Black Lightning

On December 31, Timur Bekmambetov's Black Lightning opens in Russia. He's producing,

rather than directing, as he did with Day Watch and Night Watch, but his hyperrealist visual style is definitely imprinted on this film. It's probably not a good thing that the movie has two directors.

The plot involves a flying car—a Volga, the pride of Soviet Russia's car industry—that transforms a young man into a superhero so that he might ultimately protect Moscow from an evil force that seeks to mine the city's underground field of diamonds. The kid who stars certainly looks like Hayden Christensen's Anakin. It's also rather ironic that Russia's first superhero film, as Bekmambetov has described it, carries the same name as one of DC's first African-American superheroes. The latter

debuted in 1977 and seems much cooler. (This cover, by Eddy Newell, is from

1995).

The teaser trailer is pretty scant and doesn't whet my curiosity. The feature trailer has been pulled from the interwebs. The concept pictures do resemble Wanted (for what that's worth), or a modern-day Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, as io9 observed, but I can't help but think of the Wachowski's Speed Racer meets Herbie the Love Bug.

Unclothed Man redux

Has it really been a whole week? I've a little been busy.

Knit my fornix

My father, a cell biologist, loves to pester me with the question, Is there art in science? Well, sort of.

Axis of Evo

Dr. Colin Purrington, a professor of evolutionary biology at Swarthmore, maintains Axis of Evo, where he blogs on issues related to Darwin's theory of evolution and creates projects designed to encourage the acceptance of the theory, particularly among children. He created the awesome "Darwin Has a Posse" stickers. His latest project: textbook disclaimer stickers. Unsurprisingly, he gets a lot of hate mail. My favorite: "What a waste of internet space."

The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century A.D.

All four episodes of Dash Shaw's The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century A.D. are available on IFC's website. The animation is fantastic. It manages to stay true to Shaw's style without looking like static drawings conferred with halting movement. I particularly like his use of abstract sequences of color and form, which are reminiscent of early twentieth century abstract film—Walter Ruttmann and Oskar Fischinger, for instance. There's also something of Viking Eggeling's Diagonal Symphony in the progression and formation of shapes (though in The Unclothed Man, these transformations are less articulated and more natural) and of Jeremy Blake's color gradations for Punch-Drunk Love, with certain sequences resembling animated Rothko paintings.

Pasternak's spiritual wilderness

English Russia has posted photographs of forests and waterfalls in the Northern Urals. They make me think of that vast wilderness in Doctor Zhivago and Pasternak's unforgettable descriptions of nature, in particular a forest cathedral:

Many of the trees in the first had not yet turned; in its depths they were still fresh and green. The afternoon sun was setting behind the forest, piercing it with its rays, and the leaves, letting them through, flowed green like transparent bottle glass.

...

Ever since his childhood Yurii Andreievich had been fond of woods seen at evening against the setting sun. At such moments he felt as if he too were being pierced by shafts of light. It was as though the gift of the living spirit were streaming into his breast, piercing his being and coming out at his shoulders like a pair of wings. The archetype that is

formed in every child for life and seems for ever after to be his inward face, his personality, awoke in him in its full primordial strength, and compelled nature, the forest, the afterglow, and everything else visible to be transfigured into a similarly primordial and all-embracing likeness of a girl. Closing his eyes, "Lara," he whispered and thought, addressing the whole of his life, all God's earth, all the sunlit space spread out before him.