Corona | Coming Attractions

One of my pals emailed me today about an interesting video mural that's installed in the elevator of the Standard Hotel in New York City. Displayed through the glass wall inside the elevator is a surreal, short film created by director Marco Brambilla, the guy that gave us the cheesy '90s flicks Demolition Man and Excess Baggage and then fell off of Hollywood's radar. Brambilla was asked by the owner of the Standard Hotel to think up a film that the elevator passengers could watch while going up or down. Given complete autonomy to dream up whatever he liked, Brambilla came up with "Civilization", a three-minute video showing a journey from Hell to Heaven -- or, if you're headed from a top floor down, Heaven to Hell -- using clips from hundreds of Hollywood movies over the years. The end product is fascinating, trippy, mesmerizing and I would imagine sort of creepy if you're taking a ride in the elevator all by yourself.

Motiongrapher has an interview with Marco Brambilla about the making of "Civilization" and how he used Photoshop to paste his video together.  Watching it myself I can see Hugo Drax's video wall from Moonraker, the flying head from Zardoz, the green absynthe fairy from Moulin Rouge, the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters, the blue neon tubing from the dance club in Basic Instinct, Arnold Schwarzenegger crucified on the tree of woe from Conan the Barbarian, one of the dancing witches from 300, the Hawkmen from Flash Gordon...and I'm still not even one percent through the amount of imagery contained in this video. Is that weird-looking open-mouthed statue one of the ones seen on the surface of Giedi Prime in David Lynch's Dune? Is that electric vortex borrowed from the ending of The Fountain? Watching this video is like playing a game in your head: do you recognize that scene and if so, remember the movie that it appeared in?