The perils of sushi

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


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

From the studio that needs no introduction

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


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






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Marathon Man

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


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


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


Pork buns at Momofuku Ssam


...and spicy rice cakes.


Spicy rice cakes at Momofuku Ssam


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


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


Tweety Bird in a cage


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


Monkey channel surfing


Monkey watching tv

Monkey watching monkey documentary


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


Rabbit applying lipstick


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


Fish sticks


...and animatronic sausages squirming around like earthworms.


Animatronic sausage in cage


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


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


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


Speed the Plow


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


James makes a pit stop

Group hug


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


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


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Red announcement

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


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


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



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


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


Jim



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


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Movie trailers on Hulu

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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.


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Fake celeb Twitter accounts

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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).


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Crawford

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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.







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The Dark Knight on Blu-Ray

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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.


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

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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:



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.

We're also still working hard on adding and replenishing our content library. Here's the season three premiere of Heroes.





Okay, I will go collapse now.


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Most anticipated fall/winter movie

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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.


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