Remains of the Day

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.

-----

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!