Boredom Defended

NY Times film critics Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott recently published an apology for slow and thoughtful film: "In Defense of the Slow and the Boring." The disappointing thing is that they are not having to defend thoughtful cinema from viewers, who of course express their opinions with their dollars, but from other cultural and film critics. But this is less a catty fight than a discussion of whether film should even be permitted serious aspirations beyond popular entertainment. Unsurprisingly, they think it should.

On the other hand, says Scott, "I certainly don’t think fun should be banished from the screen, or that popular entertainment is essentially antithetical to art. And while I derive great pleasure from some movies that might be described as slow or tedious, I also find food for thought in fast, slick, whimsical entertainments." But the makers of films themselves seems to promote a kind of anti-art bias which at heart is, he suggests, "a defense of the corporate status quo." That is, even film makers are slow to argue that film is, or even should be, an art form rather than commercial entertainment.

I'm a little sad at the fact that I personally am loosing my capacity to experience films purely as entertainment. Art cinema may indeed be "cultural vegetables," but dang it, I like culture, and vegetables, too. I don't think thoughtful films are necessarily enculturating, but they are by definition thoughtful. And "thinking is boring, of course (all that silence), which is why so many industrially made movies work so hard to entertain you."

Why I Hate the Silver Screen

I don't know why it's taken me so long to come to this conclusion, but I don't like going to movies. Not at all. Now, I love movies, really, really love 'em. Or maybe, better said, I love "film." I love compelling visual narratives that make more sense of life than really exists in live. Great film has shaped my worldview much more than books have. That's how I'm wired. I'm a sensualist.

But movie theaters are a terrible place to see films, or movies. First, I don't know how to have a thoughtful and meditative encounter with a film when I'm sharing it with a couple hundred strangers. It's like reading a book with someone looking over my shoulder. But more basically, I just find theater speakers too loud and the screens too big. I have terrible, fussy eyes. I visually cannot take the whole movie screen in, and I find frenetic action on-screen, especially, to be visually and physically fatiguing. I've never wanted a 50" TV with 200w of surround sound at home. My little computer monitor and headphones are optimal, for me.

Worst of all are 3D movies. They are dim, the colors cold, the contrast low, the glasses uncomfortable, and they give me a headache. And 3D adds nothing to a movie's immersiveness. It's a gimmick to which you, in any case, quickly become habituated. I could go on, but Ebert has already given 3D a good and proper thrashing.

Now, as if I needed another reason to give up on movie theaters, I read today that many theaters are not bothering to change from their 3D to 2D lenses when showing the latter. The result is all the downsides of 3D (up to 85% darker, flat colors, plain ugly) even with 2D. The problem, apparently, is that the Sony 4k digital projectors that many theaters use are extremely tamper-resistant, making the lenses a pain to change. A small misstep and the projector can lock you out, causing logistical nightmares. Since the 3D lenses are of course absolutely necessary for 3D movies, some managers are saying, just leave 'em on.

So if you go to a 2D movie and it seems maddeningly dim, complain and ask for your money back. Hopefully a lot of other people will do the same. Customer contempt really should not be tolerated.

Greatest Movies Ever Made

This article by Roger Ebert is certainly worth a look by any movie fan. I personally love Ebert as a critic and rarely find myself disagreeing with him. His comments on the inherent utility of such lists ("propaganda") should be noted, but at the same time, he gives it a thumbs up. Worth a browse for any cinephile. And I guess I need to go watch "The Night of the Hunter."

Amateurs' Carnivale

Amateur artists have never had it so good. In fact, this is truly their day. Not only has the internet broken studio and publisher monopolies on distribution, they also control no longer the means for filming/recording and production. The industry still has most of the money, but of course nothing gets made without the artists, and now musicians and visual media artists can produce much of their work entirely on their own.

Recording software like Digidesign's Pro Tools is used in high-end studios to make glossy, big-budget recordings. But it's also found on 1000s of Macs in private garages and basements where really good music is also being made. Veteran bassist Lee Sklar (Phil Collins, James Taylor) says he is doing more and more session work in recent years in private homes, having literally recorded bass lines while sitting on someone's bed. Three of my all-time favorite albums (the three freshman albums by the White Stripes, the Black Keys, and Fleet Foxes) were all recorded in home studios, the first two on four- or eight-track recorders that give a great, raw retro vibe. But Fleet Foxes sounds purely studio. In fact, professional studios are being driven out of business by falling demand, due to the rise of home studios.

Amature film makers have had it a bit harder. Film cameras and stock are very expensive, and both editing and post processing really have to be contracted out. Camcorders have been out for years, but their quality has been nothing like studio. Even recent pro-digital HD cameras, while much less costly than $100k studio cameras, have still required substantial capital investment.

But I've been fascinated to see what amature film makers are doing with the Canon EOS 5D Mark II DSLR. That's right, it is a still camera, but it also can capture full 1080p HD video at 30fps, and looks brilliant. All for about $2500 (body). Even with a good lens or two, a computer, Final Cut Pro software, and recording and support equipment, you can start producing almost studio quality HD video with less than $10,000 in gear. Brilliant.

Loads of 5D videos and film shorts may be found on TheEOScars.com, and see more as well on the cinema5D.com forums. I've embeded one below. If you start it and then click the HD icon on the right of the screen, it will link you out to Vimeo, where you can watch the clip in full 720p HD. You'll want to let it cache, and it may not play smoothly on older computers. But wow is it gorgeous. The first feature-length film shot entirely with a 5D will be released next year.

wemakemusic* - Dance with a Statue from Sebastian Woeber on Vimeo.

More Real than Real

I have an acquaintance who is a photographer and cinematographer. I once asked him over lunch what the single greatest advance in film making has been. He replied, "The quality of film stock."

You may expect just such a bland technical observation from a photographer, but I might agree. Much of the basic look of modern film is derived from the fantastic films and film processes cinematographers have available to them, and of course the great skill they employ in using them.

To me this is most evident in their color saturation. The stunning, rich colors that immediately differentiate a film shot today from one made in the 80s and earlier are all about the film used. I think some digital transfers of old films may get their colors punched up a bit, but those older films still just look incredibly bland by today's standards. In fact, I find that dated look a challenge to my enjoyment of them. Just watch A Bridge Too Far next to Band of Brothers. Both are seminal WW2 pics, but I find the immersion of of the latter so much greater, with its immense color and sound fidelity.

Though maybe "fidelity" is the wrong word. Today's film stocks reproduce images that are more real than real. Looking out my window at work, the trees do not look like movie trees. The light is flat, the colors bland, and as my eyes see them right now, they are thoroughly unspectacular. But I am not viewing them through masterfully processed 35mm Kodak VISION3. If only life looked as good as art.

But aside from saturation, incredible film stocks and even more incredible analog and digital processing allows a cinematographer to recreate any period look, or simply create a unique aesthetic that complements the film. Cinematographers like Janusz Kaminski (Spielberg) and Roger Deakins (Cohen brothers) are geniuses at this, as seen in films like Catch Me if You Can (Kaminski) and Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? (Deakins). I'm getting goose bumps just thinking about the look of those films. I guess I'm a very visual person.

For the average still photographer, film stock is inconsequential, since we've all traded film for digital. Old timers still get dewy-eyed over Fujifilm Velvia 50, a supersaturated slide film that too is more real than real. But who needs it with Photoshop. Even the rankest of amateurs, like me, can take a very average photo and, with a bit of tweaking in PS, make the colors look brilliant. There's no looking back now.



A shot of Stonehenge, before and after a Velvia-like color boost in Photoshop.

Comic Books: All Grown Up (Part 3)

Of course, comic popularity is even bigger in movies than in print. Badly-animated children's cartoons and silly live-action TV series have given way to Hollywood blockbusters, and even to independent hits like American Splendor. It began with Superman (1978) and then Batman (1989), a decade later, but now with the massive success of the Spider-Man and X-Men movie franchises, comic-based movies are coming fast and thick. As many as came out in 2008, this year looks to be even more so the Year of the Comic Book Movie.

Naturally this is giving print comic popularity a bump, and at the same time, digital comic collecting has taken off. Comic enthusiasts began a number of years a go to scan their old comics into pdfs and share them with fellow fans on internet forums and newsgroups. The more ethical groups impose a moratorium on trading files of comics less than one year old. No one wants to hurt the publishers. But the publishers have been curiously slow to capitalize on this interest in digital copies of their back-issues.

But I predict that will change very soon, thanks to the iPhone/Touch. You can now purchase digital comic reader software for the iPhone/Touch (ComicZeal) that is specifically designed to read the most popular formats for scanned comics. The interface is a little rough (it is fairly new), but it works very well. And, the software publisher also has out-of-copyright comics available for download.

The major publishers will certainly make paid content available on iTunes sooner or later, and iVerse is leading the way with the backing of a number of smaller independents. The idea of iPhone comics has been dissed. The content problem (lack and cost thereof) can be solved, but there is not much to do about the small screen size. For me the Touch screen is just big enough, but just barely.

The majors (DC and Marvel) are already testing the waters with different comic-based products, in particular with voice-over narrated, semi-animated comics which Marvel calls In-Motion or simply motion comics. These are based on print comics and have some big talent behind them, like Joss Whedon. Most ambitiously, a 12-episode motion version of The Watchmen was published on iTunes, as well as on DVD and Blu-Ray. Unfortunately, at $20 on iTunes, the price is simply obscene.

But motion comics are really minimalist cartoons, not comics. Since a lot of enthusiasts are already trading scanned comics, and loading them on their iPhones/Touchs, the major publishers will not be long in getting their content up. In fact, Marvel has a digital comics subscription service, but they need more content, especially at $60 a year. And it's not available through iTunes. But it'll happen.

Scientists Prove that Kevin Bacon Is Key to Understanding the Cosmos

I've long subscribed to the philosophy of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, who is a lesser philosopher than Francis Bacon but a way better actor. This theory, originating with Bacon (Kevin, not Francis), is that any actor can be linked through his or her film roles to Kevin Bacon. Bacon's original quip was that he'd worked with with every actor in Hollywood, or with someone who had. The link isn't always that close, but the Oracle of Bacon has rigorously tested the theory and found that only 12% of 800,000 actors in the IMDB cannot be linked to Kevin Bacon.

So, as an utterly random example, I go to the Oracle and type in "Rosemary Clooney," whom I cannot imagine being linked to Bacon in any immediate way. But it turns out she worked with Mark Jeffery Miller in the Radioland Murders (1994), who worked with Kevin Bacon in Death Sentence (2007). Eerie.

My mind is always making these movie connections, unconsciously, and when they bubble to the surface it tends to unnerve me. It's almost like insight into the foundational principles of cosmic sympathy, with the ley lines all leading Hollywood. For example, let's return to Rosemary Clooney, whom most would place far from the center of the cosmos. (Hold on, this gets a little complicated.)

Robert F. Kennedy was shot on June 5, 1968, in Los Angeles in the Ambassador Hotel's Embassy Room ballroom. Present was Rosemary Clooney, a close friend of Bobby Kennedy. Clooney was the mother of actor Miguel Ferrar. Miguel Ferrar and actor Jacob Vargas starred together in Traffic (2000). Jacob Vargas also had a minor role in Bobby (2006), a movie about the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. This relates Clooney and the almost unknown Mexican actor Vargas to each other in two different ways. Uncanny.

Back to Kevin Bacon's theory. (To give due credit, the general idea comes from the small world theory of Stanley Milgram, which more or less concluded that all people in the US are separated by only six degrees of removal.) Scientists are now discovering that there is some kind of "hidden metric space" beneath complex systems. Says the author of a recent article on this theory, "A vast majority of very different complex networks have similar shapes.  They have similar shapes not just for fun, but perhaps because they all evolved toward structures and shapes that maximize efficiency according to their main common function, and that function is communication." In other words, most systems grow in such a way that they are in fact closer to other things in that system than they appear on the surface. Insight into this hidden space could revolutionize the internet, medicine, and many other areas of technology and science. See here.