Remains of the Day

The Touch

Random bit of movie trivia I heard today: "The Touch," the song that Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg) sings in Boogie Nights, is from The Transformers - The Movie (20th Anniversary Special Edition). It adds another layer of absurdity, or perhaps it's the cherry on top. The lyrics are truly a work of staggering banality.

Technorati Tags: film, movies, music

My nephews

From our family's Thanksgiving weekend gathering in Temecula.

Technorati Tags: nephews, Evan, Ryan, thanksgiving

Sundry

At Broad Nightlight is a small collection of nighttime photos of Berlin, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. What's peculiar about these is how few people are visible.

The upcoming issue of Wholphin will contain Alexander Payne's film school thesis, The Passion of Martin.

10 innovative ad campaigns in Tokyo train stations.

The Amazon plog for the book How Lance Does It contains some interesting points. In one post, author Brad Kearns quotes Dr. Glen Gaesser on how to identify the most talented athletes. Said Glaesser, "Go to a race and stand at the finish line. Then...see who crosses the line first. There is the most talented athlete." Kearns also writes a passionate post defending Lance Armstrong: Why Lance is Clean. But my favorite quote is about Lance's successful approach, and it's on the back cover. "Lance hates losing, but is not afraid of it." That sums up a lot of all-time greats in many sports (remember the Jordan Nike ad "Failure").

A man sold everything he owned, took the cash, and bet it all on one spin of roulette in Las Vegas. This is what happened.

It doesn't appear that this chair is available for purchase yet, but already I want one.

An interview with Eiko Tanaka of Studio4°C, the company in charge of adapting Taiyo Matsumoto's classic manga Tekkon Kinkreet into an animated feature.

Technorati Tags: advertising, animation, anime, Berlin, film, film school, filmmaking, gambling, gaming, goods, HongKong, Lance, manga, movies, photography, products, psychology, marketing, sports, Tokyo, travel

Black Monday

Dry Shampoo. Spray in, wait two minutes, and brush out. What will they think of next? Useful on a film set, or if your livelihood depends on looking good all the time (comme moi), or if you're confined to a bed because some Kathy Bates-like character has gone Misery on you. Or if you are this guy.

The Dragon is the most revered sign of the Chinese zodiac, so Chinese birth rates in Dragon years escalate, leading to crunches in providing schooling, medical services, etc. Some economists conducted a study which debunks this superstition, but I still look for a healthy increase in sales of lingerie, champagne, and roses in China in mid-2011, leading into the next Dragon year in 2012.

In a game that had clearly become a draw, Vladimir Kramnik made a stunning mistake late in his second game versus the computer program Deep Fritz to allow the software to checkmate on the next move.

James Surowiecki on Nintendo and how it has found profitability with products like the Wii while Sony and Microsoft rack up huge losses in their efforst to win the console war. There are many markets that are not "winner takes all." We're #3! We're #3!

In this week's New Yorker, George Saunders can't resist offering his two cents on Borat, and I read it, and it is probably the most trenchant critique of the movie yet. Borat is, as M refers to Bond in the the latest offering, a "blunt instrument." The irony of it all is that Cohen's burgeoning fame is undermining his ability to find gullible targets, forcing him to pick on easier and easier targets (lawsuits notwithstanding) and transforming him from David to Goliath. I laughed at many moments of the movie but was disappointed at all the material recycled straight from the TV show.

Technorati Tags: beauty, business, chess, china, gaming, geek, goods, humor, movies, newyorker, products, georgesaunders, software, video, youtube

When You Were Young

My classmate sent me a link to these photos of animals in the womb. Stunning.

These are from an upcoming TV program Animals in the Womb which will air on the National Geographic Channel in the U.S. next month.

Technorati Tags: animals, photography, nature, science

Django

Takasi Miike is remaking the spaghetti western Django as a Japanese Western shot in English and featuring Quentin Tarantino as a gunfighter named Ringo.

Which might sound bizarre, but it is Miike, and so we nod knowingly.

Technorati Tags: film, movies, western, takashimiike, tarantino

Superman II, the Richard Donner Cut

Superman II - The Richard Donner Cut

Richard Donner was canned during the shoot of Superman II, and Warner Bros handed the reigns over to Richard Lester. I'm usually annoyed when studios release another version of a movie on DVD much later after releasing the original. It's usually a ploy to extract more dollars from real fans (e.g., King Kong--Three-Disc Deluxe Extended Edition), but this is different. I didn't think this cut would ever see the light of day, and if nothing, it will be interesting to watch purely as a lesson in the power of editing.

Technorati Tags: dvd, film, movies

Chips

Beta test some new Kettle Brand Potato Chips flavors.

Cinematical has compiled the YouTube links to every Bond opening credit sequence ever.

Louis Menand on the new Thomas Pynchon novel Against the Day:

[It] is a very imperfect book. Imperfect not in the sense of “Ambitious but flawed.” Imperfect in the sense of “What was he thinking?”

Online only, in this week's New Yorker, five different Thanksgiving-themed covers by Chris Ware.

Technorati Tags: books, comics, film, food, movies, chrisware, thanksgiving

Elevate Your Game

I'm not a huge fan of the Lebrons Nike commercials. I don't really understand them. But this new commercial (another link here) for the Jordan Melo M3 shoe? That I like. Notice the clock at the end: 2.4 seconds left. The shoe releases Nov. 24. Jordan wore 23 (and yeah, Kobe wears 24 now, but...well). The commercial screams Wieden + Kennedy and recalls classic Jordan Nike commercials like the classic one for the Jordan XXI.

Not surprisingly, Melo is part of Brand Jordan.

Technorati Tags: ad, basketball, carmeloanthony, commercial, nike, hoops, shoe, sneakers

We're on

The first three of my group's shoots were two weekends ago. We rotated through crew positions for each other, and I started out as the sound mixer. Consciously or not, I channeled the demeanor of other sound mixers I've seen on set before and spent most of my time with my headphones on, trying to stay out of the way of the gaffers and grips running around.

On the next shoot, I was the AD, a position which reminds me of program management in the technology world. As an AD, you spend most of your time running around keeping people on task, running a series of mental calculations to ensure the director gets all the shots needed in the time available. Most people don't like the AD, but there's an art to it. I enjoy the job in small doses, but it's not a position I aspire to. Since our first shoots are given a time and film constraint--from call time to wrap, we have four hours and four hundred feet of 16mm film--the AD has to be particularly tuned into where the shoot is in terms of film and time. Four hours has seldom felt shorter.

At the same time, all those years working at Amazon.com accustomed me to maintaining a certain zen-like focus in a maelstrom of stress and emotion. It's like trying to launch a website on time by facing down a series of bugs. Movies do not occur naturally; they require an infusion of directed human energy.

The third shoot came the same day as the second shoot and started in the evening. We were all running a bit on fumes by that point, but counteracting my exhaustion was a burst of adrenaline because I was DP'ing the shoot. If it's nerve-wracking the first time an AD calls the shoot and every one on set looks to you as the director for some answer, it's just as if not more intimidating to have the visuals of your classmate's directorial effort in your hands.

Up until each moment I turned on the camera, everything around me was a chaos of human activity. Lights going up, equipment and props swirling all around the sound stage, people shouting light meter readings, actors or boom operators asking questions. And then, when I flipped the Arriflex camera on, the gorgeous sound of the film being pulled through the gate would fill the air like a flock of birds taking flight, and all else would go quiet.

That chatter of film being pulled through a mechanical motion picture camera surely must be one of the most magical sounds in all of art, one of the beautiful pieces of analog feedback that's lost when shooting on video.

On my DP shoot, I had a taste of everything. The first shot was on a tripod. The second started on a high hat, but when that didn't work, I squeezed up against a wall and shot it handheld. Then I had a shot down from up on a catwalk, a PA holding onto me so that I wouldn't fall over and drop to the stage below.

The final shot, though, was a real doozy, or the coup de grace depending on how you looked at it. My classmate wanted a crane shot to descend from overhead onto a couple lying in bed, with the camera tilting and panning so that it ended up in a side profile shot from just off the side of the bed.

We didn't have a crane for this shot, so to simulate that we had to pop the bed upright and secure it to a wall. Then we staples the sheets and pillows to the bed and shifted all the wall dressing--photos, posters, a cross--to a false ceiling. Then the couple would stand up and act as if they were lying down, and to simulate the crane shot we'd dolly in at an angle and pan the camera as we moved in. It reminded me of what Michel Gondry did for much of his video for Massive Attack's "Protection."

We had about twenty minutes left when we finished the previous shot. I did not think there was any way we'd get the shot off, so I suggested just shooting a wide shot and then pushing in for a MS or CU so that she could just cut them together in the final edit. I didn't want her to have to live without any footage of her opening scene. But she believed we could get the dolly shot. She wanted us to go for it. Inside, I was glad. I wanted to try to get it.

The tech office had given us a special tripod head to mount the camera on horizontally, at a 90 degree angle. But try as we might, we couldn't get the tripod head to tighten on the camera. With ten minutes left, I suggested just shooting the shot handheld. But the director still had faith. We'll get it, she insisted. People were running around the set like villagers fleeing a horde of pillaging invaders, trying to set up lights and secure everything to the set.

With three minutes left, there was no time to fix the tripod head. I said I'd lay the camera on my shoulder. We threw the camera and tripod on the doorway dolly, and I jumped up beside it. We would not have time to rehearse. The gaffer shouted a couple quick light readings to me. I did some simple math in my head. The lighting was suitable for our T-stop. There was no room on the dolly for my AC, so I estimated the focus by eye and nodded to the director. This would be an all-or-nothing effort.

Everyone went silent, and then the director shouted "Action!" My dolly grip began pushing in, and I began panning with my right hand as we neared the bed, while with my left hand I pulled my own focus, trying to estimate how far to pull just by looking through the viewfinder. When we got all the way into the bed, I was twisted up like a pretzel, trying to maintain my balance and hold the camera still while the actors kissed and chatted on the bed.

"Cut!"

My director looked at me. Did we have time for one more take? The TA gave us the go-ahead, so we rushed the dolly back to one. And again, without slating, we rolled. My dolly grip pushed in, and I panned and pulled focus and tried to keep the camera steady on my shoulder. It was utterly insane, and completely exhilarating.

And then our time was up, our film was done, and we had no idea if we'd captured anything. I spent two and a half days feeling a bit cold inside, wondering if we'd gotten it. Had I pulled focus properly? Was the pan smooth? Did the shot really look as if it had come down from overhead?

A few days later, we gathered to watch the dailies from the first weekend's shoots. I was bouncing in my seat the whole time, waiting for the footage to come up on screen.

When the shoot I DP'd came up on screen, I felt a knot in my stomach as the grey card appeared. I'd never seen film I'd shot projected before. It was stomach turning both in a good and bad way. One thing I miss from the days of shooting film is that gap in time between taking a photo and getting the slides or contact sheet back from the lab. It's maddening, but if you feel like you got off a beauty, it's like waiting a few days to unwrap a Christmas present. During that time, it sits there all wrapped and pretty and full of possibility, and your imagination runs wild until you forget exactly what you shot so that when you finally see the finished product, it's a surprise again.

The other good thing about shooting film is that it forces you to think when you're framing. An entire generation is being raised on digital photography, using the camera and cheap memory cards to just snap one picture after another until the right one shows up on the LCD screen in back. That's fine, but it transforms photography into a brutish trial-and-error art, and it doesn't work well if you're trying to capture a fleeting moment.

That crazy dolly/pan/tilt shot? We got it. By some miracle, we managed to get the shot the director wanted. If you hadn't known what we'd done, it would appear as if we'd shot the scene from overhead. I felt sixteen levels of relief and two of joy when it appeared they'd be usable.

Next time it won't be quite so tense. But you can't ever match the rush of the first time.

Technorati Tags: film school, filmmaking, movies, photography

Q&A

Thanksgiving stuffing--in the bird or out? Mark Bittman recommends out, in which case it's dressing, not stuffing.

Do you really need a 1080p TV, or will 1080i suffice? You're probably okay with just 1080i, marketing literature notwithstanding.

Does Daisuke Matsuzaka throw the gyroball or not? Will Carroll published a new article (you have to be a subscriber to read it, unfortunately) on Baseball Prospectus today stating that he does believe now that Matsuzaka throw the gyroball, but that he doesn't yet have control over which type he throws. There appear to be two variations that differ based on the tilt of the axis of rotation. If it points up, the ball moves more laterally away from a right-handed batter (all this assumes a right-handed pitcher). If it tilts down, the pitch actually breaks in on a right-handed batter. Carroll pointed to this video of Matsuzaka as having the closest rendition of a pure gyroball:

You know what I enjoy about watching Japanese pitchers? They tend to have long, deliberate motions with high leg kicks, long windups, with hands and feet tracing wide arcs around their bodies (many also have these odd pauses or hitches that mess up the batter's timing). It's old school. Not many pitchers have such motions anymore (as a Cubs fan, Mark Prior and Kerry Wood's super simple deliveries come to mind, in contrast to a guy like Kevin Appier). I love watching old videos of guys like Luis Tiant or Sandy Koufax, with their huge leg kicks. Every pitch looked like a complex series of coordinated motions requiring maximum exertion to pull off correctly.

Technorati Tags: baseball, cooking, electronics, food, gadgets, pitcher, pitching, gyroball, recipe, shopping, thanksgiving, turkey

Soderbergh goes old school

David Bordwell has an edifying post on Steven Soderbergh's attempt to pay homage to a more classical style of shooting in The Good German. Bordwell's post builds on a Dave Kehr article in the NYTimes about the same topic.

Some of Soderbergh's lens creative restrictions--black and white only, no zoom lenses, and no sound that couldn't be captured by a boom mike--amused me because that's what I basically lived with for my first student project which I shot with my crew two Sunday's ago. I shot on Kodak's 16m Double-X black and white film stock, used prime lenses wherever possible (except for two OTS shots because I didn't have a prime lens in the range I wanted), and captured all sound through the boom.

Kehr's discussion of coverage versus cutting in one's head in the article seemed like a happy coincidence because we're being taught how to shoot coverage in one of our classes right now.

"Don't cut in your head!" we're told again and again. On our first projects, it was unavoidable. I had only 400 feet of 16mm film and needed to shoot a three-minute two-person dialogue scene. I just didn't have enough film to shoot the whole scene all the way through from each camera angle. So I had to make some decisions in my head about what portions of the script to shoot from each angle.

When I was in NYC editing, I could understand the appeal of shooting coverage. Having options as to how to cut a scene was liberating. As directors mature, though, I suspect they shoot less and less coverage because they know what they want out of a scene and can work more quickly by cutting to the chase. Over the years, for example, Scorsese realized that he could jump into a scene without a master or establishing shot, and so he did. A lot of times, you don't need that master shot. The modern audience member is very quick to process what they're seeing.

Soderbergh is also often his own editor, and directors like Scorsese are knowledgeable on the art of editing, so they may be exceptions.

Technorati Tags: film, film school, filmmaking, movies

Hmm

Economics can be applied to all sorts of decisions, e.g. the costs and benefits of a bikini wax.

You've heard of the turducken, but how about the turduckencorpheail? The osturduckencorpheail? Or the bustergophechideckneaealckideverwingailusharkolanine?, a 17 bird nested bird roast served at a royal feast in France in the 19th century? Sounds disgusting? I'm not sure the nested vegetarian concoction, the tofucken, has any more appetizing an appellation. Apparently the rule on nested birds is that their name must be nested to create a monstrosity similar in nature to the dish itself. [thx to Joannie]

The trailer for the Simpsons movie.

Technorati Tags: dining, dish, economics, food, movies, simpsons, recipe, timharford, trailer, turducken

Some useful stuff

The Tide to Go Instant Stain Remover stick works as advertised. Nifty.

I spent the first week or two of school trying to find a comfortable, functional laptop bag. I needed a big one to carry around my 17" laptop, binder, textbooks, and random film equipment. The solution came in the form of a BBP bag. BBP stands for bum back pack, offering relief for those with "bum backs" by offering a configuration where you can wear the laptop bag like a backpack, except with the bag hanging lower, near your bum (you can also wear it like a standard messenger bag, one strap over a shoulder). The strap technology reminds me a bit of the golf bags with the double straps that allow you to wear them like backpacks. Sometimes I feel a bit ridiculous hauling the giant around on my back, but I'll settle for being comfortable over cool.

Technorati Tags: shopping, stuff, tools

MOG

MOG.com allows you to inform the world of what music they've been playing on their computer. But most people probably don't care what music you're playing. They'll be more interested in the artist MOGs, to see what folks like Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie or Matthew Caws of Nada Surf or Tom Gray of Gomez have been listening to.

Technorati Tags: music

Stay of execution

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip gets a reprieve from the guillotine: NBC orders 9 more episodes to carry the show through season's end. The future looks grim, though. Considering all the stars in the show and its current viewer level of about 7.7 million people per week, it can't sustain a premium time slot. Maybe it will have the shelf life of, say, Sports Night?

Technorati Tags: sorkin, tv

Daisuke Matsuzaka

Baseball Prospectus examines Daisuke Matsuzaka to see if he's really worth spending $20 to $30 million on, just for the right to even negotiate with him. The answer? He probably is. He might just be the second best starting pitcher in baseball after Johan Santana. I want to see the gyroball.
UPDATE: Rumor has it the Boston Red Sox won the bidding war for negotiation rights with an offer of somewhere between $38 million and $45 million. Wow.

For your next vacation, won't you consider a virtual tour of World of Warcraft with Synthravels, the first online virtual travel agency?

The NanoNuno umbrella dries off with a simple shake. The secret? Nanotechnology. That image on their website makes it seem as if the umbrella emits some kinds of forcefield.

Technorati Tags: baseball, gadgets, geek, MLB, online, pitcher, pitching, gaming, sports, travel

Sonos

My part-time roommate Dave got the Sonos for his house back in Seattle and raved about it. Joel loves it too. Two points make a straight line, right?

Sounds like a nifty solution for those who want to distribute music from their computer to anywhere in the house though it's certainly not cheap.

Technorati Tags: electronics, gadgets, music, wireless

What is genius?

MacArthur and Clark Award winner Kevin Murphy on the difference between a genius and a really smart person:

I think the difference is a really smart person will come up with what you would come up with, only faster. A genius will come up with something that you would never come up with, no matter how long you worked on it.

Technorati Tags: economics

Spiderman 3 trailer in HD

Spiderman 3 trailer in High Def or in low def below.

It seems as if they're continuing with the idea of giving his powers a psychosomatic origin. When he didn't want to be Spiderman, as in the second movie, his powers waned. In this one, it seems as if they're using the black Venom Spidey suit as a visual reflection of Peter's moral corruption as he seeks revenge for his uncle's death.

Of course, in the first movie, it's used as a sort of joke. He has the hots for MJ, then he's bitten by a spider, then he starts shooting milky white webs around his room without any control. Gee, I wonder if that's a metaphor for something.

Technorati Tags: comicbooks, comics, film, movies, spiderman

A few geeky links

The Hannibal is one mean DVR/media center thingamajiggy.

This is a really good summary of Amazon's web services strategy. Having been on the web services team when I left Amazon, I'm surprised more people didn't pick up on this sooner.

DivX for Windows 6.4 enables 1080 HD creation, both 1080i and 1080p.

Technorati Tags: divx, DVR, electronics, gadgets, HD, amazon, tech, webservices

Midterms

Heath Shuler, that's right, Heath Shuler, with cumulative NFL career totals of 15 TDs and 33 INTs, wins a House of Representatives seat for the Democrats in North Carolina.

I'm embarrassed to admit this, but I tend to know more about various models of televisions I'm considering purchasing than I do the candidates I'm voting for. Not that I didn't try to put in some research. Since school started, I've been so buried in school projects and shoots that I had to cram for an hour and a half before hitting the polls tonight. I sifted through the three thousand or so flyers I received in the mail, and I surfed online to see who various outlets were endorsing.

The more I read, the less I knew. It's not hard to find objective information on products online, but the candidates we're trying to elect? Most readily available information on them seems to be propaganda. The web has revolutionized lots of activities, especially retail, but I don't think it has made comparable leaps in helping voters to understand what their candidates are all about.

But I could be wrong. If you know of good sites on this topic, send them my way. Or perhaps it's just the nature of politics to take a stab in the dark, using indicators like political party as a sort of shorthand.

Technorati Tags: football, news, politics, vote

This is all I have to offer

Aaron Sorkin visits a dental hygienist.

Why don't studios just use catchy movie posters as the DVD cover? Looking at the examples cited, I suspect that studios think that by the time the DVD comes out, everyone knows the story, so they don't go with the more mysterious poster images which act almost like teasers. But I agree, the movie posters are superior. Those are some fugly DVD covers, most of which seem to say, "Hey, remember who was in this movie?"

Amazon.com posted a copy of the Publisher's Weekly advance review of Thomas Pynchon's new novel Against the Day. PW gave Pynchon a star, their mark of recommendation. If my mind weren't monopolized by all the first quarter film shoots my classmates and I are buried under, I'd be game for tackling new Pynchon. But my mind is, and so I'm not. Not even close.

Technorati Tags: aaronsorkin, books, dvd, movies, posters, reading, Pynchon