Well, I wasn't expecting this. It's been twelve years since the Cap'n worked for or in a movie theatre, and that was one of those "chain" types (it still exists which is why you might have noticed the fact I no longer identify it by name) and I thought that I'd probably never find myself in a projection booth again. Not because I didn't enjoy it, but because it tends to be the kind of job high school students get over the summer or stick around through the fall and move up from concessions to usher to projectionist. I know this is the case because it's what I did.
The Cap'n is no spring chicken, so it seemed like if I'd been away for so long and that the younger generation was no doubt better equipped to handled these new fangled "digital" projectors we hear about. Speaking of which, true story: when I went to see The Dark Knight Rises a few weeks ago, before the IMAX showing, I saw it at a large (but different) "chain" multiplex and when the movie ended I could see the Windows toolbar at the bottom of the screen. As in, no film whatsoever, we were watching a projection of somebody's digital copy of The Dark Knight Rises. I'm not making justifications for people who pirate movies, but it's an uphill battle convincing them that you're in for a better experience watching a theatre's projected computer screen for $15.
Anyway, so with digital projectors being in vogue and projectionists not really in demand (you can program those things and they run themselves, reducing the person in the booth to a minimum-wage IT employee), it hadn't crossed my mind in some time I'd ever be working in a theatre again. But then I got word from a friend whose husband worked for a local theatre that they needed a projectionist and all I needed to do was drop by. And all of a sudden, with limited funds, a very part time job, and lots of spare time I could be using to make money (sorry readers, but this here Blogorium is a labor of love, not a lucrative cash cow for the Cap'n), I decided why not go check it out.
Now this particular theatre was enticing because I've been going there since I was a kid. It's been here since before the Cap'n lived in this state, and while it's changed hands a few times over the years, it turns out one thing hasn't changed at all: the projection booth.
I expected to be rusty at threading a projector (and I was) but I had no idea I'd be working with machines as old as I was, kept in working order by a dedicated team making the best of what they had even when parts were in short supply. And by that I mean "we don't make that kind of part anymore" short supply. It's impressive to see projectors that I saw movies on as a kid still playing films today, including The Dark Knight Rises. 35mm film is still where it's at, as far as this Luddite is concerned.
The other thing I'd forgotten was how much fun it is to physically thread the film through the machine - yes, it can be maddening when you have four movies starting within five minutes of each other (still better than eight to sixteen), but there's something about being in the background, watching the audiences sit down to watch a movie, and getting everything ready. Because much of the equipment isn't automated, I also get to do little tricks like lower the lights on cue, adjust the sound between trailers and the film, and sometimes physically lift the shutter covering the lens.
It's the kind of thing you forget that you enjoy doing, a job that's entirely behind the scenes but results in people being able to escape somewhere else for a few hours. Being a projectionist is a unique sort of job in that you are responsible for the experiences of anywhere from two to two hundred people, but only you know what that responsibility means. I'm not diminishing the front of house folks (who are all very nice and laid back people - the atmosphere of the theatre is very laid back with no uniforms or restrictions on facial hair, etc.). Believe me, they get the complaints if I do my job badly, but don't think I don't know if I goofed up. Chances are I'm trying to fix it, and every time a piece of film is a little too loose or rides to the side of a roller, I am hoping that doesn't sully your moviegoing experience. People don't go out to see movies that much any more, so it is incumbent on me to make it worth your while.
Do I make too much out of this? Maybe. I mean, it's not like I'm making much more than what I did twelve years ago. But I enjoy doing it, and I'd forgotten how much I could enjoy doing it, even as a second part time job. If I ever get a call back from full time work, or if the Blogorium magically turned into a hit or something tomorrow, I still think I'd hang on to this gig for as long as it lasts. If nothing else, the stories will be good, and I have a few already.
Showing posts with label digital media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label digital media. Show all posts
Monday, August 6, 2012
Thursday, September 22, 2011
News and Notes: Vampire Nicolas Cage Edition
Let's get this out of the way before moving to something more interesting: it's not that they're calling it Qwikster, which is admittedly stupid - I'm really entertaining the thought of dumping Netflix entirely. Not only am I not enamored of their streaming service, which sounds like it's going to get worse before it gets better, but if I wasn't interested in Gamefly after a free trial, Qwikster adding games also won't light my fire. I don't rent DVDs enough any more to justify the price (which will certainly rise very soon), and I'm having trouble justifying keeping either service. I'm certainly open to entertaining other options, including Hulu or GreenCine.
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Blogorium reader and author of Gin and Candy Liz Fitz asked me to discuss the photo circulating the internet last week of someone in the 1870s that looks like Nicolas Cage. It was listed on eBay and the sale is closed Luckily, all you have to do to have your own copy is to right click the picture, which is all over the place, and save one for yourself. Then you can share it on the Blogorium, like so:
The description makes the following claim, which has perpetuated - well, let's just look at the ingenious way someone sold this:
Original c.1870 carte de visite showing a man who looks exactly like Nick Cage. Personally, I believe it's him and that he is some sort of walking undead / vampire, et cetera, who quickens / reinvents himself once every 75 years or so. 150 years from now, he might be a politician, the leader of a cult, or a talk show host.
So this is clever; I'll give it that. Capitalizing on the inherent "weirdness" of Nicolas Cage (he of MEGA ACTING), people are of course going to be amused by the suggestion he might be a vampire. It's the same kind of garbage as the picture. Yeah, I said it. I don't believe for a second that it's real. At all. I'm sure that some incredibly devoted geek is out there hunting down the original photo where the subject is looking to his right (not head on) and isn't the face of Nicolas Cage awkwardly pasted on. Not for a second did I entertain this being genuine (as claimed), but I applaud the seller for attaching a comparably ridiculous theory to distract visitors. I'm sure they made some money, had some yuks, and will still claim the picture is "real." If that's what works for you, but remember that vampires don't photograph well. Just a thought.
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Finally, I am slowly but surely shoring up the titles for Horror Fest 6, including a few films that aren't on the poster (which I'm still not in love with, so if you're the type who likes tinkering with design, I'll be happy to provide you with the text free version). Please keep voting using the options on your right - anything ought to be fun and the titles provide me with no end of amusement.
Programming Note: The Cap'n will be out of town for the weekend, so while you can expect spoilers for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, as well as the customary trailers to close out the week, there will be no reviews tomorrow or the day after. Have an enjoyable weekend watching movies, or whatever it is you do when I'm not here...
---
Blogorium reader and author of Gin and Candy Liz Fitz asked me to discuss the photo circulating the internet last week of someone in the 1870s that looks like Nicolas Cage. It was listed on eBay and the sale is closed Luckily, all you have to do to have your own copy is to right click the picture, which is all over the place, and save one for yourself. Then you can share it on the Blogorium, like so:
The description makes the following claim, which has perpetuated - well, let's just look at the ingenious way someone sold this:
Original c.1870 carte de visite showing a man who looks exactly like Nick Cage. Personally, I believe it's him and that he is some sort of walking undead / vampire, et cetera, who quickens / reinvents himself once every 75 years or so. 150 years from now, he might be a politician, the leader of a cult, or a talk show host.
So this is clever; I'll give it that. Capitalizing on the inherent "weirdness" of Nicolas Cage (he of MEGA ACTING), people are of course going to be amused by the suggestion he might be a vampire. It's the same kind of garbage as the picture. Yeah, I said it. I don't believe for a second that it's real. At all. I'm sure that some incredibly devoted geek is out there hunting down the original photo where the subject is looking to his right (not head on) and isn't the face of Nicolas Cage awkwardly pasted on. Not for a second did I entertain this being genuine (as claimed), but I applaud the seller for attaching a comparably ridiculous theory to distract visitors. I'm sure they made some money, had some yuks, and will still claim the picture is "real." If that's what works for you, but remember that vampires don't photograph well. Just a thought.
---
Finally, I am slowly but surely shoring up the titles for Horror Fest 6, including a few films that aren't on the poster (which I'm still not in love with, so if you're the type who likes tinkering with design, I'll be happy to provide you with the text free version). Please keep voting using the options on your right - anything ought to be fun and the titles provide me with no end of amusement.
Programming Note: The Cap'n will be out of town for the weekend, so while you can expect spoilers for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, as well as the customary trailers to close out the week, there will be no reviews tomorrow or the day after. Have an enjoyable weekend watching movies, or whatever it is you do when I'm not here...
Saturday, July 30, 2011
The Netflix Dilemma.
While deleting and re-installing Netflix on the Blogorium PS3 last night (it had something to do with being "unable to connect"), I had a moment of two to mull over the whole "price raising" (some call it gouging) situation the company announced earlier this month. It wasn't popular, and I'm sure they're catching hell for it, and I suspect many Netflix subscribers will leave when the hike takes effect in September.
Me? I'm on the fence. Truly I am, and while my knee-jerk reaction was "raise your prices? to hell with you jerks!" I did settle down and consider that I was paying $12 a month for unlimited streaming and one DVD or Blu-Ray at a time. If I tried to buy any of the movies or TV shows I was taking full advantage of, I'd be spending a lot more than that a month. That's a fact, even if you really want to get into the nitty gritty of hunting like a madman online for the best possible price and then tacking on free Two Day Shipping (which is, by the way, actually a 68 dollar yearly fee on Amazon) or dropping another three to seven dollars for next-day delivery. Netflix offers a certain convenience with instant viewing and deliverable discs. Their movies also don't go "dead" twenty-four hours after you rent them, like Playstation Network's rental system, and you don't have to download them, so that's another perk. You can stop watching something and pick up where you left off - also nice.
The flipside(s) are also totally valid, and I can't do a much better job than this piece, entitled Dear Netflix: Drop Dead. You're going to find out a few things you probably didn't know about the streaming service in there, the least of which is that Showtime's currently airing series aren't coming back to "Watch It Now." HBO series probably never will. Netflix arbitrarily pulls movies from the Instant Queues, often with little warning, which sucks, but I always viewed the "watch it now" part of the service as an added bonus - it was something I could use in addition to my DVD rentals.
Now that I need to consider paying for both, I'm torn. It's not the random dropping of movies or the lack of some TV shows, which I guess sucks. It's not the movies that end up "pan-and-scan" in an era when "Full Screen" finally means something very different, although that also sucks. It's not even the considerable disparity between what Neftlix offers in their disc-based and streaming-based plans, with the 28 day holdover on new releases which are also now barebones discs, which sometimes really sucks. I can get past most of that. The question becomes "do I use both of them enough to merit paying 60% more?"
That's the catch; the streaming allows me to watch televisions shows, which I am habitually unable to keep up with as they air (the exception is Doctor Who). I've been able to slowly but surely make it almost to the end of Battlestar Galactica thanks to Neftlix Instant Queue. I will finish the series by the end of the summer, something I was unable to do picking up seasons while working at a used book store as the show aired. Then I can start on Luther and Sherlock, two BBC series I've wanted to look into. Netflix just added Mad Men, a show I've been wanting to watch but haven't yet, and now I have a year to catch up on the four seasons before the fifth starts. And there's The League, and Louie, and Archer, FX shows I've caught in fits and bursts. Being able to watch The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, Futurama, Arrested Development, Better of Ted, Top Gear, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and a host of other shows at any time is also a perk, since I no longer have any of those DVDs and can't afford the Blu-Rays.
I also was able to watch Exit Through the Gift Shop, Double Take, ThanksKilling, and (sigh) Monsturd through the streaming option, movies I might not be aware of otherwise or might simply have forgotten about. I understand that Rubber is currently available, so can imagine The Troll Hunter won't be far behind. Netflix is very good about picking up smaller, independent films and putting them on their Instant Queue before the discs are available. They're very good with new releases from Criterion, which saves all kinds of money.
On the other hand, I can't watch all of the excellent Doctor Who DVDs on Netflix. I can watch some of the episodes, but not all of them. I can't watch any features, and as many of you know, the Cap'n is something of a supplement junkie. Classic Doctor Who DVDs go above and beyond the call of duty for every story when it comes to extras, so I like to rent the discs for that. Also, they rarely "pull" movies from my DVD queue, something I can't say about their Instant. I don't need three discs at a time, but I don't really want to drop the Instant service. I use both of them, and while the cost isn't excessive, Netflix has a ways to go before it's justifiable to pay for each one as its own entity.
So I'm on the fence right now, as I suspect many of you are. The other options aren't thrilling, unless I just give up and risk being sued for illegally downloading all of the things I want to watch. That's not cheaper by a long shot. If you have suggestions, I'm all ears, gang.
Me? I'm on the fence. Truly I am, and while my knee-jerk reaction was "raise your prices? to hell with you jerks!" I did settle down and consider that I was paying $12 a month for unlimited streaming and one DVD or Blu-Ray at a time. If I tried to buy any of the movies or TV shows I was taking full advantage of, I'd be spending a lot more than that a month. That's a fact, even if you really want to get into the nitty gritty of hunting like a madman online for the best possible price and then tacking on free Two Day Shipping (which is, by the way, actually a 68 dollar yearly fee on Amazon) or dropping another three to seven dollars for next-day delivery. Netflix offers a certain convenience with instant viewing and deliverable discs. Their movies also don't go "dead" twenty-four hours after you rent them, like Playstation Network's rental system, and you don't have to download them, so that's another perk. You can stop watching something and pick up where you left off - also nice.
The flipside(s) are also totally valid, and I can't do a much better job than this piece, entitled Dear Netflix: Drop Dead. You're going to find out a few things you probably didn't know about the streaming service in there, the least of which is that Showtime's currently airing series aren't coming back to "Watch It Now." HBO series probably never will. Netflix arbitrarily pulls movies from the Instant Queues, often with little warning, which sucks, but I always viewed the "watch it now" part of the service as an added bonus - it was something I could use in addition to my DVD rentals.
Now that I need to consider paying for both, I'm torn. It's not the random dropping of movies or the lack of some TV shows, which I guess sucks. It's not the movies that end up "pan-and-scan" in an era when "Full Screen" finally means something very different, although that also sucks. It's not even the considerable disparity between what Neftlix offers in their disc-based and streaming-based plans, with the 28 day holdover on new releases which are also now barebones discs, which sometimes really sucks. I can get past most of that. The question becomes "do I use both of them enough to merit paying 60% more?"
That's the catch; the streaming allows me to watch televisions shows, which I am habitually unable to keep up with as they air (the exception is Doctor Who). I've been able to slowly but surely make it almost to the end of Battlestar Galactica thanks to Neftlix Instant Queue. I will finish the series by the end of the summer, something I was unable to do picking up seasons while working at a used book store as the show aired. Then I can start on Luther and Sherlock, two BBC series I've wanted to look into. Netflix just added Mad Men, a show I've been wanting to watch but haven't yet, and now I have a year to catch up on the four seasons before the fifth starts. And there's The League, and Louie, and Archer, FX shows I've caught in fits and bursts. Being able to watch The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, Futurama, Arrested Development, Better of Ted, Top Gear, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and a host of other shows at any time is also a perk, since I no longer have any of those DVDs and can't afford the Blu-Rays.
I also was able to watch Exit Through the Gift Shop, Double Take, ThanksKilling, and (sigh) Monsturd through the streaming option, movies I might not be aware of otherwise or might simply have forgotten about. I understand that Rubber is currently available, so can imagine The Troll Hunter won't be far behind. Netflix is very good about picking up smaller, independent films and putting them on their Instant Queue before the discs are available. They're very good with new releases from Criterion, which saves all kinds of money.
On the other hand, I can't watch all of the excellent Doctor Who DVDs on Netflix. I can watch some of the episodes, but not all of them. I can't watch any features, and as many of you know, the Cap'n is something of a supplement junkie. Classic Doctor Who DVDs go above and beyond the call of duty for every story when it comes to extras, so I like to rent the discs for that. Also, they rarely "pull" movies from my DVD queue, something I can't say about their Instant. I don't need three discs at a time, but I don't really want to drop the Instant service. I use both of them, and while the cost isn't excessive, Netflix has a ways to go before it's justifiable to pay for each one as its own entity.
So I'm on the fence right now, as I suspect many of you are. The other options aren't thrilling, unless I just give up and risk being sued for illegally downloading all of the things I want to watch. That's not cheaper by a long shot. If you have suggestions, I'm all ears, gang.
Thursday, May 19, 2011
More News, More Notes
Good day to you, Blogorium readers! I was all set to do some reviewing, but a few things have come to my attention that are worth at least mentioning, and least one is a follow-up from Saturday's news and notes.
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Let's start with this Lars von Trier "Nazi" business, since I have some suspicion that it may seriously impact the announcement last week of his collaboration with Martin Scorsese. If you haven't already heard, von Trier was at a press conference for Melancholia, and he made some unfortunate comparisons between himself and Hitler. Well, you know what? I'm not going to paraphrase what Lars von Trier said. Here's the video:
Today, he was banned from the Cannes Film Festival, and gave an interview attempting to clarify the gaffe, which has the Danish provocateur in a more precarious than usual situation. This is quite a bit further than Antichrist being booed at 2009's festival, as his comments have garnered negative publicity from around the film community. Von Trier, for his part, seems reticent to do anything other than go home and direct pornography (see the interview linked atop this paragraph), and reactions are... mixed. I don't really want to say much more than that, because somehow arguments about French hypocrisy (involving Roman Polanski) and Mel Gibson started showing up here. Honestly, I don't want to wade any further into that, but felt it was worth directing you towards in order to give you some idea of the fallout from von Trier's comments.
What I did want to speculate on is that "remake" of The Five Obstructions story that was everywhere last weekend. This is a bit of a stretch, but in light of Arnold Schwarzenegger's tabloid troubles putting his return to acting on hold indefinitely, and the nature of really toxic publicity killing projects, I'd say the likelihood of this team-up between Lars von Trier and Martin Scorsese just hit the rocks. I'm not a prognosticator, but it seems like Melancholia is either going to be the hot ticket movie when it comes out, or it's going to be The Beaver and vanish from sight until Criterion releases it (as they did with Antichrist).
At this point, the actual quality of Melancholia (or The Beaver, for that matter) is irrelevant; this is about public perception, and the people who already hate Lars von Trier hit the jackpot, as "Nazi" is really not something you want to identify yourself with, even in jest. His fans will probably retreat quietly, and no American distributor is going to want to touch a Scorsese / von Trier joint. That's my guess, anyway. Bad publicity has killed many a "dream" project, and this one looks to be headed in the wrong direction.
---
Okay, to lighten the mood, let's talk about two things you don't have to weigh heavily, either intellectually or emotionally: movies online. Not the illegal ones (the Cap'n wouldn't know anything about that), but streaming video of films in their entirety from reputable sites. Free ones, at that: while Netflix and Amazon Prime customers already have access to streaming movies and television, YouTube also decided to get in on the game and now offer a "Movies" section on their main page.
What you've probably noticed is that they are charging for many of these movies, but what you may have missed is their selection of "Free" films. I was expecting to find mostly public domain, easy to locate anywhere fare, but I was impressed to see that YouTube has a solid lineup of higher profile features at no cost. Titles like Ghostbusters, The Buena Vista Social Club, Bad Taste, The Third Man, Bringing Up Baby, Bob le Flambeur, His Girl Friday, "M", The Man with the Golden Arm, The Intruder, Scarlet Street, Chaplin's The Kid, The Squid and the Whale, Super Size Me, Peeping Tom, American Scary, and DiG!.
It's actually pretty impressive, and that's just a cross section of movies you can watch (in their entirety) instead of the latest clip of some stupid thing a cat did, or whatever the hell "planking" is. The quality isn't amazing, but I'd say it is perfectly watchable, considering. This, coupled with IMDB's available free movies, you're in pretty good shape if rental prices are too steep.
---
Finally, I don't know why I haven't mentioned this sooner, as I'm a full-on addict to this site, but cinephiles need to run, not walk, to Trailers from Hell. Spearheaded by director Joe Dante (The Howling, Matinee, Gremlins), the site is a collection of all kinds of trailers for all sorts of classic (and not-so-classic) films, presented by themselves or with commentary from the Trailers from Hell gurus. The gurus include geek fan favorites like Edgar Wright and Guillermo Del Toro, as well as Roger Corman, Neil LaBute, Brian Trenchard-Smith, Lloyd Kaufman, Bill Duke, John Landis, Allison Anders, and Rick Baker.
Informative and enjoyable, I get a kick out of watching the trailers with thoughts from long-time fans and filmmakers who give historical context (just look at the mini-lesson from Bill Duke on Sweet Sweetbacks Baadasssss Song) to what are normally considered "exploitation" trailers. Seriously, go there now!
---
Okay, that's plenty for you to look into heading into your weekend. I'll be back tomorrow or Saturday with a new review, so until then stay classy!
---
Let's start with this Lars von Trier "Nazi" business, since I have some suspicion that it may seriously impact the announcement last week of his collaboration with Martin Scorsese. If you haven't already heard, von Trier was at a press conference for Melancholia, and he made some unfortunate comparisons between himself and Hitler. Well, you know what? I'm not going to paraphrase what Lars von Trier said. Here's the video:
Today, he was banned from the Cannes Film Festival, and gave an interview attempting to clarify the gaffe, which has the Danish provocateur in a more precarious than usual situation. This is quite a bit further than Antichrist being booed at 2009's festival, as his comments have garnered negative publicity from around the film community. Von Trier, for his part, seems reticent to do anything other than go home and direct pornography (see the interview linked atop this paragraph), and reactions are... mixed. I don't really want to say much more than that, because somehow arguments about French hypocrisy (involving Roman Polanski) and Mel Gibson started showing up here. Honestly, I don't want to wade any further into that, but felt it was worth directing you towards in order to give you some idea of the fallout from von Trier's comments.
What I did want to speculate on is that "remake" of The Five Obstructions story that was everywhere last weekend. This is a bit of a stretch, but in light of Arnold Schwarzenegger's tabloid troubles putting his return to acting on hold indefinitely, and the nature of really toxic publicity killing projects, I'd say the likelihood of this team-up between Lars von Trier and Martin Scorsese just hit the rocks. I'm not a prognosticator, but it seems like Melancholia is either going to be the hot ticket movie when it comes out, or it's going to be The Beaver and vanish from sight until Criterion releases it (as they did with Antichrist).
At this point, the actual quality of Melancholia (or The Beaver, for that matter) is irrelevant; this is about public perception, and the people who already hate Lars von Trier hit the jackpot, as "Nazi" is really not something you want to identify yourself with, even in jest. His fans will probably retreat quietly, and no American distributor is going to want to touch a Scorsese / von Trier joint. That's my guess, anyway. Bad publicity has killed many a "dream" project, and this one looks to be headed in the wrong direction.
---
Okay, to lighten the mood, let's talk about two things you don't have to weigh heavily, either intellectually or emotionally: movies online. Not the illegal ones (the Cap'n wouldn't know anything about that), but streaming video of films in their entirety from reputable sites. Free ones, at that: while Netflix and Amazon Prime customers already have access to streaming movies and television, YouTube also decided to get in on the game and now offer a "Movies" section on their main page.
What you've probably noticed is that they are charging for many of these movies, but what you may have missed is their selection of "Free" films. I was expecting to find mostly public domain, easy to locate anywhere fare, but I was impressed to see that YouTube has a solid lineup of higher profile features at no cost. Titles like Ghostbusters, The Buena Vista Social Club, Bad Taste, The Third Man, Bringing Up Baby, Bob le Flambeur, His Girl Friday, "M", The Man with the Golden Arm, The Intruder, Scarlet Street, Chaplin's The Kid, The Squid and the Whale, Super Size Me, Peeping Tom, American Scary, and DiG!.
It's actually pretty impressive, and that's just a cross section of movies you can watch (in their entirety) instead of the latest clip of some stupid thing a cat did, or whatever the hell "planking" is. The quality isn't amazing, but I'd say it is perfectly watchable, considering. This, coupled with IMDB's available free movies, you're in pretty good shape if rental prices are too steep.
---
Finally, I don't know why I haven't mentioned this sooner, as I'm a full-on addict to this site, but cinephiles need to run, not walk, to Trailers from Hell. Spearheaded by director Joe Dante (The Howling, Matinee, Gremlins), the site is a collection of all kinds of trailers for all sorts of classic (and not-so-classic) films, presented by themselves or with commentary from the Trailers from Hell gurus. The gurus include geek fan favorites like Edgar Wright and Guillermo Del Toro, as well as Roger Corman, Neil LaBute, Brian Trenchard-Smith, Lloyd Kaufman, Bill Duke, John Landis, Allison Anders, and Rick Baker.
Informative and enjoyable, I get a kick out of watching the trailers with thoughts from long-time fans and filmmakers who give historical context (just look at the mini-lesson from Bill Duke on Sweet Sweetbacks Baadasssss Song) to what are normally considered "exploitation" trailers. Seriously, go there now!
---
Okay, that's plenty for you to look into heading into your weekend. I'll be back tomorrow or Saturday with a new review, so until then stay classy!
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Robots and Plants, Oh My!
Things have not progressed well in finding our mystery science-fiction film. I tried to search the "plot" section of IMDB, to no avail. I've pored through a dozen or so sci-fi related websites that claim to list "every movie with robots ever!", to find nothing. I even plugged the following sentence into Google:
Alas, the Cap'n found nothing. No trace of this movie anywhere. If I had not seen it with my own eyes and did not have documentation (photos by Major Tom, to give belated credit where it's due) one could reasonably convince me that no such film ever existed. But it does. I know it does, and it's alternately comforting and baffling that it's so hard to identify a movie in the age of information.
But seriously, how could you not want to find out the movie responsible for these images?
Please help. I'd love to share the video, but it's so hard to follow the movie without our inane commentary, but if it comes to that, I will put that up if it helps you identify the film.
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My brain and throat are unpleasant, so it's just about time for the best "From the Vault" you could ever hope for...
See, last year I promised not to mention M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening on the Blogorium for a year, and that year is up. For those of you who are intimately familiar with my coverage of The Happening, I hope you enjoyed the sabbatical.
For those of you who aren't aware of my unique relationship to Night's first "R" rated film, I happily re-present the first of two reviews for The Happening. Tomorrow I'll post the second review. One of them is the absolute truth, and the other is a total lie. I'll leave it up to you to figure it out.
Blogorium Review: The Happening
There's a common expression on the interweb for a person who posts a positive review of a movie almost everyone else is panning: PLANT!
Typically, this is to imply that the person who gives the thumbs up to something universally reviled is actually an employee of the studio releasing the movie; hence, their review is "planted" on sites like CHUD or Aint It Cool in order to swing the negative trend.
It's particularly fitting that I'm likely to be hit with "plant!" for what I'm about to write, considering that the menace of M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening may or may not also be leafy and green. Moreover, I do not work for or know anyone at 20th Century Fox, and while it's going to be an uphill battle convincing you, I really feel like The Happening is the victim of "piling on".
As you probably noticed in the last few days, I was in no way interested in seeing The Happening: as a person who was not a fan of Signs and didn't bother seeing Lady in the Water or The Village, I had pretty much given up on M. Night and was buying into the sea of negative press his new movie was getting. Could an R rating actually make the difference for a guy who had apparently lost all sense of storytelling?
Well, I don't know about the R rating, but The Happening is waaaaaaayyyyy better than you've been hearing. I might go so far as to say it was amazing, but then you'd think I was drinking the Kool Aid or something. The catch is that this movie is being advertised as this sort of Hitchcockian thriller, ala The Birds or something like that, and The Happening isn't that at all.
Going in to this The Happening, you should probably have movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers on the brain, because that's what Night is doing here. The Happening is a hyper-stylized film, and it seems like most of the reviews are missing that. Yes, everyone stands around like a deer in the headlights and delivers lines like they weren't just in the scene preceding this one, but it's uniformly corny. It's not like one person is acting like people normally do in this movie; everyone is acting like they're out of a 1950s "Red Scare" science fiction film. You might also want to consider Soylent Green.
I can honestly say I sat riveted through the whole film, as did Daniel and Leckie. Even though there's no M. Night "twist", he finds ways to keep the menace creepy and (largely) unseen. The plant angle is pretty much where the film goes, but they keep other possibilities floating around so that you have options to follow. I also dug little moments and, no pun intended, signs like the one that reads "You Deserve This" on a real estate billboard.
The mass suicides are effective mostly because Night drops you right in on them. The world is pretty much exactly like the one we recognize, and right off the bat crazy shit starts happening. It would be like if Steven Spielberg cut the awkward opening off of War of the Worlds and just got to business wiping out people. The R rating may be less for the stuff you've seen in the trailer and more about the two brutal shotgun killings (of kids, no less) and the "lion" scene.
Well, I know you aren't going to believe me, because everyone else is hating on the film. That's fair: if they want to beat up on Shyamalan because that's the path of least resistance, so be it. I'll stand up proudly and recommend all of you see it and judge for yourselves. It's the only way you'll know for sure. Feel free to ask for more information. I promise you I did see it and I could not turn away.
"low budget space movie with robot that turns astronauts into space zombies"
Alas, the Cap'n found nothing. No trace of this movie anywhere. If I had not seen it with my own eyes and did not have documentation (photos by Major Tom, to give belated credit where it's due) one could reasonably convince me that no such film ever existed. But it does. I know it does, and it's alternately comforting and baffling that it's so hard to identify a movie in the age of information.
But seriously, how could you not want to find out the movie responsible for these images?
Please help. I'd love to share the video, but it's so hard to follow the movie without our inane commentary, but if it comes to that, I will put that up if it helps you identify the film.
---
My brain and throat are unpleasant, so it's just about time for the best "From the Vault" you could ever hope for...
See, last year I promised not to mention M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening on the Blogorium for a year, and that year is up. For those of you who are intimately familiar with my coverage of The Happening, I hope you enjoyed the sabbatical.
For those of you who aren't aware of my unique relationship to Night's first "R" rated film, I happily re-present the first of two reviews for The Happening. Tomorrow I'll post the second review. One of them is the absolute truth, and the other is a total lie. I'll leave it up to you to figure it out.
Blogorium Review: The Happening
There's a common expression on the interweb for a person who posts a positive review of a movie almost everyone else is panning: PLANT!
Typically, this is to imply that the person who gives the thumbs up to something universally reviled is actually an employee of the studio releasing the movie; hence, their review is "planted" on sites like CHUD or Aint It Cool in order to swing the negative trend.
It's particularly fitting that I'm likely to be hit with "plant!" for what I'm about to write, considering that the menace of M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening may or may not also be leafy and green. Moreover, I do not work for or know anyone at 20th Century Fox, and while it's going to be an uphill battle convincing you, I really feel like The Happening is the victim of "piling on".
As you probably noticed in the last few days, I was in no way interested in seeing The Happening: as a person who was not a fan of Signs and didn't bother seeing Lady in the Water or The Village, I had pretty much given up on M. Night and was buying into the sea of negative press his new movie was getting. Could an R rating actually make the difference for a guy who had apparently lost all sense of storytelling?
Well, I don't know about the R rating, but The Happening is waaaaaaayyyyy better than you've been hearing. I might go so far as to say it was amazing, but then you'd think I was drinking the Kool Aid or something. The catch is that this movie is being advertised as this sort of Hitchcockian thriller, ala The Birds or something like that, and The Happening isn't that at all.
Going in to this The Happening, you should probably have movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers on the brain, because that's what Night is doing here. The Happening is a hyper-stylized film, and it seems like most of the reviews are missing that. Yes, everyone stands around like a deer in the headlights and delivers lines like they weren't just in the scene preceding this one, but it's uniformly corny. It's not like one person is acting like people normally do in this movie; everyone is acting like they're out of a 1950s "Red Scare" science fiction film. You might also want to consider Soylent Green.
I can honestly say I sat riveted through the whole film, as did Daniel and Leckie. Even though there's no M. Night "twist", he finds ways to keep the menace creepy and (largely) unseen. The plant angle is pretty much where the film goes, but they keep other possibilities floating around so that you have options to follow. I also dug little moments and, no pun intended, signs like the one that reads "You Deserve This" on a real estate billboard.
The mass suicides are effective mostly because Night drops you right in on them. The world is pretty much exactly like the one we recognize, and right off the bat crazy shit starts happening. It would be like if Steven Spielberg cut the awkward opening off of War of the Worlds and just got to business wiping out people. The R rating may be less for the stuff you've seen in the trailer and more about the two brutal shotgun killings (of kids, no less) and the "lion" scene.
Well, I know you aren't going to believe me, because everyone else is hating on the film. That's fair: if they want to beat up on Shyamalan because that's the path of least resistance, so be it. I'll stand up proudly and recommend all of you see it and judge for yourselves. It's the only way you'll know for sure. Feel free to ask for more information. I promise you I did see it and I could not turn away.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Things You Should and Shouldn't Look Into
I thought I'd start with an amendment to Monday's piece about The Simpsons Season Twenty. While the episodes are, in fact, in high definition, so far there's nary a widescreen presentation to be found. Based on the opening credits, I may have mistaken the jump from 4X3 to 16X9 by a season. The current run (season 21) has different opening sequences, many of which poke fun at the wider image. Still, I'm a little confused why Fox pushed so hard to rush season twenty out, since it technically misses the 20th anniversary and it's Blu-Ray release doesn't take advantage of the screen in the way fans are going to expect.
Additionally, there is literally one extra on the disc: a three minute teaser with Morgan Spurlock for a forthcoming Anniversary Special. Unfortunately, there's no indication of when the special is airing, or if it's going to be available. None of the commentaries from other seasons are present, or deleted scenes, commercials, making of's, or anything else. It screams of a quick cash-in, and I'm really not going to be shocked if you see this season released AGAIN sometime before season twenty-one.
---
For anybody with Netflix's "watch it now", while you can't see any new Warner Brothers releases, what you can do is catch two movies that are a little trickier to see: Big Fan and Che. Now Che comes out from Criterion next week, but Steven Soderbergh's four-and-a-half hour Benicio del Toro as Che Guevara epic is going to be a little steep on DVD or Blu-Ray. Luckily, you can watch Part One and Part Two in HD streaming right now. I might just do that in a bit.
While Big Fan technically came out yesterday, no store in the area was carrying the DVD and Amazon has it on a two week back order, so I wouldn't be seeing it that way until the end of the month. Netflix, sensing this problem, not only has Big Fan to watch Instantly, but they one-upped the DVD version by offering the film in HD. Since there's no Blu-Ray release listed, you're getting a bonus here.
I did watch Big Fan, but I'm going to save that review for tomorrow. In the meantime, if you have access to the movie (instantly or on disc) I highly recommend it. Patton Oswalt is excellent, the character study is engrossing, and the ending was a bit surprising. I'll say more tomorrow, but go seek Big Fan out now.
---
The Cap'n promised I wouldn't make you sit through another pan of Terminator: Salvation, and so you won't have to. I won't tell you about the reasonably interesting action sequences hampered by an idiotic story punctuated with massive plot holes. I won't tell you about the squandered opportunities or the myriad references to other films that were bungled. I won't mention the stupid ending, a weaker version of the "John Connor is a terminator!" twist that leaked prior to filming. I won't mention how toothless the film feels with a PG-13. I won't tell you all about how fake the digital Arnold face looked or the REALLY STUPID plan by Skynet that JUST DOESN'T MAKE SENSE, or how Sam Worthington's accent goes from "Southern" to his native Australian while he's hanging by a car frame. Above all, I certainly won't mention how the film feels exactly like the exercise in futility that I thought it would, but somehow manages to be even less interesting than I expected.
No sir, you won't have to sit through that, and I won't have ripped off a Harlan Ellison article to not tell you.
---
In the wake of having written my defense of Rob Zombie's Halloween II - which is the best way to prepare someone for that film, because it really is Rob Zombie's singular take on the series - I'd like to hear from Cranpire and find out what others thought. Don't get me wrong; I've seen a lot of bad reviews, but none from people I know. So if there are some guest bloggers out there, I'm asking for your input.
Additionally, there is literally one extra on the disc: a three minute teaser with Morgan Spurlock for a forthcoming Anniversary Special. Unfortunately, there's no indication of when the special is airing, or if it's going to be available. None of the commentaries from other seasons are present, or deleted scenes, commercials, making of's, or anything else. It screams of a quick cash-in, and I'm really not going to be shocked if you see this season released AGAIN sometime before season twenty-one.
---
For anybody with Netflix's "watch it now", while you can't see any new Warner Brothers releases, what you can do is catch two movies that are a little trickier to see: Big Fan and Che. Now Che comes out from Criterion next week, but Steven Soderbergh's four-and-a-half hour Benicio del Toro as Che Guevara epic is going to be a little steep on DVD or Blu-Ray. Luckily, you can watch Part One and Part Two in HD streaming right now. I might just do that in a bit.
While Big Fan technically came out yesterday, no store in the area was carrying the DVD and Amazon has it on a two week back order, so I wouldn't be seeing it that way until the end of the month. Netflix, sensing this problem, not only has Big Fan to watch Instantly, but they one-upped the DVD version by offering the film in HD. Since there's no Blu-Ray release listed, you're getting a bonus here.
I did watch Big Fan, but I'm going to save that review for tomorrow. In the meantime, if you have access to the movie (instantly or on disc) I highly recommend it. Patton Oswalt is excellent, the character study is engrossing, and the ending was a bit surprising. I'll say more tomorrow, but go seek Big Fan out now.
---
The Cap'n promised I wouldn't make you sit through another pan of Terminator: Salvation, and so you won't have to. I won't tell you about the reasonably interesting action sequences hampered by an idiotic story punctuated with massive plot holes. I won't tell you about the squandered opportunities or the myriad references to other films that were bungled. I won't mention the stupid ending, a weaker version of the "John Connor is a terminator!" twist that leaked prior to filming. I won't mention how toothless the film feels with a PG-13. I won't tell you all about how fake the digital Arnold face looked or the REALLY STUPID plan by Skynet that JUST DOESN'T MAKE SENSE, or how Sam Worthington's accent goes from "Southern" to his native Australian while he's hanging by a car frame. Above all, I certainly won't mention how the film feels exactly like the exercise in futility that I thought it would, but somehow manages to be even less interesting than I expected.
No sir, you won't have to sit through that, and I won't have ripped off a Harlan Ellison article to not tell you.
---
In the wake of having written my defense of Rob Zombie's Halloween II - which is the best way to prepare someone for that film, because it really is Rob Zombie's singular take on the series - I'd like to hear from Cranpire and find out what others thought. Don't get me wrong; I've seen a lot of bad reviews, but none from people I know. So if there are some guest bloggers out there, I'm asking for your input.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Blogorium Review: The Girlfriend Experience
I wasn't really sure what to expect from Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience. When the film was inching towards release, the magazines were agog about porn star Sasha Grey's "mainstream" debut, and I remember reading an article in Rolling Stone that didn't make much of an impression. Honestly, if I was going to watch The Girlfriend Experience, it was because of the director, and not the star. And I wasn't really sure I was that interested at the time. Looking back now, I'm glad I gave it a chance.
Steven Soderbergh, like Richard Linklater, are often my typical examples of "50/50" movies. In their respective bodies of work, I like about half of their films, and even though they tend to alternate between commercial fare and strictly low budget, esoteric work, the half and half don't tend to split that way.
For example, I really enjoy the Ocean's films. If you move past the star power and the glitz, Soderbergh is still working within his "reluctant auteur*" M.O., and particularly in the much derided Ocean's Twelve, appears to be playing with the French New Wave playbook in his editing choices and camera angles. On the other hand, I'm not a big fan of The Good German, a purely stylistic exercise in recreating a Hayes Code Era war film with the sensibilities of the American New Wave 70s by way of late-noir "idiot detective" outlook on life. In a sense, the film builds to a Casablanca-derived ending for the express purposes of subverting Casablanca. Interesting, but not very good.
I'm a bit on the fence about Bubble, the film that The Girlfriend Experience reminded me the most of in presentation. Grey aside, The Girlfriend Experience is populated with a cast of lesser or unknown faces, shot handheld on digital cameras (or, in one instance, by a character in the film) in obstructed or distant framing, and with dialogue that sounds at least partially improvised. In this respect, it's also a bit like Full Frontal, a movie of Soderbergh's I wasn't terribly fond of, but The Girlfriend Experience works in ways I wasn't expecting.
For one thing, Soderbergh's stylistic choices and fragmented narrative hook serve The Girlfriend Experience very well. The narrative, such as it is, is micro in structure: Chelsea / Christine (Grey) is an escort who provides all of the trappings of being in a long-term relationship for her clients: they go out on dates, talk about business and friends, and sometimes end up sleeping together. Her actual boyfriend, Chris (Chris Santos) is a freelance trainer looking to expand his business horizons, and they seem to maintain a normal relationship despite the fact that very little time is spent together.
In fact, the subtext of The Girlfriend Experience is one of the factors the film has going for it: most of Chelsea's clients complain about the economic crisis, and it becomes a pervasive thread for the first half of the 76 minute run time, but it never occurs to them that hiring a pre-fabricated "girlfriend" isn't the best way to alleviate their situation. At the same time, Chelsea and Chris are essentially doing the same thing: for a fee, they pretend to be your friend, your confidant, your sounding board. Just because the idea of an escort is more salacious than a personal trainer doesn't change the fact that they're trading money for temporary loyalty.
The Girlfriend Experience doesn't hit you over the head with this, and just at the point where you think it might, Soderbergh begins playing with the narrative threads he's asked you to juggle, so that certain ambiguities about Chelsea's business encounters become clearer. The film doesn't so much end as it drops you off, which actually makes it preferable to me in lieu of a more formulaic ending.
Since verisimilitude and understatement are the name of the game here, the cast is accordingly not "showy". Grey, in fact, is served very well by the fact that it doesn't feel like she's acting, or if she is, then it's a very natural performance. To be honest, I haven't seen any of her work (although I'm willing to bet at least Cranpire has), so I'm basing her performance strictly on what I saw in the film, but she didn't strike me as cold or emotionless, judgments lobbied in the film's direction upon release. Santos is also very good, although he plays the more outgoing and verbally effusive half of the couple.
Other characters come and go, and in order to preserve the narrative's disjointed structure, Soderbergh wisely uses actors with voices that mislead the audience into thinking Chelsea is talking to one character rather than another. By the end of the film, each client is clearly defined and has their own distinguishing characteristics, but I felt he left some room for healthy confusion when setting up two critical character moments for Chelsea.
In the end, I was pleasantly surprised that I enjoyed The Girlfriend Experience. It works as a slice of "real life", but doesn't feel inhibited by a standard narrative structure. At the same time, the film never feels showy or ostentatious. Soderbergh uses his considerable experience to tell a small story in a believable way with a cast that never oversells the material. The Girlfriend Experience is a short movie, but I never felt it lacked something, and at the end I was glad to have seen it. Now I need to catch its "studio" corollary, The Informant! when that hits dvd / Blu-Ray, plus Soderbergh's epic Che from 2008. Odds are I'll really like one of them, and if I'm lucky, both.
* I actually wrote a paper about Soderbergh becoming an auteur by trying very hard not to be one a few years ago, but it's not good enough to merit sharing here.
Steven Soderbergh, like Richard Linklater, are often my typical examples of "50/50" movies. In their respective bodies of work, I like about half of their films, and even though they tend to alternate between commercial fare and strictly low budget, esoteric work, the half and half don't tend to split that way.
For example, I really enjoy the Ocean's films. If you move past the star power and the glitz, Soderbergh is still working within his "reluctant auteur*" M.O., and particularly in the much derided Ocean's Twelve, appears to be playing with the French New Wave playbook in his editing choices and camera angles. On the other hand, I'm not a big fan of The Good German, a purely stylistic exercise in recreating a Hayes Code Era war film with the sensibilities of the American New Wave 70s by way of late-noir "idiot detective" outlook on life. In a sense, the film builds to a Casablanca-derived ending for the express purposes of subverting Casablanca. Interesting, but not very good.
I'm a bit on the fence about Bubble, the film that The Girlfriend Experience reminded me the most of in presentation. Grey aside, The Girlfriend Experience is populated with a cast of lesser or unknown faces, shot handheld on digital cameras (or, in one instance, by a character in the film) in obstructed or distant framing, and with dialogue that sounds at least partially improvised. In this respect, it's also a bit like Full Frontal, a movie of Soderbergh's I wasn't terribly fond of, but The Girlfriend Experience works in ways I wasn't expecting.
For one thing, Soderbergh's stylistic choices and fragmented narrative hook serve The Girlfriend Experience very well. The narrative, such as it is, is micro in structure: Chelsea / Christine (Grey) is an escort who provides all of the trappings of being in a long-term relationship for her clients: they go out on dates, talk about business and friends, and sometimes end up sleeping together. Her actual boyfriend, Chris (Chris Santos) is a freelance trainer looking to expand his business horizons, and they seem to maintain a normal relationship despite the fact that very little time is spent together.
In fact, the subtext of The Girlfriend Experience is one of the factors the film has going for it: most of Chelsea's clients complain about the economic crisis, and it becomes a pervasive thread for the first half of the 76 minute run time, but it never occurs to them that hiring a pre-fabricated "girlfriend" isn't the best way to alleviate their situation. At the same time, Chelsea and Chris are essentially doing the same thing: for a fee, they pretend to be your friend, your confidant, your sounding board. Just because the idea of an escort is more salacious than a personal trainer doesn't change the fact that they're trading money for temporary loyalty.
The Girlfriend Experience doesn't hit you over the head with this, and just at the point where you think it might, Soderbergh begins playing with the narrative threads he's asked you to juggle, so that certain ambiguities about Chelsea's business encounters become clearer. The film doesn't so much end as it drops you off, which actually makes it preferable to me in lieu of a more formulaic ending.
Since verisimilitude and understatement are the name of the game here, the cast is accordingly not "showy". Grey, in fact, is served very well by the fact that it doesn't feel like she's acting, or if she is, then it's a very natural performance. To be honest, I haven't seen any of her work (although I'm willing to bet at least Cranpire has), so I'm basing her performance strictly on what I saw in the film, but she didn't strike me as cold or emotionless, judgments lobbied in the film's direction upon release. Santos is also very good, although he plays the more outgoing and verbally effusive half of the couple.
Other characters come and go, and in order to preserve the narrative's disjointed structure, Soderbergh wisely uses actors with voices that mislead the audience into thinking Chelsea is talking to one character rather than another. By the end of the film, each client is clearly defined and has their own distinguishing characteristics, but I felt he left some room for healthy confusion when setting up two critical character moments for Chelsea.
In the end, I was pleasantly surprised that I enjoyed The Girlfriend Experience. It works as a slice of "real life", but doesn't feel inhibited by a standard narrative structure. At the same time, the film never feels showy or ostentatious. Soderbergh uses his considerable experience to tell a small story in a believable way with a cast that never oversells the material. The Girlfriend Experience is a short movie, but I never felt it lacked something, and at the end I was glad to have seen it. Now I need to catch its "studio" corollary, The Informant! when that hits dvd / Blu-Ray, plus Soderbergh's epic Che from 2008. Odds are I'll really like one of them, and if I'm lucky, both.
* I actually wrote a paper about Soderbergh becoming an auteur by trying very hard not to be one a few years ago, but it's not good enough to merit sharing here.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Digression: Digital Media re-Revisited
While preparing to hit the road, the thought occurred to me: "Why don't you throw a movie onto the iPod, just in case there's nothing to do?"
My initial reaction - which, incidentally, is why I'm writing this - was to say "Nah. Do I really need to watch another movie on my iPod? It's a bit silly, this whole digital media business."
The more I think about it, the less convinced I am that the whole "digital revolution" is really going to kill out dvds and (as some are already proclaiming) Blu-Rays. It's not an illogical position; digital media doesn't eat up physical space, you can take it anywhere on a drive of varying sizes, and they look pretty good. The problem is that it lacks tangibility.
Maybe the Cap'n is a Luddite - folks have accused me of being far worse - but even when transferring my music over to digital files, I still kept most of the cds. I bring the along from time to time, but for the most part I don't mind having the digital equivalent.
Movies, on the other hand, I'm far more inclined to carry the dvd, Blu-Ray, or occasionally VHS copy with me. Rather than saying "hey, I've got _____ movie(s) on my portable drive", I can bring one or two movies and say "look what I brought!" Sometimes, careful selection of just the right movie for just the right group of people can be more important than bringing everything over and asking them to choose.
I don't know about the rest of you, but there are innumerable hours wasted in this apartment trying to find a movie to watch. There is such a thing as "too many good options", and I'll waste the equivalent of one or two films just trying to pick the one I want to watch. Then I don't watch any of them. It's silly. It's why I'm glad Netflix has a queue limit, and why I imposed a much tighter one for myself. Otherwise, the amount of fine material would be debilitating.
That, in many ways, is how I feel about the "hard drive full of movies" that digital media represents. Try getting a room full of people to decide on one movie and see how long it takes, particularly if the options increase dramatically. Sometimes it's a good thing to just bring one along with you, to pop open the case, and let the disc do its magic.
Other, minor, quibbles like the lack of extra material or compatibility issues with certain players also hampers the experience, but I think my big reason for choosing the disc format over the intangible format is simply that I like holding dvds, like I like holding books. Perhaps one day the Cap'n will come around to seeing things like you "normals", but in the meantime I'll stick with my shelves of flicks, even if it is hard to narrow down that "perfect" movie.
My initial reaction - which, incidentally, is why I'm writing this - was to say "Nah. Do I really need to watch another movie on my iPod? It's a bit silly, this whole digital media business."
The more I think about it, the less convinced I am that the whole "digital revolution" is really going to kill out dvds and (as some are already proclaiming) Blu-Rays. It's not an illogical position; digital media doesn't eat up physical space, you can take it anywhere on a drive of varying sizes, and they look pretty good. The problem is that it lacks tangibility.
Maybe the Cap'n is a Luddite - folks have accused me of being far worse - but even when transferring my music over to digital files, I still kept most of the cds. I bring the along from time to time, but for the most part I don't mind having the digital equivalent.
Movies, on the other hand, I'm far more inclined to carry the dvd, Blu-Ray, or occasionally VHS copy with me. Rather than saying "hey, I've got _____ movie(s) on my portable drive", I can bring one or two movies and say "look what I brought!" Sometimes, careful selection of just the right movie for just the right group of people can be more important than bringing everything over and asking them to choose.
I don't know about the rest of you, but there are innumerable hours wasted in this apartment trying to find a movie to watch. There is such a thing as "too many good options", and I'll waste the equivalent of one or two films just trying to pick the one I want to watch. Then I don't watch any of them. It's silly. It's why I'm glad Netflix has a queue limit, and why I imposed a much tighter one for myself. Otherwise, the amount of fine material would be debilitating.
That, in many ways, is how I feel about the "hard drive full of movies" that digital media represents. Try getting a room full of people to decide on one movie and see how long it takes, particularly if the options increase dramatically. Sometimes it's a good thing to just bring one along with you, to pop open the case, and let the disc do its magic.
Other, minor, quibbles like the lack of extra material or compatibility issues with certain players also hampers the experience, but I think my big reason for choosing the disc format over the intangible format is simply that I like holding dvds, like I like holding books. Perhaps one day the Cap'n will come around to seeing things like you "normals", but in the meantime I'll stick with my shelves of flicks, even if it is hard to narrow down that "perfect" movie.
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Come on, "The Giant Claw"!
You're so close to making the cut! If two more people voted for you, the Cap'n would have to throw this into triple over time September madness. And believe you me, I'd do it.
Incidentally, if you're the person who voted for Horror of the Blood Monsters, I salute you. I'm glad you lost, because we're not going to try to watch it (and fail) for the third time. You could tell me that the movie starts spitting out $100 bills after the 30-minute mark and I still wouldn't subject myself of others to Vampire Men of the Lost World. That movie is designed for one purpose only: to chase away stragglers at a party.
But kudos to you for voting for it. You're one sick puppy, and I respect that.
---
I've noticed when something that has cultural significance happens, I tend to ignore it. It isn't that I didn't notice them or that I'm being a contrarian for not mentioning current events; it's more that I think about it and then realize there's something I'd rather write about. Seriously.
Today, I'm breaking that trend in order to point out something that (at least) I hadn't heard anything about. As it's Beatles day (or "sold out everywhere I looked day"), it occurred to me that amidst all of this marketing blitz, no one seems to care that A Hard Day's Night turned 45 last month. August 11th, to be specific.
Beyond the fact that today marks the first major Beatles release since the Anthologies came out a decade ago, I included A Hard Day's Night in the list of "movies I thought would be in High Definition before Lord of Illusions" because it just makes sense. There's absolutely no reason not to release A Hard Day's Night and Help! on Blu Ray at the same time the remastered cds and boxed sets come out.
Not only is it nice synchronicity with Beatles related merchandise, but there's an anniversary related excuse to put out a "new" edition of each movie in a separate format to entice audiophiles and cinephiles into dropping some extra cash. While I'm certain the color palette of Help! would look great in HD, I'm willing to bet a nice, crisp black and white transfer for A Hard Day's Night would be just what the doctor ordered. But instead the world gets a video game. Silly.
---
I'm tempted to drop $6.99 on an HD On Demand viewing of I Sell the Dead. The film stars Dominic Monaghan, Ron Perlman, and Angus Scrimm, and is the tale of a career grave robber (Monaghan) confessing his crimes before execution. It turns out that grave robbers have to deal with zombies, vampires, ghouls, and even aliens!(?) If you haven't heard of the movie, don't be surprised; it's in very limited release, has no indication of when (if?) a dvd is coming, but reviews are pretty good. I Sell the Dead has been favorably compared to Creepshow and EC Comics, so it might be worth seven dollars to check it out.
Incidentally, if you're the person who voted for Horror of the Blood Monsters, I salute you. I'm glad you lost, because we're not going to try to watch it (and fail) for the third time. You could tell me that the movie starts spitting out $100 bills after the 30-minute mark and I still wouldn't subject myself of others to Vampire Men of the Lost World. That movie is designed for one purpose only: to chase away stragglers at a party.
But kudos to you for voting for it. You're one sick puppy, and I respect that.
---
I've noticed when something that has cultural significance happens, I tend to ignore it. It isn't that I didn't notice them or that I'm being a contrarian for not mentioning current events; it's more that I think about it and then realize there's something I'd rather write about. Seriously.
Today, I'm breaking that trend in order to point out something that (at least) I hadn't heard anything about. As it's Beatles day (or "sold out everywhere I looked day"), it occurred to me that amidst all of this marketing blitz, no one seems to care that A Hard Day's Night turned 45 last month. August 11th, to be specific.
Beyond the fact that today marks the first major Beatles release since the Anthologies came out a decade ago, I included A Hard Day's Night in the list of "movies I thought would be in High Definition before Lord of Illusions" because it just makes sense. There's absolutely no reason not to release A Hard Day's Night and Help! on Blu Ray at the same time the remastered cds and boxed sets come out.
Not only is it nice synchronicity with Beatles related merchandise, but there's an anniversary related excuse to put out a "new" edition of each movie in a separate format to entice audiophiles and cinephiles into dropping some extra cash. While I'm certain the color palette of Help! would look great in HD, I'm willing to bet a nice, crisp black and white transfer for A Hard Day's Night would be just what the doctor ordered. But instead the world gets a video game. Silly.
---
I'm tempted to drop $6.99 on an HD On Demand viewing of I Sell the Dead. The film stars Dominic Monaghan, Ron Perlman, and Angus Scrimm, and is the tale of a career grave robber (Monaghan) confessing his crimes before execution. It turns out that grave robbers have to deal with zombies, vampires, ghouls, and even aliens!(?) If you haven't heard of the movie, don't be surprised; it's in very limited release, has no indication of when (if?) a dvd is coming, but reviews are pretty good. I Sell the Dead has been favorably compared to Creepshow and EC Comics, so it might be worth seven dollars to check it out.
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Planning Ahead
While I was training a new employee at work tonight, she mentioned that there's a Drive-In over in Albermarle that's up and running. More importantly, it's doing pretty well. This makes me happy for two reasons:
1) this hints at a possibility of the revival of independent theatres - specifically drive-ins - that people can experience separately of the multiplex. Not knowing what they play, I don't want to go too much further down that avenue, but this does at least mean the Drive-In and drive-in culture isn't dead.
2) there's a (relatively) nearby drive-in to make a trip to and see movies at. I'm pretty excited about that possibility, especially if the movie matches the venue. We should put something together in the not-too-distant future about checking this out.
---
The DVR is now working, and it should be recording David Cronenberg's Shivers, a movie I don't have on dvd and it'll be nice to have in some format. This aspect of digital media may have the edge on other "portable media" formats, since it looks pretty nice and is easy to access. The "remote" recording aspect is also a plus. I can plan waaay ahead to dvr a show and watch it on when I have a chance.
Now it's just a matter of perusing the absurd amount of movie channels available and narrow down additional films or series to check out. I also noticed that Syfy HD runs blocks of Tales from the Darkside, including later seasons, which I should also add to the "record" function. Horror fest will be coming sooner rather than later...
---
Speaking of Horror Fest, Trick R Treat comes out on October 6th and I brought home a highly spoken of indie horror film called Plague Town. The Cap'n also needs to check out Martyrs, once he unpacks the Netflix disc.
Also, a little picture I found called Strangler of the Swamp...
---
Behave out there, gangarinos. Remember, you still have two days to put in any dvd, book, game, vhs, or cd requests from Sweaty's.
1) this hints at a possibility of the revival of independent theatres - specifically drive-ins - that people can experience separately of the multiplex. Not knowing what they play, I don't want to go too much further down that avenue, but this does at least mean the Drive-In and drive-in culture isn't dead.
2) there's a (relatively) nearby drive-in to make a trip to and see movies at. I'm pretty excited about that possibility, especially if the movie matches the venue. We should put something together in the not-too-distant future about checking this out.
---
The DVR is now working, and it should be recording David Cronenberg's Shivers, a movie I don't have on dvd and it'll be nice to have in some format. This aspect of digital media may have the edge on other "portable media" formats, since it looks pretty nice and is easy to access. The "remote" recording aspect is also a plus. I can plan waaay ahead to dvr a show and watch it on when I have a chance.
Now it's just a matter of perusing the absurd amount of movie channels available and narrow down additional films or series to check out. I also noticed that Syfy HD runs blocks of Tales from the Darkside, including later seasons, which I should also add to the "record" function. Horror fest will be coming sooner rather than later...
---
Speaking of Horror Fest, Trick R Treat comes out on October 6th and I brought home a highly spoken of indie horror film called Plague Town. The Cap'n also needs to check out Martyrs, once he unpacks the Netflix disc.
Also, a little picture I found called Strangler of the Swamp...
---
Behave out there, gangarinos. Remember, you still have two days to put in any dvd, book, game, vhs, or cd requests from Sweaty's.
Monday, August 3, 2009
Little Boxes on the hardwood, little boxes made of...
well, cardboard, I guess. For all the Cap'n knows, they could be ticky-tacky. If one takes the definition of ticky tacky ("shoddy material, as for the construction of standardized housing"), I suppose you could actually say they are made of ticky tacky. And most of them look the same.
That, as many of you can guess, is the problem. I'd love to tell you about all the movies I've watched since class ended and I moved in, but I honestly can't remember which box has what movie. I only just found the box with the Torchwood and Doctor Who blu-rays, and I think I learned how to use the DVR (we'll find out if Weeds is on it tomorrow), but On Demand doesn't work for some reason and Chiller (the all horror channel) also doesn't want to load. Cheesus crust!
Other than that, things are good. I was surprised to come back from an internet blackout to see that Ridley Scott is directing this Alien prequel thingamabob and that Spielberg is remaking Harvey. Both of these struck me as very odd and unnecessary, but the Cap'n has been wrong before.
---
I think before dipping into the "Vault", I mentioned that my days of used books and more were winding down. This is true; in fact, my last day of enjoying "McKayflix" will be Thursday, so if you have requests, now is the time to get them in. Trade credit is light but I can buy them on your behalf for a later date. Just let me know.
The split is one more out of "that's how it has to be" than "what either would prefer": I can't work the schedule they need and they don't have positions for seasonal employees. It's okay though, I'll still find ways to keep the filmic updates coming your way, and hopefully I should have a ton of material to sort through in the three weeks between the end of work and the beginning of school.
---
If I get this DVR thing working correctly, I might even start reviewing stuff I'd never use trade credit on, or check out, and definitely not buy. Having spent very little time perusing the twenty or so movie channels to record from, I couldn't give you specifics, but those lesser-tier HBO and Showtime channels are airing just about anything.
---
Finally, I saw this on Saturday night and thought it was cute:
That, as many of you can guess, is the problem. I'd love to tell you about all the movies I've watched since class ended and I moved in, but I honestly can't remember which box has what movie. I only just found the box with the Torchwood and Doctor Who blu-rays, and I think I learned how to use the DVR (we'll find out if Weeds is on it tomorrow), but On Demand doesn't work for some reason and Chiller (the all horror channel) also doesn't want to load. Cheesus crust!
Other than that, things are good. I was surprised to come back from an internet blackout to see that Ridley Scott is directing this Alien prequel thingamabob and that Spielberg is remaking Harvey. Both of these struck me as very odd and unnecessary, but the Cap'n has been wrong before.
---
I think before dipping into the "Vault", I mentioned that my days of used books and more were winding down. This is true; in fact, my last day of enjoying "McKayflix" will be Thursday, so if you have requests, now is the time to get them in. Trade credit is light but I can buy them on your behalf for a later date. Just let me know.
The split is one more out of "that's how it has to be" than "what either would prefer": I can't work the schedule they need and they don't have positions for seasonal employees. It's okay though, I'll still find ways to keep the filmic updates coming your way, and hopefully I should have a ton of material to sort through in the three weeks between the end of work and the beginning of school.
---
If I get this DVR thing working correctly, I might even start reviewing stuff I'd never use trade credit on, or check out, and definitely not buy. Having spent very little time perusing the twenty or so movie channels to record from, I couldn't give you specifics, but those lesser-tier HBO and Showtime channels are airing just about anything.
---
Finally, I saw this on Saturday night and thought it was cute:
Saturday, July 18, 2009
It takes more than just spray paint.
Good News, Cranpire!
Now you can have a Tommy Wiseau double feature, and I know that's something you've been hankering for secretly. So secretly you've never told anyone, but in my imaginary land the Cap'n is all seeing.
---
Some quick HD-DVD feedback:
- Dune surprised me. Well, not the movie. I've seen the movie before, and it is what it is: enjoyable but it feels like big chunks are missing (which they are). The picture was better than I ever imagined it would be, particularly since that whole "80s film stock looks like shit so don't expect much" argument I foisted up for Ghostbusters. Why Dune could look this good and maybe Ghostbusters doesn't is a discussion for another time. Lynch's ridiculous eye to production design pays off big time with this HD-DVD, so I guess you'll have to come over and see for yourself.
- The Army of Darkness HD-DVD looks almost exactly like the version downloaded from the PS store, and that's not a bad thing. Plus, this one doesn't expire.
- If memory serves me correctly, Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind look as good or better than when I saw them at the Janus and the Carousel (respectively).
- The Deer Hunter looks good but not great. Pretty grainy but the three hours have more room to stretch out, so there's better detail.
- Haven't watched Seed of Chucky or Anchorman yet. Will get on that soon.
---
There's no forward momentum on Stab Lincoln, Civil War Zombies, or Raptor of Liberty yet. I've sketched out a rough idea for Raptor-in-Chief, which you could consider to be a cross between Jurassic Park and King Ralph.
If anyone would like to volunteer their services for some concept art, I'd be happy to share it with readers of the blogorium. The Cap'n has tried with little-to-no success in photo-shop-ing a proper "zombie Lincoln" picture, so any freelancers out there are welcome to give it a go.
---
One of these days I'll get back to proper "critical essays", a tag sorely underused since the Cap'n jumped ship from DieSpace.
Wait. Is that domain taken? I wonder if it is, because if not, there's a great movie in there somewhere. Okay, a shitty movie, but a shitty movie I can turn into gold! And by that I don't just mean spraypainting dog crap gold, like I usually do. I mean actual alchemy involving feces and mystolen newly acquired Philosopher's Stone.
Please don't tell Hogwarts I "borrowed" it. Let's just keep this between ourselves, okay?
Now you can have a Tommy Wiseau double feature, and I know that's something you've been hankering for secretly. So secretly you've never told anyone, but in my imaginary land the Cap'n is all seeing.
---
Some quick HD-DVD feedback:
- Dune surprised me. Well, not the movie. I've seen the movie before, and it is what it is: enjoyable but it feels like big chunks are missing (which they are). The picture was better than I ever imagined it would be, particularly since that whole "80s film stock looks like shit so don't expect much" argument I foisted up for Ghostbusters. Why Dune could look this good and maybe Ghostbusters doesn't is a discussion for another time. Lynch's ridiculous eye to production design pays off big time with this HD-DVD, so I guess you'll have to come over and see for yourself.
- The Army of Darkness HD-DVD looks almost exactly like the version downloaded from the PS store, and that's not a bad thing. Plus, this one doesn't expire.
- If memory serves me correctly, Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind look as good or better than when I saw them at the Janus and the Carousel (respectively).
- The Deer Hunter looks good but not great. Pretty grainy but the three hours have more room to stretch out, so there's better detail.
- Haven't watched Seed of Chucky or Anchorman yet. Will get on that soon.
---
There's no forward momentum on Stab Lincoln, Civil War Zombies, or Raptor of Liberty yet. I've sketched out a rough idea for Raptor-in-Chief, which you could consider to be a cross between Jurassic Park and King Ralph.
If anyone would like to volunteer their services for some concept art, I'd be happy to share it with readers of the blogorium. The Cap'n has tried with little-to-no success in photo-shop-ing a proper "zombie Lincoln" picture, so any freelancers out there are welcome to give it a go.
---
One of these days I'll get back to proper "critical essays", a tag sorely underused since the Cap'n jumped ship from DieSpace.
Wait. Is that domain taken? I wonder if it is, because if not, there's a great movie in there somewhere. Okay, a shitty movie, but a shitty movie I can turn into gold! And by that I don't just mean spraypainting dog crap gold, like I usually do. I mean actual alchemy involving feces and my
Please don't tell Hogwarts I "borrowed" it. Let's just keep this between ourselves, okay?
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Updating the old "release list" allows the Cap'n to correct one erroneous statement from a few weeks ago: The Stepfather will in fact be on dvd, just not until two weeks after Stepfather II arrives. Sticklers must remember to be patient, lest ye ruin the chronology of pre-Lost/X-Files/Millenium Terry O'Quinn. But don't worry, that's what I'm here for; to keep you on track.
A cursory glance also reveals the following "Really? That's Going to Be on Blu-Ray?!" movies: The Postman, Ichi the Killer, Starman, Over the Top, The Quick and the Dead, Blue Thunder and Cutthroat Island.
On the other hand, you'll finally be able to say you own Torso, Stunt Rock, Anvil! The Story of Anvil, and Werewolf: The Complete Series on dvd before the end of the year. Who says a new format's not good for bringing you every single "cult" film or tv show left in the archives*?
Still no sign of that Troll 2 Blu-Ray though...
---
As of right now, the only HD-DVD disc to arrive is The Frighteners, which looked pretty nice. By watching it, I've been able to confirm a suspicion I had about the other discs and the player itself: there's an ever so slight "jerky" motion to the picture. The sound is pretty great and generally the image looks good, but when things get very busy on-screen (as the beginning of The Frighteners does) the image can kind of lag or jerk for just a hair of a second.
I'd need someone else to double check it, but I'm pretty sure this is not an isolated phenomenon. This may have something to do with the HD-DVD drive or the video encoding, I don't know. Truthfully, it's not really distracting, except perhaps on a subliminal level, telling you "this is a smidge off, hoss", until you shrug it off. It's something I've never noticed on Blu-Ray discs, but then again we're dealing in uncharted territory here.
---
Maybe the only good thing to come out of Shit Coffin was the BD-Live availability of a scene from Trick R Treat, which Warner Brothers has been sitting on (for no apparent reason) for almost two years. Everyone who sees it seems to love it, and as a sucker for anthology films anyway, I've been waiting patiently.
The clip involves Brian Cox as "grouchy old dude who probably hates Halloween" being terrorized by that little sack-headed kid you might have seen in the artwork. Once you get past the sack kid looking a little silly, things get quite violent. There's a better back and forth than I was expecting from the "non-believer gets scared" story, and the violence isn't nearly as one-sided as it normally is. If anything, the nine minutes I watched really got the Cap'n jonesing to see the whole thing in context, plus the other two stories alluded to in this here trailer:
Look for it to join Let the Right One In at Horror Fest in October, provided Warners ever picks a release date.
---
Off to fiddle around with some digital media and see if the game systems can see them. Then packing. I have to be out of this apartment by, let's say, next week. Ack.
* Except for Monsters. What must I do to get Monsters on dvd? Do I have to buy Friday the 13th: The Series? Poltergeist: The Series? Do I need to petition Freddy's Nightmares so I have to buy that too?
A cursory glance also reveals the following "Really? That's Going to Be on Blu-Ray?!" movies: The Postman, Ichi the Killer, Starman, Over the Top, The Quick and the Dead, Blue Thunder and Cutthroat Island.
On the other hand, you'll finally be able to say you own Torso, Stunt Rock, Anvil! The Story of Anvil, and Werewolf: The Complete Series on dvd before the end of the year. Who says a new format's not good for bringing you every single "cult" film or tv show left in the archives*?
Still no sign of that Troll 2 Blu-Ray though...
---
As of right now, the only HD-DVD disc to arrive is The Frighteners, which looked pretty nice. By watching it, I've been able to confirm a suspicion I had about the other discs and the player itself: there's an ever so slight "jerky" motion to the picture. The sound is pretty great and generally the image looks good, but when things get very busy on-screen (as the beginning of The Frighteners does) the image can kind of lag or jerk for just a hair of a second.
I'd need someone else to double check it, but I'm pretty sure this is not an isolated phenomenon. This may have something to do with the HD-DVD drive or the video encoding, I don't know. Truthfully, it's not really distracting, except perhaps on a subliminal level, telling you "this is a smidge off, hoss", until you shrug it off. It's something I've never noticed on Blu-Ray discs, but then again we're dealing in uncharted territory here.
---
Maybe the only good thing to come out of Shit Coffin was the BD-Live availability of a scene from Trick R Treat, which Warner Brothers has been sitting on (for no apparent reason) for almost two years. Everyone who sees it seems to love it, and as a sucker for anthology films anyway, I've been waiting patiently.
The clip involves Brian Cox as "grouchy old dude who probably hates Halloween" being terrorized by that little sack-headed kid you might have seen in the artwork. Once you get past the sack kid looking a little silly, things get quite violent. There's a better back and forth than I was expecting from the "non-believer gets scared" story, and the violence isn't nearly as one-sided as it normally is. If anything, the nine minutes I watched really got the Cap'n jonesing to see the whole thing in context, plus the other two stories alluded to in this here trailer:
Look for it to join Let the Right One In at Horror Fest in October, provided Warners ever picks a release date.
---
Off to fiddle around with some digital media and see if the game systems can see them. Then packing. I have to be out of this apartment by, let's say, next week. Ack.
* Except for Monsters. What must I do to get Monsters on dvd? Do I have to buy Friday the 13th: The Series? Poltergeist: The Series? Do I need to petition Freddy's Nightmares so I have to buy that too?
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Summer Fest Day Four: Creepshow and Shaun of the Dead
For the last night of the Greensboro Summer Fest Massacre Part II, we watched two HD downloads from the Playstation Store: Creepshow and Shaun of the Dead. If you're going to have a weekend of "Horror Comedies", then you'd better include these at some point.
There are a number of strange reasons why we only got to watch two movies tonight. Some have to do with exhaustion, some with auto repair, and a few related to the fact that all of us have school, work, or both tomorrow morning. That being said, I wanted to close things out on a high note, so the Cap'n will give you some brief thoughts on both films.
Creepshow is a movie I often forget to be a George Romero joint, in part because of how well he adapts the "comic" sensibilities. The movie is awash in strong primary colors, weird framing, kooky angles, and broad acting. Of course, that's why Creepshow works; because it borrows so heavily from EC Comics and it's very difficult to do those kind of "ironic horror" anthologies without tongue (or fang) firmly planted in cheek*.
The cockroach story at the end remains my favorite, as after years I still find the final scene disgusting (where the bugs emerge from inside his body), and Stephen King's acting in the plant man segment is so bad that it almost works. Well, almost.
I'll be picking this up on Blu-Ray in September, as the film looks like gangbusters in 1080p, no small feat for a movie made in 1982. Kudos to Warners for making their catalog stuff look top notch. Now we can just hope it's not a barebones disc.
---
Shaun of the Dead continues to reward with repeated viewings, as I catch more and more payoffs to seemingly innocuous setups late in the film. There's virtually nothing Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg don't introduce early in the movie that doesn't appear in some way, shape, or form before Shaun of the Dead is over. The gore continues to be impressive for a "comedy", and I had a nice chuckle at a throwaway 28 Days Later joke at the end of the movie (where the zombie plague is not blamed on "rage filled monkeys") delivered by Wright in newscaster voiceover.
I think that Hot Fuzz is perhaps better in other areas, but as watchability goes, Shaun of the Dead is hard not to watch repeatedly.
---
Thanks to everyone who came over the four days (and those brave souls who were there every day) and the Cap'n and others can attest that having both Cranpire and Ad Rock was something not to be missed.
I really have to recommend you hunt down Terrorvision in any way you can and watch it, and that you sit tight on Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus. Drag Me to Hell was fun but I suspect many of you can save it for a renter. Hillbillys in a Haunted House is also something you should look into, but it's not for all tastes. Just good ones.
Stay tuned tomorrow for some pictures from Summer Fest and a handful of anecdotes that deal loosely with movies. I'll also give you my recipie for "Hobo Bug Juice" if you're daring enough to try it.
If you're lucky, I might even tell you about Stab Lincoln and Civil War Zombies (1 and 2).
* A key example is the straight up horror version of Tales from the Crypt Amicus made in the 1970s. It's still better than you'd expect it to be, but the lack of humor pulls it away from the source material in odd ways.
There are a number of strange reasons why we only got to watch two movies tonight. Some have to do with exhaustion, some with auto repair, and a few related to the fact that all of us have school, work, or both tomorrow morning. That being said, I wanted to close things out on a high note, so the Cap'n will give you some brief thoughts on both films.
Creepshow is a movie I often forget to be a George Romero joint, in part because of how well he adapts the "comic" sensibilities. The movie is awash in strong primary colors, weird framing, kooky angles, and broad acting. Of course, that's why Creepshow works; because it borrows so heavily from EC Comics and it's very difficult to do those kind of "ironic horror" anthologies without tongue (or fang) firmly planted in cheek*.
The cockroach story at the end remains my favorite, as after years I still find the final scene disgusting (where the bugs emerge from inside his body), and Stephen King's acting in the plant man segment is so bad that it almost works. Well, almost.
I'll be picking this up on Blu-Ray in September, as the film looks like gangbusters in 1080p, no small feat for a movie made in 1982. Kudos to Warners for making their catalog stuff look top notch. Now we can just hope it's not a barebones disc.
---
Shaun of the Dead continues to reward with repeated viewings, as I catch more and more payoffs to seemingly innocuous setups late in the film. There's virtually nothing Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg don't introduce early in the movie that doesn't appear in some way, shape, or form before Shaun of the Dead is over. The gore continues to be impressive for a "comedy", and I had a nice chuckle at a throwaway 28 Days Later joke at the end of the movie (where the zombie plague is not blamed on "rage filled monkeys") delivered by Wright in newscaster voiceover.
I think that Hot Fuzz is perhaps better in other areas, but as watchability goes, Shaun of the Dead is hard not to watch repeatedly.
---
Thanks to everyone who came over the four days (and those brave souls who were there every day) and the Cap'n and others can attest that having both Cranpire and Ad Rock was something not to be missed.
I really have to recommend you hunt down Terrorvision in any way you can and watch it, and that you sit tight on Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus. Drag Me to Hell was fun but I suspect many of you can save it for a renter. Hillbillys in a Haunted House is also something you should look into, but it's not for all tastes. Just good ones.
Stay tuned tomorrow for some pictures from Summer Fest and a handful of anecdotes that deal loosely with movies. I'll also give you my recipie for "Hobo Bug Juice" if you're daring enough to try it.
If you're lucky, I might even tell you about Stab Lincoln and Civil War Zombies (1 and 2).
* A key example is the straight up horror version of Tales from the Crypt Amicus made in the 1970s. It's still better than you'd expect it to be, but the lack of humor pulls it away from the source material in odd ways.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Quick Non-Review-Review and More Summerfest Additions
I can't promise that Student Bodies is going to make the already packed Summer Fest list (new additions shortly); it's not a great movie, but this "first horror-comedy"* is much better than Return to Horror High, a movie we already watched two fests ago.
The premise is simple: it's a parody of slasher movies. The one thing I'll give Student Bodies over Scream or Scary Movie is that it came out at the height of "slasher mania" in 1981, and while many of the jokes are misfires, enough of them hit and nail the genre conventions. I considered putting the trailer up here but it does the movie a disservice by playing too broad. Don't get me wrong, Student Bodies is throwing jokes out with Zucker-like speed, it's just that every now and then one of them will be funny, and the trailer is not. It also ruins the first ten minutes of the film.
Because it does fit into the "horror comedy" tent I'm pitching for Summer Fest, I'm giving it some consideration, even if it's not the best thing we're going to see. Speaking of which, let's look at some of the new additions.
Major Tom scored a copy of Terrorvision, which you can read his thoughts on in the "comments" section of the last Summer Fest post. I have a VCR, so this is a sure thing.
I did manage to actually find a 3-D copy of My Bloody Valentine, and despite Neil's protestations, we are going to watch it on Saturday. Friday the 13th Part 3 (in 3-D) will be playing on, appropriately, Friday. If enough of you can convince me it's the right thing to do AND it's still playing in theatres, Thursday's Field Trip movie will be Drag Me to Hell. It's the only horror-related movie playing right now. If The Final Destination were opening before August, we'd be seeing that - in 3-D!
Troll 2. HD. I just need to know, and you're going to find out with me.
I realize the fake Friday the 13th is coming out soon, but we're not watching it. Only legitimate Jason movies are considered Fest-worthy. Movies where Jason becomes a horde of Giant, Man-Eating Bunny Rabbits clearly fall into the "legitimate" category.
The Cap'n is keeping his eye open for a copy of House of Long Shadows on VHS, so if you feel so inclined to also keep an eye out, it would be much appreciated. I'm totally down with more VCR horror if you folks are.
While this is the "Horror Comedy" version of Horror Fest, I do feel the need to include a "classic" of some variety. Thoughts?
This is a smidge early for Horror Fest IV: The Final Chapter, but since Trick R Treat is finally coming out on Blu Ray, we'll be watching that in October, along with Let the Right One In.
Actually, I have a lot of ideas for the October finale of Horror Fest (here, anyway. I will continue it wherever I move to, in this state or not) but I need to focus on other pressing matters between now and July, let alone now and Shocktober.
* Not to get picky here, but I'd say Bride of Frankenstein may be the first "Horror Comedy." If you think I'm applying the standard too liberally, allow me to suggest The Fearless Vampire Killers in its stead.
The premise is simple: it's a parody of slasher movies. The one thing I'll give Student Bodies over Scream or Scary Movie is that it came out at the height of "slasher mania" in 1981, and while many of the jokes are misfires, enough of them hit and nail the genre conventions. I considered putting the trailer up here but it does the movie a disservice by playing too broad. Don't get me wrong, Student Bodies is throwing jokes out with Zucker-like speed, it's just that every now and then one of them will be funny, and the trailer is not. It also ruins the first ten minutes of the film.
Because it does fit into the "horror comedy" tent I'm pitching for Summer Fest, I'm giving it some consideration, even if it's not the best thing we're going to see. Speaking of which, let's look at some of the new additions.
Major Tom scored a copy of Terrorvision, which you can read his thoughts on in the "comments" section of the last Summer Fest post. I have a VCR, so this is a sure thing.
I did manage to actually find a 3-D copy of My Bloody Valentine, and despite Neil's protestations, we are going to watch it on Saturday. Friday the 13th Part 3 (in 3-D) will be playing on, appropriately, Friday. If enough of you can convince me it's the right thing to do AND it's still playing in theatres, Thursday's Field Trip movie will be Drag Me to Hell. It's the only horror-related movie playing right now. If The Final Destination were opening before August, we'd be seeing that - in 3-D!
Troll 2. HD. I just need to know, and you're going to find out with me.
I realize the fake Friday the 13th is coming out soon, but we're not watching it. Only legitimate Jason movies are considered Fest-worthy. Movies where Jason becomes a horde of Giant, Man-Eating Bunny Rabbits clearly fall into the "legitimate" category.
The Cap'n is keeping his eye open for a copy of House of Long Shadows on VHS, so if you feel so inclined to also keep an eye out, it would be much appreciated. I'm totally down with more VCR horror if you folks are.
While this is the "Horror Comedy" version of Horror Fest, I do feel the need to include a "classic" of some variety. Thoughts?
This is a smidge early for Horror Fest IV: The Final Chapter, but since Trick R Treat is finally coming out on Blu Ray, we'll be watching that in October, along with Let the Right One In.
Actually, I have a lot of ideas for the October finale of Horror Fest (here, anyway. I will continue it wherever I move to, in this state or not) but I need to focus on other pressing matters between now and July, let alone now and Shocktober.
* Not to get picky here, but I'd say Bride of Frankenstein may be the first "Horror Comedy." If you think I'm applying the standard too liberally, allow me to suggest The Fearless Vampire Killers in its stead.
Friday, May 1, 2009
Long Live the, um NEW New Flesh (part two)
In order to begin thinking about this potential remake of Videodrome, something many people (the Cap'n included) are opposed to, I thought it might be a good idea to watch the movie again. This time, instead of simply sinking into the film, I was trying to see how and why this film would be remade (let alone could, as many of you have suggested), and while I remain opposed to remaking this film (which turned twenty-five last year), I now understand the rationale behind it.
The first thing that stood out to me in re-watching Videodrome was how frequently this particular idea has popped up since Videodrome was released, particularly by John Carpenter. While most - if not all - of David Cronenberg's films deal with the body and changes that occur to us, Videodrome also deals directly with the trope of "resistance through enlightenment". Max Renn discovers Videodrome, which changes his body (and his mind) in literal and figurative ways, and while he temporarily becomes the tool of the "evil forces" behind Videodrome, he ultimately embraces the New Flesh and rebels, attaining transcendence from the "old flesh" in the end. This idea had been explored before Videodrome, but perhaps never as graphically - pun intended.
Since Videodrome, we've seen permutations of this in films, typically engaging a device other than television. They Live (subliminal messages), In the Mouth of Madness (books), Avalon (virtual worlds) Tron / The Matrix (computers), and even in Cronenberg's own eXistenZ, which dealt with the New Flesh in a game format. eXistenZ may have been ahead of its time, and because it presupposed the success of virtual reality without being tied down to a console, it was not as effective as, say, The Matrix. While each of these films (and a number of others I'm not mentioning) are successful in some ways, none of them have the visceral impact of Videodrome. Yet, it is Videodrome slated for a remake*. Why?
I suspect it has to do with generational readings of films. As I write this, VHS has been declared all but dead (the last manufacturer of cassette tapes announced they were discontinuing production), and in ten years the VHS tape may totally vanish from what people understand as "home video". This is not a lamentation; it is a likely reality, one that those of us who grew up with video tapes have to get used to. Like cassette tapes, video tapes are obsolete. Unfortunately for Videodrome, the film hinges on the power of the videocassette as a transformative mechanism.
Videodrome spreads to Max not through broadcast but in the form of VHS tapes. His "instructions" after becoming a tool of Convex come through breathing, pulsating videotapes. Television is the medium of transformation, but the tapes are the mechanism by which the change initiates. To many viewers today (and I'm considering the two to three generations that are coming of age as cinema "literate" primarily), VHS is not a legible medium. As time passes, Videodrome will become increasingly difficult to connect to, removing them from the experience of watching this film.
Additional things have been rendered obsolete: twenty five years later, the "pirate" tv channel is almost nonexistent, replaced by watered down variations of public access television and pay cable channels. Neither of these versions represent the programming that Renn's Civic TV Channel 83 airs, or anything close to it. Risque, pornographic, and "pirate" frequencies of an overly salacious nature don't exist in the realm of television. Although it is not abundantly clear if Civic TV represents a Cable channel or a sneaky UHF frequency, similar "niche" programming like Z Channel were run off of cable stations with the advent of HBO. Already two of the major thematic devices of Videodrome are rendered illegible to new audiences.
When I jokingly suggested that Videodrome and the New Flesh revolution would present themselves on the internet, it was only half tongue-in-cheek. Even now, as the net grows more and more regimented, the ideas being represented in Videodrome and the transformative mechanisms are more easily mapped onto the "back channels" of the web. While movies like Fear Dot Com and Untraceable ham-handedly explore this possibility, I suspect that the only way to remake Videodrome involves the "viral" quality pervasive online now.
The torture angle that draws Renn into Videodrome has been explored - considerably more explicitly - in films like Hostel and the (regrettably) successful Saw films. The taboo that Videodrome superficially represented has to some degree become discursively mainstream, even if it retains a "forbidden" quality to some. Nevertheless, type "Hatchet vs Testicles" into your google bar and see what comes up. Several of you have already seen it, and authenticity aside, the readily available nature of previously taboo footage also robs Videodrome of its potency. Remaking this film successfully would require a director who was truly willing to push the boundaries further than Cronenberg did in 1983.
Unfortunately, the only person I feel would be willing (and interested) in pushing the New Flesh further than we would be comfortable with is David Cronenberg, and he's already moved on. I think that the relative dismissal of eXistenZ by audiences drove Cronenberg to move his body explorations into less "extreme" circumstances, resulting in the very interesting work of Spider, A History of Violence, and Eastern Promises. I sense that he is less interested in going "gonzo" with his films, and the days of stomach vaginas and flesh guns with teeth bullets are over. Accordingly, while I can't speak for all of the potential directors of this very palpable Videodrome remake, it is hard to imagine a successful updating of such a potent original.
I must stress that I feel no excitement about this remake of Videodrome, but after watching the film again I do understand the rationale someone would have about taking it and rendering the material legible for an audience who has no connection to the major plot devices. How to make the film successfully map on more contemporaneous tropes is a problem I would prefer writers and directors not concern themselves with, and yet I can't necessarily blame them for wanting to try. Perhaps it will work; more likely this "new" Videodrome will be at best different. The New Flesh really has no choice in 2009.
* They Live is also in line to be remade, but I feel it's embrace of western and exploitation roots are the impetus behind revisiting the film. Its cult status is no doubt also a factor.
The first thing that stood out to me in re-watching Videodrome was how frequently this particular idea has popped up since Videodrome was released, particularly by John Carpenter. While most - if not all - of David Cronenberg's films deal with the body and changes that occur to us, Videodrome also deals directly with the trope of "resistance through enlightenment". Max Renn discovers Videodrome, which changes his body (and his mind) in literal and figurative ways, and while he temporarily becomes the tool of the "evil forces" behind Videodrome, he ultimately embraces the New Flesh and rebels, attaining transcendence from the "old flesh" in the end. This idea had been explored before Videodrome, but perhaps never as graphically - pun intended.
Since Videodrome, we've seen permutations of this in films, typically engaging a device other than television. They Live (subliminal messages), In the Mouth of Madness (books), Avalon (virtual worlds) Tron / The Matrix (computers), and even in Cronenberg's own eXistenZ, which dealt with the New Flesh in a game format. eXistenZ may have been ahead of its time, and because it presupposed the success of virtual reality without being tied down to a console, it was not as effective as, say, The Matrix. While each of these films (and a number of others I'm not mentioning) are successful in some ways, none of them have the visceral impact of Videodrome. Yet, it is Videodrome slated for a remake*. Why?
I suspect it has to do with generational readings of films. As I write this, VHS has been declared all but dead (the last manufacturer of cassette tapes announced they were discontinuing production), and in ten years the VHS tape may totally vanish from what people understand as "home video". This is not a lamentation; it is a likely reality, one that those of us who grew up with video tapes have to get used to. Like cassette tapes, video tapes are obsolete. Unfortunately for Videodrome, the film hinges on the power of the videocassette as a transformative mechanism.
Videodrome spreads to Max not through broadcast but in the form of VHS tapes. His "instructions" after becoming a tool of Convex come through breathing, pulsating videotapes. Television is the medium of transformation, but the tapes are the mechanism by which the change initiates. To many viewers today (and I'm considering the two to three generations that are coming of age as cinema "literate" primarily), VHS is not a legible medium. As time passes, Videodrome will become increasingly difficult to connect to, removing them from the experience of watching this film.
Additional things have been rendered obsolete: twenty five years later, the "pirate" tv channel is almost nonexistent, replaced by watered down variations of public access television and pay cable channels. Neither of these versions represent the programming that Renn's Civic TV Channel 83 airs, or anything close to it. Risque, pornographic, and "pirate" frequencies of an overly salacious nature don't exist in the realm of television. Although it is not abundantly clear if Civic TV represents a Cable channel or a sneaky UHF frequency, similar "niche" programming like Z Channel were run off of cable stations with the advent of HBO. Already two of the major thematic devices of Videodrome are rendered illegible to new audiences.
When I jokingly suggested that Videodrome and the New Flesh revolution would present themselves on the internet, it was only half tongue-in-cheek. Even now, as the net grows more and more regimented, the ideas being represented in Videodrome and the transformative mechanisms are more easily mapped onto the "back channels" of the web. While movies like Fear Dot Com and Untraceable ham-handedly explore this possibility, I suspect that the only way to remake Videodrome involves the "viral" quality pervasive online now.
The torture angle that draws Renn into Videodrome has been explored - considerably more explicitly - in films like Hostel and the (regrettably) successful Saw films. The taboo that Videodrome superficially represented has to some degree become discursively mainstream, even if it retains a "forbidden" quality to some. Nevertheless, type "Hatchet vs Testicles" into your google bar and see what comes up. Several of you have already seen it, and authenticity aside, the readily available nature of previously taboo footage also robs Videodrome of its potency. Remaking this film successfully would require a director who was truly willing to push the boundaries further than Cronenberg did in 1983.
Unfortunately, the only person I feel would be willing (and interested) in pushing the New Flesh further than we would be comfortable with is David Cronenberg, and he's already moved on. I think that the relative dismissal of eXistenZ by audiences drove Cronenberg to move his body explorations into less "extreme" circumstances, resulting in the very interesting work of Spider, A History of Violence, and Eastern Promises. I sense that he is less interested in going "gonzo" with his films, and the days of stomach vaginas and flesh guns with teeth bullets are over. Accordingly, while I can't speak for all of the potential directors of this very palpable Videodrome remake, it is hard to imagine a successful updating of such a potent original.
I must stress that I feel no excitement about this remake of Videodrome, but after watching the film again I do understand the rationale someone would have about taking it and rendering the material legible for an audience who has no connection to the major plot devices. How to make the film successfully map on more contemporaneous tropes is a problem I would prefer writers and directors not concern themselves with, and yet I can't necessarily blame them for wanting to try. Perhaps it will work; more likely this "new" Videodrome will be at best different. The New Flesh really has no choice in 2009.
* They Live is also in line to be remade, but I feel it's embrace of western and exploitation roots are the impetus behind revisiting the film. Its cult status is no doubt also a factor.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Remastering continued.
Sometimes a subject bears more discussion. In the instance of last night's ruminating over "digital scrubbing", regular reader Tom D. had some interesting comments about the issue of remastering (visible here). His particular interest comes from two Criterion releases: By Brakhage, an anthology of Stan Brakhage's experimental films, and La Jetee / Sans Soleil, two films by Chris Marker.
The Cap'n highly recommends you read the comments in full before continuing, and I'd prefer to not paste edited versions here, even for space considerations. What it did do was get me thinking about further examples, but particularly the issue of "director's choice".
Given that both of these remasters were done with and approved by their respective filmmakers (Brakhage and Marker) if the intention of the director supersedes our own personal preference. It is true that unintended consequences, be they print damage, fading, poor projection, or video mastering, can create a separate version of the film that audiences come to rather than the director's desired product.
David Lynch has famously indicated that unless he can control the image output of every tv set in the world that he has no interest in pursuing another series. Both Twin Peaks boxed sets reflect his desire to control the precise image, down to "home tests" which allow you to adjust the image to his "ideal". So if we are to respect, in some ways, auteurial influence, where is the line?
George Lucas is the frequent punching bag in this conversation (not merely for Star Wars but for THX 1138's "new cut") but I am deeply conflicted about what William Friedkin did to The French Connection. His newly remastered version for Blu Ray started by splitting the negative: creating a new black and white negative which was meticulously cleaned up for the sharpest possible image. What Friedkin did next is where I find myself troubled by this "intent" discussion.
Friedkin took this black and white master and added the color back, but not in a matching system. Instead, he allowed colors to appear smudgy and bleed (particularly strong reds, like on Popeye Doyle's Santa suit), giving the effect of a "colorized" film. Frank Capra and Orson Welles notoriously threw fits when Ted Turner tried to do similar colorizations to their films in the 1980s, but this is a separate issue. The French Connection was made in color, and the image available on this High Definition release is not reflective of what the film looked like when released in theatres. Hell, it doesn't even reflect the dvd version released four years ago!
William Friedkin is well within his rights to do this but I have great reservations about buying The French Connection on Blu Ray because of his "tinkering" with the film. Unlike Lucas, who makes fairly noticeable digital additions to his older films, Friedkin erased the original picture's color palette and replaced it with something that looks like poorly synched colorization.
Similar changes have happened at Criterion, even on "director-approved" editions, most noticeably The Last Emperor and Chungking Express. Both films were re-adjusted in different ways by their cinematographers, rather than directly by the filmmakers. The framing of Emperor was opened up from 2.35:1 to 2.00:1 by Vittorio Storaro, under the claim it was the "intended" framing of the film.
What is not mentioned on Criterion's site is that Storaro developed "Univision" - a film stock designed to be shot at 2.00:1, and that accordingly demands all films he shot be transferred to 2.00:1. Which, in case you were wondering, is why no version of Apocalypse Now released on dvd has ever been framed at its original 2.35:1 aspect ratio.
Chungking Express is more directly related to color timing. Criterion had been working on Express, but Kar-Wai was too busy filming Ashes of Time to personally oversee it. Criterion producers discovered the film's cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, was in New York working on a Jim Jarmusch film and showed the BD-R to him. From their blog, On Five:
"Now, by this point, we were already at our initial DVD-R and BD-R stages for Chungking. That means that . . . we were done. Basically, we just had to go through the discs and check them to make sure there weren’t any errors or problems.
But the prospect of getting Doyle’s stamp of approval on our transfer was too tantalizing, and important, to let slip by. So our tech director, Lee Kline, contacted Doyle and persevered until he got the cinematographer to find time in his hectic schedule to swing by and check out the results of our work. Not surprisingly, Doyle did request some changes, ones that only someone closely involved with Chungking’s overall visual presentation would’ve known. They weren’t anything too major: dialing out some green in a few shots, warming up Kai Tak airport interiors, fixing a couple of skin tones. Still, it meant we’d have to “start over” to a certain extent, inserting those fixes and reauthoring both the standard-def and Blu-ray discs. "
Now, admittedly, Chungking Express does not have a "director's stamp of approval" as some of their releases do. Wong Kar-Wai was personally involved in the sound mix, but it appears that only Doyle saw the temporary work on the picture and addressed some changes. I don't have much of an opinion one way or the other on this; it is, however, interesting because we have an example of remastering that is not specifically the director.
There are a handful of other examples of this, the one that comes to mind immediately is the dvd release of Terry Gilliam's Tideland. In this case, the company who released the disc (ThinkFilm) decided not to wait for Gilliam to reframe his 2.35:1 picture into a 2.00:1 image, so they cropped the film to a 1.77:1 picture and released it on dvd as a "16x9 Full Frame" presentation. More insulting than this erroneous decision is that all of the deleted scenes and making of material on the second disc is still presented 2.35:1, so it's not like we'd never know.
When ThinkFilm received complaints from fans (and Gilliam), they acquiesed and claimed they would release the film, but they still gaffed it up. Rather than do the right thing and honor Gilliam's request to reframe the image, they said that Tideland would be released "in its original 2.35:1 format".
To add insult to injury, I've never been able to find a copy of this "fixed" version of Tideland. Amazon still lists the 1.77:1 version and no store I've ever been to carries a different version. ThinkFilm may never have released it, assuming that we were too stupid to bother checking up on that. In the meantime, Tideland is only availble with half of the image missing, a result of impatient dvd mastering.
Admittedly, this is a complicated issue. I'm sure there are people who prefer the scratchy, fuzzy versions of Eraserhead and Night of the Living Dead, among many others. I happen to prefer the newer editions, ones that reflect some degree of revisionism on the filmmakers part. Or maybe it doesn't. It's truly hard to be certain.
The Cap'n highly recommends you read the comments in full before continuing, and I'd prefer to not paste edited versions here, even for space considerations. What it did do was get me thinking about further examples, but particularly the issue of "director's choice".
Given that both of these remasters were done with and approved by their respective filmmakers (Brakhage and Marker) if the intention of the director supersedes our own personal preference. It is true that unintended consequences, be they print damage, fading, poor projection, or video mastering, can create a separate version of the film that audiences come to rather than the director's desired product.
David Lynch has famously indicated that unless he can control the image output of every tv set in the world that he has no interest in pursuing another series. Both Twin Peaks boxed sets reflect his desire to control the precise image, down to "home tests" which allow you to adjust the image to his "ideal". So if we are to respect, in some ways, auteurial influence, where is the line?
George Lucas is the frequent punching bag in this conversation (not merely for Star Wars but for THX 1138's "new cut") but I am deeply conflicted about what William Friedkin did to The French Connection. His newly remastered version for Blu Ray started by splitting the negative: creating a new black and white negative which was meticulously cleaned up for the sharpest possible image. What Friedkin did next is where I find myself troubled by this "intent" discussion.
Friedkin took this black and white master and added the color back, but not in a matching system. Instead, he allowed colors to appear smudgy and bleed (particularly strong reds, like on Popeye Doyle's Santa suit), giving the effect of a "colorized" film. Frank Capra and Orson Welles notoriously threw fits when Ted Turner tried to do similar colorizations to their films in the 1980s, but this is a separate issue. The French Connection was made in color, and the image available on this High Definition release is not reflective of what the film looked like when released in theatres. Hell, it doesn't even reflect the dvd version released four years ago!
William Friedkin is well within his rights to do this but I have great reservations about buying The French Connection on Blu Ray because of his "tinkering" with the film. Unlike Lucas, who makes fairly noticeable digital additions to his older films, Friedkin erased the original picture's color palette and replaced it with something that looks like poorly synched colorization.
Similar changes have happened at Criterion, even on "director-approved" editions, most noticeably The Last Emperor and Chungking Express. Both films were re-adjusted in different ways by their cinematographers, rather than directly by the filmmakers. The framing of Emperor was opened up from 2.35:1 to 2.00:1 by Vittorio Storaro, under the claim it was the "intended" framing of the film.
What is not mentioned on Criterion's site is that Storaro developed "Univision" - a film stock designed to be shot at 2.00:1, and that accordingly demands all films he shot be transferred to 2.00:1. Which, in case you were wondering, is why no version of Apocalypse Now released on dvd has ever been framed at its original 2.35:1 aspect ratio.
Chungking Express is more directly related to color timing. Criterion had been working on Express, but Kar-Wai was too busy filming Ashes of Time to personally oversee it. Criterion producers discovered the film's cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, was in New York working on a Jim Jarmusch film and showed the BD-R to him. From their blog, On Five:
"Now, by this point, we were already at our initial DVD-R and BD-R stages for Chungking. That means that . . . we were done. Basically, we just had to go through the discs and check them to make sure there weren’t any errors or problems.
But the prospect of getting Doyle’s stamp of approval on our transfer was too tantalizing, and important, to let slip by. So our tech director, Lee Kline, contacted Doyle and persevered until he got the cinematographer to find time in his hectic schedule to swing by and check out the results of our work. Not surprisingly, Doyle did request some changes, ones that only someone closely involved with Chungking’s overall visual presentation would’ve known. They weren’t anything too major: dialing out some green in a few shots, warming up Kai Tak airport interiors, fixing a couple of skin tones. Still, it meant we’d have to “start over” to a certain extent, inserting those fixes and reauthoring both the standard-def and Blu-ray discs. "
Now, admittedly, Chungking Express does not have a "director's stamp of approval" as some of their releases do. Wong Kar-Wai was personally involved in the sound mix, but it appears that only Doyle saw the temporary work on the picture and addressed some changes. I don't have much of an opinion one way or the other on this; it is, however, interesting because we have an example of remastering that is not specifically the director.
There are a handful of other examples of this, the one that comes to mind immediately is the dvd release of Terry Gilliam's Tideland. In this case, the company who released the disc (ThinkFilm) decided not to wait for Gilliam to reframe his 2.35:1 picture into a 2.00:1 image, so they cropped the film to a 1.77:1 picture and released it on dvd as a "16x9 Full Frame" presentation. More insulting than this erroneous decision is that all of the deleted scenes and making of material on the second disc is still presented 2.35:1, so it's not like we'd never know.
When ThinkFilm received complaints from fans (and Gilliam), they acquiesed and claimed they would release the film, but they still gaffed it up. Rather than do the right thing and honor Gilliam's request to reframe the image, they said that Tideland would be released "in its original 2.35:1 format".
To add insult to injury, I've never been able to find a copy of this "fixed" version of Tideland. Amazon still lists the 1.77:1 version and no store I've ever been to carries a different version. ThinkFilm may never have released it, assuming that we were too stupid to bother checking up on that. In the meantime, Tideland is only availble with half of the image missing, a result of impatient dvd mastering.
Admittedly, this is a complicated issue. I'm sure there are people who prefer the scratchy, fuzzy versions of Eraserhead and Night of the Living Dead, among many others. I happen to prefer the newer editions, ones that reflect some degree of revisionism on the filmmakers part. Or maybe it doesn't. It's truly hard to be certain.
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Doughnuts, do-dee-do-de-do, Doughnuts!
I'm not really sure why it's worth weighing in on the "Wolverine" situation, but I have nothing else really pressing in my "to discuss" column today.
For those of you who aren't movie pirates or don't follow film sites, it appears that thereabouts April 1st, a not-even-remotely April Fool's day joke happened when someone posted 20th Century Fox's X-Men Origins: Wolverine movie online. I don't know where you can find it so please don't ask. I don't care enough about the movie to even start sifting through those channels to locate it. It's out there, I guess if you're so inclined you could find it.
Whether you should or not is totally up to you. Like I said: The Cap'n doesn't care. I don't represent 20th Century Fox and have no vested interest in the film. What I find interesting is the ensuing debate going on about sites like Ain't It Zoul News refusing to accept reviews.
Fox is doing exactly what they should do: hunting down the culprit and arresting the shit out of them. They spent millions of dollars (admittedly, on a movie that people don't seem to like) on this particular film and it was leaked without their permission. Fair enough. Regardless of how I sometimes feel about 20th Century Fox and how they handle their properties, they have the right to protect their investments.
Once upon a time, The Cap'n knew several people who had access to movies before they were available (in theatres or on dvd) and yes, I saw a few of them. I won't lie. American Psycho, Insomnia, Dogma, One Hour Photo, and a number of others. Half of it occurred during the "unprotected Academy Screener" phase and the other half in the early 2000's, when "bootlegs" were chopped in half to fit on CD-R's.
I had a friend get in trouble for distributing movies online when we lived on-campus. Universal apparently didn't care for that, but he had a nice RD and the situation was resolved without litigation. The point is that I understand the "other" side as well; sharing movies obtained online wasn't something done for money but merely to share the movie with others. I can still remember a guy who had a copy of The Blair Witch Project months before it opened locally, so I can see how this is still going on.
What I am a little fuzzy about is the double standard of asking people not to send in "reviews" of a movie leaked online from sites that regularly posted pictures, script reviews, and artwork online only to have it "pulled" with similar legal threats. If the script was sold to the studio, it belongs to the studio, so unless you work for that studio and were paid to "leak" a review, it's stolen property. Please feel free to correct me if this is erroneous.
If you don't want to post reviews of the film, that's fine, but please stop posting other related images or script reviews if the issue is "copyright infringement". Personally, I think things like early looks at Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter or the Tron footage that Disney doesn't seem to be pulling are good ways to create word-of-mouth interest.
Most (if not all) of the movies I was privy to in the past were also things we saw in theatres and bought on dvd. It's the only way I know that One Hour Photo has a different beginning that's nowhere to be found on the dvd, but I don't mind having the "officially" released version. I'm not a movie pirate, nor do I have issue with either side doing what they do (studios and pirates). If you both can "get away with it", so to speak, then by all means do it.
I don't really trust Bit-Torrent and the turnaround these days is close enough that the Cap'n can wait if he doesn't see it on the big screen. I wasn't planning on watching Wolverine so it's pretty much a non-issue for me. I just find the reaction online to be strange, especially from places that pride themselves on "scoops".
For those of you who aren't movie pirates or don't follow film sites, it appears that thereabouts April 1st, a not-even-remotely April Fool's day joke happened when someone posted 20th Century Fox's X-Men Origins: Wolverine movie online. I don't know where you can find it so please don't ask. I don't care enough about the movie to even start sifting through those channels to locate it. It's out there, I guess if you're so inclined you could find it.
Whether you should or not is totally up to you. Like I said: The Cap'n doesn't care. I don't represent 20th Century Fox and have no vested interest in the film. What I find interesting is the ensuing debate going on about sites like Ain't It Zoul News refusing to accept reviews.
Fox is doing exactly what they should do: hunting down the culprit and arresting the shit out of them. They spent millions of dollars (admittedly, on a movie that people don't seem to like) on this particular film and it was leaked without their permission. Fair enough. Regardless of how I sometimes feel about 20th Century Fox and how they handle their properties, they have the right to protect their investments.
Once upon a time, The Cap'n knew several people who had access to movies before they were available (in theatres or on dvd) and yes, I saw a few of them. I won't lie. American Psycho, Insomnia, Dogma, One Hour Photo, and a number of others. Half of it occurred during the "unprotected Academy Screener" phase and the other half in the early 2000's, when "bootlegs" were chopped in half to fit on CD-R's.
I had a friend get in trouble for distributing movies online when we lived on-campus. Universal apparently didn't care for that, but he had a nice RD and the situation was resolved without litigation. The point is that I understand the "other" side as well; sharing movies obtained online wasn't something done for money but merely to share the movie with others. I can still remember a guy who had a copy of The Blair Witch Project months before it opened locally, so I can see how this is still going on.
What I am a little fuzzy about is the double standard of asking people not to send in "reviews" of a movie leaked online from sites that regularly posted pictures, script reviews, and artwork online only to have it "pulled" with similar legal threats. If the script was sold to the studio, it belongs to the studio, so unless you work for that studio and were paid to "leak" a review, it's stolen property. Please feel free to correct me if this is erroneous.
If you don't want to post reviews of the film, that's fine, but please stop posting other related images or script reviews if the issue is "copyright infringement". Personally, I think things like early looks at Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter or the Tron footage that Disney doesn't seem to be pulling are good ways to create word-of-mouth interest.
Most (if not all) of the movies I was privy to in the past were also things we saw in theatres and bought on dvd. It's the only way I know that One Hour Photo has a different beginning that's nowhere to be found on the dvd, but I don't mind having the "officially" released version. I'm not a movie pirate, nor do I have issue with either side doing what they do (studios and pirates). If you both can "get away with it", so to speak, then by all means do it.
I don't really trust Bit-Torrent and the turnaround these days is close enough that the Cap'n can wait if he doesn't see it on the big screen. I wasn't planning on watching Wolverine so it's pretty much a non-issue for me. I just find the reaction online to be strange, especially from places that pride themselves on "scoops".
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Digital Media and USA's Up All Night
To follow up a little bit on last night's PlayOn / Hulu / Netflix discussion, I thought I'd share my thoughts on streaming / digital media. There are a number of bloggers and internet writers who have already declared Blu Ray a dead format, and I believe that Tom also shares this opinion. While digital media certainly has its perks, I'm hard pressed to buy into this "next wave already" argument.
For one thing, the convenience and portability of a dvd or Blu Ray doesn't exist yet. Talk to me all you want about portable hard drives and quick USB hookups, but until each digital media source has the same unified standards for all of the various types of computers, projectors or game systems out there, it's just not as easy as bringing the disc over.
Sure, I understand that having a Blu Ray player limits what I can bring over to houses that don't have it, but it's not like I cleared out all of my dvds either. However, if I have a movie on my iPod and want to bring it over to hook up to someone's computer, we have to make sure that iTunes doesn't try to erase my iPod while syncing, or beyond that, that they're even compatible. DRM is still making things tricky in a way that set top players don't have to deal with.
The other big issue I've noticed so far is that if you want to watch something in HD from a digital source you'd better be prepared to wait for it. The higher the quality the larger the file size so you're pushing those high speed connections. Even downloading demos and add ons for the PS3 takes time, and that's not even close to the size of a movie. The Apple TV is still pretty expensive, and while cool, requires quite a bit of set up in order to use, let alone trying to move it to someone else's house.
While I can understand how digital media is already permeating the next generation players (not just game systems but blu ray players, Apple TV, Tivo, DVRs, etc) and that it will eventually become uniform enough that portability and compatibility are no longer an issue, for now I think it has a way to go. The streaming Netflix looks good, but it's like having a VHS tape. You can pause, stop, and play. Fast forwarding and rewinding work to a degree but there's only so much bandwith it has to work with.
PlayOn also doesn't work with Macs right now. For now I'll take the ability to bring discs from one house to another, including being mailed something from Netflix in addition to their "instant" queue. Tangibility is still a plus as far as the Cap'n is concerned.
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In news which will make many of you happy, Tales from the Darkside season one is finally coming to dvd next month. If you're wondering what that is, there was a period of time before USA showed Monk and Psych and Burn Notice all the time. Back in the network's skeazier days they used to have this program called USA Up All Night, hosted first by Gilbert Gottfried and then by Rhonda Shear. From 1986 to 1998 Up All Night was for many of us an introduction to movies like Revenge of the Nerds, Killer Klowns from Outer Space, Basket Case, and Night of the Comet. The wikipedia page doesn't have Klowns listed, but I know that's where I and many of us first saw it.
As important to the movies were the host segments, which are on Youtube. Click the screen of each of these for links to more of them.
| .. .. After Up All Night ended (usually with an episode of USA's Silk Stalkings), the network would air Tales from the Darkside, which was a cheaper version of Tales from the Crypt. Because it aired so late and because the budget was so low, they frequently went much darker than Crypt and were more violent. USA didn't really care since we're talking well after midnight here. If you were lucky, Darkside was followed by Monsters, which was the cheaper version of Tales from the Darkside and while rarely scary was frequently hilarious. Here are the intros for Tales from the Darkside and Monsters: .. .. While it may seem hard to believe to you jaded kids now, just the intro to Tales from the Darkside used to creep me out. Monsters is, as it always was, retarded*. If Monsters comes out on dvd I'm not saying I won't buy it, but Tales from the Darkside is a guaranteed purchase. I haven't seen that show in years, and thanks to Phillippi I unearthed a memory of one episode that scared the shit out of me. Don't know how quickly I'll leap to watch that. It's a curious time for horror television, as the not-that-great Friday the 13th: The Series is now on dvd. Freddy's Nightmares will no doubt follow as the remake gets closer to release. Freddy's Nightmares is only kind of better than Friday the 13th: The Series, mostly because of how stupid it is: .. * other than Patton Oswalt's bit about Death Bed: The Bed That Eats, the only contact I had with man-eating beds was in an episode of Monsters. |
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