Last year when I made up my list of films I said that I had a hard time thinking of a list of the best films since there didn't seem to be a lot of great films that year. I think that this year was a better year for films and my track record was certainly better. Here is my list of my seven favourite films of 2003 in no particular order (since it was a better year than last year):
Some films are not what they seem or are hard to market or easily fit into a category. Some very good films that I would put in that category would be Monkeybone, The Guru, The Big Lebowski, Ghost World, and Bad Santa. The interesting thing is that the final three are all connected with The Big Lebowski written, directed and produced by Joel and Ethan Coen, Ghost World directed by Terry Zwigoff and Bad Santa executive produced with a premise from the Coen's and directed by Zwigoff.
The challenge of the films that I have mentioned is that they are fairly unique in their approach, tone and subject matter and don't lend themselves very well to a brief summary. Here's my shot at a summary for Bad Santa -- sort of like It's a Wonderful Life with Jimmy Stewart never sobering up. Bad Santa is a profane and intentionally offensive film that actually has a semi-sweet centre. Billy Bob Thorton is a misanthropic alcoholic Santa (who really is a safecracker) who is teamed up with Tony Cox as an elf (who is really the brains behind the operation) who travel from town to town every Christmas robbing department stores on Christmas Eve. Thorton throws himself into the role and wallows in the filth with complications added by a misfit kid played by Brett Kelly and a bartender (who is really a Santa fetishist) played by Lauren Graham. The cast is amazing and Zwigoff stays true to the very dark tone throughout.
I laughed out loud a lot and in thinking about the film and the balance between comedy and pathos I still laugh about parts of the film. There is an odd and twisted moral message in the film that makes you smile, but it's not a Hollywood ending. While the Bad Santa trailer is in Apple's trailer section, the link to the official site goes to Miramax's site because Dimension Films is a subsidiary of Miramax which is a subsidiary of Disney and there isn't an official site for Bad Santa at all. Films like Bad Santa, The Guru, Ghost World and Monkeybone are completed, then marketed in a perfunctory fashion and then are released to video. What's fascinating about Bad Santa is that after 2 weeks in release it is doing better than the latest Ron Howard film, The Missing, which had more publicity.
Zwigoff burst (well, maybe emerged is more appropriate) onto the scene with the documentary Crumb, about cartoonist R. Crumb. He moved into drama with the adaptation of Daniel Clowes's comic book Ghost World. The final odd element in the whole equation of Bad Santa is the script written by John Requa and Glenn Ficarra who are the team who wrote the family comedy Cats & Dogs. It seems as if Bad Santa is the very dark comedic balance to the family comedy. Maybe the lack of promotion of the film is due to possible confusion and the potentially horrific accident of someone mistaking the film for a family comedy. But really, I think that it's because the film takes a off-kilter point of view without condescending to the audience and it sticks with it all the way to the end of the line. I loved it!
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I've watched the first season of the BBC series, The Office and I love it. I'd read about it and saw most of an episode and took the plunge and bought the 2 DVD set. It's a 6 episode series set in the offices of Wernham-Hogg paper and it is shot in the style of a single-camera reality tv documentary. Cowritten and directed by Ricky Gervais (who plays David Brent, the boss from Hell) and Stephen Merchant it walks a fine line between comedy and pathos. The style works very well with the content and the actors. While on the surface it's a very dark comedy, there is a fascinating and touching level of identification that I feel with the characters. I actually work in a great office now, but what is fascinating about the show is the recognition of the absurdity of office life combined with the reality effect of the documentary camera. When I first watched it I felt uneasy as the show was so delicately balanced that some things were creepy...but that was the point and after watching more the sensibility of the show clicked in and it worked. Kind of like unfocusing your eyes to see one of those 3-D images...
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Last week I saw Patrice Leconte's L'Homme du Train (Man on the Train). I've wanted to see it for a while and the Fundy Film Society brought it in and I was able to thoroughly enjoy the tale of two men and roads not taken. I love a well-structured film and L'Homme du Train has a relatively elaborate construction, but the amazing thing about the film is that for the most part it is two men in rooms talking or thinking. Jean Rochefort and Johnny Hallyday are the two men, a retired teacher and a bank robber, and they wonder how things would have been had they not lead the lives that they had lived. It's wonderful to watch the story unfold and the characters develop in an understated, economical fashion. Rochefort is a pleasure to watch and Hallyday has the most incredible eyes that make you wonder what is going on behind them. The film exemplifies that less is more with a melancholy tone that I found beautiful.
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About a week ago my son asked me for some help with redoing his Web site. He's seven years old and he likes to do things that everyone else in the family does and since most of us make Web sites that's what he wants to do. He already has some locally hosted stuff. He wanted to blog so I set him up with Movable Type which he used a bit and then he saw me working on this site and he wanted to use what I used, which is Blosxom, so I set him up with Blosxom which kept him for a while longer. Then he wanted to change the look of the site and he asked me how I did it. He wanted to use HTML, like me, but I didn't have time to teach him so I started thinking about the books in the computer bookcase and thought of Jennifer Niederst's Learning Web Design. I gave it to my son and he started reading and coding with BBEdit. Then he wanted more control over the look and layout of the site and asked me how I did that. I told him about CSS and then he wanted to learn about that and I discovered the CSS palette in BBEdit that makes things a bit simpler.
This got me thinking about how things were when I started making Web pages and how wonderful it was when I found out how to do things. The first book that made things easy and understandable was the now out-of-print Designing for the Web. I still have the book and it actually holds up pretty well. It was my constant companion when I first started teaching Web design to people. Then I moved on to Web Design in a Nutshell which is still my favourite printed reference.
Now I don't read a lot of books about basic stuff since I'm trying to do more with CSS and focussing on the content and less on the presentation since sometimes working on the look is a great way to delay writing. It was neat in the old days because there weren't as many Web sites and many of the questions weren't "how" to do something, but "if" something was possible to do. It was fun because everyone was learning and trying things out. There was the constant push to cut things down and to wrap your head around a different way of thinking to code stuff. Now I code stuff by hand with BBEdit's help and I really like it. I'm closer to the code and by trying to code stuff cleanly and to standards it isn't as big a deal to do a redesign in terms of needing to redo lots of pages.
I'm also realizing how many design and coding principles that I've assimilated into my own practice. I don't look a lot of stuff up and firmly separate out the content from the presentation. In a funny way I think that many of the practices that I follow are all aligning... the same for thinking about teaching, editing, writing and creating almost anything. I think about what to say, how to say it and then playing around with the presentation. The simple version is "think, plan, make it work, and make it pretty." When I don't follow that process is when I get off topic and spend more time exploring a technique and less time exploring ideas.
Seeing my son build his pages made me remember how wonderful it is to see something appear in a browser after you code it. The sense of wonder that made the Web so special. The amazing feeling of seeing a new page and figuring out how it was done and checking out the code to confirm what you thought. In some ways it is a bit of magic - seeing behind the curtain at the machinery inside. I'd forgotten about a lot of that and now I've got a little bit of it back thanks to my son asking a few questions.
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I saw American Splendor last night and was very pleasantly surprised. It's a wonderful mixture of drama and documentary that adapts Harvey Pekar's comic in a way that fits his style perfectly. I'd first seen Pekar and his work in Ron Mann's film Comic Book Confidential but I didn't get any of his comics. I really regret that and will try to remedy that soon.
Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini cowrite and codirect the film and it was one of the most amazing films I've seen in a long time. Paul Giamatti captures Pekar and manages to look like some of drawings of him... it's a great performance which is made even more fascinating in a scene where they appear together. Pekar himself narrates the film and there are brilliant touches where archival footage is intercut with the actors. It works because it's a film about a comic that is the story of everyday life...but the comic isn't real life with everything...just the interesting and true parts, which is what the film does as well.
Pekar is a gifted writer who has an amazing eye for detail and what is important in a situation or a person. He documents ordinary life and struggles in a way that makes me wonder about why spectacular stories seem interesting when there are so many profound and important things that happen around us.
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One thing that I've realized is that while I have a bit of a background and interest in sound I don't have a lot of sound-related stuff on the 'blog. I do have images and lots of film stuff, but not much sound stuff outside of more traditional music at all. I've been fascinated the last few days with a radio show from WFMU, "DO or DIY with People Like Us"
hosted by People Like Us who is Vicki Bennett. The show is a neat collection of offbeat music and collages created by People Like Us that I just love listening to.
I first heard People Like Us as part of the Illegal Art exhibition where her hauntingly beautiful track "Swinglargo" is included. I then saw the video "We Edit Life" that she was commissioned to make for Lovebytes. What she cuts and mixes together is clever and fun and with obscure references that I sometimes pick up and sometimes don't, but always enjoy. She's also profiled as a Featured Commoner as she's a supporter of the Creative Commons project and is one of the people who suggested a sampling license. She has a very wide range of recordings available for download on her site, so you can listen and then buy some CDs. I've got to listen some more myself and buy some CDs. (But People Like Us also makes me want to do more with sound on my own too...the last thing I did was silent!)
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I just finished watching "A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies" which was codirected by Scorsese and Michael Henry Wilson. In one of those odd coincidences I was looking through DVDs at a store and found this one by accident. I'd heard about the film and seen the book and always wanted to see it, but never spent a lot of time looking for it. When I saw it in front of me I had to get it and I'm very glad that I did.
While it is a 3 part series that is over 3 1/2 hours, but it seemed to zoom by. Scorsese talks about his deep love for movies and the movies that influenced him. What is great about it is that he does touch on some of the classics, but what is most interesting are the more obscure films and directors. What I realize as I see more films is that there is an amazing body of work out there that doesn't get seen very often. Many times the most interesting work is happening in the margins or in the corner of a bigger film. The documentary alos has interviews with directors about their films and filmmaking. It is the beginning of another list of films and directors for me to explore. Scorsese is one of the great directors and is able to translate his deep love of movies very well to the screen in this documentary as well as in every film that he makes.
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I'm a teacher of Screen Arts which is filmmaking, and that's part of the entertainment industry, which is related to music. One of the great things about my job is that I get to teach cool, rock-star-like people who are creative and don't always realize the abilities that they have. That's why I identified with Jack Black's character in The School of Rock. The film is directed by Richard Linklater who first burst (or wandered) onto the scene with the rambling, but compelling film Slacker. Slacker is similar to his later film Waking Life and while Waking Life is amazing to look at, it rambles a bit too much and seems more like an essay than a film and lacks the feeling of Slacker. I haven't obsessively followed Linklater's films, but I really liked Before Sunrise and I was thinking that maybe I just didn't like Linklater's writing or the more heavily philosophical parts of it.
Seeing the trailer for The School of Rock and finding out that Linklater was directing made me think that it could be interesting. The film is built around Jack Black who has been stealing scenes in films such as High Fidelity, Enemy of the State and The Cable Guy. But I first really noticed Mr. Black as part of the cast of Mr. Show where he played a number of characters in the first and second season. Black has great comic timing and was good (but a bit too restrained) in Shallow Hal. In Orange County he played the stoner brother and Mike White, the writer of Orange County wrote The School of Rock for Black. The film allows Black to strike the right balance and he's funny and solid too. Kind of like Robin Williams when he strikes the balance right in a film.
One of the rules in filmmaking is not to work with kids or animals, but they assemble a great supporting cast with the kids and there is a genuine chemistry with Black. It's a goofy mistaken-identity film where everyone all learns a valuable lesson and it manages to be funny and sweet without being sappy. I thought that it would be funny and I was surprised by how much I liked it.
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With a title that is an obvious reference to the films of Sergio Leone (who made Once Upon a Time in the West and Once Upon a Time in America), Robert Rodriguez wraps up his desperado trilogy in style. The first film was El Mariachi and is a legendary ultra-low-budget production about a guitar player who is on the run. It was the breakthough film that allowed him to remake the film with a bigger budget and stars as Desperado with Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek.
There are some actors that have "it" and they are very watchable. Banderas and Hayek have "it" and have been able to pull off some great performances in films that may not be so great. They return for Once Upon A Time in Mexico with the addition of another actor with "it" with Johnny Depp. Depp steals the show in a quirky performance where he constantly changes a series of tacky t-shirts. The film is a violent action story of betrayal and revenge - similar to the "spaghetti westerns" of Sergio Leon's "Dollars" trilogy (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly) and Once Upon a Time in The West as well as many other, lesser films. The odd history of the "spaghetti westerns" is that they were Italian coproductions featuring American stars such as Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, Henry Fonda and Charles Bronson.
Rodriguez produced, wrote, directed, shot, edited, designed and scored the film which was shot on HD video. It looks gorgeous and has the feeling of the earlier spaghetti westerns with a modern update. While on the surface it is a tale of revenge, there is a fascinating political allegory just below the surface with Johnny Depp as a CIA agent causing destruction throughout Mexico. So while he's a person, he also represents America, just as Antonio Banderas embodies Mexico. The allegorical content keeps it interesting, but it is a fast-paced action movie that was a lot of fun.
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I actually received it a few weeks ago, but I didn't write about it right away, but now I'll tell you about my new PowerBook. I've been lucky in having PowerBooks where I've worked over the last few years and it's definitely part of my computing lifestyle. The three PowerBooks that I've had have all been great and have never been the first models of that generation. Most of the time they've been the previous model when the new model came out. My first PowerBook was a 1400 which was a great colour PowerBook with a neat top lid that allowed you to change the cover... it even came with a template to make your own covers. The keys are worn down and shiny as I used it every day. The power supply went after I had it year or two and it had to be replaced. My second PowerBook was the one that I just moved from and it still works well aside from the sound going and a frayed power cord that had to be replaced.
I found out that I would be getting a new PowerBook and patiently waited for it to come in as rumours constantly swirled around about the new Aluminum 15-inch PowerBooks. When the sound went on my trusty old "Pismo" G3 PowerBook and the need for a new PowerBook became much stronger. Then the announcement of the new 15-inch Aluminum PowerBooks was made and my PowerBook hadn't arrived so I was hoping that I'd get one of the new Aluminum 15-inch PowerBooks. Then mine arrived and on the outside of the box it said Titanium, so I knew that I had one of the older Titanium ones. I quickly got over my disappointment (there wasn't really much disappointment) and started using it and I have to say that I like it a lot. It has a SuperDrive so I can burn CDs and DVDs and it's spiffy and good looking too. I'm still getting used to the keyboard and trackpad and sometimes I do miss the feeling of my old Pismo PowerBook. Another reason that I didn't write about this right away is that the power supply went shortly after I received it. I plugged it in and there was a spark from the white square of the adapter and it wasn't working. So for a week I was able to get recharges from other people who would lend me some power, but I had to move back to my Pismo to do work. But now the TiBook is my home and I'm enjoying it. The next thing that I have to do is run Final Cut Pro 4 a bit more and see how it works.
So while I don't have the latest and greatest, I'm still very happy that I've got this PowerBook. It's probably better not to have the very first of a new generation as the later models are the ones that are tweaked and fixed and honed. That's it for talking about this new computer.
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I haven't done much Web design or coding in the last while. I haven't been teaching it either. But I still keep up with things and always at the back of my mind is the desire to redo my sites to look and do things better. One of the (still) frustrating things about putting a Web site together is making it look good and having it work in various browsers. It's amazing how the Web has been around a relatively long time and many of us take it for granted, but it's still hard to depend on everyone seeing everything the same way on a site. The standards haven't changed that dramatically, but the adherence to the standards still isn't completely there. One of the major resources that I've relied upon in the last few years has been A List Apart which is filled with great articles about Web design.
ALA just launched version 3 and it's still a great resource. The look of this site grew out of an article on ALA and my desire to follow the standards and really separate content and presentation. But that's another rant (but you really should be using CSS). The driving force behind ALA is Jeffrey Zeldman who is one cool standards-based Web designer who also wrote Designing With Web Standards and was one fo the people behind the Web Standards Project. Zeldman drives home the point and exemplifies the maxim that it is the content that is most important in what we produce.
One of the three articles in the new issue of ALA is a neat examination of some of the neat things you can do with CSS called Sliding Doors of CSS. Douglas Bowman explains how to use CSS to create a tabbed interface. It's one of those articles that makes me start thinking about redesiging things. Even though I recently redid this site, this article makes me think that there is a better way to do some of the things that I've done with it.
If you not that geeky about HTML, CSS, and standards as I am... well, you probably won't be that excited about ALA 3.0 firing up.
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I'm a big fan of Joel and Ethan Coen's films. I've liked every one of them for different reasons and I'm always excited to see what they'll do next. They are genre chameleons, similar to Kubrick, moving from noirish drama to slapstick comedy to tragedy and back again. With Intolerable Cruelty they tackle romantic comedy with a nod to older screwball comedies. Some of the reviews of the film were a bit lukewarm and I liked it more than those reviews. One of the neat things about the brothers is that they seem to mold the characters, look, style, tone, and plot together to fit the type of film that they are making. It's fascinating to look at trailers for many of their films as it's obvious that the studios have always faced challenges in marketing the films because they straddle so many boundaries. They also work with much of the same team every time which has got to be a lot of fun.
Intolerable Cruelty has some great performances from George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Jones has great comic timing and says so much with just a glance. The film itself is very funny and features some great scenes whose pleasure comes from the surprise of what is happening. As with all of their films, part of the pleasure is in meeting the characters that populate the film. I'm thinking that some of the disappointment amongst some critics is that it seems a little bit more restrained than other Coen brothers films and that could be due to the original script being written by others with Joel and Ethan doing a rewrite. But I had a lot of fun and laughed a lot and still love whatever they've done.
Many of the films that they've made are cut by them (as Roderick Jaynes) and this is the first one that they've cut digitally, using Final Cut Pro. An article on Apple's web site goes into detail which is great for geeks like me. I love Final Cut Pro and it's neat to see that Joel and Ethan Coen are using it too.
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I hadn't heard anything from Buck 65's new CD, Talkin' Honky Blues, but I loved the other CD that I bought, so I got it and I love it. I'm listening to it right now on my new PowerBook (but that's another Titanium-tinged story for later). It's filled with great lyrics, catchy loops & rhythms, great instrumentals, and just good songs. One neat aspect thrown into the mix is the addition of live musicians which move the CD into the world of carefully-crafted, alternative music. It's an eclectic combo with Buck's distinctive voice forming the core and music elements that remind me of Portishead and Ennio Morricone along with a sprinkling of Tom Waits. I don't want you to think that Buck 65 is derivative... he's original and not derivative... there are just some family resemblances. It's eclectic, very listenable, and beautifully crafted. I think this could be "The Big One" that moves Buck 65 into the larger consciousness of the music public. But, I've got the CD and he's doing ok, so whether greater success spoils him or not won't affect this lovely little disc. The CD has some enhanced CD content (which is something I'm partial to) with a video that provides a neat glimpse at Buck 65 and some info about the CD as well as a link to the "Buck a Month Club" where I'll be getting more music every month. Now it's in heavy rotation in iTunes and in the CD player in the car.
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Sofia Coppola creates a beautiful, gentle, and subtle story in Lost in Translation. I loved this film. It is rare to see a film that is built out of moments and that doesn't move slavishly from plot point to plot point. The film drifts, not aimlessly, but in a direction that finds two strangers meeting in a Tokyo hotel. Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson are the strangers and they have a great on-screen chemistry. Both understate their roles and we watch as things unfold between them. Coppola has a great eye and with cinematographer Lance Accord they capture the right moments in a film that isn't heavy on dialogue, but builds character on the screen within the frame. The film has a great pacing and was edited by Sarah Flack, who also cut The Limey, which also has a lyrical, thoughtful pace. Film is essentially voyeurism and we watch these characters, but don't find out everything. We have to fill in the blanks and construct meaning out of the images and moments that are shared with us. Kind of how we deal with the world.
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One thing that I always try to do at film festivals is have the last film that I see be a film that I really like. This year I was lucky and finished off my viewing of festival films with Andrea Dorfman's Love That Boy along with a large and enthusiastic crowd. It tells the story of the somewhat uptight Phoebe (Nadia Litz) who makes lists of things she wants to do before she graduates from University. The film is anchored by Litz' strong performance (who I just realized was in the short "Evelyn: The Cutest Evil Dead Girl" from last year's Atlantic Film Festival).
Love That Boy is a gorgeous film with colourful, 50s-style production design by Marcia Connolly and cinematography by Tom Harting. The film was cowritten by Andrea and Jennifer Deyell and it builds up a cast of quirky characters and then puts them into situations that could seem improbably at the beginning, but become more logical as you are drawn into the film. It was funny and warm, which is what a romantic comedy should be. It also didn't have a completely conventional structure as I wasn't sure what direction things were going to go in and what romantic avenues would be travelled down... that was fun. Andrea Dorfman has a distinctive voice (cinematically as well as in person, but I'm thinking more cinematically right now) that I love to listen to and I'm looking forward to her next adventure.
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About a year and half ago I was at a conference in New Brunswick that featured a showcase with a great lineup of Atlantic Canadian talent. The highlight of the show was the performance by Andy Jones of the Prologue of his one man show, "To The Wall" which was originally developed for the One Yellow Rabbit Performance Theatre and directed by Charlie Tomlinson. I quickly Googled Andy Jones and maybe I should make it clear that I'm talking about Andy Jones the Newfoundland actor / performer and not the English postman, the American Mazda Isuzu dealer, the Andy Jones who takes improv classes in Chicago, the BMX racer, PC Party candidate or the animation director.
The Prologue that I saw in person was amazing and I wanted to see the show, but wasn't able to make it to any of the other live performances. But then when I saw the lineup for the film festival this year I saw the show, which is part of the CBC's performing arts series, Opening Night and I was excited because I knew that I could see it and also see Mike Jones (who, according to legend, saved my marriage and now may break it up, but that's another story). It's co-directed by Mike Jones (Andy's brother) and Moya Walsh. They manage to capture a stage show that doesn't seem forced or too showy. I was expecting something like Jonathan Demme's Swimming to Cambodia, but it's not as showy, which can be distracting. A testament to the power of the performance (which won Andy the Best Actor award at the Atlantic Film Festival) and the production is that the audience in the movie theatre actually applauded at points during the film...you don't see that happening too often.
The show deals with issues of God, religion and Newfoundland... and science! Andy has an amazing ability to hold your attention and take you on a journey through topics that fit together and create a wonderful and entertaining tapestry. It will be broadcast on CBC TV on November 13.
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Guy Maddin makes the most beautiful films that can sometimes be quite challenging to watch. If you haven't seen his work, imagine that Eisenstein had moved to Winnipeg in the 20s and started making films...that's a good way to start to think about what he does. The Saddest Music in the World is a remarkable, perfect film. It's perfect in the sense that I can't think of anything that would need to be changed. It's completely unique and works within an amazing cinematic space that seems to be 70 years old, but also comments in elliptical ways on contemporary events. The film ranges from melodramatic to hilarious with an improbable plot that works.
The beautiful Isabella Rossellini stars as a brewery magnate, Lady Port-Huntley, who decides to sponsor a radio contest to find the saddest music in the world in order to increase the consumption of beer. That's just the jumping off point and the film moves through a wonderful world that could only exist on film. The visuals and the soundtrack are amazing with loving attention to every detail. A great film makes you look at the world in a different way, but this film makes you look at cinema in a different way.
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Isabel Coixet directs the amazing Sarah Polley in My Life Without Me, the story of a 23 year old woman who finds out that she only has months to live. It's a beautiful film with cinematography by Jean-Claude Larrieu and camera operation by Coixet. It's a Spanish / Canadian coproduction that was shot in Vancouver and the solid and moving performance by Polley forms the heart of the film as she decides to make the most of her last days on earth. While it was moving at times, it wasn't overly moving, but it could be because so many of the films at the festival this year have been dealing with themes of death that maybe when I saw it I was a bit desensitized to that aspect of the story. A beautiful, well-crafted film that is definitely worth seeing. Coixet also has her own site that is pretty neat too.
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Today was a busy day and I'm just in the middle of it. The Atlantic Film Festival is in full swing now and the nice highlight and heart and oasis of the festival for me is the Linda Joy Media Arts Society Brunch which is held every year at Brunswick House in Halifax. There is great food and the most wonderful people. The festival becomes a bit of a blur after a while, but I always have a safe, warm, wonderful time at the Brunch which makes me feel so glad that I'm part of this whole business that (my theory goes) is the result of a recessive gene... the filmmaking gene... if you've got it, you've got some stories in you that you have to get out there. Meeting other filmmakers is the best part most of the time, because they understand and you don't have to explain "why do you do this?" I'm also very mentally spent now so I'll have to catch up with writing about films tomorrow since I think that this is about all that I can squeeze out today.
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Yesterday I saw the American independent feature, The Station Agent, which is showing tonight as the Anniversary Gala as part of the Atlantic Film Festival. Thomas McCarthy directs a great cast in the story of Finbar McBride, who wants to be left alone in the train station that he has inherited. Born with dwarfism, he is short and always the centre of attention. With two quirky friends he becomes involved in their lives and they all learn something about each other. The independent scene in the US now is hot and it's the place where you get to see great actors and stories that would work in a completely different way if you had celebrities in the roles. It's an appropriate film for the Anniversary Gala as it shows how independent films now have become closer to the mainstream without becoming bland or boring. The film won the Audience Choice Award at Sundance and is definitely worth seeing.
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Denys Arcand is Quebec's top director...he's made some of my favourite films, including Jésus de Montréal, as well as Le Déclin de L'Empire Américain and this year Les Invasions Barbares is the closing gala at the Atlantic Film Festival. It kicked off a festival run at Cannes where Marie-Josée Croze won best actress.
I loved the film...I enjoyed it more than the original Déclin as the new film happens within a different context in a different world. While the characters are similar, the introduction of the children of the characters provides new opportunities to explore contemporary Québecois culture and social issues. It's very intellectual, but I found it surprisingly moving. The film moved along smoothly and then it was over... it didn't feel as long as it should and I'll definitely see it again. It's playing Friday night as the closing gala at the Atlantic Film Festival.
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A few nights ago I saw Duncan Roy's AKA which is a no-budget 35mm feature that tells the story of Dean Page, who manages to jump above his station. Through a series of coincidences and good luck he gradually becomes someone else. The innovative part of the film is that it is presented in three screens, each of which featuring a slightly different perspective. It's a compelling portrayal with the different screens featuring sometimes different takes, and other times the same images. While it may seem to be technique for technique's sake, it works very well, and I'm not sure if it would work that well on video, since the level of detail wouldn't be the same.
At times it reminded me of Midnight Cowboy, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Abel Gance's Napoleon, which split the screen into a triptych. AKA is not what I expected and I enjoyed it.
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Every now and then you see a film that you don't know anything about and experience everything about it in a fresh way. I didn't know much about Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself except that it was set in Glasgow and it was a Scottish / Danish coproduction. It's one of my favourite films of the festival. It hit me just the right way. It was directed by the Danish director Lone Sherfig. It's a post dogme film that explores similar themes, without the arbitrary rules. It tells the story of a pair of brothers, one suicidal (Jamie Sives)and one selfless (Adrian Rawlins). Then it brings in a single mother (Shirley Henderson) and her daughter (Lisa McKinlay) and the threads of the story begin to weave together. I found out later that it was shot on HD, but it's not the way that it is shot that caught me, but the characters and situations.
It reminded me a bit of Diane Keaton's 1995 film Unstrung Heroes which I also loved. Part of the please of Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself is in the exploration of the complex relationships that we have with those around us and the much greyer world of decisions, choices and morality. It screens tonight at the Atlantic Film Festival at the Park Lane cinemas.
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On Monday I attended a great workshop with Ann Marie Fleming, the creative force behind The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam. The workshop was a combination of the personal and the work, which is what she does in her films. Of particular interest to me is her approach to documentary and the use of humour. It disarms you and makes it easier to deal with sometimes difficult issues. I had a great time and there were gifts as well! She showed lots of work and contextualized, analyzed, and philosophized about it. It hit me right in the heart and reinforced my belief that things will work out well and important stories will be told because they have to be told. Some quotes from my notes from Ann Marie's workshop: filmmaking: "so much heart and so much fussiness", "we all have stories", "the very specific is most compelling", "all film is documentary film", "standup is like experimental film", and "you just have to want to do it." She confirms my theory that filmmaking can be characterized as a recessive gene... you don't really have a choice, you just have to tell these stories. I'm glad that Ann Marie is out there sharing her stories.
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The International Shorts I program at the Atlantic Film Festival was great. It's one of the reasons that I love going to festivals as shorter work is hard to see outside of the festival context. The program started off with the quirky mocumentary "Walking with Walken" about an obsessed British Christopher Walken fan who doesn't do an impression of Walken so much as channel him. "Der Er En Ybdig Mand" (This Charming Man) is a Danish film about a man who is unemployed and has a somewhat farcical experience of being mistaken for an immigrant. At times I was a bit uneasy with directions that the film was going in, but it turned out to be a clever look at prejudices that are hidden and not so hidden. "Gravel" is about a single mom who takes her teenage daughter and a friend to meet an ex-convict she may be interested in. Beautifully shot on HD, it suggests rather than tells and leaves things ambiguous in a good way. "10 Again" is a nice series of 3 stories packaged up into one where adults in voice-over tell stories of their childhood while we see young actors portray what we are hearing. My favourite though was "El Elegante" which is a very quirky 16mm short about a man and woman in a decaying (but interesting) old hotel. Very strange characters, great art direction, music and some dancing - I loved it!
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I'm so glad that I saw Proteus and then was able to take John Greyson's Directing Master Class. It was a lot of fun and was packed with clips and great stories from the soft-spoken and genuinely nice guy that he is. I don't know what I expected, but it was an engaging way to spend my Sunday afternoon. His background is in video art and while many try to categorize him, I think that he embodies the spirit of the independent filmmaker. All of his work is challenging and crams a dizzying range of ideas into beautiful structures. Seeing clips from his body of work along with his commentary revealed patterns, concerns and a wealth of information about telling a story through the media of film and video. A highlight for me was a short produced by Greyson as part of the 25th Anniversary of the Toronto International Film Festival that encapsulated the love that we have for film and festivals.
There were fascinating glimpses into the process that he has followed and the challenges that he has overcome. He is one of the many filmmakers who grew out of the coop scene which is the backbone of media arts production in Canada. His diverse experience was shared as he talked about his video art, feature filmmaking and episodic tv ("Made in Canada", and "Queer as Folk"). I took pages of notes and here are some gems that I took from the session: "three is so nice", Movies of the Week - "interesting ways to talk about our lives", "lunches are good", documentary - "an immersion in ideas and not emotions", and directing is "finding what feels right."
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John Greyson's latest feature film is the hauntingly beautiful Proteus, which, on the surface, tells the story of love triangle set in 1725 in a prison garden in Cape Town. Greyson doesn't like things to be too simple and it's amazing to watch how all the diverse elements unfold together. While it is a historical drama it is full of wonderful anachronisms and is constructed in a such a way that makes you realize that you are watching someone tell a story, even though you still become emotionally involved. The film took 6 years to make and is the blossoming of a collaboration between John Greyson and Jack Lewis. The production is a coproduction between Canada and South Africa and effectively uses the South African locations. The careful crafting of the script and the ideas tells a story that works across time and combines themes that you wouldn't think possible in a way that is both visceral and intellectual.
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The first animated shorts program of the Atlantic Film Festival, Frame x Frame, was a diverse and entertaining mixture of styles, technique, and stories. Some of the highlights of the program was a 3-D animation called, "The Freak" which told the story of a ... freak ... who wanders around a city. It had a great soundtrack and a neat use of shallow focus, which you don't see all the time in 3-D animation. The highlight of the program was another 3-D animation called "Blink" which tells the story of the challenge that a family of worms face when their home is threatened. There was also some more traditional animation with an Irish adaptation of an Inuit legend, "From Darkness", and the NFB's "Penguins Behind Bars" which was a slightly long take on the girls gone bad noirish drama with penguins. At another stylistic end was the evocative sand-animation of "Rehy Fox" which featured a beautiful soundtrack of an Irish man telling the story of a canny fox.
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Long Tack Sam was an acrobat, magician, performer and vaudevillian who was one of the most amazing performers of all time. He's also Ann Marie Fleming's great-grandfather and the star of The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam. Thanks to her search and travels around the world she pieces together the story of the man who performed around the world and influenced magicians and performers for decades, but he didn't make the leap into film as he always believed that the portrayal of those of Asian heritage on the screen should be positive.
The film is a visual feast with a dizzying array of animation styles and approaches to tell the story. Presenting stills in an interesting way is a challenge, but Fleming rises to the occaision with subtle touches such as people in photographs blinking and animation of documents and comic books. It's a wonderful journey that seems to combine just about every visual way of capturing an image from video to photography to drawing to painting to cinema.
The personal documentary is a tricky thing as what may be interesting to the filmmaker may not be interesting to the viewer. As it says in the end credits, "History is relatives." Luckily in the skilled hands of Fleming the various stories of Long Tack Sam are revealed to us as she smoothly uses whichever technique works at any particular point in time. You can't really categorize the film as it combines so many elements together in a skillful way that it's just about everything you could hope for.
The film is distributed by the NFB and is screening at the Atlantic Film Festival on Sunday, September 14 at 7:05pm. There is also an NFB Master Class with Ann Marie Fleming on Monday that I'll be enthusiastically attending.
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Nathaniel Geary's feature film debut is On the Corner, which tells the story of a brother and sister struggling to survive in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. It's a remarkable film that has an understated tone and subtle shooting style with an almost verité quality to it. While the subject matter is dark, it isn't depressing. The cast is solid with Alex Rice as Angel and Simon Baker as Randy forming the brother and sister pair in performances that draw you in quickly. It's the type of film that could easily fall into movie of the week territory or have a heavy-handed message, but Geary thankfully lets the story unfold and the characters live their lives as we watch them.
A great film gives you insight into a world that you haven't seen before and On the Corner does that extremely well. While other films that deal with poverty and drug abuse tend toward melodrama or visual excess, what Geary does is focus on the relationships of the characters, how they fit into the community and the challenges of dealing with a broken family. A story - whether it is a documentary or drama - is about people and not issues and if the people are compelling we'll think about them and understand a bit more about the choices that they make. There is no easy way out and the film provides a multidimensional and sensitive portrait of the characters so we can't easily divide the characters between good and bad as everyone does what they need to do to survive.
Shot at the old Portland Hotel where Nathaniel Geary worked and on the streets of the Downtown Eastside the look of the film is dark. Brian Johnson's subtle compositions and smooth movements contribute to the documentary and observational atmosphere of the production.
The sad reality of film distribution in Canada is that it's hard for independent films to be screened in theatres, so most people will see the film on television. It recently premiered in Toronto at the festival and is screening on Monday, September 15th at 9:25pm at Park Lane 7 in Halifax as part of the Atlantic Film Festival.
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Today the latest installment of the Atlantic Film Festival starts in Halifax. It's a great festival that is big enough to have a wide range of films, but small enough to be able to know more of the people involved with it. The timing is just about perfect as my Screen Arts students have to go to a number of films as part of school, which also means that I get to go to the festival. It's a great time to network, meet new people, talk about films and actually see some too. It looks like there is a great lineup of films and I'll be writing about them shortly.
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I've had the good fortune to be included as part of an exhibition at the Acadia University Art Gallery called "Digital Dialogues: connecting in art and science". The exhibition was curated by Gair Dunlop who is a visiting artist from Scotland who I met in New Brunswick at the Atlantic Cultural Space Conference in May. One of the other people that I met there was Jan Marontate who thought that it would be neat to get Gair back here. Flash forward a year and a half later and thanks to funding from the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art Science and Technology, Gair has been back and he's curated a great show that explores the area around here, which is next to the Bay of Fundy, and explores art and science, science and art, and it gave me a chance to explore some things I wouldn't normally explore. The project was coordinated by the talented Janice Hudson who toiled away in the Peter Gzowski room with Gair. The amazing crew at the Acadia Institute for Teaching and Technology also were an integral part of the whole process and they did some neat stuff (as they usually do). This is just the perspective that I have looking from slightly outside the whole process, which always requires a lot of people to make something wonderful happen.
For my contribution I took a series of 1005 digital stills to form a set of 7 loops around 3 locations in Wolfville. I would take a still, step to my right and then take another still and repeat the process from between 60 to 400 times. I then combined the stills together to form animated loops. Then I played with it in Final Cut Pro and made filmstrips that remind me of working with 16mm film. Finally I put it all together onto a DVD that I burned. It's called "Circular Logic: 7 Loops in Wolfville" and it's part of what I think of as the inappropriate use of technology. It involves using technologies is way that they aren't really supposed to be used. It was a lot of fun. Eventually it will be up on the Web and I'll let you know more about it and I've also got to go back and explore more of works as the opening was tonight and I didn't get a chance to explore much. The show runs until September 24 at the Acadia University Art Gallery in the Beveridge Art Centre in Wolfville.
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Just about the only place that you hear people say "tissue" is in a film. The word "Kleenex®" which is Kimberly-Clark's facial tissue product has become the generic term...it's used so often that you don't really think about it. The same thing has happened with Web searching and Google, which is 5 today.
Back in the early days of the Web you didn't really need a search engine as it was possible to look through a lot of pages. The other thing was that most Web pages or "home pages" as many called them then was that a lot of them consisted of links to the other sites out there. It was a nice time that is easy to mythologize...you could know most of the people on the WWW.
Yahoo! started the popularity contest with their guide and search. Then I remember using AltaVista to find stuff. But then Google came along and it worked very well. What was striking about Google is the simplicity of the front page. One text-entry box and two buttons. When you got the results (if you weren't "Feeling Lucky") the multicolored logo added a repeated letter "o" to spread out the page results.
It still works well and now it's a verb... you "Google" something. The coolness of the verb was driven home to me driven home by William Gibson in his novel Pattern Recognition where it was used to refer to what you would find when you Google two of the characters.
Life before Google will be a story we tell our kids, just like explaining a rotary phone, old "pocket calculator", or floppy disks. But Google, as you proabably know isn't infallible as it indexes what's out there and doesn't always distinguish what's actually true, but that's what we're supposed to do for ourselves. William Gibson's bio mentions that if you Google him you'll find out that he writes it all on a manual typewriter, which he hasn't done for a while.
Google now is branching out with news, cool stuff from Google Labs, and my favourite, Google Zeitgeist which gives you a glimpse into what people are looking for. Happy Birthday Google!
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Last night I saw Whale Rider, which is an amazing film from New Zealand. Based on a novel by Witi Ihimaera and directed by Niki Caro it tells the story of a Maori girl and her family as they live their lives and try to reconcile their traditional and personal roles. It's a gorgeous film that is very moving with a fantastic performance by Keisha Castle-Hughes as Pai. Only 11 years old when they shot the film, she is perfect as a strong female character that is sadly rare to see in most mainstream films. The entire cast is solid and the film captures the complicated relationships and stresses that exist in families without descending into melodrama.
It's a good sign when films like this start making their way into smaller theatres as the wave of loud, expensive, and empty summer movies make their way out of the theatres and allow for some great films to show up. It's a good film also to get me ready for the Atlantic Film Festival which starts up next week.
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I love NetNewsWire. I registered it and use the pro version and it's always running in my dock. Now it's the main source for news for me. It's also the main way that I keep track of the 'blogs that interest me. I have been able to keep the feeds down to 22 so I don't have to scroll, but I think that I may need to add some more. NNW recently had a nice little update to version 1.0.4 which now uses Apple's Web Kit (the renderer in Safari) for displaying the HTML and it also allows you to use your own CSS if you want to control the display within NNW. My favourite new feature was suggested by Aaron Swartz who script is used to implement HTML differences which shows any revisions to an entry as green text and what was replaced as red strikeout text. It's a neat way to see how someone changes entries on a site. I like seeing the traces of revisions as a more ephemeral history.
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I've discovered a new environment for developing and exploring the possibilities of digital media. One of the problems in working with digital media over time is that if you change tools and as things evolve it becomes difficult to work with older material. The other challenge is that the tools that you use tend to push you in a certain direction. You don't have to follow that direction, but it's harder to swim against the current. I've used a bunch of different tools and I'm fascinated in how the history and evolution of tools can be embodied within them. As time goes by I notice how new tools always seem to have all the answers, but overall it doesn't seem as if things have evolved that much.
Back in the old days when I started using version 4 of Director it was amazing...so much that you could do. Now the hot tool is Flash and it seems as though Macromedia is revising their product line using years to maximize the profit. Even though I've used a lot of versions of Flash, I'm getting tired of constantly updating. I've been thinking for years that there is a need for an open-source or free tool for developing things a bit more advanced than what you can do with other programming languages.
Now I think I may have found it in Processing, which was started by Ben Fry and Casey Reas. It's designed to allow the exploration of programming more within the context of electronic art. What's neat is that it is built upon Java, so when you're done you export your work as Java and it can be placed on a Web page...no complicated plug-ins, etc. I've started playing with it and I hope to have some experiments up soon.
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I've updated to the latest version of Blosxom and there may be some strange things over the next few days as I play with the new plugins, etc. The upgrade was surpisingly painless...well, I guess it isn't that surprising since Blosxom works pretty simply and painlessly.
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Last night I had the pleasure of going to the Valley Drive-in. It's been a long, long time since I went to the drive-in. There aren't that many to begin with and the ones that are left aren't close by. But I found out that the Lions Club restarted a drive-in down the road from Wolfville. So off we went to see a double-bill of "Finding Nemo" and "Pirates of the Caribbean." I hadn't seen either film which made the whole experience kind of neat. One thing that the trip to the drive-in made me realize was that how expensive it is to go to the theatre. At the drive-in it was much cheaper to get in and the food was cheaper too. There is something very special about sitting outside watching a film on a summer night.
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I'm firmly embedded in a discourse of teaching, learning and supporting now. It's everywhere around me and as with every time you are really into something everything is related to that. Kind of like relating everything you see to that great movie you just saw, etc.
Teaching is a great honour. You're given the responsibility to help people change their lives and you have to take it seriously...but you don't have to be too serious... but anyway... One of the most important and difficult things to do in the classroom is to build the trust between learner and teacher. To not control people, but to build a safe, trustful space where learning can take place.
It applies to business too. Putting more controls and barriers up doesn't make people want to buy something. Doesn't trust work? I still see roadside stands in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick when I'm driving that have vegetables out and jars or boxes to leave money in. Someone may rip the money or produce off, but it's a risk that they're willing to take. I have lots of faith in people and if you have faith in them, they'll give it back to you.
This entry was kicked off by a blog entry by Jason Kottke "Business lessons from the donut and coffee guy" which tells of a donut and coffee vendor in New York city who trusts his customers to make change. It restores your faith in humanity every now and then to read something like that.
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The Summer Institute is about halfway through and I'm tired and happy
as I think about the experience here in Truro. Whether intentional or not, when a group of people live in the same building, eat and study together, socialization will take place. Shared values will emerge, and if the hiring procedure works as it should, they should be coherent with the values of the institution.
One can't underestimate the importance of staying in the residence in the whole process. A great deal of learning and sharing takes place outside of the classroom, but it is almost always connected in some way to the events of the day. While the long days filled with stimulating discussion, group work, writing and eating should result in early nights filled with peaceful slumber, for many it is an energizing experience. We work until the time that we'd usually go to bed and then socialize.
A group of teachers is the most difficult group to teach. It would be similar to the task of a stand-up comedian who must face a group of stand-up comedians who sit and say, "O.k., make me laugh." It's a tough crowd and requires great courage to face people who can second-guess both the ideas and the way that they are presented. For these reasons it also can be difficult to learn as a teacher. I find that I must often take a breath and remember that I am here to learn and resist the temptation to teach.
The most positive part of the experience is the sense of collegiality that I feel. We are a community of learners and a community of teachers. With shared values and goals we can work together and challenge each other. We often complain about the workload, but we're all putting much more effort in than is needed. It is a positive feedback loop with everyone wanting to be challenged and to grow. This is our chance to try out new things and to grow and we're loving it.
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Working for the Nova Scotia Community College has been a great experience in that I've been able to meet some great people, teach things that I love and be able to develop my skills as a teacher. Now I'm in Truro at the Truro Campus taking a series of education courses to become a better teacher. While the courses are the main reason for being in Truro (and they've been great courses), what is amazing is being able to network and get to know some of the people who make up the college. There are an incredible number of people with diverse backgrounds and skills here. For the most part we talk about teaching...in the morning, at lunch and dinner and after hours. We stay up late into the night and get up early in the morning. They are long days, but I wake up every morning ready to dive back in again.
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Last week I was able to get the full series of "Sports Night" on DVD. It's a 6 DVD set with the pilot, first and second seasons on it. I remember watching it when it was airing normally and becoming completely sucked in to it. It wasn't a comedy and it wasn't a drama. Unfortunately many of the episodes had a laugh track that ruins some of the pacing and subtlety of the writing and later episodes were thankfully free of the canned laughter.
"Sports Night" was a series created by Aaron Sorkin before "The West Wing." It was odd in that it was a half-hour "dramadey" which had elements of a sitcom and drama in the shorter slot. With a great ensemble cast and rapid-fire dialogue, it is clear that CBS didn't really know what to do with it. The show was a critical hit, but I remember that it was hard to find it with a time slot that changed and a sporadic airing and a slow decision not to renew the show. The DVD falls into the category of corporate tolerance in that it crams 45 episodes onto 6 discs, which means that the are fairly highly compressed with a bit of a loss of the visual quality. There are also no special features, but the episodes themselves are great. I'd put it in the same category as "Monkeybone", "Ghost World", "The Guru", and "Mr. Show" in that they stretch beyond easy categories and you have to look around to find them. Now I have to find the time to dip in and keep watching all of the episodes... all 22 1/2 hours of them!
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I saw Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later yesterday and I loved it. Although it's being promoted as a zombie horror film, it falls more into the British post-apocalyptic tradition with a nod towards J.G. Ballard. Brilliantly shot on miniDV, it creates a compelling portrait of a group of characters after a plague devestates England. The film was beautifully shot by Anthony Dod Mantle who manages to pull incredible images out of a prosumer camera. Mantle previously worked with Boyle on the darkly humorous Vacuuming Completely Nude in Paradise that pushed the visual envelope even more (maybe a bit too far). There is a great visual grammar used by the film with high-shutter speeds, quick cutting and an eerily beautiful soundtrack. The editing by Chris Gill alters the pace dramatically in an instant and holds every shot just long enough. It was also interesting to see the quality of the images from the blowup to 35mm from miniDV. Overall it seems that closeups and low-light material works great with a fairly stable camera helping. The high-shutter speed footage is great for isolating quick images that magnify the horror by providing fleeting, sharp images. A horror film that isn't really about zombies, but humanity and morality.
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I took a chance and bought the DVD of "The Guru" last night and I wasn't disappointed. I'd seen the trailer for the film and it looked like a neat cross-cultural story with a sense of humour and some neat musical numbers. It's a wonderful, hard-to-categorize film that probably caused the American distributor to barely release it in theatres (it was in limited release this past January) and put the DVD out without much marketing or a lot of extra special features. It's not exactly what I expected and had a surpising depth and range that managed to hit all sorts of notes from Bollywood to Hollywood to slapstick to drama. Heather Graham and Jimi Mistry have a great chemistry and Marissa Tomei is great as well. A great supporting performance by Michael McKean as a porn producer adds a neat little subplot. It helps when there is a great cast to pull off a story that is very difficult to categorize or describe. One of the things that I loved about the film is that it shows the cross-cultural globalization that is a reality in the world. Much more of a European film, it somehow manages to keep it all together. The deleted scenes on the DVD reveal that the film could have gone a bit more toward melodrama or broader comedy, but the balance was struck just right by director Daisy von Scherler Mayer. The official guru site has some goofy games, but the British site reveals that it's more of a British film (as star Jimi Mistry was on "Eastenders" and the songs from British pop groups).
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A few days ago I watched the DVD of Frida and was pleasantly surprised by it. I hadn't seen the trailer for the film and only saw brief glimpses, so I didn't know what to expect. It's an engaging and complex biography of the artist that also presents the story in a visual style that complements the paintings. The film is beautifully shot by Rodrigo Prieto and is impressive without showing off or being distracting. Just right and just enough visually. The performances are similar in style as well. Salma Hayek becomes Frida and Alfred Molina is great as muralist Diego Rivera. There are some innovative visual sequences that fit perfectly and also had the side effect of saving money without any compromises. The film is well-directed by Julie Taymor who manages to pull great performances out of the cast and have a film that is visually impressive without being excessive. I haven't really explored the special features on the second DVD yet, but I will.
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I was playing with the new iChatAV beta using audio chat and wanted to use the new iSight, but I don't have one, and my G3 PowerBook is too slow for video chat. But I was thinking about the amazing design of the new iSight and how it just uses FireWire to connect. Then I was thinking that it would be cool if you could take that camera off of the computer to take pictures unconnected...then I thought about the iPod, which is a FireWire hard drive. Hmmm... if you plugged the camera into an iPod you have a camera and a hard drive. (But now the iPods have a Dock connector instead of straight FireWire.) What if the iPod 2 or iPod AV had a colour screen, video playback and recording capability? That would be cool. Plug in the iSight, look at the iPod screen and record video... and maybe if the iPod had AirPort you could stream video from the iPod or have a neat wireless iChat without needing a keyboard...maybe sort of an iPhone for around the house? It seems as if all of the parts are in place for this and maybe it's just a matter of time.
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I've been listening to the new Radiohead CD, Hail to the Thief over the past week. It's a bit downbeat, but that's to be expected, and it continues to move forward by striking a balance between pop and experimental elements. There are two songs on the CD that I love: the first single, "There there" and "Punchup at a Wedding." The two songs seem to be some of the less processed, and more built around the band playing (who knows if that's how the tracks came about, but that's how I think about it). The video for "There, There" is an amazing stop-motion animation with Thom wandering through forest filled with anthropomorphic animals. The video is at the "Radiohead Television" site, and if you check out the site at the top of the hour you can see a half-hour show, "The Most Gigantic Lying Mouth of All Time" which features music from the CD combined with more experimental video and animation as well as some live stuff. It's a neat progression from the videoblips used to market "Kid A" in a more viral sense. I've only seen one episode, but I liked it. One quirky thing that I've noticed is that it looks as if the site isn't working when I access it with Safari, but that was because the pop-up blocking feature was stopping it from happening... so you have to allow unrequested pop-ups for that site to see the show (just make sure you turn it back on after you leave the site). The band is doing the rounds like every other band now as it seems they've become much more well-adjusted as human beings following the grind of "OK Computer" documented by Grant Gee in "Meeting People is Easy".
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Today is Bloomsday, the day that James Joyce's Ulysses took place in 1904. Sip (I'm enjoying a pint of Guinness right now). Ulysses is an amazing achievement, moving through various literary styles as Stephen Dedalus moves through Dublin. I've never been to Dublin (hopefully someday...) but the amazingly descriptive novel paints a picture that resonates. Joyce invented one of my favourite words that works on so many levels: "alcoherently", but in Finnegan's Wake, which I've only dipped in to from time to time. Tonight I think that I'll start to read Ulysses again.
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One of my all-time favourite films, Miller's Crossing, has finally been released on DVD. I bought it yesterday along with Barton Fink, which also was released on DVD. Miller's Crossing to me is the Coen brothers masterpiece (to this point). It's a film that manages to strike a difficult balance between comedy, drama and genre all while not falling into any predictable pattern. I've watched it many times and I continue to enjoy it more. On the surface it's a noirish, gangster melodrama, but it features the Coen's ability to construct characters who defy and are defined by their ethnicity, sexuality, and moral codes. John Polito's speech in the first scene of the film encapsulates the entire moral universe of the film and neatly sums up the dilemma: "It's about ethics." The speech and the choice made in that scene kick off the action and the world and complex relationships start to be revealed to us. I actually have the shooting script and after I read it I started picking up even more. Part of it is due to the rapid-fire dialog. Part of it is due to the complicated structure and relationships, but it's still a joy to watch.
The DVD isn't exactly packed with extras, but it does feature some interviews that would have been part of the electronic press kit from over a decade ago. It's neat to see what people are saying about the film and the Coen's (who had previously done the dark "Blood Simple" and the lighter "Raising Arizona"). There is an interview with Cinematographer (and now Director) Barry Sonnenfeld about shooting Miller's Crossing as well. Unfortunately there isn't a commentary track, but it doesn't really need one, does it?
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The Matrix is a hard act to follow. My first exposure was through the Web site that was set up that posed the question "What is the Matrix?" It was a brilliant piece of marketing -- you had to give your email address and then received a password that gave you access to the site. The other brilliant bit of marketing was that they commissioned comic artists to create stories set in the world of the Matrix and available online. They established the world and didn't take away from the film. The first film itself is a unique combination of kung fu, sci-fi, philosophy and melodrama... it's fun and makes you think a bit too... not as deeply as the volume of discussion would have you believe, but more than the usual film filled with shooting.
The marketing for Reloaded has been pretty much unavoidable. There is a DVD of Anime related to the film coming out next month but it started on the Web leading up to the release of this film. The DVD of Reloaded apparently comes out in October to build up for the final chapter Revolutions in November. The theatre had lots of people in leather jackets and sunglasses and the distinctive Matrix letter cascade was all over the windows with green streamers all around as well. I don't think that the other summer films will be able to challenge the film, despite the marketing efforts.
I really liked Reloaded, but it took me a little while to get into it, but then it had me and overall it's a different film (but not as different as a sequel as X2 was). One early theory that I have is that the film will probably split audiences down the middle, based on what they enjoyed in the first film. If they loved it mainly for the action, they'll probably not like the sequel as much, if they liked the philosophical elements they'll probably like the sequel. Just so you get the philosophical aspect there is a camero by American philosopher Cornell West and a philosophy section on the Web site!
The structure of the film is fascinating, but I'm not going to recount the plot (don't you hate reviews that do that)...and I'm not going to spoil it either. Part of the enjoyment of the first film was having a world revealed to you and that's part of the pleasure in the second film as well. One very cool thing that I noticed as an editor is a very neat pattern of cross-cutting that condensed and combined things across time and space in a way that I was in awe of. So much information so efficiently.
The film overall has great action sequences and it makes you realize that a good action sequence is a combination of writing, shooting, editing and acting. What's important is that you understand what is going on and that it sucks you into the world. If you don't buy the conceit or the melodrama, it can be tough (like a John Woo film). While it took me a little while to get into the film (I was thinking, "OK, I've seen this before."), the new stuff (with an exception that was a very 15-year-old geek fantasy-like thing) was better than I expected. The world and the story expanded a bit and it did manage to make me think some more. I guess I'm a sucker for an action film filled with love, honor and sacrifice.
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I watched the documentary "Comedian" last night. It's about Jerry Seinfeld putting together a new act. It's a fascinating glimpse into the creative process. I've always liked Seinfeld's standup and I've watched "Seinfeld" for years and still catch episodes almost every day. The documentary was directed by Christian Charles, who seems to be a first-time director (at least according to IMDb) who also shot the film with Gary Streiner (who was Producer) and Mark Plumber. A great soundtrack links the film together and it features a smooth editing style (by Chris Franklin) that weaves together Seinfeld building a new act with up-and-coming comedian Orny Adams.
It's a rare look at how comedians are like musicians, practicing and honing jokes until they work and then expanding their set with more and more solid material. Seinfeld thinks a lot about this stuff and it's interesting how he put himself through the way it used to be to assure himself that he still "has it."
Carolyn summed it up in an odd way in that the film is kind of like "Heart of Darkness" with Bill Cosby as Kurtz... maybe it could be called "Heart of Lightness"...
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One of the things that happens quite often is that you don't notice the things that are always in front of you. That's what has happened with Omni Outliner from the Omni Group. I registered it last year and use it just about every day. I started using it because I needed to organize a bunch of information for a report that I was working on. I was able to structure and write the bulk of the report and then move it into another program for laying stuff out. I really like working in the outlining mode as it helps me structure things and flesh them out. At some point I think that I'll be using Keynote to create support material (but I'm waiting for a teacher deal like the one that was available in the U.S. for Keynote and iLife together), and I can export my outlines to Keynote to become presentations. Now I make lesson plans with it and use it for all sorts of planning...I'm just starting to use styles with it to make the outlines look better. It's simple, well-designed and powerful. The only downside is that I also use Omni Graffle which I registered at the same time, but the latest version of Outliner doesn't work with Graffle...before I could drag and drop an outline onto Graffle and get a neat diagram...but I'll have to upgrade to the latest version of Graffle to do that again. But Graffle is still great for creating all sorts of graphics, but the update adds a lot...
The most inspirational part of using Outliner is the user community... the application is filled with features that I keep learning about through what other people are doing. The column adding features have made me think of using Outliner to keep track of student marks. Some people use Outliner for project management or accounting and there is a whole page filled with samples that you can download from the extras page.
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I was playing a bit with an application called Zoë which I first read about in an article last year by Jon Udell called "Googling Your Email". It seemed like a neat idea, but I didn't bother to download it and try it out. The Web site is enigmatic with a manifesto and a bare minimum of documentation. It was created originally by Raphaël Szwarc who now has other developers helping him with it. While "Google for email" is a good starting point, it's a lot more than that. Under OS X the installation is incredibly simple and involves double-clicking on a Java application which starts it running and then clicking on more links to configure things. It sucked all of my mailboxes in... it took a while as over the past few years I've moved from Claris Emailer to Eudora to Mail.app and imported my mail from all of the accounts... so I've got several years of email stored in the mailboxes.
The greatest thing about Zoë is how everything shows up through a Web interface. You search and can click on links that sort and subdivide even more. In just a few minutes I was able to find all sorts of different connections that I hadn't made before and surfed around through my old email. I often search through my email to find out what I've said or to find links that I've sent as well... with Zoë all of the links (and people) show up and can be used to find other connections. It runs as a Web server, smtp server, ftp server, etc, etc, etc. It lets you get attachments, messages and information from it. You can send and retrieve email through it and you can also keep using your regular email program. I think that I could end up using this a lot... I knew I was keeping my mail for a reason for all these years!
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My first laptop was a Toshiba T1000 and it's the first machine that really brought the Internet into my home and marked the beginning of my writing everything on a computer. I bought it from a professor of mine and used it to write essays and articles. It had 512 k of RAM with a memory expansion that could be used as RAM or to store 768 k of information or programs. There was only a 720k floppy drive and no hard drive. I used WordPerfect 4.2 which fit onto 2 floppies. In 1992 when I moved to Montreal to study I bought a modem (2400 baud) to connect to the Vax at Concordia to use electronic mail and telnet. One of the first hypertext programs that I used was Hytelnet. It was written by Peter Scott and it connected Telent sites. This was before I used Gopher and before the World Wide Web. I used Telnet and Hytelent to do a lot of research at various libraries around the world. Then I organized things in a WATCOM database from the University of Waterloo.
Then I began looking at MOOs and MUDs to explore the fascinating culture of creating worlds and community through text. I really had a great time discussing postmodernity and cultural theory in the Postmodern Culture MOO which was the online component of the journal. It's where I first had a voice online and began connecting with people around the world. Then it started to get more popular and a bit too crowded so I moved on to the BayMOO and then to the Diversity University MOO where I took an online course in Adult Education using technology.
The Web was (and still is) very exciting to me. I launched my first Web site about 10 years ago... right after I used Cello and Mosaic and found HTML to be fascinating. My first Web site had a rant about the film "Disclosure" and (as pretty much every site then did) a bunch of links to other sites. The site was hosted at an Antarctic research station Web site that had extra hard drive space. You just sent an email asking for space and they set you up. That was before the Web was commercial...and you could know most of the people who were around... and we were happy... and walked uphill to school in snow storms....but that's a whole other story. Now a decade later I'm celebrating the first anniversary of my own domain and Weblog. Things have changed a lot in some ways, but not so much in others.
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I was recently reading an article on the O'Reilly Network about "Freeware Gems for Mac OS X" and found it interesting. One of the neat things about OS X is that it has spawned a whole new wave of development and applications. The great thing about OS X is that it combines the Mac with Unix in a pretty package. You can admire and use the system mainly on the surface or dive into development and manage stuff with the command line. The most interesting free app in the article is an address book called SBook. SBook was created by Simson Garfinkle in 1991 for NeXT (which OS X owes a lot to).
I'm actually quite happy with the built-in address book in OS X and I love how I can use iSync to keep my address book on the machines that I use and my Handspring Visor in sync. But I thought that I'd try out the program as I like Simson's writing and if he went to the trouble of reviving a program I should try it out. What intrigued me is how he mentions in the description that the search algorithms are quite paoerful and that they are very fast and parts of them made their way into Mail.app and the OS X built-in address book. So I tried it and really like it. I love how it's a free-form address book, so you don't need to fill in certain fields. It figures out what is what... a name, a business, an email address, a phone number, etc. So you can type lots of notes explaining things and mix it all together however you like. Then you can go to a Web site, send an email, dial the phone, or print an envelope or label. It's fast and searches almost instantly. You can even drag pictures into it! I think that this is going to be my address book of choice soon. I still miss a feature of Apple's Address book such as being able to look up a map by clicking on an address, but I'm sure that it will show up soon.
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My regular Internet radio source has pretty much been Soma FM's Secret Agent feed, but occasionally I need to listen to something different. Gair Dunlop is back on this side of the ocean for a while and he mentioned a London radio station called Resonance FM that has a feed available. I tuned in and the first thing I heard was a program that was all...backwards... the next time that I listened it was more of a disco and dance mix with some entertaining banter in between the songs, and then a music and spoken word program. Now I'm listening to a program about fruit machines, which I've learned is what slot machines are called in England. Definitely eclectic and interesting. It's a radio station in London that broadcasts at 104.4 FM is operated by the London Musician's Collective. Resonance FM was 1 year old on May Day.
Reading about and listening to the station it reminded me of my days in (on) radio in New Brunswick when I worked on a comedy show and then returned to do a news and public affairs show. The station was CHSR-FM, based at UNB in Fredericton. They have a feed as well.
Resonance FM broadcasts live at noon (GMT I suppose) every day for 12 hours (a bit longer on the weekend), but they also have a recorded loop that runs during other times. One of the neat things about the station is that it is live and commercial free... there is something that I love about live radio... the knowledge that there are people on either side of the microphone and speaker who are connected either through the radio waves over the air or the signals flying through the Internet. A great combination of the human and technological.
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During the war in or on Iraq I relied a lot on online news sources...in general I've been getting more and more of news from online sources and not tv... the only exception is CBC radio... so not a lot of tv news. The most fascinating reading during the recent events in the Middle East were the BBC Reporters Logs which were halfway between brief news reports and notes from reporters to the world. But an earlier and still-running collection of links to a broad range of information about what's currently going on in the world is the Guardian Weblog. I rely on the Guardian's journalism and their Weblog keeps me informed as well...and I recently checked out some of the "Weblogs We Like" sidebar which had me surfing around for a while.
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I have to say that I love gardens, but for some reason I am horticulturally challenged. A few years ago we tried to grow some vegetables in our back yard, but everything died or was eaten by animals...but the animals would have starved as we only had 1 or 2 pathetic tomatoes. That's why a beautiful public garden is impressive to me. There is the peaceful and relaxing nature of the environment and then there is the fact that someone had to think about how it all fits together and grows and looks.
Yesterday I was walking home from lovely downtown Wolfville and stopped in to the Harriet Irving Botanical Gardens at Acadia University. It's another one of those things where you live close to something and walk or drive by it and never really see much of it. Carolyn and I walked around inside the gardens on a beautiful Sunday afternoon and vowed to return when everything was in bloom.
Still in the garden mood, I heard that the Halifax Public Gardens were open today and I went for a walk. It's an amazing place to go, right in the heart of Halifax. It was the first public garden in Canada and was opened to the public in 1837. A beautiful and authentic Victorian garden it's a large and comfortable place surrounded by iron gates and a pond with ducks...just the place to spend some time on a sunny day. I have to get out more!
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One of the things that I love about living in Nova Scotia is that I keep discovering lots of talent all around...it's not that there hasn't been talent in other places where I've lived and grown up... there is, but being a little bit "from away" gives you a bit of a different perspective. The latest NS musical discovery that I've made is a guy originally from Mount Uniacke called Buck 65 (with his secret identity being Richard Tefry). He's got a Tom Waitsian sense of language, but combined with a great hip hop sense that is based in his reality, which is closer to my own reality which has it's own rural elements.
Every now and then you realize what a small place this part of Canada can be. I drive a lot and listen to the radio or music a lot as well. In the lead up to the East Coast Music Awards there was a lot of coverage on CBC Radio of the musicians nominated for awards and Tefry was on the radio with a great interview and an intriguing song. A day later a guest I had brought in to my class at work turned out to also be Buck's manager, so then I figured when I had a chance I should pick up the latest CD, which is called Square. The cover looked familiar and I realized that it was drawn by James Paterson of Presstube fame. Jeez... he studied in NS too...and used his Flash skills for the site supporting the CD (where you can listen and decide to buy it for yourself). The CD is great (which is probably why it won "Best Urban Recording") and is divided into 4 tracks. Definitely not a collection of singles, but a series of long-form explorations of different ideas, beats and sounds... I really like it and will be a regular consumer of his work.
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The sequel to X-Men isn't like the original, even though pretty much everyone is the same on both sides fo the camera. X2 is a lot of fun and not as serious as the original. Sir Ian McKellen (who's web site has a great personal touch) pretty much steals every scene that he's in...he's very watchable and obviously loves what he's doing. Much like the first film, part of the pleasure is watching a great actor bring life and depth to a comic book that could become campy...and the scene between McKellen and Patrick Stewart is a pleasure to watch. Alan Cumming also brings a suprising degree of feeling to the character of Nightcrawler, which shows that Brian Singer's casting instincts are solid. Another acting highlight is that Rebecca Romijn-Stamos is given more lines and more of a role than in the first film. Overall I liked it and wasn't disappointed at all. A great cast with a good comic book story.
It's interesting that I'm writing more about the acting than the special effects and action...well, it's a comic book film... and it does it very well... the first one has more depth, but X2 is a lot of fun, but it suffered from me seeing the Matrix Reloaded trailer for the first time on the big screen before the film. Now that's a film that will have some pretty amazing action.
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A CD that I bought a couple of weeks ago is "Elephant" by The White Stripes. I had heard a few of their songs and seen the amazing Lego video for "Fell in Love With a Girl", but I decided to take the plunge and buy the new CD without hearing any of the tracks. I really like it and I listen to it a lot as I drive home from work and in iTunes. It's a neat blend of styles that all link together with Jack and Meg White playing pretty much all of the limited range of instruments. A great sense of humour runs through the CD which has elements of NY punk, Blues, Led Zeppelin, and Folk... with strange echoes of The Rocky Horror Picture Show... it's hard to explain, but I think that I'll pick up some other CDs from The White Stripes.
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One thing that I'm specifically trying to do is to read more books that aren't manuals or non-fiction. So I picked up William Gibson's Pattern Recognition a few weeks ago and started reading it. It's a bit embarrassing to admit it, but I haven't actually read a novel by Mr. Gibson before...I've read interviews, saw "Johnny Mnemonic", a great X-Files episode that he cowrote and, most recently, his blog, but never read the novels. It's one of those things that I've been meaning to do, but the longer it took, the more he wrote, and I delayed buying that first book. Being a lapsed SF geek is why I felt a twinge of guilt at not reading a bunch of the cyberpunk stuff... so what better place to start than with Gibson's latest, which isn't SF at all.
I'm about 3/5ths through it (squeezing in chapters whenever I can) and I love it. Gibson nails the texture, taste and feeling of online culture, which what you are reading is part of as well. A good novel (or film for that matter) will stike a chord with you when you recognize the elements of truth in it. The idea of a coolhunter who doesn't like having the ability is a great premise and it takes off from there. The obsessive nature of "footageheads" who seek out uploaded footage that is part of some larger and mysterious work runs through the novel as well and the intersection of our heroine and the footage is fascinating to me. The novel is making me think about my relationship with the online world, fashion, culture, etc. Maybe I like the idea of the novel because I love editing and editing a film (especially a documentary) is really about looking at a whole lot of material and recognizing patterns and then assembling them into a (hopefully) coherent whole.
I guess the other reason I'm enjoying the novel so much is that I identify with Cayce Pollard in some ways... seeing things emerge and recognizing what's coming up. My daughter Caitlin once said that I like things before they're popular. For some reason I seem to stumble into things just before they break into the wider world by noticing things that seem to fit together.
Why am I still writing? I have to go and read some more!
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One of the applications that I have fallen in love with is Graphic Converter. I used it years ago and then I started using Photoshop and didn't think that I'd use anything else. Then OS X came along and the Photoshop version took a long time to come out. Then I wasn't able to upgrade to version 7, but I needed to do a lot of image processing as I was working on "When Voices Rise..." and I didn't want to do a lot of work in Photoshop 6 in Classic as I was using Final Cut Pro 3 under OS X. I scanned hundreds of photos and documents and needed to resize and crop them to make them more manageable. I found Graphic Converter, tried it out, loved it, and bought it. Small, efficient and fast. I used the Browse feature to select images and resized and adjusted them for use. Then when I was authoring the DVD I had almost 100 images that I wanted to use in a slide show for the DVD, but I needed to rescale and resize the images in a non-proportional way and also to place them on a black background. GC's Batch was able to save me a ton of time doing that. It's what I use to resize and prepare images for the Web and iStockPhoto when I upload stuff there. It even takes a lot of Photoshop plugins!
There have been a few updates over the last year to GC and I dutifully download them, but I hadn't been using it a lot. But for some reason I hadn't poked around in it a lot. Then I had an image open I noticed that there was a new Stamp tool! That was the only thing that I really, really missed from previously using Photoshop as the colour-correction, levels, and other image adjustments work great in GC. The browser has also been updated (in an iPhoto-like way) and there is a neat catalogue HTML export that I may play with as well. I have to check out updates a bit more carefully!
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It's time for some updates to the site as I'm approaching my 1 year anniversary with bitdepth... soon I'll probably update to blosxom 2.0 (maybe the beta, maybe the release) as I like the look of some of the plugins. Even though I'm using Movable Type at work, I like the more hands on approach of writing stuff up in BBEdit and uploading it for my own blog. I just don't want to get too far from the raw content, but I don't want to spend a lot of time coding.
Teaching Screen Arts is fun, but it takes up a lot of time during the school year (it is my job)... and it cut into my blogging, but things are easing off a bit now and I have to reestablish the routine of blog first, ask questions later. It reminds me of a video artist friend of mind who was frustrated with me with my film background and shooting style with a video camera...I'd carefully think about the shot and shoot very efficiently, but her aesthetic was to capture the moment. I've taken the same approach sometimes with the blog...not a lot of posts, but interesting stuff that I've thought about a bit more. But now I'll try to rebalance it a bit.
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Wow! It was a busy day at work...end of the term and lots of marking and adding and wrapping up. In my brief glance at Apple's Web site this afternoon I saw that they launched the music store and updated iTunes to version 4. Even though I'm in Canada and we (along with the rest of the non-US world) can't buy songs yet, it's a pretty amazing leap. One of those Apple things that you look at and say, "Hey, that makes sense." I can see me impulse-buying stuff as soon as it's possible. There are still some gaps in the music that is available, but they've got a lot and the presentation is great. The staff picks are idiosyncratic and I suspect that they reflect the folks at Apple. It looks as if the whole thing was a massive task. Over 200,000 songs, tons of album art and a whack of encoding. The other neat features of iTunes 4 are sharing via Rendezvous and AAC encoding (higher quality at lower bitrates...just the same as encoding audio for DVDs).
A very cool feature for iTunes 5 or maybe 4.5 would be "Upload My Songs" to allow independent musicians to make their work available via the Music Store. Now that would be the next step, but would the record companies allow it? The video that Apple has (in the new "Music" button on Apple's site that replaces the "Switch" button) introducing the store and new iPods has a rather smarmy tone about the music industry, so maybe it's not too far-fetched. I love the new ads for the music store... they feature people singing as they listen to music on an iPod. A neat exercise in contrasts.
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One thing that I've realized about my 'blog (becoming self-reflexive in a very blog-like way) is that I try not to be in the blogrolling mode with links to other blogs as others do it better and it's maybe a bit too meta for me...but anyway...I would rather blog the unblogged... but I started reading Steve Mallett's Emergent Technology blog which is now one of my NetNewsWire feeds (which I try to prune down to I find most useful and interesting). Alpha geek that I am, but without the free time or money to go to the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference it's a way to get a glimpse of some of the cool things that are developing.
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Iamstatic is back with a redesign and new members. Featured works are by James Paterson and Randy Knott. I saw Randy's "Don't Forget to Remember" in a theatre on a big screen while at a conference in Moncton last year. It's a great linear Flash piece that makes me wish for a perfect world where great work like that is shown in theatres ... instead of the stuff that is usually shown there. It's great to see Iamstatic back!
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I just checked out the Winter 2003 issue of Born Magazine. There is some great stuff there. The "Just Born" section combines an artist and a writer to create an interactive experience. Some good poetry and interactivity that was just the right thing for me at the end of a long week. Especially interesting visually and aurally was "August 10" by Debbie Urbanski and Abnorm.
"The Birthing Room" features more experimental explorations of interactivity. I love "The Language of New Media" by George Shaw and Thomas Swiss which you have to solve puzzles to move forward through the words...with the words concealed in the interface, or is it the interface concealed in the words?
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I saw the 2001 film "Human Nature" on the weekend and I liked it. I didn't know really what to expect, but I wanted to see it since the script was written by Charlie Kaufman whose "Being John Malkovich" and "Adaptation" are well-loved by me. It definitely has Kaufman's multithreaded plot structure with an elaborate, but simple tale of a man (Tim Robbins) who teaches a feral man (Rhys Ifans) to become mannered. Oh...and there is a very hairy nature writer played by Patricia Arquette (with a musical number)... but that's a lot about the film... in an odd way it reminded me a bit of "A Life Less Ordinary"... but that probably only makes sense if you've seen both films. "Human Nature" is directed by Michel Gondry, who has previously directed some great music videos for Björk and Daft Punk along with television commercials. Although the film is in English, it has a somewhat French structure and pacing (like Truffaut's lighter works or "My Wife is an Actress") which I liked as well. His next film is also written by Charlie Kaufman and is called "The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" which stars Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet.
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Some time last year, late one night during a free trial or when I was somewhere that had a cable channel that I don't subscribe to, I saw a chunk of the pilot of the series "Six Feet Under." What caught my attention was seeing Peter Krause who starred in the excellent "Sports Night" series... I thought that it was an episode of "Sports Night" that I hadn't seen, but I realized that it wasn't. The first season is out on DVD now and I watched the first 3 episodes. The series was created by Alan Ball who made "American Beauty" and they share some elements. The drama is built around a family-owned funeral home and part of what I liked is the way that the family history and tensions emerge in the early episodes...it looks great and has a great ensemble cast who all seem to have deep roots in theatre... The family chemistry is great with a neat dynamic between mother, brothers and sister with a somewhat wacky employee thrown in. I want to see the rest of the episodes and I'm looking forward to checking out the second season as well.
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She's not, actually, but that's the name of the film we watched last night (Ma Femme est une Actrice). I've been on a bit of a French film kick the last week or so... I watched Jeunet and Caro's Delicatessen again and 8 Women is out on DVD this week... I loved it... It's written, directed and starring Yvan Attall as a man who is married to a beautiful actress played by Attall's real-life wife Charlotte Gainsbourg. They play Yvan and Charlotte as a couple who struggle with Yvan's jealousy as she goes off to London to shoot a film with Terrance Stamp (who plays a character named John). A lovely looking film with a great cast with real chemistry between all of the characters (especially Attall and his sister...the actress who plays his sister). The blurring of roles is a recurring theme in a lot of films lately (especially Adaptation), but the whole filmmaking thing reminded me a bit of Truffaut's Day for Night (La Nuit Américain) which tells the story of a French film being shot with an English lead actress. Truffaut cowrote, directs and stars as the film director. Another Truffaut connection (at least in my mind) is that the first time that I saw Ms. Gainsbourg was in the film The Little Thief (La Petite Voleuse) which was made posthumously based on a story by Truffaut. My Wife is an Actress was released in France in November 2001 and it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 12, 2001... which is probably why it has taken a while to come out... and it also played at the Atlantic Film Festival, where I should have seen it, but I didn't find out about it until a few months ago! I have to see more festival films next year!
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Via Rael I saw this nifty little bit of Bluetooth wizardry... the Sony Ericsson Clicker which uses the Bluetooth capability of the cellular phones from Sony Ericsson to turn the phone into a remote control for a Bluetooth equipped Mac with 10.2. You can control your presentation, the dvd player, or use the proximity sensor to pause iTunes when you leave the room. It's very cool and illustrates the potential that Bluetooth has....hmmm... Bluetooth TVs, radios, lamps... they'd shut off when you leave the room. But I've still got too much stuff that I lug around... my PowerBook, my cell phone and my Visor... and I'm still waiting for my cell phone provider to provide the ability to send email from my phone directly... I can receive it, but no sending yet...then I can 'blog via mobile phone... that will be cool and brief.
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It's neat when something comes into focus all of a sudden. I read "The Death of the 'Comments' Section. RIP" by Steve Mallett and I finally figured out why (instead of how) to use Trackback. Until I read the article I didn't really realize what need more specifically that Trackback filled... now I do. Now since many people have weblogs they aren't posting comments as much...they'll just make an entry in their 'blog that links back to what they're commenting about. Trackback can assemble those together. Mallett also links it up with community, which is less than or equal to 150 people. Movable Type has Trackback built-in and I can use that where I teach (with a Movable Type 'blog for my students) and I can also add Trackback support to Blosxom (which runs this 'blog). Rael also did a comment hack to Trackback to add comments to Blosxom. It's neat to see how this stuff is all evolving and even better when a bunch of things click into place and suddenly make sense.
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It's great when you get to see something develop and grow and come to fruition. My favourite new app has gone pro and you can register it to help the development continue. NetNewsWire Pro is the only thing other than Mail that runs constantly on my PowerBook. It has been developed by Brent Simmons of Ranchero Software and it's the best way to quickly catch up with all of the RSS feeds that make collecting information and opinion so much easier than aimlessly surfing around for hours. I also use it to edit the Movable Type 'blog that I use with the Screen Arts students at NSCC where I teach. Yay!
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It's been a few days and the news cycle revolves around and around alternating between the Space Shuttle Columbia and the pending war in Iraq. I was absent-mindedly watching tv and noticed the "Breaking News" on CNN...it's used so much now though that it took me a little while to figure out what was going on. Seeing Mission Control made me start to pay attention as I didn't think that was a good sign. As what was happening slowly began to become clearer and clearer it was sad, but I can't help but think about the horrific events of Sept. 11 and how the media coverage of that in some ways seems to have permanently numbed part of impact that "Breaking News" has.
But as the days went by I started thinking about the astronauts who were lost and then remembered the Challenger and how I've followed space flight pretty much my entire life.
My earliest memory is of the Apollo 11 moon landing (I wasn't there...I just remember seeing it on tv). My Mom saved the local newspaper from that day and I still have it. The first novel that I read was a sf novel about the Moon race...it was fascinating as I read it years after the actual Moon landing which made it oddly anachronistic. The idea of space travel is amazing and inspiring. You can see the earth--the whole planet with every human being on it--from space...it's amazing to think about that and the perspective it provides.
The connections that people feel with the space program are fascinating as well.
Many 'bloggers are remembering their childhood and the various significant milestones and tragedies in the history of sending animals and then humans into space. The technology that I'm using now is connected to the development of technology for space so if it wasn't for the space program, I wouldn't be writing this and you wouldn't be reading this. But the technological and scientific goals are often wrapped up with nationalistic goals as well. With the end of the Cold War much of the flag-waving motivation and attraction of the space program has faded and it has seemed to become less about patriotism and more about science...maybe that's why the launches and landings didn't get as much coverage and it seemed much more commonplace and less of a risk. But it was and remains risky and it sadly takes a terrible accident to bring the space program back into our thoughts again.
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Congratulations are in order for Rael Dornfest who has officially released version 1 (and then 1.1) of Blosxom, which efficiently has been powering this 'blog since I started it. One of the neat features is static rendering which makes for a more logical and efficient archive for me. So now categories and dates will let you go to entries with a logical hierarchy. i.e. http://www.bitdepth.org/archives/2002/ for all entries from 2002 (with http://www.bitdepth.org/archives/2002/12/ for just December of 2002) http://www.bitdepth.org/archives/film/ for all of the entries in the "film" category. Keep up the great work Rael! I've updated the site with it and it took only a few minutes. Then I set up the static archive along with a little cron job to generate it automatically...a bit geeky, but it's nice to have a simple system that works well that is easy to understand and use.
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It seems somewhat appropriate that I saw Michael Winterbottom's film "24 Hour Party People" around the same time that I saw "Adaptation". Both films are self- referencial, but while "Adapatation" is inward-looking, "24 Hour Party People" uses the self-referentiality to tell the fascinating story of Factory Records, Manchester, England and Tony. Written by Frank Cottrell Boyce, the film uses Tony Wilson to tie what could be a massive undertaking into a quick history of how music, people, and how a city evolved from 1976 to 1992. Steve Coogan plays Tony Wilson and he talks to the camera, commenting on his character and the film. Beautifully shot by Robby Müller, the film visually changes to match the time where the story is taking place. The casual, hand-held look of the film hides the technical complexity of the film that is just lurking beneath the surface as the complicated story is illustrated with seamless story-driven special effects.
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I finally was able to see Adaptation yesterday and I wasn't disappointed. It was made by the same team of writer Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze that created the amazing Being John Malkovich.
It's a great film that you end up thinking and talking about a lot about afterwards. It's probably not a good idea to go to the film alone as you could be frustrated that there isn't someone to talk with afterwards. A big part of the film is seeing how things unfold so I won't spoil any of that... it's not "The Crying Game" spoiling, but more how things happen.
The film is very much in the "meta" category and it reminded me a bit of Italo Calvino. There is a constant blurring of reality and fiction and it continues the style that began with "Being John Malkovich" both literally and figuratively. It's a lot of fun, but seriousness creeps in from time to time and moves the film from being quirky and funny to a level of seriousness and poignancy that can be surprising. Jonze creates things that are deceptively rough. While a lot of it looks casual, rough and hand-held, it's actually very meticulously constructed. I identified a lot with Charlie Kaufman (who is the main character in the film along with his (possibly fictional) twin brother Donald. I'm a shy, obsessive, procrastinator as well...but that's where the similarities end...
I found out about Being John Malkovich from the great cheesy web site for JM Inc. which is now defunct, but I linked to the Internet Archive version of it so you can still see it. It features bad design and a scrolling status bar message. When you sign up for more info you go to the real site with info about the film. The DVD also features a great design along with a tv ad for the (fictional) Web site.
The site for Adaptation features a good use of Flash to present clips, script excerpts and photographs from the film. Jason Kottke has also assisted with the meta aspects of the whole thing with a 'blog for Susan Orlean (regarding: Adaptation) about the film which is an adaptation of her book...
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Doc Searls got me thinking about presentation software which has become a current topic with Apple's new Keynote software. PowerPoint dominates presentation software and I really hate it. Maybe that's not completely fair. I hate PowerPoint in the same way that I hate Flash...not so much the software itself, but how it's used. With most applications there is a way that you are supposed to use them...it's how they're designed. You can work with them in a different way, but you're going against the grain. PowerPoint seems to tend toward mediocrity in the direction that it pushes people.
Derek K. Miller explains "Why PowerPoint is like a sauna in a Saab" and Doc's article "It's the Story, Stupid" should be read before anyone prepares a presentation.
Years ago I had to make PowerPoint presentations for other people as part of my job. On the 7100AV that I used it was slow and an incredible memory hog. I didn't help it a lot since I'd usually make up the shows in Photoshop as a series of images and bring them in. I much preferred doing things like that using Director and later Flash. But one of the hidden, but very useful features of Adobe's Acrobat reader is the full-screen mode that turns a PDF file into a presentation. I've done some presentations that way.
The last presentation that I gave was supported with slides that I created in Photoshop and then assembled with QuickTime Pro as a series of stills. It worked well.
Now when I'm writing something more structred I'll start in OmniOutliner which is probably the best outliner I've every used. Most other things that I write will be in BBEdit (where I'm writing this now). Whenever I have to do another presentation I'm thinking of using BigShow which was written by Aaron Hillegass of Big Nerd Ranch. It's very small and simple and uses XML. I'm thinking that if I organize things in OmniOutliner and then maybe use a bit of AppleScript to reformat things into the proper XML it can be a quick way to whip something up.
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Last year I first read about iStockPhoto when Zeldman wrote about them. iStockPhoto isn't your typical online source of royalty-free stock photography. What makes them a bit different is that they're more of a cooperative. Once you are acccepted (after submitting sample images) you can upload photos that others can license for use. It costs 50¢ US for each image, which is a bargain. The artist gets 10 of those cents which can be used for their own downloads-that's the cooperative part. There are some very nice images there and new things are being constantly uploaded. The self-serving part of this item is that I now have a bunch of images up there under my online name of chrisxero. Why should I hoard stuff when it can be shared?
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I've subscribed to BlogFodder which is a "micromail" that provides a seed for weblog posting. Meg Hourihan mentioned it and it intriqued me. I'm thinking that it may help me write more...kind of like bran increasing your regularity. I'm very much a creature of habit and I'm thinking that this may become part of my blogging routine to get things moving. It also reminds me a bit of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies. So the first one is "Next year's resolutions."
Hmmm... I'll resolve to spend more time tending to the garden and I'll spend less time in front of computer monitors.
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One of the fascinating characteristics of Canadians that I've observed (from the inside, since I'm Canadian) is the concern of what others (especially our American friends south of us) think of us. It happens with popular movie stars who happen to be Canadian, musicians, writers, etc. Mentions in the American media are carefully scrutinized... do they like us? Are they making fun of us? Michael Moore has a section of "Bowling for Columbine" that focusses on Canada (and the film was produced by Halifax-based Salter Street (see...I'm doing it now)). Many Canadians will remind each other of the Canadianness of the famous or of Canadian connections. (hey...did you know that some of "Catch Me If You Can" was shot in Montreal?) Now 'blogs are firmly moving into the popular consciousness and with the proliferation of stories, 'bloggers now are increasingly saying "hey! They're talking about us!" and we proudly watch as the mainstream media pick up stories that we knew about days ago. I think that it's a sign that the whole 'blogging world is maturing so now there is more focus on the ideas in a 'blog than the tools used to create it. So while I think that many 'bloggers have the Canadian characteristic of being overly concerned with what others think, the movement of 'blogs from niche to mainstream makes me wonder "what's next?" If 'blogs now are what a homepage was a few years ago, what's the next big cool thing for geeks? I'll let you know if I figure it out.
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It's rare that something indispensible is added to your toolkit after a number of years. It is even rarer when an application can change the way you do things. The Web browser did that and now I'm thinking that NetNewsWire has done that for news and 'blogs for me. When RSS feed first came out I thought that they were cool and I wanted to use them, but never got around it. Meerkat did (and still does) a great job, but I was too lazy to set up my own mobs to use it more efficiently. In the last few months it seems that many things have clicked into place: the explosion of 'blogs into the more mainstream consciousness, the proliferation of feeds, and Brent Simmons releasing NetNewsWire Lite. I was trying to explain to Carolyn how much I love NetNewsWire, but I said the best way to figure it out is to use it and she did and understood. So now a big chunk of my online reading happens through the RSS feeds that are aggregated by NetNewsWire Lite. It lets me spend more time getting to the good stuff and less time surfing and more time reading what I'm interested in. There are only two applications that are constantly running on my PowerBook: Mail and NetNewsWire.
I started thinking about this more when I read Meg Hourihan's O'Reillynet Megnut column "Dial Up Revelations" where she talked about using dialup while in France and how NetNewsWire Lite helped to ease the low-bandwidth pain. The other encouraging thing that I took from her writing was that the sites that work well and translate to various devices are the ones that are standards compliant. It's an exciting time...now if only more people would write great software like NetNewsWire and create standards-compliant web sites...
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Creative Commons is a great response to the controversy surrounding the largely American debate concerning copyright. It's a Canadian issue as well, but the law is a bit different here and is not so much driven by Disney protecting the mouse. On December 16, 2002, they released a set of copyright licenses that facilitate and streamline the sharing of work. This is all mixed together with ideas similar to the GPL and the Open Source movement, etcetera. What's fascinating is how quickly the idea is spreading through the medium of 'blogging which is so interconnected that ideas travel literally at the speed of light. Creative Commons has inspired me and I've licensed my stuff under one of the licenses. One of the great things that they've done is provided simplified, easy-to-understand licenses along with legal and electronic versions. They even have a Flash presentation that explains why and how this is all a good idea.
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I didn't get to see Martin Scorsese's latest, "Gangs of New York" until this year, but it would have bumped "Bowling for Columbine" off my list of top 5 films for 2002 if I had. It's a great film and confirms that Scorsese is the greatest living American filmmaker. I haven't seen anything by him that I haven't enjoyed and thought about often. Technically it's superb, but it's the combination of technique, story and performances that make it a powerful film. It's heavily allegorical without being heavy-handed and amazing to look at without really showing off. There are also some great triads in the films where instead of cross-cutting between two parallel threads, three stories or themes or characters are linked together. As with all of Scorsese's films since "Raging Bull" it was brilliantly edited by Thelma Schoonmaker (who I had the privilege of seeing at a workshop in Prince Edward Island a few years ago). I'm keen on seeing it again to see what else I see in it.
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Belatedly I will put up a quick review. Spielberg's latest is Catch Me If You Can. It's one of those films that are solid and fun, but don't really stick with you that long. Visually it's nice and the performances are solid and it's almost a tv movie...I kind of get the sense that Spielberg made it to flex some lighter muscles after the brilliant "Minority Report." The highlight of the film for me was the opening credit sequence which was a great, graphical overview of the entire film.
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Hmmm... I seem to be in a top 5 mood... The top 5 applications that I've registered or use just about every day are as follows (in no particular order)... NetNewsWire Lite (I haven't registered it, but that's because the Pro version is in beta now), BBEdit, Graphic Converter, Transmit, and Joe's Filters For Final Cut Pro. Over the past year I've come to depend on these things... in some ways they are the silent heroes who work away in the background, but each one of them have talented people working away making my life easier.
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As the minutes tick away and 2002 ends I figured I'd make a list of the top 5 films that I saw in the past year. In no particular order here it goes: CQ, Minority Report, Solaris, All About Lily Chou-Chou, and Bowling for Columbine. It was strange as when I was trying to think of films there weren't a huge number that leaped out at me. Will next year be better? Hmmm... I haven't seen Adaptation or Gangs of New York, so they could have made the list if I had seen them.
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