From Sully we share notes and the trailer for Urbanized:

[T]here are so many shared characteristics between cities that they can always learn from one another, the film argues. Two of the projects featured in Urbanized—a community-building effort in a Cape Town township and a mass protest against a rail project in Stuttgart—emphasize the social implications of citymaking and design. “Ninety-nine percent of the shape of the city is a result of the top-down approach, at least in the formal design,” [Hustwit] says. “Those projects that seem to work best are the ones using people in the city as the compass for deciding what the solution should be.”

PS. The film is by Gary Hustwit, the same fellow who gave us the fascinating documentary Helvetica.

TAKE ANOTHER SMOKE BREAK

There’s a sweet-sounding fundraiser for a beautiful-looking film on West Coast Modernist Architecture by Gavin Froome and Mike Bernard going down in Strathcona next Thursday night. Footage will be shown, plus there will be the inevitable music, dancing and partying to follow. Tickets here, details there, and check the poster after the jump…

The best opening line of any movie trailer, ever.

Yikes! The first trailer for the long awaited film adaptation of Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged just dropped…and boy does it ever look suspect. The book – which has turned idiots into conservatives and liberals into libertarians since it was first published in 1957 – is a compelling read, and it has never been too tricky to draw comparisons between its pages and those of the daily newspapers (especially since the financial collapse of 2008). But could the epic ever be made into a film? I’d heard talk of it being a Brangelina project a while back (Pitt as John Galt and Jolie as Dagny Taggart), and then of Charlize Theron taking on the Taggart role (both scenarios worked for me), but alas…no. What I just watched looks like it was squarely intended for the straight-to-DVD shelf, somewhere between “Larry The Cable Guy” and “American Pie 4″.

A new mini-doc called Cannonball shows how skateboarders in and around Fresno have been capitalising on the recession by riding all the abandoned pools in the backyards of foreclosed homes. It’s very similar to what the Lords of Dogtown kids did around Venice during the water shortages of the 1970′s and early 80′s.

Once upon a time, Fresno was the California Dream. Own a car. Own a house. Own a pool. Everyone wanted it and the wonderful world of credit made it all possible. But now, with the foreclosure monster running wild, the dream is dry. Thousands of pools are festering in the hot Central Valley sun. For most people this is tragic. But for some, it’s an opportunity.

Proof that every apocalypse has an upside…