Ben Shoemate's Notebook

The four kajillion of you guys who sent me this probably figured out that I was saving it for the end of the day; I mean, I love Star Wars and nerdy rap, but this is pretty special besides. Not only is it a pretty decent song by itself -- always a plus -- there's the following:

• Each original trilogy movie gets a verse
• Leia plays Max Rebo's piano thing
• Rebel pilots and Stormtroopers bust a few moves
• Leia's obvious but still funny DJ headphones
• Ewoks which somehow manage to be more disturbing that actual Ewoks
• Slave Leia
• "Daddy power activate."

If you want to check out the full lyrics, head here -- I highly recommend it. At the very least to take your mind off those Ewoks.

What's more terrifying than a call coming from inside the house? The call coming from inside the theater. That's the thought behind Last Call, an interactive horror film in which the main character calls a random audience member for help. More »

If you haven't read the epic Equire interview, go do that before reading the rest of this post. Famed film critic and all-around awesome human being Roger Ebert has not been able to speak for four years, since undergoing cancer-related surgery. He's been communicating with hand signals, monotone text-to-speech software, and a wonderful ongoing stream of Twitter updates.

Today is a big day, though: on Oprah, he debuts his new voice, which sounds a lot like the old voice we all knew and loved. In the video above, his wife Chaz hears it for the first time. Yeah, I cried.

Scotland-based tech company CereProc create the text-to-speech voice using archived recordings of Ebert speaking (specifically, DVD commentary tracks). The result is amazing. More: Ebert's own blog, CNN, ABC News, Videogum

A Cornell University professor analyzed 150 of the highest grossing movies of the last 70 years. The more recent the movie, he found, the closer it adhered to the mathematical formula that describes the human attention span.

In the 1990s, researchers at University of Texas in Austin determined that our attention spans could be described by the 1/f fluctuation, a pattern representing the ebb and flow of our concentration over a period of time. In a new study, professor James Cutting found that the more recent the blockbuster, the more closely the length of its shots followed that same fluctuation.

Whereas Detour, made in 1945, has shots that only vaguely correspond to the 1/f fluctuation, the 2005 King Kong remake stays surprisingly snug with the attention span wave.

As Cutting explains, this increasing correlation means that films "resonate with the rhythm of human attention spans," but just because movies are increasingly pleasing to our subconscious minds doesn't mean that we will necessarily like them more: the Star Wars prequels strictly followed the formula. [PhysOrg and PopSci]

This week an intriguing new film, Utopia in Four Movements, screened at Sundance. It explores the way people in the past imagined the future. We can't wait for it to bust out of the festival circuit.

So far only a few handfuls of people have seen the film (a "live documentary," screened with performances by San Francisco musician David Cerf and Brooklyn band the Quavers).

Utopia looks at various disparate seeming images and issues — Lenin's revolution, the J,G. Ballard/George Romero-like abandonment of the world's largest shopping mall, Esperanto and nudist communes.

Peggy Orenstein touched on the movie in a recent article in The New York Times Magazine, "The Coast of Dystopia," about how economic and cultural pressures were moving California out of the "utopia" category:

This month, Sam Green, a documentarian who, like me, is a Midwestern transplant to the Bay Area, will screen "Utopia in Four Movements" at the Sundance Film Festival. The movie explores early-20th-century faith in a perfectable, socially engineered future - for instance, that adopting Esperanto as a universal language would put an end to war. "In general, that joy in imagining the future doesn't happen anymore," Green told me. "People can only envision it as a continuation of current problems. And in California, rather than having this fantastic notion of what could be, people are now just trying to hang on. It's such a lowering of ambition and expectation."

Here is a whimsical interview with Green — whose The Weather Underground was nominated for an Academy Award — on The Rumpus, and here a video interview with the director on the world's largest shopping mall.

Here is a slide show of images.

Utopia, of course, means "nowhere" or "not place" in Greek, so it's no surprise that this impulse for perfection doesn't always end well.

Images courtesy Utopia in Four Movements