Remains of the Day

Saddam Hussein executed

Saddam Hussein executed. More from the NYTimes.

Technorati Tags: international, news, politics

Twas two nights before 2007

The NYTimes 2006 Year in Pictures.

After seeing Pan's Labyrinth, I couldn't help thinking of Insect Lab, a studio which combines dead insect bodies with antique watch parts and electronic components.

Okay, so NYC is not perfect. One problem being that is populated by lots of people like this.

LifeHack's 50 best hacks for your life from 2006.

Technorati Tags: hacks, insect, nyc, photo, photography

Pan's Labyrinth

The early critical response to Pan's Labyrinth was strong, and now that I've seen it, I can add my voice to the chorus of admiration. The audience word-of-mouth for this movie is going to be off-the-charts. It's magic.

One thing Guillermo Del Toro has shown in his film career thus far is an ability to conjure the sensual and the dark. With this movie, he's blowing up before our very eyes.

It's tough to shake that lullaby from the soundtrack from your head. You can hear much of the soundtrack by just clicking through to the official website.

Technorati Tags: film, movies

Is there a one syllable name athlete?

Funny but also debate-provoking bit from this Football Outsiders NFL article:

The greatest athletes of all time by number of syllables in their name: Two syllables: Babe Ruth. Three: Wayne Gretzky. Four: Michael Jordan. Five: Muhammad Ali. Six: Roberto Clemente. Seven: LaDainian Tomlinson. Eight: Martina Navratilova. Nine: Chris Fu'umatu-Ma'afala or somebody.

Technorati Tags: athletes, bestof, football, list, NFL, sports

Aaaa-weh!

Perhaps the most famous sound library scream in film history is the Wilhelm scream (click through to read about some of the dozens of famous Hollywood movies that have used it). You can also hear it again and again in the YouTube montage below.

Technorati Tags: film, movies, history, video, youtube

The long and the short of it

Zudeo is a high-res content distribution system built on Bittorrent. You have to download a lightweight client to browse and grab clips. It's not going to cause YouTube any heartache, but for people who like their video content big and beautiful, like me, it's a useful supplement. They signed a deal with the BBC to put episodes of TV shows online at some point for some undisclosed fee. But there's some decent free content already live, like Luis Bunuel's classic surrealist short "Un Chien Andalou," based on a story by Bunuel and Salvador Dali.

Criterion is launching a new line of DVDs under the name Eclipse. They won't be the souped up DVDs customers are used to with the Criterion label, but Eclipse will help to rush many more movies that aren't currently available on video onto DVD. The first release on the label will be the 5 DVD Series 1: Early Bergman on March 27 of 2007.

Technorati Tags: dvd, movies, video

Two clear winners thus far: Children of Men, The Queen

Among the numerous movies I've seen this holiday break, two have stood out thus far: The Queen and Children of Men. One of the immense pleasures at the heart of each is the performance of the leads. Helen Mirren is a shoo-in for a Best Actress nomination from the Academy, and Clive Owen is, as always, combines equal parts sensitivity and flintiness in a way that is wholly unique. He is, in that way, a sort of modern day Bogart. Both Mirren and Owen have an appealingly lean method of acting: precise, without a hint of fussiness. They never seem to seek the camera's attention, and because of that we can't take our eyes off of them.

Children of Men features two single-shot action sequences that will put cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki's name on the tongues of film students everywhere. One is a car chase. I have no idea what type of rig the camera was mounted on, but I sure hope the DVD contains a making-of video that shows it because the camera seemed to be able to move all around the inside of a vehicle filled with actors.

The second is a single, unbroken shot in which a handheld camera chases Clive Owen for what feels like ten to fifteen minutes through an urban warzone, diving and ducking behind walls and rubble, into a building under siege by government soldiers, up stairs, down halls, in and out of several rooms. The longer the shot went, the lower my jaw dropped. The audacity required to try to shoot that sequence in one take fills me with glee. Give that camera operator a gold star.

It's too bad that Children of Men is only in limited release, and even in LA and NYC it is only in two or three theaters. Though it depicts a grim, dystopian future, it is a nativity story for our times and a thought-provoking Christmas film for adults.

Another movie I can't wait to see opens this Friday in limited release: Pan's Labyrinth. The trailer makes me giddy, though the voice of the voiceover doesn't feel right.

Technorati Tags: acting, film, movies, cinematography

A visual pun?

Coming back from a Christmas morning brunch with my family at Joe Shanghai's, I spotted this not so subtle ad on a Chinatown store window and had to snap it with my cameraphone.

The name "bubble tea" comes from "boba tea," as it was known in Taiwan where I first encountered it in 1982. "Boba" is Chinese slang for breasts, or, in a strange phonetical coincidence, boobs.

Technorati Tags: advertising, food, photo

Merry Christmas

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

by James Joyce, from "The Dead"

Technorati Tags: jamesjoyce, literature, book, writing

Clearing the TiVo of life

This list of cool stuff costing $10 or less is useful if you need a few belated stocking stuffers.

Gosh, I've missed NYC. I'm trying to reserve judgment on LA, but I have no doubts about my adoration for NYC. Being back and strolling the streets, mingling with the people, it's like CPR for the spirit. The weather in LA is fantastic, but it didn't take long for me to realize it's an urban planning disaster with perhaps no solution to come in my lifetime.

I didn't realize how draining my quarter had been until I arrived back in Manhattan the day after my faculty review. The first week, I've had to resort to drinking coffee three times to stay awake (I weened myself off of black gold in 1998), and when I sleep I have the types of vivid, often disturbing dreams I only have when exhausted.

The irony of film school, at least the first year, is that students have little time to actually watch movies. The night after my last final, I wanted to go see a movie, but when I looked up show times I realized it wasn't playing in any theater in the L.A. region anymore. The last time that happened to me was...hmm, I think that's the first time that's ever happened to me.

So among other things, while on break, I will catch up on movies. In fact, this winter break is a chance to catch up on everything that film school forced me to put off until later. I'm clearing out the playlist in my personal life DVR: sleep, good eating, exercise, natural light, movies, music, correspondence with friends and family (but no holiday cards this year, alas), drink, world news, the simple pleasures in life.

I wish the same to all of you. Happy holidays!

Technorati Tags: goods, gadgets, shopping

Among the many similarities between me and 007

The black and white sequence at the start of Casino Royale was shot on Kodak's Double-X film stock. That's the same film stock I shot my first quarter student project on (The 35mm version of Double-X, used in the Bond movie, is Kodak product code 5222, and the 16mm version, which I used, is 7222).

I was after a particular look, especially given that my location, a cafeteria on campus, wasn't exactly the most gorgeous setting. Double-X allowed me to work around the drab colors inside, and the film stock handled hot sunlight with aplomb. Shooting with the Double-X also allowed my makeup artist to achieve a dramatic, almost vampire-like contrast for my actress' face, the pale skin accented by near ebony eye shadow and lipstick.

One movie I had in mind when thinking about how I wanted to shoot my movie was John Cassavetes' Faces, also shot largely on Double-X. I had my DP shoot handheld, and I tried on a smaller scale to have my actress channel the emotional instability of Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence.

Another way I could have gone, especially if I'd wanted to preserve the option of showing my film in color, would have been to shoot on color stock and drain the color in post production. Some of my classmates shot on Kodak's Vision2 500T color film stock (5218). It's decently fast, simplifying the lighting, and if you're going to release the movie in B&W then you don't have to worry about the blue tint it will acquire when shooting in sunlight (the T after the 500 indicates that the film is designed to be shot under tungsten lights).

Good Night, and Good Luck was shot on 500T. Selling off the rights to a movie in Japan these days requires shooting in color, but that's not why they chose to do so on that movie. A lot of the sets, I've heard, were painted in shades of grey anyhow because Clooney knew he wanted the movie to remain B&W in every format.

Shooting color and and then desaturating in post is what many digital photographers do now. Shoot in color on your digital SLR, then use the channel mixer in Photoshop to create a black and white print. The only problem with that is that it's difficult to achieve the high contrast look and grain of shooting in B&W film in the first place. I find that many photographs shot this way contain too much in the midtones, requiring extra work in Photoshop. There's something ironic about trying to use cutting edge camera hardware and photography software to create the same look you could create with an older film camera and film stock with much less work.

Technorati Tags: film, filmschool, movies, photography

What your lady wants for Xmas this year

I hadn't gotten three steps into James apartment late last night when he had me watching this short on his DVR, from the Justin Timberlake-hosted episode of SNL which was still running. I'm filing that away as an early leader for my Halloween costume in 2007.

Technorati Tags: humor, video, SNL, tv, youtube

Representin'

Yee-ha! Who says nice guys finish last.

Next time I see Yul, he's buying the first round of drinks.

Technorati Tags: tv

Loadkill

Consider this the white flag on, among other things, my e-mail inbox. I used to try to return all my fan mail within a day, but then this matter of my first quarter of film school came flying in like a defensive end from my blind side annihilated me. I feel as if someone tied a rope around my waist while I wasn't looking and then attached the other end to a giant parachute that they tossed up into a raging gale. One minute I'm standing there, and then suddenly I'm yanked off my feet and dragged through the forest, struggling the whole way to detach myself, to no avail.

I moved to LA and had about three days to unpack and settle in before school started, and the rest has just been a blur. For some reason, perhaps stupidity, I didn't anticipate the first year of film school being so packed wall-to-wall with class. Morning, afternoon, evening, even Saturdays, we all seemed to live at school. I've never lived in a city for so long and seen so little of it. I've worn a deep path between my apartment and the school parking garage, and that's about it. I don't even know the entire campus; the only portion I'm really familiar with is the section where the film school is.

Yesterday I threw out about five-foot tall stack of unread Sunday NYTimes, only to discover another stack of equal height behind it. The newspaper stack is flanked by two towers of magazines, the whole thing resembling a sort of Petronas Towers of print media. The good thing is that if there's a nuclear winter, I should be able to keep warm for months by using it as kindling.

This last week, my classmates and I have grown more and more exhausted as hour upon hour of editing on the flatbeds have begun to take their toll. I can't recall another week in this century when I've strung together so many nights with just a few hours of sleep. The other day, I wandered from the sixth floor of my parking garage down to the third before I found my car because I couldn't remember which level I'd parked on. I couldn't even remember parking it at all.

Editing on 16mm film on a flatbed is one of those experiences which we'll speak of fondly in hindsight, but when in the midst of it, more than one of us nearly succumbed to frustration and despair. More than one of us has had to field a phone call from a crazed classmate and to talk that classmate back from the ledge. Having learned to edit on a computer, I had an especially hard time getting used to the idea that cutting in a single piece of footage could take ten minutes as opposed to 20 seconds.

This is how nearly all major motion pictures were edited for years and years! It's almost as difficult to fathom as the stories my dad used to tell me about programming a computer by feeding it punch cards. I hadn't thought about how slow the editing process would be when I wrote my script consisting of back and forth dialogue for about three minutes straight. As a result, I had to make nearly 40 cuts. You bet I looked on with deep envy at those folks who had films consisting of four or five long takes spliced together.

At the same time, I now understand why certain filmmakers, like Scorsese and Spielberg, held out as long as possible before moving to digital non-linear editing (in the case of Scorsese, it was his editor Schoonmaker who made the switch, but he went along begrudgingly). For one thing, there's a certain discipline and care that working with actual film engenders. Being in a dark room with a trim bin filled with hundreds of feet of film, working on a flatbed machine the size of a compact car, feeling the film run over your fingers...at no other point this quarter did I understand as clearly that filmmaking is a craft as much as it is an art. Sure, a dish prepared in a microwave oven is going to be ready faster than one baked in a real oven, but you also taste the difference.

Making a cut that works is much more satisfying on the flatbed. By the time I finished cutting my film, I'd gained an intuitive sense of how many frames I needed to add in or pull out to get the timing I wanted. You can build a similar sense of timing on a computer, but with film, the relationship between time and linear distance (the length of film in your hand) is fixed.

That bright semicircle of light? That's the end of the tunnel. Thursday we screen our movies on the big screen, Friday we meet with faculty for the end of quarter evaluation, and Saturday I fly back into the arms of NYC for the holidays.

Yesterday I spent a couple hours capturing foley for my film. The clicking of a woman's heels on linoleum, the scraping noise of a wooden chair being pushed back or pulled forward against the ground, the rustling of a woman searching through her purse, even the chafing of fabric against fabric as jackets are put on or removed. I projected my movie on a large screen and sat in the recording booth while a classmate outside would walk in heels in time to the movements of the actress on screen, or sit down and stand up while putting on or removing jackets of various fabrics.
Professional foley artists have one of the most fun jobs around.

When I went back in to add the foley to my sound mix, every sound that matched the action on screen gave me a silent thrill. The engaging sense of hyper-realism that comes from watching a Hollywood narrative film comes in large part due to the clean sound from foley, something that's difficult to capture with the mics on location or on a camcorder.

Today I finished my sound mix. I had to go back to my Nagra tape and recapture a take because my actress's lines got clipped when I transferred to CD-R. The Nagra is an old sound recording device, analogous in age to the flatbed in editing. We used the legendary 4.2, pictured below. I believe it was in the third episode of season one of The Wire when McNulty or one of his peers complained about still having to use a large, clunky Nagra taped inside his shirt to do surveillance when the FBI had moved on to stealthier, more compact, wireless recording devices.

The Nagra is bulky and heavy, but it has one thing going for it. No matter how hot the sound, it's nearly impossible to cause the Nagra to distort. It has an amazingly wide latitude and forgiveness and can capture the most dynamic ranges of sound with ease. But transfer to CD and you bump heads with the lousy dynamic range of digital sound. A shouted line that sounded beautiful on the Nagra clipped when I transferred it to CD, and so I had to recapture with a lower input level on the CD Recorder to remove the distortion in the line reading. Digital sounds has its conveniences, but it's still trying to catch up to analog sound in quality.

Thursday all of our movies will show on the big screen at school. I'm excited to see everyone's work projected large. The improvement in home theater technology this past decade has been great, but I'm not one of those who prefers watching movies at home just because of the cost or inconvenience of going to a movie theater, dealing with lines and rude people talking on cell phones. Seeing a face projected twenty feet high fundamentally changes your experience of the movie, and so does seeing it in the company of others.

Technorati Tags: film school, filmmaking

Wordloaf

Among the many cool-sounding shows I haven't had time to see recently is "All About Walken," a show featuring a bunch of Christopher Walken impersonators.

The Adobe Photoshop CS3 beta releases this Friday. Rumor has it that the Universal Binary will "scream" on the new Intel-based Macs.

Monthly upload bandwidth lifted from 20MB to 100MB for free accounts at Flickr. I though they should have lifted those a while ago, but better late than never.

I was fuming mad at the world today, well, mostly Bank of America for their shoddy (read: nonexistent) integration between branches in different states, and then I went back to watch episode 6 from this season's Simpsons, and by the end of the episode I was smiling again. Go grab a torrent. With guest appearances by Gore Vidal, Tom Wolfe, Michael Chabon and Jonathan Franzen, and another comic turn by J.K. Simmons reprising his J. Jonah Jameson from the Spiderman movies, it's an instant classic. And yes, I don't watch much TV anymore which is why I'm recommending an episode that aired sometime during the Kennedy administration.

Technorati Tags: animation, humor, photography, photoshop, simpsons, software, theater, tv

You too?

In the YouTube era, it seems as if everyone, even U2, has the equivalent of a dorky high school yearbook picture.

Technorati Tags: music, U2, video, youtube

I think she said "I'm an arse"

Meaningful Machines has come up with a clever software algorithm for language translation.

Maybe when their software is out of beta we can get Rosie O'Donnell a copy to beta test.

Technorati Tags: language, software, tech, youtube

RIP RA

Last week (or was it the week before?), on my way into school, I was listening to NPR when I heard that Robert Altman had passed away. We'd just watched a print of his Nashville the week before for class, and his passing saddened me much more than most celebrity deaths. He seemed like such an avuncular soul, and perhaps his death resonates so much because he was a director sui generis. Who else could have made Nashville? And who would've thought that Emilio Estevez, of all people, would try to channel Altman and Nashville?

Can you spot all 75 bands represented in this photo?

What policy issues do most economists agree on?

I saw Mabou Mines DollHouse tonight, a truly unconventional adaptation of Ibsen's A Doll's House, source of the most famous door slam in literary history. In this Lee Breuer version, all the male characters are played by little people, none taller than four and a half feet. The women, on the other hand, are played by very tall women. I don't see much avant-garde theater, but I recognize it when I see it. The only Ibsen play I've read is Hedda Gabler, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that Krogstadt doesn't get a blow job from Kristine in Ibsen's original text. And I can't imagine another production of this play that could elicit more laughter. Not all of Breuer's choices spoke to me, but it's been a while since I've seen a production with as many ideas that got me thinking long after I'd left the theater.

Yep, there's no shortage of Obama 2008 paraphernalia at Cafe Press.

Technorati Tags: economics, film, filmmaking, movies, music, Obama, play, politics, barackobama, puzzle, theater

Thanksgiving redux

A few highlights from Thanksgiving, which I spent at my parents' place in Temecula (yes, I'm really behind):

• I ordered a turducken from New Orleans this year. We had traditional turkey on Thanksgiving day, and then the next night we branched out into the turducken. It arrived on dry ice and was simple enough to prepare. Thaw, cover, and bake in the oven for 4.5 to 6 hours, until the meat was at 165 degrees inside. Because it was mostly boneless, carving was much easier than with a normal turkey. The meat was tasty, seasoned with cajun spices. But in the end, I couldn't fully embrace the concept. Here's the problem: with the shipping price of over $30, a turducken ends up costing about $100. Yes, you save on some preparation time because it arrives cleaned, stuffed, seasoned, and ready to bake, but I didn't detect any synergies from embedding a duck inside a chicken inside a turkey. In fact, many people find it disgusting. I don't, but I also think you're better off just buying a duck, a chicken, and a turkey separately and preparing each as its own dish. The turducken was nothing more than the sum of its parts, while I was expecting something more.
• At every holiday gathering in our family, there is one comic sketch or movie that recurs in conversation over and over again. This year it was the David Blaine street magic spoof. Mike and Jason and Linda, among others, had sent it to me the week before, and on Wednesday night, while waiting for traffic to die down, I watched it at home. Brilliant, especially since James has shown me so many David Blaine street magic videos in the past.
• My parents live just on the other side of an Indian reservation. Just over the wall, on the reservation, is a house on the side of a hill. It's surrounded with a wooden fence, and on the fence is painted, in brown paint: "F*** U" (but without the asterisks). It has been there as long as I can remember. Somehow, on Thanksgiving, a holiday first celebrated between Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians, and given the subsequent history between the settlers from Europe and the Native Americans, that graffiti greeting seemed more appropriate than ever.
• A few of us did pay restitution to the Native Americans, in a way, by giving business to Pechanga Resort and Casino, the largest casino in California. Much to my dismay, those lucky few did not include me. It's a running joke now. Every holiday in Temecula, I want to make a pilgrimage to Pechanga, but no one will go with me and I feel so guilty about leaving the family to go by myself that I abstain.
• Other things that are a bit of a family tradition include some heated board game contest. This was the first family gathering in a long time which did not include such a contest. But it doesn't matter what the game is...it could be a game of pure chance, it always feels like a Yankees-Red Sox game. It's all giggles and smiles and hugs until a game is proposed, and then everyone dons their game faces.

Technorati Tags: food, humor, thanksgiving, turkey, video, youtube