Remains of the Day

Tron Legacy trailer

What is catching about this new trailer is the audio: score, sound editing, and mix.

Dramatizing the digital life

Virginia Heffernan writes about the challenge of dramatizing the online life.

Anyone who has followed fantasy football or an eBay auction at the office — and gotten away with it — knows that many of our everyday activities now look like work. Typing and scrolling and peering at a computer, you could be doing anything: e-mail, accounting, short-selling, browsing porn, buying uranium, getting divorced.

This odd accident of life online — the increasing visual homogeneity of our behaviors — may be a boon to procrastinators, hobbyists and multitaskers. But it has some victims. I don’t mean bosses concerned with productivity (who cares about them?). The crowd truly stymied by the merging of human activities are filmmakers. If fighting now looks like making up now looks like booking travel, as it does when people conduct their affairs online, how do film directors make human action both dramatic to viewers and roughly true to life?

Another anachronism that drives me crazy in the movies is continued reliance on analog answering machines so that either the audience or some other person in a room can eavesdrop on a voicemail meant for another person. Who owns one of those machines anymore? It's a crutch for unimaginative storytellers.

Top movies of the decade

I enjoyed both Film Comment and Sight and Sound's top movies of the decade lists. Film Comment used a poll of international critics to determine their list of 100, while Sight and Sound's editorial team personally curated their list of 30.

Here are the 18 movies that enjoyed the distinction of making both lists, along with Amazon links where available (all except Colossal Youth were up there, and that one is coming out on a Criterion DVD which isn't on Amazon yet but which I linked to at the Criterion website):

• Adaptation
• Colossal Youth
• The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
• The Gleaners and I
• Caché
• Inland Empire
• In The Mood For Love
• Memories of Murder
• The Holy Girl
• Yi Yi
• Russian Ark
• The Son
• Spirited Away
• Talk To Her
• There Will Be Blood
• 35 Shots of Rum
• Tropical Malady
• Werckmeister Harmonies

White liberal guiltlessness (and some stuff about Avatar)

This is an old link but one I meant to share a while back because I enjoyed it. Giovanni Tiso notes that critical discussion of both Avatar and past injustices against Haiti are being decried as inappropriate, the former because hey, it's just a movie, and the latter because a tragedy is no time to try to hash out our complicity in Haiti's poverty.

Similar backlash occurred after 9/11 in the U.S., when any attempt to analyze whether U.S. policy had contributed to the rise of Al-Qaeda was treated as heartless political pandering. It's just another instance of the tyranny of the OR, where it's assumed one can't be both analytical and sympathetic. I would hope we're able to appreciate that real-life is more nuanced than that, even if we can't tolerate that level of complexity from our mass entertainment.

Besides, I’m a consumer of information just like everybody else, of serious, sometimes cataclysmic front page news that bleeds into entertainment news and back again, a phenomenon made even more pronounced by the design of Web pages and aggregators and by the nature of hypertext if, like me, you get most of your news online.

In that environment, it is quite natural that James Cameron should accept an award in the name of a people that is indigenous only to his head, and that it should be greeted at best with a collective smirk or shrug or guffaw, since after all it was done in the spirit and logic of the times, while actual political statements of demonstrable historical urgency, like Peter Hallward’s, attract offense and derision. And this same spirit and logic will dictate that an immense human tragedy that weighs on the shoulders of the international community should be consumed as an act of God, outside of history, in the same present tense as entertainment, asking of us only that we fill that void with as many random quick fire donations - think of the convenience of texting for relief - as we can fit in the course of our normal activities and in the time allotted for caring for such things.

There is only one thing worse than white liberal guilt, and it’s white liberal guiltlessness, demanding that history not be ‘brought into it’, that memory be erased. We must fight that. And, yes, give, and give discriminately.

Esoteria

Lindsay Beyerstein defends Y Tu Mama Tambien from a detractor who implicates the movie's female lead Luisa as a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. What is a MPDG?

Onion AV writer Nathan Rabin coined the term to describe Kristen Dunst's character in a scathing review of Elizabethtown: The Manic Pixie Dream Girl exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is an all-or-nothing-proposition. Audiences either want to marry her instantly (despite The Manic Pixie Dream Girl being, you know, a fictional character) or they want to commit grievous bodily harm against them and their immediate family.

Natalie Portman is usually trotted out as Exhibit A in MPDG litigation.

I liked Y Tu Mama Tambien and endorse Beyerstein's defense against said charges. But I also enjoyed adding MPDG to my vocabulary.

***

A touching Roger Ebert story. No, not that one, though that is a great one that's gotten a lot of coverage recently, and deservedly so. In losing his voice, he found a new one in his online journal (his output has expanded into Twitter as well). I have my own Roger Ebert stories from having chatted with him a few times at Sundance, but I'll share those another day.

I DVR'd Ebert on Oprah today, but I'm not sure tonight is the night to watch. I must brace myself for the emotional impact.

***

"All the Good Stuff Always Happens in the Ladies Room" by Paulina Porizkova

It's a funny read, honest and not ironic. It evokes my sympathy when I read about her "frequent bouts of self-doubt and the occasional humiliation of being a celebrity past her prime" and I don't often feel sympathy for supermodels, the title granted her in her byline.

I link to it mostly because it reminded me that we live in an odd age when celebrities are writing at us in an unmediated fashion more than I can ever remember. Celebrity Twitter accounts, blogs, websites, and iPhone apps. I'm not sure what I should feel when a celebrity tweets from their high life: what other celebrity they just ran into, what it's like on the red carpet or on the movie set or the exclusive party they're at. It seems like vanity, or perhaps insecurity, or maybe they have nothing else to write about because their lives are really one long string of parties punctuated by an occasional gig that resembles work. I'm not sure how I feel about this other than it should be the subject of a Chuck Klosterman essay.

***

Shawn Blanc makes his plea for a good iPhone feed reader. I made a similar wish earlier this month.

I use three newsreaders on my iPhone today: Byline, Reeder, and NetNewsWire. Use might not be the right word. I bounce between them depending on my mood, but none of the three thrill or delight me yet.

I differ from Shawn a bit in my primary complaints about the three. Byline is the fastest of the three and allows offline reading which I love, but a few things about its UI irk me. One is that after loading its initial set of items, you have to click a link at the bottom to load more stories from your feed. But that link is placed right below a Mark All As Read link which I hit by mistake all the time. The second is the inability to select stories from an individual feed. Sometimes I don't want my full newsfeed, I just want the latest from one feed. I'd also love the option to save state the way Tweetie does so i can start browsing forward from the last article I was shown in my previous Byline session.

Reeder allows me to select individual feeds, but it doesn't save state. The worst problem is that it chokes on syncing all the stories from all my feeds. I spend a lot of time waiting for Reeder to register my screen gestures as it syncs; those long delays drive me crazy. I can't tell if my iPhone has frozen or if Reeder is just constipated (I have syncing turned on at startup so every time I launch the app I'm waiting around for something to happen). I've had to all but turn Reeder syncing off to use the app which is too bad because it has a lot of other features I appreciate.

As for NetNewsWire, on the iPhone it is essentially unusable for anyone with any healthy number of feeds. It feels as if my phone has just frozen.

My hope is that someone solves this on the iPad because that has the potential be a fantastic newsreader device, especially as the Kindle is not great in that area. An iPad with a great Google Reader app and access to browsing all the usual news websites through mobile Safari and a great ebook reader would be something I spend a lot of time with on the toilet. Did I say toilet? I meant "around the house."

***

Is this the same old woman who looks like a little girl from Orphan?

The intentional fallacy

This profile of Quentin Tarantino in the LATimes is notable for revealing the director's desire to reign in the deep mining of his movies' for key source material.

But as it turns out, after all these years of happily giving it up for his favorite filmmakers, Tarantino has become deeply conflicted about discussing the sources of his influences, in large part because Tarantino's honesty has often been used against him by critics and bloggers when they want to belittle his films or blame the filmmaker's endless parade of movie references for the swarm of mindless Harry Knowles-style fanboys who now dominate the online movie scene. In the course of a long conversation the other day, Tarantino managed to go--in a matter of minutes--from saying he "loved having influences" to saying that he was "unbelievably annoyed" with critics who used his reliance on influences as a way of trashing his movies.

After checking out some of the critical feedback to Tarantino's films, I began to feel his pain. In the course of an otherwise admiring review of "Basterds," Roger Ebert argued that judging from the way Tarantino photographed Melanie Laurent near the end of the film, focusing on her shoes, lips, dress and facial veil, "you can't tell me [that] he hasn't seen the work of the Scottish artist Jack Vettriano." (Cackling with laughter, Tarantino's response was a resounding: "No.")

But the critic that really got under his skin was Salon's Stephanie Zacharek, who in the course of reviewing "Kill Bill" said the movie felt as if Tarantino "were holding us captive on a moldy postgraduate couch somewhere, subjecting us to 90 minutes worth of his favorite movie clips strung together, accompanied by an exhausting running commentary along the lines of 'Isn't this great?' "

To say that Tarantino finds this aggravating would be an understatement. "Here's my problem with this whole influence thing," he told me. "Instead of critics reviewing my movies, now what they're really doing is trying to match wits with me. Every time they review my movies, it's like they want to play chess with the mastermind and show off every reference they can find, even when half of it is all of their own making. It feels like the critics are IMDB-ing everything I do. It just rubs me the wrong way because they end up using it as a stick to beat me down with."

This is a classic critical analysis dilemma: can we, should we, guess the artist's intent? I side with the thesis of W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley's essay "The Intentional Fallacy" that argues that interpreting a piece of art based on knowledge of the artist's life or factors external to the work itself should not be the primary type of criticism. That type of criticism is not replicable, and as is clear from the article above, is often fallible. Many movie critics are taking wild guesses, often wrong ones, about what Tarantino's influences are.

A closely related problem is one that is hinted at in a line near the end of A.O. Scott's review of Shutter Island, and that is whether critics bring too much historical appreciation of director to their later works. Maybe we can label this the "auteur delusion"?

Mr. Scorsese in effect forces you to study the threads on the rug he is preparing, with lugubrious deliberateness, to pull out from under you. As the final revelations approach, the stakes diminish precipitously, and the sense that the whole movie has been a strained and pointless contrivance starts to take hold.

There are, of course, those who will resist this conclusion, in part out of loyalty to Mr. Scorsese, a director to whom otherwise hard-headed critics are inclined to extend the benefit of the doubt.

This has been a common addendum to many critical reviews of the movie, which I have not seen. Those who don't like the movie imply that many who do are Scorsese fanboys who see art in even his weakest movies.

It's hard to argue with the idea that each movie should be approached on its own merits. For me, the tendency I must combat is the reverse, and that is my attraction to contrarian opinions. People whose opinions offer differ with me and who seem like bright thinkers intrigue me. It's the Sherlock Holmes mystique, the idea that there's a thinker out there so logical and unemotional that his thinking clarifies your own.

A Hulu success story

I'm fairly certain this is the most successfully named movie in Hulu's catalog. Not that you need to make a movie with "sex" in the title to hit it big, but given the powerful bloc of young males voting with their mouse clicks and search queries, it was a built-in advantage. You still need to make something people want to watch; attracting that first click doesn't get you the full check, but with each ad break you keep a viewer through earns you additional revenue.

Still, the naming shouldn't be discounted here. The filmmaker Stevie Long didn't know his movie would end up on Hulu so it may just be chance, but knowing your distribution medium and tailoring something to break through on that medium is something more independent artists looking to break through should consider. When Jeff Bezos founded Amazon, he specifically wanted a name for the company that began with the letter A because so many directories for the web were organized alphabetically back then. Being on page 1 was a big deal.

Strictly Sexual is also a testament to the power of free, or in this case, semi-free. There are many sites that will charge you $5 for an online rental of indie films, but if you're an independent filmmaker who thinks someone will drop $5 on a movie they've never heard of, you're likely overvaluing monetary payback and undervaluing exposure. But Long's example shows you don't always have to trade off between the two. Per CNN, he's reinvesting his profits into his next film, "Porn Star: The Ugly Life of a Beautiful Girl," which he'll release directly on the internet.

Why mess with the formula?

American Psycho the musical

It's on!? But is it an adaptation of the book or the movie? They are quite different in key ways. Most people I know who love it have only seen the movie. I saw the movie first but read the book later during my backpacking trip through South America in 2003. The book is much more graphic than the movie; I imagine the musical will be even more sanitized than the movie was but will still draw adoring crowds of bankers who fail to see the satire and clamor to look into the mirror it holds up to their lifestyle.

It has been too long since I've read the book, so I don't recall which scenes from the movie were lifted straight from the book, but I can't help but picture one of the musical numbers in this movie being a trio sung by Patrick Batemen and the two prostitutes he's paid to participate in a 3-way conference call.

Peek-a-boo

The ghosts in this sequence are one thing, but the real world examples? Only in the movies. Have you ever tried to sneak up on someone and stand behind them in the instant between them swinging open a bathroom mirror and closing it? Darn near impossible.

Which reminds me of this...

Toy Story 3 trailer

Why "TiK ToK" went #1

Why was Ke$ha's "TiK ToK" such a smash hit? This analysis fascinates me as an example of a field of research that attempts to deduce patterns of popularity in artistic work. Like studies that analyze faces that most people find attractive (we like faces that are symmetrical and that tend to be averages of faces across a large population), the film and music industries have tried to reverse engineer the hit and break it down to a reproducible recipe.

I haven't read Futurehit.DNA, the book whose research is applied here to TiK ToK, but some success elements it identifies in the song are quite specific. For example:

THE DROP OUTS PREVENT BOREDOM

There are two crucial points in the song where the music basically drops out and forces the listener to engage. This is an essential point for any new song to prevent it from being passive. You need it to be active in order to engage people to listen multiple times and actively purchase. The first drop out occurs at 31 seconds when the verse ends and creates a half second of silence before the chorus kicks in. This actively accents the chorus and makes sure you are paying attention before it starts. The second point is just after 2 minutes when the bridge after the second chorus drops out most of the instruments and all the rhythm. Typically most listeners start getting bored right at the two minute mark, so having this change up right at this moment is the smartest move the producers could do. There’s also a subtle, yet crucial change in the chord progressions at this point. This is key as this also creates a shift that engages the listener. This draws from chapters 3 and 4.

LACK OF RESOLUTION AT THE END

The song is in D minor, but that chord first comes in at the 7th beat of the 16 bar progression. So when the song ends cold on the first note of that progression, it ends on Bb. This gives the listener a subtle feeling of an unfinished song, even though it ended on the 1st beat, which is typical of most songs. By not resolving the chord, the listener is more apt to hum the song and therefore more likely to need to listen to it again. This is detailed out in Chapter 5.

A few years back, Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article called "The Formula" which delved into efforts to crack the formula of hit songs and movies.

Wait for it.

Sorry, I was just trying the Dropout strategy for my writing, inserting a random gap at about 2 minutes in to see if it would keep you interested.

Anyhow, Gladwell profiled a music company, Platinum Blue Music Intelligence (now Music XRay) which used software to analyze songs and predict their hit potential. The more interesting company discussed in the article was Epagogix, a company that claimed to be able to predict the box office potential of any film project given just the script.

It's not clear whether or not these companies can do what they promise with any degree of accuracy. The secrecy around their algorithms makes it difficult to evaluate their effectiveness. One could argue that if they did work, artists, studios, and labels might all have an incentive to keep it a secret from the public. No one likes to think they've been duped by some paint-by-numbers artistic work that preys on some Pavlovian wiring in their brain.

On the other hand, if these algorithms really did work, you'd think it would be well worth the cost to employ them and that a higher percentage of songs and movies coming out of the big labels and studios would be commercially successful.

If Filmmakers Directed the Super Bowl

A stylistic spoof. The Godard is my favorite, but that's probably also the easiest target. Turn any film to black and white, give it a French voiceover and English captions, give it that particularly French philosophical inflection, and I'll laugh (it's a popular joke among filmmakers, most recently employed in 500 Days of Summer).

CGI rotting sci-fi from the inside?

China Mieville is down on CGI's impact on sci-fi filmmaking. Avatar is his exhibit A.

Even those of us exhausted by yet another overlong mawkish gush — let alone one which reiterates the old cliche of Going Native and Leading Them to Freedom by Becoming the Most Awesome (White) Mohican™ — can admit that the special effects are impressive. But that’s a very long way from liking them, or thinking they’re a good thing. That computer-generated imagery (CGI) is rotting science fiction from the inside.

In the relentless search to produce the most ostentatiously spectacular scenes possible, CGI, which once had the potential to be a useful aesthetic tool, has become a mannerist absurdity. It is straightforwardly untrue that CGI “looks real.” Are we yet at the point in history where we can all agree we could totally see the digital seams whenever Gollum walked onscreen? Can we stop pretending that the Na’vi and rendered landscapes of Pandora in “Avatar” don’t immediately stand out from the real physical actors, moving as they do with the unpleasant, jarring, parabolic precision of all CGI?

Drift

A short movie made using digital stills morphed together. Doesn't have to be a really fancy digital camera, either.

Weinstein feedback to Errol Morris

From the entertaining Tumblr blog Letters of Note is this letter from then Miramax head honcho Harvey Weinstein to Errol Morris at the time The Thin Blue Line was in release.

Without the full context of their correspondence up until then, and having not seen Morris's performance on NPR, it's difficult to interpret fairly. But a few thoughts:

• As feedback goes, it's efficient. Learning to give and receive honest feedback is critical in business, and being overly sensitive is a barrier to achieving good work. We're all human, of course, and it's perhaps impossible to take criticism of one's work with complete impartiality, but given enough repetitions, one can cultivate a professional receptivity that leads to more efficient interchanges. I like to think of standup comedians honing their routines in the most brutal of environments, the small comedy club, receiving instant feedback in the form of laughter or, in the worst case, jeers. There's a certain courage and maturity required to submit to unmoderated feedback, and more of the world needs it in the age of the internet, where anonymous feedback through mediums like email and blogs and Twitter comes with zero cost.
• Plenty of successful executives have a cultivated the personality of an enfant terrible. But is the sarcasm really necessary? "If you have any casting suggestion, I'd appreciate that." That needless dig doesn't ease the reception of any useful feedback in the note. Just on a purely economic basis, I've never understood the fascination on the part of so many people in the entertainment business with being assholes, it would seem like a bad move in a world where it's difficult to predict who you might need to work with again given the variability of success on the part of even the industry's brightest talents.

Logorama

The movie that provided me the most chuckles per minute at Sundance was one of the shorts that played in the Shorts Program I, perhaps the best shorts program I've ever seen at Sundance (which may have been why they chose it as one of the opening night screenings). It contained four shorts, one of them being the latest Spike Jonze film I'm Here.

But the short I'm referring to is the one called Logorama, and the best way to see it is to not read anything about it beforehand. Normally that's all I'd say, keeping this post spoiler free.

But there's a decent chance this short never gets picked up and released, and so I'm inclined to explain why, and those of you who don't want to know more can stop reading.

The difficulty of securing a release is not just that it's a short movie (and who watches shorts except at film festivals and on compilation DVDs) but that the filmmakers, French directing collective H5, madeit almost entirely out of corporate logos and brand characters, over 2,000 in total, without asking permission. Not only that, many of the brand mascots are depicted in ways their companies would likely choke on. Ronald McDonald as a machine gun toting, f-bomb dropping bank robber? Mr. Kleen as a gay tour guide at a local zoo? It's not just a satire of our branding-saturated society, it's a funny spoof of Hollywood movie tropes.

There is a full, albeit fuzzy version of "Logorama" online on this blog. I can't imagine this embedded copy is a legal one, but even with an army of lawyers this short might not see the light of legal distribution again, so a low-res stream may be better than nothing at all.

Ironically, the filmmakers did seem to have cleared the music which seems like putting a dab of sunscreen on your nose while jogging in the nude on a sunny day.

Some perspective

If you measure number of tickets sold and not movie gross (even adjusted for inflation, which it often isn't), Avatar is still only the 26th most popular movie ever. It's hard to imagine any movie, actually, any single media product, regardless of what it is (book, CD, videogame) ever coming within binocular viewing distance of Gone With the Wind, and that's fine. I am much happier with the diversity of entertainment options in this modern age and find most grumbling about the glory days of media past to be a function of clinging to outdated modes of production and distribution on the part of both artists and consumers.

Still, what has been impressive is Avatar's ability to get people to pony up $17, $18, even $20 a ticket to don 3-D glasses to watch a 3 hour movie. I had my doubts after seeing the extended trailer, but whatever its ultimate take, Avatar has become far more of a mainstream phenomenon than I imagined.

Avatar-inspired reading

What's surprising to me about Avatar is the corpus of critical writing it has inspired. With all apologies to Michael Haneke, whose White Ribbon would seem to be the frontrunner in inspiring critical discussion, what with its promise of tracing the origins of evil and World Wars I and II and the Nazis, no movie has generated as much fascinating reading for me this year as Avatar (Inglourious Basterds and A Serious Man, perhaps, are runners up).

It's unexpected, all this serious analysis for a James Cameron-penned screenplay that is largely derivative of familiar Hollywood tropes. Why Avatar has generated this back and forth and not other big Hollywood movies is curious; for one reason or another it has become a global cultural touchstone.

Here's just a short list of writings about Avatar that I enjoyed:

Avatar and the American Man-Child

When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like "Avatar"?

Avatar: "Totally racist, dude."

Avatar and American Imperialism

Obligatory Avatar Post

I hated Avatar with the Fire of a Thousand Suns

"They Killed Their Mother": Avatar as Ideological Symptom

A Chinese Take on 'Avatar'

This is just about the movie itself and doesn't even factor in how the movie was shot. When the inevitable $99 10-disc Blu-Ray Na'Vi Ultra Edition with 12" bronze figurine of James Cameron's penis is released, there will be enough making-of featurettes to make the movie's 3 hour runtime seem like a movie trailer.

The technology Cameron developed to allow him to look at live actors on a soundstage but see them as Na'Vi figurines in a digital landscape sounds like a George Lucas wet dream and may be itself a metaphor for the idea of American cultural imperialism, that is, Cameron wears goggles that allow him to see what he wants to see, a fantasy which uses reality as a mere skeleton. That Americans only see the world through their own red, white, and blue goggles; that's an argument I've heard many a time while traveling abroad, or that I read a couple times each day when answering user e-mails to Hulu (to those people I'll just say this; the reason we don't stream our content outside of the U.S. yet is because the rights we were granted were for U.S. streaming only. Content distribution rights in entertainment have long been sold geography by geography, and the global nature of the Internet doesn't change that overnight. This isn't some U.S.-centrism at play, Americans are just as locked out when it comes to streaming content from other countries, much to my dismay when trying to watch the latest season of MI-5/Spooks on the BBC website).

If you find other Avatar-inspired articles of note, please pass them along.

Iron Man 2

The first trailer is out now. I bet I see this before Avatar tomorrow night.

Mammoth

Trailer for Lukas Moodysson's new movie Mammoth. I loved Lilja 4-ever and Show Me Love, two of his earlier works. But I hear this latest compared to an Inarritu movie and suddenly I see unhappy people...not a good sign.

The Elephant Man

Hot rookies for your Oscar nomination fantasy draft

I would have titled this "a star is born" but it's fantasy football season and that terminology is on the brain. From the Toronto Film Festival two young actresses to look for come Oscar season when best actress nominees are announced...

Abbie Cornish from Bright Star. I'd never seen any of her work until I saw the new Jane Campion movie at TIFF. Cornish plays Fanny Brawne, a fashionista who falls into a feverish romance with poet John Keats, played by Ben Whishaw, whom I last saw playing Hamlet at the Old Vic in London in 2004. Campion is underrated as a visual stylist, and the beauty of the shots in this movie convince us that they could have inspired Keats' poetry.

Campion does not blow the romance out of proportion. We do not see the moments on screen literally inspiring specific words in his poems, and though we know Keats is to become one of the world's great Romantic poets, he seems no different than many a fervent young lover. Cornish's portrayal of Brawne feels both controlled and yet completely free and uninhibited, a quality I see in so many of my favorite performances. She has a very good chance at a best actress nomination.

Another young actress who will announce her presence in a memorable fashion this fall, is Carey Mulligan. She is the star of Lone Scherfig's An Education which opens in LA and NY today. My sister Karen and I caught a morning screening at TIFF.

Mulligan plays a 17 year old overachiever in her last year of high school, on the cusp of applying to Oxford where her father has always dreamed she'd go. But a chance encounter brings an older man (Peter Sarsgaard) into her life, bringing with him the fun and excitement of fine dining, jazz clubs, travel abroad, and access to the world beyond books and studies.

The movie is based on a memoir written as a look back on an affair at an earlier stage of life. One can imagine the voice of the older self dissecting transgressions of youth with a critical, chiding tone, but played by Mulligan, the movie has a sweetness at its heart. Mulligan is charming and cute as a button, and she doesn't just recall the look of a young Audrey Hepburn in scenes set in Paris but also the charisma. The role of the gamine, among others, is hers to own for years to come whether or not a best actress nomination comes at the next Oscars.

And even if An Education doesn't break big, she has plenty of movies shooting or in post which will introduce her to a global audience. Among others, she'll be seen in 2010 in Wall Street 2 playing Gordon Gekko's daughter and love interest of Shia Labeouf, whom she's dating in real life.

Some pics of Mulligan from Q&A after the screening...

Indie downturn

I had a wonderful time at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) this year; more on my first visit there soon.

With the high cost of attending a film festival like Sundance or Toronto (once you factor in plane tickets, lodging, transportation, and the cost of a film ticket there, assuming you can even secure the tickets you want, the $20 you pay for a movie ticket, popcorn, and drink at your local indie cineplex seems like a bargain), it's worth considering whether such a trip is worth it.

One reason these treks are still worthwhile to me is the contraction of the independent film market. Anne Thompson sees the dearth of purchases at this year's TIFF as continuation of this trend. I still enjoy a lot of what people refer to as "independent films" but fewer and fewer of them cross that bridge over troubled water between film festival and theatrical release.

Yes, I can still wait and see the movies on DVD at some point, but call me old-fashioned, I still love the experience of watching a movie on a huge screen in a darkened theater in the company of others. Drifting into the theater with other moviegoers giving off that palpable sense of anticipation, watching the movie trailers and making snap judgments about what will succeed, nibbling on popcorn or some candy, standing outside the theater afterwards and discussing our reactions to the movie we just saw, I love it all. Some people complain about the price of a movie ticket, but for my money, $10 or $11 for a movie ticket is still the best value for 2 hours of entertainment on a night out.

Back to independent film, most wouldn't make enough on DVD sales alone to continue to subsidize their production. Financiers back these movies assuming some revenue from theatrical release.

So yes, for independent film lovers, there is still value in the film festival pilgrimage (it's also a great way to diet; rushing from one screening to another at TIFF, I learned to subsist on water, popcorn, and body fat).

As to the fate of the independent film market, I am not as gloomy as most, though there will be blood in the near term. It should come as no surprise given what I've spent so much of my career working on that the reason I'm still bullish is that little thing called the Internet.

What do independent films need? Publicity and distribution. The internet is very good at the former, and getting better at the latter. The stigma against the internet as a distribution channel is understandable given how conservative the entertainment industry has always been (just tonight, on the Emmys, Neil Patrick Harris played Dr. Horrible in a skit poking fun at internet distribution of television). And internet distribution is still handcuffed by certain factors, including the shoddy internet infrastructure in the U.S. and the somewhat shaky and long chain of software and hardware involved in watching video streamed live through said the Internet. The reliability and quality of streamed video can't match that of a DVD disc played through your DVD player. Yet.

But that won't last forever. Take out the costs of film prints and old methods of marketing an indie film, trying to open it big in NYC and LA, and suddenly the height of the cost hurdle drops in a massive way. Forego the traditional windowing system and release a movie through multiple channels simultaneously and take advantage of concentrating your marketing efforts on a narrower window. Many independent movies that play the festival circuit won't generate revenue across multiple windows the way a Harry Potter movie will anyway, so why diffuse the spend across multiple windows?

I mentioned above how much I love seeing movies in theaters, but I'd absolutely pay to watch some of these movies at home on my TV, through PPV or streamed or downloaded off of the internet for $10 a pop, if that meant these movies would continue to get made.

If anything good comes from this downturn in the independent film market, I hope it's that filmmakers of all sorts look past their prejudice against the internet as a means for sharing their work and apply the same creativity they use to make their movies to exploiting the internet.

Miscellany

Google Reader asked some notable folks what their top picks were for Google Reader. Good idea, but I find it a bit offputting that so many folks chose their own website as one of their short list? Their sites are already listed and linked under their names, are we to believe they really spend time reading their own writing in Google Reader?

***

This past weekend, I was driving home on the 405 and saw a massive, odd-looking cloud standing alone in a clear blue sky, like a single head of cauliflower poking its head up through a bed of smog. Then I realized it was smoke from the fires in the San Gabriel mountains. It looked like a scene from 24, as if someone had dropped a nuclear bomb on LA. Here's one tightly-cropped time-lapse video of the smoke from the fires.

To truly appreciate how terrifying it looks, watch this wider-framed time-lapse which will give you a sense of the magnitude of this latest SoCal conflagration.

***

Hitchcock is a storyboarding app for the iPhone that can use photos. You're limited to the fixed focal length lens of the iPhone, but I could see it being a handy tool on set. We were shooting our Alec Baldwin Super Bowl commercial earlier this year in NYC, and the director Peter Berg grabbed my iPhone at one point and used the camera to help us visualize a shot he envisioned. He mentioned offhand that he wouldn't mind having a simple tool on the iPhone for quick previz.

It's $19.99, but there are more specialty tools coming to the iPhone that aren't intended for mass audiences, and those can justify higher prices.

Incidentally, I wish the iPhone app store had a way to put apps on a wishlist, or save them for later view. I often see apps that I think I might want to buy later, and I never have a way to remember them. Like this one cool app I saw last week, what did it do again, it was something about...oh, forget it.

***

A BMW concept diesel-hybrid. As with all concept cars, it looks absurdly futuristic, but it's heartening to see higher end manufacturers committing to the sustainability movement. Design can lift up the mundane and make it desirable, and having manufacturers like BMW or Tesla pushing the high end of this market can only help.

***

On Japanese simplicity.

In just over 30 years Hello Kitty has become a multibillion-dollar model of resourceful minimalism within the global juggernaut of Japanese pop culture. From Tokyo to Tehran, her expressionless, barely sketched visage adorns key chains, backpacks, toiletries and even a Hello Kitty-themed airline jet. Late last year an entire maternity hospital with Hello Kitty imagery adorning bedspreads and birth certificates opened to great fanfare in Taiwan.

But why is she mouthless? Because when you look at Hello Kitty, or “Kitty-chan,” as she is affectionately known in Japan, she will feel just like you do. As Japanese anime critic Hideki Ono says: “Your brain projects the missing information, then your imagination fills it in and feels the pleasure of participation.”

The Japanese design aesthetic has a strong influence on my product team as all my designers are either Japanese or very into Japanese culture.

During my trip to Tokyo earlier this year, I couldn't help but notice that the metropolis of over 12 million people was so clean relative to other cities its size and population. Each night, as we walked back to our hotel after a day of sightseeing, several massive street cleaning vehicles would pass us on the road.

It's not that every part of Tokyo is tea gardens and bonsai trees. Any place with the urban density of Tokyo is going to feel overcrowded, and it's important, as many commenters on the article rightly point out, that cleanliness does not equal a low environmental footprint, even if that's the superficial impression.

I watched Miyazaki's Ponyo recently. Though it is on the surface a retelling of The LIttle Mermaid, it is at its core a story about humans trying to come to harmony with the environment and their natural surroundings. When he makes these movies, is he holding the Japanese up as paragons of that, or is he taking shots at them, too? Often his heroes and heroines are children. Is he issuing a call to the next generation to correct the environmental failings of their parents?

***

The resurrection of the suburban novel? I never read many suburban novels while growing up in the suburbs, but there is something to the thesis of this article, that the suburbs are about a state of mind as much as they are about a physical place. The post-war generation fled to the suburbs in search of a big house, a big backyard, a more peaceful and fulfilling existence. That they found a spiritual wasteland that filled them with an almost depressing boredom.

That feeling of disappointment or disillusion is one with broad applications and perhaps explains the enduring nature of the concept of suburban dystopia.

The Downfall of the Downfall parody

Just brilliant, though you should go on YouTube and watch a few of the earlier Downfall parodies first to get the full impact (e.g. Hitler gets banned from Xbox Live, Hitler finds out Michael Jackson has died, Downfall of Grammar).

Some memes grow tiresome quickly; I have yet to tire of this one. But once a meme becomes self-referential, perhaps it has swallowed its own tail.

El Bulli, Dan Brown, et al

Man hits the culinary lottery and gets a reservation at El Bulli, then recounts his meal in comic book form. 30 courses! I felt engorged and exhausted just reading about all the dishes.

***

Bill Maher rants at Huffington Post about the idiocy of Americans in an article titled "New Rule: Smart President ≠ Smart Country." Bryan Caplan would be proud.

At times like this, trying to pass some form of healthcare reform, even a watered-down version because of the difficulty of getting any big change through the conservative institutional roadblock that we call the Senate, one wonders how the government has ever achieved anything on behalf of anyone other than a special interest.

Obama took his argument directly to the people in an Op-Ed in the NYTimes. I'm curious who was the last President of the U.S. to write an Op-Ed in a major American newspaper. I'm going to go out on a limb and say it wasn't the previous occupant of the office.

An interesting sidenote to the whole debate on healthcare reform is the uproar over Whole Foods CEO John Mackey's editorial in the Wall Street Journal arguing against the health care bill on the table. The Opinionator over the the NYTimes tracks the timeline of the whole brouhaha. If you disagree with Mackey, I don't think boycotting Whole Foods is the solution, but I do think CEO's of companies need to be careful of what they say because it's too convenient to read their comments as representative of the views of Whole Foods as a company, and it's dangerous to ascribe too many coherent policy decisions to a capitalist institution, even one like Whole Foods which many people associate with a progressive lifestyle.

***

Andrew Collins examines the global phenomenon that is Dan Brown, universally reviled by literary critics and other writers but whose next novel The Lost Symbol will command the largest first print run in Random House history at 6.5 million.

I'm not sure it's such a paradox that someone can be a bad writer yet spin a real page-turner. What grabbed me about The Da Vinci Code was the fabricated secret that tied together so many known quantities in history in a clever way, from The Last Supper to Mary Magdalene and everything in between.

The plots of his stories themselves never strike me as plausible or gripping, his characters are two-dimensional (and that may be generous, though perhaps I'm being sexist in finding gorgeous and leggy nuclear physicist Vittoria Vetra of Angels and Demons a bit implausible), nor is his command of the English language that noteworthy. After all, one chapter of The Da Vinci Code concludes with this sentence, one that would have failed me out of my first year fiction writing class in college:

Almost inconceivably, the gun into which she was now staring was clutched in the pale hand of an enormous albino.

***

A physicist writes that The Time Traveler's Wife may be the most scientifically accurate movie treatment of time travel ever. No comment on whether the cheesy slow dissolve of Eric Bana each time he travels through time is also consistent with the laws of physics, or whether his expressionless acting is a consequence of too many leaps through time and space.

The article's a good read, though, as I didn't realize that physicists had come to such consensus around these constraints of time travel. I still say The Terminator remains the most brilliant time travel movie because of its stunning revelation that by going back in time to change the future you just create it, illustrated in the movie by the Moebius strip of a plot in which John Connor sends Kyle Reese back in time to protect his mom, only to have Kyle Reese become his father.

In that twist, the movie adheres to one of the principles stated in this article, the so-called "self-consistency problem," that is, "You can't kill your own grandfather."

***

Justice Antonin Scalia and Thomas, the Twiddle Dee and Dum of the Supreme Court, argued in the minority against allowing a prisoner to challenge his murder conviction after many witnesses recanted their testimony and implicated another person as the actual murderer. Scalia, in his dissent (PDF), claims the following:

This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is “actually” innocent.

Those quotation marks around the adverb actually in that sentence rank among the most pernicious and cruel punctuation I've ever encountered. It is not a ringing endorsement of our government that both Scalia and Thomas ended up with lifetime appointments on the highest court in the nation.

***

For those of you waiting with bated breath for Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are, this week's New Yorker features a short story by Dave Eggers, "Max at Sea" which is an excerpt from Eggers upcoming novel The Wild Things which itself is loosely based on the screenplay Eggers wrote with Jonze for the movie, which in turn is based, of course, on the children's book by Maurice Sendak.

Lists

Roger Ebert draws attention to another "best movies of all time" list, this one by Spectator magazine. The top one on their list is one I haven't seen atop these lists before, The Night of the Hunter: Here's the top 12 from the list, and you can see the rest here.

1. The Night of the Hunter, Laughton
2. Apocalypse Now, Coppola
3. Sunrise, Murnau
4. Black Narcissus, Powell & Pressburger
5. L'avventura, Antonioni
6. The Searchers, Ford
7. The Magnificent Ambersons, Welles
8. The Seventh Seal , Bergman
9. L'atalante, Vigo
10. Rio Bravo, Hawks
11. The Godfather: Part I and Part II, Coppola
12. The Passion of Joan of Arc, Dreyer

***

The Times (UK) selects the 60 best novels of the last 60 years, with the twist that they could only choose one book published each year. This list is provocative in its mix of classics and more populist fare: on few lists will you see Twilight (as the best novel of 2005) sharing a podium with Lolita.

Still Walking

A trailer for Still Walking, the next movie from perhaps Japan's most talented director right now, Hirokazu Koreeda. I had a ticket to watch this at the LA Film Festival but ended up being in Japan of all places when it screened (vacation, so I can't complain).

Nobody Knows, one of his earlier works, remains one of the saddest movies I've ever seen.

The Hurt Locker

Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker is one of the best movies I've seen this year. If only a fraction of the crowd that went to see Transformers 2 had gone to see The Hurt Locker instead, the whole world would experience a net gain in entertainment pleasure.

Hulu has the entire opening sequence of the movie.

The Informant

Years ago I read Kurt Eichenwald's The Informant. It's a beast of a book, but it falls in a category of book I'm fond of, the white collar crime or falls-from-grace chronicles (see also The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron, Den of Thieves, Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management, Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street). It's also a great read.

I was surprised to hear Steven Soderbergh was turning it into a movie, and even more surprised after watching this trailer.

The book always struck me as fairly somber, more of a tragedy or melodrama than what this trailer seems to convey, something more comic in tone. No doubt that informant Mark Whitacre, played here by a mustachioed Matt Damon, was a nut. But this adaptation seems to seek the humor in the witness and FBI's ineptitude rather than the tragedy of their shaky efforts to bring down Archer Daniels Midland.

It's always dangerous concluding too much based on a trailer, but the intent to set audience expectations on tone is very strong here, down to the exclamation point that punctuates the title (the official title listed at IMDb right now is "The Informant!").

Antichrist...Rated E for Egad

Hot rumor of the day is that Lars Von Trier's controversial movie Antichrist, which caused the biggest ripples at Cannes this year, will be made into a PC-only videogame. Yes, the same Antichrist which features onscreen genital mutilation, said genitals belonging to one Willem Dafoe, and aforementioned mutilation occurring courtesy of Charlotte Gainsbourg. The Wii jokes are so obvious that they were stale even before they wrote themselves.

I thought Von Trier didn't like animation. Do videogames not count?

I may need to reinstall VMWare Fusion just to give this a whirl.

***

Court jester of the art world Banksy gets a legal exhibit at a museum in Bristol. You can see peruse a few of the pics. Always amusing.

***

NYTimes Magazine profile of Rafael Nadal.

“Every tennis lover would like, someday, to play like Federer,” Philippe Bouin told me. “But every man wants to be Rafael Nadal. Which is different.”

This profile was written before Nadal officially withdrew from Wimbledon, but that fits with its thesis which wonders if Nadal's style of play will cause him to break down physically. Very sad for the sport that he won't be there. Tennis needs Federer to face his foil.

Sunday

I saw Up in 3-D at the El Capitan last night. It's the richest, most moving script from Pixar yet. Animation lovers will love the references to Howl's Moving Castle and Castle in the Sky.

I will be curious, when it comes out on Blu-Ray, to see it in 2-D also, but this is probably the most polished 3-D movie I've seen to date. There is a level of control with digital animation that allows the 3-D effects to be extremely precise, with much less of the distracting blurring that makes other 3-D movies feel like gimmicks.

***

So, did Susan Boyle win in the finals of Britain's Got Talent? Go see for yourself.

I keep forgetting you don't have to sing to be on that show. The finals are like America's Best Dance Crew vs. American Idol.

***

Last survivor of the Titanic dies. I knew she was ready to pass on after she dropped that blue jeweled necklace into the ocean.

***

Nadal loses at the French Open. Massive upset. This makes Robin Soderling the future answer to a trivia question. Djokovic is out, too. Federer, the door is open. This is your best, and maybe last chance, to walk down that red clay carpet and on through.

***

In the New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert reports that we are likely in the midst of the sixth mass extinction in Earth's history. By the end of this century, nearly half of Earth's species may be extinct. The suspected cause is the pace of human activity.

Miscellany

Toy Story 3 teaser trailer. What jumps out at me now is not the technology of the digital animation, which is commonplace, but how quickly we recognize our old friends Woody and Buzz and friends. Consistency of character is the magic sauce here.

***

Cool--Hulu Desktop made it into Uncrate. I have a secret list of ambitions for Hulu, and most of them consist of getting Hulu featured in things I follow in my own daily life. Some others: getting mentioned on The Simpsons, by Oprah, by the President, and in the lyrics to a hip-hop song. Getting Jason to get one of those black and white dot photos in the WSJ.

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Useful little site: copypastecharacter.com

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Mad Men Season 3 episodes may be squeezed by 2 minutes to accommodate more ads. Damn this recession.

***

Eastbound and Down Season 1 is coming to DVD in June. Can't wait. I love me some Danny McBride, like I did Will Ferrell before his overexposure.

***

How they shot those Where Amazing Happens commercials for the NBA where classic plays are gradually painted in, one player at a time.

Kottke posted a great dissection of the Kobe to Shaq alleyoop spot, noting how it contains evidence of just how dysfunctional Kobe and Shaq's relationship already was at that time.

***

Jeffrey Toobin profiles Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts in The New Yorker. Toobin opened my eyes to just how much Roberts has already shifted the Supreme Court right during his short tenure. Roberts may be Bush's most unpublicized but lasting legacy.

Still, there is no disputing that the President and the Chief Justice are adversaries in a contest for control of the Court, and that both men come to that battle well armed. Obama has at most one more chance to take the oath of office, and Roberts will probably have a half-dozen more opportunities to get it right. But each time Roberts walks down the steps of the Capitol to administer the oath, he may well be surrounded—and eventually outvoted—by Supreme Court colleagues appointed by Barack Obama.

I loved Toobin's book The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court.

***

If Obama is Spock, then is Kirk John McCain?

Star Trek

Anthony Lane is at his most amusing when lancing a movie with his quips (MILD SPOILER ALERT ahead for the new Star Trek movie):

This theme of alternative reality is clumsily worked, and not a patch on its tighter, more alluring, and thus much scarier treatment in “Coraline.” Its effect here is to saddle us with two Mr. Spocks, one from the vulnerable present and one from the comforting future, and its main purpose, I suspect, is to drag in Leonard Nimoy, who these days makes Bela Lugosi look like Zac Efron, and thus insure that all the “Star Trek” scholars in the audience will have to hurry home and change their underwear.  

The movie works best at high speed, when it's hurtling at you off the screen so quickly that you can't stop and contemplate the plot but can appreciate the quick references to Star Trek mythology and character future. Amongst a crowd of Trekkies cheering every next Enterprise crew introduction, I felt a certain communal nostalgia, as if at a wedding watching the slideshow segment, or attending a Trek convention.

In the car, on the way home, unfolding the plot in my head, one finds many pieces missing, and the ones that are there don't really fit together. It feels like a cheat, all these prequels that draw on our affection for movies past but plotlines future, rearranging our childhood loves and selling them back to us in scrapbook form. But then again, those wedding slideshows whipped up in iPhoto and set to MP3s serve their purpose, if a bit brutishly, at least with sentiment and good intentions.

The Brothers Bloom - the first seven minutes

Years back, I saw a movie at Sundance called Brick, by a first-time director named Rian Johnson. Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Lukas Haas, Brick cast the traditional roles of a film noir in a high school setting, hard-boiled dialogue and all. Of the many movies I saw that year, Brick was among the most memorable for its intriguing conceit, one which the director committed to fully. It was no surprise that it won a special mention or award during the festival for uniqueness of voice or vision, something of the sort.

Back then, I made a mental checkmark next to Rian Johnson as a talented young director to watch. And soon I will have the chance. Hulu has an exclusive on the first seven minutes of his next movie, The Brothers Bloom.

Three musical pieces

As an espresso shot of inspiration, this musical number (YouTube) which many many people forwarded me yesterday. What would be perfect is if I heard she'd started dating Paul the opera singer.

Also moving, also musically related, is Anvil! The Story of Anvil, a documentary about a metal band. Like many who come to this movie, I had not heard of Anvil, nor am I a metalhead. My first thought on seeing the trailer was that I wanted to see it but perhaps just on DVD given how far on the periphery of my interests it fell.

But I kept getting pitched to see it from UCLA film schoolers who raved about it, and given that it was only in LA for a one week run at the Nuart, and after reading a rave review by Anthony Lane in The New Yorker, I planned an outing to see it last night and invited a bunch of friends.

Just one person responded, in the negative, and the remaining radio silence I read as tacit declines, perhaps reacting the same way I did to the trailer. So I went by myself; once I saw the documentary, that seemed only fitting.

Anvil was a seminal metal band, and in the early 80's, people in that genre of the industry foresaw big things for them, but for reasons not entirely clear to me as an outsider to that genre, they slipped into obscurity while bands like Anthrax, Megadeth, Metallica, and Slayer went on to fame and fortune (in the documentary, they are referred to as The Big Four, a bit of trivia that was news to me).

Lead singer Steve Kudlow is known to all but his family as Lips. The drummer's name is Robb Reiner, a coincidence that seems so improbable and perfect that I thought he might have changed his name at one point, but no, this is art and life together in a winking conspiracy. The two of them are the founders and soul of Anvil, and even now, in their 50's, bicker, make up, repeat, like an old married couple.

What always surprises me is how sweet all the people involved in heavy metal music seem to be, from the musicians with their face paint and outfits heavy on leather and endless waves of hair to the fans with their heads bopping and tongues hanging. Lips is the star of the documentary, almost childlike in his optimism. He and Sally Hawkins' Poppy from Happy-Go-Lucky should get together, just to see if their buoyancy might generate a harmonic convergence that could bring about world peace.

Not that Lips doesn't have his moments of despair, but much of the wonder of this movie is watching him, on screen confronting his despair, and then setting it aside with what comes to seem a courageous perseverance and good cheer.

I can see why so many film students gravitate towards the story, as all who enter the arts confront the issue of "what price my art?" on a daily basis. The internet has made critics of us all, but it has not simplified the question of why people pursue art, and at what cost to themselves and their loved ones.

It's a touching story about which I will reveal little else other than to recommend it highly. See it if/when it makes it to your town. The director Sacha Gervasi, who wrote the screenplay for The Terminal and who is teaching screenwriting at UCLA Film School this quarter, showed up after the screening for an unpublicized Q&A. He was gracious and shared some intriguing stories:

• Gervasi met Anvil when he approached them backstage in London and introduced himself as their number one fan. Lips said it was their first time in London and asked Gervasi to show them around town, leading to the humorous image of Gervasi, a young metalhead, leading Lips and Reiner through the Tate Gallery. Gervasi claimed credit for introducing Reiner to the works of Francis Bacon, a story that is less humorous when you learn, in the movie, that Reiner paints Edward Hopper-esque scenes with considerable skill.
• At the screening at Sundance in 2008, a woman during the Q&A asked Lips if he'd ever considered what toll his pursuit of his music placed on his family, and Kudlow broke down and started crying, and then the woman started crying. And she said to him that at least he'd taught his son one of the most valuable lessons, and that was to never give up on his dreams.

Lastly, as part of our documentary launch at Hulu, we added a documentary I saw at Sundance years ago and loved, called DIG!. It shares some parallels with Anvil in its exploration of why artists do what they do.

Director Ondi Timoner, the only two-time Grand Jury Prize winner ever at Sundance, spoke to Hulu editor Rebecca Harper recently. One of the reasons this appealed to me more than many documentaries is that Timoner used one of the principal characters as a narrator, and not an unbiased, omniscient narrator. It's a twist that works, something Timoner spoke about:

Why choose to have Courtney narrate the film?

Courtney was a huge breakthrough for me. I'd attempted to tell the story without narration, but I needed an anchor. I didn't want omniscient narration; I wanted it to be a ride, a journey. So I woke up very pregnant in the middle of the night a month and a half before I finished. I called Courtney right away. He happened to be in Europe at the time, but he was flying into L.A. the next day. He didn't change any of my words; he was gracious and generous. I appreciate him for that.

The Girlfriend Experience

I can't think of too many directors who've built a more personal and varied body of work than Steven Soderbergh. He's written, produced, directed, and even been his own cinematographer, while doing anything that interests him, from personal projects to huge blockbusters with stars like George Clooney and Julia Roberts. He's experimented with distribution with a day-and-date release for Bubble, and he's shot epic movies like Che Parts 1 and 2 with a Red One camera that was still in beta. It's a dream of a career arc.

We have the premiere of the trailer of his next movie at Hulu. The Girlfriend Experience (also shot on the Red One) follows the life of a high-end call girl who offers not just sex but the full girlfriend experience, and it stars an adult film star, Sasha Grey. Soderbergh did a Q&A with Hulu about the movie.

Why choose to go with non-professional actors for this project?

I've been experimenting with non-actors (terrible term) for years now, and I really love what they bring. It's not a result-oriented process for them, so the feeling of the performance can, if you're lucky, be incredibly realistic, almost documentary-like. In fact, I viewed the whole film as kind of a fictionalized documentary.

Most of the movie was shot with nothing more than natural light. I'm looking forward to seeing it.

The answering machines lives on

Recently someone posted about how the ubiquity of cell phones has neutered movie plotlines dependent on lack of communication for dramatic suspense (if someone knows which post I'm referring to, let me know; for the life of me I can't remember where I saw it). For example, Romeo and Juliet would've never ended tragically if the two of them could have texted each other rather than having a messenger try to deliver the news of the faked death ("Drnking drug to fake death for 2 and 40 hrs. Not rlly dead! Meet @CapuletCrypt? <3<3<3 -J")

So screenwriters depend on poor cell phone reception or destroyed cell phones to try and extend the useful life of communication barriers as a plot device.

The plot device that bothers me the most is the use of old-school answering machines to incite conflict. Every time a character comes home with a loved one and then presses play on one of those old-school answering machines, unwittingly playing a suspicious or incriminating message out loud before they can hit the stop button, I picture a lazy screenwriter at the laptop thinking of how to squeeze a plot turn into one page of script. I barely know anybody who still has a landline, let alone one of those answering machines. Mobile phone voicemail just isn't as convenient for a screenwriter, though, so the answering machine lives on.

A higher mission

Rumor has it Disney investors and toy manufacturers are down on Pixar's next feature Up because it isn't commercial enough.

Perhaps Wall Street would not care so much if Pixar seemed to care a little more. The co-director of “Up,” Pete Docter — who also directed “Monsters Inc.” — said in a recent question and answer session with reporters that the film’s commercial prospects never crossed his mind. “We make these films for ourselves,” he said. “We’re kind of selfish that way.”

John Lasseter, a co-founder of Pixar and now Disney’s chief creative officer, routinely says in interviews that marketability is not a factor in decisions about what projects to pursue. Instead of ideas that feel contemporary, he aims for stories that are rooted in the ages.

“Quality is the best business plan” is one of Mr. Lasseter’s favorite lines.

One of the reasons Pixar is among the world's most admired companies is one of the common threads among almost all the great companies I admire: their mission in life is not centered around making money.

I have nothing against profit as that is what keeps the bills paid and the dream alive. But the way to build something great is to set out to do something great. Pixar didn't start their company thinking that they should make movies that could be spun into franchises or spawn toys. Their mission was to tell great and timeless stories. It's why thirty years from now, people will remember Toy Story movies but find the Shrek franchise to be dated.

At Amazon.com, Wall Street continually questioned Amazon every time it pushed off profitability to invest in new business lines, new geographies, every time Amazon returned its gains in gross margin to its customers in the form of free shipping or steeper product discounts. If Amazon had listened, they would have achieved profitability sooner, and they'd also be a fraction of the force they are today.

Go to work each day with your sole focus as making money and your soul shrinks a little bit every day. You'd have to drag me kicking and screaming back to a job like that. Life is too short.

Break in case of marketing emergency

Yes, it's a cheat in your movie trailer to use Arcade Fire (as in the appropriation of "Wake Up" in the trailer for Where the Wild Things Are, embedded below) or "Hoppipolla" by Sigur Ros (Children of Men, Slumdog Millionaire) or "Aquarium" from Saint-Saëns The Carnival of Animals (first Benjamin Button trailer, for example) in your trailer. But trailers are all about shortcuts to the pleasure centers of your brain, and the trailer below pushes many of them.

Not to say it might not still be a dud of a movie--you can't draw any meaningful conclusions from such a short and produced montage--but count me among the intrigued, especially since YYY's Karen O is collaborating with Carter Burwell on the score/soundtrack.

Who watches the Watchmen? I do, tonight at midnight

Spider-Man, the musical

Titled Turn Off the Dark, with music and lyrics by Bono and The Edge and direction from Julie Taymor (Lion King), the Spider-Man musical will preview on Broadway beginning Jan. 16, 2010 and open officially on Feb. 18, 2010.

I can't help but picture a three melody ensemble piece: Neil Patrick Harris as Peter Parker, singing in his Spiderman suit, perched on the precipice of a tall building in NYC, Mary Jane (no thoughts who'd play her), many miles away, singing from a fashion catwalk where she stands as various assistants attend to her hair and makeup, and finally, Ewan McGregor as Eddie Brock, harmonizing from a NY city alley, as as Venom's inky black creeps across his skin and possesses him.

Bizarre.

Slums to riches

The best part of the interview below is when Ryan Seacrest asks one of the young kids from the Slumdog cast a question, and he doesn't reply. Another boy standing in the back row explains, "He doesn't speak English."

Ryan Seacrest then asks, "Can one of you translate?"

Another of the actors jumps in, "He doesn't speak English."

The other critical information revealed in this interview is that Freida Pinto is single and hasn't been asked out via her agent despite the movie's popularity. Sadly, I did a search on my iPhone for "Freida Pinto agent" and got zero results.

Complaining about the Oscars is some sort of national pastime, but one that's always exasperated me. If you don't like the Oscars, the movies they nominate, don't watch! The Oscars, like the Hall of Fame in baseball, are voted on by a select and insular group of people, so if your tastes don't align with those voting in each category, it's futile to expect anything to change. Saying you don't like the Oscars doesn't earn you any exclusive indie cred; that bandwagon is full every year and has been for years.

Honor the movies you enjoy by going to see them and telling people you know to see them. I grew up watching the Oscars with my family and have always looked forward to them. It's one of the few events left on TV outside of sporting events that people gather to watch live. I am sad when they show the montage of the recently deceased, excited to hear familiar musical cues from famous scores or see montages of classic movie scenes, and happy when someone I admire wins the golden naked guy statue. Sure, there's plenty of room for improvement in every telecast--what was with the odd acting award presentation process this year?--but there are usually enough fun moments (Anne Hathaway and Hugh Jackman dancing, Ben Stiller channeling Joaquin Phoenix channeling Ted Kaczynski) to keep me coming back for another dose the next year.

Miscellany

The new tv show Lie to Me is based on the real-life research of Dr. Paul Ekman into facial behaviors, or how muscles of the face reveal underlying psychology through microexpressions that are nearly unconscious or involuntary.

Ekman's system is called the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), and its companion is the Facial Action Coding System Affect Interpretation Dictionary (FACSAID). I first heard of Ekman's work through a Malcolm Gladwell article in the New Yorker titled "The Naked Face".

You can purchase the training system for $260. Maybe it will pay for itself through your weekly poker game?

--@--

Chase Jarvis offers 5 tips for shooting better pictures with your iPhone. He also recommends two apps for the iPhone, CameraBag ($2.99) and Pano ($2.99), both of which I use and enjoy.

I put the prices there because I know some people don't like to pay for any apps, but if there's one thing I urge people to do this year it's to pay for things that provide value, even if they're things you can obtain illegally for free. Whether it's software or music or movies, with the Internet it's easier than ever to reward people directly for work you appreciate. When apps for the iPhone cost less than a Vietnamese Banh Mi sandwich, there's really no excuse. Do the right thing, fight the recession, reward people who do great work that improves your life.

Two other iPhone photography apps that I recommend: Photogene ($2.99) and QuadCamera ($1.99). The iPhone camera is not going to win any prizes for picture quality, but the use of these apps should improve your snaps noticeably. Your Facebook and Flickr friends thank you in advance.

--@--

Speaking of iPhone apps, I've reached the nine page, 144 app limit. I don't use all the apps all the time, so it's not a problem to delete a few, but the limit seems somewhat arbitrary, and at some point in the near future I can see having more than 144 apps that I'd use semi-regularly, or at least often enough that I wouldn't want to have to be deleting and installing apps all the time.

Paging through nine pages of apps doesn't exactly play to the iPhone's interface strengths (some ability to group apps or nest them in folder would be handy) but it's certainly not unusable.

--@--

Amazon's Universal wishlist feature allows you to add products from other websites. Not sure when this launched, but it's an idea I recall being bandied about at Amazon many years ago.

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Metacritic compiles top 10 lists from movie critics across the land (they need to fix their HTML header as it still reads 2007 Film Critic Top Ten Lists in my browser tab). I'm still waiting for their year-end compilation graphic that assimilates all these top ten lists into a master best-of list. I'm not sure if they're producing it again this year, but I hope they do.

A special special-needs girl

Onward into 2009

There's this shot in The Wrestler, a steadicam shot behind Mickey Rourke as he walks through the back offices of a grocery store out to the deli counter. It echoes many other shots in the movie, from better times for Randy "The Ram" Robinson, and the visual reference is unmistakeable and poignant.

But just in case you're oblivious, the sound designer slowly mixes in the sounds of a raucous wrestling crowd chanting his name, just as he hears it when he prepares to walk out through the curtains at a wrestling event. It rises to a crescendo just as he's about to walk through the hanging plastic flaps out to the deli counter.

I wish they'd had the restraint to leave the shot as is and leave out the audio clue. What was an understated and lyrical moment is transformed into something overly sentimental, and I felt that way about many instances of the score in the movie which is otherwise shot in an unfussy, documentary style.

Besides that, though, it's a very moving film. You don't just feel for Randy "The Ram" Robinson but for Mickey Rourke who is nearly unrecognizable, at least to me. This is the guy from Diner and 9 1/2 Weeks?

***

The Israel Consulate is using Twitter to manage their message during this military campaign against Hamas. It's a challenge, trying to communicate complex messages with a 140 character limit, as many organizations are learning while trying to use Twitter for unmediated communication with users. Lots of URL shorteners and common online abbreviations are used, lending an oddly casual air to what are serious messages.

Two perhaps adventitious consequences of this medium: the character limit forces a concise and often more forceful statement of a message, and users who write you are forced to adhere to the character limit also, so it's a level playing ground.

***

Jay-Z crossed with Radiohead = Jaydiohead (from DJ Minty Fresh Beats)

***

A movie trailer that is just one scene, perhaps not truncated or edited down from what appears in the movie itself? Effective.

***

Given NYC's economic dependence on the finance industry, you'd expect Manhattan real estate to have taken a disproportionate beating in this recession.

In fact, New York's real estate market is proving more resilient in this downturn than that of other U.S. cities.

Today’s Case-Shiller housing price figures indicate that New York City’s prices dropped 7.5 percent in the last year, while prices in Los Angeles declined 27.9 percent. Nationwide prices dropped 18 percent. New York is the only major metropolitan area with prices that are still 90 percent above prices in January 2000. According to National Association of Realtors data, New York is the only city in the continental United States, outside of San Francisco Bay, where median sales prices remain north of $500,000.

Despite Wall Street’s suffering, the New York area’s unemployment rate, 5.6 percent in the latest figures, is lower than that in many other major cities. The comparable unemployment rate for Los Angeles is 8.2 percent. The comparable number for Chicago is 6.4 percent.

What's going on? Economist Edward Glaeser attributes it to faith in the city's talented citizens and concentration of said people.

New York still has an amazing concentration of talent. That talent is more effective because all those smart people are connected because of the city’s extreme population density levels. Historically, human capital — the education and skills of a work force — predicts which cities are able to reinvent themselves and which ones are not. Those people who are continuing to pay high prices for Manhattan real estate are implicitly betting that New York’s human capital will continue to come up with new ways of reinventing the city.

***

The first album of 2009 that's gathering critical buzz and mp3 blog lust: Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion

***

The statistics behind the B.C.S. are not just inscrutable but fundamentally flawed.

Statistically, the system is such an abomination that at least one expert — Hal S. Stern, a professor of statistics at the University of California, Irvine — advocated that no self-respecting statistician should have anything to do with it. In an article published in The Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports two years ago, he wrote that the B.C.S. computer rankings serve as little more than a confirmation of the results of the two opinion polls the system also uses to create its rankings. The people who run the computer rankings, he noted, have never been given any clear objective criteria to design their programs, and they are not allowed to use the score or site of a game in their calculations. Stern urged a boycott, a refusal by the community of statisticians to lend credibility to a system he regards as scientifically bankrupt.

In the end, it comes down to money.

“The six big conferences don’t want to share money with the smaller conferences,” Stern said. “That to me is the story that people don’t tell.”

I've never understood the fascination with college football. The quality of play is noticeably inferior to that in the NFL, the BCS system encourage Division I powerhouses to pad their non-conference schedules with patsies, most players on teams are complete unknowns so the individual storylines have no range, the concept of the student-athlete is a farce at many schools in football, and the B.C.S. system, as noted above, doesn't clarify anything at season's end.

It feels like college football fans watch in part to try to reclaim some bygone university solidarity.

***

According to CNET News, one of six sure things for 2009 is that Hulu will start its own porn site.

Hello Kitty

"I want new ones."

"What do you want them to say?"

"The Boy from Oz."

Swimming Pool

Swimming Pool, besides featuring lots of footage of a scantily clad and nubile Ludivine Sagnier, is a clever little meditation on the writing process.

Alexandre Desplat

One of the reasons I'm looking forward to The Curious Case of Benjamin Button on Christmas Day is the opportunity to hear the new score by Alexandre Desplat, my favorite film composer working today.

The perils of sushi

Jeremy Piven is making an early departure from the Broadway production of Speed-the-Plow, which I saw when I was in NYC to watch James run the marathon in November, because of elevated mercury in his blood. Doctors blame his diet of two sushi meals a day.

The production team was sympathetic, for the most part, but the playwright David Mamet was less so. In true Mametian fashion, the playwright told Daily Variety, “My understanding is that he is leaving show business to pursue a career as a thermometer.”

Your next Oscar host

Trailer for X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

Looks more fun than Australia.

Best of 2008 lists

The New Yorker issues its best of lists for 2008:

• Sasha Frere Jones best of the year in music.
• John Lahr's ten best plays.
• Alex Ross's ten best performances.
  
• Anthony Lane's ten best films.
• David Denby's ten best films.

From the studio that needs no introduction

Pixar is great, we all love Pixar. But their past several trailers have all started with a long vanity reel: "Over the years..."

If there is one studio that needs no introduction, it is Pixar. They could flash the company logo and Luxo at the start and go straight into the trailer and people would be sufficiently thrilled for a new Pixar production. There's a hint of flashing the bling with their intro reels that seems unnecessary.

Marathon Man

I was in NYC the first weekend of November to watch my brother James run his first marathon. It was a true family affair as James ran for Fred's Team to raise money for Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center where my other brother Alan works. James raised something like $13,000, just an amazing amount.

I flew in late Thursday night. The next day, while James was off at work, I got up and just walked around. New York City is still my favorite among all the cities I've lived in, and I suspect it's because it's the one city where I can feel both alone and among people at the same time.

I stopped for lunch at Momofuku Ssäm Bar, one of the outlets in the David Chang empire. Back when I lived in NYC, I came here on its first day open, when they still didn't have a menu. It was like a burrito bar back then, and when I walked in the one guy behind the kitchen counter looked surprised to see anyone. Now it's transformed into a fairly chic sit-down joint with a menu and prix fixe lunch. I had crispy pork belly buns...

...and spicy rice cakes.

It was Friday, Halloween, but more importantly, it was the last day of the Banksy exhibit in the West Village, The Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill. I managed to get there just about a half hour before it closed.

Banksy is to the art world as Michel Gondry is to music videos, just conceptually brilliant. This faux pet store wasn't populated with the real animals. Instead, there was a depressed and caged Tweety...

...a caged animatronic monkey wearing headphones, clicking on a remote control, and watching a TV playing a documentary about monkeys free in the wild...

...a rabbit looking in a mirror and applying lipstick...

...animatronic fish fingers swimming in fishbowl...

...and animatronic sausages squirming around like earthworms.

A leopard fur coat basked in a tree branch, its "tail" hanging down and swaying lazily. A rooster watched over its children, little Chicken McNuggets with legs bobbing for food.

Not Banksy's most subtle social commentary, but a humorous conceit executed simply. According to the security guard, the exhibit was on its way to London next.

That night I caught a production of David Mamet's Speed the Plow at the Barrymore Theater on Broadway. This three person meditation on the conflict between art and commerce in Hollywood starred Jeremy Piven, Elisabeth Moss (Peggy Olson on Mad Men), and Raul Esparza.

Bashing Hollywood for favoring money over art is hardly an original form of cynicism, but the underrated Piven is always fun to watch on stage. He plays a character not so unlike his Ari Gold from Entourage: Bobby Gould is a studio exec tasked with making commercial hits. When Elizabeth Moss, a temp secretary, playing someone not unlike her Peggy Olson in Season One of Mad Men, appeals to his conscience to push for an adaptation of a dense and decidedly depressing novel (for some reason I thought of Blindness by Saramago), the battle for his soul is on, with Raul Esparza playing the devil on his shoulder, having brought Gould a made-to-order action script with a big star attached.

Piven has a way of making greed warm and fuzzy. His Ari Gold and Bobby Gould both talk a game of mindless materialism, but the body language conveys a person not entirely comfortable with all the bravado. We see in Piven our own greedy nature, but because we sense his chance for redemption is our own, and so we root for him. Tony Soprano and Don Draper are part of a recently crowded stable of antiheroes, and Piven is like their comedic brother.

After the play, I set off to my old neighborhood haunt of Union Square. I'd read that there would be a flash mob of Sarah Palin look-a-likes this Halloween night, but only a few materialized. Dagmar and Alex, two other folks from UCLA Film School were in town for a thesis shoot, so I met up with them and followed them around, taking pics of Dagmar with costumes that struck her fancy. We snapped a lot Palins, among others. But the most popular costume, by far, perhaps for ease of creation, was Heath Ledger's smudged-lipstick-and-white-face-paint Joker.

The night ended, as many busy social days in NYC end, with my sister Karen hobbling in pain alongside me at 3am in her Audrey Hepburn circa Breakfast at Tiffany's high heels, the two of us trying and failing to find a single unoccupied taxi in Greenwich Village.

The night before the marathon, we all stayed at the Westin in Times Square as James and all the Fred's Team runners were put up there for their fundraising efforts. They got their own transportation to the start line.

The family met up to watch him at the Fred's Team viewing bleachers on 1st Ave., near 67th St, around mile 17. We saw the wheelchair division fly by. One man in a wheelchair stopped across the street, attached a pair of artificial legs below his knees, and ran. The competitive women and then the competitive men flew by, and we saw both eventual winners in those groups.

Thanks to the marathon's e-mail alerts, we knew when James was approaching. As he ran by, giving Alan and the kids a quick hug, I shouted out to him to "Drop the hammer!" He looked back, then down at the street, puzzled, thinking I'd said that he'd dropped something.

We tried to make it across town to the finish line to catch him, but he was too fast. He'd already finished in an impressive 3:57 by the time we waded through the Central Park mob.

Congrats, on both the great time and the amazing fundraising haul! Each speaks volumes, one to his obsessive nature, the other to his likability.

Red announcement

UPDATE: Here's the news. A lot to absorb, but basically, Red is going to turn their entire product line into a modularized model so you can slowly upgrade over time rather than having to buy entirely new cameras over time. The number of sensors from the company is growing like rabbits and will include a 617-sized sensor in the future! Lastly, they're building a Red 3D camera which looks unbelievably cool.

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Tomorrow, Red, the digital cinema company, is announcing something big about their upcoming 3K and 5K cameras, Scarlet and Epic. They've posted a countdown timer on their homepage.

Jim Jannard, company founder, has been building up the announcements in the Red user forums.

We will announce the new Scarlet and Epic programs on Thursday Nov. 13th.

I want to say that no one has any idea how incredible this announcement will be. Call this hype... please. I am quite sure that the announcement will be called a "scam". Should be a lot of fun to hear the reactions. I can't wait.

Jim

Not many companies do a better job of publicizing themselves with no PR department than Red. Jannard's honesty and participation in user forums is refreshing.

Movie trailers on Hulu

We (I use the royal We now when referring to Hulu) added a section of our site for movie trailers today. More to come, but having not been to the movies recently, I feel out of the loop on what's coming. For example, this trailer for Valkyrie, apparently based on a true story. Tom Cruise tried to kill Hitler--who knew?

In watching the latest Harry Potter trailer, I was reminded of a recent talk given by Brad Bird at Skirball here in LA. They offer a series in which luminaries come in to speak and screen a movie of their choice. Bird had chosen to screen Dr. Zhivago, an epic romance, since he's writing and directing a live action epic romance of his own, 1906, about the earthquake and fire in San Francisco in said year. (Brad Bird moving to live action--who knew? Not me, I'm oblivious to all but the latest poll numbers. Nov. 5 can't come quickly enough)

Bird noted that he preferred the Lord of the Rings trilogy over the Harry Potter movies because the former honored the spirit of the books whereas the latter attempted to hew to the literal word. Movies and books are different mediums, something I strongly agree with, and have very different strengths.

His favorite of the Harry Potter movies was the third, the same choice as most every person I've spoken to. I have not read any Harry Potter books other than the first, and perhaps that's aided my enjoyment of the movies.

Something my old roommate and movie buff Scott said about trailers has always stuck with me: they are a brutish art form. That said, they are useful case studies in the art of condensed storytelling.

Netflix Instant Play finally available for Macs

Via Microsoft Silverlight. Rolls out tomorrow and requires Intel-chipped Macs.

Fake celeb Twitter accounts

The use of Twitter for basic info, where you are, what you're doing, is not nearly as amusing as using it as a new comedic form, among which one of the more amusing niches is fake celebrity tweeting.

You know of Fake Sarah Palin by now, but one order higher on the complexity scale of humor is interaction between fake celebrity Twitter accounts.

Here's Fake Megan Fox replying to Fake Michael Bay:

@michael_bay has a saying: "I turn things from boring to awesome. Then I turn them from awesome to Bay."

My favorite fake Michael Bay tweet:

If Im groggy in the am I get a triple venti espresso from starbucks and dump it on the first homeless person I see in downtown LA. It works.

Every character on Mad Men seems to have their own Twitter accounts, though they don't quite do it for me. Part of the charm of those characters is their entrenchment in that time and the inscrutability of their inner lives, so the self-conscious and reflective nature of a Twitter account doesn't fit (AMC briefly had Twitter take them down, though they've since been restored).

Crawford

Our first movie premiere at Hulu is the documentary Crawford, about the effect on the small Texan town when George W. Bush moves in.

Producer and Director David Modigliani was kind enough to answer a few questions I sent his way, and you can read that Q&A here. A taste:

Q: We're used to seeing states divided into red and blue on electoral maps, and in press coverage of each election. How do you think Crawford helps us to understand the reality of that view of the U.S.?

A: I think the film shows that the US is a purple country, even in Crawford, Texas. It behooves each party to demonize and stereotype the other -- to draw divisive lines and oversimplify things into a lame dichotomy. I think there's this notion that small-town "Red State America" is filled with ignorant people who are somehow "other" than people in other parts of the country. When I first arrived in Crawford, I had some of those preconceptions. Instead, I found people who were warm, hospitable, bright and funny. They had political viewpoints across the board, but -- and this sounds trite -- they were people, above all else. I would say to "Blue State America" that people in small towns are folks to engage, rather than to write off. If the political parties and their rampant advertising -- and the media and its lust for conflict -- would get out of the way, I think we'd see more connection and union in the country, which would allow us, in turn, to face our problems together instead of across divisive lines of fire.

The Wire, the complete series, on Blu-Ray

On Dec 9, the complete run of The Wire, all five seasons, comes out on Blu-Ray. Those of you who watched The Wire don't need my endorsement. Those who haven't and own a Blu-Ray player? Treat yourself to a holiday gift of the best television series, or telenovel, ever.

The Dark Knight on Blu-Ray

Warner Home Video announced two Blu-Ray editions of The Dark Knight to street Dec. 9. The limited edition will come in a Bat-Pod display case and, if the art is correct, looks to include a small replica of the motorcycle.

Amazon has a sign-up page for the Blu-Ray release, and it will likely flip into a pre-order page shortly when the SKUs come through.

I wonder if there will be an in-video option to toggle to pillar boxing just for the IMAX sequences. On a TV it actually will reduce the viewing real estate, but you'll see the full frame of the IMAX print.

Taco truck, where art thou? Also, some Hulu updates

We launched a bunch of new features to Hulu at around midnight, debugged for a while, and then just before 3am the late night crew here hopped into cars and rushed over to hit our late night go-to spot, the taco truck near Vons in West Los Angeles. Taco trucks do a poor job of branding. They have no names, only locations, and they are all referred to just by the generic name of their classification: taco truck.

That truck typically operates from 10pm to 3am, but on this night, it was not there. You know the economy is bad when even the taco trucks are impacted.

So we went to Izzy's Deli in Santa Monica and celebrated our labors until 4 in the morning.

Some of the new things you'll find on Hulu:

• Discussion boards
• Channels, including new ones like anime (Naruto or Mushi-Shi, anyone? Death Note?) and Food and Leisure (Giada!)
• Improved queue management, including the option to separate out subscription alerts from expiration alerts
• Show recommendations - at the bottom of each show page, we recommend other shows you might like based on what people are viewing.
• New TV and Movies homepage layouts

There are other subtle changes, some of which you may notice as you browse around the site.

Two other cool Hulu news bits: the latest issue of Wired magazine has an article on us, and Tina Fey mentioned Hulu when accepting the Emmy for 30 Rock as best comedy series on Sunday night. It's probably the closest I'll ever come to having Tina Fey say my name. Good enough.

Okay, I will go collapse now.

Fears of the Dark

Trailer for an animated horror film.

The Stranger

We were able to get one of Orson Welles lesser known movies for Hulu. But it's still Welles. I'm looking forward to checking it out.

Most anticipated fall/winter movie

The movie I'm most looking forward to seeing the rest of this year? The new James Bond film. It introduces Mathieu Amalric, he of the fascinating French face, as the villain.

The latest trailer is out, and it's hot. Is it any coincidence that the return of Bond to a heavy-hitting movie icon coincided with his return to the Aston Martin as his car of choice? It heralded the return of a more severe Bond, of extreme and discerning taste, and it served as a bridge to the Bond of old, breaking ties with the intermediate BMW Bond years (let's just sweep those under the rug).

The theme song, "Another Way to Die," will be a duet between Jack White and Alicia Keys.

Title sequence of Thank You For Smoking

From Art of the Title, a Quicktime movie of the gorgeous typography of the title sequence of Thank You For Smoking.

W, the movie...er, film

I made the mistake of visiting the site for WTheMovie.com, which is a surreal satire on the presidency of George W. Bush, instead of WTheFilm.com, official site of the upcoming Oliver Stone satire about the presidency of George W. Bush.

You may mistake the movies for each other via the URL's, but once you've watched the trailers you're not likely to confuse the two.

More Pixar philosophy

The two most interesting points from the Harvard Business Review blog post "Pixar's Collective Genius" about keys to the successful leadership of Pixar cofounder Ed Catmull:

Redefining the vision. For decades, Ed's driving ambition was to help create the first full-length computer-animated feature film. After realizing that dream with Toy Story, he set himself a new goal: to build an organization that could continually produce magic long after he and Pixar's other cofounders were gone.

This is the challenge for all entrepreneurs: to make the transition from doing something themselves to creating organizations that can carry on without them. Walt Disney, genius that he was, failed this test.

Delegating power. Ed and his fellow executives give directors tremendous authority. At other studios, corporate executives micromanage by keeping tight control over production budgets and inserting themselves into creative decisions. Not at Pixar. Senior management sets budgetary and timeline boundaries for a production and then leave the director and his team alone.

Executives resist exercising creative authority even when it's thrust upon them. Take reviews of works in progress by "brain trusts" of directors at Pixar and Disney Animation. The rule is that all opinions are only advice that the director of the movie in question can use as he or she sees fit. Catmull, chief creative officer John Lasseter, and executive vice president of production Jim Morris often attend these sessions but insist that their views be treated the same way and refuse to let directors turn them into decision-makers.

Even when a director runs into deep trouble, Ed and the other executives refrain from personally taking control of the creative process. Instead, they might add someone to the team whom they think might help the director out of his bind. If nothing works, they'll change directors rather than fashion solutions themselves.

It's fascinating that Pixar is often spoken of as having such an empowering, delegation-based style while being fused at the hip with Apple, where you-know-who is famed for being a micro-managing tyrant (but one we love since we don't work for him).

Also, HBR hosts a longer interview with Ed Catmull, Pixar cofounder and president of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios titled How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity.

I recently finished The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company and am halfway through To Infinity and Beyond!: The Story of Pixar Animation Studios, both of which tell the history of Pixar. It's more of an improbable story than I'd realized. For many years before it became the success story we know today, Pixar struggled to stay in existence with meager to no revenues. The former book is recommended if you just want an inexpensive textual history of the company, while the latter is more expensive but larger, like a coffee table book, with color photos printed on high quality paper.

Digital cameras of note

Trailer for Knowing starring Nicolas Cage. Notable as this movie was shot on the Red One, recently profiled in Wired magazine.

I had a chance to visit Red headquarters last week and play with a couple of Red Ones they had set up with different lenses and configurations. What's amazing about the Red One is that what it allows a filmmaker to do is potentially shoot, edit, and output a 2K resolution movie (the Red One shoots 4K but 2K is close to the resolution of what you see in most movie theaters) all using equipment you can afford and put in your own house. On the price-performance curve, if you plot every camera from your average camcorder you can buy at Best Buy to something like a Panavision 35mm camera or even an IMAX camera, the Red One is an outlier.

The sensor in the Red One can be thought of as similar to the 12 megapixel sensor in your digital SLR, except the Red One can shoot 24 fps (or higher, if you want to overcrank), whereas your SLR shoots maybe 11fps in burst mode and eventually has to stop to clear its buffer.

If you can't afford a Red One, which while cheap is still a $17,500 body, todays specs for the new Nikon D90 should be really intriguing. The D90 follows in the footsteps of other Nikon Digital SLRs, but there's a twist. This 12.3 megapixel SLR can also shoot HD, 720p, 24fps video.

As David Pogue points out, there are some limitations:

• Shooting HD, the max shot length is 5 minutes.
• The audio is mono.
• The camera shoots in .avi file formats that eat up a ton of memory card space.
• Once you start recording video, autofocus no longer works.

The last one was the biggest disappointment to me as it would have been amazing to shoot a fast-moving subject in high dev without having to have an AC (assistant cameraperson). On a professional film shoot, when making a movie, the 1st AC is responsible for pulling focus, or adjusting the focus on the lens during a shot. So there is no autofocus on a professional film shoot, like you have on a prosumer camcorder. But that's by design. Anyone who's watched a consumer home video and watched the focus drift in and out as the camera's autofocus struggles to figure out where you want focus to lie knows that manually controlling focus is one of the professional cinematographer's tools, not a hindrance.

But for the average consumer, shooting their child at a soccer game with their D90, having the full capabilities of the Nikon's autofocus systems to track their child as they spring towards the camera would be amazing.

Still, all that being said, adding HD video capabilities to an SLR is a nifty trick. I don't need a D90, but I'd sure love one. It won't be too long after these are released until we see the first short film shot entirely on the D90.

By the way, you can buy a Nikon mount for the Red One so that it accepts Nikon lenses to shoot with also. Every day, digital SLRs and digital camcorders converge.

Two from Melville

Two more DVD's of movies from one of my favorite directors, Jean-Pierre Melville, drop October 7, from Criterion: Le Doulos and Le Deuxieme Souffle.

Man on Wire

Last weekend, I caught Man on Wire, a documentary about wire walker Philippe Petit and his attempt to walk between the two World Trade Center towers in 1974. After watching it, I wondered how it was that such an obsessive personality could have escaped Werner Herzog's eye. Those are his specialty.

It turns out Petit and Herzog are longtime friends, and Esquire has a transcript of a conversation between the two.

WH: What I do is for spectators. Whether Philippe's walk between the Twin Towers was witnessed by anyone down in the street really didn't matter. Philippe once secretly put a cable across a 2,400-foot ravine and walked across it and danced on the rope. Only a farmer who was driving his cattle at sunrise realized that someone was there. He rushed into the village to wake a policeman. And when they came back on a motorcycle, there was no Philippe, there was no wire left.

PP: But the cows remember.

8 short notes on the day of Phelps' 8th gold medal

You wouldn't think a man would have much leisure time in a race in which he sets a new world record of 9.69 seconds, but Usain Bolt had enough of a lead at the end of the men's 100-meter dash to blow out finger pistols, flash Jay-Z's Roc-A-Fella triangle hand sign, and check his watch.

If I were racing against him, I'd be intimidated just seeing "Bolt" on the back of his jersey.

***

I thought I saw Michael Phelps ride across the pool to his last medal ceremony standing on the backs of two dolphins, holding a trident.

***

I was wondering about something at dinner yesterday and saw that someone else had asked Marginal Revolution the same thing: for such a populous country, why has India won so few Olympic medals?

***

Visual evidence that Nikon has made a huge comeback against Canon in the professional sports photography market. Look at the lenses in this shot of the press photography area at the Olympics.

Black lenses are likely Nikon's mounted on D3's, while the light gray lenses are the Canons that used to dominate.

***

Is it worth carrying an airline-mile credit card? Probably not unless you are a big-spending, high-flying, elite status traveler. I ditched mine several years ago in favor of various cashback cards.

***

Is it really possible Anthony Lane didn't know right away which actor was playing Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder? From his review:

He is a doughy, balding monster with big spectacles and even wider hand gestures, all his power distilled into profanity: a grotesque update, if you will, on the movie executive with the shock of white-hot hair, brought to life by Rod Steiger, in “The Big Knife,” more than fifty years ago. It took me half the running time to realize who was playing this new beast, and it was only his voice that triggered the recognition; I suspect that there will be gasps during the end credits, as people see his name and find themselves rethinking the whole movie, marvelling at what could have inspired so stiff an actor to unfurl and bounce around.

Roger Ebert also thinks some people will not recognize the actor behind this cameo:

The movie is a send-up of Hollywood, actors, acting, agents, directors, writers, rappers, trailers and egos, much enhanced by several cameo roles, the best of which I will not even mention. You’ll know the one, although you may have to wait for the credits to figure it out.

Really? I think most every person in the theater will know who it is right away.

***

As if it wasn't already hard enough to tell what people really look like from their carefully chosen and touched-up Facebook profile photos, soon we may all have access to software that can automatically enhance facial attractiveness. This SIGGRAPH paper discusses the technique and shows some results which were validated by independent ratings.

***

Ah, only in Texas.

Hulu love from sites I frequent

Some sites I frequent have posted some Hulu links. I'd like to think it's love, but in web currency, links are like slaps on the butt in sports.

Filmoculous: "Some movies I didn't realize you could watch in their entirety on Hulu: Metropolitan, The Fifth Element, 28 Days Later, Requiem for a Dream, Lost in Translation, Koyaanisqatsi, and Eternal Sunshine."

Kottke, continuing the Filmoculous thread: "Me either! Also available are Raising Arizona, Lost Highway, Hoop Dreams, Sideways, Master and Commander, Ghostbusters, The Karate Kid, and Groundhog Day."

Will Carroll, in Baseball Prospectus: "I can't watch the Olympics without thinking of this video."

How artists work

A long set of links to articles or interviews in which various artists describe how they work.

Unnecessary Knowledge

Toplist of Unnecessary Knowledge factoids. I like this one:

In “Silence of the Lambs”, Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) never blinks.

Hoop Dreams

Today's entry in Hulu's Days of Summer is Hoop Dreams. Before there was the panoramic American epic The Wire, there was Steve James documentary about Chicago inner city high school basketball players Arthur Agee and William Gates. It is one of my five favorite documentaries of all time, and the first one that enlarged my view of what a documentary could be. Watching it will make you guilty for what earns the title "reality TV" today.

The scene from He Got Game where Denzel and Ray Allen face off? It's got nothing on the scene in Hoop Dreams when Arthur plays his father Bo one-on-one.

Today, Arthur Agee has a foundation, while William Gates is a pastor in the Cabrini-Green neighborhood of Chicago. Both have experienced tragedy. Arthur's father Bo was killed in 2004 after having seemingly turned his life around. William's brother Curtis was murdered in 2001.

I remember them as I saw them in Hoop Dreams, and I find it hard to imagine how, given the circumstances, any of us could have turned out any better.

Objectified

The next documentary from the Gary Hustwit, the man behind Helvetica, is Objectified, about industrial design. Scheduled to come out in 2009, the doc features an impressive cast of designers and design experts:

Paola Antonelli (Museum of Modern Art, New York)
Chris Bangle (BMW Group, Munich)
Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec (Paris)
Andrew Blauvelt (Walker Art Center, Minneapolis)
Anthony Dunne (London)
Naoto Fukasawa (Tokyo)
IDEO (Palo Alto)
Jonathan Ive (Apple, California)
Hella Jongerius (Rotterdam)
Marc Newson (London/Paris)
Fiona Raby (London)
Dieter Rams (Kronberg, Germany)
Karim Rashid (New York)
Alice Rawsthorn (International Herald Tribune)
Rob Walker (New York Times Magazine)

Nibblets

Facebook's profile updates are rendered in an odd tense, in a very Facebook-centric view of the world. You change your profile to married, and instead of writing, "Scott changed his relationship status to married" it reads "Scott is now married." Never mind that he may have been married for years; in the Facebook world, nothing is so until you declare it so in your profile.

What happens if you change your sex? "Fred is no longer male"? Your birthday? "Susan is no longer born July 7, 1978"?

I am going to change my relationship status to king so it reads "Eugene is now king."

***

As of Friday morning rehab, I am sans crutches. This is a big moment for me, and an even bigger moment for my armpits.

***

To the person who came to my website via the Google search "eugene wei the dark knight" yesterday: yes, I am Batman.

***

Speaking of Batman and my crutches, I didn't buy Harvey Dent's conversion in The Dark Knight. But I can empathize with the personality-transforming power of physical injuries or deformities. Having one bad leg, not being able to exercise, has definitely made me grumpier these past two or three months.

I walk by a homeless guy, and I flip a coin. Heads, I give the guy the coin. Tails, I kick him with my walking boot.

No, not really. But not being able to run or work off occasional frustration has left me snippier. I'm like Harvey Two-Leg.

***

Lebron vs. Yao Ming in the Coke ad "Unity" from Smith&Foulkes for W+K Portland.

***

One of the restaurants I wish I ate at before moving from NYC is Blue Hill at Stone Barns. This glowing review with its gorgeous photos is like a megaphone for that regret.

***

Cleverly written commercials for dandruff shampoo that could be done by any one who knows After Effects.

***

Why read The Watchmen, which has spiked in popularity now that the non-geek masses have seen The Watchmen trailer playing before The Dark Knight? Bryan Caplan says: "The Watchmen is the Best... Utilitarian Parable... Ever."

I've never thought of it that way, but having read that graphic novel probably five times in my life, I'd have to say it makes sense.

***

"Tarantino's Mind" (short film)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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..

Important science

Scientific American interviews an expert in kinesiology and neuroscience to ask if someone could really be Batman. The conclusion was that it might be possible, but only for a short while before your body broke down.

Was this really a deep question people needed scientific verification for?

Quantum of Solace

The trailer for the new James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace (sounds like a spa treatment), is up at 007.com.

Casino Royale, like Batman Begins, deals with that common sequel malady, protagonists who have become locked in character stasis, by discarding previous installments and starting at the beginning (the former was more successful than the latter, IMO). What story throws a longer character arc than the origin story? Now both franchises are moving onto the second installment since the relaunch, and so the odds are against them achieving as interesting a story, but nonetheless, I predict I will be planted in a theater on opening day of both.

UPDATE: You can watch the trailer in HD at Moviefone. It's very confusing, finding out which sites have which trailers for which movies in HD.

When animals attack

I haven't seen the movie, but Is this the plot of The Happening?

Nevertheless, local and federal officials have advised citizens confronted head-on by a red wing to simply stare back into its eyes.

Which sounds like advice out of a Holiday Inn commercial.

Interview with Guillermo del Toro

[via thesetoday from many days ago] Interview with Guillermo del Toro as Hellboy II is just around the corner.

And he has retained a highly contagious passion for every aspect of filmmaking. He refuses to start using a 2nd unit camera team, preferring to oversee every shot with trusty cinematographer Guillermo Navarro, who has shot all of his movies.

On projects he hopes to shoot in the future:

And if you’re very lucky he’ll show you his constant companion, a dog-eared notebook stuffed with intricate sketches of past, present and future films. Highlights include demon drawings from Mephisto’s Bridge (a 15-year-old del Toro script about a Faustian doppleganger) recycled into Hellboy II; and concept art for dream projects like satanic Sherlock Holmes mystery The List of 7 and H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains Of Madness, about the discovery of a lost civilisation in Antarctica.

Pages from his scrapbook related to Hellboy II are online.

On the connection between his childhood and his choice of material:

I saw my first corpse at four, I worked next door to a morgue as a teenager, I’ve had guns put to my head and seen people killed in front of me. That’s why I turned down directing Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban and The Chronicles Of Narnia – I don’t understand youth because I’ve never had one.

Hellboy II closes the LA Film Festival tomorrow night. I'm looking forward to it as he's a consummate visual stylist.

Wanted, in the rear view mirror

It's taken me many days after seeing Wanted at last week's opening night gala at the LA Film Festival to jot down my thoughts here, and that probably says enough. It wasn't fun enough to spur me to rave about it immediately, but to pick on Timur Bekmambetov's latest movie for thin to little character development or logic seems as insightful as grousing over the poor gas mileage in a Hummer. But still...

I saw Night Watch at the Tribeca Film Festival a couple years back, and I entered that movie and left that movie feeling the same things I felt going into and coming out of Wanted:

Going in: "Ooh, that looks like fun!"

Coming out: "Ehh."

Bekmambetov's specialty might be termed visual rococo. What might be simple and direct becomes, in Bekmambetov's hands, overelaborate and extravagant. There's a place for a director like that in this ever-escalating war for the summer blockbuster to end all summer blockbusters. In a movie about assassins, for example, it's not enough to have men in trenchcoats flying in slow motion across the screen, a handgun blazing in each hand, doves soaring out towards the sky like refugees from a magician's dressing room. John Woo has covered that ground, and then some.

Fanboys are always looking for new visual excess in their summer fare, and Bekmambetov and the screenwriters pull out a few new tricks. Bullets curve as shooters whip their guns with a lateral motion, almost like tennis rackets or frisbees, as they fire. Not one kill occurs in real time. The frame rate ramps from molasses-like slow motion to hyper speed, and back again, all the better to showcase bullets tearing through flesh and exploding fireworks of blood.

There's no doubting his visual ambition, but if only someone could bridle it towards the service of directed storytelling. I'd like to spoil the story for you, but that would imply that one existed. If the premise is tough to swallow even when explained in the arresting baritone of Morgan Freeman, that's a sign not to try. I'll only note that it involves binary code and weaving and an ancient league of assassins called The Fraternity and...oh, forget it. Did you know Angelina Jolie rises out of a hot tub in the nude? Not animated Angelina Jolie, either, like in Beowulf.

Jolie playing a foxy assassin named, well, Fox. Fortunately. She has few lines but spends much of the movie with the hint of what on most mortals would be called a smirk playing at the edge of her world class lips, but in her case it's either a hint of bemused delight at the wilting power of her sexuality on the men around her or some variation of the smile on the Mona Lisa. Watching her stride across the screen is like watching a tiger pacing or listening to the low growl of Italian sports car engine purring in first gear.

Perhaps it's fruitless to think a summer action movie can excel at engaging both the teenage groin and the adult brain, but then again, Angelina Jolie can go from sex symbol to human rights ambassador with one flight in her private jet. As Brad Pitt can attest, sometimes you can have it all.

Encounters at the End of the World

On Saturday night, I saw Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World at the LA Film Festival (the end credits dedicate the movie to Roger Ebert). Whether you enjoy Herzog's movies, especially his documentaries, depends quite a bit on whether you appreciate his world view. To steal some words from Bogdanovich, you see a Herzog movie, you know "who the devil made it."

This, his latest documentary, is a meandering account of Herzog's journey to Antarctica to understand what type of person goes down to the end of the world. Given a grant by the National Science Foundation, Herzog warned that he would not be going down to shoot another movie about "cute, furry penguins" but instead was curious about, among other issues, why men domesticated horses while he had yet to see a chimp or monkey riding a goat. Or something like that. It's not surprising, Herzog's attraction to people who'd choose to live and work in the extreme conditions of Antarctica. Give me your bold, your insane, your ambitious, and your bizarre, those living on the edge: that has always been Herzog's fascination.

If there were the equivalent of typefaces for voices, I'd pay an unbelievably high number for that of Herzog. Of course, it's not just his thick German accent but also his severe and often dour outlook on the world that combine to form one of the more distinctive voices in film. In one scene, as a linguistics expert speaks on screen, the audio fades out and Herzog's voiceover comes in over the image of that man speaking. Herzog muses that during the time that he listened to the man speaking, some three languages likely died out in the world. Another time, as a woman speaks on screen, the audio fades out, and Herzog chimes on: "Her story went on forever."

Much of the humor of the movie is in such directorial asides. On landing at Antarctica, his first stop is Camp McMurdo, of which he notes "contained abominations such as an aerobics classes and yoga studio."

When he does visit a small colony of penguins, his attention is drawn, naturally, towards the same odd behavior he seeks out in men. He asks the local naturalist who has been studying the penguins if he has noticed any signs of derangement in the penguins. Confused, the naturalist notes that he hasn't seen any penguins bashing their heads against the rocks. But Herzog has the last laugh as he spots one penguin heading off in the wrong direction, towards the mountains, and towards certain gloom, a point Herzog makes with a tone of utter satisfaction.

At movie's end, when Herzog seizes on a message of impending environmental doom and the extinction of humanity, it's almost so conventional as to be surprising. But the real unifying theme is a common quality in all the people he encounters there. They are all dreamers, but the type who've gone as far away from the rest of civilization as they can, and when they can go no further, they find themselves together, at the South Pole.

Wanted

If you're wondering what kind of movie Wanted will be, these few excerpts will make it clear:

I'm seeing it tomorrow night as it opens the L.A. Film Festival. If nothing else, it looks to feature Angelina Jolie as a taciturn, moody, sexy assassin, which, all things being equal, tends to be how I prefer them.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Day 3 of Hulu Days of Summer brings one of my favorite movies ever.

Lost in Translation

We're launching a summer event at Hulu. Every weekday through mid-August, we're going to add something great to the site. We add videos everyday, but for this event we've gone out and pushed for some extra special content. We have an RSS feed for this event for you RSSegetarians.

First up? Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation. Enjoy!

By the way, isn't it only a matter of time before some scenes of Scarlett Johansson in this movie are mashed-up with footage of Barack Obama? Seems like Obama Girl's got some competition.

The Recruiter

One of the projects I worked on when at The Edit Center in NYC is making it on air this summer as part of HBO's Documentary Films Series. Directed by MacArthur Fellowship winner Edet Belzberg, The Recruiter introduces us to Sergeant First Class Clay Usie, one of the most effective Army recruiters working in America, and four of the teenagers he recruits into the U.S. Army.

My classmates and I edited some of the early footage into scenes which our instructors assembled into a rough cut. One of our instructors, Adam Bolt, went on to be one of the two editors on the documentary.

I first saw the final cut of the documentary at Sundance in January. Having worked on the project, I'm biased, of course, but I really feel like it is that rare documentary that, in this day and age, presents a very balanced view of a topic that could easily devolve into either a liberal or conservative sermon.

It's also the first movie project I've worked on in which I have an official credit, as an additional editor, so it holds a special place in my heart.

Study confirms what most Netflix renters already know

This Harvard Business School paper confirms a phenomenon most Netflix renters are familiar with. People feel like they should rent Citizen Kane or Born Into Brothels, but those DVDs sit on the TV collecting dust while rentals like Must Love Dogs or Mr. and Mrs. Smith get watched and returned lickety-split.

The study notes, however, that this disparity lessens over time as people finally realize that what they want is not to have to think.

We predict and find that people are more likely to rent DVDs in one order and return them in the reverse order when should DVDs (e.g., documentaries) are rented before want DVDs (e.g., action films). This effect is sizeable in magnitude, with a 2% increase in the probability of a reversal in preferences (from a baseline rate of 12%) ensuing if the first of two sequentially rented movies has more should and fewer want characteristics than the second film. Similarly, we also predict and find that should DVDs are held significantly longer than want DVDs within-customer. Finally, we find that as the same customers gain more experience with online DVD rentals, their “dynamic inconsistency” is attenuated. We interpret our results as evidence that myopia has a meaningful impact on decisions in the field and that people learn about their myopia with experience, allowing them to curb its influence.

Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation

With the fourth Indiana Jones movie just around the corner, this seems timely. A legendary amateur filmmaker shot-for-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark has been been floating out there for many years now, with occasional film festival play and a decent amount of press coverage.

The first 10 minutes are available at YouTube now.

A writing professor once told me that if I typed out the entire text of James Joyce's "The Dead" that his soul would inhabit mine. Perhaps this is the filmmaking equivalent?

The Fall

Trailer for The Fall by Tarsem. Showed its head at the Toronto Film Festival back in 2006 but didn't get picked up by distributors, but now, with David Fincher and Spike Jonze throwing their names behind it, a theatrical release looms.

I wonder who chose to go with just plain "Tarsem" instead of "Tarsem Singh." Was it Tarsem himself, or a third party? If one of my movies makes it to theaters one day, can I just have "Directed by Eugene" flash on screen at the start?

Innovators and innovation

Lots about innovation this past week. The May 12 edition of The New Yorker was the Innovators Issue, and one of the better ones in recent memory.

It features an article by Malcolm Gladwell, ostensibly about Nathan Myhrvold and his company Intellectual Ventures, a sort of idea-generating patent-filing machine, but really about the radical idea that innovation or innovative ideas may not be as rare as we think, may not be the result of genius and eureka moments. Can you capture innovation or ideas merely by dedicating time and resources to searching for them?

The issue also features a profile of someone who I've never heard of but whose work I've undoubtedly seen dozens if not hundreds of times: Pascal Dangin, the world's foremost digital retoucher of fashion photographs.

Vanity Fair, W, Harper’s Bazaar, Allure, French Vogue, Italian Vogue, V, and the Times Magazine, among others, also use Dangin. Many photographers, including Annie Leibovitz, Steven Meisel, Craig McDean, Mario Sorrenti, Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, and Philip-Lorca diCorcia, rarely work with anyone else. Around thirty celebrities keep him on retainer, in order to insure that any portrait of them that appears in any outlet passes through his shop, to be scrubbed of crow’s-feet and stray hairs.

I'm aware that most fashion photographs are worked over in post-production, but seeing an example of Dangin's work in the actual print copy of the issue surprised me with how much he actually alters body parts and features. Manipulating the truth, or giving the public what it wants?

But playing with the representational possibilities of photographs, and the bodies contained therein, has always aroused the suspicion of viewers with a perpetual, if naïve, desire for objective renderings of the world around them. As much as it is a truism that photography is subjective, it is also a truism that many of its beholders—even those who happily eliminate red-eye from their wedding albums—will take umbrage when confronted with evidence of its subjectivity. Eastlake was responding to the distress of certain members of the London Photographic Society over a series of photographs taken deliberately out of focus. More recently, Kate Winslet protested that the digital slimming of her figure on the cover of British GQ was “excessive,” while Andy Roddick griped that Men’s Fitness exaggerated his biceps, saying, “Little did I know I have twenty-two-inch guns and a disappearing birthmark on my right arm.”

To avoid such complaints, retouchers tend to practice semi-clandestinely. “It is known that everybody does it, but they protest,” Dangin said recently. “The people who complain about retouching are the first to say, ‘Get this thing off my arm.’ ” I mentioned the Dove ad campaign that proudly featured lumpier-than-usual “real women” in their undergarments. It turned out that it was a Dangin job. “Do you know how much retouching was on that?” he asked. “But it was great to do, a challenge, to keep everyone’s skin and faces showing the mileage but not looking unattractive.”

Also profiled: Grant Achatz, head chef at Alinea, one of the more famous restaurants in America, and perhaps the most famous outpost of the molecular gastronomy movement in the U.S. I ate at Moto many years ago, just before Alinea was set to open, and already there was a several month waiting list for Grant Achatz's first restaurant of his own.

Achatz is trying to fight his way back from tongue cancer, a particularly devastating illness for someone who depends so heavily on his sense of taste. I'd still love to eat at Alinea which, along with French Laundry and El Bulli, are the three restaurants that top my dining hitlist.

Achatz is putting out the Alinea Book, a cookbook, this fall.

Lastly, and not from The New Yorker, was this popular article (free registration required to read it) from McKinsey Quarterly, an interview with Pixar's Brad Bird about how he and Pixar foster innovation.

A great interview, from which a few points stood out to me.

Brad Bird: In my experience, the thing that has the most significant impact on a movie’s budget—but never shows up in a budget—is morale. If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value. Companies should pay much more attention to morale.

This is true in so many walks of life, from the office to the film set to the locker room. What's difficult about achieving this, though, is that it's so easy for senior management/directors/coaches to be oblivious to the morale of their companies/cast and crew/teams. This is perhaps most true for the business leader.

The very nature of being senior management insulates one from the troops. The most common shape of a modern business org. structure is a pyramid, which is designed for efficiency of downward communication, but not for the reverse. CEO's sit in gilded offices on the top floor of ivory towers, and access to them is restricted by intimidating assistants. The power structure in companies means that even if morale is down, no one lower down on the org. structure is likely to be honest in front of the CEO or the head of their division for fear of being seen as a malcontent.

It's a real challenge. It's not easy for the top dog to be just "one of the guys" to use an old and somewhat sexually dated saying. I'm reminded of Henry V in Shakespeare's play, on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt, disguising himself as a commoner and walking around his camp to both gauge and raise the morale of his men. He does so with the recognition that it's the only way his men will speak honestly with him. In fact, the first question posed to Henry V as he wanders in disguise is from a sentinel, Pistol:

Discuss unto me; art thou officer?
Or art thou base, common and popular?

It's an interesting choice of words, "common and popular," and it speaks to the difficulty of being both powerful and popular, derived from the Latin populus for "the people."

Then there’s our building. Steve Jobs basically designed this building. In the center, he created this big atrium area, which seems initially like a waste of space. The reason he did it was that everybody goes off and works in their individual areas. People who work on software code are here, people who animate are there, and people who do designs are over there. Steve put the mailboxes, the meetings rooms, the cafeteria, and, most insidiously and brilliantly, the bathrooms in the center—which initially drove us crazy—so that you run into everybody during the course of a day. He realized that when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen. So he made it impossible for you not to run into the rest of the company.

On the Hulu development team, we've tried to counteract both the insulation and communication issue by all sitting in one communal cube farm. Everyone, regardless of title, has the same setup. So far it's worked out great.

First of all, there's a collegial feeling fostered by all sitting together. Communication is sped up; rather than fire off e-mails, many exchanges can be handled by simply strolling a few feet to a colleague's cube, or just by swiveling a chair. News travels really really fast in dev heaven, the nickname of our little office neighborhood. Many times, one of us overhears a conversation between some colleagues and can jump in with a suggestion or solution.

If our setup weren't enough to encourage interaction among the team, we also set up central snack or food areas in the center of dev heaven to encourage more foot traffic and casual encounters. We keep several rolling whiteboards in the area to allow for quick, mobile meetings or brainstorms.

We keep one or two communal offices nearby for those times when people need to do jump on conference calls or make personal calls. It's not the conventional setup for development teams, what with Peopleware extolling the virtue of private offices for every developer, or even for normal companies, but in a startup that needs to stay nimble and move quickly, it's been a plus for us.

One last point from the Brad Bird interview:

Brad Bird: Walt Disney’s mantra was, “I don’t make movies to make money—I make money to make movies.” That’s a good way to sum up the difference between Disney at its height and Disney when it was lost. It’s also true of Pixar and a lot of other companies. It seems counterintuitive, but for imagination-based companies to succeed in the long run, making money can’t be the focus.

Amen.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars trailer

Not the most expressive of animated faces, but then again, there weren't many of those in the last three Star Wars movies either.

Criterion Blu-ray DVDs coming

From the Criterion newsletter:

Our first Blu-ray discs are coming! We’ve picked a little over a dozen titles from the collection for Blu-ray treatment, and we’ll begin rolling them out in October. These new editions will feature glorious high-definition picture and sound, all the supplemental content of the DVD releases, and they will be priced to match our standard-def editions.

Here’s what’s in the pipeline:

The Third Man
Bottle Rocket
Chungking Express
The Man Who Fell to Earth
The Last Emperor
El Norte
The 400 Blows
Gimme Shelter
The Complete Monterey Pop
Contempt
Walkabout
For All Mankind
The Wages of Fear

Speed Racer

My roommate took me to a BAFTA screening of Speed Racer last Saturday. I didn't know what to expect, having only seen that trippy trailer once, but walking into the cacaphony of a Saturday afternoon screening packed with really young kids should've clued me in to the target audience, of which yours truly was definitely not a member.

This is a kids movie. A kids movie. Not like a Pixar movie, which people of all ages enjoy, but a kids movie, one that left me feeling nothing. Watching the CGI-heavy auto races reminded me of watching me of watching that canyon race in The Phantom Menace. In both cases, I didn't feel anything, not a sense of speed, or danger, or excitement. Maybe it's the immateriality of digitally drawn surfaces, or the highly-attuned ability of people to sense when the physics of collisions and motion of digital vehicles are just not quite true to life.

There are some interesting visual touches that caught my eye. Some shots with a close-up of a face in the foreground and figures in the other half of the frame in the background seem as if they were shot with a split diopter, both sets of people being in such sharp focus. It's as if the DP was trying to imitate the flat, deep focus look of animation like that in the original TV cartoon series.

But for the most part, I felt uninvolved, even bored. There are times when I find I can't enjoy something targeted towards a younger audience and feel, well, old. But in this case, it's not me, it's you. Or them. Or it.

Extra extra

Interesting rumor: 24.4MP Nikon D3 replacement on the way? Or are some D3s 24.4MP cameras in waiting?

Unused script by Michael Chabon for Spiderman 2. (UPDATE: link to the full script PDF was removed, sadly)

New York state passes bill forcing Amazon.com to start charging New Yorkers sales tax. Ouch.

Steven Spielberg acquires the rights to make a 3-D live action version of Ghost in the Shell.

Odds and Ends

Oh, I'll just set aside my $80 for this now.

Kevin Love, making like Lebron James in that Powerade commercial.

Friday Night Lights greenlit for Season 3, but only in a unique deal in which it airs on DirecTV first, starting in October, then moves over to NBC in 2009?

Howard Shore scoring, Guillermo del Toro directing...The Hobbit sounds promising.

The sometimes bizarre effects of scarcity: a used copy of the CD of the score to The Transformers is running, at a minimum, $89.99 on Amazon.com.

The bizarre

Floyd Mayweather knocks out The Big Show, but not before playing up the drama for the crowd.

Years later, the theatrics of wrestling and the popularity of said performances don't seem to have changed much.

***

The cast of the upcoming G.I. Joe movie includes:

Channing Tatum as Duke

Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Cobra Commander

Sienna Miller as The Baroness

Ray Park as Snake Eyes

Dennis Quaid as General Hawk

Arnold Vosloo as Zartan

Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje as Heavy Duty

Jonathan Pryce as the U.S. President

Marlon Wayans as Ripcord

Shout out from Gruber

Hulu got a nice little review from John Gruber at Daring Fireball today. It's always a bit more exciting to read about your work at a site you frequent in your own day-to-day life, and Daring Fireball is a daily read for me.

Hulu, the NBC-and-Fox-spearheaded free online video service, is out of beta, and it’s pretty sweet. The video quality is good, the selection is good, and the advertising is remarkably minimal — two mid-show ads of 15 or 30 seconds for a 22-minute show, for example. Individual skits from Saturday Night Live, like this one from Saturday’s show, are commercial-free. Real movies, like The Big Lebowski and The Usual Suspects have just two or three minutes of commercials — and are uncensored. They even have good URLs.

No download option, alas, so there’s no supported way to watch these things on your TV, but it’s pretty damn cool overall.

Some Like It Hot

Probably the movie I'm most excited about having at Hulu is Some Like It Hot, the Billy Wilder comedy starring Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, and Marilyn Monroe. AFI rated it the number 1 comedy in movie history.

That Billy Wilder, he was a genius.

Wall*E, trailer 3

New trailer for Pixar's Wall·E.

Much revealed. I had no idea this is what the movie would be about. Can't wait!

Hulu launches

Around 1:45AM this morning, Hulu shed the covers of private beta and opened to the public. Anyone in the U.S. can now come to our site and watch any of our videos for free. No special software needed other than a web browser, Flash player, and an internet connection. PC, Mac, Linux users, we support all of you.

We've all substituted caffeinated beverages for sleep for days now, and this morning I came into work with my t-shirt on backwards. Coherence is going to be a bit of a reach.

We have increased our content lineup significantly. Among my favorites:

• Every episode ever of Arrested Development, all 52 of them.
• The Big Lebowski. Dude.
• The Lonely Goatherd from The Sound of Music, and the other musical numbers you'd expect from there: Sixteen Going on Seventeen, Maria, Do Re Mi, Edelweiss, My Favorite Things, So Long, Farewell, and The Hills Are Alive. Pauline Kael may not be a fan, but it's the music of my childhood.
• Kagemusha . Yeah, the Akira Kurosawa classic!
• The top 10 moves of February from the NBA. Warning: more than a few ankles are broken in this one. And here's that crazy Chris Paul dribble move from the All-Star Game, in which he fakes a crossover and snaps the ball back to himself with backspin, goes by the defender, and dishes to the trailer for the dunk. Chris Paul is crazy good.
• "Down by the River" from SNL, featuring Chris Farley. I miss that guy, and I miss his show.
• "Ultimate Power in the Universe" from Family Guy: Blue Harvest. Watching for free is a great way to try out shows you've heard of but missed out on the first time around, and Family Guy has been that show for me, the one that Hulu got me hooked on.

People love to associate Hulu with big media because of some of our investors, but Hulu is a startup through and through (look at the team photo below, taken at around 1:50 this morning--I don't think we look big media, do you?). It's the smallest company I've ever worked at if you don't count the lemonade stand I ran one summer day when I was about 8. Smaller than Amazon.com was when I worked there. We have our initial investments from which to run our company, but we're not going to be spending it on big parties with models walking around holding trays of saffron baby lamb chops. No, our pre-launch evening meal for everyone pulling an all-nighter was some 100 tacos from a local taco truck here in Santa Monica, at the extravagant cost of $1.25 per taco. Our biggest spend that night, out of our own pockets, was to raise $160 among the team to dare one of our star programmers Andrew to drink two cups of salsa, one red hot, one green, in 30 seconds. Andrew woke this morning $160 richer, though I'd venture to guess he paid the price sometime during the day.

A small group of people, a little family, work night and day (sometimes more night than day) to put this site together from scratch. Some of the user e-mails I've read make the easy assumption that we're an ignorant, uncaring media behemoth, but we do care, perhaps too much for our own peace of mind. Between Eric, Betina, and myself, we've read well over 10,000 e-mails since we went into our private beta, and rather than go the form e-mail response route, we've tried to respond personally to every e-mail we can. We're gratified by the compliments, and we agonize over the angry e-mails, even the inaccurate and/or profane ones.

We do want to be able to distribute our content internationally. We do want to offer more episodes of every show on our site. We do want more varied ad creative so that we don't have to watch the same ad spots over and over. We do want closed-captioning on every video on our site. And we do want to do it legally, in a way that compensates the creative people all the way back at the start of the food chain. Not a day goes by that we don't wish we could just accelerate the future with a snap of our fingers and have everyone in the world streaming HD content to their plasma TV's.

It's easy to bash big media and claim to be forced to resort to piracy, and it is absolutely the right of users to write in with their honest feedback. It's the most useful kind. But it's far harder to try to fix the problems. It's easy to open up your blog editor and rip the movie you just saw. It's exponentially harder to go out and make a movie. It's easy to laugh at some startup you read about in the news because the business plan sounds terrible. It's much harder to start a company yourself.

We're working here to try to fix the industry from within. We want to be able to watch all our favorite videos however we want, just like you. We're building this service to be one we want to use. We're not anywhere near the finish line. It always feels like the to-do list outweighs the completed side of the ledger. But if it didn't, then it wouldn't be that interesting a challenge, and most of us probably wouldn't be here.

Check out our site, and if you don't mind, help spread the word. The more users we can rally to our cause, the quicker we can transform things for the better.

Cheers!

Coming to a movie theater someday

Based on the true story: "I fell in love with a female assassin." A common movie plot (True Lies, La Femme Nikita, e.g.) finds a riveting real-world proof.

If adapted into a big-budget Hollywood film, likely Angelina Jolie as Marylin and, hmm, Ewan McGregor or Ed Norton or James McAvoy as journalist Jason P Howe?

Alexandre Desplat

If pressed to name my favorite film score composer working today, my reflexive answer would be Alexandre Desplat. His latest for Lust, Caution lives up to his previous work. I was more taken with the score than the story adaptation, though it is the first movie I can recall that reveals hidden depths to shoe who are well-versed in the rules and strategy of Mah Joong. There are hidden clues in the moves and tiles in the game that only a fraction of viewers will understand.

Perhaps that subtlety is the movie's chief flaw, that it keeps too much under wraps for too long until the main actors, Tony Leung and Tang Wei, are literally unwrapped on screen in some athletic love scenes. It can't help but sound prurient, but the love scenes are the most emotionally complex in the movie.

Trailer for Star Wars: The Clone Wars

No embeddable link, so you'll have to go here to watch the trailer for this summer's animated movie filling in the gap between Episodes 2 and 3.

Trailer for Indiana Jones and the...uh, whatever it's called

Trailer for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Those first few notes from John Williams' Indy theme are like notes from my childhood, reaching out across the years to tickle me.

Technorati Tags: movies, trailer

Hilton Als on activist actors

In his post "On Heath Ledger" Hilton Als denounces the activist-actor:

When an actor’s charming, vulgar, and childish desire to be seen and felt by a large number of people becomes perverted by self-seriousness, the performer slips into insipidness, thus deadening the carnival spirit that should inform his theatricals.

And if an actor forsakes greasepaint and sparkles to make public pronouncements about the evils of the media, Hollywood, the red carpet, or certain Third World countries, pomposity is never far behind.

Simply put, the craft of acting can’t bear the weight of ideas. Nor can the actor. Acting is thought in action; the character is merely a figment of the script and the director’s imagination. We’re interested in an actor’s personality, not his Op-Ed-informed mind. And when a performer asks to be taken “seriously”—but if we love him, doesn’t that mean we take him seriously? Is love not serious?—he insists on being real in a way that we know he is not. Movie stars are not humane. In general, what has fascinated the public about stars—and always will—is their apparent lack of mundane “niceness.” (They don’t usually share what they have, except with other stars or a publicity-worthy cause.) For the most part, movie stars are self-interested, hence their proclivity for giving interviews: they field questions because they can’t wait for their own response.

He doesn't specifically indict Ledger, but the loss he feels is more specific than that I've read elsewhere. Als wonders how Ledger might have explored the rift between his private and public selves in future roles.

Technorati Tags: acting, newyorker, heathledger

A healthcare system I could get behind

I don't know much about the French healthcare system, but if it's anything like the one depicted in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly then I'm all for instituting something similar in the U.S. All of Jean-Dominique Bauby's nurses are gorgeous. His girlfriend, the mother of his children, even his literary assistant are all attractive. Having just awoken from a stroke to this assemblage of beauties, Bauby muses that he must be in heaven.

The truth is a great deal more tragic: Bauby has locked-in syndrome. A stroke has left his mind is alive but paralyzed nearly every muscle in his body. The one part of his body that still serves him is his left eye, and in time he learns to communicate using a system of blinking in response to a series of letters arranged in order of frequency of occurrence in the French language.

It's a subtle but smart choice to cast so many striking women. Bauby's recognition of their beauty reminds us of how alive he still is, despite his condition. The mind that survives need not be a sterile one, bereft of the pleasures of the opposite sex.

In addition to being a moving true story, the movie also serves as a fascinating intellectual examination of the value of communication in the human condition. A simple but brilliant movie.

Technorati Tags: film, healthcare, movies

State of the arts

Bryan Caplan on Tyler Cowen on the state of the arts:

From the standpoint of the consumer, the supply of great art has clearly never been better. And even from the standpoint of the producer, it is easy to argue that, overall, this is the best of times.

From Caplan's five points on why that is:

5. One of Tyler's best points: The past often looks better than the present if you compare the best to the best. There is no living composer as great as Bach. Nevertheless, the present looks much better than the past if you compare the fifth-best to the fifth-best. Who even wants to listen to the fifth-best Baroque composer? But the fifth-best punk rock band (say, the Dead Kennedys) is excellent.

That's almost certainly true for television. In music, thought CD sales are down, distribution via the Internet means I can more easily discover new music than in the days when radio was my primary means of exposure.

I'm less certain about the quality of movies overall, but there's no doubt that accessing classic movies via DVD and services like Netflix has broadened my viewing canvas in a huge way.

Musical notes

That catchy ditty from the Macbook Air commercial? "New Soul" by Yael Naim.

***

Okay, I could barely fit on the bandwagon by the time I climbed on board a few weeks ago, but the new Vampire Weekend album is a lot of fun.

You can preview a few of the tunes at their MySpace page, and you can also snag the MP3s from Amazon's MP3 store where it is currently the number one album.

***

I thought this would be the year that broke my Sundance visit streak, but a few last-minute breaks brought me back out to Park City for opening weekend. One of the movies I caught out there was U2 3D.

It was, flat out, the most immersive 3D movie I've ever seen. The technology has come a long way. You still wear goofy-looking glasses, but the 3D technology (this movie used tech by 3ality Digital) has come a long way. It's even more impressive than the 3D from this summer's Beowulf which I thought was decent. It's hard to imagine ever watching a plain old 2D concert movie and being satisfied. 3D is all grown up.

The celeb-packed screening was like a rock concert. During the introduction of the movie, when Geoff Gilmore, director of the Sundance Film Festival, uttered the words, "Ladies and gentleman, the greatest rock band in the world...", all I heard afterwards was a collective eruption from the crowd as everyone shot out of their seats and clapped like pre-pubescent girls at a Hannah Montana concert.

Even if you're not a U2 fan, the movie's worth seeing to experience what I believe is a groundbreaking moment in the evolution of film technology.

Here's one of my pics from that screening. A handful of my other pics from Sundance are here.

***

Gnarls Barkley has a new album coming out April-ish, and one of the tunes that's leaked off of it is "Run."

The label is playing whack-a-mole and pulling it down wherever it pops up, but if you're persistent and web-saavy you can probably catch it somewhere. It's funkalicious.

Technorati Tags: 3D, concert, film, movies, mp3, music, sundance, u2, video, youtube

2000

I rated my two thousandth movie on Netflix today. I've probably seen more that I haven't rated, but that's a pretty good approximation of how many movies I've seen in my life. That works out to about 1.1 movies a week, or 58.8 movies a year for my lifetime. Given that I didn't start watching movies until I was probably in my early teens, it's probably more like one and a half movies a week.

Not as many as a movie critic, but still a lot of hours of my life.

Technorati Tags: movies

Bloody Monday

Zooey Deschanel is coming out with an album of tunes with M. Ward. They call themselves She and Him. Indie people everywhere swoon. Stream the songs at this MySpace page, pre-order the album Volume One from Amazon.com. The new Magnetic Fields is streaming on MySpace, too.

I enjoyed the film City of God, and now we have City of Men, with City of God director Fernando Meirelles as producer. View the trailer here. The movie starts a limited run in the US this Friday.

Old school civil rights leaders turn a cold shoulder on Obama.

It's pretty clear Blu-Ray is going to win this high-def DVD format war. The downside, in the near term, is that it's near impossible to get a Blu-Ray DVD from your Netflix queue.

I think it's safe to classify "I drink your milkshake" as a meme now. I saw the movie last week and enjoyed it, and damned if there haven't been some stellar scores this year by folks you think of as rockers first: Jonny Greenwood and Nick Cave. I'm a huge fan of Brahms' Violin Concerto and of Arvo Part, so to put music by both in that movie is almost like cheating.

Technorati Tags: barackobama, bluray, DVD, film, m.ward, movies, music, netflix, obama, politics, video, youtube, zooeydeschanel

Holidays 2007 in Scottsdale

Free wi-fi at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport. Boo-yah. (I wrote that back on Dec. 30, when I started writing this post, and now, weeks later, I'm still trying to finish)

With the addition of so many little kiddies to the family, we tried something different for the holidays this year and rented a vacation home for a week in Scottsdale. The four bedroom house had a pool, a hot tub, a grill, a pool table, a home theater room, and lots of flat screen TVs. My favorite was the home theater room. It had six plush, reclining, leather theater seats with cupholders, arranged in two rows of three, the back row raised off the ground slightly in a stadium seating configuration. A small and somewhat middle-of-the-road projector hung from the ceiling, shining its picture on a screen flanked by theatrical curtains. The kicker was an old school theater-style popcorn machine.

James and Angela had said before the trip they planned to rent a Toyota Solara convertible. So as I stood curbside waiting for them to pick me up from the airport, I thought it odd that a flaming red Mustang pulled up next to me, the passenger waving at me. A second glance revealed that it was Angela sporting her giant movie star sunglasses.

"We decided it was too cold for a convertible," she explained. So we drove back from the airport in a cousin to the future KITT (Knight Industries Three Thousand). The engine makes a suitable American sports car growl, a low, menacing rumble.

That car is no friend to the environment. "I can see the fuel gauge needle moving!" Angela said as she drove.

We all have our natural roles at the holidays. Mine are chiefly around entertainment: I'm responsible for bringing lots of movies on DVD, bringing by Nintendo Wii, and taking photos or video. The parents did most of the cooking. James and Angela bought most of the groceries. Joannie was our liaison to the vacation home owners. Karen looked up info for our social outings into Scottsdale, like the location of hikes and downtown attractions. My dad was responsible for playing with the grandkids in a semi-educational manner.

I brought two movies from the past year for people to watch: The Bourne Ultimatum and Once. James bought Pan's Labyrinth. When the kids weren't watching the Pixar Short Films Collection in the home theater room, those three movies occupied most of that room's screening time.

Usually we'd put on a movie after the kids had gone to bed and the dinner table had been cleared, dishes washed. That meant starting at 10pm some nights, so it took some people a few days to find the time to watch a movie start to finish without having to run off to collapse in bed.

Every one enjoyed all the movies, especially Once.

Our family has just the right mix of personalities to escalate things, so the day someone mentioned the durian, the so-called "king of fruits," and discovered that most people at the table had not eaten it before (come to think of it, that someone was probably me), it was inevitable that we'd end up buying one from Ranch 99 and forcing every one in the family to take a bit on video camera. See, the thorny-skinned durian is famous for its polarizing taste and odor. Those who enjoy it worship it and, I suppose, are the ones who dubbed it the "king of fruits." Those who find it revolting describe the odor as similar to that of rotting sewage or trash. I count myself among the latter.

The durian we bought was not as malodorous as the ones I'd encountered before in China. I remember the scent of raw durian to be so revolting that I couldn't bring myself to eat it raw. I was only able to consume it after it had been incorporated into a pancake, which was actually decent. But under the glare of my father's video camera, there was no escaping it this time. My dad chopped it open and scooped out the yellowish flesh onto a styrofoam plate.

James, the most curious one of us all, stepped up first. Or perhaps it was Sharon. Either way, both found it neither tasty nor awful. I was next and spooned a generous heap into my mouth.

Big mistake.

The taste of it reminded me of its smell and nearly made me gag. It took me about a minute of stomach-turning chewing and mental fortitude to swallow it without coughing up my dinner. I seem to recall breaking out into a sweat as I tried not to heave in front of my family, a sign of weakness that would be recounted at family reunions until my funeral. Karen, Joannie, Mike, and Angela had similar reactions.

My dad was convinced our revulsion was merely in our head, that we had prejudged and condemned the fruit without giving it a fair trial. To prove his point, he took two large bites and chewed away with no reaction. I'm convinced, however, that my dad has lost all feeling and taste sensations over the years. I've seen him slice his finger open nearly to the bone and have minimal reaction, and I thought his nonchalant reaction to the taste of durian was related, somehow, to his indifference to pain. Still, he pitched out the rest of the durian, giving our trash that evening the smell of, well, trash.

Some random holiday notes:

• Most played song: No One by Alicia Keys. By the end of vacation, was I sick of the song? Probably. But for the one week before you reach saturation with a catchy tune, it's toe-tapping good times.
• Most listened to local radio station: Phoenix's Movement 97.5. Like the music they'd play at a dance club that you're just slightly embarrassed to admit you like (think Tone-Loc, Timbaland, Fergie). Driving around in the Stang, blaring 97.5, I realized that James, Angela, and I were a parody of suburban cheesiness.
• Some random food consumption stats: 4 boxes of Gobstoppers, two bottles of Scotch (one Macallan, one Glenlivet), two gallons of Tampico (my brother's private equity firm owns them, so drinking this was a show of solidarity), about twenty bottles of wine, somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty dozen eggs, maybe six cases of water. Last chance for some fun before the New Years resolutions kicked in.
• Most watched movie: Once. That scene in the music store? I've seen it about 28 times now. Best scene of the year.
• Most played video game: Wii tennis. I'm impressed by how hard and flat my four-year-old nephew Ryan can crack the ball in Wii Tennis. Wii sports is the great equalizer. Young children who have infinite patience can, through repetition and immediate feedback, can develop some wicked skills in sports like Wii tennis and bowling. I discovered this the hard way when I ran into a six year old girl who nearly dropped a 300 in bowling on me. I was not amused.
• Number of kisses planted on my nephew Connor's cheeks: 389.

Some personal highlights:

• Scoring 100 in pop-a-shot at the Sugar Bowl ice cream parlor in Old Town Scottsdale. I'm pretty good at pop-a-shot, but for one transcendent moment, I entered the zone. The rules are simple: 45 seconds to shoot as many baskets as possible. Each basket counts for two points, except in the final 10 seconds, when they count for three each. You shoot with a cantaloupe-sized basketball at a smaller than normal basket. I think I missed two shots the entire round, breaking 100 on my last shot. I felt like Michael Jordan in that first half against Portland, or Reggie Miller at the end of the game against the Knicks. "That will be your opus," said James. If so, then that will have been one sad life.
• Scoring a birdie on hole 10 at Troon North. On a good round, I usually shoot one birdie out of sheer luck. But not having played golf in a while, I wanted to snap my clubs over my leg while hitting on the driving range before the round. I thought I had a better chance of actually killing a bird than scoring a birdie during the round (hundred of wild guinea roamed around the golf course, apparently oblivious to the dangers posed by amateur golfers like myself). But by the last several holes, I started to slow down, and my swing started to come around. On the last hole Alan and I played, I hit a drive about 270, a pitching wedge to within 5 feet, and toilet-bowled a putt for my birdie.
• The craziest moment of the holiday, by far, occurred on the third hole of Monument Golf Course at Troon. This par 5 hole is known as the Monument hole for the massive rock sitting right in the middle of the fairway about 260 yards out. Just past that hole, as I walked towards my ball to play my third shot, I spotted what appeared to be a small tiger sitting on the hill. The golf instructor who was riding with us was strolling up the fairway. James and I asked him what it was, and he said it was a bobcat. I stood my ground, expecting it would wander off, but our presence didn't faze it in the least. Soon it wandered into the fairway, past my ball. I took a couple steps back, but it didn't even look my way once, even when our instructor tried to shoo it away. The bobcat was gazing across the fairway. I followed its line of sight and realized it was looking at a rabbit sitting just off the fairway. It crept slowly across the fairway. I couldn't believe the rabbit didn't spot the bobcat which was now within 25 or 30 feet. Though the bobcat was now crawling on its belly, it wasn't hard to spot against the green fairway, and its tail wagged expectantly. And then, just as I thought it might be sitting there for a half hour, the bobcat shot towards the rabbit which dashed off through the bushes across the cart path. The bobcat didn't go after the rabbit but hurled itself into a bush. A narrow escape for the rabbit, I thought. But I was wrong, on both counts. First I spotted the bobcat coming out on the other side of the bush, another rabbit in its mouth. Then I heard our instructor Ryan hitting the brakes on his golf cart. The first rabbit I'd spotted had run across the path just as Ryan was cruising by in the golf cart, and Ryan had hit it. I walked over and saw the rabbit's cotton ball of a tail sitting on the cart path, and we found the rabbit nearby, limping around, one of its back legs broken. Rabbits are pretty damn cute, and we all felt awful, but I wasn't about to pick up a rabid rabbit and try to fashion a splint for it or anything like that. I thought it would be dramatic if I took an 8-iron to it, put it out of its misery, tears in my eyes, screaming "Damn it all to hell!" as I brought the club down again and again, but I didn't. Life, death, the circle of life, and a three putt bogey, all in the course of one hole. Only in Arizona.
• Seeing Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West. I've seen Taliesin in Wisconsin and Robie House in Chicago, and both were inspiring. Now I just need to get out to Fallingwater. Many Heloise Crista sculptures adorn Taliesin West, and they're great.

Most mornings, I'd be woken around 6 or 7am by the sound of my nephews running around. This would be after I'd stayed up until 3am by myself, maybe watching 30 Rock - Season 1 on DVD in the home theater room, or reading The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, or something else. So I'd spend the day sleepy. But not tired. The thing about vacation that keeps me running on so little sleep is the thought that I could get sleep at any time. When you're working, you're never sure how much sleep you'll get from one night to the next, and that worry is more mentally exhausting than anything else.

Most awkward moment of the holidays. Just as we were about to wrap a book I'd bought for my nephew Ryan, he burst into the room and surprised us. He grabbed the book, looked at the cover, and said, "Don't get me this book. I already have it." Then he ran out.

I went running with James and Angela and even Alan a few times. There's a budding movement to try and get as many of us together to run the NY marathon this year as possible. Will it happen? I'm not sure. It's a new year, though, the time to resolve such things.

Technorati Tags: christmas, connor, family

Vanity Fair on Indy 4

The cover story of the latest Vanity Fair is Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

***

An article about how to deal with regret in a healthy way.

Complexity reflects an ability to incorporate various points of view into a recollection, to vividly describe the circumstances, context and other dimensions. It is the sort of trait that would probably get you killed instantly in a firefight; but in the mental war of attrition through middle age and after, its value only increases.

***

Basia Bulat covering "Someday" by The Strokes.

***

Kanye West gets p0wned by Beyonce in Connect Four.

"No, it's you I love"

In Once (which many of you know I love), Guy (Glen Hansard) takes Girl (Marketa Irglova) for a ride on his father's motorcycle. They stop in a park and have a chat, during which she reveals that she's married but that her husband (and father of her daughter) has moved away.

Guy asks her how to say "Do you love him?" in Czech. She teaches him, and he repeats it back to her in Czech.

She pauses, looks at him for a moment, and says something in Czech. Then she walks away. Guy chases after, asking her what she said, and then they cut to the next scene.

I'm not sure why I never tried to figure out what she says, but I showed the movie to everyone in my family this week, and James and Angela had the clever idea to go online to look it up. (I guess I should throw in a SPOILER alert here)

What Marketa responds in Czech is, "No, it's you I love."

The movie makes sense even if you don't know what she says, but knowing is like the cherry on the hot fudge sundae.

[Finding out what she said reminded me of watching the YouTube video in which someone used audio analysis to try and decipher what Bill Murray whispers in Scarlett Johansson's ear at the end of Lost in Translation.]

A few movie notes while stuck at LAX

Apparently arriving an hour and a half early to the airport is not sufficient for the holidays if you're flying Delta. Apparently they have not heard of staffing to handle seasonal loads. I stood out in a skycap line for 45 minutes, then got to the front and was told I'd missed my baggage check-in time. So I was directed to an unstaffed counter inside where I was told to pick up a black phone and speak to someone about my predicament. This service is called, I joke not, "Delta Direct."

The volume on the phone was so law I had to stick a banana in my other ear and cover the phone with my other just to make out the woman's voice on the other end. She began by asking why I was calling. I explained my situation.

She told me to hang on and proceeded to do something (I imagine she was typing furiously wherever she was, perhaps sitting in a hammock in the Bahamas, sipping a turquoise drink out of a coconut shell). As always, it took her about five minutes of typing to deduce exactly what I had just told her, that they wouldn't let me check in my bags because I was inside of 45 minutes to my flight time.

She then asked me if I could see any agents standing around nearby who could help me out. This bank of Delta Direct counters had no agents, simply a bank of phones. I felt like I was being Punk'd. My suspicion is that Delta's agents, realizing they had not staffed appropriately for this day, but fearing the wrath of angry holiday travelers, set up this bank of phones and directed people like me to them, whereupon they transferred us to speak to a corresponding phone bank in a prison somewhere. I imagine a prisoner in an orange jumpsuit in a prison, seated behind one of those glass windows, picking up a phone in confusion because there was no one on the other side of the glass.

"Hello, who is this?"

"Who are you?"

"Listen, I'm stuck here at the airport because they won't check my bags and won't let me go to the gate. I really need to get out of this hellhole and on to the plane to go meet my family."

"Oh, cry me a river, I'm doing 10 in this federal penitentiary and my cellblock mate calls me Boo."

Delta Direct. I want to find the person who concocted this service.

Bumped to a flight four hours later, I sit in a Mexican cantina in the airport eating a soggy tamale. There is a haiku in this, but I possess not the zen state of mind required for such creative output.

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On the commonality of the Trajan font in movie posters: website and video. Humorous. I've noticed this before, but not at a conscious level.

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Fox Searchlight has posted the screenplays from many of its 2007 movies. Among them is Once, one of the best movies I saw this year and a good last minute gift if you're behind on your holiday shopping.

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Thanks to Very Short List, I learned that my favorite movie from 2005, Best of Youth, will air on the Sundance Channel Dec 25-28. Originally a 6 hour miniseries aired in Italy, it came over as one long movies in 2005, but the Sundance Channel will air it as it originally played, in four 1.5 hour chunks.

If the thought of spending time with your in-laws this holiday season has you feeling a bit morose, spend an hour and a half each night with a family you will come to ache over. (You can find a trailer over the the official website)

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I saw Sweeney Todd at the dome at the Arclight. I'd never seen the musical, nor was I too familiar with the storyline. Having lived in New York City for two years, however, I knew it involved a murderous barber. Having suffered a bad haircut or two in my day, I was curious to see where the film would ask me to place my empathy.

As a child, I felt a kinship with Tim Burton's awkward but swollen-hearted leads, including Edward Scissorhands, played of course by Johnny Depp. The two collaborate again in Sweeney Todd, only this time Depp is wielding a set of blades with a heart frosted over by thoughts of revenge. Only, it's Johnny Depp, and so something of the doleful recluse seeps out, even as he's slashing away with his straight razor as if he were hacking through a rainforest with a machete.

It's a musical, so characterization is broad, and quick. A young man spies a young blond in a second story window, and it's love at first sight. He immediately wanders down the street crooning, "I feeeel you, Johanna..." Musicals have always been a medium which wrenches emotions out of you using tendrils of music that can slip through the slimmest of cracks in your emotional armor. Everyone wears their emotions in song

My interests have strayed away from Tim Burton films and musicals over the years, but as a twist on the holiday movie, Sweeney Todd is satisfying in parts, buoyed largely by the nuanced melodies of Stephen Sondheim and the soot-laden sets of Victorian London, which I've always associated with Christmas, perhaps tracing back to mental images from A Christmas Carol.

Beowulf in 3D

Another one of the BAFTA screenings Hazel let me tag along for was an early screening of Beowulf in 3D. I was less interested in the movie itself than trying out the 3-D experience. I've always been excited by the possibility of seeing movies in true 3-D, but all the 3-D movies I've seen to date have been a disappointment. The last movie I saw in 3-D was Superman Returns in IMAX 3-D and I preferred the non 3-D version. There were many moments in the 3-D version when I couldn't tell what was happening. In scenes of high motion, the picture seemed blurry.

Beowulf uses Real D's 3-D technology. Instead of those old corny red and blue 3-D glasses, Real D's glasses hold circular polarized lenses.

So how does it look?

A lot better than the old 3-D technology. The images seem better aligned, and the 3-D effect is more consistent from start to finish. There are still occasional moments of high motion, when things fly quickly from foreground to background or vice versa, when it's difficult to lock your eyes into the proper plane of depth, but not many. The new 3-D tech paired with Robert Zemeckis's motion capture technology produced something that looked like a really expensive, immersive video game cut scene.

The problem with digital motion capture animation, though, remains a certain dead or frozen quality to human faces. It's improving, but still not quite there. It's as if every character had one Botox injection too many. The more cartoon-like faces of characters in traditional animation or in a movie like Ratatouille are still more expressive.

As for the story, I doubt many high school English teachers will be showing it in class as a supplement to reading the old English poem, but it does elicit a chuckle or two, whether intentional or not. If you see it, see it in 3-D, as another milestone on the 3-D development roadmap. At our screening we were allowed to take the RealD glasses home, and with the addition of eyebrows, a rubber nose, and and a moustache they'll make a stylish and technologically advanced pair of Groucho Marx glasses for the next such 3-D screening.

This is our country?

Two Mondays ago Hazel took me as her guest to a BAFTA screening for No Country For Old Men . Hazel won a BAFTA scholarship last year, and one of the perks is that she's invited to all sorts of screenings and events. There seems to be one nearly every night.

No Country For Old Men is not my favorite Cormac McCarthy novel (I'm partial to Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, and The Road), but the Coen brothers have identified the spine of the thing and planted it in the dust of the West like a tombstone for a more comforting age in America's history, when the enemy wasn't as empty and unfeeling as the nihilistic killer Anton Chigurh, played with placid efficiency by Javier Bardem. When asked in Q&A how he found the character, he replied simply that it began with "the haircut" (Josh Brolin said that when Bardem walked out with that haircut for the first time, he complained, "I'm not going to get laid for three months").

McCarthy has written many beautiful elegies for the West; this one also ushers in something chilling in the form of Chigurh, whose weapon of choice, a percussion stun gun used on cattle, is the perfect symbol of a supposedly more civilized age but which seems clinical and soulless in its proficiency. Josh Brolin plays Llewelyn Moss, an ordinary man who finds a suitcase filled with $2 million in cash out in the Texas countryside, the remnants of a drug deal gone bad. Is there any cinematic symbol more pure than a suitcase of cash?

Moss decides to keep the money, and Chigurh, whom we've already met, comes after him like a bounty hunter from hell. Tommy Lee Jones, as a lawman following the trail of carnage behind Moss and Chigurh, has a face nearly as metaphoric as the cattle gun. Every crag and nook of Jones's face seems like a record of the history of the land. Jones knows that times have changed, that Chigurh represents a new sort of evil and darkness in the world, one he doesn't understand and one he fears he can't overcome.

From the opening shot, you know you are in the hands of craftsmen who control the tension in the film as easily as a violinist tightening a string on his instrument. It's a strong return to form for the Coen brothers whose Ladykillers was a big disappointment. There is at times a sense of stasis in the film; some of the characters are who they are, and they aren't about to change over the course of two hours (that's McCarthy's influence also). But it's a damned enjoyable two hours, and every time Javier Bardem appears on screen, you get a knot in your stomach that's tied together with one strand of suspense and another of glee.

The cast also includes Woody Harrelson and Kelly McDonald (great the first time I saw her in Trainspotting, she manages to extract a lot from playing Moss's wife; it's not easy being a woman in a McCarthy novel).

NOTE: One of my film school classmates Chris Carroll was an intern on the shoot and gets his own line in the credits under the camera crew. Look for him under "Intern."

Control

The trailer for Anton Corbijn's movie about Ian Curtis and Joy Division, Control, is at the movie's official site. Some people close to Joy Division, like members of New Order, are said to not appreciate the movie's liberties with the truth, but I'll probably see it anyway.

Joy Division and New Order are the music of my childhood. Joy Division for those days when I was oscillating between self-loathing and defiance, and New Order for happier times. It's hard for me to not feel a bit nostalgic when I hear "Atmosphere," the last song that plays in the trailer. And I own one of these "Love Tears Me Apart" t-shirts, whose design actually echoes the waves on the Control website interface.

Iron Man

Trailer for Iron Man , starring Robert Downey Jr. What a bizarre trailer. But if Robert Downey Jr. (one of those people whose names only sounds right when pronounced in its entirety) is going to be unleashed to do as he wishes instead of locked behind that expressionless helmet, then maybe...

Oh, forget it. Why are we squeezing round pegs into square holes?

I smell a rat

Ratatouille on Blu-ray Nov. 6. That should be a good format on which to appreciate the gorgeous animation, but almost every title coming out is only on one HD format or the other, so these "exclusive to Blu-ray" or "exclusive to HD-DVD" announcements don't excite me.

This is an example that the pursuit of individual interests within a group of sellers does not always lead to a global maximum. The studios are killing sales of both formats because the average consumer will not buy two DVD players just to watch their hi-def discs (well, okay, maybe I will, but only because I'm a video quality fiend). With both camps trying to carve out the biggest piece of the pie for themselves, they've shrunk the entire pie.

Famous title sequences

A YouTube compilation here.

Technorati Tags: art, design, movies, video, youtube

Heima

Here's the trailer for the Sigur Ros movie Heima. I have no idea what it's about, but if ever there was a band whose music could inspire a new Qatsi trilogy for this age, it's Sigur Ros.

Shine a Light trailer

Martin Scorsese has a Rolling Stones documentary called Shine a Light coming out, well, I think in 2008 sometime. Here's the trailer in Quicktime 480p and smaller if you're scared to see the crevices in Keith Richards' face with too much clarity. The trailer is good, energetic.

I've always been partial to Scorsese's musical docs. The Last Waltz is fantastic.

UPDATE: Ken asked that I add a warning about the graphic footage of Mick Jagger grinding up against "young-enough-to-be-his-grandaughter (or at least a fifth girlfriend)" Christina Aguilera. Instead of a May-December, this is more March-December. I was just surprised to discover the two had sung together in concert.

The Big Parade and Born to Be Bad

I caught up with a film school classmate last night by attending a double bill of King Vidor's The Big Parade (2nd highest grossing silent film of all time after The Birth of a Nation) and Nicholas Ray's Born to Be Bad (a sort of All About Eve starring the lovely Joan Fontaine). You might ask what links these two movies (shortly after asking "What movies?"). You might ask because I did, shortly after my friend suggested the double bill.

It turns out that the what links the two movies is that they are rare pieces from the UCLA Film Archive, not to be found on DVD or at your local megaplex or as a torrent on the high seas of Internet piracy, and both are black and white.

Together they loomed as a formidable opponent to my attention span on a Friday night after a long week at work. I laugh now to think that I initially asked if I should leave work earlier than normal in order to buy tickets in advance. I must have been thinking of Superbad, that movie showcasing those new film technologies known as color and sync sound. No, even in the most ardent film appreciation city in the world, I doubt a back-to-back showing of a 2 hr 20 min silent film and a 1 hr 30 minute black and white from the 1950's would sell out.

When we strolled into the very new Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum, I spied a die-hard audience of about 8 people, most of them old enough to have been Billy Wilder contemporaries. I was no longer nervous that I'd pass out and start snoring loudly as it was likely that a few of the other filmgoers might do so as well, out of sheer age. One seat in the theater, right on the aisle, is a different color than all the others. Supposedly it was actually Billy Wilder's chair from some long gone age; unfortunately they chose to model all the other seats in the theater on that one instead of opting for more comfortable and modern furnishings. I felt like I was sitting in a coach seat of a 737. My friend's knees were wedged against the seat in front of her. Not a promising sign for what promised to be about four hours of viewing.

Some man had the audacity to sit in Billy Wilder's chair despite the preponderance of empty seats. I thought of approaching and reproaching him on his impudence, but a second glance gave rise to a second plausible theory that perhaps he was simply too old to notice which seat he had occupied.

A pianist played en electronic keyboard to accompany the entirety of King Vidor's silent film. That guy had a good memory and a good sense of timing. In part because I'd just finished Discover Your Inner Economist, I had promised myself that if at any time the movie bored me I'd walk out and do something more productive with my time, like play keep away from the dozens of hobos wandering the streets of Westwood.

After a somewhat disturbing first act, the movie increased in watchability, and I found myself unexpectedly moved by several moments in the movie. Spanning the period from just before the start of WWI to just after its conclusion, the movie follows the story of Jim Apperson, a lazy son of a wealthy businessman who comes of age when he enlists in the army. His character arc mirrors that of the nation, from idleness to patriotic fervor to disillusionment with the war, and his personal triumphs and tragedies are those of America.

While in France, he falls in love with a French woman named Melisande, and their first date is a staple of that romantic comedy genre classic, the meeting between two people who are in love but don't speak the same language. They trade a French-English dictionary back and forth, and their resulting meet-cute dialogue is genuinely touching and romantic.

Many people think of silent film and think of Chaplin or Keaton and keystone cops and those sorts of physical capers, but many of them, like Intolerance and this Vidor film, work in modes other than comedy and offer great depth and complexity. The acting may not impress a modern audience, but there's stronger story and heaps more emotional heft in The Big Parade than in The Transformers.

Born to Be Bad is some good melodrama. You'll either laugh at that old school sass (that the movie is hard to find on video is the only explanation I'll accept for why IMDb has no memorable quotes listed) or chuckle at the old school syrup, with Joan Fontaine being pulled into about twenty to twenty-five passionate kisses to the accompaniment of strings soaring to a crescendo.

I'll also confess to thinking Joan Fontaine is a stone cold fox who looks ravishing in this movie. Younger sister of Olivia de Havilland, Joan was not just a pretty face. According to her IMDb bio, "Joan Fontaine has been a licensed pilot, a champion ballonist, an expert rider, a prize-winning tuna fisherman, and a hole-in-one golfer, a Cordon Bleu chef and is also a licensed interior decorator." She's the only actor to win an Oscar in a Hitchcock film, and "Howard Hughes, who dated her sister Olivia de Havilland for awhile, proposed to Joan many times." And that, as we all know, is as foolproof an endorsement of a woman's hotness as existed in that age.

Technorati Tags: film, movies

Elizabeth: The Golden Age

In this summer of one mind-numbing sequel after another, one which hasn't gotten much attention but which I have been waiting for a long time is the sequel to Elizabeth titled Elizabeth, Part Deux. Or actually Elizabeth: The Golden Age.

Here's the oh-so-pretty Quicktime trailer. Featuring the contrasting acting styles of Cate Blanchett, method actor, and Clive Owen, "I'm Clive Owen, you're not" actor.

Technorati Tags: film, movies, trailer

Some links, some involving Jason Bourne

Ben Affleck hoping Jason Bourne has sidekick in next movie.

Trailer for Lars and the Real Girl, starring Ryan Gosling. Clever premise.

Scary view into the C.I.A.'s interrogation techniques. Scary stuff, especially the details on the interrogation technique called waterboarding. I'd say we need to call Jason Bourne to expose these practices, but the public already knows what's going on.

Gruesome death: man bitten by his pet black widow spider and then eaten by his other pet lizards and insects. Is this story true? Those generic photos make me skeptical.

A poster of Marlon Brando as Don Corleone, produced entirely using the text of the script. From a company called L.A. Pop Art which specializes in using this technique called micrography to produce such prints. The pieces they have for sale don't interest me as consumer products, but I'd love to see the technique generalized so that you could order a custom print of any picture generated entirely from the text of your choice.

A popular article that circulated among the technorati a few weeks ago: In Silicon Valley, Millionaires Who Don't Feel Rich. Hard to feel sorry for people who have a couple million and still feel poor.

Technorati Tags: film, humor, movies, newyorker, tech, trailer

More on Bergman and Antonioni

Woody Allen pays tribute to Bergman. Martin Scorsese pays tribute to Antonioni.

Jonathan Rosenbaum writes that in hindsight, Bergman's star may be inflated (article locked behind NYTimes pay-wall, which is too bad considering how much discussion it has generated; there's no better way to attract lightning than to stand on a tall building and wave a metal flagpole over your head, though I think he was sincere in his feelings). A full summary of Bergman coverage at the NYTimes is here. David Bordwell re-examines both Bergman and Antonioni in light of all the autopsies of their careers and theorizes that perhaps one's feelings towards each may be influenced by when one came of age.

Technorati Tags: film, movies

Concept art from Ratatouille, Imogen Heap

Hmm, an old post I forgot to post from a few weeks back...

You can see the goodness here. At the time I wrote this, I hadn't seen Ratatouille yet. Every one seemed to have seen it by the time I decided I couldn't wait any longer, so one night I just drank a Coke and caught the late showing one night after work. It was all that and then some. The animation was stunning.

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Via FreshArrival, here's a WMV file of a live performance by Imogen Heap at the studios of Indie 103.1 here in LA back a . A friend from Starbucks got my a pass to go see her perform at the Starbucks music lounge at Sundance in 2006. Watching her work was intriguing because she used a series of gadgets, including a Macbook Pro, all of which she demonstrated to us before she played her set. She's one person but with all that gear she can sing with herself. The video gives you an idea of how she creates that big sound. Here are a few of my pics from the show at Sundance.

Technorati Tags: animation, art, music

Ads, ads, ads

A trailer for the movie version of Kite Runner, posted by Yahoo alongside a video ad for The Bourne Ultimatum (at least it was last I checked) that plays at the same time, obscuring the audio of the trailer. Two ads fighting for control of your speakers. Yahoo must be hurting.

Another case of advertising gone wrong: this QSOL print ad. Sex and servers: sounds like a trashy novel set in the Bay Area.

Technorati Tags: advertising, movies, tech, trailer

Be Kind Rewind trailer

The trailer for the next Michel Gondry movie Be Kind Rewind is here (in Quicktime HD if you can handle it). I previously mentioned the movie in June. The concept: Jack Black stars as Jerry, who accidentally becomes magnetized, erasing all the tapes in the video store where his best friend Mike (Mos Def) works. To retain the store's best customer, an old lady who might be going cuckoo, Jerry and Mike decide to re-enact and film every movie she chooses to rent. Among the movie they remake, supposedly, are Ghostbuster, Rush Hour 2, Back to the Future, The Lion King, and Robocop.

I would give my left hand just for the discarded scraps of ideas that are in the trash bin of Gondry's brain.

Technorati Tags: film, movies, trailer, video

Remains of a long day

You want a proxy for the state of Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD? Sales of 300 on Amazon offer a good proxy. The movie was available on both formats. On Blu-Ray the sales rank is currently #5 on Amazon.com. On HD-DVD? It's Amazon sales rank is 12. Slight edge Blu-Ray. Of course, none of this matters because so few titles are available on either format, let alone both formats. In fact, most titles that are available on Blu-Ray are not available on HD-DVD and vice versa.

A brief history of shoegazing, a genre of music I should have been listening to in high school to express those oh so hidden depths of soul and heartfelt yearnings behind my otherwise shy facade.

NYTimes doing away with TimesSelect soon? Let's hope so.

Two new Nokia phones, the 7500 and 7900, look like...well, the analogy I'd us is that these new phones are to old Nokia candybar phones as Bizarro Superman was to Superman in the looks department. Cubist, or maybe crystallized?

Facebook is all the rage. I held out until I realized how many of my classmates were using it to communicate. I've now had a few months to fiddle around with it. It's a huge step up from the loud mess that was MySpace and the cleanest designed social networking site to date. It also did a smart thing in opening up for application development by third parties. But I have a lot of thoughts on how the site could improve and where it's vulnerable. I'm not sold on its longevity. Those thoughts will have to wait for another day, when I have more time. In the meantime, this article is a good read.

Technorati Tags: amazon, dvd, gadgets, mobile, music, nytimes, phones, facebook

RIP Ingmar Bergman and Laszlo Kovacs...and now Antonioni

UPDATE: And now we can add Michelangelo Antonioni to the list. The pantheon is summoning some legends. Revered by film students everywhere, Antonioni had a huge influence on directors perhaps more popular among modern arthouse crowds, e.g. Wong Kar Wai or Sofia Coppola. Blow Up and L'Avventura are his most famous movies and well worth seeing, though I lean at this moment towards La Notte as my favorite of his scripts. The Passenger has one of the most brilliant and famous ending shots in cinema.

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The film world lost two all-timers in the past week in Ingmar Bergman (NYTimes obit) and Laszlo Kovacs (LATimes obit).*

I met Laszlo Kovacs a few weeks ago at Cinegear. He and Vilmos Zsigmond were honored for their distinguished cinematography careers. He signed a poster for me and chatted for a few moments. He wasn't content just to hear abotu who I was but wanted to pass on advice about being a cinematographer. Friendly to the end. In hindsight, the timing of the tribute for Kovacs seemed scripted. His work as a DP (Director of Photography) is vast and wide-ranging, everything from Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces to Ghostbusters and Say Anything. When I think of Kovacs, I don't think of a particular look but of shooting out in the open air.

For a film student I still have a great deal of Bergman's oeuvre to cover (though he likely occupies more positions in my Netflix queue than any other director). But the movies of his that I have seen have all gotten under my skin. How many modern movies have you leaving the theater thinking you know who made it? You wouldn't ever ask that of a Bergman film. If you're looking for one movie as an introduction, Scenes From a Marriage is where I'd start. Years from now you'll be able to walk on set and say you want a Bergman-Nykvist-like aesthetic and a knowledgeable film crew will know what you mean.

Many people say that they like to just shut off their minds when they go to the movies, and a Bergman movie is not for that person. But I question the idea that you go to the movies to sit there as a brain-dead receptacle. I suspect that people actually want more mental stimulation but have been fed so much empty formula that they've started to lower their expectations prior to walking into the theater so that the actual experience is less disappointing. The idea that you want your brain to work less only makes sense if there is some limit to the amount of mental processing power in a given day, and I've yet to see any biological proof for that idea. I suspect physical fatigue is the limiting factor and is confused by most for mental fatigue.

I always seek more, rather than less, for my brain to chew on. Far from tiring me out, intellectual stimulation wakes my brain up, brings it to life! I add the caveat that I'm the type of person who ends up bored after a minute of sitting on the beach on the first day of a vacation and has to get a book in hand or frisbee to toss. Still, the idea that a movie can't be intellectually bracing and entertaining is a false dichotomy. Avoid that trap and demand more for your $10.50.

*Look at the number of Google News obits for Bergman and Kovacs and you'll get a useful proxy for the popularity of directors versus that of cinematographers to the public at large. Don't feel sorry for the DP's. They're happy to stay in the shadows. Also, the DP is less likely to be a egomaniac than the director.

Technorati Tags: cinematography, film, filmmaking, movies

Two for Tuesday

Trailer for Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited (written by Anderson, Roman Coppola, and Jason Schwartzman).

I saw a demo of Microsoft Labs' Photosynth a long time ago. It looked amazing, and now it's in beta. Unfortunately for me it only works for Windows Vista or XP users running IE or Firefox, but if I qualified I'd be putting it through its paces.

Technorati Tags: film, movies, photography, software, trailer

Once

Yesterday I thought I had a pass for a preview screening of Danny Boyle's Sunshine. What's even better is that it would be held at the lovely new Landmark theater in LA, one of the few with a handful of 4K projectors and swanky stadium seating. But after cursing my way through a standstill of traffic, I found no line at the theater. I looked down at my pass.

July 19.

Oops. I blame the steady diet of decongestants which have left me with crazy dreams for several days now. I haven't had such a disorienting stretch since the last time I was on malaria medicine.

With half an hour to spare, my buddy and I rushed across town, me at the wheel, cursing and driving like a maniac, in the hopes of catching a 7:40pm showing of Rescue Dawn at the Arclight instead. We arrived exactly 10 minutes after the movie had started.

The lady behind the counter shook her head at me. Apparently the Arclight does not sell tickets to a movie beyond 10 minutes past the start time. Thwarted again. I was more demoralized than upset.

We scanned the board. Between the two of us, we'd seen most everything on the board. Except for Once. I'd missed it at Sundance in January, but while there I ran into a friend who'd seen and loved it.

So this story has a happy ending because Once is one of the better movies I've seen this year. Most fans of The Frames have already seen the movie and know the back story, but for those who don't, the director John Carney once played bass for them, and he directed Frames lead singer Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, Hansard's collaborator in his solo effort The Swell Season, in this indie film about the joys of artistic collaboration.

I don't really like musicals, and this movie technically is not a musical, but if this was a musical, then I would like musicals. The music in the movie is actually the music the two of the leads wrote together, and the way it's woven into the movie feels organic. You can hear some of the lovely tunes at the movie's official website or on the charming soundtrack.

The movie put me in enough of a musical mood that meeting up with some classmates for a farewell karaoke session (a couple of them are headed overseas on a travel video internship) was more enjoyable than I remember karaoke could be. If you are going to sing karaoke, by all means, take it seriously.

Technorati Tags: film, movies, music

Thanks to the linear forward motion of time it's Friday

Jim Jannard reports that the Red team has been able to shoot useable footage with the Red One rated at ISO 4000. Pretty amazing.

David Lynch to direct a commercial for Gucci's next perfume.

MIT neuroscientists identified the neuronal mechanics of déjà vu. Much to my disappointment, they have nothing to do with a glitch in the Matrix.

A few sites that I've just started playing with: Swaptree is a site that allows you to swap media products with other people. You pay for postage. I may start listing all my stuff on here since I've since resigned myself to the fact that most of my old DVDs an CDs and books are just about worthless used. Geni is a free website that allows you to build and maintain a family tree. Everyone you add to your tree can then build on it, and in just a week or two my tree has sprouted into something resembling a small shrub.

Technorati Tags: camcorder, camera, cinematography, filmmaking, gadgets, medicine, commercial, Red, science

Two trailers

Here's the HD version of the 1-18-08 trailer.

And a really low-quality version of the trailer for Lust, Caution. I would never allow the only copy of my trailer on the web to be a low-fi Flash video. UPDATE: This copy of the trailer is a little better.

Ironically, the 1-18-08 trailer would probably not suffer as much being on Flash given its intentional man-on-the-ground shaky camcorder aesthetic, but that's the one gilded in glorious HD.

Technorati Tags: movies, trailer

Spiderman the musical?!

Marvel is in pre-production on Spider-Man the musical, to be directed by Tony-winner Julie Taymor with music and lyrics by Bono and the Edge.

Nice Flickr collection of the evocative name placards on apartment complexes here in Santa Monica. I agree with the photographer - these are the sole redeeming feature of the otherwise fugly apartment architecture ubiquitous in Santa Monica (and Los Angeles in general). You've never seen so much stucco and old shag carpet.

Kaoru Kubo is the famous voice heard on Airport Limousine buses ferrying passengers from Narita Airport to Tokyo. Very soothing.

A montage of beautiful title sequences by Kuntzel+Deygas who did the titles for Catch Me If You Can, among others.

Classified government report says Al-Qaeda is the strongest it's been since 9/11. How did this country ever elect Dubya? Perhaps Bryan Caplan is right.

Technorati Tags: LA, musical, photography, politics, travel

Live from the Emerald City

This post broadcast from the Emerald City, where yours truly attended Audrey and Matt's lovely wedding this weekend (some pics here). Seattle's gorgeous summer weather arrived early (for the Pacific Northwest) this year; it's actually warmer here than in Los Angeles. The only problem is that I have one of the worst summer colds I've ever experienced and have been hacking myself awake every night for a few hours. I'm popping decongestants like they're SweeTarts. If this is my last post ever, know that I probably choked to death on my own phlegm in the middle of the night.

***

Telekinesis is an iPhone Remote application that allows you to access files on your computer via your iPhone.

Red is a popular brand name for high end products. Besides the camera, we now have SRAM working on a sub 2000g component group called Red (for those of you who are non-cyclists, a component group is all the stuff that goes on your bike frame (outside of your wheels and pedals and handlebars; components include your cranks and derailleurs and brake levers, stuff like that). Always good to have a bit of competition for the two market leaders, Shimano and Campagnolo.

The rumors are confirmed: Dan Patrick is leaving ESPN. The peak of ESPN's quality was when Patrick and Keith Olbermann hosted The Big Show. He faded from view for me in recent years as he moved over to the radio. I didn't even own a radio in NYC.

Dress like Roger Federer at Wimbledon. You're sure to impress in your all-white blazer and warm-up trousers when you show up for local club match, at least until you pull your hamstring in the third game. That was some final between Federer and Nadal, by the way. Those two epitomize the peak of the modern tennis game now; compare that to, say, footage of an Edberg-Becker final from back in the day and it's a totally different game.

You think you're always waiting a long time for the woman in your life to get ready? Lián Amaris Sifuentes took it to another level. She went through the usual preparations for a date but slowed them down to fill 72 hours, and she performed it in Union Square this weekend (so close to my old apartment!). NYU professor R. Luke Dubois shot the performance on three high-def camcorders and will compress it into a 72 minute video. Dubois has used this technique before, compressing previous Academy Award Best Picture winners into one minute. Some examples are posted here (Amadeus or Titanic, e.g.). That's what it must be like to have one's life flash before one's eyes. Trippy.

Technorati Tags: apple, art, cycling, ESPN, gadgets, iPhone, tennis, software, sports, tech

Cloverfield

Before The Transformers opening night showing, a trailer played for a J.J. Abrams movie coming out Jan 18, 2008. There's a teaser website for the movie that consists, right now, of just a single photo. The movie is known right now just by the internal name Cloverfield. The trailer made a brief appearance on YouTube before Paramount launched a lightning bolt of a lawyer and smote it into the ether. It looks to be some monster attack on NYC movie, but shot with handheld camcorders from the perspective of people on the ground. Creative trailer.

So to see the trailer, you have to go sit through The Transformers. I can't in good conscience recommend that, but I do suspect that if the Transformers played a big role in your childhood, you will get some pleasure from watching in the company of fellow Transformer-philes. Otherwise, it will probably strike you as the silliest use of someone else's $150 million.

***

People are being deceived by SPF ratings and false labels on sunscreens and getting burned. Sunscreens are tested by applying 2 milligrams per square centimeter of body, so you should apply about two ounces to cover your body. But most people put on much less. A shortcut offered in this article is "Apply about a teaspoon of sunscreen to your face and a shot glass of it to your body."

Here's a list of the best sunscreens. Darn, I guess my Neutrogena Sunblock isn't that hot at UVA protection after all. This stuff is important to me now that I live in the land of perfect weather. It has been about 75 degrees and sunny for nine thousand days straight now.

***

T-Mobile is launching a cellphone service in which you can make calls for free when your phone can connect to a T-Mobile wi-fi hot spot. It's a good thing for consumers when data streams start to merge. With this and Apple's entry into the handset market, perhaps the mobile phone industry will get a kick start. It's about time competition improved cell phone devices, services, and prices.

***

Whoa! David Pogue, branching out into musical comedy.

Technorati Tags: film, gadgets, health, humor, iPhone, mobile, movies, nytimes, phone, pogue, trailer, video, youtube

Soderbergh endoses the Red

Steven Soderbergh loves the Red One camera:

"This is the camera I've been waiting for my whole career: jaw-dropping imagery recorded onboard a camera light enough to hold with one hand. I don't know how Jim and the RED team did it--and they won't tell me--but I know this: RED is going to change everything." Steven Soderbergh

Soderbergh uses the pseudonym Peter Andrews when he's a DP. Shooting the movie you're directing is not something the ASC is a fan of. I went to an ASC even earlier this year, and there was some grumbling about Soderbergh and his ilk, though I can't think of any other prominent directors who shoot their own movies.

There are a whole slew of crazy rules set forth by all the guilds, the DGA, the Writer's Guild, the ASC, and the ACE about what names can appear where. You'd think that the person who does the work should get the credit, but that would be too logical.

Technorati Tags: camcorder, camera, cinematography, filmmaking, movies, Red

Master Classes

Two Sundays ago I took a few master classes in cinematography. The morning session was taught by Ron Dexter whose website includes some of the information he shared in the class.

The first half of the afternoon session was taught by Daniel Pearl who shot both the original and remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. He has shot a lot of recognizable commercials, including many for Gatorade and the award winning Motorola commercial "Wings" (check out his sports reel and general reel). Pearl favors high contrast cinematography, and one of the interesting things he said was that modern film stocks are so good that they almost work against DP's striving for high contrast. First thing most DPs say when they are sitting in telecine is to crush the blacks.

Pearl's class consisted of watching clips from his reel followed by Q&A after each clip. The second half of the afternoon class, in constrast, consisted of an actual lighting workshop taught by Rodrigo Prieto, the DP most famous for his work with Alejandro González Iñárritu on Babel, 21 Grams, and Amores Perros but who has also shot films like Brokeback Mountain, Alexander, 8 Mile, and Frida.

Prieto chose to recreate the lighting from the final scene of Lust, Caution which he just finished shooting for Ang Lee. Without giving away the story, Prieto told us that the last scene consists of Tony Leung entering a dark room from the hallway, walking over to sit on a bed, and then standing and walking back out the door. On a small stage at the Mole Richardson building he set about recreating the lighting from his memory and then shooting two shots on a Viper camera brought in for the class.

I hadn't heard much about Lust, Caution, but any movie directed by Ang Lee and starring Tony Leung is going to hook me (it's adapted from this book by Eileen Chang). Prieto discussed the challenges of trying to control soft light, and he walked us through how he dealt with several tricky lighting issues he ran into for these last two shots. Several LCD monitors were set up around the room so we could get a sense of what the camera was seeing.

The camaraderie among cinematographers never fails to impress me. You'd think people who have to compete for work would be guarded and jealous, but DP's always seem willing to share their techniques and knowledge with others. Prieto was as personable a guy as you'll meet in the film world.

Technorati Tags: cinematography, filmmaking

Two sequels tonight, one good, one bad

I caught Rodrigo Y Gabriela for the second time tonight, at the Ford Ampitheatre under a surprisingly clear LA evening sky, the temperature a perfect 69 degrees. It was a bit of a risk because bands with one album under their belt often lack enough material to fill a full set. At the same KCRW Sounds Eclectic concert where I first heard Rodrigo Y Gabriela, Lily Allen mailed in a set where she played her same set list for the umpteenth time. But Rodrigo Y Gabriela were so so good that night...

About a quarter of the way into tonight's performance, Rodrigo addressed just that topic when he said they didn't want to play the same set list they'd been playing all over the world. So he asked for requests, and the usual litany of cries popped out from the audience.

"Freebird!"

"Nirvana!"

After one person cried "Shakira!" Rodrigo played a few bars from "Hips Don't Lie." But the best cover of the night was when they dipped their toes into "Wish You Were Here" by Pink Floyd--just a few strums from the opening bar--and then decided to keep rolling with it when the crowd started to sing along. Just one of those special moments when crowd and performers meet each other halfway, the type of spontaneous thing that can only happen live. They also riffed on Dave Brubeck's "Take Five," and I look forward to the day when they put out an entire album of covers.

After a few songs, early in the concert, Rodrigo took the mike and, in halting English, said, "I want to ask a question." He hesitated. And then he asked us if wanted to stay seated or to stand. They weren't used to performing in front of a seated audience, he said. "Do you want to stay seated..." Silence. "...or do you want to stand?" Everyone cheered and stood up, and with that, a charge arced through the crowd.

Few musical groups rally the crowd to their support with such unanimity. Even their constant use of the Irish-inflected "fookin" (picked up when they were playing on the streets of Ireland, just before they landed their first record deal) failed to deter the elderly woman seated in front of me, who danced a jig like there was no tomorrow. The music just takes you there.

One thing that always leaps off the stage at their show is the sound engineering. Two acoustic guitars sound like an entire band under the skilled hand of their sound engineering team. A revelation at this show was the video projected on a white sheet behind them featuring live black and white video footage of the two of them on stage, cut together in time with the music. I couldn't see the cameras from my seat, but I'm guessing they were portable wide-angle cams attached to the guitar or mic stands.

The Mexican guitar duo are touring the world for most of the remainder of 2007, so do yourself a favor and get out to see them. They just set down in LA after rocking a 15,000 person crowd at the Glastonbury Festival, and prior to that they've blown folks away at Coachella and Bonnaroo, among others.

After that, I rushed back down to the Bridge to catch another sequel of sorts, Live Free or Die Hard. Hollywood has been in sequel mode for years and years now, but I'm hard-pressed to recall another period beyond the last year in which they've deluged us with more (off the top of my head: Rocky Balboa, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, Shrek the Third, Evan Almighty, Spiderman 3, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Ocean's Thirteen, Hostel II, Saw 29). And I haven't seen one yet that caused me to feel much of anything (I haven't seen them all, but perhaps that's for the best).

Tory, Phil, Jen and I were the only ones in our theater cackling our asses off at the sheer risibility of Live Free or Die Hard. In its sheer earnest absurdity it did offer that pleasure along with the usual communal joy of the company of opening night fanatics. As a night out I got my money's worth but

Timothy Olyphant, as the chief villain, gives an epically terrible performance. Just mind-blowingly awful. The grand tradition of Die Hard was the bombastic bad guy, from Alan Rickman to Jeremy Irons. Olyphant is like a constipated Ryan Seacrest for the duration of the movie. I've long considered trying out season one of Deadwood, but it's tough to get over the fact that Olyphant is one of the leads. Then again, we did live through 8 seasons of Robert Iler on The Sopranos, so perhaps you can carry a weak link with a strong ensemble.

A lot of people like to attribute my distaste for a movie like this to being a film snob, but that's far from the truth. I got my start in movies watching popcorn movies, and I'm still the guy who waits in line to get opening night seats to take a big group of friends with me to see the big blockbusters at midnight. I loved Die Hard and think Bruce Willis is quite underrated.

But too many sequels are just excuses for us to hang out with characters again. They've long since halted in any development, and these sequels are excuses for us to see them repeat a song and dance. Story and drama are decoration, draped on a spine of action sequences. I'm not so naive as to think studios would ever initiate plans for blockbuster sequels by focusing on character, but I don't think it has to be an afterthought, either. A character that undergoes some sort of arc during a movie--that's the basis for compelling drama, especially in movies like this where we all know the ending going in.

John McClane is the same guy in Live Free or Die Hard that he's been since the first movie ended. His character doesn't evolve in this movie; he arrives fully-formed and runs around while lots of gear explodes around him. What's worse is that the quasi-realism of the action set pieces in earlier Die Hard movies has been replaced by some of the most preposterous action sequences I've ever seen. Here is where I may spoil an action sequence or two, but maybe not since half of them are in the trailer. Anyway, consider that your spoiler warning.

In one sequence, the bad guys are in a helicopter chasing Willis and his sidekick, the Mac guy Justin Long. Though they are right next to the car firing away with a machine gun, they can't hit anything. It's just shoddy blocking. Then Bruce Willis takes out a fire hydrant and the resulting spray knocks the shooter out of the helicopter. A bit ludicrous, but funny as a sight gag. Willis then drives into one of the NYC tunnels to avoid the helicopter, so Olyphant orders his hacker team to direct traffic into the tunnel from both ends, and then he kills the lights in the tunnel while the cars are driving towards each other. For some reason, none of the drivers think to turn on their headlights so they all crash into each other and nearly crush Willis and Long, the monkeys in the middle. Angered, Willis drives his car into a tollbooth which somehow causes the car to launch up and out into the the hovering helicopter.

In the most ridiculous sequence, though, Olyphant orders an F-35 military jet to take out Willis, who's driving a semi. Thanks to Wikipedia I've learned that the F-35 featured in the movie is of the short-takeoff and vertical-landing (STOVL) variation, and it can fly under highways and hover over the street like a Harrier. The entire sequence culminates with Willis somehow hanging off the back wing of the airplane as it spirals out of control and...well, I won't continue.

As a form of disposable inanity, perhaps it delivers what lots of audience members want, and so part of the responsibility lies with the audience. In the bathroom after the show, a couple guys were high fiving and saying it was the best movie they'd seen all summer. Just now I perused the Metacritic page for the movie and was shocked to see how many critics stamped it with approval. Maybe the critics really have given up and realized they have no effect on popular fare like this. Or maybe I am that film snob.

Technorati Tags: concert, film, movies, music

Links

Orson Welles last movie was the 1986 animated Transformers movie, voicing the planet moon Unicron.

The iPhone rate plans: $59.99 for 450 minutes, $79.99 for 900 minutes, and $99.99 for 1350 minutes, all with unlimited data.

Technorati Tags: apple, film, gadgets, mobile, movies, iPhone

Chacun Son Cinema

Cool DVD for those with region-free players or a region 2 player: Chacun Son Cinema, a series of 32 3-minute films directed by some of the world's premier auteurs to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival. Sadly, the 33rd short, "World Cinema," by the Coen Brothers, is not on the DVD. My copy arrived today, though sadly my region-free DVD player has died so I have to watch it on my computer. I hate region coding.

Here's a listing of the shorts and directors on the DVD (as seen over at Filmbrain):

OPEN-AIR CINEMA- Raymond Depardon
ONE FINE DAY- Takeshi Kitano
THREE MINUTES- Theo Angelopoulos
IN THE DARK- Andrei Konchalovsky
DIARY OF A SPECTATOR – Nanni Moretti
THE ELECTRIC PRINCESS HOUSE- Hou Hsiao-Hsien
DARKNESS- Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne
ANNA- Alejandro González Iñárritu
MOVIE NIGHT- Zhang Yimou
THE DYBBUK OF HAIFA- Amos Gitai
THE LADY BUG- Jane Campion
ARTAUD DOUBLE BILL –Atom Egoyan
THE FOUNDARY- Aki Kaurismäki
UPSURGE –Olivier Assayas
47 YEARS LATER- Youssef Chahine
IT’S A DREAM- Tsai Ming-Ling
OCCUPATIONS- Lars Von Trier
THE GIFT- Raul Ruiz
THE CINEMA AROUND THE CORNER- Claude Lelouch
FIRST KISS- Gus Van Sant
CINEMA EROTIQUE- Roman Polanski
NO TRANSLATION NEEDED- Michael Cimino
AT THE SUICIDE OF THE LAST JEW IN THE WORLD IN THE LAST CINEMA IN
THE WORLD David Cronenberg
I TRAVELLED 9000 KM TO GIVE IT TO YOU –Wong Kar Wai
WHERE IS MY ROMEO? –Abbas Kiarostami
THE LAST DATING SHOW- Billie August
IRTEBAK – Elia Suleiman
SOLE MEETING –Manoel De Oliveira
5.557 MILES FROM CANNES
WAR IN PEACE –Wim Wenders
ZHANXIOU VILLAGE- Chen Kaige
HAPPY ENDING- Ken Loach

Technorati Tags: cannes, dvd, film, movies

Soderbergh next big name to shoot the Red

I've been at each day of Cinegear Expo this weekend. Friday I was able to convince a few classmates to join me, and the first seminar we attended was the Red seminar where we watched the short that Peter Jackson shot on the Red, a WWI pic titled "Crossing the Line." More on that later, but the latest interesting news is that in addition to being used on the Angelina Jolie-Morgan Freeman movie Wanted, the Red will be used to shoot Steven Soderbergh's movies The Argentine and Guerilla.

Getting such huge names to test and sign off on their cameras is a huge win for Red. Here's a pic of the Red they had at Cinegear:

Technorati Tags: camera, cinematography, filmmaking, gadgets, movies, Red

Video 3-pack

I got a crush on Obama (Youtube video) - goodness gracious.

How to wash your filthy keyboard? Put it through the dishwasher (Quicktime). Looks light it actually works with the right types of keyboards.

A quick tease of a trailer for Pixar's next animated movie Wall-E (next movie after Ratatouille, that is).

Technorati Tags: film, howto, movies, obama, pixar, animation, trailer, video, youtube

Don't

One of my favorite movies, Don't Look Now, is being remade. Aarrgghh.

Technorati Tags: film, movies

2:1

Interesting interview with Storaro (Vittoria, of course) in which he advocates for standardizing on the Univisium system and its aspect ratio of 2:1. He's not a fan of 2.35:1. He also believes in standardizing on PAL's framerate of 25.

Technorati Tags: cinematography, film, filmmaking, movies

Curious

This is a trailer that draws you in. I hope I can avoid finding out any more about the plot, but in this day and age, that's a tall order.

Technorati Tags: film, movies, trailer

2 steps past, 1 step future, or vice versa

The Vladmaster is a movie told through a handmade View-Master reel. Portland-based artist Vladimir photographs dioramas to recreate famous stories. The View-Master was one of my favorite childhood toys. I wish I still had my old red viewer. The View-Master Ultimate Reel List is the IMDb of View-Master reels.

The new Apple iPhone ads. The iPhone drops Jun. 29. I want one, but my last experience with AT&T (or Cingular, as it was then) was awful. Hmmm.

A still from Michel Gondry's new movie Be Kind Rewind. Jack Black stars as Jerry, who accidentally becomes magnetized, erasing all the tapes in the video store where his best friend Mike works (Mike is played by Mos Def). To retain the store's best customer, an old lady who might be going cuckoo, Jerry and Mike decide to re-enact and film every movie she chooses to rent. Where does Gondry come up with all those wonderful concepts?

Technorati Tags: Apple, film, gadgets, movies, phone, gondry, toys

Memorial Day weekend

I am really sick: eyes watering, nose running, throat burning. My sinuses and chest are so congested I feel like I'm breathing through one of those coffee straws. A lot of people at school seem to be sick; one professor just canceled a class tomorrow morning. It's odd to see a cold seize hold around school when the weather is 70 degrees and sunny every day.

I have not slept as much or as regularly this quarter, and this weekend was really packed. Perhaps the lack of sleep has compromised my immune system. Whatever the cause, here's a sick day worth's of content.

Saturday I spent as 1st AC (assistant cameraperson) on a classmate's shoot. Since this was a reshoot, we had the luxury of a 2nd AC, and it made life a lot easier. Last quarter we had one AC per shoot, and that's a lot of work for one person. You have to load and download film, take focus measurements, guard the camera, swap lenses, check the gate, clean filters, move the camera into position, swap the camera from sticks to dolly and back, pull focus, keep a camera log, set the T-stop on the lens, run a stopwatch on shots to calculate how much film was run and how much is left, mark and clap the slate, write camera reports, and more. It's a very technical position, but I enjoy it. The day started early, with a 5AM alarm buzzing in my ear. When I got home at the end of the day, I told myself I'd take a quick nap and then head out to meet up with a few friends. I woke up at 5AM the next morning.

Sunday was spent at a wedding in Laguna Beach. I know nothing about the city other than what I'd seen on a few episodes of that MTV show of the same name (that show was shot beautifully on Panasonic Varicams, I believe). I'm not sure the city had any say in the matter, but that show forever cemented that town's image among most of America as the place where wealthy, self-absorbed teenagers ply their Machiavellian schemes to climb the social ladder.

Monday, on a last-minute suggestion from Mark, I attended the last day of the Star Wars convention at the LA convention center (the official title of the event was Star Wars Celebration IV). I consider myself a moderate Star Wars fans (enjoyed eps IV-VI, watched eps I-III out of devotion), but next to the types of fanatics you'd imagine at a gathering like this, I felt like Paris Hilton at a Mensa meeting.

At one T-shirt booth I asked a vendor if she had a particular Boba Fett t-shirt in large.

"Which one?" she barked.

"The second one from the right, top row?" I replied, taken aback by her hostile demeanor. She looked over her shoulder and then back down at some book she was reading.

"That's Jango Fett," she muttered, and paid me no further attention. Oops.

This being the last day of the convention, the schedule was very light on Lucasfilm-generated content. Most things to see were created by vendors or fans, from droids, action figures, and models to fan films and costumes. One room featured dozens of decorated Darth Vader helmets, much like the ubiquitous cows that appeared on city sidewalks a few years back. Darth as Lady Liberty? Or the Unabomber?

At another booth, as I looked over some artwork, a boy of about 8 or 9 years old walked behind me holding a yoda lightsaber, one of the ones that lights up and makes lightsaber sounds when swung through the air. A booth clerk, in his early forties, stopped the boy.

"The yoda lightsaber?" nodded the man in approval. "Strong choice."

"It's my first one," said the boy, beaming.

"That one's very light," the man explained. "Good for people who use a one-handed fighting technique, like me." He proceeded to demonstrate with some shadow-fencing, but one of his parries smacked me in the back of my head.

"Sorry, man," he said.

"Easy there, Jedi," I said, rubbing my head.

I watched a couple of fan films in the screening room. The ones I saw were all 2005 award winners. "One Season More" is an animated short that imagines Luke Skywalker's yearning to leave Tatooine as a musical number. It has the suitable mix of love and satire that characterizes the best of fan homages. It's one portion of Star Wars The Musical. This year's winners and entries can be seen at AtomFilms.

No plans for a new Star Wars movie were unveiled, but one welcome bit of news was the announcement of a new CG series from Lucasfilm Animation: The Clone Wars. Here's a sneak peek. I really enjoyed the last animated series, Star Wars - Clone Wars, Vol. 1 and Star Wars - Clone Wars, Vol. 2. This looks to be in that style.

Tuesday morning and early afternoon I spent at Disneyland with Alan, Sharon, and my two nephews Ryan and Evan. What do Disney and Lucas have in common? Both appropriated stories and built entertainment empires. Lucas took strands of Japanese film and set them in another universe (Lucas was originally supposed to direct Apocalypse Now, and Star Wars is his version of that movie, about how a small force--the Rebels--can overcome a larger force--the Empire--through sheer force of will). Disney took Grimm's fairy tales, which were indeed grim, and gave them happier endings and an animated life.

Since the last time I visited Disneyland, over 10 years ago, the most apparent change is that the price of admission has more than doubled. But seeing it all through my nephew Ryan's eyes helped me to appreciate just how enduring a piece of culture Disney built. He was so excited he was a live wire--no nap needed on this day.

While sitting with my nephew on It's A Small World, he almost jumped out of the boat he was so pumped up. That ride doesn't look like it's been updated one bit since my parents took me on it when I was a child (I thought perhaps we'd see young children in India answering customer service phones, or Chinese kids sewing Nikes, but the ride retains its idyllic view of the world), and yet it still kills with youngsters.

Something I wondered while wandering the park: what happened to the Mickey Mouse Club? Why isn't that show still running? Look at some of the talent that came out of the sixth and seventh seasons of the most recent incarnation of the show, which ended in 1994: Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Justin Timberlake, and Ryan Gosling. That's the pop music equivalent of the 2003 NBA Draft that produced Lebron James, Carmelo Anthony, Dwayne Wade, and Chris Bosh, among others. The Mickey Mouse Club was so competitive that Jessica Simpson and Matt Damon failed to make the cut. I'm not sure why they ceded that space to the likes of American Idol. If Disney doesn't bring back that show, I hope they've at least retained the services of the casting director/talent scout.

------------------------------------

I miss walking the streets of NYC. Google Maps Street View allows me to revisit old favorites. Here's my old apartment.

Microsoft Surface, coming Winter 2007, is one of the early products pointing towards the gesture-manipulated touchscreen interface seen in Minority Report.

An upcoming June software upgrade will allow it you to watch YouTube videos on the AppleTV.

The 2007 Cannes Film Festival winners. From what I've heard from folks who attended, the lineup of movies was very strong this year.

Christopher Nolan is going to shoot some of The Dark Knight in IMAX format. Most features that have been projected in IMAX theatres are simply 35mm films blown up. Since they weren't framed for the IMAX theater, I find many scenes incomprehensible unless you're sitting in the back row. Audiences viewing The Dark Knight at an IMAX theater will see the movie switch aspect ratios from whatever the 35mm aspect ratio is to 1.43 to 1 when the IMAX scenes come on screen.

Based on Gallup Polls, America is willing to elect a black or a woman for president, but if you're gay or an atheist (or both, I presume) your time has not come.

Darren Aronofsky disses the DVD for his movie The Fountain. It doesn't have a commentary, but Aronofsky has said he recorded one himself and will post it online soon so you can listen to it while watching the movie.

as many of you can tell it is light on the extras as compared to my previous dvd releases.

everything at the studio was a struggle.
for instance: they didn't want to do a commentary track cause they felt that it wouldn't help sales.
i didn't have it in me to fight anymore.
whatever.

so:
niko, my friend who did the doc on the dvd came up with a novel idea.
we recorded a commentary track ourselves.
we're gonna post it on a site soon, http coming soon.
you can play it and watch the flick and hopefully you'll enjoy it.

Technorati Tags: Apple, cannes, dvd, film, filmmaking, filmschool, microsoft, movies, music, politics, disney, starwars, tech, tv, video, youtube

GIF (Good it's Friday)

Ivan Basso confessed to "attempted doping," and now Bjarne Riis admits that he used EPO during years that include his 1996 Tour de France win. Eric Zabel and Rolf Aldag, who rode for Telekom during the Riis and Ullrich Tour de France wins in the 90's, also fessed up to EPO use. So did Telekom rider Bert Dietz. And Udo Bölts, and Christian Henn. Cycling is detoxing, and it's necessary, though not pretty.

On this the weekend of the Star Wars convention here in LA, psychiatrists have diagnosed Anakin Skywalker, later Darth Vader, of having a personality disorder. It sounds so obvious as to be an Onion headline, but apparently it's not. If you read me this line, I'd swear it was satire:

The diagnosis came to [psychiatrist Eric] Bui, a Star Wars fan, as he watched the series. "I thought to myself, 'That guy is crazy.' But he's not crazy. He's borderline."

Speaking of Star Wars, there's a rumor going around that George Lucas will announce a new Star Wars movie tomorrow at the convention (Saturday).

New ride at the Kennedy Space Center simulates 17,500 mph liftoff of a Space Shuttle. Now that sounds cool.

90% of handset owners believe iPhone is better than their current phone. That's when you know your marketing and brand are strong, when your product hasn't even reached consumers and yet they're crowning it the champ.

Michel Gondry directs Natalie Portman in the video for Paul McCartney's "Dance Tonight." Maybe not as conceptually brilliant as his other videos, but he still is able to pull off his effects in camera. Here's another Michel Gondry video, for Cibo Matto's "Sugar Water," which is built around a supremely clever conceit.

Someday our kids will laugh at us for ever having been impressed with regular old HD resolution. By then they'll be watching Ultra HD, with a resolution of 7680 x 4320 (16X sharper than HDTV), shot on cameras that can capture 4000 fps.

Technorati Tags: Apple, cycling, doping, drugs, gadgets, michelgondry, movies, music, psychiatry, HD, sports, starwars, tech, theonion, video, youtube

The river

I'm still recovering from a weekend in Vegas for Betina's wedding. Good times, though exhausting. If I ever stayed there for more than a weekend I'd surely end up like Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas. Two cruel and stone-faced blackjack dealers nearly made it a costly weekend, but I managed to fight back valiantly at a poker table and a blackjack table, finally surfacing into the black sometime around 4am on Sunday morning.

Get your order in now for the 2005 vintage of Marilyn Merlot.

A list of the world's fastest growing religions. High birthrates in countries where a religion dominates are critical for growing the religion.

SomeEcards offers e-cards for the modern, sardonic sensibility. I'll definitely be sending some of these in the near future (some are funny but borderline NSFW).

Steampunk Star Wars desktops.

RetailMeNot collects coupons for online shopping sites. They offer a Firefox extension that notifies you when there's a coupon for the online shopping site you're visiting (there's also a Dashboard widget).

Tim Allen to star in the mixed martial arts drama Redbelt which David Mamet wrote and will direct. Huh?

Technorati Tags: desktop, film, humor, movies, coupon, religion, shopping, wallpaper, wine

DL on DV

David Lynch has found digital video religion.

Once you start working in that world of DV with small, lightweight equipment and automatic focus, working with film seems so cumbersome. These 35mm film cameras are starting to look like dinosaurs to me. They're huge; they weigh tons. And you've got to move them around. There are so many things that have to be done, and it's all so slow. It kills a lot of possibilities. With DV everything is lighter; you're more mobile. It's far more fluid. You can think on your feet and catch things.

Technorati Tags: cinematography, film, filmmaking, movies, DV, video

Control

That Anton Corbijn film about Joy Division opened strong at Cannes. Can't wait to see it.

Technorati Tags: cannes, film, movies, music

Some footage from My Blueberry Nights

First trailer I've seen for My Blueberry Nights. You can find lots of stills from the movie if you click on the pic below and register on the forums at KFCCinema.com. I worry about the pic as it's WKW's first effort in English, and because the only time I saw Norah Jones in concert she seemed to withdraw under the gaze and attention of the crowd. But some directors you follow wherever they go.

Technorati Tags: film, movies, photo, trailer, video, wkw

Budget kitchen

Mark Bittman advises readers how to assemble a well-equipped kitchen for $200 to $300 by hitting up restaurant supply houses. The low prices he quotes for many kitchen tools are impressive.

The economics of The Godfather.

The Visual Effects Society announced its list of the 50 most influential visual effects films of all time (remember, the difference between visual effects and special effects are that the latter must be done on set, e.g. blowing up a car, turning on a smoke machine). The top 10:

1. Star Wars (1977)
2. Blade Runner (1982)
3. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
3. The Matrix (1999)
5. Jurassic Park (1993)
6. Tron (1982)
7. King Kong (1933)
8. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
9. Alien (1979)
10. The Abyss (1989)

RIP Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Can't say it bothers me much. The show never really grabbed me.

Technorati Tags: cooking, economics, film, howto, movies, tools, tv

What is a picture maker

From a conversation between Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg:

Scorsese: And even off the floor while you're directing sometime you can still be writing the script while you're shooting. Again, I want to ask you about the visuals. Steven is a picture maker and people wonder what a picture maker is. I once asked you about a shot in Empire of the Sun, and I'm going to ask you to tell the story. I think that kind of defines it. There's this extraordinary shot of the sun in the morning. A great big sun coming up and the last three kamikaze pilots are doing ritual sake and they are silhouetted against the sun.

Spielberg: Sometimes it pays to get to the set before your crew, which I try to do on almost every picture. I like to get there first. I walk around, and figure out what I'm going to do that day. I got to the set while it was still dark and then I saw, as it got lighter, where the sun was going to rise. It was going to rise on the very flat area, and I suddenly had this idea. Luckily, thank God, the camera truck had arrived and there was one assistant and he was taking boxes out of the truck. I had the driver and the assistant take an 800mm lens out and stick it up on an Arri, and we ran with five sandbags. I ran into the makeup hut and grabbed these four Japanese who spoke no English. I gave them swords and put hats over their heads, and dragged them out to the field, and basically said, "Do what we did yesterday. Do. Rehearse." I took a sake cup: "And do this [Spielberg mimicked the sake ritual] and bow." I ran back to the camera, which was about an eighth of a mile away. It was awful — this was before we had little motorcycles and golf carts — you just had to run. They were having trouble getting the magazine loaded because the guy who took the camera off the truck was not a loader, so we were both together loading the camera. I had never loaded an Arri before and you have to load it properly. By this time, the sun is five feet off the ground, and we're not going to make it in time. Finally, we closed the gate. I do an eye focus, turn on the camera, and scream as loud as I can, "DO IT LIKE YESTERDAY." It was like kismet, like magic, just where the sun needed to be. We filled the entire frame with the 800mm long lens. We were able to get that moment.

Also from the same interview:

Spielberg: Well, when I was about 15 years old, I was living in Phoenix, Arizona. My second cousin had a friend who had a friend who was the creator of Hogan's Heroes. [Through this connection, Spielberg visited the man at his office.] This guy said, "Well, do you want to be a picture maker?" and I said, "Yes," and he said, "I'm in television. You want to talk to the guy next door. That's the guy you should talk to. It's John Ford." I said, "You have John Ford next door?" He said, "Yeah, his secretary's really nice." So I went next door, and the secretary said, "Well, Mr. Ford's at lunch, but he'll be back any minute now, so why don't you have a seat and wait." So we waited and we talked, and I told her about my little 8mm movies I was making back in Phoenix, Arizona, and all of a sudden the door opens and a man in a complete safari outfit, with a patch over his eye, with a cigar between his fingers comes walking into the room. She says, "Mr. Ford will see you for a couple of minutes." So I walk into the room and he is sitting there with his big cowboy boots on his desk. It reminded me of the scene in It's a Wonderful Life when Jimmy Stewart sits across from Mr. Potter. Mr. Potter purposely has the chair across from him so Jimmy Stewart looked like one of the Little Rascals once he sat in the seat, and shrank down. I did the same thing. Ford said to me, "So you want to be a picture maker?" And I said, "Yes." "What have you done so far?" I said I was 15 years old, and I said, "I've made some films in 8mm and I go to school in Phoenix, Arizona." "Well, what do you know about picture making?" "What do you know about pictures?" "What do you know about art?" "You've got to know about art." I guess I was quiet. "Well, get up and look around the room. What do you see on the walls there?" I said, "Art." "Go to the first painting." And, by the way, these were all Western paintings, probably Russells, Remingtons, but I didn't know those names then.

Director John Ford (center) with actors Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne on the set of "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" - click image for larger view and details.

He said, "Tell me what you see?" I said, "Well, there's a cowboy sitting on a horse—" He said, "No, no, no, no, where is the horizon?" I said, "Well, the horizon is just a couple of inches above the bottom of the picture." He said, "OK. Go to the next painting, what do you see in that painting?" I said, "There's a lot of Indians on horseback—" "No, no, where's the horizon?" "Well, the horizon's at the very top of the painting?" "Go to the next painting. What do you see there?" I said, "There's no horizon at all." He said, "No, no, what objects are in the painting?" I said, "There's an Indian and a cowboy." And then, still sitting in his chair, he turns around, he said, "Look, kid, when the day comes in your life when you can tell that a shot is great when the horizon is at the very bottom of the frame with all that sky, or the horizon is at the very top of the frame with all that ground, and when you can recognize the fact when the horizon goes directly in the center of the frame, it's a lousy painting, when you recognize that, you might have a future in the picture business."

Technorati Tags: film, filmmaking, movies, scorsese, spielberg

The Golden Age

Trailer for the sequel to Elizabeth. Certainly a study in contrasts, between the method acting of Cate Blanchett and the decidedly non-method style of Clive Owen.

Technorati Tags: film, movies, trailer

My Blueberry Nights poster

(Image removed per request from the owner)

Technorati Tags: film, movies, poster

Nibble

One of the things about LA bike culture is that cruisers predominate. Going down the beach boardwalk on your tricked out road bike doesn't impress anyone. Perhaps "The Ride" by Ellsworth is a suitable compromise: a high-tech cruiser. What a beauty, at least until someone knocks you off of it and steals it.

A whole lotta free MP3s over at WuTangCorp.com, home of the Wu-Tang Clan & Killa Beez.

Weng Weng, the 2' 9" Philippine dynamo, Agent Double 0, lives on thanks to YouTube. I think I'm impressed that someone actually took the time to write that rap.

Technorati Tags: bike, cycling, gadgets, LA, music, mp3, video, youtube

Glimpses of the short Peter Jackson shot on the Red prototypes

Here are some 4K res JPEGs from the short. Here's a short snippet of the short at 1K res (you'll probably have to try one of the mirrors at this point). It's such a short clip that it's hard to draw any sweeping conclusions, but that little bit is pretty sweet. In particular, it has a film-like DOF (Jackson's DP shot using Cooke S4 primes and Angenieux Primo zooms).

Here are some war stories from the shoot itself courtesy of HD For Indies. At this point, I'd sell my car to get one of these Reds, but I don't think that would be enough (literally!).

Technorati Tags: camcorder, camera, cinematography, filmmaking, gadgets, movies, Red

The rule of "four to fourteen"

From an interview with Renaissance man and film editor extraordinaire Walter Murch:

BLDGBLOG: When you’re actually editing a film, do you ever become aware of this kind of underlying structure, or architecture, amongst the scenes?

Murch: There are little hints of underlying cinematic structures now and then. For instance: to make a convincing action sequence requires, on average, fourteen different camera angles a minute. I don’t mean fourteen cuts – you can have many more than fourteen cuts per minute – but fourteen new views. Let’s say there is a one-minute action scene with thirty cuts, so that the average length of each is two seconds – but, of those thirty cuts, sixteen of them will be repeats of a previous camera angle.

Now what you have to keep in mind is that the perceiving brain reacts differently to completely new visual information than it does to something it has seen before. In the second case, there is already a familiar template into which the information can be placed, so it can be taken in faster and more readily.

So with fourteen “untemplated” angles a minute, a well-shot action sequence will feel thrilling and yet still comprehensible: just on the edge of chaos, which is how action feels if you are in the middle of it. If it’s less than fourteen, the audience will feel like something is lacking, and they’ll disengage; if it’s more than fourteen, so much new information is being thrown at the audience that they’ll also disengage, though for different reasons.

At the other end of the spectrum, dialogue scenes seem to need an average of four new camera angles a minute. Less than that, and the scene will seem flat and perfunctory; more than that, and it will be hard for the audience to concentrate on the performances and the meaning of the dialogue: the visual style will get in the way of the verbal content and the subtleties of the actors’ performances.

This rule of “four to fourteen” seems to hold across all kinds of films and different styles and periods of filmmaking.

Also from the same interview:

BLDGBLOG: As far as an acoustically rich space goes, is there a specific place – or a building or a landscape – where you like to record sounds for use in a film? How does the actual space affect the sounds you can record in it?

Murch: Well, first of all, I record a sound without any atmospheric envelope around it. I then take that recorded sound and find an acoustic space that is as close as possible to the acoustical space in the film; I play the sound in that space; and I record the resulting reverberation on another device, placed to extract the maximum reverberation. Then, in the final mix, I have the ability to blend those two sounds: the “dry” sound itself, alongside a sound which is almost all reverberation.

In musical terms, you could say it’s like the relationship between the string of the violin and the reverberation and amplification added by the body of the violin itself.

By first separating and then balancing those two elements together, I can custom-fit what seems to be the right dimension of sound implied by the space on screen. If you have too much reverb, and you don’t hear enough of the original sound itself, the result is too diffuse and ethereal to be realistic – but sometimes that lack of realism is exactly what you want. On the other hand, if you play proportionately too much of the dry sound, it doesn’t seem to connect to the space you’re looking at. But maybe that’s exactly what you want – that kind of dislocation. It all depends on the dramatic intent of the moment. But these two elements give you the handles to control the final result.

Over the last forty years, this time-consuming technique of physically “worldizing” the sound has been gradually replaced by increasingly sophisticated digital techniques, though the principle is the same. Now we can record a digital “snapshot” of a real acoustic space, using tone bursts and frequency sweeps, and then impose the resulting parameters on any sound we want, back in the studio.

Even if Murch weren't a famous editor, he'd be one interesting dude.

Technorati Tags: editing, film, filmmaking, movies

The Bourne Ultimatum trailer

Yahoo snags the early online screening rights to The Bourne Ultimatum trailer. Half of it is recycled footage from the old movies.

I read the books a long time ago (junior high?), and based on my admittedly hazy memory of the books, the movies have completely gone off on their own storyline. What happened to Carlos the Jackal?

Technorati Tags: film, movies, trailer

WKW, this time in English

Wong Kar Wai's My Blueberry Nights will open Cannes.

Technorati Tags: film, movies, cannes, wkw

Updates from the Apple Keynote event at NAB

Updates from today's Apple event at NAB thanks to Engadget. And the relevant info is at Apple's website now, too.

Final Cut Studio 2 includes Final Cut Pro 6, Motion 3, Soundtrack Pro 2, Color, Compressor 3, and DVD Studio Pro 4.

There's also a marketing video talking about how to use FCP6 with the Red camera, and here's the NAB reel highlighting content edited by FCP.

I wish I had time to sift through all the details today, but I have a lot of work to do for class today, using, what do you know, FCP.

Technorati Tags: Apple, filmmaking, finalcutpro, hd, Mac, editing, software, video

Trying to laugh through the tears

Next year, I'm mailing my taxes via UPS or Fedex. Still fuming and on hold waiting for various financial institutions to answer their customer service lines and resend my 1099's. Argh. But through the tears, perhaps a few nuggets of laughter...

The Apple iRack.

Google Maps directions for New York, NY to Paris, France...skip ahead to step 23 (via a Sports Guy reader)

Also funny, from the same Sports Guy column, this box score from the San Antonio-Phoenix NBA game. Skip down to Robert Horry's line for the Spurs.

Ryanair CEO vows to offer flights from the U.S. to the UK for less than $10.30. You'd probably pay more because Ryanair charges for all sorts of basics a la carte, but still.

Some progress today in the fight against global warming.

Jackie and Jet team up (with an assist from Yuen Woo Ping). It would have been a dream of a pairing if they two of them were about 10 to 15 years younger, but we'll take what we can get. Meanwhile, the Weinstein Co. could use some wire work.

Tiger Woods Reveals He Is Zach Johnson.

Technorati Tags: Apple, basketball, google, humor, movies, NBA, golf, sports, theonion, travel

Killer

Caught Killer of Sheep with some of my classmates tonight. Charles Burnett's 1977 MFA Thesis Film at UCLA was shot in Watts on weekends and could not be distributed due to the cost of music licensing. Ross Lipman of the UCLA Film & Television Archive restored the movie and transferred it to 35mm from 16mm, Steven Soderbergh put up half of the $150,000 to secure the music rights, and the movie is making a limited tour of the country. It is a stunning black and white elegy to life in the ghetto, and that's before considering that it was shot as a film school thesis.

Thank goodness they secured the music rights (to all except "Unforgettable" by Dinah Washington for the last scene of the movie, but it's replaced by an encore performance of "This Bitter Earth" which is just as gorgeous); the soundtrack is amazing.

Technorati Tags: film, filmmaking, filmschool, movies

Fun with movies

Fun with movies is back with the fourth in its "identify the movie based on one frame" puzzles. Good times.

Technorati Tags: film, movies, puzzle

Does a keyboard and an internet connection a film critic make?

Ronald Bergan wrote a post at the Guardian titled "What every film critic must know."

...it seems that film, the most accessible and popular art form, is just not treated on the same level or with the same degree of seriousness as the other arts.

Unfortunately, this has led to a deterioration in film criticism, which has become primarily descriptive, anecdotal and subjectively evaluative rather than analytical. Most reviewers deal primarily with the content of a film - anybody can tell you what a film is about - rather than the style, because they do not have the necessary knowledge to do so.

He goes on to list what he believes every film critic should know (difference between a fill a key light, e.g.), have read (Eisenstein's The Film Sense, for one), or seen (Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du Cinéma). The good thing is, I should be qualified to be a film critic by the time I graduate film school if other avenues don't work out. The comments on Bergan's post are, as expected, heated. I think his requirements are too extensive, but I tend to agree with him more than I disagree.

I don't read as much film criticism as I once did. One reason is that few critics write well enough that their reviews are enjoyable to read as just pieces of writing. Another reason is what Bergan notes about reviews becoming too descriptive. A third reason is that it's difficult to find a reviewer whose tastes match well enough with your own that their opinions can serve as positive leading indicators (though a great reviewer can educate even when you disagree with them). I also enjoy seeing movies fresh, and I'm not just talking about spoiler-free. Having someone's opinion in my brain can subconsciously push me towards agreement or disagreement even before I've seen the movie.

I also don't watch as many movies in theaters as I used to. With so many classic movies now available on DVD, there's greater competition for my entertainment consumption, and I've seen so many movies that I'm suffering from severe Hollywood fatigue.

One worthwhile type of film criticism, to me, is the review that articulates why I feel a certain way about a movie. Some of Bergan's requirements about film stylistic techniques are helpful in this regard, but Pauline Kael provided many of those mini epiphanies and I never thought of her as a very technical film critic. Much of film influences us subconsciously, but having stylistic choices brought to my attention doesn't detract from the effect, it only enhances my appreciation of the filmmakers' craft. I took a class in fall quarter of film style in which we watched one movie a week and discussed the stylistic choices in a particular area, for example in editing or camera movement or story structure. It was one of the most instructive classes I've ever taken and made me aware of how rare good film style criticism is these days.

Lone contrarian voices in a sea of agreement catch my attention as well, though only if they're critics who seem to know something about film. I'm naturally attracted to contrarian opinions. Consensus among a broad group of critics that a movie is terrible or great will pique my curiosity; the former is usually a decent sign that a movie is, indeed, awful, while the latter seems to throw down a gauntlet. I can't help but see what the commotion is all about.

I've met perhaps five people in my life whose opinions about movies always interest me, but I can't remember who two of them are.

But despite the somewhat depressing state of film criticism, I still find it far more useful than music or book criticism. I don't understand enough about music, but most music criticism seems to me purely subjective. At the end of the day, what most matters to me when reading a review is to feel as if an intelligent mind is grappling with their reactions to a piece of art and sharing their revelations.

Technorati Tags: film, movies, criticism

In a world...

Profile of Dan LaFontaine, the voiceover actor of choice for movie trailers and TV ads. I got a laugh just listening to the intro on his website.

Technorati Tags: movies, ads, trailer, tv

Spring break's over

Auto porn: a part by part look at the new BMW M3 V8 engine. Featuring brake energy regeneration (reminds of of the old Tiger Woods/BMW joke). Hear the sound of the new V-8 during acceleration. Check out these headers, and imagine them glowing bright red. If Paris were an auto-snob, she'd say, "That's hot."

As one article noted, these images of the BMW engine headers recall Edward Weston's photo of a pepper. Compare:

Arnold Kling on the single-payer health care:

1. People are forced to buy something that they don't seem to want
2. Provided by a monopoly
3. Paid for by higher taxes

Three funny Onion sports headlines:

• Greg Oden On Final Four Appearance: 'I'm Happier Than I've Been In 30 Years'
• Confident Phil Mickelson Guarantees Tiger Woods Will Win Masters
• Tiger Woods Signs $15 Million Deal To Endorse Alex Rodriguez

TigerCinema.com seeks to be a Netflix for Asian DVDs. They state that 95% of their titles have English subtitles and that most are Region 1. Sadly, the search and browse functions are somewhat crude. No browse by country? director? actor? The browse tree for Martial Arts is only one level deep! Good luck delving through 23 pages of results. The selection is decent but not as complete as I'd expect for such a niche-focused site. It's probably not entirely their fault as there are so many editions of many Asian movies, and many editions are out of print or hard to find. They probably can't stock enough copies of certain titles. For now, there's still eBay and HKFlix and YesAsia and sites like that for those willing to buy. Many eBay DVDs are simply burned copies and will not last very long; I treat most of those as disposable copies.

One of the best channels for showing off your high definition TV is Discovery HD Theater. Perhaps the best program to air on that channel yet is Planet Earth which debuted last Sunday. Apparently viewers agreed as the show snared 12 million viewers total over 3 hours and had a 3.6 HH rating, Discovery's third highest ever. I've only watched the first episode, "Pole to Pole," and it was spectacular, all of the footage having been shot in high definition. They say porn is the killer application for any new video technology, but IMHO sports and nature shows are the most desirable types of programming for HD.

Technorati Tags: autos, bmw, cars, economics, hd, healthcare, humor, dvd, sports, theonion

Army of Shadows

Army of Shadows - Criterion Collection arrives on DVD from the Criterion Collection May 15! It's perhaps the most critically lauded film of 2006 (even though opened in 1969, it took 37 years to find a U.S. release). It was the best movie I saw last year, but I am an avowed Melville freak.

Technorati Tags: dvd, film, movies, video

Well(es) Well(es)

Warner Brothers to release The Magnificent Ambersons and Journey Into Fear on DVD in 2008? From the chat:

Q: All's well that ends Welles... My subject is Orson Welles. When will WB release The Magnificent Ambersons and/or Journey Into Fear? Or heck, any other Orson Welles related stuff? Including HD.

[WARNER]: We have finally found good elements on AMBERSONS, and plan to release both AMBERSONS and JOURNEY in 2008.

Technorati Tags: dvd, film, movies, video

Triangle

Johnnie To, Ringo Lam, and Tsui Hark will debut their movie Triangle at Cannes. The fabled triumvirate of Hong Kong action film directors shared directing duties, each helming one 30 minute segment of the film. Hark starts, Lam takes over, and To anchors, all using the same cast and crew. Movies in which each director submits a separate short haven't impressed in the past, but this is a twist on the concept and I'm excited to screen the results.

David Bordwell, a great friend to Asian cinema, was invited to visit the set. He shares this interesting tidbit about HK films: almost all of them are shot MOS (without sound), speeding up productions and unleashing the visuals. Italian movies were shot this way into the 1960's though I've never heard much about the impact of that on their productions.

Bordwell's account of his set visit is well worth a read for fans of HK cinema and Johnnie To as Bordwell has lots of great pics and notes on To's filmmaking technique.

Johnnie To's trademark visual style is a camera that's always in motion, but rarely handheld. Bordwell snagged this choice quote from Shan Ding:

The handheld camera covers 3 mistakes: Bad acting, bad set design, and bad directing.

Technorati Tags: cinematography, film, hk, movies, filmmaking

300

Before heading out of town for spring break, I took in a movie for the first time in months, a showing of 300 at the Bridge Cinema de Lux IMAX down by LAX. The ironic thing about first year film school is that you have no time to go see any movies. Every one expects film school students to be up on every movie, but I had to ask friends about what was good and out in theaters. The flick with the most buzz was the Frank Miller comic book adaptation.

For my sleep-deprived brain, it was perhaps a suitable film, the cinematic equivalent of a lava lamp. If that sounds like damnation with faint praise, well...

The visuals are occasionally beautiful, but I was driven insane by the huge number of shots that were out of focus. Perhaps the IMAX screen put the soft focus in boldface, but one of my classmates, a cinematography student, also noticed it. $60 million may be what passes for a small budget for an action film these days, but it's plenty to afford some better focus pullers. Was the soft focus a result of post-production?

An example is a close-up of Dominic West just before he introduces Lena Headey to the, uh, business end of his spear. It's a by the shoulder shot angled up at West's Theron, and his face is totally blurry. In another shot early in the movie, a close-up of Leonidas, it's his ears that are sharp in focus while his eyes are soft. I tried to look at his eyes, but the focus kept pulling my eyes away, to the edges of the frame.

The characters are as flat as the comic book pages from which they were pulled, the most depth any of them displays being the grooves demarcating each of their ab muscles. Gerard Butler has a good face, but the most he can do with a thin part is to shout his lines with the CAPS LOCK button depressed. THIS IS SPARTA! COME AND GET THEM! TONIGHT WE DINE IN HELL! TAKE FROM THEM EVERYTHING! THIS IS WHERE THEY DIE! The characters don't travel in arcs in this film; they are launched fully formed out of a cannon, weapon in hand, ready to behead the first head they encounter. Leonidas and his queen Gorgo are defiant, start to finish.

The film is tinted, not just with a gorgeous amber and red palette but also with more than a hint of racism. I don't have much of an issue with the skin color as that may be historically accurate, but the movie has no qualms with exaggeration to emphasize the filmmakers' distaste for the enemy. Xerxes is not only given heavy eyeshadow, but he has no eyelight or pupils. His voice sounds like it was run through the "drag queen reverb" filter. Xerxes' elite fighting force of Immortals wear dramatic tragedy masks that, when removed, reveal hideous, deformed faces. What race of people are they supposed to be? Xerxes' army also employs a series of horrific freaks, including a massive blob of a man with massive knives for forearms and a 10 foot beast of a man whom tosses Spartans around like rag dolls. The traitor Ephialtes is, not surprisingly, a hunchback. Meanwhile, a glimpse inside the Persian tents reveals a nonstop series of beheadings and orgies.

Many movies choose good-looking actors to play the heroes and more hideous ones to play the baddies, but a bit of nuance would have helped the story to rise above its pulp comic book roots. But none of this seems to matter much as the unique visual look of the trailer and strong word of mouth have launched it to the top of the 2007 box office list. On IMDb right now, 300 is ranked number 214 all time based on user ratings. 214 all time, ahead of movies like Rififi, The Lost Weekend, and Dial M for Murder, and just a hair behind movies like Scarface, Bonnie and Clyde, and High and Low.

What worries me is the thought that director Zack Snyder might paint his next movie project with the same black and white broad brush strokes. That project is Watchmen, and it's ten times the graphic novel that 300 was.

Technorati Tags: film, filmschool, movies, comicbooks

Dramedy

There was a TV show called Film School on cable just two or three years ago that followed some students at NYU Film School. I watched a few episodes and never got sucked in, but perhaps that was because the show followed older students instead of first years (at least I believe it did; my memory of the show is fuzzy).

My classmates and I all shot a short project last quarter using a roll of 16mm film donated by the school. This quarter, we were given four days to shoot a 6 page script. We were split into three groups, my group being, once again, the group missing a seventh member.

The one condition that remained the same from our first quarter project was that we'd be assigned one of seven crew positions on each shoot each weekend. Each person would serve as one of the following crew members exactly once: director, assistant director, director of photography, gaffer, sound mixer, boom operator (since I was in the group short one person, we had to find our own boom operators).

The key point is that first year film school directors are assigned classmates to serve as crew while second and third years usually choose their own crew members. Choosing your own crew probably leads to a more pleasant, harmonious shoot. But if you want the type of hysterical drama that makes for engaging reality TV, the type that inspires a sense of car crash rubbernecking on the part of the audience, filling them with a soothing schadenfreude, then handing a whole class of directors a random set of crew members is a brilliant concept.

Every one in the class has one position they're best at, and one position they're worst at. You find out more about a person when they serve in either of those capacities than at any other time. Students in their second or third year shared stories of tears, fistfights, and shouting matches. After a rather smooth fall quarter on our 2-minute film shoots, I thought we'd come through the winter quarter relatively unscathed. But ah, the pressure of the film set should not be underestimated.

Because we were limited to a 4 hour shoot in the fall quarter, the damage from personality clashes and skills deficiencies were minimized. But this quarter, with four days of 12 hour shoots (and more, if a director wanted to push his cast and crew into that dark forest called overtime), tiny cracks in each production team spread and grew into gaping fissures.

Movie sets foster rumor the way NYC trash attracts rats. Perhaps it's the division of a crew into departments, each with its own culture and responsibilities. I've always been intimidated by union grips. Actors, of course, have a certain exalted status on set. The whole process of making a movie creates dozens of micro-stories. Did you hear that this actor was late to set this morning? Did you know that so and so lost his mind and yelled at so and so (see Russell, David O.)? Yes, it's true, she just started crying. I think he was on something--did you see his eyes?

Our first quarter professor told us of recent studies that show that humans thrive on gossip, that it's a sociological instinct. After this quarter, I'm starting to believe him. Splitting our class into three different groups for the quarter promoted what is already a gossip-filled environment. Not only did we have stories to share from our own sets, but whenever we ran into someone from one of the other two groups on break, stories would be swapped as readily as cigarettes.

This type of environment walks a fine line between therapeutic and toxic. At Amazon we always liked to say that brands are like quick-drying cement. It's not different with a person's reputation. That first impression is a bear to shed.
I tend to shy away from drama. It's not my style to act out, and for the most part I try to keep emotion out of disagreements. But it only takes a single person to detonate a group.

And so, at the end of our second quarter of film school, it becomes clearer who will work with whom next year when each director is responsible for assembling his or her own crew. I think most people have at least a half dozen or so people they'd be willing to work for, and there's always outside help, especially in LA. 2nd year shoots should be smoother sailing, but they'll make for lousy TV.

Technorati Tags: filmschool, movies

We will make lots of money!

Another entry in the "movie trailers overflowing with choral chanting of apocalyptic nature to proclaim the movie's action-packed dramatic spectacularity." Every time one of these trailers comes up on screen I start to chuckle at the sheer marketing aggrandizement (the trailers for Spiderman 3 fall into this category also).