I just uploaded a photo to Flickr that brings the size of my archive to one thousand photos. That's a lot and it confirms my belief that Flickr is a killer app. It's actually changed the way that I think about photos and I'm taking a lot more. There are many ways to upload and share photos, but what makes Flickr great is the social component. When I started uploading pictures I was thinking that it was a great way to share photos with my family as it just didn't make any more sense to keep emailing the same photos around all of the time. The other thing is that I didn't want to upload photos of the kids and family events for the world. Sharing pictures with the family worked great, but it wasn't until I started getting comments on my public photos and started participating in groups that I really started to get more heavily addicted.
What is wonderful about Flickr is that you can connect with people from around the world and communicate visually. You find people who have a similar visual sensibility to you. Now if someone adds me as a contact I look at their photos to try and figure out why. Usually it only takes a few images to figure out what you share in common, whether it is an interest in things that are rusting, similar framing or topics. I look forward to seeing the images that my contacts have uploaded and I want to share more.
The other thing that this sharing has encouraged me to do is more fully embrace Creative Commons licensing as all of my public photos have an "attribution-NonCommercial" license. I love being part of a community that communicates through images.
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Thanks to a mention by Hugh MacLeod. I found out about the film Young Adam, directed by David Mackenzie. It's a film from Scotland that's hard to neatly categorize other than being something that is well-crafted all around. Not a feel-good story, but a somewhat dark, but always mesmerizing tale of a young man and his past. While there is a bit of a secret at the core of the film, that's not what makes it interesting. The wonderful cast of characters Ewan McGregor, Tilda Swinton, Peter Mullan, and Emily Mortimer fit into the roles perfectly with understated performances that are subtle and perfect. You're not watching actors acting, but people who you are fascinated with. A glance or a touch becomes significant and with Mackenzie's direction it becomes an introspective story that involves us on a visceral level as the events unfold. The most difficult thing to show in a film has to be a connection between characters that feels real. Why do they love each other? What is the attraction? In Young Adam we see it between the characters. It doesn't need to be explained in the dialogue that papers over a weak performance. Based on a novel by Alexander Trocchi, the story is sexy, haunting and meticulously constructed. Set mainly on a barge that travels between Glasgow and Edinburgh in the 1960s, the locations mirror the feeling of being trapped within the choices that you make. Every decision that we make determines our fate and it's rare to find a film that explores that idea in such a compelling way. It's great to find a gem like this.
Hugh Macleod also interviewed Tilda Swinton via email on gapingvoid as well as calling Young Adam "the best Scottish film ever", which is a quite a bold statement considering the competition, but I'd tend to agree.
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Every now and then you find something interesting by accident and really enjoy it. It's like a wonderful present and a glimpse of a world you didn't know about. Since we don't see all tv from the UK, we get a distorted view since we see a lot of great stuff. It's probably the same the other way around where people outside of North America think that tv here is a wonderful mix of "Six Feet Under", tv documentaries and wonderful dramas and sitcoms. The truth is there is a lot of crap everywhere.
A few years ago I discovered a television series from the UK called "Spaced" which was shown on Bravo here in Canada. It's a clever sitcom written by (and starring) Simon Pegg and Jessica Stevenson and directed by Edgar Wright. It follows the struggles of flatmates and is filled with references to science fiction and horror films. Pegg and Wright then went on to write Shaun of the Dead, which is a parody of zombie films.
I saw Shaun of the Dead last night and I really liked it. What distinguishes it from most parodies is that it isn't a series of jokes loosely linked together by characters or a theme, but it is built around the characters. It challenges the conventions, is funny, but is also scary at times. What makes it work is the linking of the lives of the characters and the conventions of horror films. It works both as a comedy and as a horror film. While there are a ton of jokes related to other films, I don't think that you wouldn't enjoy it without getting them (although there is some gore...) One of the neat things that I found out about the film is that many of the zombie extras were cast based on a call that went out through the Spaced-Out fan site for "Spaced". Hopefully we will be able to buy the DVDs of the series on this side of the Atlantic soon thanks to the success of Shaun of the Dead.
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Remember that night you went out and ran into a friend and had a drink and started talking. You found out a lot about your friend, things you never knew, and you shared some of yourself as well. It's captured in the film Melvin Goes to Dinner. Transient moments that you remember your whole life.
I read about Melvin Goes to Dinner on the Bob and David site, but hadn't been able to see it (or really find it in many places). Luckily I was able to finally buy it, unseen, and I was very glad that I did. Usually I'll know a lot about a film before I see it and will have seen a trailer and read about it. I hadn't read very much about it and I really enjoyed the film. It's based on the play, Phyro-Giants! by Michael Blieden and directed by Bob Odenkirk. The writing and acting are amazing. It's a talky, character-driven film, but after a great conversation you don't say, "I just spent an hour with someone and all we did was talk!" You're more likely to say, "is it really that late?" The direction by Bob Oderkirk is interesting as well, with the core of the film being handheld and gorgeously processed digital video, with some neat stills-based sequences outside of the dinner with Melvin, a friend who he accidently goes to dinner with and another couple of friends who are also there. I don't think that I've ever seen a film that has captured a night out with a group of people so well where they, as Bob Odenkirk puts it, "accidently tell each other what is actually going on with their lives."
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What a difference a day makes. It was a nice looking snow storm, but it kept coming and when it was over there were close to 40 cm of snow on the ground and the trees and the power lines. It was heavy, wet snow and it brought down 6 large transmission towers and knocked out the power to my house in Wolfville for about 51 hours. Without power you realize certain things or maybe things that you know are just confirmed. I'm addicted to coffee and I spend a lot of time online.
While I knew these things, I didn't realize how much light and being online had altered my perception of time. With the dark I always thought that it was later than it actually was and I slept more. But one of the neat things was that I had a bit more time to think and I got to enjoy the warmth of a wood stove. The sad thing is that bushes and branches on the trees around the house were bent and broken. We also lost a lot of food, but we all managed to stay warm and safe.
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I woke up this morning and while the forecast had called for snow, it still was a surprise to see snow covering everything. It's so peaceful and quiet when it snows. I quickly went outside (because I was cold) and grabbed a few pictures, including one of a leaf with snow on it. Now it will be harder to say, "I can't believe it's November already" with the snow starting to fall. This is the fun time when the snow is light and fluffy and you don't have to worry about shoveling it and getting around on the roads. It's beautiful when the snow lays a blanket over the world.
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Michel Gondry is an amazing visual filmmaker and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is remarkable, but simple story about love and loss. While the structure of the film seems loose, it's quite intricately constructed so I appreciated (and enjoyed) it even more the second time through. Ellen Kuras' cinematography adds to the casual look of the film, but within the frame there is a wonderful combination of ingenious sets and special effects that manage to create a story that is very much emotional and internal. The skillful shooting and writing turn what could be a very talky film into something that exists in small moments and quiet spaces between people. By playing characters opposite to what they usually do, Jim Carey and Kate Winslet manage to hit notes that they don't always hit. At times the performances are almost painful to watch which is probably a testament to how well we can identify with them. One of the smaller pleasures is the dysfunctional relationship with David Cross as a hotheaded pothead. The balance between the sillier elements and the depressing elements is just right. When I first wrote about this film I said that it didn't blow me away, but it would grow on me and it has.
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I don't know why, but the DVD release of Ed Wood was delayed several times. Finally it came out and I had to get it since I loved the film when it first came out. I think that it's probably one of Tim Burton's best films as it combines comedy and drama all within the context of a black and white film with (intentially) bad acting. It's a "B" movie that understands and loves the characters so well that it becomes more than what it appears to be on the surface. The heart of the movie is within the characters and the relationship between Wood and Bela Lugosi. Johnny Depp as Wood and Martin Landau as Lugosi move beyond caricature and create characters that we care about who are struggling to fit in and be themselves with a group of other people who just don't fit in. It's a lot of fun, but it's also moving at times and it helps move things along in a film that is over 2 hours long, but doesn't feel it. With Ed Wood, Tim Burton gets the balance just right in how he slips drama within a "B" movie context. The DVD also features a loose "making-of" with much of that shot on black and white film. What I like about it is that it isn't a smoothly polished marketing package, but a glimpse into the shooting of a few scenes. It looks like it was a lot of fun to make.
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I've been lucky to be part of many different communities in my life. At the time you don't necessarily think of them as communities as they just seem to be the cool people that you are hang out with. One of the first communities that I was involved with (and I'm still connected to) was the NB Filmmakers' Co-operative in Fredericton. I was born and grew up in Fredericton and when I found the coop I felt like I belonged. There wasn't a lot that I had to explain why I was there and we shared a lot in common. We also made films and that becomes addictive. Filmmaking and community are closely connected.
Technology has seemed to also play a role in the communities that I've been involved with. Film is built around cameras and tape recorders and it is filled with specialized terminology like the NPR, the Bolex, the Nagra, and the Steenbeck. I love those things and for members of the filmmaking community they mean something. But filmmaking isn't (or shouldn't be) about the equipment. It's about the stories and the people. That's what keeps you there.
With my use of email via the universities where I studied I was able to connect with other communities thanks to that technology. As with many new communication media a lot of time and space was taken up with discussions of the technology itself and what it meant. Email was more complex then and numbers played a far bigger part in what you did online. I still have the black notebook where I wrote down the addresses that I used to connect to other systems. But what was amazing and fun and addictive were the connections that I could make with other people. I could be in touch with people from all over the world and we could discuss things and share our interests. Another place where I didn't have to explain why I thought that this was so amazing.
But as a new technology becomes more widely dispersed we grow accustomed to it and take it for granted. I don't have to think about using email now, I just use it. That's how I stay in touch with people and keep track of things. This blog is one extension of that. With bitdepth I try to keep it fairly original and think a bit more and not just post collections of links. I'm part of the blogging community, but I like reading and watching others more than putting a lot of stuff out. So while I've been part of this blogging thing for a while (bitdepth has been up for 2 1/2 years now!) and with the new Screen Arts site I'm over 100 posts, which is quite amazing.
One of the things that has prompted this more reflective post is the recent US election and the IRC chats that I've participated in with some bloggers that I've been reading for a while. Kevin Marks combined the log of one of the chats that David Weinberger set up with QuickTime and an MP3 of the debate and then I felt a bit more connected. Then on election night I was able to chat again and it was still snarky, but not as much fun (most of us in there would tend to the left side of the political spectrum) since things weren't going the way that we had hoped. During that chat Halley mentioned about posting that day and I checked out her posts and they changed my perspective a bit as a bit more of the personal side started in to my consciousness. She had a health scare which is the big shift, but a smaller thing is that I realized that we both do the same yoga routine. It made me realize again that it wasn't just technology or topics, but humanity that connected us. More cool people who were human and good and sharing part of themselves.
So we commiserated and the evening got a bit more depressing and many people had colds and everyone started drifting away. But even though I wasn't in the best mood I was happy that I shared the experience with other people and I felt that I was part of a community and that made me feel pretty good.
Yesterday was a great day at work as well. I get to work with a very talented and committed person every day in teaching a group of very cool people who share our interest in film so I love going in every day. What made yesterday great was that I was able to have two guests in to speak about filmmaking. One of them was one of my oldest friends and the other was one of my newest friends. But both love making films and the day reminded me of why I love this stuff and why I do it. It's about people and stories.
The other thing that prompted this is my latest obsession, which is Flickr! and how my use of that has meant that I haven't been doing much in this space. I noticed today that I've uploaded 500 pictures since I've started, which I didn't think that I'd do. The reason I've been there so much is the sense of community that is there. It's not sharing the photos, but it's a way to communicate visually and get another perspective as you get to see how people see the world and the people around them. So it was appropriate that some of the first images that I uploaded to Flickr! were from a workshop that I took at the Film Coop in NB recently. The more recent pictures are from where I'm working now in Halifax. I was wondering if there were many other people taking pictures in Halifax and then one of those strange connections happened as I found through the tags that AKMA, who I occasionally read and who was in the election chats had been in Halifax a few months ago and had taken pictures there. So my communities had connected again and that made me think about how great it is that we can connect and share no matter what is happening in the world. We're part of a virtual community, but there are real, live humans at the other end of these electronic connections. It's about people and sharing and that's why I love making films and why I'm glad that I have this space to share this.
I think that I've made up for the lack of recent posts... thanks for sticking with me!
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Good Bye, Lenin! is a gently humourous film that is an ironic love letter to East Germany. Wolfgang Becker directs the cast in a subtle way that balances the melodramatic with the comedic and he manages to explore what we'll do for the one's we love. It also gives a bit more perspective to German society and how the myth of progress isn't always what it's cracked up to be. Things changed quickly when the Berlin Wall fell and I hadn't really thought about the challenges that would have been faced by the people who were losing their communist government. It's not so much a love letter to East Germany, but the story of a man who will do anything he can for his mother, even remaking the world to fit her memories to ease her recovery from a coma. Everyone shapes the way we deal with our families to make things easier by not telling them everything. Where do we draw the line and who are we really trying to help, our loved ones or ourselves?
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Hugh MacLeod draws cartoons on the back of business cards and he's been sharing those cards as well as his great insights into the creative process through gapingvoid. I'm keen to follow the conversation and to point others at him. He gets it and it's fascinating to watch the shape of how things are working now emerge. A lot is changing and Hugh is starting to trace around the edges of it. How is he different from others pronouncing on trends and how to be successful? He listens, he's generous and he's got a wicked, cynical sense of humour. He doesn't have to do the blog or draw the cartoons, he wants to. That makes a big difference. I'm glad that he's doing it. I wish more people would.
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I've been using the browser less and less since I started using NetNewsWire to read RSS feeds. It's one the best shareware investments that I've made. It's simple, well-designed and works well. Most of the time I can quickly get a lot of information via the feeds and NNW lets me check out things that I'm really interested in. When I used to click on a link it would open in my browser which is usually Safari, but I'm using Firefox a bit now. Now I'm using the latest beta which makes a good thing even better. Support has been added for Atom feeds and the weblog editor has been broken out into a new application called MarsEdit. The thing that has changed the way I look at things the most is that now (thanks to WebCore) I view pages within a tab that pops up in NNW. It's a great idea and now I'm going outside to the browser less when I want to check something out. Simplifying things is always good.
MarsEdit is something that I wasn't sure I'd use that much. But I've been using it a bit and I think that I'll use it more. I'm not using Movable Type as much now which is what I used the weblog editor for before, but I am using Blogger and I can post to Blogger using MarsEdit with the quirk of not being able to set the title, but that's on the way. I'm also thinking of using it a bit with this blog which is Blosxom-based with me editing the posts in BBEdit. The change in the interface of MarsEdit is that it now works and looks a bit more like email, which makes a lot of sense. The email workflow is closer to how blogging works intellectually. That being said, why am I writing longer posts now?
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A couple of nights ago I sat down to watch the U.S. Presidential Debate and decided to join in the second IRC chat that David Weinberger set up. I hadn't used IRC in years and I was surprised at how much I forgot... I had to get a client and get connected, but then it was a lot of fun. I sat down on the couch with the debate on the tv and made snide remarks as the debate went on. At the peak there were something like 50 people there. What was neat was that it wasn't that big a room and while there were some big name bloggers there, it was refreshingly flat. It made me nostalgic for the old days of the WWW where you could know most of the people there.
Then when I saw Weinberger's entry Annotated Debate, where he points to how Kevin Marks took Dave Winer's MP3 of the debate and combined it with the transcript to make a QuickTime that he calls "audioblogging with comments". I opened up the johodebate movie and saw that I got the first comment, which was about Kerry's tie. In David Weinberger's post he's a bit nervous about the "semiprivateness of chat being exposed in the full public of the Web" and I was wondering the same thing. Then I saw my (rather literal) nickname show up and felt a strange, internal, "yikes" as I quickly tried to remember what I said. Would I have said anything different if I knew where it would end up? Probably not, but it was interesting to go through the thought process of semiprivate and public speech.
I've been thinking a lot about how people speak and look when they are being recorded. The record changes the way you respond. With chat there is a text record, with video and film there is an additional dimension. Documentary filmmaking makes you (or should make you) think about what you see, what you say, what you show and how you establish context with editing. It's fascinating and demanding and it's why people get sucked in to making documentaries as you see how you can change the life of someone or cause them to act by just showing them something.
What started off as something that was fun and snarky has turned in to something that is more dynamic, but also managed to tie in to other stuff that I've been thinking about too. Thanks, Kevin for the value-added and thanks David for setting up the chat!
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Tarnation probably isn't the type of film you'd think that someone would make out of home movies over a couple of decades using iMovie. But then again, Jonathan Caouette doesn't seem to be a typical person. Tarnation is a very personal documentary that is utterly compelling and amazing to watch. Every now and then while watching I thought that I was part of an elaborate cinematic joke. The film just seemed to be too perfect, too well-constructed to be a documentary. But it wasn't fiction, as you could see the people in the footage growing up and growing old. There are lots of stories around about how much the film cost, but in some ways it's beside the point. It's an amazing film no matter what it cost to make. Intensely personal, the film is the story of Jonathan Caouette and his mother, Renee all told through the prism of video, music and family photos. It's a wonderful, harrowing and heartbreaking cinematic experience that is probably best viewed in a theatre if you have a chance. After pouring so much out I wonder what Caouette will do next. But maybe that's a good thing, now that he's put it all out there he can start fresh.
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The music was like electric sugar.The arrival of a new recording by Tom Waits is always exciting. The latest one, Real Gone, is bold and wonderful. While he could coast on his inherent coolness, he and long-time collaborator Kathleen Brennan have stayed in the same lyrical territory, but musically it's a bit more radical, but crisply produced and a joy to listen to. Waits and his musical accomplices wander through diverse musical terrain with infectious beats that get into your head and roll around in your mind and touch your soul. Tom Waits is like an old friend who you always look forward to seeing again to find out what he's been up to.
He's the type of wheel you don't fall asleep at.The tracks are amongst some of my favourite songs and I've been listening to it almost constantly since last night. What is interesting is that many of the songs continue threads started on other albums with rhythms, sounds and noises that remind you of the ancestors. The family was involved with the production as well with son Casey providing some turntable and percussion support. A few seconds in to the first track, "Top of the Hill", he had me. It's a hypnotic mixture of rhythmic sounds with a toe-tapping beat. Listening to "Dead and Lovely" I have an image in my mind of a dance hall filled with elegantly dressed couples dancing while the dark lyrics and smoky rhythm fill the spaces between the dancers.
What's more romantic than dying in moonlight.The meandering poem "Circus" paints the dirty picture of a circus and those who are trapped inside it and follows on from tracks like "9th and Hennepin" from Rain Dogs and "What's He Building in There?" from Mule Variations. "The Day After Tomorrow" could be the completion of a trio of tragic letters home that started with "Tom Traubert's Blues" from Small Change and continued through "Time" from Rain Dogs.
I know that rose like I know my name.Who would have known that something with so many experimental elements could feel so familiar. But that's Tom and I'm glad that I have another glimpse of more of the musical territory that he's exploring with his friends and family.
I'm in the middle of the Atlantic Film Festival this year and it's a great time. Lots of amazing films and people and not much time to actually write about it! At this point in time I've seen about 37 films (a combination of features and shorts) and I will do my best to write about them over the next few days. I'm amazed at the quality of the programming and the smooth functioning of the Festival. It's quite an achievement and I'm glad that I'm reaping the benefits. It's the 24th festival and it just seems to keep getting better.
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The reality is slipping away.Ross McElwee is a very personal filmmaker. The first film that I saw by him, Sherman's March (just out on DVD), was, on the surface, about the Civil War, but it's really about McElwee and his relationship with women. He makes documentary films that are about him (but isn't everything that we make and do really about us?) and in the process we find out a lot about ourselves and the people, places and ideas that he comes into contact with. His latest film is Bright Leaves, where he goes home to North Carolina to find out more about his family, tobacco, his friends and a Hollywood film that could be a sort of "secret home movie". He works in a gentle, subtle style that could rub people the wrong way. Not me as I love it and settled in to the groove of the film right away. While his films are personal, they are also about filmmaking and contain many profound insights. The connection and disconnection that occurs when you film things hit home with me. In looking at footage of his father he thinks that "the reality is slipping away" and while the images remain, what about the memories. Does film preserve or destroy our memories. I became so disturbed by this that I actually didn't videotape or photograph a lot of my family for almost a year. I wanted to be there and participate and not document what was happening. McElwee shoots and records most of the sound himself (with some assistance this time from his son) and his son Adrian also took the photo that is beside this entry. I really liked this film and I'm glad that I saw it.
I like to think that I'm an alpha geek. I try as much stuff out as I can and I like to be able to see things that are coming or things that I want to see develop. There were some rumblings about Flickr and I noticed it and looked at the site and the photos there a few times and read about it, but never signed up. Finally I did and I was hooked fairly quickly. Flickr is a way to share photos which isn't really that revolutionary, but it's how they do it that is remarkable. There are a bunch of ways to put galleries together to share images, but they can be a bit of a pain. If you want to have more personal photos you can set up rules and passwords, but that's not a lot of fun. Flickr really clicked for me when I realized that I was emailing the same photos to different people. It would make more sense to have the photos in one place and let them go there. Then it clicked even more when I made the connection between RSS and Flickr. In the same way that I don't need to go to a different site to see if it has been updated, it's easier to check the feed. With Flickr you have an imagestream, which consists of the photos that you upload. You can also view streams by how they are tagged or who uploads them. When this is combined with the ability to share certain images with contacts or friends or family or everyone it moves into the killer app territory. It's in beta now and all of the details aren't worked out, but I'm hooked. It's easier to understand once you use it though. The interesting thing is not that you have a limited amount of space, but it is how the space is limited. You have limits on how much you upload each month. So the bias of the system is to post stuff every month (or day or hour if you start to use it a lot). If you have a cell phone with a camera you can send images directly to Flickr. If you have a blog you can blog directly from Flickr. Technologically it's great, but the social component is what will make it stick... that and the well-documented Flickr API that lets you make other cool new things out of it and of course they have a blog. They also have Creative Commons licensing built-in as well! Hopefully as it develops and the pricing scheme is worked out it will take off. This is going to be very big I think. In some ways I think that Flickr and the RSS and Atom feeds that it generates will also help a lot of people understand why they would want to use feeds. Outside of the more tech-savvy blogging world there are a lot of people who use the Web and don't use feeds. NetNewsWire has changed the way that I view the Web because of how it lets me use the feeds and I think that Flickr is dramatically changing the way that I see sharing images. You can go to my Flickr page and you'll only see the photos that you're allowed to see... if you're a contact you'll see more, if you're not you'll only see the public photos. It's simple, functional and addictive!
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It's tricky whenBjörk is a fairly unique and talented individual. Her new CD, Medúlla is built around her distinctive voice. While it's not completely acapella, it's a fascinating collection of soundscapes and minimalist lyrics that I really like. I heard the track and saw the video for "Oceania" and I fell in love with it. This can be a dangerous thing as the rest of the songs may not be as enjoyable. The interesting thing is that the other tracks on Medúlla aren't a lot like "Oceania", which is probably the most mainstream of the songs, but I love the diversity of the other songs. Each song takes you on a little journey with amazing stereo explorations of sonic and emotional spaces. The design of the CD by M/M is beautiful as well with a striking photograph of Björk on the cover by Inez & Vinoodh. I find that Medúlla is the perfect way for me to take a break from everything that tends to swirl around me every day.
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Last weekend some friends and I went rafting through the rapids of the Shubenacadie River. The tides in the Bay of Fundy cause the highest tides in the world, which makes the water flow up rivers when the tide is rising which creates a tidal bore. What this does in the Shubenacadie River is cause some rough water and rapids. A small tourist industry has grown up around taking people in boats through the waves.
It's a lot of fun. I've never done anything like that before and I had a great time. The water splashes over the boat, over you and into the boat. The ingenious design of the boats (Zodiacs, I believe) allows the water to flow out of the back of the boat. My arms were a bit sore from hanging on tight as we bounced around and went through the waves. The roughness of the ride depends on the tide and the time of year. Around this time of year is the best time...if you like the waves to be big. The tide is about 30 feet, which means that the water level of the river rises by 30 feet within a few hours.
You put on your rain gear, put on your personal floatation device and get into the boat and go up the river. The area is beautiful and when you're not getting bounced around, you see some beautiful scenery. But the main attraction is the ride. The pilot goes through the waves up and down the river as the tide comes in. The best adjective to describe the experience is "wet" and the dominant taste is salt as you're splashed constantly by the salty water from the sea. Even though I was a bit sore, I think that I'll do it again sometime. The adrenaline rush was great!
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"If we wait long enough, something strange will happen."I've only read one novel by Alex Garland and seen one film where he wrote the script. I loved the film (28 Days Later) and I also loved the book (The Coma). The Coma is the story of a man in a coma. It's a small, beautiful book that is filled with woodcuts by Nicholas Garland (Alex's father). I read it very quickly over three nights just before I went to bed. Maybe it wasn't a good idea since I had a hard time sleeping over those three nights. My sleep was... strange. The novel is subtle and it wasn't until I was about a third of the way into it that I started to realize what was going on (which I'm not going to tell you). It's not a big secret, but, like a dream it's hard to explain and maybe that's the point. Garland explores what it means to be awake and be asleep and make us wonder about ourselves, how we think and what we are. How much of us is us? What can we lose and still be who we are? How do we define ourselves? Is it how we look, how we feel or how we think? Garland writes very well and I loved the condensed prose that slowly unfolded in front of me. It made me think a lot and sometimes made it hard to sleep. It's good when something does that.
I've been using Blogger to create a new Screen Arts blog and I really like it. I tried out Blogger when it first started and had a bit of the usual, "that's too simple for a geek like me" attitude, but it was an important step in the development of the blogosphere. I found In the Beginning: A Video on Weblogs History by Alberto Gonzales that takes us back to 1999 when Pyra was making Blogger and other cool stuff. Google bought Pyra last year and they've been revamping and developing Blogger. I was looking for an alternative to Movable Type since the pricing structure changed and I wasn't sure if I could get all of the pieces in place to continue having the site hosted at work. So I tried out Blogger again and I was very pleasantly surprised. It's simple and it works well. But the neat thing is how it is evolving. I can audioblog or blog by mail (which I haven't done yet) and you can also work with Flickr to add photos to the free Blogspot hosting. They also removed the ads from Blogspot and added a toolbar at the top. It's a good thing to be with Google and I'm hoping that somehow I'll be able to get a Gmail account soon as well to play with that too. It's all part of the evolution of a lot of this stuff where it doesn't really matter where you are or what particular device you are using. Tim O'Reilly talks about it in the IT Conversations interview with Doug Kaye called The Software Paradigm Shift.
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Hacking is moving into the mainstream. O'Reilly has their successful "Hacks" series of books and people just can't resist finding out how things work and making them better. 2600 is now 20 years old and they're still as relevant as ever (maybe even more now). Lately I've been thinking about hacking and making stuff a lot. I listened to the Paul Graham talk about hackers and painters with Doug Kaye thanks to IT Conversations. I have to get Paul Graham's book, named Hackers and Painters which collects some of his essays together. Then over the past few weeks I found myself looking at not martha and reading about the early 2005 launch of Make from O'Reilly. Make is halfway between a book and a magazine and it's going to be filled with stuff to make. I'm looking forward to it. This blog runs with the tiny and cool Blosxom Perl script and I've been looking at Ruby and the very cool Instiki Wiki which is written in Ruby. People are doing some great stuff with simple technologies. But it's not only the new stuff that is cool. I also saw someone repair a chair and glue it together using rope clamps. Just simple twine tied to itself and tightened with a wooden dowel. It's efficient, environmentally-friendly and cheap. I have to start making more stuff myself.
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One of the fascinating things about looking at older political thrillers is to see how the political world of the film has changed. Common knowledge and assumptions no longer hold. Assumptions about race, class, and gender have shifted and our view of what works and what doesn't changes as well. That being said, John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate holds up very well. I'd seen the remake before the original, and I was surprised at how shocking the original was at times. Firmly set during the Cold War, the film shows a Korean War hero who has been brainwashed by Communists. Angela Landsbury is great as the domineering power behind her husband the senator and her son, the war hero. The cynicism of the film was surprising to me, and I wondered if the film stood out dramatically from other films of the time or whether it fit in to an undercurrent. I checked out what other films were released in 1962 and found "Lolita", "To Kill a Mockingbird", and "Lawrence of Arabia"... so I guess that a cynical political thriller kind of fit in to a somewhat controversial view of the world. One of the neat things that I noticed in "The Manchurian Candidate" was that video was used effectively in several places. A press conference features a room full of cameras with Frank Sinatra conducting the press conference. The camera pans across a room filled with cameras to Angela Landsbury standing beside a television showing the press conference as the scene unfolds. The film moves along quickly and while I generally knew what was going to happen since I'd seen the remake, I was surprised when it actually happened.
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Michael Mann takes a bold step into the world of HD with Collateral. More films are being shot using HD and with a filmmaker such as Mann, who makes films that look gorgeous, is a major milestone. Collateral happens at night in Los Angeles and the pixels look amazing and capture the feeling of the city at night incredibly well. Shot by Dion Beebe and Paul Cameron the content and the presentation are perfectly matched. There is something that I really like about the way a CCD captures low light. It's the same as the perfect fit of Anthony Dod Mantle's cinematography in the DV world of 28 Days Later.
Collateral isn't about the technique and it isn't an action movie either. It's really an existential drama that throws two men together for one night in a cab. Jamie Foxx is great as the cab driver and in an early scene with Jada Pinkett Smith I loved the way all of the parts worked. This is great acting, directing and cinematography all combined together.
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Jonathan Demme has a knack for creating a feeling of uneasiness. He made the amazing The Silence of the Lambs which featured actors looking directly at the camera. It breaks the fourth wall, but it also forces you to identify more with the characters. You're looking at them and they're looking at you. With The Manchurian Candidate he does the same thing with the same effect. One of the things that I loved about The Manchurian Candidate is that I was uneasy at the beginning of the film. What was going on? When was it going to start? It's bold to throw the audience off-balance from the beginning, but it's perfect to get you into the confused, paranoid mind of Denzel Washington's character who's trying to figure out what is going on. A lot has been written about the political aspects of the film, and while they are there, it's a character-driven story with the focus on the struggle to figure out who we are. The remake is filled with a solid cast who are given the opportunity to shine by Demme. Liev Shreiber is the somewhat blank candidate of the title and he plays the character with a subtlety that strikes a delicate balance between a man who is empty and a man who wants to know who he is. Do we have a choice in our lives? In politics? Who makes the decisions? There are great actors who show up for just one scene, which undermines your expectations. Will they show up again? Are they important or just a red herring? You try to figure it out along with the characters. It's a film that sticks with me.
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I live in the Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia, which is one of the most amazing, beautiful places in the world. Yesterday I went to Kejimkujik National Park which is about 90 minutes away from Wolfville (giving distance in units of time is a Canadianism that I've recently become aware of). Even though I've lived in Nova Scotia for 4 years now, I've never gone to Keji as it's affectionately called. It's an amazing place. It's sad, but all too often we miss the wonderful places and things that are close to us. Keji has camping, hiking trails and boat rentals and is very affordable. I'm definitely going to go back and explore the park and maybe even get a tent and stay there. I'm more of a hotel person than camping person, but maybe I'll change a bit.
To capture some moments without the fear of ruining an expensive digital camera, I bought a cheap digital camera that is also submersible. While it removed the fear of the camera being splashed by water, the pictures look like pictures taken with a cheap digital camera. But part of me likes the grainy, impressionistic images from it.
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I've liked every one of the films that Tim Burton has made, but for some inexplicable reason I didn't see Big Fish in the theatre. While many critics have praised it as Burton's most mature film, etc, etc, etc, I think that they're ignoring a lot of Burton's work. Sleepy Hollow is complex, dark and solid. Ed Wood is brilliant as it tells the story of a tragic figure in the style of the films of Ed Wood. What I think Big Fish manages to do is combine the more serious elements of Burton's work with the more fanciful elements. There is a great cast and a sentimental story that sucked me in. How could I not love a story about someone who tells stories? It's an episodic tale of a man's life told through stories with a framing structure that holds it all together. It's beautiful and melodramatic, and it clicked for me. Telling stories is one of the fundamental and important things that we do whenever more than one person is around. We should celebrate it more.
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Bernado Bertolucci loves cinema. If you don't believe me, then see The Dreamers. It's a light, wonderful love letter to cinema which, for many, is wrapped up with the French New Wave and the reaction of French critics to American films. It's a simple story of a Matthew, a young American cinephile who meets Isabel and Theo and falls in love. Part of the film is a love letter and a lot of the film is a exploration of youth and sexuality. Setting the film in Paris in Spring of 1968 makes it possible to explore all sorts of ideas about when film became a more self-conscious art. But it's not a didactic film and it's not boring. It captures the feeling of falling in love with the flickering images on the screen and the feeling that you're seeing a whole new world for the first time. Maybe I'm biased, but meeting a scarily beautiful uninhibited woman who only wants to talk about films, see films, reenact scenes from films and have sex is probably a fantasy shared by many cinephiles. But Bertolucci makes it more than a tawdry fantasy and manages to combine the sensual, the cinematic and the political in a Brechtian mix that never seems heavy. Maybe it's not for everyone, but I loved it.
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Two years ago (less two weeks) I began a journey with the Nova Scotia Community College. I attended New Faculty Orientation which was the first of 10 courses as part of the Community College Education Diploma Program. Last summer I spent a month in Truro as part of the Summer Institute. It was an amazing experience that changed my life. At the end of this phase of the experience I was lucky enough to be chosen to speak for the graduating class which is quite an honour. I was able to spend a couple of days before the ceremony in Truro with some of my friends and had a great time. I felt like I belonged and was happy and solid and centered. On the morning of July 30 I wore a blue gown and lined up with my fellow graduates in Truro and we walked in to the gym and graduated. (Carolyn took the picture of me on the way in.) I've typed up a version of my speech to preserve the moment. Here's what I said.
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There are films that are stylish and there are films that have important social messages. Most of the time those are two very different films. Then something like City of God (Cidade de Deus) comes along and does it in a way that looks effortless. Shot in an exciting, hyperkinetic style, City of God traces the epic story of group of boys who grow up in the City of God outside of Rio de Janeiro. It's a sometimes violent story that is based on what actually happened in the planned community of Cidade de Deus. The cast was drawn together from workshops which give something back to the community that is presented on the screen. The use of unknown or non-actors can work incredibly well when the people involved have a connection with the material. The film is powerful and has bold, swaggering attitude that jumps out at you from the very first scene. Directed by Fernando Meirelles and co-directed by Kátia Lund, it's a film that goes against the trend of big-budget safe, market-tested films. The process that they followed in making the film is fascinating as well in that they made a short film with some of the cast members to make sure that it would work. I'm convinced that you can tell by simply watching a film if the cast and crew really cared and with City of God they're doing great work. The DVD also features a documentary from 1999 called News From a Personal War that was directed by Lund and João Moreira Salles.
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Today is Stanley Kubrick's birthday and now I'm starting a tradition of writing about Kubrick on his birthday. Kubrick is one of the most focussed and precise filmmakers ever to commit images to film. He worked deliberately and slowly to craft masterpieces that hold up extraordinarily well. I recently found some more great collections of links and information about Kubrick. The wonderful Coudal Partners (creators of the Jewelboxing system) have a magazine-style site filled with great links. They also have a collection of Stuff About Stanley Kubrick and pointed to Filmbrain's pointer to a pdf of Kubrick's script for Napoleon, which was never filmed, as well as some other great links to Kubrick stuff. Filmbrain also found and was able to watch many earlier Kubrick films including Fear and Desire, Day of the Fight, The Seafarers, and The Flying Padre.
Last year I tried to watch all of Kubrick's films before his birthday, but managed to just get through most of the black and white ones. Maybe tonight I'll watch Barry Lyndon, which is one of my favourites. I think that Barry Lyndon is often overlooked because of the slower pacing and the tone. It's amazing to watch both visually and with the story. Once you settle into the rhythm of the film it moves along beautifully as we watch the tragedy unfold.
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José Padilha's 2002 documentary Bus 174 is about a bus hijacking in Rio de Janeiro in 2000 is a gripping, heart-wrenching look at an incident as an indication of a larger problem. Through the incident it establishes the context and the series of events in Brazil that lead to a situation that was both horrible and inevitable. The film uses the extensive footage of the incident covered live on television in Brazil. It asks the general question of "how did we get here?" and the more specific question of "how did Sandro get here?" The invisibility and lack of media attention paid to the street-kid who caused the incident is the nagging question that Padilha thought was the key to understand how it happened. Film is a time-based medium and co-director / editor Felipe Lacerda and Padilha skillfull break up and magnify time as the incident unfolds and we understand things a bit more. The cross-cutting between the story of the Sandro and the hijacking slowly reveal broader insights into Brazillian society in a direct, powerful and personal way that many documentaries about larger social issues fumble all-too-often. Sweeping helicopter shots establish the locations and provide some relief from the tension of the events. But as the film moves towards the end of the highjacking we watch in excruciating detail how the tragedy unfolds. An amazing film that exemplifies the possibilities of documentary.
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Last weekend I facilitated a stop motion animation workshop at Faucet, the media arts part of the artist-run centre Struts Gallery in Sackville, New Brunswick. It's the second workshop that I've given there and I had a great time. The participants were a talented, motivated group who produced a bunch of animations in two days mainly using digital still cameras. It's part of what I like to think of as the inappropriate use of technology. What was cool about the workshop is that I just started things off and they went off in various directions. There was plenty of technology to go round... almost everyone had an iBook or PowerBook and digital still cameras. The animations ranged from cut-outs to pixilation to drawing on a wall. It's great to see people doing cool stuff with relatively cheap tools. I made up a site with links for the Faucet Animation Workshop which is over at my mac.com site.
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Finally! After far too long, the second season of Six Feet Under has been released on DVD. I don't understand how HBO releases DVDs... things like The Sopranos come out quite quickly, but stuff that I really, really want to see such as Six Feet Under or Mr. Show show up years later. While I wish that I could have seen it sooner, one of the great things about having a DVD of a series is that you can watch it all closer together instead of parcelling it out over four months. I've tried to avoid finding out a lot about how the show has progressed, but that's not really the point, as what makes the show interesting isn't the surprises, but the amazing cast combined with the quirky writing and directing.
I've only watched the first episode of the second season, but I really liked it and I can't wait to wade through the other episodes. It's awkward at first, but everyone seems to know that. The characters are reestablished slowly and the whole thing feels like someone you've known and loved for a long time that you finally see again. They've changed a bit, but they're still the same person and you've forgotten a few things about them which can be a bit awkward. The big difference on the other side of the camera was that the show became popular which can change things. Luckily in the hands of Alan Ball and the cast and crew it still works.
I love the show and I love the cast. Peter Krause is one of my favourite actors. Maybe it's because he's not overexposed and that he's got a knack for portraying a character in a subtle way that makes you forget that he's an actor. Years ago when I saw the pilot for Six Feet Under I stayed up far too late because I saw Krause and couldn't stop watching. Krause, along with the whole cast is trying to figure out who he is and what he is supposed to do. How do you fit in with your family? What is the right choice? There are no easy answers and we watch a group of people that we care about struggling with their lives. In the vast wasteland that is television today with the channels filling up with less original material and more "reality" it's good to see something well-crafted that has respect for the craft of drama and respect for the audience.
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Sergio Leone knew how to use the frame. Many years ago I saw "The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly" on tv and I was mesmerized by it. Then I was lucky enough to be living in Montreal and was able to see it again in a theatre and it was amazing. I then was able to see the other films in the "Dollars" trilogy and finally I saw "Once Upon a Time in the West." It came out last year in a new DVD release and I finally picked it up. A bold film for the time and a bold film now. Leone stretches everything out with long scenes and long shots. The sound effects are stylized and the score by Ennio Morricone is odd, unmistakable and fits perfectly. All of the pieces are slowly assembled, from the opening sequence that spreads the titles out over 10 minutes to the final showdown.
The casting of Henry Fonda as a psychopathic gunfighter was deliberately perverse. Leone wanted to cast Fonda against type to enhance his first appearance in the film. Charles Bronson is perfect as a man with no name called "Harmonica" because of the harmonica that he plays. Jason Robards was also cast against type as a man framed for a massacre he wasn't responsible for. All three men are brought together by a woman played by Claudia Cardinale. While her character isn't a big step forward in terms of the portrayal of women in film, she's a strong character who takes care of herself and would have been even more surprising when the film was made in 1968.
While Leone knew and loved the Western, he rethought and recontextualized the genre with antiheroes and everything stripped down to the most basic level. The combination of the wide frame and deliberate pacing set up scenes with a visual clarity that makes dialogue almost redundant. The final showdown between Fonda and Bronson is electrifying. Leone is a masterful filmmaker who loved films and was a powerful influence on many filmmakers that followed.
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I've been working with Final Cut Pro for a long time. It's one of those programs that I loved right from the first time that I've used it. It feels comfortable to me and it's like working with an old friend. With the latest version which adds HD instead of a version number (but it's really version 4.5) it's even better. I haven't done any HD stuff with it, but someday I'm sure that I will. What I like about FCP is that it doesn't get in my way. I can sketch out ideas fairly quickly now and don't have to think much about how I will do it. When I'm editing I want to focus on the story I'm telling and how things will look and sound without needing to remember a lot. One of the challenges with any application that you've been using for a while is to learn new tricks and to break out of old habits. I'm using some of the new features such as the full-screen preview with an external monitor. It makes a big difference in how I work. The other thing is that I'm consciously trying to work in a more visual way and moving away from a list of clips to thumbnails arranged in a bin. My secret dream is to combine some of the very cool XML parts of FCP with CVS to have a way to roll back to different edits and allow multiple editors to work together. All of the pieces seem to be there and I'm hoping that Apple is thinking this way too. I would love to set something like that up, but I don't know if I'll have the time. Wouldn't it be great to have something like a Project Manager that would let you check out the latest cut of the film that you're working on? You'd have the captured footage on a local hard drive and would just need the XML that describes the timeline. Then I could change one part of the timeline and someone else could change the other. You'd just need to make sure that your footage was in sync and it would work. I'm working on a simplified version of this (without CVS) that will use an iPod and maybe iDisk to share and synchronize things, but true version control would be the ultimate goal.
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In the first Spider-Man Sam Raimi had to set everything up and establish the franchise. If he did it well, there would be another film. He did a great job with Spider-Man, but there seemed to be some rough edges. Parts felt a bit forced - maybe a bit like a suit that almost fits. But with Spider-Man 2, the suit fits very well and Raimi has made a great comic-book film that really captures the essence of the Spider-Man comics and explores the whole idea of what it means to be a superhero. What's great about the whole world of the comic-book superhero is that when it works well it isn't about (mainly) guys in suits fighting each other, but us - non-superheros and how we deal with the challenges in our lives. The hard part isn't fighting an enemy with 4 mechanical arms, but struggling with our feelings and doing the right thing.
Sam Raimi has a great sense of humour, can direct great action sequences, and also can make very moving smaller films such as A Simple Plan. In Spider-Man 2 he brings it all together into my new favourite comic-book film. Even though the film is just over 2 hours long, my son said to me afterwards, "That was a short film." That says a lot as John can be easily bored. It's a pretty much perfect balance between nail-biting action sequences and emotional moments. Maybe it's because I loved the comic book, maybe I'm a sucker for that type of story, but the film brings everything that works in that type of story and leaves out things that don't. The cast is great with Toby Maguire bringing the proper balance of strength and vulnerability to the part. Even though you know that it's a franchise and the hero isn't going to die, you're worried for him, which means that you've suspended your disbelief and you care about what happens. Alfred Molina brings depth and dignity to a villan who could be just a set of arms by giving him a heart. Kirsten Dunst is completely believable as a woman that you'd be hopelessly in love with. She's a strong character and adds subtlety to a role that could be just "the girlfriend." We care about the characters, which is why the film works so well.
While Peter Parker agonizes over his life and the decisions he's made the balance with the action is just right and the film moves along well. The action sequences and computer imagery are fantastic this time. In the first film they were a bit off, but this time they're exciting and perfectly integrated. I was never bored and I noticed that I was sucked in to the story and action. A great summer film that is solid and fun.
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Daniel Dugas found an old journal in a box and he's putting parts of it up. 25 years ago he took a trip around Canada and the U.S.A. starting and ending in Moncton, New Brunswick. He obsessively wrote in a journal during the trip. If he did this today he'd be posting to a blog with a cell phone and a laptop. What's neat about how he's doing it now is that the entries are going live 25 years after the fact in blog1979. The other cool thing is that it's not just a documentation, but he's got links as well. In his first entry me mentions the 375th anniversary of the arrival of the Acadians in this part of the world (New Brunswick and Nova Scotia) and when I read that I thought about the Congrès Mondial Acadien, which is all over the place here in Wolfville and Grand Pré and he helpfully links to it. It's a link from the past into the present. Sometimes we're obsessed with things that are live or wireless (guess where I'm blogging from!, etc.). This project shows that you don't have to put something up right away. It also makes me feel better about the boxes of stuff that I have laying around... maybe they'll be useful someday. I should have a look at them soon. But for now I'm looking forward to following Daniel's chronologically offset adventures.
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Michael Moore gets a bit better with each film. Fahrenheit 9/11 continues his series of quirky political documentaries in a very timely fashion. It's funny, moving and serious. It was also a little bit annoying at times, but overall I think that it's a better film than Bowling for Columbine. Moore is less present in this film, which is good as the construction of the film is a bit better without someone needing to stand in for us. I can see Moore moving into the background within his films as he's starting to become a distraction as you can't really be a completely ordinary guy after winning an Academy Award and the Palme d'Or. What's great about Fahrenheit 9/11 is that it solidly captures the spirit of Moore's TV shows (TV Nation and The Awful Truth) in the blend of the timely, the political and the irreverent and captures a good chunk of the zeitgeist of the time. It's a difficult balance with only a few exploitative parts. Political documentaries are tough as most of the time you're either preaching to the converted or upsetting those who don't share your view. Moore injects enough humour to carry things along without letting things get too serious, but the film definitely has a point of view and it's a call to not reelect Mr. Bush in the upcoming U.S. election and it doesn't pretend to be anything else. As a documentarian, it's encouraging to see a documentary doing so well at the box office (even though the competition was a bit weak) and it will be interesting to see how it holds up against Spider-Man 2.
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David Mament has a distinctive writing style that blends elements of reality with a stylized way of speaking to create memorable puzzles where you try to determine what is really happening while listening to the fascinating conversations that are occurring. With Spartan, Mament creates a thriller with the dialogue stripped down as well as the information that we need to understand what is going on. The film revolves around the basic question, "Where is the girl?" Val Kilmer turns in a precise and compelling performance as the man who will find her. The only title at the beginning of the film is the name of the film and there are no intertitles indicating place or time unlike most thrillers that condescend. You find out what you need to know it and have to listen and watch closely to make sure that you don't miss any clues. It's a very efficient film and everything that you see or hear is connected with something else. But it's more than just an exercise. In a perverse way it's a fairy tale told through the genre of political thriller.
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Last week I uploaded Circular Logic: 6 Loops in Wolfville to my space at ZeD. The Circular Logic project originally happened for the Digital Dialogues exhibition at the Acadia Art Gallery that was curated by Gair Dunlop. I'd been working with QuickTime VR for a while and was thinking of doing something with that. Then I started thinking about going around in circles and taking stills along the way. When that was combined with stop-motion I thought that I would have something that looked like pixilation but where the camera moved instead of objects.
I tried some experiments and it worked if I made sure that there was a focal point in each image. That's the reason for going in circles around a building or large public object as it gives you something to focus on and gives me a way to keep the image in the frame consistent. I like to think of it as the (somewhat) inappropriate use of technology. I wanted to use a digital still camera to take single frames that I combined together to create an animation. For the loops around Wolfville I took over 1000 stills that I combined together in QuickTime Pro and then manipulated them in Final Cut Pro.
For the show at the gallery I burned the loops onto a DVD that looped and it played on a television set in the gallery. Later I made a shorter, more linear version for a screening at Salvation in Halifax and that's what I have up at ZeD now.
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Doc Searls points to a great bit of writing on Britt Blaser's blog Escapable Logic. He writes about blogs as conversations (which is not new) and puts things in a great way. The theme he explores is: "Memorable conversation is the foundation of civilization." That quote hit me and it's one of those moments where the time and place and state of mind where I am all click.
Right now I'm in Truro taking a course with another amazing group of NSCC people. We talk a lot and share experiences of teaching and the rewards of working together to change the world through changing people's lives. It's important that we talk with each other and maybe the popularity of blogs and blogging is due to this inherent need to speak and be heard. Blaser hits the nail on the head in saying that blogs "contain a huge body of thoughtful conversations" and then he connects the conversations with actions to make the world a better place with the Spirit of America project. It's amazing how quickly things can happen when people work together and engage in conversation which leads to action. People are working to make the world a better place. It reminds me of the amazing outpouring of support and random flowers to same-sex couples who were getting married in San Francisco in February that was made possible through conversations on the Web.
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My Titanium PowerBook has a problem with white blotches on the screen - or behind the screen to be more precise. That means that it's out for repair now and I'm using a relatively new 14-inch iBook. It's a neat machine and it's made me realize how the designs of the PowerBook and iBook differ. The very first thing that I noticed was that I've become accustomed to the wider screen of the PowerBook. The aspect ratio of the PowerBook is wider, which means that I work differently with that screen. The reason I can see such a direct contrast was that I synchronized everything using iSync and Backup which meant that all of my preferences were moved over along with all of my Address Book and iCal information and my very important Safari bookmarks. It's one of the easiest moves that I've made from one machine to another. (I'm writing this now in BBEdit which has all of my preferences so I can upload the entry via ftp within BBEdit.) The biggest difference though is the temperature and noise. The iBook is dramatically quieter in terms of the hard drive and fan and a lot cooler. My Titanium PowerBook gets warm very quickly and the fan can come on often, but the iBook stays relatively cool and I have yet to hear the fan come on. The quality of the sound from the speakers is better on the PowerBook, but a laptop isn't I'll be glad when I get my PowerBook back, but I wouldn't mind having an iBook which surprises me. I guess that it's similar to the difference between an iMac and a G4 - it all depends what you are doing with it. The iBook is a great laptop.
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Wikis are very neat. They are Web sites that are easily editable by anyone. It's kind of like a public binder where anyone can add pages and anyone can edit the pages. A wiki provides a fairly intuitive way to start creating pages and links between the pages. It's the ultimate user-supported community. The first Wiki was created by Ward Cunningham at the Portland Pattern Repository. There are many wikis and many implementations of wikis around the Web. One simple and fast one that I really like is Brian Ingerson's Kwiki, which is actually a Perl module. I've got Kwiki running at home to play with. I just haven't figured out what to do with it out in the wild yet.
An amazing project that has figured out what to do with a wiki is Wikipedia which is an incredible resource that is filled with user-contributed information about just about everything. It's a massive (hundreds of thousands of entries) encyclopedia that can let you quickly find out about things that have happened and even current events. A wiki is a leap of faith and a vote of confidence in the goodness of humanity. In a world and a time when there are many large corporations trying to restrict freedom through copyright it's amazing and encouraging to see something like Wikipedia work so well. Online pioneer and documentor Howard Rheingold recently spoke about the Wikipedia in a speech to graduates of Stanford's Communication Department that David Weinberger pointed at today. One thing that caught my mind in Rheingold's speech was that the mean time to fix some vandalism on Wikipedia is 4 minutes! The argument made against setting up a wiki almost reflexively is that you can't let anyone edit a site as it will be vandalized. With a community people will take care of it. You just need to have faith.
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I've been a member of ZeD for while and have been watching and lurking without uploading anything. In the past the only thing that I've uploaded has been a tiny thumbnail image for my profile page which is called bitdepth. ZeD is a great project initiated by the CBC who have some talented, creative people working on digital media stuff. ZeD is a tv show on the CBC and a web site that shows and collects content as well as discussions. It's a community of creators and viewers and they give you a space to upload and share your work. They also broadcast uploaded work on tv and tv work on the Web. The name of the community is phonetically how the last letter of the English alphabet should be pronounced, which is a point of pride for some Canadians.
Today I uploaded video that I made last summer. It's called Truro Loop and it is only 3 1/2 seconds long, but it loops so it can be just about however long you want it to be. I'll be uploading more stuff soon.
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I put some of the photos that I took during the recent hand processing film workshop at the NB Filmmakers Co-op up on my Mac.com site. They are in the Hand Processing Workshop Gallery. I had a great time and the images give a bit of a glimpse of things that I noticed during the workshop.
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Steven Frank is one of the co-founders of Panic (makers of essential software such as Transmit, as well as Audion, Desktastic, Unison and Statoo. He also writes about Mac and geeky stuff. I stumbled onto his site a while ago when I was trying to get my email organized and I looked at his application Emila. Today he wrote a bunch of stuff, but a small mention of the lack of a Mac PDA made me think about PDAs.
I always wanted to have a PDA. I think from the first time I saw a computer I wanted one and a personal computer in the form of one on your wrist or arm or held in your hand was amazing to me. Finally I won a Newton MessagePad 2000 in an Apple contest and I had a PDA. The MessagePad was (and still is) amazing as it is a powerful computer with a great design that is just a bit too big. I synced it with my PowerBook 1400 and could print via infrared at work! But I found it a bit of a pain to carry around the PowerBook and the Newton and the PowerBook won out. Unfortunately a while after I got the MessagePad it was discontinued. Then I purchased my first PDA which was a PalmPilot from US Robotics (which went from Asimov's fiction to a real company and back to fiction). I patiently learned the simple, stylized handwriting known as Graffiti and have been taking a lot of my notes that way since then.
Now my PDA is a Handspring Visor Neo which I bought because I love the size and functionality of my original PalmPilot. It works great with iSync so I can use iCal and all of the other goodness in OS X and have everything all synchronized. I don't want a tiny keyboard and I like Grafitti for writing. Now I'm afraid that I may shift away from my Visor as I will probably be getting an iPod soon and the newer PDAs just don't turn my crank. I want to simplify things and I can have my calendar, address book, music, and files all together... but I won't be able to take notes, which makes me wonder about how I will replace that. I do carry around a paper notebook that I use occasionally and a cell phone, but I can't take notes with the phone (at least with the phone I have now). So maybe I'll end up simplifying things with an iPod and a pen and paper.
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Right now as I'm typing this I'm listening to Vicki Bennett's radio show "Do or DIY with People Like Us" streaming over the Web from WFMU. She's speaking right now, but that's from a file. She's updating the playlist via the internet so the text that shows up is live, but the words are from back in time. It's the last show of the season and as usual it's a good one. The shows are archived, but I wanted to make sure that I listened to it live. I was thinking why I liked listening to it live since she records it earlier and it streams out from a file. Then I remembered why live things are cool - it's not the technological part, but the human part. It's a shared experience. I know that other people are listening at the same time and I also know that Vicki is typing right now as well. Years ago I helped out with some Webcasts and even more years before I had some radio shows. It's a strange thing to speak into a microphone knowing that strangers are listening. A fascinating, intimate, yet distant thing. Kind of like a shy exhibitionist.
So while I'll still be able to listen to older shows, I know that the experience will be a bit different as there won't be as much simultaneity. Thanks Vicki!
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A couple of weeks ago I took a great hand-processing 16mm and 8mm film workshop at the New Brunswick Filmmakers' Co-operative. It was two weeks after another coop workshop where I got to load and shoot my own film. The hand processing (and Bolex) workshops were taught by the talented photographer and filmmaker Chris Giles, who uses the Russian tank method of processing film. Using black and white reversal film you can shoot and process your own film. For the workshop we covered all of the information, then loaded up a Bolex and went out to shoot. Then it was into the darkroom and the images magically appeared. After the film dried we watched what was shot. All together it was less than an hour from the time we had shot. Those really are "rushes". It was a great experience and it made me fall in love with film again.
Shooting film is a completely different experience from shooting video. It's amazing how your perception of time changes and smaller increments of time seem to become more precious. Shooting black and white film changes things even more as the level of abstraction of not knowing exactly how the image will appear on the emulsion is compounded by the loss of colour. When you see film that you have shot projected it is magic. It's truly a different way to see the world.
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I'm a big fan of the Creative Commons project. They keep expanding the project with new licenses more specifically targeted to music and countries other than the USA. You can search for content and create your own derivative works. Many people are embracing the model of sharing and respecting the audience. Right now I'm listening to a stream from Magnatune who have built their online record label around Creative Commons licenses. The reason that I'm writing now is that they've revamped their licenses and I've revised my licensing. Now the written content on the site is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 deed. There also is a new logo that you'll see at the bottom of the site. That means that you can use anything that I've written on the site as long as you give me credit and you aren't using it commercially and you can also modify what I've written as long as you allow others the same right. Everyone should contribute to the commons!
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Last night I saw Steve James' documentary Stevie which is built around James' idea of going back to find out how the boy he had been a Big Brother for 10 years earlier had turned out. The idea was to do a small, short film about it, but things didn't turn out that way. During the course of filming Stevie Fielding is charged with a serious crime and everything gets much more complicated. James becomes part of the story as we watch the tensions in the family grow and see the difficult decisions that need to be made. It could have been a very exploitative film (such as Capturing the Friedmans), but James questions his own motives and implicates the audience in watching the difficult situations with no clear way forward. It's a challenging film that isn't judgemental about the subjects, but doesn't avoid resposibility which is really what documentary filmmaking is all about.
The film was screening as part of the Atlantic Film Festival's Inspired series for emerging Atlantic Canadian Filmmakers, which meant that the directors were present for an interview with journalist Laurie Brown after the screening. It was a great interview and James' provided more context and insight into the role of the documentarian and the relationship with the audience. The key thing that he talked about was how a documentarian has to "fight the tendency to sit back in easy judgement" of the people that you see on the screen. Steve James thinks that if filmmakers don't wrestle with the issue of whether they are leeches on the subjects of their film then maybe they shouldn't be making films. James has made a bold and powerful film that doesn't give easy answers, but provides a compelling and difficult look into the lives of the people who surround Stevie Fielding.
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As I mentioned early on in the life of this site, I've had a strange attraction to the Radio Canada International shortwave broadcasting station in Sackville, New Brunswick. I've stopped there a few times and taken pictures and even have taken a tour inside. Every time I drive by I want to stop, but I usually don't. On my way up to New Brunswick a week ago I stopped and made 3 QuickTime VRs that you can see now. The files are a bit big, so know that when you click on the link!
Close to the sign - QuickTime VR - 1.2 MB
On the road to the station - QuickTime VR - 1 MB
Close to the broadcasting station - QuickTime VR - 940 KB
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John Lurie is a very cool guy. He's a talented composer and jazz musician who also happens to act and hangs out with cool people. Lurie made a tv show a few years ago called "Fishing With John" where he went out fishing with Jim Jarmusch, Tom Waits, Matt Dillon, Willem Defoe, and Dennis Hopper. There were 6 episodes produced (the Dennis Hopper one has two parts) and it's not so much about fishing as it is about Lurie and his guests. Each episode follows the usual fishing show format, but things are a bit off. The narrator delivers tidbits of information and sometimes loses track of things and talks about sandwiches and just starts rambling. Highlights for me were the Tom Waits episode in Jamaica and the very odd ice fishing in Maine with Willem Defoe (where the narrator claims that they died). The show was written and directed by Lurie and some of episodes veer wildly around. They are entertaining and interesting to watch with an original soundtrack from Lurie. I'd like to see his latest show which is called "Are You Comfortable?" but I don't know where to find it yet.
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I've been up to Fredericton briefly a couple of times in the last 3 weeks and one interesting thing that is going on there is that downtown there is free, unlimited public WiFi access (the Fred-eZone) in the downtown area. The network is made possible due to some forward-thinking in the city when they decided wire up the downtown with fiber in 1999 just as it looked as if there was no end to the dot com boom. The high-speed network downtown was set up for the needs of the city, but with the excess capacity they decided to open it up to the citizens of Fredericton. What a great idea! I haven't wardriven much, but what is cool about how they have things set up in Fredericton is that there is a little "e" with radiant lines on the side of signposts and buildings in areas that are covered. I sat on a bench with my PowerBook a couple of weeks ago and went online. It was neat to do and it worked well. Inside the Film Co-op (which is just above where the bench is) it didn't work as well, but that could be due to the walls or other things in between it. It's great that Fredericton has it and I wonder how many people are using it. It would be great if this would catch on in other places.
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Errol Morris is a film craftsman. His films tell challenging stories in visually interesting ways. The Fog of War won the Academy Award for Best Documentary and it is also one of Morris' best films. The film is built around interviews with Robert S. McNamara. The score by Philip Glass moves the film forward with a steady pace along with archival footage, stills and significant, but understated visuals illuminate, but don't distract from the lessons of the film. Morris knows how to build a film from various elements that suit the material and The Fog of War is divided into 11 lessons as the organizational principle. While the man and his personal insight are at the centre of the film, it is a fascinating glimpse into the history of the United States and how individuals shape that history. McNamara is amazing to watch and he engages with Morris through the Interrotron, which is a camera with television in front of it. McNamara at one point outlines a fundamental rule for dealing with the media - "Never answer the question that has been asked of you. Answer the question you wish you had been asked."
Is McNamara spinning us? Yes, of course. But what is the truth? How do we know what happened? How do we know what will happen? These questions form the core of many of Morris' films and he doesn't flinch from dealing with them. One of the many things that I admire in Morris' work is how he lets the audience make up their mind. He takes a point of view, he presents evidence, but he doesn't hide edits. With earlier Morris films he would insert some black frames to indicate that parts of an interview were cut out, but now he jump cuts because I think that with the interviews it would probably be distracting. The biggest challenge in making a non-fiction film is treating the interviewees with respect, presenting them fairly and telling the story with all of the pieces fitting together to illuminate a life, tell a story and to give us some insight. Errol Morris does that very well and I'm glad that he's making films.
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Last weekend I went up to Fredericton for a two-day workshop at the NB Filmmakers' Coop. It was the Bolex: 2 Day Filmmaking Boot Camp workshop taught by Chris Giles. It was a lot of fun and I learned things that I should have known a decade or two ago. The Bolex is a 16mm motion picture film camera that was first introduced in the 1920s and it is still being manufactured! The coolest part of most Bolex cameras is that they operate using a spring-powered motor, which means that you never have to worry about batteries. In the two days we went through all of the aspects of the camera and lenses, came up with films to shoot, and then loaded the camera and shot the films! The Bolex takes 100 foot rolls of film, which translate into 2 1/2 minutes or 4000 frames. We shot black & white reversal film, which means that there is no workprint and what you get back can be projected. The film is off to the lab now and so I don't know if it came out or not, but that's part of the excitement of shooting film. I shot a hybrid stop-motion walk around the block with Cathie LeBlanc as my partner and soon I'll find out if the exposure and focus was sharp or not. The difference between shooting film and video is quite striking. I haven't shot film in a long time and I'm always pleasantly surprised at the different perception of time when you shoot film. Shooting film makes you think more carefully about what you are rolling on as with the Bolex you only have 2 1/2 minutes total footage (if you shoot at 24 fps) and can't run that long on a wind... so you have to have a good idea of what you will have before you shoot. But it frees you up in other ways as you start and then feel the rush of adrenaline as the film runs through the camera.
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One of my all-time favourite films is Down By Law, directed by Jim Jarmusch. I haven't seen it in years and maybe not since the first time that I saw it was in the 80s in a theatre in Montreal. It's a stunningly beautiful film with amazing black & white cinematography by Robby Müller. The Criterion DVD features a transfer that presents the film in full grayscale glory. The film is languorously paced and follows Tom Waits, John Lurie, and Roberto Benigni as they are thrown together in jail. Jarmusch is a master at letting things go on. You capture some amazing moments just by waiting and watching the right people as they improvise. Melody London edited the film and the rhythm is perfect visually and sonically. The film starts and ends with Tom Waits songs and John Lurie provides a great musical score that is almost impossible to separate from the film. While some remastered and retransferred films are accompanied by reworked surround sound soundtracks, the soundtrack of Down By Law is presented in the original mono. I was thinking that it would be a bit flat, but the soundtrack is amazing and full. I've been spoiled by technology and the false belief that more is better. A good soundtrack is a good soundtrack and you don't need all sorts of sounds whizzing around. The location sound is great and it makes me want to record sound again for a film. I was surprised at how wonderful the film was and I'm still amazed by the beauty of it all. The special features are as idiosyncratic as the film and have some interesting telephone conversations between Jarmusch and the three stars. There also are thoughts on the film by Jarmusch which are presented as just sound. It's better than most commentary tracks as it is difficult to talk about a film for the entire time it is playing. The neat icing on the cake the music video the Jarmusch and Tom Waits collaborated on as part of the Red, Hot and Blue project.
A few years ago I was at a huge film business barbeque in Toronto and I was in the beer tent and I saw Jim Jarmusch standing alone in the tent. I saw him and didn't go over and say anything as I was afraid that I'd freeze or say something stupid... now I wish that I went over and said, "Hi Jim, thanks for making some great films."
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How can you describe something that works so well without saying a lot? One thing that I don't like about many reviews is the recounting of the plot as a way to fill the space. Scottish director Lynne Ramsay's Morvern Callar is a haunting film that is surprising as you watch it and it kept me off-balance and anxious the whole time that I was watching it. There are secrets, but I don't think that knowing them ruins the enjoyment, but I won't share them with you as part of the pleasure in watching for me was not know where things were going. Samantha Morton stars as Morvern Callar and she gives a hypnotic performance that combines with great cinematography, editing and direction to create a film that really has stuck with me. I was speechless after it was done and then said, "Wow." I can't think of many films that have left me in an unsettled state during the film... the Belgian film C'est Arrivé Près de Chez Vous (Man Bites Dog) did it and there have been other films as well, but while "Man Bites Dog" is deeply disturbing and well-made I may not watch it again. Another film that did it was Lynne Stopkewich's Kissed, which is also haunting and disturbing and I will watch again. Is it that Kissed and Morvern Callar were both directed by women (with the same first names as well)?One of the things that I loved about Morvern Callar was Lynne Ramsay's capturing of moments that felt very real. Things like watching a bug walk under a doorway, the banality of work, talking with a friend's grandmother, talking with someone at a party while drinking with the noise or just sitting and thinking. It's great to watch something that is so visual and so subjective and so beautiful. I have the DVD and I think that I'm going to get the soundtrack as well. Warp Records has a good Morvern Callar site for the film with a look that I love. The film was shot in 2001, released in 2002, but for North America it seems as if it was one of those films that people don't want to release, so it quietly slips out onto DVD with the only features being chapter selection!
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I've liked just about everything that I've seen from Michel Gondry, from music videos for The Chemical Brothers and Bjork to the film Human Nature. While he's brilliant at music videos, in Human Nature it felt a bit forced, but Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind was a great combination of his talents within a great script with what appears to be little studio manipulation. I've been watching the Directors Label DVD The Work of Director Michel Gondry and I'm amazed by the talent of the man. After watching many of the videos you begin to see patterns of repetition and common themes and everything is dreamlike. The most amazing video is Bjork's breathtaking Bachelorette which makes your head spin to watch it.
While the videos are great to watch, the neatest part of the DVD is the documentary about Gondry growing up and how and why he works in the way that he does. I've Been Twelve Forever takes you through his childhood and mind in an entertaining and visually exciting way that lets us behind the curtain of some of the visions that he has brought to the screen. It's a lot more than a promo piece that consists of people talking about how wonderful it is to work with him and Gondry himself tries out a lot of different visual tricks to show how he's thought about his life and the music videos and manages to keep coming back to the same themes in different visual styles. It's a great DVD that I'll be spending a lot more time with. It's fun and inspirational.
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Friday was a busy day for me. I started out the day with the last day of the term with a wave of assignments coming in to me that now need to be marked. Then my friend Errol and I drove up to Fredericton for the NB Filmmakers' Co-op Spring Social. We didn't tell anyone that we were coming, so it was a surprise when we showed up. It was a great night with many old friends that I hadn't seen for years and lots of memories. The party had a wide range of members from over the years, from one of the founding members to some of the newest members. I started hanging around the co-op in the early 1980s, but at the party I saw my original membership application which was dated August 28, 1985! So while I worked on some things before I joined, I officially joined then. That's still a long time! I hope that I will be able to be around the co-op a lot more this year to catch up more with the current members and to see the stories that they are telling.
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I've watched a bit of the second series of The Office and I'm still impressed with it. It's brilliantly written and performed and it is perched on a knife edge between comedy and pathos. It's almost a bit painful to watch and it's interesting to see how the popularity of the show may have altered how the actors and writers approached it. The second series kicks off with a funny little bit to let you know that things are back, but then it throws a few curves as David Brent's new boss shows up and things just don't go well for Brent with jokes going awry. What's great is that any sympathy for Brent is undermined by his telling of a racist joke and how he tries to explain it. The Office is part of an increasingly growing subgenre of comedy that is painful at times to watch as you become invested in the characters. Curb Your Enthusiasm works in the same space as well as Ken Finkleman's The Newsroom and his much more biting More Tears. What they seem to have in common is strong writing and casts that pull off the documentary feel which heightens drama as well as the comedy. I've only watched the first episode of the second series, but I looked at the amazing video diary by co-writer/directors Stephen Merchant and Ricky Gervais as well as the outtakes. One thing that I think always shows on the screen is how good a time people are having working on a show. The best shows are fun to work on. It looks as if working on The Office would have been great fun. I'm looking forward to more from Gervais and Merchant.
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I really like Mr. Show and when it was aired in Canada on The Comedy Network I taped as many as I could. But there were some gaps, but now in the age of DVD it is getting easier to get an entire series in a boxed set. The show had a tough time as the fans who were able to find the show loved it, but the people higher up in the production chain didn't understand it so it was bumped around time slots on HBO and then was cancelled after 4 seasons. I finally got around to buying the third season DVDs since I read on Bob and David's site that they just recorded the commentary tracks for the fourth season DVDs which could be out any time in the next year. HBO has an odd pattern of releasing DVDs of series. Some things come out fairly regularly, but other things take a long, long time. The third season of Mr. Show continues the sketch comedy series that linked all the sketches together (as Monty Python did). It's biting and relatively timeless in how the comedy grows out of characters and situations and not directly from the news of the day.
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I was lucky enough to be asked to act in a student production yesterday. It wasn't much of a part, but I loved it as it let me see a bunch of my students at work. It was great to see them shooting and working as professionals. They were calm and even seemed to be having fun. I haven't spent a lot of time on a set in a long time, so it was neat to be around for that. Even though the day was long I felt the rush of shooting which kept me going long past the time I would have been asleep. It's always neat to see how people work together to make something creative. A group of creative and talented people working together is wonderful to see and even more amazing to be able to be a small part of it. The other great thing was the food. Mmmmm! A crew needs good food and great food helps thing go much more smoothly. It will be neat to see how things turn out.
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Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a low-key film that explores loss and memory. Shot in a hand-held and casual style, it hides a story told with an incredible visual sense. There is a seamless mixture of physical effects, camera tricks and digital effects so you just watch what is happening and get sucked into the story. But the film isn't about the effects, but emotions and memories both good and bad. It's all about memory and loss or as Tom Waits puts it in a song "the things you can't remember" and "the things you can't forget". How do we remember and how do we relate to each other? What happened? How do things go from being amazing and wonderful and full of possibilities to something that we just want out of. If you could erase your memories, would you?
Apparently the idea originated from Gondry's friend Pierre Bismuth who wondered what it would be like if you received a card in the mail telling you that you had been erased from someone's memory. It served as the departure point for Charlie Kaufman who wrote the script for Gondry after he finished writing Adaptation. It's territory that Kaufman has explored before, but never with the almost painfully realistic portrayal of a relationship's birth, growth and death. Jim Carrey is restrained and Kate Winslet is goofy, but attractive in solid performances. The film didn't blow me away instantly, but it's one of those films that will stay with me and grow. The marketing in general has been low-key with a neat fake site for Lacuna, Inc. who will erase your memories and some great posters that brilliantly obscure the eyes of the stars.
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Comic books are fertile ground for film adaptation now. With the development of special effects and the success of some recent big-budget comic book films there are a lot out there so Hellboy is emerging into a crowded field. Ten years ago Mike Mignola's Hellboy premiered as a comic. I've only looked at some of the online comics, but it's a distinctive comic with a great central character. Now Guillermo del Toro has brought Hellboy to the screen and I had a great time. What makes the film so successful though is Ron Perlman's performance as the red hero. While buried under makeup and in a muscle suit, he still brings a lot to the role. He's a bit complex and lovable. How couldn't you love a hero who has Tom Waits playing in the background when we first see him. Being the first Hellboy movie (I'm sure that there will be more), we have the origin story which means the first part of the film is heavy on exposition. But when John Hurt appears it helps things out a lot. It's important when things are a bit implausible to have a solid British actor to take the edge off. Hurt is great and with Perlman it brings a lot more to the whole package than simply an adaptation. With a comic book film there are lots of things that can fall flat, but Hellboy does a great job at pulling everything together into a fun package. In Perlman's capable hands it doesn't feel like he's throwing out clever lines on cue, but they're part of his character and he rises above the guy in a suit and makeup that this type of film is always in danger of becoming. One other thing that I loved about the film was the music...which wasn't the generic superhero orchestral mix but a bit funkier with Tom Waits and a version of a Nick Cave song that made it fun to listen to as well.
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The Nouvelle Vague or New Wave of French cinema in my understanding is defined mainly by Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. When I first saw À Bout de Souffle (Breathless) directed by Godard (with a scenario by Truffaut), I was amazed. I'd read about the films a bit and knew vaguely about it and the movement, but hadn't actually seen them. This was back in the 1980s and since then I've seen a lot more, but pretty much limited to the works by the same two men. Later I saw some excerpts from Agnès Varda's later work and read some writing about her, but hadn't seen her early film from 1961, Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cleo from 5 to 7). I finally saw Cléo de 5 à 7 and sat with my mouth open in amazement. The film is a tour de force of acting, staging and direction. Shot after shot explores the role of a woman and the presentation of women in films. The style of shooting shifts as a singer awaits the news of a test of whether she has cancer or not. It ranges from drama, verité-style street scenes, musical, to a broad parody of silent comedies (featuring Godard). The film unfolds in approximately real time and is divided into chapters that break everything down to an almost minute-by-minute exploration. Like all great films you'll look at the world in a different way and think about how films work and fall in love with cinema again.
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Lawrence Lessig is Stanford Law Professor who founded the Center for Internet Law and Society. He's a cogent writer on the intersection between intellectual property law and creativity. I first noticed him (although I now realize that I'd read him earlier) when he represented Eric Eldred in the U.S. Supreme Court case to overturn the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. He's also chair of the Creative Commons project which is how this very blog is licensed. His most recent book is Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity and in a great example of putting your money (or book) where your mouth is he's licenced the book (and made a freely downloadable version of Free Culture) under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License. You can also buy Free Culture in an old-style paper version with the pages all bound together. Derivative versions have started appearing already with one of the neatest ones that developed was AKMA's idea to have people read and record chapters, which is almost completely done after a couple of days. I've downloaded the PDF version and I'm reading it now. It's great and I'm going to buy the print version to finish reading it. I have to admit that I'm a bit of a policy wonk and I love the argument that he's making in contextualizing the development of law, culture and public policy. Maybe it's a Canadian trait with so much of our national identity wrapped up with communication technologies and being the birthplace of Marshall McLuhan and Harold Innis (who linked "Empire and Communications"). I'll end with a quotation from Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig:
"A free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists donŐt get paid. A culture without property, or in which creators canŐt get paid, is anarchy, not freedom. Anarchy is not what I advance here."
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Jon Ronson has a fascinating article called "Citizen Kubrick" in The Guardian today about Stanley Kubrick's archive. It's an amazing look into the massive amount of research that the filmmaker conducted with each of his projects. Each Kubrick film is precisely constructed and assembled together. I never get the sense of anything accidentally being included in one of his films. Jan Harlan's documentary, A Life in Pictures gives a picture of the man and his work, but Ronson's glimpse into the Kubrick-designed boxes filled with photographs, letters and other more exotic artefacts from the artist's life show the attention to detail that made each of his films so breathtaking. The article comes just before the opening of The Stanley Kubrick Exhibition at the Deutsches Filmmuseum and the Deutsches Architektur Museum. I wish that I could go, but the Web site has great photographs and information about the exhibition.
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George Clooney made his directorial debut with an adaptation of Chuck Barris' "unauthorized autobiography" Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. It's an inventive blend of documentary and drama that is anchored in reality, but what is reality anyway? The screenplay was written by Charlie Kaufman who seems to have done quite well with his other adaptation, Adaptation and this script also breaks the fourth wall and is at least partially about filmmaking and perception as well. While Clooney is known as an actor (and he does act in the film), he pulls off an amazing film that suits one of the most innovative television producers. Sam Rockwell plays Barris and manages to capture many of his mannerisms and his look, especially in "The Gong Show" phase.
I was a fan of "The Gong Show" and watched it far too often. While criticized as lowering the tone of television, now the work of Barris seems middle to highbrow. Barris had a sense of fun and an obligation to entertain that came through in the shows he made. Now the cynicism and lack of originality in "reality" television and much of television in general means that the criticism aimed at Barris in the past doesn't even seem to apply. A fascinating part of the DVD is a documentary that features an interview with Barris himself that explores more of the man and his work.
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Errol Morris is a gifted filmmaker who carefully constructs his stories in a deliberate and highly-entertaining fashion. Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. tells the story of the man who began by designing and repairing electric chairs and then moved into researching the use of poison gas in WWII Nazi concentration camps, which resulted in his downfall. It's a fascinating story of how pride and vanity can take people into directions that you could not predict. As with all of Morris' work it tells both the story and provides insight into the way that we construct reality and truth. The critical thing in any documentary or research is in asking the proper questions. Morris asked the right questions to tell the story and Leuchter did not in his illegal research which has been used to deny that the Holocaust occurred. It's one of the best documentaries that I've seen in how it constructs the story and deals with so many issues and potential pitfalls in the story. Morris and his way of constructing a film is a source of inspiration for me and he's influenced the way I see filmmaking because presentation and re-presentation of reality is much more complicated than it seems.
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I know of Neil Postman primarily as the author and critic of technology from his book Amusing Ourselves to Death. His theory from the 1986 book is that television makes everything show business. It's not really much of a theory any more as the proof is so overwhelming as you see it all around as soon as you turn on the television set. Jay Rosen writes PressThink and today he posted his remarks "Remembering Neil Postman" where he talks about Postman as a person and mainly as a teacher. It made me think about teaching and the powerful and unintended effects that it has. What is particularly interesting to me is how Rosen writes about how Postman would disturb his students so learning could occur. I like that. It's not how I teach, but I love being able to see things in a different way and it's fascinating to see how you can make that happen. Cognitive dissonance is a good thing. PressThink is a great place to keep track of what is happening in the mass media and I'm glad that I read it and was able to find out a bit more about Neil Postman from someone who knew him as a colleague and a student.
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Sofia Coppola's debut feature The Virgin Suicides has many of the elements of her recent and personal favourite Lost in Translation. I hadn't seen it before and didn't really know what to expect. It's a great looking film but I didn't like it as much as Lost in Translation. But it's still an interesting film that captures a lot of teen angst in a great 1970s look. What I found fascinating was the mixture of elements: capturing moments, a sweeping storyline spanning many years, and a large cast. The strongest parts of the film were the look and the moments and those are the elements that Lost in Translation is built around which is why it works well. I'm looking forward to Ms. Coppola's next film.
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The first film set that I was ever on was "The Spectre of Rexton" which was directed by Kevin Holden. It was many years ago in the 1980s and my first impression at the time was that it was very, very warm. It was a scene with 4 actors in a building in downtown Fredericton just around the corner from the NB Filmmakers' Co-operative. While there was a lot of waiting around, people were in good spirits and it was exciting. Most people had things to do and it was amazing to watch how everything came together. The scene was blocked, the actors rehearsed, the lighting was tweaked and then they did the scene. The actors were really good and weeks later I was able to see the rushes and it was very cool to see how it actually looked a lot better on film than it did in person. I was hooked. I only was able to go out on other special effects and test shoots since the shooting schedule was mostly at night and I had a part-time job that interfered with it. But I knew that I would love to have the chance to work on a film and started looking for opportunities to work on more stuff. I still love the place and the people there.
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I've been lucky enough to work on documentaries that gave me a chance to meet and learn about amazing people and stories that I would never have known about. When you work on a documentary you have a chance to preserve the story and lives of people and that's what makes working on documentaries so wonderful and difficult. I finally was able to see the film Standing in the Shadows of Motown on the weekend. The documentary tells the story of the Funk Brothers, who were the heart and soul that made the Motown sound what it was. I've always loved Motown songs and heard many of them on Danny Finkleman's CBC Radio show Finkleman's 45s, but I never thought about how the Motown sound originated. The most obvious answer is that it came from the session musicans who played on all of the songs. They are an amazing group of incredibly talented musicians who never received proper credit or appreciation of what they accomplished. What's amazing to watch is a band reassembled after many years and it seems as if they never took a break from playing. The film features a perfect blend between interviews, recreations and performances by the Funk Brothers with a near-perfect structure that kept me entertained and left me content. One of the great music documentaries.
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About 21 years I first found out about the New Brunswick Filmmakers' Cooperative in Fredericton New Brunswick and today the Coop (as I will always know it) is 25. On March 1, 1979 the Coop came into being and the media arts scene in New Brunswick has never been the same. I owe the Coop so much (including my dues for this year) and it is inseparable from my own development as a media artist. Pretty much everything I know about filmmaking has come from there and it's also probably the reason that I teach now.
The role of the Coop has changed dramatically over the past 2 1/2 decades. At first there were artists who needed the equipment to make their films. The reduced cost and portability of 16mm film equipment and the involvement of the National Film Board of Canada made it possible for a small group of artists to start telling their own stories in their own way. When I first walked into 51 York Street it was with my friend Kevin Holden who was working on a film called "Just Say Hello" which was part of New Brunswick's Bicentennial celebration. I remember seeing the Steenbeck and learning how film was edited. I began recording sound when Doug Sutherland had no one to record sound for a scene on his short film, "Smoke." I remember Dave Clarke, the first coordinator of the Coop. I remember my good friend Tony Merzetti the second and current coordinator of the Coop and the person who taught me so much about filmaking and lighting and editing that it couldn't be crammed into any film school anywhere. The Coop is also where I met my friend Errol Williams who gave me a chance to work with him when I took a workshop and heard him talk about a documentary that he wanted to make about Willie O'Ree. During a break I told him if there was any way that I could help him I would. He's given me a few chances to work with him and it's always been fun.
So on the evening of the 25th birthday of the Coop I'm a bit sad that I can't be there, but so proud that I've been able to be part of such an amazing organization that has helped so many people tell their stories. Now I'll raise my glass which has some of the Scotch that was given to me as a present when I left the Coop a few years ago. Cheers and see you all soon!
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I've been looking at some of the notes that people have been taking at the latest O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego and I really wish that I could be there. Cory Doctorow's notes are great and have induced my sense of missing some stuff that is amazing. Two of the talks that got me thinking were Elizabeth Lawley's talk, "Breaking into the Boy's Club" about diversifying your team and how to attract women to tech-heavy and male-dominated fields. Great advice that I will use. The other one that got me thinking a lot was the "Life Hacks" session by Danny O'Brien who is the editor of Need to Know. O'Brien talked about how geeks organize their lives. I recognized a lot of things that I do and some advice that I think will help me get things together a bit more. But I wish I could have seen and heard it for myself!
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I'm finishing up a very neat book called You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination that was a Christmas present (which could explain why I haven't written anything here in so long due to a lack of time). It's written by Katharine Harmon of Tributary Books and I'm having a great time exploring it.
I first realized that I loved maps when I worked for a summer in a library many years ago. There was a map room which was filled with neat maps and I was lucky enough to be able to design some maps for the library. I didn't know much about maps or design, but being in a library I was able to look up some stuff. I wanted to use symbols for the map so I look around and found a book of symbols that I used for the map. These were in the days before more visually oriented computers (and in the early days of the Mac before I had used one) so I photocopied and typed and pasted things together to make things. Now I have access to tools to make all sorts of graphics and maps and I don't have time to do it...but I do have to right, so that's what I'm doing now.
The book has over 100 maps that tell more about the people who made them than the places they describe. It's a great way to think about mapping in a different way from simply describing the physical or geographical arrangements of things on the surface of the earth. It also reveals the amazing creativity and distinctive ways of looking and thinking about things that exist. It makes me think about my perception of the world in a different way.
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Northfork is a stunningly beautiful, original film by the Polish Brothers, Michael and Mark. It tells the story of the death by drowning of a Montana town named Northfork in 1955 when a dam is built. It's visually stunning with every shot filled with meaning. It's a complicated film that jumps around between characters and stories that all tie in with evacuation, religion, angels, and journeys. It works on a metaphorical as well as a literal level and is close to magic realism. Northfork is one of those films that I watch and just have to sit and think for a bit after it finishes and absorb it. I'm still absorbing and processing it. The Polish Brothers link together the stories of a sick boy, salesman-like evacuation committee members, a minister, and some angels in way that blends the stories together in a surprisingly moving way. It's quite a unique film, but it does evoke similar emotions in me as Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire did. Unfortunately Northfork didn't receive a very wide theatrical distribution and I wish that I was able to see it projected in a theatre.
Northfork is the third film by the Mark and Michael Polish and I've only see their first, which is Twin Falls Idaho, where the identical twins play conjoined twins in what is called "a different kind of love story." I saw it a year or two ago late one night and it was haunting. Then when I saw the trailer for their second film, Jackpot, I wanted to see that too, but never did. Now I have to see Jackpot to fill in the blanks. The Polish Brothers are very talented, original filmmakers who epitomize independent filmmaking.
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I just finished reading William Gibson's All Tomorrow's Parties which I like a lot. I've become a bit of a fan of Gibson in reverse. I'd known about him for a while with the "invented the term cyberspace" plastered throughout almost everything written about him, but I didn't get around to reading any fiction by him. The nonfiction that I read was great, so one day I saw a discounted copy of All Tomorrow's Parties and I picked it up, but never got around to reading it. Then I saw Pattern Recognition which I bought since I browsed through it and couldn't put it down. I loved Pattern Recognition and started reading All Tomorrow's Parties right after I finished it. I like the idea (since I arrived late at this particular party) of working my way through his work backwards.
The other thing that I didn't do (which is a bit different for me) is research the book... when I like a film I'll find out a lot about it and then track down similar works or previous works by the director or writer or other members of the team behind the film. It's fascinating to find the patterns and connections between people, their work, their ideas and how it intersects with a particular time and place. This type of thinking and these themes are articulated by Gibson, so maybe that's why I consciously avoided that approach so I'd be a bit fresher when I experienced the work.
I'm glad that I did, since I think that I may have enjoyed the book more. What I found out when preparing this entry is that All Tomorrow's Parties follows on with characters from two previous Gibson books that are on my list... it was interesting to pick up the stories where I did. One character just showed up briefly near the end and I wondered why he was there... in reading an excerpt from Idoru I figured it out. Aside from that one blip, everything else worked great. The world existed and I loved how it felt real with a history. I think that where I latched onto Gibson will make me enjoy the direction that he's going in now. Two novels can be enough to determine the general trajectory of a writer and I like where he's going and I appreciate where he's been. What I find fascinating about Gibson's writing is the intersection between the characters and technology which is exactly where I am right now and what I love to think about.
All Tommorow's Parties focuses on an emerging nodal point where everything changes. It's the big change that everyone expected in 2000 that didn't happen and was only delayed. The whole Y2K thing is quaint now, but the fear and hysteria leading up to it was real and overwhelming for a while. It's a fascinating story of trying to make sense of a world on the verge of massive change. You know that something big is going to happen, but not exactly what it is. That's where we are now in the world.
I can't wait to see where Gibson's next novel takes place. I get the sense that as our mediated world becomes more and more surreal and the technology more ubiquitous that it's harder to writer about the future as that's where we are. The world is changing and it's more profound and moving to capture something that is real and close to now than it is to project something that will be in the future. All Tomorrow's Parties is set in the future, but it is a future that existed in the pre-millennial phase before the year 2000 and before the 11th of September signified so much more than a date. Things begin their movement towards anachronism now so quickly that the when and where of creation can be very significant.
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I guess that I was expecting more of a concert-type film and it took a bit of adjustment (a few minutes) but then I really got into Lance Bangs' road documentary Let America Laugh, which follows David Cross' recent tour supporting his comedy cd. Cross is half of Mr. Show (with the other half being Bob Odenkirk) and is a solid, intelligent independent comic. While Mr. Show was produced with HBO and Cross did a great HBO special in 1999, David Cross: The Pride is Back, that special hasn't been released on VHS or DVD. Mr. Show was slowly released on DVD and the Mr. Show movie, Run Ronnie Run was finally released, but I have yet to see it and apparently it's not the edit that the filmmakers would prefer to release. So that probably explains why Mr. Cross didn't go the traditional route of many comedians and stay within the Time Warner AOL, etc, etc, etc world and make more stuff. One problem could be the difficulty in packaging Cross' acerbic and politically charged material into a sitcom built around David and his quirky neighbours. So that's probably why the fiercely independent comedian released his comedy CD, Shut Up, You Fucking Baby! on Sub Pop records.
Lance Bangs follows Cross around and does capture chunks of the stand-up, but what is more fascinating is how the documentary shows a great slice of life on the road. There is a lot of focus on the fans and people attending the shows. It's a great view that gives you the sense of being with Cross as he tours around through the good and the bad. If I have to compare the film in a pitching, high-concept sort of way I would say that it's a bit of a mix between Grant Gee's Meeting People is Easy and Christian Charles' Comedian. It's a road movie that gives you a great slice of life as Cross tries to make people laugh across North America.
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One of the challenges with independent films is seeing them if you don't go to a lot of film festivals or have some of the premium cable channels. A few months ago I found the site for Mark Neale's 2001 documentary about William Gibson, No Maps For These Territories. The DVD was available through the site, but I didn't get around to ordering it. But now the DVD is released more broadly by Docurama and I was able to rent it and just watched it. It's a fascinating documentary that is built around a series of interviews with Gibson in the back seat of a limosine. Gibson is a fascinating writer who thinks and writes clearly about the technology that surrounds us. (I'm slowly working my way backwards through Gibson's novels after I read Pattern Recognition and now I'm reading All Tomorrow's Parties.) The film plays around with the image in post and features a great soundtrack and lovely digital images. It's a great blending of the subject and the ideas of Gibson in a great documentary. I haven't had the time to explore the extra features of the DVD yet, but I'm going to buy it and explore away. The site for the film also has lots of information and clips about the film. The world of documentary is becoming much more exciting with people pushing the limits of the form and exploring new ways of making documentaries.
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