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[ Comments Off ]Posted on February 1, 2011 by admin in Popular Media
Tuesday, February 1st, 2011
If you love seeing films at the theater, you better hurry. Within a couple years what you’re watching will almost certainly be coming from a hard drive.
When was the last time you went to a theater and saw a film? I guess that depends on what you call a “film”, because there’s a reasonably good chance that what you saw was data stored on a hard drive on a media server and projected with a digital projector. The other day I ran across this rather charming clip (also below) that features a film projectionist talking about his job, and how that job is slowly becoming a relic. If you really love film, you may have the same fondness that I do for classic full-size theaters, and have a certain irrational attachment to all the things that go with them, including the distant clacking sound of an actual film projector. As much as I generally prefer this archaic process to work, one of my favorite theater experiences ever was when – in the middle of Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder
– the projector jammed and I watched the frame melt on the massive screen at the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor, MI. These days, this would just be an annoying interruption of the high-priced experience you pay for at the multiplex, but at the time – surrounded by cinema addicts – it was a chance to talk about film while the projectionist scrambled to get the film rolling again. So this reminiscing got me curious. They’ve been talking about digitizing theaters for quite a while now, but how many theaters are actually digital? This turned out to be some tough information to track down; the industry is changing so rapidly that even the venerable HowStuffWorks.com isn’t up to speed. Although their features on film projection and screens are pretty interesting, they’re woefully out of date, as is their feature on digital projection. The US film and theater industries in general have been struggling for some time to decide who was going to foot the bill for the switch to digital, and which technology was going to be the standard, a struggle that’s not so surprising if you look at this lengthy list of theater chains. In any case, this has all been changing rather rapidly, probably due in part to how unprepared theater chains were for the onslaught of 3D, which requires digital projectors. Last year three major players – AMC Entertainment, Cinemark Holdings and Regal Entertainment Group struck a deal to convert about 14,000 screens, and smaller chains like Showcase got on board more recently. In broad strokes, the deals mean that almost all US theaters should have digital by the end of 2012. We’ll be doing a followup piece; the mysteries of the projection booth are fascinating, and there’s remarkably little up-to-date information about the broader impact of the suddenly-rapid switch to digital. Read the rest of this entry »
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on December 18, 2010 by admin in Popular Media
Saturday, December 18th, 2010
This New Year, if you’d rather watch a film you’ll remember than drink away a night you’ll forget, here are ten New Year themed films that include some of the best and the worst movies ever made.
 
Okay, okay. So you had a bad
year. No need to jump. Yet. |
Christmas is less than a week away, and you know what that means. Time to start over-anticipating the next holiday, i.e.: New Year’s Day. I’ve always been a bit perplexed by the holiday tradition of drinking your brains out on the last day of the year, as if that will somehow make it go away. The year, that is, not your brain. Even when I did drink – which used to be quite often – I certainly didn’t see anything especially exciting about drinking for a holiday, and now that I don’t, my New Year’s Eve is more often spent having a nice dinner and watching a movie or going to a party where I know that getting staggering drunk isn’t the over-arching theme. This year looks like a movie year for me, so if you’re thinking along the same lines, we’ve rounded up some interesting New Year’s themed films for your consideration. In my opinion, probably the best New Year’s film ever made was the Coen Brothers’ The Hudsucker Proxy
. If you saw it but missed its message of circles, cycles, and beginnings-being-ends, give it another go-round, so to speak. On top of the always-stylish Coen Brother’s production and set design, it’s full of brilliant and over-the-top performances by Tim Robbins, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Paul Newman, Bill Cobbs, and Charles Durning. And of course Jim True-Frost as “Buzz the Elevator Operator”. I love this film so much that a couple of years ago I made it part of the evening’s party plan, cuing it to start at exactly 10:22:45pm so that Tim Robbins’ character would jump off the building at exactly midnight. Yeah, I know. A little weird. Anyway, this year I thought I’d break away from the Hudsucker tradition and explore some other New Year’s films. Some selections and unsolicited commentary below. Read the rest of this entry »
[ Comments Off ]Posted on November 14, 2010 by admin in Popular Media
Sunday, November 14th, 2010
Part one of our look at why sci-fi gets such a bad rap, with a look at four worthwhile science fiction films from the last few years that you may have passed over or not even heard of.
Sunshine is just one of many great sci-fi films
that get overlooked because of marketing. |
I’ve always been a little befuddled by the average person’s resistance to science fiction as a genre. I can understand why a person would be put off by the schlockier segment of this market, but every genre of fiction has a large quantity of commercial tripe from which you have to pick the better material. I would argue in fact that some of the greatest fiction of the twentieth century would typically be categorized as sci-fi: Arthur C Clarke
, Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and other sci-fi writers wrote some of the most insightful social-commentary-as-fiction of the era, and yet other writers, like Anthony Burgess with A Clockwork Orange
and Philip K. Dick’s stories like A Scanner Darkly
and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
pushed the reader to explore social and psychological realms that are crucial to a modern person’s examination of life in our rapidly-evolving information and technology-driven world. In the case of Science Fiction film, the root of the problem is obvious. It’s the Hollywood marketing mindset. Blade Runner is a classic example of a brilliant film that nearly didn’t make it to market because test audiences “didn’t get it”. While Hollywood execs are (unfortunately) probably correct in their assumption that the average viewer isn’t very bright, there’s no reason to encourage their stupidity or mental laziness by focusing all the marketing dollars on dazzling schlockbusters like Avatar or the Star Wars franchise. Films like Alien, Blade Runner, The Matrix, TV productions like Battlestar Galactica, and even sci-fi comedy like Men In Black have proven that there’s a large audience with a long market life without adhering to the traditional Hollywood approach of staying in the safety zone of films with A-List actors, dumbed-down messages like Avatar’s ecotardedness, and massive product tie-ins that – in the case of films like Star Wars – generate more than twice the revenue of the films themselves. We’ll be back in part two with a look at how comedy can ease the pain of embracing sci-fi films, but below are a few more recent films you may have overlooked. Feel free to share suggestions for our expanded list in part three. Read the rest of this entry »
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on November 3, 2010 by admin in Popular Media
Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010
Within just minutes of my first contact with Funky Forest: The First Contact, I had ordered a copy on Amazon.
One clear indicator that I may be slightly disturbed is the fact that a couple of my favorite films of the last few years were Teeth and Hissss, and that David Cronenberg remains one of my favorite directors. All of which is why – after only watching a single YouTube clip (also below) from “Funky Forest: The First Contact”, I had ordered a copy on Amazon within a matter of minutes. Every review or synopsis I’ve read either makes feeble attempts at describing why the film is so great, or insists that attempting to do so is impossible, and that it simply must be watched. Co-directed by Katsuhito Ishii (The Taste of Tea
, Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl
), Hajimine Ishimine and Shunichiro Miki, Funky Forest gives the impression that it might be the 21st century Japanese bastard child of David Cronenberg and Monty Python. Which is good enough for me. After watching the clip below, tell me you won’t be picking up a copy for that special someone on your holiday list too. Although some would find the imagery in this film a little disturbing, the only thing that disturbs me is how this stayed under my pop media radar for so long – the film was released in 2005. Clip below. Read the rest of this entry »
[ Comments Off ]Posted on September 5, 2010 by admin in Popular Media
Sunday, September 5th, 2010
On film, in a campy Bollywood comedy called Tere Bin Laden, with a fun Desi soundtrack
It appears that just in time for September 11, Osama Bin Laden has finally been captured. On film. In India. In spite of rumors earlier this year that Osama was alive and well and enjoying a relaxing life in Iran with his falcons, it turns out he’s actually happily surrounded by cocks in Pakistan. At least that’s the basis of the premise for a new Indian comedy called Tere Bin Laden
. In spite of an obviously limited budget, the film is actually a fun 90-minute goof full of jabs at the war on terror and the cultural collisions of south Asia and the middle east. The story revolves around a young reporter working for a low-budget Pakistani TV news channel that dreams of moving to “Amreeka” and becoming a famous international correspondent. Having been deported from the US once already, his chances of realizing his dream have become slim. Given a choice of either creating a new identity with a forged passport for 272 grand (in an unspecified currency) or going to Iran as a mujahadeen so he could surrender in Iraq and get to America for free – but as a traitor/insurgent – he is convinced his dreams may be dashed. After botching the coverage of a press conference and being forced to pay his boss a fine to keep his job, the last straw is when he and his partner get assigned to a “cock opera”, i.e., a rooster crowing contest. His fortune seems to turn while editing the footage from the contest, when he realizes that the owner of the winning chicken is a dead ringer for Osama Bin Laden. This inspires him to hatch a crazy plan that ends up causing a US invasion. The flick is no cinematic masterpiece, but is a fun piece of Bollywood camp that shows a lot of potential for the team that created it. It was written and directed by Abhishek Sharma, and produced by Pooja Shetty Deora and Aarti Shetty. The gags are silly, the cultural cliches are rampant, but I enjoyed it if only for a fresh view of America from abroad, the hilariously bad American accents, and a mostly upbeat desi soundtrack
. The site for the movie is kind of amusing too. Trailer and screengrabs below. You might watch the film simply because you can, it’s been banned in Pakistan. Read the rest of this entry »
