We’ve come a long way from twee harmonies and admissions video prancing… Here’s “Love of the Dead,” a zombie-romance-horror short film from the minds of some truly depraved Yalies.

General plot outline: Boy meets girl. Girl becomes zombie. Boy imprisons and rapes zombie girlfriend. Boy poses as gay, trapping and killing enticed men in order to provide zombie girlfriend with food. Boy takes off shirt and works out. Boy rapes/kills different girl, feeds her to zombie girl. Zombie girl eats boy.

This is seriously horrifying:

Love of the Dead – the Yale Zombie Project from Yale zombie project on Vimeo.

Cornell Professor James Cutting released a groundbreaking discovery out of Ithaca this week: Hollywood Blockbusters follow a pattern. Pretty nifty for an Ivy League Prof., right?

In all seriousness though, Prof. Cutting analyzed 70-decades worth of 150 high-grossing films made between 1935 and 2005. He discovered that since 1935 shot lengths have more and more often come to correlate with a mathematical pattern based on the human attention span. This pattern is known as 1/f fluctuation, or pink noise, and it says, “attention spans of the same length recur at regular intervals.” So Cutting essentially asserted that movie shots of the same length recur at regular intervals, especially in recent big blockbusters. [Full text of the paper here, if you're into that sort of thing].

In order to secure precious Cornell moneys to watch movies and make such assertions, Cutting built off of the original 1/f research done in the 90s at the University of Texas in Austin. He expanded the pattern to include the fact that modern smash hit movies obey the same 1/f fluctuation –– A formula which Cutting believes to “resonate with the rhythm of human attention spans.” Interestingly enough, this pattern has also been found in the annual flood levels of the Nile River, in air turbulence and in music.

But before going to press, Prof. Cutting wanted to make it very clear that despite researching 150 Blockbusters, one shouldn’t overlook his taste. His favorite genre is Film Noir and you’ll be reassured to know that such high-brow art does not follow the 1/f law common to movies for the masses, like Star Wars Episode III, “which Cutting considers to be ‘just dreadful’.”

However, this still leaves one question unanswered: Is this Cornell-polished mathematical formula good enough to save the Film department from the administration’s mass budget cuts?

Back in October, the world’s favorite young hot witch was seen touring the top Ivy League schools. But in April, Emma shocked the Ivy nation by opting to attend Brown over Harvard and Yale. Naturally this sparked a great reaction, mostly from IvyGate commenters who could not believe that someone actually chose Brown instead of settling for it–much less someone as internationally famous as Emma Watson. The three questions being tossed around were:

     1. She’s not actually going to Brown, right?

     2. Harvard and/or Yale must have rejected her, correct?

     3. Holy fuck, why is she going to Brown?

Three months later, these questions can be finally put to rest. With Half-Blood Prince coming out this month, the Harry Potter kids are on the interview circuit. Daniel Radcliffe took a break from being nude to say this to The Guardian about his co-star:

[Emma Watson's] very clever. Do you know her GCSE results?” His eyes boggle: “I was thrilled with mine – seven Bs, two As and an A*. I think Emma got three As and seven A*s – she’s incredibly academic, it’s frightening. Me and Rupert [Grint] to all intents and purposes dropped out of school. And she’s going to Brown.”

Not much reading between the lines needed there. Although Watson may have used the Imperius Curse on Radcliffe to keep him from revealing that she’s going to Tufts. Read the rest of this entry »

Yeah, okay, maybe my title is a little bit misleading here, but it’s late, and it’s only effin’ Monday, so deal with it, kidlets.  Anyway, W., The long-awaited prequel to the Obama movie feature film about everyone’s favorite Yale grad, is coming out on October 17th.  Just what we need to look forward to, right?  Even more Bush.  The film is directed by Oliver Stone and stars John Brolin as George W. Bush.  After the jump, check out the trailer, where the opening sequence has bizarre aspirations toward Coyote Ugly, George W. Bush makes his Yale hoodie look bad-ass, and George Senior epically proclaims, “Are you chasing tail?  Driving drunk?  Who do you think you are, a Kennedy? You’re a Bush–act like one.”  So, what do you guys think?  Excited about the film or not?  Let us know in the comments.

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This morning, at 12:01, The Dark Knight, which is a movie about the detective Batman, came out in theaters. I waited in line starting at 9 o’clock to watch it with lots of people who were way weirder than me. Some of them had painted their faces to look like clowns, and they were talking very loudly. The movie was playing on like thirty screens at Lincoln Center in New York, and you got to go inside based on what theater you were assigned to. One of my friends is an idiot and bought a ticket to a different theater than us, so I had to wait outside while she gave someone a blowjob to trade tickets so we could all sit together.

At the theater, all these kids from Columbia University high school summer camp or something ran into the auditorium and their counselors yelled about the greatness of Columbia summer camp. I think the campers don’t understand how stupid it is to do the high school Columbia summer camp. The NYU summer campers are much better dressed and, hey, maybe you could even get into NYU.

When we were all sitting in our seats, the person in the seat in front of me was watching “Batman 1″ on DVD and it was so funny to be watching a DVD on a computer in a movie theater. I thought he was wearing a Dartmouth hat, so I yelled, “Hey, did you go to Dartmouth?” and I think I’ve never felt like a bigger douchebag, ever, especially when he said, “Naw, dog, it’s a Dallas Cowboys hat.” I really love the Cowboys, so we could have been friends, but no, he thinks I went to Dartmouth.

The seriously good part of the night was when I watched Batman the real movie and I was crying blood because it was so crazy and awesome. There’s this part where the Joker kills this guy, Hong Kong style, so hard. Then, Batman makes his truck flip over when he’s riding his motorcycle. Then, he’s got to save Gotham before it’s too late, but everyone is corrupt and evil is the way of the world, so will he stop the Joker in time? There’s no love only fear and anger so the movie is never boring. You might have a headache when it is over because you have to be upset for a whole movie but the point of art is to make you very upset. I think Heath Ledger should have won an Oscar for this movie, so he wouldn’t have to kill himself.

Batman 2 is better than the ride Batman and Robin at Six Flags because the lines are the same length, but the movie is a lot longer than the ride and a lot more people die.

Recent graduates heading off to B-School take note: the smartest move right now is buying a car you can’t afford. America’s next top business executives have quickly learned that emptying your bank account earns you a much bigger financial aid package and basically scores you a new set of wheels. Now we know how the Enron guys got their start.

Well Harvard students may be clever enough to fudge some financial aid documents, but are they smart enough to BATTLE ZOMBIES?

That’s right, you spent four years developing that brain, and now someone (something?) else wants it for lunch.  There’s not too much information out there about producer Warren Zide’s “Harvard Zombie Massacre“, but something tells me the plot is not very difficult to figure out.

According to the Crimson’s interview with executive producer Ryan Lewis:

So, the world’s smartest college students have to battle the world’s smartest zombies…Usually you get serial killers and ghost stories and stuff with college kids. There hasn’t been a college zombie movie yet. It will have that great cheekiness, some great horror moments—it’s really a great blend.

After the jump: Zide’s battle with Harvard’s real monsters: the administration Read the rest of this entry »

Penn students who decided to extend their stay in Philadelphia (for whatever reason) got the chance to see the Transformers sequel being filmed on their campus.

But they’re pissed about it!

Apparently, even though it’s filming at Penn, rumor has it that the actual setting for the movie will be Princeton, where they’ve also filmed. Naturally, Penn students are upset to have their 15 minutes of sort of fame snatched from them by Princeton of all places, and they’ve even taken the fight to the streets Facebook.

“An Open Letter to Michael Bay from the University of Pennsylvania,” a group of almost 200 sprung up as a place to air out such sophisticated complaints as “Seriously, Michael Bay? Seriously? Princeton???” Even a Temple student was mad enough to join.

And what exactly does Michael Bay have to say for himself? Well nothing, but one of the producers told the Daily Pennsylvanian that neither school’s name would appear in the film.
And one of the Facebook group members claims that Penn itself denied them the rights to use the name! Et tu, President Gutmann?

Regardless of what name actually ends up on screen, this makes three Ivies where Shia has made movies after the latest Indiana Jones filmed at Yale. (No love for Harvard, Shia? Maybe you can make a cameo in How High 2.)

Pics of Michael Bay, Shia, and his costar Isabel Lucas (should I know who that is?) on set in Philly after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

Similarly, are you bored right now, or the most bored you’ve ever been? If the latter, we’ve got some primo cinema for you. Cornell student Oliver Bundy made a quick documentary–nay, a requiem in four parts–last year about the Cornell Daily Sun. Considering his atrocious subject matter, Bundy’s assembled a rather watchable piece. One of the subjects getting a lot of face time is Michael Morisy of IvyGate guest-editing fame. Luckily Morisy doesn’t say anything stupid, so we’re not obligated to make fun of him.

Our favorite segment is the second, where arts editor Alex Linhardt (maybe the same who writes for Pitchfork?) talks about six-year-old girls getting upset by the Sun’s depiction of “fellatio,” and when the production manager (Cornell ‘74) says “The writing has definitely declined… over the past 30 years. … Ask professors they’ll tell you the same thing.” Hey old man, just whose side are you on?

Four segments of life at a college newspaper after the jump (about 15 minutes total).

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The following episode of the IvyGate Index® has been rated WTF for strong language and a graphic depiction of a complete lack of Ivy dominance.

Welcome to the third (and probably final) installment of the IvyGate Index®, our hyperscientific gauge of Ivy influence in arbitrarily chosen fields. This time: Hollywood! Are you ready for your close-up?

To measure Ivy dominance of the film industry, we sicced our in-house team of Nobel number crunchers on the 78th Annual Academy Awards. We knew it was a gamble: Hollywood is not the Ivy slumber party that, for example, the media and the executive branch are. But how bad could it be? Movies are important … and nothing’s more important than the Ivies … so we should totally own these jokers, right?

Not so much. For the top 12 Oscar categories, a grand total of one (1) bona fide Ivy League diploma walked trophy-ward across the Kodak Theatre stage.

Why, it’s … it’s almost as if an Ivy diploma is overvalued in this context! Sean Penn, auto mechanics major at Santa Monica College? Say it ain’t so! We cry a single tear as we inform you that Hollywood’s IGIQ (IvyGate Index Quotient) is a box office bust at exactly 12 percent domination. Slap me Pappy, it’s pie chart time:

Verdict: What have you won for us lately, Natalie Portman?

Soldier on past the jump, if you’re able, for notes on methodology; disinfect all surfaces after handling raw data.

Read the rest of this entry »