Curio: Clay Creations

Alexa here. With Frozen being the only thing on my young daughter's mind these days, I've been searching for some non-Disney-manufactured goodies to please her. (Yes, I'm stubborn that way. If we saw the film why not just buy the related merchandise, you ask? Because I'm a curmudgeon.) In my search for the perfect handmade Olaf I fell down an etsy rabbit hole of clay creations.

Some selections from my excursions...

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Curio: Just Keep Livin'

Alexa here. My personal highlight of the Golden Globes this year, and of my Sunday night, was Matthew McConaughey.  I'm glad that all the prognostication over the last few years finally payed off with a win for him. And I loved/found it hilarious how "on brand" he was with his speech (opening it with "alright alright alright" and closing with a variation of "just keep livin").

Right after the show I threw "True Detective" on, and it couldn't have lived up to the hype more, with McConaughey delivering yet another career-high performance in the first episode.  Since the chances of a Wooderson-esque speech at the Oscars are probably still low, let's celebrate this moment with some curios in the Texan's honor.

More after the jump including bongos...

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Curio: Screenwriter Love

Alexa here. Josh Abraham is a man of many hats: writer, producer, cartoonist. At his etsy shop he sells some of his artwork that has a film spin; I particularly like his Manic Pixie Dream Girl print, which is updated to include Samantha from Her. In a series of prints he's titled "Screenplay Heroes," Josh has turned his had to sketching some famous writers like Woody Allen and the Coen brothers (in the running for Oscar noms again this year) onto pages of their screenplays. His vaguely Hirschfeld-esque portraits really lend themselves to the black and white pages.

I love the idea of displaying your favorites as a collection. Here are seven fine examples of his work from Nora Ephron to John August...

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Curio: Pre-Mades

Alexa here. As we spend this week looking ahead -- to fulfilling resolutions, to the Golden Globes, to the Oscars -- I thought it might be nice to look through another wormhole of sorts, to these parallel film universes created by artist Peter Stults.  Peter has taken films we know by heart and imagined if they had been made at another time.  [more...]

 

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Curio: My 2013 Wish List

Alexa here. 2013 has been filled with movie gifts aplenty, my favorites thus far being the smaller-scale treasures Stories We Tell and Frances Ha. But enough pixels have been spilled over the best films of 2013, so I'm using this space to share the film curios I've been dreaming of this year, all of the art variety. Some of these I've already gifted myself, too impatient to wait for someone else to get on it!  Here's hoping you get everything you're wishing for this year, too.

1. Alternative Movie Posters: Film Art from the Underground by Matthew Chojnacki. This volume nicely covers some of the best indie film posters out there, and includes some of my favorite artists in the process. I couldn't wait for the holidays so I bought it off of my own Amazon wish list; it's sitting on our coffee table right now.  

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