The opposite of Ultimate Improv's NYC Grand Central Station freeze, with a wink to T-Mobile's Liverpool Street Station antics. To promote a Flemish reality TV show.

Peter Finch in Network tells it how it is, remixed by videobeats/pixm.

"In 1744 a simple experiment was conducted in Sweden to reproduce the underlying cause of the Aurora Borealis in a laboratory, what we would now think of as a room. A small hole in a shade "the size of a large pea" let through a ray of sunlight that then was refracted through a prism. The small patch of light broken into a spectrum of colours then traveled through a medium of turbulent air directly above a warmed glass of aquavit. The resulting image landed on a screen a few short feet away and looked like what was seen dancing in the sky on many long Swedish nights, nature's sublime entertainment in the real pre-history of cinema."

Continued here. An Animate Projects commission for Channel 4 in association with Arts Council England. Awarded Best Film at Cutting Edge at the British Animation Awards 2008. Thanks FMG.

We were chatting the other night about how the Death Star, for all its evil genius as a total killing machine, was really badly designed. I mean from a defensive point of view – a huge open port, with no gun turrets inside, leading to a big self destruct button. And Darth, despite all his Jedi training, is a pretty lousy pursuer of Luke.

So we wondered if, at the end of Episode 3, aware that the Emporer is set to win, and that not much can be done about this, he reisgns to a life inside a giant gimp suit while secretly making plans to allow it all to come crashing down when the time comes, knowing that his son would one day come to avenge his death.

I await the calls of derision from proper fans, but meantime, keep this thought in your mind as you watch the latest Darth Vadar film doing the rounds.

Interview by Geoffrey McNab. Illustration by Eric Dubois 

You issued a “Statement Of Revitality” earlier this year in which you said you planned to reschedule your professional activities in order to rediscover your original enthusiasm for film. Having made The Boss Of It All, are you now revitalised?

Von Trier: I just turned 50, you know. At that age you think of the things you dislike about your situation and you try to do something about it. I had this idea that I would have a longer time to prepare and to shoot my films. The idea was that I wouldn’t be forced to produce all the time, just because the company (Zentropa) needs the production, but in the end, The Boss Of It All was shot in five weeks. So you can scream  all you want and it won’t really help. But, you know, I like problems.  Rules are challenging. They are there to create problems for you. . I just read “The Statement Of Revitality” again and it seems it will be very difficult to change anything.

You say in your narration at the beginning of The Boss Of It All that this is a harmless comedy. Can a Lars Von Trier film ever be harmless?

Well, I felt like saying that. I had been criticised for being too political and maybe I criticized myself for that...for being too politicaly correct, actually. This is a film that was made very fast. This film is not political and I had fun doing it, but of course the good comedies are not harmless.

Have a slightly madver 2008

 it's nearly the end of the month, which means it's nearly the first sunday of next month, and time for another lookandlisten, the leeds live av night

  this time out its war, with an evening of themed muzak and visuals loosely themed around war, or more likely how it’s a bit of a wrong do including cal.tv's john lennon george bush mashioke Imagine This (cork film festival winner, below)