July 23, 2008
49
Paul Westerberg has released a 49 minute, one-track album titled 49:00. The best thing is that the DRM-free MP3 is available at Amazon.com for the princely sum of $0.49. I was going to think of 49 reasons you should buy this, but you won't need them if, like me, you used to cruise around in your parents car in high school listening to Replacements albums on cassette tape and hoping you could date Winona Ryder.
July 22, 2008
July 21, 2008
Doveman covers Footloose
Doveman covers the Footloose album for his friend Gabriel as a memorial to Gabriel's half-sister Jenny who died as a teenager in the 1980's.
When I was very young, my half-sister Jenny died tragically. She was a teenager, and it was the 80's. She left behind a wardrobe of brightly colored clothes, rainbow stickers, life-size paintings, doodles on lined paper, and hundreds of tapes. These constitute most of my memories of her. It's sad for me to look at these things, and usually I don't. But a couple of summers ago I found a tape of hers with a startling cover photograph - this was Footloose. I couldn't stop listening: it was a portrait of 80's love, desire, pain, freedom, and frenzy; of being a teenager in a time of change. By listening, I could step into Jenny's shoes, see things from her vantage point. I could be emancipated by rock and roll and walkmen, just as she had been. We could listen together.
I asked my friend Thomas to cover the album, which, sheltered as he is, he had never heard before. I was clear that I wanted to him to cover the whole album - the point wasn't to rework any one song, but to re-imagine the picture they made together. With a new Footloose we could reply to the past, tell our own story about being young. This is what he made.
-- Gabriel Greenberg
A cease-and-desist letter from a music label means you can just stream the album from that link above or from imeem, but there's a rar of mp3s at this link.
Wachovia savings commercial
Hazel directed, Raza co-directed and animated, and Chris shot this entry for a Wachovia TV commercial contest around savings (all classmates of mine from film school). Check it out and vote.
July 20, 2008
That intersection
No spoilers. In The Dark Knight, there's one scene in which some vehicles go from traveling above ground in Chicago to a down ramp that takes them to the underground street levels in the loop. If you've seen the movie you'll probably know which scene.
I stood out there a few years ago and took a long exposure picture of that ramp down to lower Wacker Street. I recognized it in the movie because of the Lyric Opera sign.
July 18, 2008
Fullscreen
DVDs that fill a 4x3 tv are called fullscreen. But since more and more homes have 16x9, that title doesn't make sense anymore. Fullscreen DVDs don't "fill" the screen of your fancy plasma tv. Yet DVDs still come out now dubbed fullscreen.
A better title would be 4x3, with a little boxy graphic to illustrate the aspect ratio, though the video snob in me is tempted to dub them "not widescreen" or "visually truncated."
The Dark Knight
Really, really good, which is a relief, because I haven't seen a summer blockbuster that I've enjoyed in a long, long time. It has an operatic grandeur, aided again by the Wagnerian themes of the score by Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard. Much better than Batman Begins, which I wasn't as crazy about in execution as everyone else was (though the concept of a darker, more realistic telling of the story was great).
See it in IMAX. Seeing it at a regular theater you will get a pan-and-scan version of about 30 minutes of the movie. It won't be bad, but if every there was a movie you had to see in its native format, on the bigger-than-big screen, this is it. You won't be able to replicate this in any home theater. The cuts between the 35mm shots and the 70mm IMAX shots are near seamless, and you barely notice them (they're easier to spot when going from IMAX to 35mm than vice versa.
Largo
Los Angeles gets its fair share of crap, and I'm as guilty as anyone. Elsewhere, people complain about the weather. Here, people complain about the traffic, the strip malls, and, well, the traffic.
But today I want to focus on one of LA's treasures. Betina asked me in the afternoon if I wanted to go with her and Justing to Largo, a movie-theater-converted-to-music-hall in Hollywood, to hear Fiona Apple. I haven't heard her sing live since a concert at the Paramount back in Seattle many years ago, but I've always enjoyed her voice, that deep and smoky megaphone.
Largo is a cozy little theater tucked on the not-so-cozy mega street of La Cienega, a long stone's throw from the Beverly Center shopping mall. Such are the geographical realities of LA.
It turns out the headliner this night was the Watkins family, consisting of sister-brother duo Sara and Sean Watkins, of Nickel Creek fame (Nickel Creek's self-titled Alison-Krauss-produced debut album is a great place to start if you want to grok them; of the 267 customer reviews on Amazon it has 213 5-star ratings).
But during their long show, they were accompanied by one guest musician after another. Dan Wilson, former leader of Semisonic and recent Grammy nominee, came out for a few tunes. Then Fiona Apple strolled out, with that introverted, nervous body language, until she opens her mouth and that powerhouse of a voice takes over the room. She is our nation's little waif, our little Edith Piaf.
Then Fiona left and Glen Phillips of Toad the Wet Sprocket fan took his place. I haven't seen Phillips since a concert at Stanford back when I was an undergrad. I'm glad he still looks reasonably young, or I would have felt even older than normal.
And then Dan Wilson came back, and who did he bring on stage for a duet than John C. Reilly, of, well, Talladega Nights fame. Reilly, besides being one of the few people I know who carries his middle initial almost like an honorific, can actually hit his notes.
Great music all night long in the larger but still intimate of two performance spaces at the Largo, and yet there were empty seats in what was an arthouse movie theater sized hall, with tickets only costing $25 each. How that place does not sell out every night is a great mystery to me.
Just the previous night, I was out with some coworkers, and we were comparing LA to Seattle and NYC, and we discussed how one problem with LA seemed to be the lack of a public place you felt you could call your own. Largo feels like such a spot, and I could see myself becoming a regular.
In contrast, I went with some coworkers to The Forum in Inglewood on Monday night to see Coldplay, and that venue is one of the fugliest buildings I've been in. It's like an oversized high school gym, and picturing the Lakers playing there after seeing them at Staples Center is difficult to fathom. Since Coldplay's debut, I've liked each successive album less, and their last album had me swearing them off, but their newest album caught my ear's interest again.
The show was good, but not great. They did not bring a full musical outfit, so on string sections of songs like "Viva La Vida" they just piped in the missing backing instruments which is always disappointing. I also didn't love all the arrangements. But Chris Martin seems like one of the nicer guys in rock, and they have a long list of big anthems to call upon.
The handicapped parking at the Forum filled up, so I had to walk what felt like two miles from the stadium back to the car in the parking lot. I felt like Jude Law in Cold Mountain. When I got home and took off my walking boot, I found a big bloody spot on the back of my sock, recalling Curt Schilling's famous bloody sock. I'm going to frame it as a memento of my heroic effort on that night.
Watchmen, the trailer, and The Dark Knight, part IMAX
Premiering with The Dark Knight tomorrow is the Watchmen teaser trailer. You can see it in all the usual Quicktime resolutions at Apple, or you can look at this teeny embed version:
Instead of "visionary director" it should read "visual director".
I'm seeing The Dark Knight at an IMAX theater tomorrow morning, bright and early. In the past, seeing feature films at an IMAX theater has been more of a novelty as those movies were shot on 35mm and transferred to a 70mm IMAX negative. But parts of The Dark Knight were actually shot natively on IMAX this time, a first for a Hollywood feature.
The filmmakers received permission to shoot a number of action sequences in Imax; these would include the opening sequence, which depicts a huge bank heist, and the climactic closing scenes. By the time production started, four major action sequences were planned for Imax, but “Chris and I knew that if we had the money and the cameras, and if it made sense, we would add other scenes,” says Pfister. “For instance, we quickly decided to shoot all the aerial work in Imax because of what we’d gain in resolution.” In the end, 15-20 percent of the movie — roughly 30 minutes of screen time — was originated in Imax.
In Imax presentations of The Dark Knight, shots filmed in Imax will fill the screen, and material shot in 35mm anamorphic will appear in the center of the frame. (Hard cuts are planned between the two types of images.) For standard 35mm presentations, a 2.40:1 image will be extracted from the Imax footage; Nolan and editor Lee Smith could choose which portion of the frame to extract, depending on the shot. “Even in the 2.40:1 presentations, the Imax sequences will be sharper and clearer, with improved contrast and no trace of grain,” says Pfister.
July 17, 2008
Alternative WKW cuts
Wong Kar-Wai has revisited Ashes of Time and produced Ashes of Time Redux. Sony Picture Classics is releasing it in September. It's the only WKW movie I haven't seen yet, and I'm excited to see a version, either version, on a big screen.
On a related note, David Bordwell compares the current cut of Days of Being Wild with an obscure, alternate cut he was lucky enough to screen. There are some spoilers for those who haven't seen the alternate cut, but since it doesn't sound like there are any plans to release this as a redux version, maybe they don't qualify as spoilers. I would give a whole lot to get my hands on this mythical alternate cut as Days of Being Wild is one of my favorite WKW movies. Bordwell tries to decode that last scene from the original cut, the famous appearance of Tony Leung in that one long handheld shot, but doesn't come to any definitive conclusions, even with the new sequencing in the alternate cut..
Pop under poop
IMDb.com opens pop-unders that get past Firefox's pop-up window blocker. Pop-unders are generally galling, like stepping into dog poop while strolling along the web, but now that most browsers come up with pop-up blockers, when a pop-under does slip through it feels even worse, like someone exerted extra effort to circumvent our no solicitation sign to sling that dog poop at you.
July 16, 2008
Purchased song sync via the iPhone
