning a vintage X-Men tee? Does it take much more obsessive attention to detail to memorize the age at which Edward was turned into a vampire than it does to know what triggers Wolverine’s berserker rage? You don’t have to care what the details are to appreciate someone’s love of knowing them.

Let’s be clear: No one is saying anyone who calls themselves a geek has to like Breaking Dawn on its merits, which are negligible (more on that below). But complaining about its shortcomings as a general-audience film is the equivalent of saying Green Lantern was a terrible horror flick. Breaking Dawn was made for a certain type of geek (just like The Dark Knight was made for a certain type of geek) and it succeeds wildly at appealing to their needs.

(Spoiler alert: Fairly major plot points follow.)

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Can Sedition Create a Marketplace for Limited-Edition Digital Art?

This week, the art world gave birth to a new platform called Sedition, which aims to create a marketplace for limited-edition digital artworks.

Wired U.K.

It has signed up some impressive names, including Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and Shepard Fairey. These artists will produce pieces in editions of between 2,000 and 10,000, which are numbered, signed and sold for between $8 and $800, with Sedition taking a cut of the revenue.

The platform aims to encourage people who might not be able to afford these artists’ original pieces to become collectors of digital editions which they can access via their mobiles, tablets, PCs and connected TVs. With each purchase comes a certificate of authenticity, which — crucially — entitles the owner to resell the works at a later date if they so wish.

Once you have bought an artwork, it gets delivered to your personal online “vault,” which you can access via an app or web browser. There are currently two sorts of artworks — static prints and videos. The former can be accessed from different devices as a JPEG and the latter must be streamed directly from the site or via the iOS app (the Android and Windows Phone apps are in development).

My first thought when I heard about Sedition was “meh.” Why would you pay for a JPEG or a video? What does it even mean to own a piece of digital art?

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Neon Indian Builds Cool Mini Synth for New Album Era Extraña

The PAL198X mini synth was sold in a special package with Neon Indian's album Era Extraña.

It can be challenging to get a truly unique sound these days, so Neon Indian’s Alan Palomo created a synthesizer to make music all his own.

The device, called a PAL198X, was created by Palomo with the help of Bleep Labs. The tiny analog synth is powered by a 9-volt battery and uses three oscillators to create funky triangle-wave sounds. Even though the PAL198X is not featured on Neon Indian’s new album, Era Extraña, the synth was inspired by the sounds on the record, and the band has been using ever since the recording sessions.

For a taste of the band’s sound, check out Neon Indian’s new single “Hex Girlfriend,” which the Brooklyn, New York-based band recently performed for web video series For No One (motto: “An intimate glimpse of bands playing to a room without a crowd.”)

Performed at Lincoln Hall in Chicago, it was a bombastic show — despite the lack of audience feedback — and displays all the cool toys Palomo and his band use in their live performances, complete with the trippy lights (video above).

But wait, there’s more! Would you like to win your very own PAL198X synthesizer like the one that was released with Era Extraña earlier this year? Now you can! Wired.com has teamed up with the band to give away one of the Bleep Labs creations. You can hear the PAL198X in action in the audio clip below.

PAL198X by Dr. Bleep

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The Humor Code: Does Mad Men-Style Boozing Yield Funnier Ads?

Mad Men's advertising mavens take a boozy meeting with Lucky Strike. But does alcohol really fuel humor creation?
Photo: Carin Baer/AMC

Professor Peter McGraw and writer Joel Warner have teamed up to explore the science of humor on a global expedition. The Humor Code chronicles their adventures, scientific experiments and unintentional comedy along the way. Learn more about McGraw, Warner and their escapades at HumorCode.com.

NEW YORK — You’ve seen it on Mad Men: The agency’s creative staff whiles away the noon hour with a liquid lunch of Old Fashioneds, then pops back into the office and whips off a whimsical Lucky Strike ad campaign that gets the masses chomping at the bit for tobacco sticks.

But does this sort of debauchery really lead to successful marketing campaigns? In particular, does it help generate humorous advertising?

Humor is considered one of the best ways to cut through a cluttered marketplace and capture the attention of jaded consumers, especially nowadays. And, as anyone who’s ever been to a comedy club can attest, alcohol and laughs go hand in hand.

We know booze can boost humor appreciation, since it lowers inhibition, decreases anxiety and increases positive mood. In a 1997 study, for example, social drinkers were asked to watch 20 minutes of goofball comedy The Naked Gun. Those who were two drinks in found O.J. Simpson’s bumbling Officer Nordberg significantly funnier than those who watched stone-cold sober.

But can alcohol fuel humor creation? Very little research has been done on the matter. To investigate, we cooked up a little experiment involving advertising creatives, a funny marketing campaign and alcohol — with an emphasis on the alcohol.

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Doctor Who Expert Richard Molesworth on the Search for Lost Episodes

Patrick Troughton's first appearance as the Second Doctor was in one of Doctor Who's great lost episodes.
Image courtesy BBC

Some calamities are so great that even a Time Lord can’t resolve them. Like the way the BBC thoughtlessly erased more than 200 episodes of Doctor Who to make room in the British broadcaster’s archives.

Sci-Fi Relic Wranglers Groups

Doctor Who Lost Episodes

The First Japanese Monster Movie Project

Black Angel, the Lost Camelot of Geekdom

Tragedies like this prompted Wired to launch Relic Wranglers, a community to help study and maybe even recover lost works. If any potential Relic Wranglers want inspiration, look no further than efforts to recover the missing Doctor Who episodes, spearheaded by people like Richard Molesworth.

An aficionado-turned-expert within the realm of Doctor Who, Molesworth says even today, sometimes 50 years after certain lost episodes originally aired, they remain one of the hottest topics of debate among fans (whether it’s due to anger, rumor, hoaxes, etc.).

“Are there any more missing episodes awaiting to be recovered, though? Or have we got to the point where every lost episode that was ‘out there’ has now been found?” says Molesworth, who has written for Doctor Who Magazine, authored a book specifically on lost episodes (Wiped! Doctor Who’s Missing Episodes) and still participates in the Doctor Who Restoration Team, a group of dedicated fans who work to prepare old episodes for DVD release.

Molesworth has written extensively about how these Doctor Who episodes disappeared: Many from the ’60s were recorded to videotape instead of film, and with no mandatory library for videotapes at the time, they were periodically wiped. In some cases, film copies were made, and these sole surviving copies have turned up all over the globe. Molesworth can point to a number of successful recoveries, like an episode titled “The Lion,” which was recovered by two fans in New Zealand.

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Trailer: Pixar Teases Brave’s Wild Redhead


          

A girl gets gutsy in the new clip teasing Brave. Pixar’s animated tale of plucky Princess Merida puts the red-haired heroine in a medieval Braveheart setting, mixes in a kilt-lifting flatulence gag and makes the point that a kid who excels at shooting arrows can be a huge tribal asset.

Brave stars 35-year-old Scottish actress Kelly Macdonald (Boardwalk Empire, Trainspotting) as the voice of young Princess Merida. Robbie Coltrane (Rubeus Hagrid in the Harry Potter films), Emma Thompson and Scottish-born comedians Craig Ferguson and Billy Connolly co-star in the movie directed by Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman.

Brave opens June 22.

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