Joel and Ethan Coen’s World Cinema is the duo’s contribution to Chacun Son Cinema, an omnibus movie made in 2007 to celebrate the 60th edition of the Cannes Film Festival. I saw the whole thing recently and somehow this short was missing — according to Slashfilm the same happens in the DVD release (perhaps some rights issue got this short pulled after the first screenings?). Anyway, it’s good, so watch it.

Since we’re on the subject of Chacun Son Cinema, I thought most shorts were kind of meh-ish, but there were quite a few wild extremes of quality in there. Youssef Chahine’s and Gus Van Sant’s were embrassingly bad (both great directors signing stuff that I’d be hard pressed to tolerate from 18-year old film students), while Amos Gitai’s, David Lynch’s and Atom Egoyan’s were ‘just’ really bad shorts. On the other hand, there were positively great moments from Nanni Moretti, Lars von Trier, Takeshi Kitano, Elia Suleiman and perhaps my favourite, Aki Kaurismaki’s portrayal of an after-hours cinema at a foundry. Add the Coens to this later lot.

I’ve been trying out Issuu, a web service that I can describe as a YouTube for PDF documents, with a very slick Flash interface. I like it, and my first impressions are very positive, despite having had some trouble uploading one file while another PDF (which, mind you, was a completely legit upload, it was an old university essay of mine) mysteriously disappeared. So let’s see.

The above example is a set of slides I did as an appendix to last year’s film production subsidy application.

The World of Chemistry!