synchro studio

Puttin' it all together.

2008-06-01T12:28:00.002-04:00

The end is in sight. Ironically, I was working on the Avid used to finish No End In Sight when I took this. Incidentally, I think we still don't actually have a name for the film.

Rhyme Animal gets it's due.

2008-05-16T15:59:00.003-04:00

We knew that eventually Rhyme Animal would find it's people. And it turns out those people live in Decatur,Georgia. I am pleased to announce that Rhyme Animal won the "Best Short Film" at the 2008 Spaghetti Junction Urban Film Festival!

Winners Announced at 6th Annual Spaghetti Junction Urban Film Fest.

Decatur, GA

2008 IMPACT AWARD Recipient: Ralph Scott

Best Short: Rhyme Animal (DIRECTOR: Phil Roc CAST: MuMs, Al Thompson and Bridget Barkan)

Best Documentary: Black To Our Roots (DIRECTOR: Ras Tre Subira)

Best Feature & 2008 SJUFF Best Film: Black August Award $1,000. (DIRECTOR: Tcinque J. Sampson & Samm Styles. CAST: Gary Dourdan, Darren Bridgett, Vonetta McGee, Ezra Stanely, Tina Marie Murray, Leith M. Burk, Elizabeth Nunziato, Big' Leroy Mobley. PRODUCERS: Jan Mabry, Judd Flemming)

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=121032201

My New Favorite Blog

2008-05-02T10:00:00.003-04:00

The Giant Squid Blog

It's science! They are discovering things from a real giant squid, pretty much the only one ever recovered intact enough to be anything other than suggestive and menacing!

It has the largest eyes on earth. The lenses are as big as oranges. It is also a LADY giant squid!

Rhyme Animal Hits the Big Screen again!

2008-04-23T12:53:00.002-04:00

One night only, don't snooze!

The Fourth Annual NYC Downtown Short Film Festival

It's time I let loose the lion (apologies to q-tip)

2008-04-06T09:50:00.002-04:00

You saw it here first!

Now go forth and acquire!

Claudius' classic works

More info

a poorly debugged set of device drivers, with excellent copy protection.

2008-01-08T00:02:00.000-05:00

good lord.

Microsoft just gave me the opportunity to wait on hold, and then to talk to a stranger from india. We had a conversation composed of me reading 54 single digits to him, and then him reading a new set of 54 digits back to me. There was a script, and so we couldn't even really say anything else to each other. It was like being in the coded communications department of the army in a war we'd both been drafted for, as I'm pretty sure neither of us had any idea what the numbers meant, and we both would've rather been doing something else. I think the man on the other end of the phone may have had the worst job I've ever run across; I feel awful for him.

Who on earth ever thought that was a decent way to do anything? Somebody must have... Did Jim Alchin approve this? Dave Cutler? Brian Valentine? Bill Gates? Did any ONE of them look at this, and think, 'Yeah, that's great, let's do it that way!"?

Actually I think Dave Cutler is the only one on that list who DIDN"T have to approve this. Unbelievable. I thought it was a joke, until I realized I couldn't actually use the copy of Windows XP I paid for until I went through these shenanigans.

wow

2007-09-11T10:35:00.000-04:00

these are pretty amazing images.

i don't have a lot to say about them except that they seem to have a quality which really makes you think. it's a liminal moment, caught on film, and somehow it generates a huge sense of wonder.

i saw these first on the svn blog.

King of Kong - in theaters!

2007-08-17T12:01:00.001-04:00

The King of Kong (homepage, trailer) was one of my favorites from Tribeca this year; I think it might even be my favorite doc I've seen there yet. That of course rules out some heavy duty films like Favela Rising, and some fun ones - Crazy Legs Conti, or Zen and the Art of Competitive Eating.

King of Kong is about the world of competitive retro videogaming. Or at least it starts out being about that. In English, that means it's about people who spend a lot of time playing Pac Mac, Galaga, Space Invaders, Dig Dug, and of course...Donkey Kong. The first wave of arcade machines, early 1980s.

What you expect to see when someone tells you that a movie is about retro video games is Nerds, capital N. And you will not be disappointed in that. But it quickly becomes something much more broad, and genuinely fascinating; King of Kong is a film about identity, and the way others perceptions of us shape our own paths - or don't, depending on who we really are. It's a film about a rivalry, and how that affects the rivals. It's also a hugely funny film, and depicts some of the most interesting folks to grace the big screen in quite a while.

And the good folks at Picturehouse have seen fit to put it into a few theaters, starting today. Highly Recommended.

(Theaters near me)

take the red pill...or the trucker speed anyway.

2007-08-14T13:23:00.000-04:00

it's the family friendly part that scares me the most, but good lord - what a wierd cast!

Speed Racer Movie from the Wachowski Brothers with John Goodman, Christina Ricci, Susan Sarandon and Emile Hirsch

vroom!

the latest thing

2007-08-06T11:46:00.000-04:00

Web video!

The Lever 2000 Raise Your Game Challenge

These videos were a lot of fun to work on. They were cut in a manner very similar to a true documentary edit process - lots of interviews, lots of versions to get to the best telling of the story. But perhaps with a little bit more wiggle room around what actually happened than a doc; this is reality TV - err, internet - after all!

In spite of the delivery format being 320x240 pixels, the series was shot on DVC50, and had both a traditional NLE upres and proper mix sessions. In English, that means it got more attention to detail than a lot of broadcast TV does these days.

I'm resposible for editing all of episode 7, and a substantial part of 8, though I had excellent help from another editor, Kevin Berry, on that one.

Enjoy! Though I highly suggest letting the video download before you start watching. For some reason, no matter how fast your connection is, the player seems intent on stuttering.

Rhyme Animal News

2007-05-08T11:21:00.001-04:00

I'll be back shortly with a wrap up of some fantastic films I saw during Tribeca...but wanted to share some good news regarding one of the short films I cut last year, RHYME ANIMAL.

- A web site is up at www.rhymeanimalmovie.com

- The movie has been accepted and screened at the Cleveland International Film Festival, as well as the Newport Beach Film Festival.

- We've got some festival dates coming up in the New York area. Rhyme Animal was accepted into the Brooklyn International Film Festival (http://www.wbff.org/) and the Hoboken International Film Festival(http://www.filmfestivalnj.com/). Those two websites are a fascinating study in contrasts. I'm not sure either site has been updated with the actual screening times yet. I believe we're screening in Hoboken on Monday, June 4, 2pm but I don't know the location.

And we're also screening in a pretty cool event, the Cannes Short Film Corner. It's not the festival proper, but it's real, it's a market, and it's online as well. Check our rhymes out here:

http://shortfilmcorner.withoutabox.com/festivals/event_item.php?id=6435

And finally, please check out the trailer for the short.

Hi Rez:

http://www.synchrostudio.com/clients/rhymeanimal/rhymeanimaltrailer.mov

Lo-fi:

http://www.synchrostudio.com/clients/rhymeanimal/rhymeanimaltrailerlr.mov

That's all the news so far!

Tribeca Film Festival 2007!

2007-04-27T12:57:00.000-04:00

Wow - this is cool - I totally have a blog!

anyway, it's that time again, spring and ... movies!

Tribeca Film Festival is upon us again, and once more I have emptied my wallet and filled my calendar with strange and unknown things to see. I'll try to make a few notes along the way and let y'all know what's interesting.

The first film I saw was the world premiere of "WILL EISNER: PORTRAIT OF A SEQUENTIAL ARTIST", which was a decent doc about a fantastic subject. Eisner more or less invented what's known today as the graphic novel; that is to say using the form of a comic book but addressing themes which would not appeal to a typical 12 year old boy. Like most art, the history of it is way more complicated than you realize; apparently the comic books went through something extremely similar to the movies where without regulation of any sort they became extremely sexy and violent, and then someone came along and blamed all of America's ills on the comics. So like the Pre-Code films of the 30s, the violent comics were the subject of a congressional inquiry (enquiry?) and the industry ended up instituting a 'self-imposed' code to keep comics safe for kiddies, and boring.

Eisner was instrumental in breaking that model, first through a periodical he published called "The Spirit", and later through a series of one–off graphic novels he did addressing a variety of philosophical issues. He also wrote a couple of manuals for comic artists, and perhaps most amazingly, displayed a sound business sense his entire life, which enabled him to be a productive artist over an astonishingly long range of time and in a huge variety of circumstances.

The film also touched on how so many of the great american comic icons were created by Jews from the ghettos of New York, and the complicated relationship these artists had with Judiasm.

Overall, I really liked this film; the interviews were well done and varied, and the filmmakers had clearly tried very hard to make space for the artwork to show through. WILL EISNER: PORTRAIT OF A SEQUENTIAL ARTIST" is screening a number of times during the festival, and I'd highly recommend checking it out.

quick link - david carr on My Kid Could Paint That

2007-01-25T09:43:00.000-05:00

I've got a few posts percolating, but here's something I saw today I really liked. I've been reading a blog by one of the NY Times journalists, David Carr, about Oscar buzz, and today he wrote about a film at Sundance I'm really interested in seeing. It's an interesting post, and does a great job of showing how a blog can be useful and different for a professional writer.

The Carpetbagger Blog

shout it from the mountaintop.

2007-01-15T15:04:00.000-05:00

really cool feature on the nyt web site i never noticed before, because it's only mentioned in little tiny letters at the very bottom of the page. Alt-click (option click in mac speak) on any word in an article and a window pops up with a definition of it. Very cool. Sunni / Shia confusion? No problem.

Why was that so hard to tell me about?

24, once more.

2007-01-15T10:58:00.000-05:00

Once again, Kiefer's back to sabotage my monday nights and keep the doldrums at bay (or slow the editing on the side project du jour, more likely). In the premiere episode, they blew up a bus before the opening credits had even finished, and Jack killed a man after being on US soil for less then 20 minutes - with his TEETH. That's some fine television right there.

Last season I tried to keep track of the violence Jack perpetrated, but never published the post because I didn't fill out the data completely. Here's the info I had gathered.

"24" kill count:

7- 8am: knocks out 1 security guard/maintainence person
8- 9am:
9-10am:
10-11am:
11am-12pm: Jack killed one person (assassin).
12pm-1pm: Jack didn't kill anyone. He beat up the President's Chief of Staff (Walt) though.
1pm-2pm: Jack shot 3 people but didn't kill them. He tortured one of them.
2-3pm: Jack Bauer killed 1 person (terrorist)

The Good Fairies of New York

2007-01-08T22:05:00.000-05:00

I read another book that has fairies in it.

This one I picked up at a new little bookstore that has opened in Jersey City...I don't believe I've mentioned it here before...it's called the Imagine Atrium, and it's a great little shop. 528 Jersey Avenue, right next to the coffee shop, which is very convenient. It's a small, but fairly highly curated little book shop, with a tendency toward the spiritual which seems to be somewhat frequent out here. Not in a bad way.

But back to the fairies - the book (The Good Fairies of New York) had a foreword by Neil Gaiman, and was published on Soft Skull Press, so I figured it was worth paying attention to. I don't really know anything about the author, Martin Millar, but I will investigate him now...It turned out to be quite a lot of fun, but not in the Susanna Clarke model of fake history....more like Buckaroo Banzai or something....it's a pretty chuckle filled tale about two fairies who are into punk rock and fashion who unaccountably find themselves in New York City...in the east village, to be exact. They hang out in bars, befriend and confound the locals. They end up meeting fairies of other ethnicities, and going on dates with them and fighting quite a bit as well. The book is written in an understated but very funny way. I laughed out loud about a dozen times. If you are looking a for quick read to divert your attention from a mysterious odor that no one can explain, and know a little bit about punk rock and the geography of New York City, you could do far worse than to grab this book. Highly recommended.

hot damn. basecamp on my treo.

2006-12-05T16:17:00.000-05:00

Looks like a few weeks ago someone released a Basecamp client for several mobile platforms, including my favorite, PalmOS.

http://www.phonified.com/Tracker.html

I'm working on 2 short films, a documentary, and another documentary right now on top of my day job, and the busier I get, the more Basecamp reveals itself to be a lifesaver. This little palm app, Tracker, is ugly, seems to be written in Java, flaunts palm UI conventions and has a frankly bizarre setup procedure. It also seems to work, and right now that's where the bar is.

For anything I manage by myself, I still love you SHADOW, the best outliner anywhere...but the collaboration thing is so undeniable once you start seeing it in practice, and being locked out of basecamp by the Treo's low-end mobile browser is very frustrating. Tracker seems to work by using a server backend to grab info from Basecamp and then pass it along to the handheld; it has to re-sync a project from time to time, but it's all there - milestones, messages, comments, to-dos. Actually...alllll the to-dos are there, even completed lists, which is a bit annoying...clearly still a 1.0 product. Also, no writeboards, but it's understandable; that could be pretty tricky on a small screen.

Making Basecamp genuinely mobile is a huge step - I'd been considering picking up PalmOS development myself again to do this one - and so I am thrilled to have Tracker around. I assigned it a hot-key within 5 minutes.

Been Reading.

2006-12-05T10:39:00.000-05:00

I've noticed that when I'm busy I tend to get the most stuff done - that is, busy with work, somehow, results in lots of non-work creative and inteelektual meanderings accomplished. To wit: while working on Rhyme Animal, I read:

Collected Short Stories of Pushkin
"Anansi Boys", Neil Gaiman
Re-read "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell", Susanna Clarke
"Ladies of Grace Adieu", Susanna Clarke
"American Gods", Neil Gaiman
"Good Omens", Nail Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
"Foundation", Isaac Asimov
"Rising Tide", John Barry
"Water for Gotham", Gerard T. Koeppel

I know there are at least a couple of others I'm forgetting at the moment. It's no spectacular truism, but it does point to the fact that an agile mind depends on keeping it well fed...and don't worry, the queue of books waiting for attention is a bit broader than the previous list, so the diet is properly balanced.

I could use a good, interesting history book right now actually.

So freakin close

2006-11-16T13:55:00.000-05:00

Rhyme Animal is almost done. We are retransfered, picture locked...everything but the mix is final. It's been a long road, and I am looking to resume many frivolous activities once more, such as cooking, sleeping, writing here and generally not making my girlfriend's life quite so miserable. It's a lot of work to make a film, even a short, but I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out. We've already submitted to Sundance, Slamdance, Tribeca FF and SXSW...wish us luck...

i have been SO busy

2006-09-14T12:07:00.000-04:00

but there is actually quite a backlog of things to write about, so it's all good.

In case you've stopped appreciating the sheer insanity that the 'net provides, take a few steps back and look at it through the eyes of Douglas Adams, about twenty years ago.

http://media.ito.com/kevinmarks/hyperland.mp4

It's a film Douglas Adams made for the BBC about the future of television and the internet, though of course it wasn't called that then. Totally fascinating stuff.

Via the interesting blog of Kevin Marks, quicktime and now blog guru.

that explains it.

2006-08-11T10:44:00.000-04:00

fortune cookie:

"in order to discover who you are, first learn who everybody else is. You're what's left."

material culture and music, or boy how i miss record covers.

2006-07-22T14:44:00.000-04:00

a few years ago - basically, within about 3 days of getting one of the first iPods - I decided to put my whole cd collection into a digital jukebox. I'm no dj shadow when it comes to record collecting, but even a fellow who's just moderately interested in music can come up with a few thousand cds and records over the years without trying too hard. I made a project out of it, took a stack of cds in to work with me every day for like 6 weeks, and had my laptop convert them while I did my job.

That allowed me to file the actual disks away - such a relief, as in a crowded new york city apartment, every inch is valuable. No more time spent wondering how this disk got in that one's sleeve, or buying another copy of something because you kicked that 22$ import across the floor and scratched it all to hell. The juke ran on an iMac(blue) I purchased on ebay solely for that purpose, and basically worked really well. Before my most recent move, I carted all the CDs up to a friend's basement...people who have entire houses don't mind that sort of thing, it turns out. At the new place, not having to fill a whole bookcase with music is completely liberating.

The thing is....initally the record collection all fit on a 40 gig hard drive. Eventually, that filled up...and I swapped it for a 80 gig drive. You can't delete the stuff from the forty, though, because of course it would take forever to reload everything, so it stays in the closet as a back up. Most recently I bought a 250gig drive, and amazingly that's close to filled up now; the iTunes store and my video iPod (which I love, and use all the time) have left me with the 'need' to archive ever larger amounts of data. I started the damn jukebox project so I wouldn't have to worry about the ever-increasing space demands of my library, and of course that problem never really goes away - it just gets transferred from one medium to another. As far as I can tell, there are really on two ways of dealing with the issue. First, make it someone else's problem - and that means probably paying some sort of subscription fee forever, not a great option. Second, leapfrog the situation by getting a truly gigantic amount of storage, which is in fact another temporary solution, but hopefully more longer temporary. That's what I'm leaning towards right now.

Mary asked me to give her some CDs to listen to in the office she's working at right now. It took me back for a minute, because I sort of assume that if you've got a space where you can listen to tunes at work (not like me, a video editor), you just plug the ipod in and go. But this magazine has a stereo and CD player, so very quaint. Of course, I didn't actually have any to give her, so I picked a few things out of the jukebox, burned the CDs and used the iTunes print feature to make the cd covers. As I held the finished products in my hands, I got kind of sad. I really miss CDs...I don't think it's the CDs exactly - I know it isn't, they sucked from day one - but I definitely miss having a physical component to the music. Something to hold, and to stare at. I loved minidiscs for that reason; there were so many types, and colors, it made a record collection literally look like a bunch of candy. I buy almost all of my music online now - eMusic, Bleep (god bless you warp records) and the iTunes store all make a pretty excellent range of stuff available. But I do miss the liner notes, the variations in the cd packaging, the double colored vinyl of a stereolab LP. And it's not just music that seems to benefit from this physical accompaniment to the cultural product being disbursed. People collect movie tickets, save the program from an orchestra concert, buy a t-shirt at a rock show. It's ingrained pretty deeply into our system to have a physical object which can contain all our associations with the artwork in question. It doesn't really seem like something we can get past...I doubt I'm gonna start going to record stores twice a week again, the downloads really fit my lifestyle a bit better. But I might carry a few CDs around, just for grins, instead of my iPod.

Of course, I'll need to clear out a shelf for them.

What's goin' on...

2006-07-16T20:55:00.000-04:00

What's goin' on...

(Listening to America: A traveler rediscovers his country, by Bill Moyers. Published 1971.)

I just finished reading Bill Moyer's travelogue, published the year after I was born. I know I was born on an air force base in north north north texas, since my dad had been drafted, but for some reason I still think of the time around my birth as being relatively calm. I guess the artificial divides of the "the sixties" and "the seventies" lead to me consider that we'd landed on the moon, and everyone was sitting around drinking cocktails, marvelling at what a crazy time we'd just had, and waiting for for the next part of the show to begin.( "Apparently, they'll be inventing PUNK rock! I hear it's AWFUL!", one party-goer will say to another.)

Of course history isn't ever that neat, and reading this book 35 years later, you get an idea of how messy it can actually be. Having concluded time as Deputy Director of the Peace Corp, "special assistant" to President Johnson, and publisher of NEWSDAY, Moyers spent a summer driving through America, asking people what was on their minds, and listening. It turns out they had a lot to say. America was worried about: the long hairs, unions, school integration (bussing), the war, immigration, the trade deficit, identity politics of several varieties, race, zoning, and how one person can actually make a difference. Moyers really lets the folks he interviews speak their minds, and the book is full of minute details about each issue, but it's fascinating anyway.

What resonates throughout all of the complaints is a pervasive sense that there's something worth saving about the country. It's rather amazing to see how much differently folks interpreted the idea of patriotism; there seems to be a genuine sense of dialog between opposing factions at many of the towns that Moyers stops at along the way.

Most of what people were worried about 35 years ago is still with us today. The country was in a war that many of the citizens opposed, and most folks had a hard time explaining to each other what it's purpose was. Anytime anyone speaks about the war, it's fairly uncanny, as we spiral ever deeper into Iraq and the Israel-Lebanon crisis gets more explosive daily.

Stepping back in time, to a day when MLK was a person whose loss was freshly felt, when the nation's youth were testing their voices and being heard, and when someone could ask a question, and know how to simply listen to the answer, is a powerful experience...I finished reading this book with a much fuller picture of what America was, and is.

al gore finds out about avenue x.

2006-06-28T12:06:00.000-04:00

http://www.current.tv/studio/media/7728433

greenlight it, folks!

this is a 'making of' doc about avenue x, that was just uploaded to current.tv, al gore's experiment in community television.

al gore makes a slideshow.

2006-06-27T09:56:00.000-04:00

I haven't managed to see this yet, but here is a cool article about some of the post-production on the film. [link] The film was directed by Davis Guggenheim. I worked with Davis' dad, Charles Guggenheim back in the early part of my career. I learned an awful lot of the foundational stuff for my career by listening to him.

Bloggin' is like the opposite of life, except not really

2006-06-26T11:14:00.000-04:00

I haven't written much here lately, but not because there hasn't been a lot of interesting stuff going on. The easy assumption is that we only blog when there isn't anything else to do; but that's not really how it's ever worked for me. I find I get the most reading or whatever done whenever I'm really busy with a 'day-job'.

Anyway: this weekend. Pride Day in New York City means drag queens drinking way too much and clogging up the streets, a crowd spilling out of Henrietta Hudson until 5 in the morning. Good, clean fun. See photos in [my photo blog] for evidence of same in Jersey City.

Also, LibertyJam took place this weekend and was fun, although severely underattended. Two contrasting attitudes towards politics and performance:

Patti Smith chose to play Steely Dan's "I'm a Fool To Do Your Dirty Work", a song she admitted her band had never even tried to play together before. At the end of the song, she added "Take That, George Bush", or something close. Parliament, on the other hand, at one point unveiled a large, handwritten sign, that simply read "FUCK GEORGE", and got a much bigger round of applause from the audience. I like the work ethic on those guys.

My friends are writing books.

2006-05-13T09:04:00.000-04:00

Not only that, the books are getting picked up and now, you can buy them!

My friend June Cross has finally finished her memoir. It's called "Secret Daughter", order it here, and read June's experiences with the whole book publishing thing in her blog here. June and I worked on a couple of films together, including the orientation film for the Museum of African American History in Baltimore.

And my friend Andrew Beaujon's book on Christian rock is out as well. The snappy title is "Body Piercing Saved My Life", snag it here. He'd been thinking about this one for a while, and pitched it everywhere without much luck. Then, Bush got elected for the second time, and his phone started ringing and ringing.

Crazy for bicycles.

2006-05-08T21:03:00.000-04:00

I rode in the 5-boro bike tour over the weekend. Lots of fun; much better organized than last year. Once again, not that many folding bikes in the crowd, which surprised me; my dahon speed pro served admirably once more.

I've put some photos over on the photoblog:

[fotoblog]

TFF: loudQUIETloud

2006-05-08T20:58:00.000-04:00

I'm gonna keep posting my reviews of things from the Tribeca Film Festival even though it's over for this year. I saw a lot of great films, and I think a good few of them have a solid chance for distribution, so eventually you can see them again. Thus:

loudQUIETloud

is the title of a pretty cool documentary about the Pixies reunion tour. It's a nice mix of behind -the-scenes footage and concert footage. The concert stuff looks amazing; they shot on super-16 film and it was worth every cent.

The basic premise the film-makers ended up settling on was that this was a doc about four band members who don't actually seem to talk to each other very much. You get to spend time with each of the band members as they do whatever they do when they aren't together, which can be fascinating and hilarious. How rock is it to see the Deal girls doing needlepoint, right? The drummer, who provides the closest thing to an arc for the film, seems to have become obsessed with magic and card tricks during the interim (again, extremely rock, yes?) and basically everyone's been living life as someone who used to be in the Pixies. Guitarist Joey Santiago is seen playing with his wife as a duet to about 14 people...

There's no big finish to the film; the tour ends and no one has written any new pixies songs or booked time in a studio, despite the overwhelming acclaim and financial success of the tour. But if you're even a marginal pixies fan, you'll want to see it. The main problem, as I see it, is that Some Kind of Monster already came out...It's hard to compete with footage of Metallica in group therapy. But all in all, this was a blast, and even if it's a bit of golden oldies & halcyon days, it's great to see the people behind the amazing music. Oh, they also got Daniel Lanois to do the score.

ps: at one point, someone in the film says that Kurt Cobain said he was just trying to rip off the Pixies...on my way home from work today, U-MASS came on my ipod, and I'll be damned...right there in there chorus, is the hook to 'smells like teen spirit'. How about that.

TFF: burke and wills

2006-04-30T22:22:00.000-04:00

low budget, b&w 16 mm film about two losers passing each other, one going lower and one going higher. Lots of things I liked - open editing (not cutty at all), a few very thoughtful setups, some decent music and some decent performances from the leads. But they wall to wall used music, sometimes to good effect, but often just to fill up the empty space. also, the story had a million title cards which I didn't like very much. And frankly the story kind of doesn't make a huge amount of sense upon reflection. It was, I will say, pleasantly non-commercial. Very dark. - Robert
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I have a blog now:
www.syncretist.com/blog
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(tag:mobile)

Tribeca Film Festival is ON!

2006-04-28T19:08:00.000-04:00

The title says it all. I've got tickets for 8 screenings over eight days. I have one day off, so that means on saturday I get to see two movies. A bizarre turn of the scheduling is that both the first and last film I've got tickets for are documentaries about Turkey.

My opening film,37 uses for a dead sheep, is an inventive documentary about an ethnic group called the Kirghiz...they lived in that part of asia around afghanistan and pakistan and china where the twentieth century borders have never really had much to do with the actual lives of the people there. In recent times, (ie the turn of the 20th century) things have been particularly difficult for them, and they've ended up migrating a preposterous five times to different countries to try to eke out an living; they end up in Turkey, no longer nomads but with small homes provided by the turkish goverment, and living in a primarly kurdish part of the country.

The film's director, Ben Hopkins, had a fairly brilliant solution to a common problem with documentaries - how do you show it if there wasn't anyone around to take pictures at the time? What he did was have the actual tribesfolk re-enact significant moments in their own history. In effect, he got them to colloborate with him on making a film about themselves. It's a really neat twist on the typical form of a documentary - as he said in the Q&A - in the 70s & 80s a documentary tried really hard to pretend that the film-makers didn't exist, which is patently absurd. So, the tribesfolk help art direct, talk about what should go into the film, and show up on certain days to shoot the scenes, which are filmed on 8mm and 16mm, and end up looking fantastic. The 'historical' footage was shot with a real early cinema style - not much camera movement, silent, so many grand gestures and title cards. The doc is thus a mix of info about the tribe through interviews and voice over, behind-the-scenes of the movie-within-the-movie, and then the re-creations. It's a neat mix, and it works pretty well.

The director has a good sense of humor, and he brings out humor in the Kirghiz he interviews as well, so the film is frequently funny, as the title suggests. It turns out there was one old man interviewed who came up with about 63 uses for a dead sheep, but he wasn't as good on camera as the the elder dude with 37, so 37.

My one complaint with the piece is this...I think in his homage to the cinema of the early twenties, the director uses a lot title cards and many sections within the film separated by black. I think this really drags the film's pacing down a bit. It's a small thing, and almost certainly intentional, from hearing the director speak about his influences and ideas about documentary; my preference is still to have the film-maker knit the story together a bit more rather than handing me so many fragments.

I also think that the re-created footage could have been used to greater effect somehow; I wonder if a reprise of the whole story towards the end might have worked. The stuff just looked so great I wanted to see it all together.

If you can get the chance to see this, I'd go for it. There are two more screenings during the festival, and Ben seems like a super nice & intelligent guy. By the way, the still at the top of this blog is a shot of the guys playing polo with a dead sheep for the ball.

web - magazine - thing

2006-04-25T10:43:00.000-04:00

I've just discovered the escapist. it's a weekly magazine about the video game industry. the writing is interesting; they're really trying very hard to do a good job. Also interesting is the layout - they've decided to mimic a traditional magazine layout and not just through the articles onto a long page. Each article page/screen is layed out like a real magazine, with artwork, photos, whatever. It looks good. I just read an interesting article about some game designed by the guy who originally wrote Prince of Persia (Jordan Michner I think) ; the distributor fell apart just as the game was finished and it only shipped like 30,000 copies, but it sounded amazing. I grabbed it off of amazon for about $20, and will have a report on it eventually...anyway, sad to think that an amazing game can disappear the same way an amazing film can due to some many issues not actually having anything to do with the content directly!

Another Blog

2006-04-23T18:33:00.000-04:00

I've started a new photo oriented blog over at http://synchrofoto.blogspot.com/. I may or may not mention here when I've added things over there; I will put a link to it in my links over on the right side of the page.

There's a few pictures up there now.

Book Corner, April 23 2006

2006-04-23T11:47:00.000-04:00

I've picked up a fun little book called A short history of the movies; by Gerald Mast. A cursory bit of research indicates it's out of print;I guess that means I got a good deal on it at 75 cents in a used bookshop in nyc.

It's always fun to read a history by someone with an axe to grind, and Mast definitely has a strong point of view. What's so amusing is that's he's completely unafraid to call a film,(or even a director) crap.

I'm only about a third of the way through right now, but the early part of the book covers the creation of film as an industry in very thorough detail. It's a story that should be pretty familiar to anyone who pays attention to the development of the internet, and I'm sure many other industries...essentially, the early years are characterized by numerous attempts to control the entire market - monopoly, patent battles, collusion, vertical integration, industry "coalitions" designed to keep everyone else out. Big players spending years locked in court battles while small players eat their bacon and leave them behind...

[I work for Paramount, indirectly, and the Paramount Corporation was there right in the very beginning, a descendent of a company called "Famous Players in Famous Plays" - an "independent" company, not a signator to the "trust" which required theater owners to only get films from trust members..... so whatever complaints we may have at the office, the staying power of the company can't be denied.]

I've been reading a lot about D.W.Griffith in the last fifty pages or so...I knew about Birth of a Nation and Intolerance but I didn't realize Griffith had worked as a hired hand for Edison pictures for a few years, first as an actor and the director. As a director he made a new, single reel film EVERY WEEK. He used that time essentially as a lab to figure out how motion picture storytelling worked, and in the process created many of the conventions we still use today. One of his features was called Broken Blossoms. The title is extremely similar to Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers, but just from the descriptions I've read I don't immediately cotton the connection.

I'll add more once I finish the book, right now it's just making me want to line up everything made before 1930 you can get from Netflix.

More photos

2006-04-09T11:52:00.000-04:00

and

I heart Jersey City

2006-04-01T17:31:00.000-05:00

Today, two very amusing things happened.

First, while sitting around reading and eating breakfast, I heard a loud noise that sounded like a gang of children being dumped off a schoolbus directly into a playground. And it started get closer, and closer, and closer. Eventually, I realized that the noise was not in fact coming from the playground a block away behind my apartment, but from the street in front of the apartment. Running to the window, I was greeting by an amazing sight: the little league parade. As far as the eye could see, small gangs of children were wearing their team jerseys, chanting team slogans, and marching down the middle of Montgomery Street. Truly a suburban paradise.

Later, after stopping in to our local tea shop to pick up additional loose black tea and 'oaties', we were crossing the street. From out of nowhere, a tall, coffee colored gentleman appeared...he was running, but he didn't really seem to be in a huge hurry. It was more like a race walk. As he dashed in front of us, we could hear him singing to himself.

"I...love....marijuana...I...love...marijuana..."

and he was on his way.

This actually really did happen.

The Library

2006-03-23T12:10:00.000-05:00

I finally managed to get organized enough to walk around the corner and visit the Jersey City Free Public Library last week. It's stupid, but it's been a real long time since I was in a library...as far as I can discern from my local branch, libraries have not changed at all in the last 20 years. I know as a rule that's not true, but there is something really amazingly "Library" about this place. Somehow putting even a new hardcover into one of the full-contact/impact resistant book covers makes it seem extremely boring and like something the doctor gave you rather the fun mysterious object that books can be when they're good.

The story of the Rough Cut Lady

2006-03-13T09:49:00.000-05:00

Old news. I'm not sure how widely this circulated around the 'net; if you're not in the video field you might not have heard these. It's a series of fake radio commercials dedicated to "honoring" certain types within the industry; essentially bosses who get in our way for assorted reasons. Turns out they were originally done by a marketing department for discovery channel.

The story of the Rough Cut Lady

And here is an interesting exhibit I'd like to go see.

(A 'rough cut' is what you call an early draft of a video piece; lots of things are finished yet. Sometimes it's a little tough to imagine what the finished version might look like, but for professionals who deal with it e v e r y s i n g l e d a y it really shouldn't be a problem. And yet...)

Edgaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar!

2006-03-07T20:40:00.000-05:00

I'll miss ya...

Nice work, Mr. Lombardi.

Nightstand roundup

2006-03-04T17:40:00.000-05:00

What's been occupying me lately...

records: got snowed under with promos from a friend of mine, but the one that hit the ipod first and stuck is The Celluloid Years, a pretty wide ranging collection of tracks from an early hip hop label. It's got Futura 2000 doing a track with The Clash (maybe not the smartest thing they ever did), several good mixes of Wild Style by Time Zone, and some African/French flavored stuff by Manu Dibango that I really like. Also, I'm still listening to the latest Boards of Canada record, The Campfire Headphase, but the one that caught me off guard is Blockhead's record from late last year, Downtown Science. It's instrumental hip-hop of a sort I didn't realize you could really even make anymore due to licensing restrictions. Artful, complicated, hummable and delicate, while never letting you forget that it's hip hop record. Of course you may start to wonder what that really means. Anyway, apparently the genius is from downtown NYC. I liked the first record, but the new one is a huge step forward. I've also been totally grooving on Konono No.1 - Congotronics.

Books:

It's funny how you sometimes aren't ready for a book, but if you come back to it later, it all makes sense. In my quest to keep my personal library under control I read and re-read my books over and over again (New York apartments & all that; even now in Jersey City there just aren't that many bookshelves).

One book I tried to read a few years ago was Umberto Eco's In Search of the Perfect Language, which I found pretty dry. But I kept the damn thing, and returned to it a few weeks ago. It turns out that reading Neil Stephenson's Quicksilver trilogy was a pretty excellent introduction to the central idea of this book of Eco's. Several of the scientists Stephenson fictionalizes spent significant amounts of their lives working on this idea of a perfect, pre-Babel type language, which would have a perfect 1:1 correspondence with the real world. Many of them felt that if you could figure out the language, then merely constructing new sentences in that tongue would generate new truths, philosophical and otherwise. Eco devotes chapters (which each feel very much like a self-contained lecture) to Kaballism, Dante, Wilkins, Leibniz, Dalgarno and the evolution Esperanto. This was totally fascinating stuff to me.

I also just found my way through Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which was extremely fun. It's always nice to read things that are understated and a bit snarky, and this book fits the bill. As many others have noted, it's sort of a bizarre mix between a slightly Tolkienesque world and a Jane Austen novel, and while that could certainly be a recipe for an astonishingly boring and really long book, it isn't. It's a completely fascinating alternate world that Susanna Clarke has constructed, with a gigantic adventure story at it's heart. I suppose there are all sorts of things to draw out of the book, but I think one of the most fascinating things to me was the use of the idea that a country has particular place in history that's special. In this alternate history, England is a place where magic had been quite common, and it seems that it wasn't in other places. There's never really any specific explanation as to why this might be, but it makes for a very interesting read.

And another thing: Last Night a DJ Saved My Life. Fabulous. Read it before, I'll end up reading it again. If you have any record you consider even slightly "dance music", reading this book will explain a million things to you about why those records are the way they are. Starting with fundamentals - the evolving role of the dj during radio's early days, and following the development of the dj's role from various US cities to England , the Carribean and back to the States, it's a superfun collection of stories, some from names you know already, and many from names you don't know. It's the best kind of history; uncovering details about things we take for granted.

Early report on my latest acquisition is that Droidworks is pretty good, though perhaps obsessively thorough. It's the story of how George Lucas changed modern cinema. It's not any obvious thing, either...the book methodically plots the courses Lucas and his buddy Francis Coppola took to get in to the 'industry',and what they then did to set themselves free of it. This one seems to be written as a college textbook maybe; it's footnoted like crazy. I like it a lot because it's the story of people making a series of practical decisions to achieve their vision.

Does this cancel out the China thing?

2006-02-24T16:28:00.000-05:00

Google is digitizing the national archives.

Download it straight to your video ipod. I really wonder how fast this will go. Amazing stuff for doc producers. Makes wandering the stacks accessible to us all...

Learn your history, it's weird!

2006-02-20T19:59:00.000-05:00

Interview with a guy who worked on ENIAC.
Eniac was the first electronic computer, more or less. It was intended to work out trajectory tables for bombs and mortars during WWII, but as with some many computer-oriented projects, the schedule slipped. They ended up using it to do some solid work on the h-bomb though.

From wikipedia:
A difference engine is a historical, mechanical special-purpose computer designed to tabulate polynomial functions. Since logarithmic and trigonometric functions can be approximated by polynomials, such a machine is more general than it appears at first.

Charles Babbage designed the difference engine in 1834. He never even finished building one. In 1985 the British Science Museum started building one and completed it in 1991. It's said by many that he intended to use it make a killing at the horse-races.

Some guy built a freaking difference engine out of LEGO.

Newsflash: I was shooting at things.

2006-02-17T12:48:00.000-05:00

In the interest of full disclosure, I would like to let everyone know that last night I spent approximately 1 hour shooting things in HALO. I'm sorry it took me this long to let you know; that's my fault and my fault alone.

I've often thought that as much fun as the 1st person shooter games can be - and I do think they are fun - they often reduce to a highly dressed up version of the moving tin ducks you can shoot with a bb gun out at coney island, or in a thousand carnivals around the country. I played the same section of Halo over and over yesterday; it's a slighly tricky section, but I love the parts where you get to fly around in the alien spacecraft while it's snowing; it's really beautiful. Anyway, I'm playing this same section over and over while I fail to get all the shots right, and it was very fun and after an hour I thought to myself, "time well spent, but time to stop". Things exploded, I got a lot of time in the air, and honed that itchy trigger finger as millions do playing similar games every day, and for all the press about violence in video games, apparently in general violent crime is down.

Can somebody teach Dick Cheney how to get his computer on the interweb so he could just play Halo like the rest of us?

it got snowy here

2006-02-14T09:10:00.000-05:00

tristam shandy - random thoughts

2006-02-10T19:02:00.000-05:00

Very funny, and in an oblique way extremely faithful. It amuses me to see how we've become used to odd storytelling structures so that it's not even really an issue. (and of course, the book being adapted is proof of how long people have been confounding audiences with bass-ackward yarns).

For me, a nice surprise: some michael nyman music, early in the film. Thanks to modern technology, one cue recycled from Draughtman's Contract sounds about a million times better than it did in the earlier film.

The crowd at the Angelika was definitely a bit more mature than is usual for a friday night crowd...and as the lights came up, a gentleman sitting behind me proclaimed it 'one of the worst damn movies I've ever seen. Not one damn funny scene in the whole film.' - I 'd love to know what he was expecting. I guess he thought the book was better. (or maybe aforemention moebius-strip diegesis is more trouble than I thought!)

There is some fine artistic philosophizing wrapped up in all the low-rent humor, which for me helped sell the whole thing. Neat discussion of the value of battles and conflict in a story structure.

Two stars!

(via cellphone - apologies for the telegram style terseness. Full stop.)

Phone pics

2006-02-04T16:55:00.000-05:00

I like this picture.

Jack Bauer vs. really bad guy from Serenity.

2006-02-04T13:34:00.000-05:00

I never watched Firefly when it was on tv, but was a Buffy fan, and I was fairly impressed with the movie. The critic in me realizes that it didn't quite add up to a lasting piece of work, and the fan and creative voices tell me it was a hell of an effort. Lots of things I liked, a few big problems. I watched it a second time with my folks on DVD, and had more or less the same reaction; a few of the cheesier decisions were more apparent the second time through. But I noticed something that made me feel a little uncomfortable - and that makes me think slightly better of the whole thing.

When I think about the movie, "the operative" character seems almost like a good guy, and not a bad guy. I don't think this means I'm a fascist, though it's obviously something to consider. But the man who fights dirty to maintain the order of the society, who follows orders without asking why, even when it seems clearly against the stated goals...he just seemed like a dude with a really hard job, who was severely competent, and relentless in his application to his duty. Where Serenity is brilliant is how that fight between Mal (the captain) and the operative, gets blurred. Honestly, when watching, it's pretty clear, because we root for the team of scrappy heroes. But the operative is pretty appealing - his idea of order may get shot down, but he survives. He has something he believes in, a structure, and he's willing to risk his life for that. He's honest about it; not a religious nut who doesn't see the holes in his schema.

Anyway, most of us are probably more like Mal, and inasmuch as the film seems to be a story about order versus disorder, I appreciate very much the benefits of disorder in art, in life, and in social structure. It's the random twitch in the DNA replication that makes the world the fascinating place it is. ("I'm a leaf on the wind...") But I think we all probably have some desire to be the other guy, with rule to follow and a clear plan we don't second guess.

So. 24 is on again, and I'm watching and I'm loving it. I start thinking in a silly way about how many folks Jack kills during the show, and it looks like this so far (conservatively):

07:00-08:00 1 directly - the assassin
08:00-09:00 Possibly one FBI agent.
09:00-10:00 (jack is busy with paperwork and expense reports)
10:00-11:00 3 terrorists (one by vest, 2 by shooting)
11:00-12:00 1 assassin (again!)

Making it a total of at least 5 people before 1pm.
(note: i still need to go back and check the hours and the count to make this more accurate)

Which means that Jack is the scruffy version of the fascist enforcer. He'll do anything to get his man, no matter how far over the line of propriety it takes him, because he believes in the idea of the society he works for. It's not entirely articulated in the show; we know he respected the presumably democratic & african-american president palmer and doesn't respect the current nixon look-alike, but he serves respectfully. Since there is always a clear-and-present-danger, Jack's excesses seem understandable if not commendable. But of course, he's basically insane, and this rule-following, unyielding submission to an ideal ends up destroying every human relationship he has.

Which only leads me to think that maybe the actual subject of 24 is the family. It's always been a big issue on the show, and we're getting a variety of angles into that subject this time around.

Murch thinks 3 is a magic number. (well, 2 1/2 anyway)

2006-01-22T12:21:00.000-05:00

Walter Murch is more or less the only rock star editor. He's written books (In the Blink of An Eye), essays and lectures somewhat frequently. You'll remember him as the editor of Apocalypse Now, The Conversation, The English Patient, Cold Mountain, Jarhead, etc. I often wonder if he's really the smartest editor out there - not meaning that he isn't smart as hell, cause he is - but I wonder if other editors think as much about what we do as he does. I know some very considered, thoughtful editors, and I know some who work a bit more...instinctively. Thinking about Walter Murch always makes me curious about how deep you really *should* go on a given project.

I just stumbled on this essay from him about complexity in sound design. Good stuff as always.

Why we fight.

2006-01-21T16:47:00.000-05:00

Managed to snag a ticket to this basically excellent doc last night. You can say it's about why we're in Iraq; a lot of the film is, but it really does try and get to the heart of the matter, as the title suggests. When it's on, the film is as beautiful and compelling as any doc I've seen. When it wanders, it's still pretty good, but fallible.

It opens with a genuinely amazing speech by Eisenhower, as he is about to end his presidency, in which he essentially warns against the perversion of democracy that a standing army and the attendant industries will wreak. This coming from a five star general who'd served in WWII. I wish they'd run the entire speech at the start of the film. Instead, we get excerpts, and then a standard talking-heads and footage piece. It sits halfway between a normal PBS story structure with several characters interwoven and something where the talking heads advance a thesis from start to finish..

What really got me was how *close* to being astonishing it was. As I said, many sections of it are beautiful -– it has a nice soundtrack that bridges a lot sections together into bigger pieces - then it would get bogged down a little with bites that were maybe not exactly off-topic, but maybe weren't bold enough. Much of the dialog is preaching to the choir, and so what frustrates me is to see the other elements get lost within the rote '“our politicians don'’t care'” soundbites. The good stuff by my reckoning includes: a great story of a NYC cop, a Vet himself, who lost a son in 9/11; a young guy signing up for the army;an army colonel (I think) who was in the Pentagon when it was struck and felt that she had to leave the armed service because of policy differences; and a woman scientist who works on bunker-buster bombs who turns out to have fled Saigon days before the fall, and who has deeply patriotic feeling for the US.

My gut tells me that if they'’d kept this a little more trim, a little more poetic, and maybe kept the run-time to 1:15 instead of 1:38, they'd have a film that was breathless, and left the audience stunned at the end, rather than feeling like they'’d seen a really great documentary. There were quite a few sections during the film that are that good, and so major hats off to the team.

I know docs aren'’t the same as news stories, and it'’s not a rule that you have to give equal time to opposing viewpoints, but I did feel like there might have been a useful way to contextualize the argument a bit better with regard to the conservative side of the fence. Not just hearing things to debunk them, but to broaden the scope.

I hope this film is a huge success; I'’ll be very curious to see what the numbers are when it opens outside of new york/la.

There were lots of animals in PAPILLION

2006-01-09T17:57:00.000-05:00

Papillion was this prison-break movie released in 1973, starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman; it takes place sometime in the 1930s. There is a bizarre amount of wildlife on screen:

1. Little crabs when arriving in French Guiana.
2. Lizards on roof.
3. Alligator when on work detail.
4. Butterflies on work detail.
5. Snake on work detail.
6. Roach in solitary.
7. Bat in solitary.
8. Large crab in solitary.
9. Millipede in solitary.
10. Dog on leper island.
11. Turtles on boat.
12. Sharks on final island.
13. Pigs and goats on final island.
14. Grasshopper on final island.

There are probably more, but that's all I can remember. It's an interesting idea, to use animals as shorthand for different situations or conditions. Not something that would work in every film, but it worked here just fine.

rocking the ebay for some retro gaming.

2006-01-05T12:11:00.000-05:00

I spent the large sum of $3.99 + 3$ for shipping to get a copy of one of my favorite games ever: Mechwarrior 2 for Mac. Released 1996. Requires at LEAST System 7.5. It runs in OS 9 no problem at all (though not Classic) once you download a patch (which actually was to let it run in OS 8!), and is super super fun. I remember it had a pretty good soundtrack; kind of reminding me of the first Autechre record (Incunabula), which is one of my favorites.

Today it might be called a realtime strategy game; it requires fast reflexes but is not a twitch game like some of the first person shooters are. It's really more about planning and tactics, if not actual strategy. Unlike some of the FPS games out there, you rarely are significantly more weaponed up than your opponents; in fact at most times you can blow yourself up with about two wrong clicks or keypresses by firing weapons too close together: heat buildup = boom.

The part I didn't remember was how thorough the environment was - not the level of details in the models, which is frankly lower than I remembered - but the details of the storyline. It really is a campaign; each mission has screens and screens of background to read, and a lengthy description of the aftermath of the battle you've just completed, or not completed as things may have turned out. There is a 'reading room' where you can just peruse the history of your clan. And you can play the whole game from either of two sides, with entirely different history and missions. It's a whole world.

The game is an adaptation of something vague D&D-ish called BattleTech universe, so much of the 'lore' is lifted from that, but it's an interesting comparison to make with something like Halo. Halo's backstory is clearly grafted on by a team entirely separate from the team building the game engine itself; not a problem necessarily, but in practice the backstory is just a few pages in the instruction manual that gets left in the box. If you want to know a little more about Master Chief, may I kindly direct you to the lovely snow falling on the battlefield as that hover-buggy swings by for another sortie on your position? It's cool, right? What was that about you were asking about Master Chief? Right, never mind.

It's not the reams of copy that made MechWarrior II such an immersive experience; part of was the sheer complexity of the tasks you're asked to complete, and part of it comes from the details you CAN'T skip over, like the endless scenes of code procedure on the bomber in Doctor Strangelove. But I think the biggest part of it is the overwhelming sense that you are participating in a larger story. Not just blasting, but a real story. When you finish a mission, you feel like a hero, not a mass murderer or a kid shooting cardboard cowboys with a BB gun at a stand out at Coney Island. It was clearly a talented bunch of folks who put the game together.

-so- underrated.

2006-01-04T18:01:00.000-05:00

The Thomas Dolby best of caught my eye, flipping through the ipod on the way home today. The dude was completely misunderstood in his time; he's a crazy good storyteller who happened to be using new tools that freaked everyone out. If I had to pick something to remember him for, it would be the lyrics rather than his crazy synth action, though that is generally very creative as well. I ain't saying he didn't drop some real mal-mots from time to time, but there are some gems in there for sure. I think my favorite line from one of his songs is from "Urges": "I look at you and I feel half human". I don't know why, but I love that. The efficient set-ups of "airwaves" and "screen kiss" are things to admire as well.

Also, as someone who has been in recording studios both low and very hi-fi while songs were being recorded, I would like to point out that "She Blinded Me With Science" sounds absolutely crazy to me now, but for very different reasons than when I was like 13 and it was released originally. I just can't imagine someone actually systematically setting out to create that track. Wow.

Capote

2005-12-15T10:30:00.000-05:00

I finally got around to seeing "Capote" last night. Very good film.

It was a fairly astonishing performance from Philip Seymour Hoffman, first off. There are almost no scenes in the film he's not in, and he definitely carries the weight of the movie without a problem. Really good work. I also always like the woman who played Harper Lee, Catherine Keener. Anyway.

What knocked me off my feet about Capote was the sheer range of issues it brought forth, without being preachy or overly arty. The most obvious thing the film does is create a portrait of Capote himself. This is done in a painterly fashion, with a natural feeling but very calculated selection of details and incidents, showing how Capote treated people close to him, strangers, and those who thought they were in one group but actually were in the other, which is a larger number than realized it.The only scene in the whole film that set off my "SUBTLETY VIOLATION" alarms is toward the end of the film, when an unknown audience member makes his way backstage to share his opinion of Capote's reading. I don't feel like I learned anything about Capote I didn't already get from this particular scene, but in the horse-trading that goes on to make a film, it may have been kept to insure some other more quiet moment was left alone. Overall, the point-counterpoint shown in his relations with others was in fact a genuinely nuanced bit of storytelling, and very human, and humane.

The film (for those who've not already seen it) drops into Capote's life during the four years in which he researched his big book, "In Cold Blood", a kind of non-fiction novel. This has a lot of resonance for me as someone who's worked on a decent number of social issue documentary films. So to wrap up a little here, there's a bit of meditation on the subject-observer relationship in art, on whether it's proper to affect the lifes of those portrayed, some small observations about the nature of justice in America, concerns of profesional jealousy, issues of balance regarding the lives of a man versus the good of Man, and also a few good tips on outfits and mixed drinks. 10 thumbs up. Go see it.

(Incidentally, before he wrote In Cold Blood, Capote wrote Breakfast at Tiffanys, which is one of my favorite movies and a book that was even better - a bit sharper and less broad.)

i dont really understand how i found this.

2005-12-14T01:00:00.000-05:00

http://www.whatacrappypresent.com/

Chroncles of Narnia, Episode IV: A New Hope

2005-12-09T12:45:00.000-05:00

In preparation for the holiday movie viewing, I started re-reading the Chronicles of Narnia. I didn't know this as a kid, but the books were written out of order- that is, Lion/Witch/Etc was written first, and then after that Clive Staples Lewis wrote the creation myth for Narnia, The Magician's Nephew - incidentally the creation myth for the actual Wardrobe in question as well.

Finishing that first book reminded me (sadly) of several moments watching Star Wars after having seen Revenge of the Sith - lines that were throw-away before suddenly had at least a little more resonance. Anyway, I got quite a kick out of the situation both Lucas and Lewis were in; the unexpected success of their pet project ended up putting a lot more focus on the work than they had anticipated, and there were some things they didn't do right the first time. So you write a bunch more stuff to explain away the things that bugged you about the successful piece. Lewis published The Lion, The Witch...in 1950;Prince Caspian in 1951 (episode 3), Voyage of the Dawn Treader in 1952 (episode 4), The Silver Chair in 1953 (episode 6), The Horse and His Boy in '54 (episode 2), The Magician's Nephew in '55 (prelude), and The Last Battle in '56. It makes Lucas' 29 year cycle seem pretty slack.

Re-reading this stuff also explains why right wing Christians tend to go nuts about Harry Potter....before that, the fantasy world had a pretty dominant, Christian myth to feed the youngsters. It's kind of nuts actually - there's original sin in Narnia by page 79 - Aslan, the Lion: "You see, friends" he said, "that before the clean, new world I gave you is seven hours old, a force of evil has already entered into it; waked and brought hither by this son of Adam".

In spite of those overtones, it's very funny in many places, and definitely holds a few chuckles for the grownups. At one point in the Magician's Nephew, the speaking animals decide to call the old man/Magician "Brandy" as that's the only word he keeps repeating...

The film of the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe opens today; I thought I had a couple more weeks. Luckily these books are written for like, fourth graders, so they go by pretty quick. I'm fairly sure my outlook wasn't unduly influenced by swallowing 800 pages of Christian Fantasy writing whole as a child, and I'm looking forward to the film, 'cause I like spectacle movies and this promises such in spades.

Documentary - Boys of Baraka

2005-12-07T16:06:00.000-05:00

The other day I went to see an interesting film at the Film Forum. I'm pretty sure I didn't actually learn anything I didn't already know from Boys of Baraka, but maybe I didn't entirely understand what I knew. If you get the chance, I'd recommend taking a look at this film. Boys of Baraka is about a few African-American boys who attend middle and high schools in Baltimore, MD, and are selected to attend a sort of 2 year-long retreat/boarding school in Africa. Hilarity and heartbreak ensue.

The footage makes the conditions in Baltimore public schools a lot more visceral than just hearing someone tell you that things there are bad, and demonstrates a great deal of hope as well. There is no shortage of memorable, light moments along the way, and the movie is filled with engaging characters. It's also shot pretty well. Probably just on DV, but by folks that knew what they were doing

In documentary films, often times there's a tricky section at the beginning, where the characters are introduced...and introduced...and introduced...(see: Spellbound). Boys of Baraka manages to avoid this by just getting started with the story after we meet the first character or two, and then introducing new ones as they come in to the story, rather than all at once.

But I think rather than any particular brilliance of editing or filming - though both are very good - the direction is really what hit home to me about this doc. It sucks you in quickly, isn't gimmicky, and tells an important story without being preachy. Though we are seeing a bit of a renaissance of general interest documentary right now, much of the work still consists of putting sunlight where there isn't any; so managing to both illuminate and not make the viewer feel as though they're in school is the challenge.

(If by some random chance, someone reading this doesn't know me personally, I spent a great deal of time editing the orientation film for a museum in Baltimore, the Reginald Lewis Museum of African American History, so I learned quite a bit about African American history in Maryland. Boys of Baraka still managed to be surprising on some details.)

Times is changing.

2005-12-06T13:06:00.000-05:00

This morning, Apple announced that they've made a deal with NBC to put quite a bit of content online through the Itunes store. It's amazing to see the media landscape actually changing right in front of your eyes. When Apple started selling videos, there were only a half-dozen shows from ABC and some Pixar shorts, but the cash has apparently been good enough that other networks are following.

I have small concerns about the technical quality of the files, but, as with MP3s, the compromises are good enough that a substantial new amount of flexibility comes from the smaller files. I can say that dealing with non-technical/non video-industry people, they seem to find the image quality not only acceptable, but pretty good. More on that later, most likely.

If we ever get to the point where IndieFlix will put your movie on ITunes like CDBaby does now, it will be a very interesting day. You might actually make the money back on a documentary without having to be in theaters.

Is that irony, comeuppance or just bad luck?

2005-11-30T14:17:00.000-05:00

So yesterday I sat down to write a little essay on media management that was going to find it's way onto this blog at some point.

While editing video quite successfully for the previous 5 hours, 120 words of unmediated brilliance on that topic (media management) were enough to completely blow the hard drive away. Damn machine thinks it doesn't even have a drive installed. Tekserve (local computer repair shop) has it now, and think it needs a completely new drive. I'll have lost about 3 days work on a short film, most likely. Otherwise, the hit isn't too bad.

(p.s. why does the spell checker on blogger not know the word 'blog'?)

hello world.

2005-11-29T12:26:00.000-05:00

this is a new blog whereupon I intend to share my opinions on sundry matters. I also hope it will help me make my writing better by practicing.