https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tbn-VEl67g

On Christmas Radiohead released a new song that they composed under commission for the latest James Bond film, “Spectre.” It was ultimately rejected by the producers in favor of a different song from Sam Smith, but Radiohead’s is leagues better, if you ask me. It’s haunting and gorgeous and would have been one of the few redeeming qualities in a film that was otherwise a huge disappointment. Now someone has combined Radiohead’s theme with the film’s actual title credits to give us all a glimpse of what might have been.

This situation echoes one that happened eighteen years ago when Sheffield, England band Pulp wrote a theme for the similarly moribund James Bond film “Tomorrow Never Dies.” It too was scuttled in favor of a song by a more mainstream artist (Sheryl Crow, in that instance), and Pulp’s too was far superior to what ultimately made it onto the official soundtrack. The band ultimately released it as a B-side called “Tomorrow Never Lies.”

Everything about this photo is the best.

Side note: In case you’re interested, I’ve written about Elvis Costello a few times, including in this post about his later works and this post about his memoir.

This is a sweet short film made by Quartz about PANTONE’s human color technicians, who possess an uncanny ability to see even the most minute discrepancies in colors. Though they use computer technology, color samples are only deemed officially approved when a human has signed off on it.

More information at qz.com.

If you enjoy “Star Wars,” and I genuinely do, there is a lot to like in J.J. Abrams’s “The Force Awakens.” It’s a sturdy actioner with a steady hand and a determined focus on servicing all the things that you like about the franchise: the key characters and their legacies; elaborate dogfights in the stars; a vaguely defined, inoffensive spiritual underpinning; and fantastical yet strangely plausible sci-fi production design.

The first act of the film, too, is a blast. It efficiently drops several new characters into the vast tapestry of the Star Wars Universe and adroitly wins the audience over to their cause. The actors who play them are all more than up to the task, and for a while their journey is a raucous good time because they’re living out the audience’s dream of taking part in this imaginary galaxy, romping through a playground of thirty years’ worth of fandom. To be specific, they spend the first third of their screen time literally walking among the remnants of the original trilogy, and the sheer novelty of it sends chills up your spine.

Beyond that, though, the film is a slog, like a long errand list of franchise debts that must be paid off. It’s been said that in many ways “The Force Awakens” feels like a remake of the original “Star Wars” entry. But for me, beyond the first third, at the point when it devotes significant time to legacy characters, it feels more like some kind of History Channel documentary of the 1977 original. It’s preoccupied with scrupulously re-enacting old scenarios, faithfully reviving old themes, pedantically inventorying old details—even resetting major aspects of the premise so that we’re essentially back at square one. Some people find that entertaining, and after the punishingly inept prequels, who can be blamed for wanting to revisit fertile ground? But for me it was tedious and even boring, like being back in school and repeating a grade. Even the considerable energy it expends painting a more ethnically diverse galaxy than any of its predecessors did is only moderately satisfying.

The original “Star Wars” and its first sequel—the only two films in the whole franchise worth a damn, in my opinion—may not have been built on genuinely new ideas, but they succeeded as wonderfully unexpected mashups of the broad world of cinema. George Lucas’s brilliant insight was that you could construct a novel vision by borrowing liberally from an eclectic array of source material—everything from old adventure serials to Kurosawa. Its genius was that it was a film about film itself, rooted in a mix of wide-eyed wonder and knowing irony.

By contrast, “The Force Awakens” spends most of its time mixing and matching bits of “Star Wars” and little else. If it has a wider body of inspiration that it draws from, it’s still nowhere nearly as diverse as Lucas’s. Most of what this ostensibly new movie puts in front of us depends heavily upon our sense of familiarity, even of nostalgia, and it’s all presented with so much reverence for Lucas’s originals that its universe feels hermetic, closed off to anything that wasn’t already contained within. If the very first 1977 “Star Wars” was a film about dozens if not hundreds of the films that came before it, “The Force Awakens” is about only its six predecessors. It’s not a film that’s animated by ideas; its principal purpose is just to worship “Star Wars” itself.

Beautiful music video for Anybody There by Argentinean creative shop molistudio. It’s ostensibly about finding the soul in machinery and routines, but its social commentary is probably less interesting than its exquisite model design, minimalist composition and charming mechanical animations. More at molistudio.com.

Each of the squares in this expansive montage is an Instagram post created by user Micah404. Actually, his whole account is a continuous, collage-like montage teeming with pop culture references. They’re posted in such a way so that each new post fades into the ones that came before seamlessly. From a technical and logistical standpoint, it’s pretty novel.

See more at instagram.com/micahnotfound—be sure to keep scrolling and scrolling for the full effect.

Painter, illustrator and textile designer Jenean Morrison has created a really amazing secondary body of work using her iPad and, ahem, Adobe’s mobile creativity apps: Adobe Illustrator Draw and Adobe Photoshop Sketch, as well as a few others that have been rolled into Adobe Capture CC to generate color themes and original brushes. The work is breezy, spontaneous and wonderfully alive.

Morrison has actually only been using an iPad for this purpose since last year, when she wrote in this blog post:

I’ve really been opening myself up to this new way of working. Adobe Line is actually a great tool for precision, but I’ve been enjoying the organic results I get from loosely playing with shapes and color.

I resisted buying an iPad for the longest time. I just didn’t see the need for it in my life. When I finally got one several months ago, I realized I’d been missing out on a whole new wonderful way of creating art. I had no idea how much I would enjoy this, and I love the effect it has had on my work.

Stories like this make my day. They reaffirm my longheld belief that just as mobile devices change the way we do all kinds of computing-related activies—messaging, networking, photography, and more—they’ll also change the way we create art and design.

Morrison has a gallery of her iPad art at jeneanmorrison.net. You can also follow her on Instagram where she often posts new works.

These supercuts from filmmaker Jacob T. Swinney put the first and final shots of dozens of famous films side by side for comparison. For some films, the two shots are very similar or symmetrical in content or tone. Others show distinctive contrasts in narrative progression, echoing ideas if not composition. And others are just markedly different from one another. What all of these juxtapositions share in common is that they provide an unorthodox way of understanding the frames that come between them; they can reveal so much about the many minutes of intervening movie time, even if they’re only a few seconds long. This is what I really adore about movies; the best ones, like these, so often reward deeper inspection.

Swinney’s first video, above, cuts together fifty-five films. His second one, below, cuts together seventy more and, helpfully, adds titles beneath each selection. They’re both completely engrossing.

This recently launched subscription service delivers a new, off-the-wall coloring book for “creative kiddos,” each illustrated by a different artist, once a month. I got a sample of the first issue, by artist Jim Stoten, and it’s delightful; twenty-eight pages of idiosyncratic, Chwast-like drawings in a scrappy, saddle-stitched, zine-like format (though to be fair, it’s much nicer than just a photocopied, D.I.Y. publication). Back issues are available for US$10 but subscriptions are only US$7 per issue; you have one more day to grab the current issue, by artist Scott Teplin before the next one ships—though in honesty Teplin’s work is so unorthodox that it makes me wonder if these are really for children or adults. Nevertheless, it’s a great project.

Subscribe at doodl.club.