Soderbergh on Spielberg's staging

I value the ability to stage something well because when it’s done well its pleasures are huge, and most people don’t do it well, which indicates it must not be easy to master (it’s frightening how many opportunities there are to do something wrong in a sequence or a group of scenes. Minefields EVERYWHERE. Fincher said it: there’s potentially a hundred different ways to shoot something but at the end of the day there’s really only two, and one of them is wrong). Of course understanding story, character, and performance are crucial to directing well, but I operate under the theory a movie should work with the sound off, and under that theory, staging becomes paramount (the adjective, not the studio. although their logo DOES appear on the front of this…).

So I want you to watch this movie and think only about staging, how the shots are built and laid out, what the rules of movement are, what the cutting patterns are. See if you can reproduce the thought process that resulted in these choices by asking yourself: why was each shot—whether short or long—held for that exact length of time and placed in that order? Sounds like fun, right? It actually is. To me. Oh, and I’ve removed all sound and color from the film, apart from a score designed to aid you in your quest to just study the visual staging aspect. Wait, WHAT? HOW COULD YOU DO THIS? Well, I’m not saying I’m like, ALLOWED to do this, I’m just saying this is what I do when I try to learn about staging, and this filmmaker forgot more about staging by the time he made his first feature than I know to this day (for example, no matter how fast the cuts come, you always know exactly where you are—that’s high level visual math shit).

To help us understand the virtues of staging in movies, Steven Soderbergh offers a desaturated version of Raiders of the Lost Ark with all the audio, dialogue and soundtrack, replaced by the score to The Social Network. I guess those kids who remade Raiders of the Lost Ark shot for shot chose well.

Whatever you think of Steven Spielberg's movies, it's hard to deny he is a virtuoso when it comes to blocking and staging. The camera moves and shot selection and sequencing in his movies is always lyrical, and even in a scene like the opening assault on Normandy in Saving Private Ryan, he induces the feeling of chaos while still preserving spatial clarity. Just the other weekend, I found Munich playing on cable and I stopped to watch one of the assassination scenes play out just to admire the camera in motion. A master class.

Incidentally, Soderbergh's website is as fun as his career. I first discovered it a while back when he posted a mashup of Hitchcock's Psycho with Gus Van Sant's remake, with all of the Van Sant scenes desaturated except the shower scene.

Hidden-city ticketing (UPDATED)

The NYTimes with a tip on one way to find cheaper airfares. It's called hidden-city ticketing.

Well, there’s a way to save some of that money. It’s called “hidden-city ticketing,” but before I explain how to execute the maneuver, you’re going to need some background. Passengers flying to or from airports that are dominated by a single carrier — like Memphis, Newark or Dallas/Fort Worth — pay fares 20 or 30 percent higher than at non-hub airports. The prices are even more inflated when you’re flying from a smaller city with a limited number of flights. A nonstop one-way ticket from Des Moines to Dallas/Fort Worth is $375 on American Airlines, for example — more than the $335 Delta will charge you to fly from Miami to Anchorage.

But what happens when you’re interested in flying American from Des Moines to Los Angeles, which hosts a more competitive airport? That flight is only about half the price ($186), despite its being more than double the distance. Now, here’s the trick: American flights from Des Moines to L.A. have a layover in Dallas. If you want to travel to Dallas, the best way to get a reasonable fare is to book the flight to Los Angeles instead, and simply get off the plane at Dallas.

Making a habit of this certainly won’t endear you to the airlines. Most of them — the major exception being free-spirited Southwest Airlines — expressly forbid it in their ticketing rules. But those rules don’t carry the force of law, and most travel lawyers say that their recourse is limited. They could probably preclude you from flying with them in the future, but their case for demanding penalties is weak, and the risk of detection is low if you don’t book these kinds of routes more often than a couple of times per carrier per year.

Fly Shortcut is an airfare search engine focused specifically on this pricing loophole. Has anyone tried this technique or Fly Shortcut?

UPDATE: United Airlines and Orbitz are suing the travel website Skiplagged over this loophole, and that lawsuit has put Fly Shortcut into hibernation for now as well.

Los Angeles Plays Itself

The great documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself is finally coming out on DVD October 14. I had to catch this years ago on a bootleg DVD that some cinephile friend had managed to track down. While in LA I somehow always managed to miss the annual screening at the American Cinematheque.

It's rare in this age to have things that are actually hard to find. Fans had long assumed the movie wasn't available because all the movie clips would prove impossible to clear, but apparently all the clips were covered under fair use.

Fair use in movies comes down to three questions: Is the clip illustrating an idea that the filmmaker is trying to make in the new work? Is the clip being used in a reasonably appropriate manner? And is the connection clear between the clip and the point being made? If the filmmaker can answer yes to all three questions, then, Donaldson says, it's fair use and the movie can be insured against lawsuits.

I hope this frees people up to do more film analysis online using actual clips from movies. It still feels like an underserved market, perhaps because most people don't want to go to the trouble of tracking down a DVD and ripping it, or perhaps because we're all philistines.

Clash of titans

Perhaps the greatest assemblage of human chess players ever converged on, of all places, St. Louis, for the 2014 Sinquefeld Cup. Included in the group were the world's top-ranked player Magnus Carlsen and the world number 2 Levon Aronian.

But, as Seth Stevenson writes, neither of those two players triumphed, and the run by the eventual winner might be one of the most incredible feats in chess history.

By the time Caruana won his fifth straight game to open the tournament, destroying Nakamura while playing with black, the commentators were struggling to situate this performance in historical context. Some brought up Anatoly Karpov’s run at Linares in 1994, when he won his first six tournament games (including one against a then-babyfaced Topalov) before Garry Kasparov at last slowed him down with a draw. There was also a magical Viktor Korchnoi showing in the 1968 tournament in Wijk aan Zee, Netherlands. But many think the field in St. Louis is stronger than those Karpov and Korchnoi faced. And Caruana was still going. Were he to win all 10 games without a blemish, it would likely be considered the greatest feat in the annals of tournament chess, stretching back to the 1800s.

I asked some experts to explain, to a layman, what sort of accomplishment it would be to go on a 10–0 run here. When not reaching for analogies from other sports—one grandmaster, in complete earnestness, likened it to pitching 100 straight innings of no-hit baseball—they invariably turned to Bobby Fischer. Fischer’s streak of 20 consecutive victories against grandmasters. Fischer’s mindblowing tournament performances. Fischer’s near-hallucinatory leaps of chess logic. Stumped for further superlatives with which to describe Caruana’s excellence, one chess expert resorted to the highest possible praise: Caruana, he said, was “Fischer-esque.”
 

I wish I had learned to play chess when I was younger. Now I don't even know where to begin.

I can appreciate the difficulty of most sports and also enjoy watching for them the dramatic uncertainty. However, I lack an appreciation of chess tactics and strategy, and that makes watching a chess match akin to watching some semiotically opaque performance art.