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Barron's reports, "This Dying Medium Has Plenty of Life":

Recent hysteria over the imminent demise of daily newspapers is misplaced. As an economic matter, most newspapers still are far more profitable than other, higher-profile consumer media. As a policy matter, those calling for government subsidies or other protections ignore the true state of the marketplace of ideas: It has never been so vibrant.

Newspapers do face a genuine crisis, but the nature of this crisis is misunderstood. [...]

Doing worse doesn't mean doing badly. Until recently, many newspapers had profit margins exceeding 30%. By 2008, the industry's average margin had fallen to the mid-teens. The speed and magnitude of this decline have resulted in wrenching changes in the way these historically stable businesses must operate.

The continuing drama shouldn't distract from real earnings power. Many newspapers still have almost double the profitability of other media sectors, such as movies, music and books -- which have long struggled to achieve margins of even 10%.

One note: Does it seem peculiar to anyone that the word "even" is used to characterize a 10% profit? Since when is profit of any size something to sneeze at?

(tip: Daily Dish)

A year from now, will we still remember this reference?

Director Joe Dante ("Piranha," "The Howling," "Gremlins," "Matinee," "Homecoming") talks with Dennis Cozzalio about stories and effects at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, in one of the most enjoyable filmmaker interviews I've read in a long time:

... I'm not saying all these new techniques are better. Unfortunately, you can't go home again, and it is difficult to make films using the old technology. I've seen a couple of pictures in Europe when I've gone to festivals where they have carefully tried to use the old Rob Bottin-Rick Baker school of do-it-in-the-camera, and it's often very effective, but those movies often don't get released anywhere because they're not CGI, they're not what people expect. I mean, love it or hate it, CGI is here to stay -- the trick is to find a way to work it so that it doesn't look as sterile and mechanical as by definition it is.

Yes, my middle name is Hussein. What? Uncover your secret Kenyan birther certificate here. You can leak it to the press yourself, or get a crazy Israeli lady to do it for you.

I took this photo of my Cronenbergian incision Friday night after I had a biventricular ICD installed to help me with various arrhythmias I've had for years, and the congestive heart failure that flatlined me back in 2000. Now I am bionic. The image brings to mind so many movies (looks a little like a smiling third nipple in this particular shot -- the swelling has since gone way down). But it reminds me most of the talking boil that sprouts on Richard E. Grant's neck in Bruce Robinson's insanely great "How To Get Ahead In Advertising" (1989), equally brilliant follow-up to the modern comedy classic "Withnail & I." I'll let you know if it starts bossing me around...

"I just think that the young filmmakers today should take advantage of the opportunities and technology that they have now, that I didn't have, or the generations before me. 'Cause now you have no excuse.... If you want to be a filmmaker, there it is."
-- Spike Lee, interview with Digital Camera Magazine

The means of production and promotion are in the hands of filmmakers in ways they have never been in the medium's history. As Spike Lee, director and tube-sock salesman (anybody remember the campaign for "She's Gotta Have It"?) has said, there are no excuses anymore. If you want to make a movie and get it seen, the tools are right there at your disposal. You don't need massive studio resources and hundreds of thousands (or millions) of dollars; all you need is a video camera, a computer, some software and access to the Internet and you've got a whole vertically-integrated world at your disposal: production, marketing, exhibition. A few well-targeted e-mails, some YouTube clips, a Facebook or MySpace page -- even an old-fashioned web site -- and suddenly thousands of people know about you and your film. A service like Withoutabox allows you to enter film festivals all over the world in a jiffy, right from your keyboard -- without so much as a trip to the post office until you know if you've been accepted or invited.

Over many years of interviewing filmmakers I've often asked them how they have the energy to make a film once they've managed to raise enough money to go into production. And I've wondered how they have enough stamina to work on getting their films seen once they're finished. Specialized film publicist extraordinaire Reid Rosefelt is amazed by the power of new technologies, but asks: "What Happens to the Filmmakers Who Can't Market Themselves?" At his blog, Shake Your Windows, he writes:

I admit that I am also ambivalent about marketing, because I am someone who loves movies first and promotes them second. I don't want a director to tell me what a movie means. I don't want to be saddled with the director's insistence that the reason they made the film defines what the movie is. In a lot of ways, the reason that a director thinks he or she made a film is irrelevant. They may not fully understand themselves as human beings, let alone understand their movie. Mysterious things come into play that they don't understand. That's the miracle of it, really.

Some filmmakers are very skilled about how to play the game of talking to the media. They have a natural facility for giving great quotes without giving away the store. Some, like Jarmusch, have a strong image that works into the way you perceive their movies, expanding and not contracting your reactions. Some are a hoot, like Almodovar, and draw you in with their high spirits. Some invent their own myth out of whole cloth, like Herzog. Many of the people who last the longest in pop culture are shape-shifters, like Dylan, Madonna and Robert Redford--they are omnipresent, hiding in plain sight, and the more you think you know about them, the less you do.

"What 'American Pie' betrays is not good taste but any notion that privacy could matter to these kids or to us. Everything in this picture is out front: whatever humiliates the characters most is precisely what everyone in the school learns about them, and the movie views this as proper and humane. For we are all swimming in the same soup of confusion and embarrassment, voyeurism and malice. But without some feeling for privacy as a value, a movie about teen sex and romance can't be made with any grace or style. The idea that everyone should know everything, however productive of comedy, links the movie to the kind of daytime talk show in which neighborhood friends betray one another's secrets and the audience howls at them in mock disapproval and open pleasure. The new hit comedies make us join that audience, whether we want to or not."
-- David Denby, The New Yorker (July 12, 1999)

Andy Warhol got it almost right. Everybody is a "Superstar" (in the Warholian sense) already, or at least everybody behaves like one. And in the future -- that is, 10 years after "American Pie" and 22 years after Andy's death -- everybody's also a self-publicist, using sophisticated technology to manage a public image that masquerades as a mutant form of privacy. Blogs, Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter -- these and so many other powerful promotional tools can be used by anyone, kids or mega-corporations, to create an illusion of intimacy with (in Facebookspeak) "friends" and "fans."

Don't forget your memes. And don't play in puddles unless you're wearing your rubbers. And wash behind your ears.

(tip: David Pogue)

The announcement of a pristine, digitally enhanced Blu-ray release of Edgar G. Uhlmer's grimy 1945 noir "Detour" got me thinking in granular terms...

The first CD I ever bought was Ennio Morricone's soundtrack to Sergio Leone's "Once Upon a Time in America." I had hundreds (thousands?) of LPs by that time, but it was the first thing I got on CD -- because of the dynamic range of the music and the recording, and the really quiet passages that always showed off the flaws in the vinyl pressing (rumble, ticks and pops from imperfections, static, scratches, dirt, etc.), no matter how careful you were with the record. There was a vinyl shortage in the 1970s, and most American records sounded terrible. Vinyl was mixed with cheaper plastics and additives (don't get me started on RCA Dynagroove), LPs got thinner and less uniformly flat, contaminants (like bits of label from recycled records) got pressed right into the grooves... I got used to the idea that I'd have to take back one out of every three or four records I bought for audible -- and often visible -- defects.

(Not these. They're just old-school changeover marks.)

Have you seen them? The first time I noticed them I thought they were just flaws in the print due to some glitch at the lab. But there was something too neat and geometrical about them. Their appearance was almost subliminal, but I became conscious of seeing them in almost every movie, like changeover marks. (See shot from "Fight Club," above. The first time I saw Tyler Durden I thought he was a lab mistake, too.)

I thought I figured out what they were, but I wasn't certain. Now David Bordwell brings them out of the shadows in a post that's mostly about something else -- the history of bugs, those company logos in the corner of the picture, which I remember first seeing during the early seasons of "The Simpsons" on the nascent Fox network. He spotlights something that's been bugging me for a while:

I had hoped to include a frame illustrating the anti-piracy stamp used on current 35mm releases, but couldn't find one quickly. This mark consists of a tight pattern of dots resembling a character in Braille. The stamp would presumably be copied if someone shot off the screen or ran the film through a telecine. How effective these bugs are at tracing pirate copies I can't say, but you can detect them, especially in bright scenes; I usually notice one every third reel or so, just left of the center of the frame. I'll keep looking for a frame and try to add one to this entry.

If he finds one, or if I do, I'll let you know.

UPDATE: From OlliS, via Wikipedia, a very simple example of the CAP code:

Todd McCarthy of Variety, who's old enough to know better, writes at the end of his review of "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button":

Still, for what is designed as a rich tapestry, the picture maintains a slightly remote feel. No matter the power of the image of an old but young-looking Benjamin, slumped over a piano and depressed about his fading memory and life; it is possible that the picture might have been warmer and more emotionally accessible had it been shot on film. It has been argued that digital is a cold medium and celluloid a hot one and a case, however speculative, could be made that a story such as "Benjamin Button," with its desired cumulative emotional impact, should be shot and screened on film to be fully realized. These are intangibles, but nor are they imaginary factors; what technology gives, it can also take away.

[Don't worry -- no spoilers.]

This makes about as much sense to me as blaming the weather on Doppler radar pictures. It may be the second-most misguided thing I've read about movies all year (after Patrick Goldstein's assertion that a "dumb summer comedy" is more worthy of contempt that a dishonest or inept film that expects its ambition to be taken more seriously).

OK, let's say the movie feels "cold" to you, and you attribute this feeling to something in the film. You could acknowledge the movie's predominantly wintry settings and sepia color pallete (exemplified by the fully digital image, set in the dead of night in an empty hotel lobby in the middle of the Russian winter, above). Or contemplate the loneliness of the emotionally detached title character/observer/narrator, who is born an old man in a decrepit body and is cursed to grow physically younger while watching everyone around him age and die.

And you might very well consider the Kubrickian sensibility of the director, David Fincher ("Se7en," "Fight Club," "Zodiac"), the most deliberate and precise of filmmakers. Not known as Mr. Warm 'n' Cozy -- even when working from a Gumpian screenplay by the writer of "Forrest Gump." If the film is dark and cool in tone, it's not because Fincher chose digital technology. It's because Fincher chose to make it dark and cool. You may dislike the countless ways in which the movie emphasizes these qualities (in every composition, every cut, every performance), but don't pretend it's the video that's doing it.

Fully customizable to fit YOUR blog or site. Just click the "Get Widget" button below. This one's already "transparent," so it'll blend into your page's color scheme, but with a few clicks you make it look however you like. Then just plop the code into your template on Blogger, Facebook, TypePad, WordPress, MySpace or whatever and you and your readers will see automatic updates. It's groovy and fun. You can also get a Roger Ebert's Journal widget by (ironically) looking in the far-right column below...

WARNING: Adolf Hitler uses objectionable language, above.

This YouTube clip puts the whole HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray thing in perspective, all right. From press reports you may have gathered that the competition for an HD standard on little plastic discs (remember CDs? CD-ROMs? DVDs?) was a fight to determine the future. It still seems to me -- and most consumers, apparently -- that it's a case of refighting the last war. Or several wars before that.

As of last fall, somewhere between 13.7% (Nielsen) and 36% (Consumer Electronics Association) of American households were estimated to have "tuners capable of receiving HDTV signals" -- and somewhere between 40%-60% of those are "still being fed exclusively with standard-definition content" (from the trade magazine Broadcasting & Cable, October 30, 2007).

The revised deadline for switching all over-air television broadcasting from analog to digital is February 17, 2009 (it had originally been in 2006). But that's not HDTV, it's just a digital signal. It doesn't apply to cable (although many cable systems are now all-digital, as are satellite services like DirecTV and DishNetwork). All TVs sold since March, 2007, have to be digital-capable, and older TVs can be upgraded with the addition of an add-on digital tuner.

According to Nielsen, DVD players, which were introduced 11 years ago (1997), finally surpassed VHS players in US households... a little over one year ago, in the third quarter of 2006. And DVD (its path to acceptance having been prepared for by CDs) is one of the most quickly adopted technologies in history.

So, how compelling is the incentive for upgrading to a high-definition DVD technology, requiring new players (or player-recorders) and new discs? Most consumers can't get the benefits of it yet, and most people with HD televisions (especially the majority with sets less than 50 inches wide -- 42-inch models being the most popular) don't think the quality improvements between standard DVD and HD-DVD or Blu-Ray are all that significant, especially if they already use regular players that upconvert to 720 or 1080 resolutions (though not to true HD).

By the time high-definition television (even at the current standards) is widely accepted, will we still be relying on plastic discs -- that have to be physically transported, whether bought or borrowed -- to deliver the "content"? How sad if that proved to be the case.

Meanwhile, congratulations Blu-Ray. Perhaps you are not the Betamax of 2008. But you are the CD-ROM of tomorrow.

(tip: Jeff Shannon)
(thanks to Kristin Thompson for the new link!)

It's the player piano roll, the 8-track cartridge, the Apple Newton, the Microsoft Bob (or Microsoft Sidewalk) of its day -- the 1981 RCA SelectaVision Capacitance Electronic Disc! Basically, it looked like a grooved black vinyl LP in a plastic sleeve, but it played video instead of music: "The magic of the RCA VideoDisc, a simple, affordable record that, like magic, can bring not just sound, but sound and pictures -- clear, beautiful pictures -- right into your living room! A record that can bring you 'Casablanca'... or Miss Piggy... or Woody Allen... or 'The Godfather'..." My favorite moment in the promo above is when Jesus approaches Rod Steiger and the chorus sings: "Bring the magic home -- with R-C-A!" Remember, too, RCA was the company that brought you the [ahem!] miraculous new Dynagroove and Dynaflex long-playing record formats.

Like its flat circular competition, the silvery 12-inch pre-CD/DVD optical storage disc systems known as DiscoVision or LaserDisc, you also had to turn it over to play, say, the "second side" of a feature film. Discs cost $15 and players between $299 and $500. Sans remote, apparently. None of these new LP-sized disc systems quite caught on with the general public. Soon, Compact Discs would set the standard for optical storage at a diameter of 122 mm (about 4.72 inches), which would also be used for CD-ROMs, DVDs, and DVD-Rs. The question of why digital information of any sort should be encoded onto a cumbersome physical object (requiring needlessly complex delivery systems including shipping, packaging, storage space, a player/recorder separate from the media itself...) is the a technological challenge "home entertainment" companies are still trying to figure out.

The above is a six-minute overview ("Bring the Magic Home" -- look for the trademark skip/stutter in the "Lady Sings the Blues clip), archived by databits, who offers quite a collection of ancient technology guides and promos at YouTube. To watch a guided tour of the SelectaVision production process (including a peek inside the lab with a guy in a shower cap), you can (as they used to say in the early days of the World Wide InterWebs), click here (for Part 1) and here (for Part 2).

"To the people behind the scenes, the people at RCA, it begins with raw materials as pure as those used in medicines -- plus a myriad of parts and procedures."

(For The Reeler's Totally Unrelated Blog-a-thon.)

In the mid- to late-1990s, the heyday of Dan's Gallery of the Grotesque and Justin's Links From the Underground (the infamous proto-blog), one of the funniest and most distressing sites on what was then called the World Wide Web (even before the unfortunate, now-extinct phrase "trip-dub") was Bud Uglly.

It took forever to load, it was excruciatingly cumbersome in every way (the exclusive Bud-Nav System© made getting around the site not only near-impossible but meaningless, and made me laugh until I cried), jammed with a whole mess of frames, randomly flashing animated .gifs, garish backgrounds, hideous embedded audio files (MIDI), tortuous typos, spastic fonts -- virtually nothing you'd want in a web site and much, much more. In other words, it anticipated the typical MySpace page by several years. In its contrived busyness and unreadability, it also captured the look of nearly every post-punk/"new wave" mag, fanzine and album cover (especially on Arista) of the 1980s -- which, in retrospect, far outstrips the 1970s for sheer bud-uglliness. Indeed, Bud Uglly's nihilistic irreverence (and/or irrelevance) virtually exemplified Postmodernist aesthetics. (Typical instructions: "WAVE your MOUSE around to activate and use this control.")

Best of all, it was a commercial pitch for a firm offering "the most cutting edge in webpage manegment and design," formed by "the Manegorial team" of ex-Studio 27 artist Bud Uglly and his younger brother Berry Uglly, who "is cerently working on 'Phil's Carwash on the Web' as well as a website for 'Martha's Stormdoor polishing service'" after "studiing at the Roosevelt grade school for the design impared..."

Fortunately for web historians, various incarnations of Bud Uglly, v. 1.0-4.0, have been archived to remind us of that glorious time from September 1996 to October 1998, during which "the site was updated weekly and new features were constantly added until it became so bloated it finally had to be shot." Then some more stuff happened, too.

Also included: "Scooter Ride Through Hell," "Uranus Teenysystems 1999 Webputer" Ron's Too Fast Homepage," "Photobooth," "Payne Philburns Jamaican Web-Tan," "Ow!" and "Crazy Joe's Internet Bungee Jump."

No filmmaker has more daringly and relentlessly explored what it means to be human than David Cronenberg.

Two weeks ago, critic Robert Horton and I discussed Cronenberg's work as part of Robert's Magic Lantern Series at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle. This short film, conceived as a self-contained critical essay/appreciation, has been expanded and refined from the seven-minute version I assembled the night before that occasion, tracing Cronenberg's thematic obsessions and the development of his artistic vision across 40 years of filmmaking. "From the Drain" to "Eastern Promises" (neither of which are included here), it's all one big Cronenberg movie, no matter what the genre: horror, science-fiction, fantasy, biography, crime thriller...

Clips from nine chapters in the ever-mutating cinematic saga of David Cronenberg ("The Brood" to "A History of Violence") are interwoven to illuminate some of the director's major themes: technology (and art) as an extension/expression of the mind and body (guns, game pods, television, cars, computers, typewriters, eyeglasses...); the human appetite for extreme sensations; violence as sex, and sex as violence; the evolution of humankind beyond biology, and the inevitable dissolution of the flesh through mutation, disease, aging; corporate co-option of the intellectual property behind new technologies... all in only 12 minutes!

I warn you, it's going to be a wild ride...

Steven Boone over at The House Next Door has seen the latest -- er, "Final" -- cut of what may now, 25 years after its debut, be "Ridley Scott's" "Blade Runner," in the new version premiering at the New York Film Festival. Above all, Boone was wowed by the digital presentation:

"The Final Cut" is remastered from original 35mm elements and transferred to High Definition digital video at 4K (4096 horizontal pixel) resolution. Projected in HD at 24 frames a second for this year's New York Film Festival, this "Blade Runner" has no visible grain, dirt or scratches, stuttering frames, reel-change "cigarette burns" or soft-focus moments when the film gets loose in the projector gate. Funny how I thought I'd miss all those things, their "organic" qualities, but this restoration gives us a pristine image without sacrificing warmth. The picture even fooled our editor, who at first thought he was looking at a 35mm projection. This "Blade Runner" removes every barrier to getting lost in Scott's fire-and-rain Los Angeles short of presenting it as interactive theater.

I saw the original version first-run in 70 mm at Seattle's Cinerama Theater in 1982, and grain was evident, probably for a couple reasons: 1) many of the visual effects involved multiple, non-digital exposures; and 2) the film wasn't actually shot in 70 mm, but was blown up from 35 mm.

According to an extensive, multi-sourced Wikipedia article on the film, the 1990 version advertised as a "Director's Cut" and shown at the Nuart in LA and the Castro in San Francisco was actually a 70 mm workprint. (In the days before digital, effects were often done in 70 mm, even for 35 mm releases, for better optical quality.) Scott approved the 1992 Director's Cut, but wasn't entirely satisfied with it. Wikipedia offers comparisons of the various versions, citing the primary changes as:

* The removal of Deckard's explanatory voice-over
* The re-insertion of a dream sequence of a unicorn running through a forest
* The removal of the studio-imposed "happy ending," including some associated visuals which had originally run under the film's end-credits.

It was apparent from the beginning that the voiceover was a big problem -- and Harrison Ford (who didn't get on with Scott, much less the studio execs who were calling him in to read narration) has said he did it badly and begrudgingly, hoping they wouldn't even be able to use it. (It's that cringe-worthy at times.) Scott, however, says he wasn't taken off the picture, and that he completed the original release version after it tested badly with audiences.

But the movie was a theatrical flop anyway, producing rentals of only $14.8 million at roughly the same time "E.T." was on its way to zooming past $300 million. According to a definitive piece by Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times Magazine (September 13, 1992), the film may have died then and there. But the new home video market extended its commercial termination date:

"Blade Runner's" availability on video kept it alive in the eyes of the always loyal science-fiction crowd, and gradually, over time, the film's visual qualities and the uncanniness with which it had seemed to see the future began to outweigh its narrative flaws. Scott says he saw the interest rise, "And I thought, 'My God, we must have misfired somewhere; a lot of people like this movie.' " And not just in this country. In Japan, where the film had always been successful, "I was treated like a king," art director [Snyder reports. "The fans would be too in awe to even look at you." The film's look began to show up in art direction and design: Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" and the stage design for the Rolling Stones' Steel Wheels tour were influenced by "Blade Runner." And when laser discs appeared on the market, "Blade Runner" was one of the films that everyone just had to get. It became Voyager's top-selling disc immediately upon its release in 1989, never losing the No. 1 spot.

(Are spoiler alerts now becoming unfashionable because we should just assume everybody's seen the movie or knows the ending? I don't care. This is one.)

In Sunday's New York Times ("A Cult Classic Restored, Again"), Scott says of Ford's character, Deckard: “Yes, he’s a replicant. He was always a replicant.”

Weren't there stories just like this about the invention of the telephone? These kinds of reports mystify me, as if they're coming from someplace in the distant past and have only just now reached our present:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Surfing the net has become an obsession for many Americans with the majority of U.S. adults feeling they cannot go for a week without going online and one in three giving up friends and sex for the Web. [...]

"People told us how anxious, isolated and bored they felt when they are forced off line," said Ann Mack, director of trend spotting at JWT, which conducted the survey to see how technology was changing people's behavior.

"They felt disconnected from the world, from their friends and family," she told Reuters.

The poll, released on Wednesday, found the use of cell phones and the Internet were becoming more and more an essential part of life with 48 percent of respondents agreeing they felt something important was missing without Internet access.

More than a quarter of respondents -- or 28 percent -- admitted spending less time socializing face-to-face with peers because of the amount of time they spend online.

It also found that 20 percent said they spend less time having sex because they are online.

Cell phones won out over television in a question asking which device people couldn't go without but the Internet trumped all, regarded as the most necessary.

"It is taking away from offline activities, among them having sex, socializing face-to-face, watching TV and reading newspapers and magazines. It cuts into that share," said Mack. [...]

"We are calling them 'digitivity denizens,' those who see their cell phones as an extension of themselves, whose online and offline lives are co-mingled and who would chose a Wi-Fi connection over TV any day," said Mack.

"This is how they communicate, entertain and live."

To which I want to say: "Duh." Talk to David Cronenberg about the use of technology as an extension of the human body and mind. He's been making movies about it for 30-something years. (Oh, and I don't think the term "digitivity denizens" is going to catch on. I'll be mortified if it does.)

Wouldn't the planet as a whole be a lot healthier if we used the web more and our cars less? Is the web allowing us to remain more in touch (and with more people) and do a better job of filtering out the people we don't want to have much contact with? Don't e-mail, chat and text technologies allow us more opportunities for instantaneous and regular contact with our real friends, regardless of geographical distance? Is there anything worse than being physically present in a room with people you don't want to be around? Is that not a terrible waste of the very essence of life -- your enjoyment of how you spend it? Is e-mail not more reliable and efficient than exchanging phone calls involving logistical or practical details? Do web services (bill-paying, prescription ordering, online scheduling, shopping, etc.) not reduce the time and drudgery expended on routine household maintenance tasks and errands (not to mention the cost parking and gasoline and the inconvenience of waiting on hold or in line)? On the other hand, isn't Scanners better than sex, anyway? (Don't answer that.)

What the hell is wrong with the studio risk-management -- er, movie -- business these days? I share some of my own modest ideas for improvement in an "Open Letter to Hollywood" at MSN Movies.

Now, some people say everything is just fine, and that we've even had a better-than usual crop of summer pictures this year: "Knocked Up," "Ratatouille," "Superbad," "The Bourne Ultimatum"... On the other hand, there's "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," "Hostel Part II," "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry"... These, I submit, are conscious or unconscious cries for help.

None of my prescriptions is a panacea, but among the measures I suggest Mr. and Ms. Hollywood might want to consider are: more nudity (way more nudity); less emphasis on pain and torture as a form of entertainment (bad for concessions sales, for one thing); better recycling of stars who have fallen out of fashion (like John Travolta in "Pulp Fiction"); watch HBO and learn about sex, violence, character, and storytelling; don't keep making sequels until the original audience hates you for it (even the last installments in "trilogies" tend to range from disappointing to insulting); stop wasting time and depleting resources fighting protracted, losing battles against technologies that have always proven to make you more money in the end: "The future arrived the day before yesterday and you're still pretending it's due next week."

An excerpt:

...[Why] why do adults in Hollywood movies still behave as if they're on "The Dick Van Dyke Show"? (Nothing against "The Dick Van Dyke Show," which is one of the great achievements in television history, but you know what I mean: Rob and Laura not only slept in separate twin beds but they always wore pajamas.)

Sex in the movies seemed like it was going somewhere in the '70s, with "Five Easy Pieces," "Last Tango in Paris" and "Don't Look Now." In 1993, the great Julianne Moore played out a full-frontal scene -- an argument at home with her husband -- in Robert Altman's "Short Cuts," and it wasn't the nudity that was shocking, it was the physical and emotional reality of the scene. Do you know people who pop out of bed after sex sporting underwear? Who's in such a blasted hurry to get dressed?

The best special effect in the history of movies is the human face, with the human body coming in a close second. Use it. You think torture porn sells? The audience for porn-porn is exponentially larger. (Have you heard of this thing called the World Wide Internets? It revolutionized a whole lucrative section of the movie industry -- mostly the one located beyond Warners, Disney and Universal in the farther reaches of the San Fernando Valley.)

Read the full "letter" here.

Got any advice for "Hollywood" yourself?

Here are questions cinephiles and critics still hear all the time: "Why do you like old movies and foreign movies so much? What about new movies? Aren't you just being elitist to say you like movies that are in black and white or have subtitles? Movies are supposed to be fun!" The implicit assumption is that "old movies" are outmoded movies and that new movies (with the latest technologies, unrestricted by old codes regarding sex, violence, drugs and other content) are inclined to be more liberated or superior. Oh, and that "fun" cannot be inspired by anything made before one was born. Not that there's anything inherently inferior about recent, English-language movies, either, but what's wrong with a kiss, boy? (Yes, I quote ol' Monty Python a lot.)

I like to counter this narcissistic question with another proposition: "Think of the new music you've heard that's been issued over the last year. Is more of it "better" than what's been made over the last 100 years? Would it be "elitist" to say that it's more likely you'll find more favorites from the last 99 years than from the last one? Even in purely statistical terms, it just makes sense.

Let's say I'm an even 50 years old. Well, movies themselves have only been around for about 100 years, so I would not be surprised to find that I had at least as many favorites that were made before I was born (1957) as I do that were made since the advent of my existence. Now let's assume that I am turning 30 in 2007. If I say I'm really interested in movies, then it shouldn't seem the least bit unlikely that I've seen more great movies made between 1900 and 1977 than I have between 1977 and now. Especially since so many of them are so easy to see -- whether on basic cable (Turner Classic Movies) or DVD.

I know, I know -- there are people who don't like musical styles of the past, either. They don't like punk or rockabilly or bebop or big band swing or Western swing or blues or Romanticism or Baroque music. And that's their taste, and they're entitled to it. But, if they haven't been sufficiently exposed to these styles, that doesn't mean those tastes are terribly well-rounded tastes. (This is where we could argue about whether some "opinions" carry more weight than others in a debate.) We don't have to like everything, we just need to have enough knowledge and experience to know what it is we don't like.

The question itself seems understandable, if misguided, at first hearing. Until you consider it for about three seconds. And then you see how insulting it really is, because another underlying assumption is: "You can't really like that stuff, can you?"

As Sammy Davis, Jr., one wrote: Yes, I can. (Whether Frank Sinatra says it's OK or not.)

Is Beyonce a greater singer because she's relatively new and young and recorded with the latest technology? Are Aretha Franklin and Edith Piaf and Dinah Washington and Patsy Cline and Martha Reeves and Susannah McCorkle and Billie Holliday and Astrud Gilberto automatically not as good because they recorded a lot of their best stuff earlier -- and some of it was not in English? It just depends on what you like, not on when it was new.

So, why do cinephiles and critics like old movies, and movies from other lands, so much? Maybe for the same reason oenophiles like vintage wines so much: They've stood up over time, and different regions have different styles and distinctive flavors. And maybe because it's part of the definition: Anybody who doesn't consider movies made more than 10 or 20 or 30 years ago has no business calling him/herself a critic or cinephile any more than somebody who dismisses the traditional cuisines of the world could be considered a gourmet. (I've been watching "Top Chef," you see...)

The debate about whether video games are art continues unabated, but maybe there's another question that transcends it: Are video games just a smaller simulation of reality? Or, is life as we know it a form of video game? John Tierney, the libertarian former Op-Ed columnist for the NYT, ponders the notion that consciousness is digital and virtual:

Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else’s hobby. I hadn’t imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims.

But now it seems quite possible. In fact, if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation.

This simulation would be similar to the one in “The Matrix,” in which most humans don’t realize that their lives and their world are just illusions created in their brains while their bodies are suspended in vats of liquid. But in Dr. Bostrom’s notion of reality, you wouldn’t even have a body made of flesh. Your brain would exist only as a network of computer circuits.

You couldn’t, as in “The Matrix,” unplug your brain and escape from your vat to see the physical world. You couldn’t see through the illusion except by using the sort of logic employed by Dr. Bostrom, the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford.

Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or “posthumans,” could run “ancestor simulations” of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems. [...]

There would be no way for any of these ancestors to know for sure whether they were virtual or real, because the sights and feelings they’d experience would be indistinguishable. But since there would be so many more virtual ancestors, any individual could figure that the odds made it nearly certain that he or she was living in a virtual world.

It's "The Matrix," "Blade Runner" and Errol Morris's superior and even more challenging and imaginative "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control" merged into one. And, as David Cronenberg will tell you, evolution is not limited to the organic...

Sean Axmaker talks to David Lynch about digital video in general, and the new DVD of "Inland Empire" in particular, over at MSN Movies:

You have, of course, never done a commentary track, but the "Stories" section of the "Inland Empire" disc could almost be a stand-alone commentary because you talk about so many things around the film.

I believe talking is OK separate from a thing, but a commentary track that goes along through a film, I think, is maybe the worst possible thing a person could do. From then on, the film is seen in terms of the memory of that commentary and it changes things forever.

You have about 70 minutes of deleted footage in the "More Things That Happened" section and you've edited them so they play like their own dreamlike film.

Right. There are things in "More Things That Happened" that give a feeling that could be like a brother or sister to the film. It's like if you know a family, but you haven't met the sister yet. You go over to Ohio and meet the sister, and it adds more to the feeling of the whole family.

In the "Stories" section of the "Inland Empire" supplements, you go on a rant about people watching movies on their phones. So how do you feel about the huge explosion of home theater?

I feel great about the home theater. It's so hopeful. It's a counterpart to the telephone experience, or the computer screen, but a lot of people are going to see their films on computers and phones and they will think they saw the films, but they will not have seen the film. And that's a sadness, as I say in "Stories," that's a real sadness. It's very hard to sink into a world when the picture is so small. I hope that the home-theater big screens at home will be something they embrace so they can feel and think in the world -- not have all this distraction around it.

I'm waiting for my DVD of "Inland Empire" to arrive. (I almost always watch them at night, with the lights off, on a 55" Sony LCD projection HDTV with surround sound.)

Even if you haven't seen Lynch's latest magnum opus ("Twin Peaks" was similarly big and deep), you can still check out my review, which was written as a sort of "Viewers' Guide to 'Inland Empire,'" suggesting various ways of looking at it. A synopsis would be impossible, anyway...

I've spent the summer going to cardiologists and gastroenterologists, how about you?

I like a hemochromatosis screening in June
How about you?
I dig a cardiac catheterization balloon
How about you?

I love an MRI
And a CAT scan, too
I love endoscopies
Holter monitor EKGs
How about you?

Oh, it's been fun, fun, fun till the doctor takes the Ambien away! Unfortunately, I couldn't come up with a good rhyme for "ventricular tachycardia" that scanned. "Gastric carcinoid" is also tough. But I've really had all those things -- and a colonoscopy and seborrheic dermatitis and daily zombifying doses of Coreg and more -- just since May! Unfortunately, this has put me far, far behind in my movie blog coverage.

For example, did you know that the terrific critic Michael Atkinson, late of the Village Voice, has joined the blogosphere? Welcome, Michael! You'll find him at Zero for Conduct.

And, weeks ago, TLRHB, the splendid blogger formerly known as That Little Round-Headed Boy, transformed himself into The Shamus over at bad for the glass: a culture blog. The Shamus writes about noir and "Chinatown," of course (BTW, I own the domain name badforglass.com -- and egbertsouse.com and sitonapotatopanotis.com, too, for that matter), movies, records and record covers, television, cartoons, and all forms of pop culture. I'd love to link to a favorite post or two but... I can't. As The Shamus explains:

If you like a post, copy it today. It may not be here tomorrow. The Shamus doesn't play by the blog rules. The template will change. Often. No archiving. One other thing: I don't roll on Shabbas. And Walter, will you put down the god-damned gun?

I've been meaning to link to this post by the invaluable girish (The Cinema in Your Head) since the end of May, but where does the time go? Who knows, maybe one day I'll even get around to writing about it myself.

Our beloved David Bordwell has a wonderful piece about the tactile pleasures of studying films frame-by-frame -- not on DVD, but on archival equipment that encourages the practice of Watching movies very, very slowly. A snippet:

Viewing on an individual viewer has both costs and benefits. Sometimes details you’d notice on the big screen are hard to spot on a flatbed. But with your nose fairly close to the film, you can make discoveries you might miss in projection. (Ideally, you would see the film you’re studying on both the big screen and the small one.) In addition, of course, you can stop, go back, and replay stretches. Above all, you get to touch the film. This is a wonderful experience, handling 35mm film. Hold it up to the light and you see the pictures. You can’t do that with videotape or DVD.

And because it's summer quarter, our Man For All Seasons, the fantastic Dennis Cozzalio at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, has posted another pop quiz: Mr. Shoop's Surfin' Summer School Midterm. Questions this time around include:

2) A good movie from a bad director

6) Best movie about baseball

7) Favorite Barbara Stanwyck performance

8) "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" or "Dazed and Confused"?

13) "Salo: The 120 Days of Sodom" -- yes or no?

20) Name a performance that everyone needs to be reminded of, for whatever reason

Oh, and so much more. PLUS two extra credit questions suggested by recent posts at Scanners!

Also, for a taste of the best of past quiz responses, be sure to sample Professor Corey's Honor Society, Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

And do not neglect to read Dennis's defense/appreciation of Martin Scorsese's misunderstood magnum opus, "New York, New York." As I posted in the comments section: "New York, New York" (after the "Happy Endings" sequence was restored) is a masterpiece. I think it would make a nice (loooong) double-bill with "La Dolce Vita" because both movies are about performance -- creating scenes, playing to the crowd, adopting roles, in public and in private. Those brutal hyper-emotional Scorsese confrontations against mockingly artificial backdrops -- genius. And your selection at this time is a fine tribute to the recently departed Laszlo Kovacs, whose fluid "NY, NY" camerawork is positively musical.

* * * *

I'm mad about polyps
Can't get my fill
Needles in fingertips
They give me a thrill

Holding breath for the ultra-sound
Pooping in Sensurround™
May not be new
But I like it, how about you?

Roger Ebert has another Answer Man item about the legendary Wilhelm Scream this week. These masterful film-history montages on YouTube explain everything:

Past Answer Man items regarding the Wilhelm Scream:

07/06/07
07/12/07

An architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times reviews the new Landmark multiplex at the Westside Pavilion:

... [It is] designed to compete directly with your living room — with your sofa, your flat screen and your ability to pause, rewind, turn on the lights or just give up on the movie idea altogether and switch over to "The Daily Show."

As if to acknowledge how tough it's becoming to drag people out of their houses for a night at the movies, with home-theater technology getting better and traffic getting worse, the Landmark includes a number of domestic architectural touches. The most striking are three "Living Room" theaters on the top floor that hold between 30 and 50 people each. They include sofas and side tables as well as overstuffed love seats and ottomans by the high-end French furniture company Ligne Roset. [...]

All of the Landmark's larger auditoriums are pleasingly steep and feature extra-wide seats with cup holders that will accommodate your Chardonnay as well as a Big Gulp-sized soda. They are served by top-of-the-line Sony digital projectors, which construction crews were moving carefully into place last week.

But those rooms offer a variation on an architectural experience we all know well: the big movie auditorium with cushy seats and teeth-rattling sound. What's new at the Landmark, at least for a first-run theater, are those Living Rooms — not just for their furniture but for what they reveal about the industry's attitude toward architectural space in a digital era. [...]

This time around Hollywood is openly admitting the extent to which the public now associates the movie-watching experience with the comforts of home.

Well, why should a theater be less comfortable or less aesthetically satisfying than your average big-screen TV home set-up? This kind of thing has been done for years (the beanbags or sofas and ottomans in the front row and such), but what I'll be interested in seeing is whether cozy 30- to 50-seat auditoria can bring in enough revenue to justify building them.

Closed 6/11/07

C. Jerry Kutner's contribution to the Contrarianism Blog-a-Thon ("Why Murch's 'Touch of Evil' Doesn't Make the Cut!") is generating some discussion over at Bright Lights After Dark. You should look into it.

Meanwhile, Jerry offers an update:

As it turns out, I wasn't the first person to object to Murch's version in print. Someone who commented at our blog noted that:

Chris Fujiwara covered some of this ground on the late, lamented, Hermenaut.

And after reading Fujiwara, I agree with him about Murch's intercutting Susie's first encounter with the Grandi's with a scene between Vargas and Quinlan: "One wonders whether if Welles had been allowed to recut the sequence as he wanted, he might not have struggled with it only to conclude that the Susie scene played better uninterrupted." - Another reason not to like the Murch cut!

The specific changes that were made [from Welles' memo] are detailed by Laurence French -- though oddly no mention is made of the recropping -- which I consider to be the Murch cut's most unforgiveable flaw.

I've read that "Touch of Evil" was shot "open aperture" (as many films are) at the standard "Academy ratio" (of 1.33:1 -- or 1.37:1 for sound films, from about 1932 through 1953) even though the "intended" ratio when projected may have been 1.66:1 (mostly a European standard) or 1.85:1. The latter format was used for the 1998 "Touch of Evil" DVD which, Kutner argues, chops the top and bottom off Welles' carefully composed full-ratio 35mm images. Normally, if a 1.85:1 film is improperly projected at the standard ratio, filling the screen from top to bottom, one usually sees boom microphones protruding into the upper part of the frame and other indications that one is seeing things that weren't intended to be seen. That's how you know it's the projectionist's fault, not the filmmakers'. But this was never the case with "Touch of Evil." (Stanley Kubrick ["Eyes Wide Shut"] and James Cameron ["The Abyss"] are among the directors who, it is claimed, have composed at least some of their video-era films in wide screen and "full screen" ratios simultaneously, so the image would fill pre-16:9, non-HDTV television screens without losing anything.)

Indeed, in a May 24, 1958, letter to the editor of the New Statesman of London (reprinted at the bottom of French's second page), Welles writes:

There was no attempt to approximate reality; the film's entire 'world' being the director's invention. Finally, while the style of TOUCH OF EVIL may be somewhat overly baroque, there are positively no camera tricks. Nowadays the eye is tamed, I think, by the new wide screens. These 'systems' with their rigid technical limitations are in such monopoly that any vigorous use of the old black-and-white, normal aperture camera runs the risk of seeming tricky by comparison. The old camera permits use of a range of visual conventions as removed from 'realism' as grand opera. This is a language not a bag of tricks. If it is now a dead language, as a candid partisan of the old eloquence, I must face the likelihood that I shall not again be able to put it to the service of any theme of my own choosing.

As I read this, Welles states his clear preference for the "old black-and-white normal aperature" over the "new wide screens" that were introduced in the 1950s (along with new widescreen processes such as VistaVision, CinemaScope and the like) -- and with regard to "Touch of Evil" in particular. The question (as one correspondent has posed it) was whether Welles really thought he could get away with making a 1:33:1 picture in the late 1950s. But even if he didn't, he knew the prints would retain that ratio. And the 16mm prints shown by universities and film societies were full-frame. So, he must have known that the film was being seen that way before he died in 1985. I wonder if either of the early versions of "Touch of Evil" was on VHS or laserdisc by then...

UPDATE: Christian Liemke offers some 1:33:1/1.85:1 "Touch of Evil" frame comparisons here.

Critics, filmmakers and pundits have been writing quite a bit over the last few years about what "digital" means for the future of cinema, and about the sorry state of the audience for foreign language films (not just distribution and exhibition, but demand) in the United States in the age of the DVD. Much of this speculative writing has been hopelessly vague and rather dismal -- and, in some cases, I don't think the writers really understand what they're talking about. But for every dozen "digital doomsday" observations, there's a concrete insight that's worth considering.

I'd like to take excerpts from three recent pieces and follow a thread that I think connects them:

David Denby, The New Yorker (January 8, 2007):

In a theatre, you submit to a screen; you want to be mastered by it, not struggle to get cozy with it. Of course, no one will ever be forced to look at movies on a pipsqueak display—at home, most grownups will look at downloaded films on a computer screen, or they’ll transfer them to a big flat-screen TV. Yet the video iPod and other handheld devices are being sold as movie-exhibition spaces, and they certainly will function that way for kids. According to home-entertainment specialists I spoke to in Hollywood, many kids are “platform agnostic”—that is, they will look at movies on any screen at all, large or small.

A.O. Scott, The New York Times (January 21, 2006):

The [National Society of Film Critics] vote stands out a bit amid all this welter because its top three choices for best picture of the year were all movies in languages other than English. The third-place finisher was Clint Eastwood’s “Letters From Iwo Jima,” which is in Japanese; the runner-up was “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,” a Romanian film directed by Cristi Puiu; and the winner, by a narrow margin, was “Pan’s Labyrinth,” Guillermo del Toro’s tale of magic and malevolence in 1940s Spain. [NOTE: Subsequently, the mostly-foreign-language films "Flags of Our Fathers" and "Babel" were nominated for Best Picture Oscars, while "Pan's Labyrinth" received six nominations, including Best Foreign Language Film.]

The honors bestowed on those three movies, not only by the National Society of Film Critics, might be taken as evidence that foreign films are flourishing.... The movies are out there, more numerous and various than ever before, but the audience — and therefore the box-office returns, and the willingness of distributors to risk even relatively small sums on North American distribution rights — seems to be dwindling and scattering. For every movie that manages to solicit a brief flicker of attention, there are dozens that will be seen only at film festivals or on region-free DVD players.

David Lynch, in his book "Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity" (published December 28, 2006):

I'm through with film as a medium. For me, film is dead. If you look at what people all over the world are taking still pictures with now, you begin to see what's going to happen. I'm shooting in digital video now and I love it. [...]

How we see films is changing.... A tiny little picture, instead of a giant big picture, is going to be how people see films. And the good news: At least people will have their headphones. Sound will become, I think, even more important.... The whole thing is, when those curtains open up, and the lights go down, we must be able to go into that world. And it many ways, it's getting very difficult to go into a world. People talk so much in theaters. And there's a tiny, crummy little picture. How do you get the experience?

I think it's going to be a bit of a bumpy road. But the possibility is there for very clean pictures -- no scratches, no dirt, no water marks, no tearing -- and an image that can be controlled in an infinite number of ways. If you take care of how you show a film, it can be a beautiful experience that lets you go into a world. We're still working out ways for that to happen. But digital is here; the video iPod is here; we've just got to get real and go with the flow.

I think Lynch, Scott and Denby are all correct in what they say above. Although elsewhere in his piece, Denby oversells an idealized view of "the theatrical experience" (which "theatrical experience"?) as if all 16mm, 35mm and/or 70mm (or VistaVision or Todd A-O or IMAX) presentations were the same: The Best Of All Possible Ways To See A Movie. The most important thing, as I think all of us would agree, is that the audience feel able to submit to the film. We may fight it, we may be unwilling to go where the film wants to take us, but we should, as Lynch says, be allowed to "go into that world."

The Googie landmark Johnie's Broiler in Downey, CA (known as Harvey's Broiler when it opened in 1958), was ground into dust overnight last weekend, to expand a used car lot. Local preservationists were not pleased, and said the demolition was "illegal." As of today, the Johnie's sign is still standing, but the building has been destroyed.

Moviegoers may remember it as Lily Tomlin's place of work in Robert Altman's "Short Cuts." It was also featured in "Reality Bites," "What's Love Got To Do With It" and "Unstrung Heroes."

More reports on the demise of Johnie's at The LA Times and Roadside Peek, which is where I found the picture used here.

Anybody know of other movies in which Johnie's played a role?

When the conversation turns, as it so often does these days, to blogs (or "the Internets" as Stephen Colbert is fond of calling the online realm), you'll find an astonishing number of people who, even in 2006, have absolutely no idea of what they're talking about. Like Bruce Kluger in USA Today, who writes: "If ever America needed a wake-up call about the mythology of blogging, we got it this month.... "

Kluger, who also contributes to Parenting magazine and Huffington Post (god help 'em), proceeds to destroy the "mythology" that, well, didn't exist until it was created by the mainstream media (like USA Today)... because they don't know what they're talking about. Kluger cites the defeat of Joe Lieberman in the Connecticut primary (then increasing Joementum in recent polls) and the disappointing box office receipts for "Snakes on a Plane" as evidence of "the capriciousness of the blog culture":

Lieberman's boomerang reminds us that voters represent a meager percentage of the total populace — and that bloggers are an even tinier subset of that group. Consequently, what appears to be a coast-to-coast juggernaut on a 17-inch monitor is, in the real world, simply an elaborate PC-to-PC chain letter — enthusiastic, but not necessarily the national mindset.

O, capricious bloggers! How dare you fool the MSM into thinking you were all-knowing and all-powerful! Shame upon thee! This is a great example of what I was writing about the other day -- another Straw Man piece that sets out to strike down its own assumptions, none of which apply to the exterior universe. It's the JonBenet Ramsay "murder suspect" hysteria/drivel all over again.

Happy "Birthday" to David Poland, whose Hot Blog, Hot Button column and Movie City News are favorite sources of information and commentary about The Biz around here. This week marks the Ninth anniversary of The Hot Button and the 1000th entry in The Hot Blog.

Check out the latest column to see how much has changed (and hasn't) over these nine years. He's also posted his Rules of Thumb -- sort of a combination of the Ten Commandments for Understanding Showbiz and Charles Foster Kane's "Declaration of Principles." I think he's dead right on all counts.

Congrats, David!

TOP TEN HOT BUTTON RULES OF THUMB

1. Great Media Outlets' Standards Are Less Stringent When The Subject Is Entertainment And That Sucks.

2. $150 Million Is No Longer A Blockbuster In Theatrical… But Right Now Represents The Start Of A Road To More Than $200 Million In Returns to The Studio In Most Cases Thanks To The New DVD Market And Expanded International Theatrical Market.

3. Successful Movie Advertising Sells One Idea At A Time… And There Actually Has To Be An Idea Worth Selling

4. The Story Of The Moment Is Almost Never The Real Story

5. There Are Very Few Journalists In Entertainment Journalism

6. Talent Is Your Friend Until It's Time For Talent Not To Be Your Friend

7. Reviewing Scripts Or Test Screenings Is Selfish And Immoral… You Do Not Know What Effect Sticking Your Nose Into Process Will Have And More Often Than Not It Is Negative

8. Opening Weekend Is Never About The Quality Of The Movie

9. There Are Things I Know And Things I Don't Know And Sometimes They Change

10.Love What You Do And Do What You Love Or Get The F--- Out.

It's been said that what "The Shining" is to the dolly/Steadicam shot, "Barry Lyndon" is to the zoom. Jeffrey Bernstein offers an in-depth exploration of all those slow, still-life zooms in "Barry Lyndon" -- 36 of them by his count, and I believe him! (Here's the .pdf file.) I have so much reading to do.

The zoom, because it is purely optical and does not involve actually moving the camera, has unique visual properties. It tends to flatten the image as it enlarges it (I was going to say "gets closer," but of course that's the point -- it doesn't). Kubrick uses it so that his characters appear to be locked within the frame, and shots are presented like paintings -- portraits or landscapes. It's part of the canvas of the film, as it were. (BTW, my revised 1981 appreciation of "Barry Lyndon," one of my favorite films, can be found here: "Barry Lyndon and the Cosmic Wager.")

Bernstein writes:

In "Barry Lyndon" Kubrick elevates a ‘poor cousin’ as it were of film technique—the zoom in progress—to a central position. In the first twenty-one minutes of the film there are six zooms and one zoom-like track-out. The majority of these zooms are elaborate; the shortest in duration lasts no less than ten seconds, while the fifth (the Nora-Captain Quin love scene) lasts a remarkable thirty-four seconds, and the sixth (the opening of the Barry-Captain Quin duel) lasts thirty seconds. Six of the first eleven scenes in the film, including three scenes in a row, begin with elaborate zoom-outs. The audience can’t help but notice the zooms. Perhaps never before in the history of commercial cinema have zooms been employed to be noticed by the audience. And not only to be noticed, but to be thought about as well. It seems to me that Kubrick’s use of the zoom movement in "Barry Lyndon" is the most elaborate and sustained use of zoom movement ever seen in a film.

You'll get no argument from me! Though Robert Altman and Vilmos Zsigmond do deserve special mention for their work in "McCabe and Mrs. Miller," "Images" and "The Long Goodbye." In the latter the camera never stops zooming and moving, as if it were bobbing on the waves at Malibu...

(Yes, those last four words are a Joni Mitchell reference.)

... and channels roles from the entire career of James Earl Jones. That's the premise of this very funny short, "Vader Sessions," from Akjak Moving Pictures, in which the Imperial Villain speaks in Jones' voice through sound clips from "The Great White Hope" to "Clear and Present Danger" to "A Family Thing." (I kept waiting for him to announce: "This... is CNN.") I know: Is it possible for yet another "Star Wars" parody to be funny? I think these guys have demonstrated that it is. I'd love to know the sources of all the dialog used -- so feel free to post a comment with whatever you recognize.

(Thanks to Alonso Sobrado in Costa Rica!)

All of the cuss words, none of the plot! Now that the courts have stopped companies like Clean Flicks and Family Flicks USA from releasing their own custom-sanitized DVD versions of other people's movies (we used to just call this "bowdlerization"), perhaps it is time to celebrate with a different approach: a feature with all the f-words left in, but the rest of the movie taken out. That's what somebody's done with "The Big Lebowski" in this two-minute, fourteen-second "F*cking Short Version." If you're offended by profanity... well, then you're out of your element, Donny!

Over at a film odyssey (check out that beautiful logo!), movie blogger and "Fight Club" Opening Shots contributor Robert Humanick mashes up two movie mash-ups from YouTube, both set to Eric Idle's uplifting, send-'em-out-whistling curtain number from the great "Monty Python's Life of Brian": "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life." The first cuts footage from Mike Judge's "Office Space" to the tune, providing encouragement to disheartened cubicle gnomes with martyr complexes the world over.

The other uses footage of Idle singing the song in "Life of Brian," intercut with gruesome footage from Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ." Either way, it's a revelation.

Comments have been disappearing into the ether. I'm not getting the notifications to approve them, although I know they exist (because I've tried making some myself). The Sun-Times tech people have been notified and I hope this is straightened out soon...

David Poland sent me this funny picture (of me) that he took during a panel discussion at Roger Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival in May, called "Not Playing at a Theatre Near You." It is clear that I was lost in thought. What was I thinking? I'm pretty sure it was either: "How can I get more coffee here right now?" or "We'd better stop fussing about how 'superior' the 'big-screen theatrical experience' is and just accept the reality that: 1) more people watch more movies on smaller screens (even big HDTV ones) than go to theaters, in part because home screens and sound systems have improved, while audience etiquette and other aspects of the theatrical experience have deteriorated; 2) theatrical exhibition should be seen as a luxury, not a necessity, since economics prevent many of the best movies being made nowadays from getting the wildly expensive full theatrical release treatment; 3) even critics who tout 'the big-screen experience' often don't see movies on big theater screens, or with audiences; they see them in small screening rooms with a handful of other critics, where the screens aren't appreciably bigger than my 55-inch Sony HDTV -- which, from where I sit, is about the size (and clarity) of your average movie screen to someone sitting in the back half of the auditorium; 4) there's nothing wrong -- or necessarily aesthetically inferior -- about watching movies on a video screen (particularly a rear-projection one, which uses a xenon lamp not unlike a movie projector) in a comfortable room at home, and DVDs are far superior in quality to most of the beat-up 35mm art house prints and 16mm nontheatrical prints (many of them multi-generational dupes) with which those of us who grew up as cinephiles in the '60s and '70s had to content ourselves; 5) there should be nothing shameful about 'straight-to-DVD' releases; that's a perfectly legitimate, and realistic, distribution strategy for the world we live in."

Yes, I'm pretty sure it was that second thing I was thinking about. Because I seem to recall saying it out loud.

I was reminded of this when I came upon girish's provocative posting about "Theater vs. Home" at his always-insightful and stimulating blog:

It is of course a happy truism that watching a movie in a theater is the inarguably ideal way to experience it. For a movie-lover, the theater is a sort of temple, and the experience touched with religiosity. You look up in hushed awe at the screen—in contrast, you look down at a TV screen, as Godard once noted—and the darkness dispatches all distraction, leaving only the light and sound emanating from the screen.

And then there’s the enveloping scale of the image, which you can regulate in relative terms by sitting closer or farther away from the screen. Cinephiles often have their favorite rows and vantage points (when I’m alone: usually fourth or fifth row center; when I’m with others: based upon a process of grumbling and negotiation). Most of all, you relinquish control over the movie by submitting to its (unbroken and continuous) terms, accepting its rules of temporality.

And yet, and yet….there’s a part of me that sees this hushed, worshipful submission to the terms dictated by the work of art as….a tad stifling.

OK, now they've done it. They've shown that they really can take performances from old movies and re-animate them to make new scenes the original actors never did. And make it look pretty convincing. Take a gander at this astonishing UK ad for the VW Golf GTI ("The original, updated."), in which Gene Kelly does a whole new kind of singin' and dancin' in the rain. Sacrilege or marvel? Whatever you make of it, at least it's a hell of a lot better made than the infamous 1997 Dirt Devil spot with Fred Astaire and the vacuum cleaner, based on the famous "dancing on the ceiling" bit from "Royal Wedding"...

(tip: AS)

"To preserve our children's future, we have to waste every resource we've got."

No, that was not Dick Cheney. That was Stephen Colbert, endorsing General Motors' $1.99 gasoline promotion: Buy one of their guzzlers and they'll reimburse you for fuel costs at the end of one year so that you wind up paying no more than a buck ninety-nine a gallon. (If you remember to send in your receipts with that mail-in rebate form, that is!) Colbert heartily endorses the deal, using flawless logic: The only way we're going to get more efficient fuel technology is to use up all the oil we can, as fast as we can.

Oddly, this is much the same logic behind the death of GM's electric car, the EV1, in the mid-1990s. According to the new documentary (and technological murder-mystery) "Who Killed the Electric Car?," there was simply too much easy money remaining to be made from old technology and the remaining trillion gallons of crude oil beneath the Earth's crust. So, anti-free-market forces (oil companies, petro-politicians, automakers) killed off an existing, and quite successful, fuel cell vehicle that was already available in California and Arizona. Emissions: None. Speed: Up to 184 mph. Operating cost: The equivalent of buying gasoline at 60 cents a gallon.

Yes, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal is generally an intellectual black hole. (Check that metaphor: Can a black hole be shallow? After all, doesn't it, too, instantly narrow to a single teeny point?) But this piece by Brian C. Anderson extolling the mental health benefits of video games does provide some amusing and intriguing fodder for our neverending debate about games and art and the human brain:

Video games can also exercise the brain in remarkable ways. I recently spent (too) many late-night hours working my way through "X-Men: Legends II: The Rise of Apocalypse," a game I ostensibly bought for my kids. Figuring out how to deploy a particular grouping of heroes (each of whom has special powers and weaknesses); using trial and error and hunches to learn the game's rules and solve its puzzles; weighing short-term and long-term goals -- the experience was mentally exhausting and, when my team finally beat the Apocalypse, exhilarating.

At last week's Conference on World Affairs, I was on a panel somewhat facetiously titled "An Epic Debate: Are Video Games an Art Form?" with Roger Ebert (whose answer to the titular question is, as you probably know, "no"). Sun-Times tech columnist Andy Ihnatko was supposed to join us, but at the last minute he couldn't make it. Fortunately, we were able to recruit author, brain expert and laparoscopic surgeon Leonard Shlain to join us.