The Wall Street Journal calls this “the neatest thing you’ll see all day,” and since the Saints game is still an hour away, the WSJ may be right. Director Chris Milk teamed up with Google and Arcade Fire to produce a music video that personalizes itself for each watcher:

“The Wilderness Downtown,” which Google calls a “musical experience made specifically for the browser,” is set to Arcade Fire’s “We Used to Wait” and takes the viewer on a journey focused on a location from childhood — provided that the user enters the address and Google Street View covers it.

Close out all your other programs (this thing will take all your computer’s processing power), go to the site, enter the address of the house where you grew up — and watch the windows start to sprout. Play with the mouse and watch the birds fly over your old backyard, or just sit back and experience the slightly eerie feeling of seeing your street injected (almost) seamlessly in videos that emerge and shrink on your computer screen.

Photo courtesy of HBO

On a weekend full of Hurricane Katrina anniversary events and memorials, NOMA hosts screenings of the entire first season of Treme. Episode 1 begins at 10:30 a.m. Saturday and the day’s final installment is episode 7 at 4:30 p.m. The final three episodes run on Sunday morning from 10:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Admission to NOMA is free this weekend, and also featured is “Untitled [New Orleans and the Gulf Coast]: Photographs by Richard Misrach.” The show runs through Oct. 24.

In the past week, during which hysteria over the proposed Cordoba House in lower Manhattan reached new fervor and polls revealed that 18 percent of Americans falsely believe President Obama is Muslim, a couple of interesting news stories came out about China. Many newspapers reported that China had surpassed Japan and became the world’s second largest economy. And then there was an absurd story of a Chinese traffic jam that is 60 miles and an estimated 9 days long. While mainstream America has been focused on the Middle East for the past decade, it would seem that in the future, we will be more concerned with China, which has an economy enjoying three straight decades of economic growth.

A film about contemporary Chinese art and the effects of globalization, Robert Adanto’s The Rising Tide is a visually fascinating profile of the change happening there. In the relatively short period since the rise of Deng Xiaoping, China has undergone tremendous change and tremendously fast change — vis-à-vis its thousands of years of history and the shift away from Mao’s communism to an orientation toward economic development. It screens at Zeitgeist this week (7 p.m. Wed.-Thu., Sat.-Sun.), and Adanto, who is in town working on another documentary, will attend screenings.

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Restrepo is one of the best combat documentaries I have seen, and also one of the best films about U.S. involvement in Afghanistan (I would add Alex Gibney’s Taxi to the Darkside as well). What allowed Sebastian Junger (A Perfect Storm) and Tim Hetherington to make such a riveting film was the amount of time each spent with Battle Company in the Korengal Valley in eastern Afghanistan. Each spent five months with the unit, going on missions and living with the soldiers at the forward outpost Restrepo, which they named after a fellow soldier killed in action, PFC Juan Restrepo (who is on film in the opening scene, footage taken by another company member in Italy before deployment). Junger was in a Humvee that was almost destroyed by a bomb planted in the road. It was detonated prematurely, going off under the engine block. A few feet further back and it would likely have killed or critically injured men in the Humvee. The scene comes early in the film, and it sets up what the deployment was like for Battle Company: 14 months in one of the war’s deadliest combat zones; in which their unit was often attacked four or five times a day by Taliban fighters.

Junger had met some members of Battle Company while embedded with it in 2005, doing an article for Vanity Fair. He decided to return to Afghanistan with the unit in 2008 (which by then had mostly different personnel). He had no advance notice they would be deployed to Korengal. When they got there, Capt. Dan Kearney decided to push back against the heavy fire from the Taliban by creating a forward outpost on a ridge. The soldiers literally dug into a rocky mountainside ridge to build what came to be known as Outpost Restrepo. Soldiers lived there for one and two-month stretches (and Junger and Hetherington stayed with them). Over time, the soldiers accepted the two journalists as if they were company members and opened up to the cameras, offering revealing interviews about what war is like on the frontlines. There also are follow up interviews in Italy after the tour of duty.

In an interview with Gambit, Junger talked about what they were able to get on film and what was left out. More after the jump.

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The 48 Hour Film Project is sort of a poetry slam for aspiring filmmakers. No professional experience is necessary; just a team with a camera and some sort of editing equipment that can crunch out a movie in just 48 hours. The annual event is in its 10th year and includes contests in 90 cities worldwide. New Orleans’ filming weekend started on August 13, and the finished films are ready for their premiere and judging. Teams were given a genre, a character, a prop and a line of dialogue that had to be used. Twenty-six teams competed. Their films are split into two showcases which will screen at Warren Easton High School (3019 Canal St.) on Saturday at 7 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. The winners will be announced at a party following the screenings at Chickie Wah Wah (2828 Canal St.) The best film will then compete in the 48HFP Filmapalooza in spring 2011 (last year’s event was in Las Vegas). The grand prize at Filmapalooza is $3,000, and the top dozen films are screened at the Cannes Film Festival in its short film program. Tickets for film screenings are $10.