Hulu launches

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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:



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!



























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Alexandre Desplat

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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.





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Hilton Als on activist actors

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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

A healthcare system I could get behind

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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.




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State of the arts

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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.


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Musical notes

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




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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.


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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.


U2 (minus Larry Mullen Jr)


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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.


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2000

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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.


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Bloody Monday

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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.


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Holidays 2007 in Scottsdale

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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.


Durian


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.


Connor and Auntie Angela


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.


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Vanity Fair on Indy 4

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



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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.



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Basia Bulat covering "Someday" by The Strokes.







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Kanye West gets p0wned by Beyonce in Connect Four.



"No, it's you I love"

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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

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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

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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?

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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

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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.