This post is about the file format

Peter, Bjorn & John - Nothing to Worry About

Somehow I’m headed to Sundance January 21-25 this year. Somehow because, well, I had very little to do with the planning of this trip. That’s all Mollie. She spent much time scheduling and finding a condo and rescheduling and… I think I actually hindered the process by not replying to emails and then waiting until the last possible minute before weighing in with my travel and movie preferences. She changed flights at least once in order to make the last Missing Person screening. She also had to actually call (like on the telephone!) to get tickets since the Internet ticket purchasing was a little fucked. We didn’t get everything we wanted, but that’s what waiting in lines is for. Confirmed schedule:

Wed

The Missing Person

Thur

Reporter
Big Fan

Fri

Peter and Vandy
Black Dynamite (How can this not be amazing?! Have you seen the trailer?)
Dirt

Sat

The Cove
Nollywood Babylon

I was just thinking about Paul Verhoeven. Yay for sushi. Thank you Blue Ribbon Sushi for being open late and being delicious. Paul. Hollow Man, Starship Troopers, Basic Instinct, Total Recall, and let’s not forget about Showgirls. All that Basil Poledouris. And RoboCop! The scene where Boddicker dies was great (Spoiler!) RoboCop stabs him with a computer interface connector that is, for reasons never explained, a 10 inch metal spike. I anxiously await a future where it’s possible to be impaled while trying to charge an iPod. God help us if WirelessHD ever catches on, this wireless shit is softening our children.

And that lead me to thinking about RoboCop. The song. Again. It’s awful, a disservice to the name really. It manages to stand out on an album chock full of mediocrity. 808s suffers from a shtick that wears thin three tracks in then forces you to put up with it for another nine. There’s no progression or evolution in the production, the lyrics are b-b-bad and the autotune does nothing to mask the fact that dude can’t sing. It’s vaguely reminiscent of The New Danger in terms of WTFness. Or Love Below. Or Zo & Tigallo love the 80s. Did you listen to that Take on Me cover??? Mamas, please don’t let your rapper children try to become singers! And Ye (or his guest blogger) swore this wasn’t the final version. This final version is not better, robot hydraulic sound effect and all. Though it’s still better than the third RoboCop movie…

and it happened during Casino Royale. The Daniel Craig Bond movie, not that other disaster. Specifically, during the first action sequence after the credits where Bond chases Sébastien Foucan through a construction site. I’m a fan of that parkour, those guys and gals are incredible! There are lots of good YouTube videos out there, and there’s always District B13. B13 is little more than an excuse for Raffaelli and Belle to run through streets and rooftops, but it’s all crazy enjoyable.

Anyway, I held off on getting a Blu-ray player for one main reason. It’s a little silly. For a long time, the most practical (supports BD-Live, upgradable, not too pricy, etc) player on the market was the Playstation 3. And the thing’s not stackable. I don’t play videogames enough to own something that demands that much vertical space. Now the DMP-BD35 from Panasonic is out, and I recently purchased one. It’s magic in a box. Technically I ended up with a BD55 due to a Circuit City mishap, but that’s another story. It’s even more magic in a box. It’s just so unreasonably high definition. I think this means I’d rather have physical media that’s gorgeous than blurry video on demand.

There’s a scene in Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna where the Lennie Small character is trying to devise a communication system with the little boy they’ve rescued in war-torn Italy. The little boy only speaks Italian (and maybe German, it’s not clear), and “Lennie” only speaks English, so Lennie’s trying to teach him to communicate by tapping on his shoulder. 1 tap for ‘yes’. 2 taps for ‘no’. 3 taps for ‘I’m sleepy’. And he keeps going. And this is funny, haha, because this is never going to work in practice.

What does this have to do with anything? The iPhone 2.1 OS update came out last week. It’s great, it fixes a bunch of bugs, it’s the second coming. My favorite feature on paper is triple-click on the mic/remote to rewind. 1 click for play/pause. 2 clicks for fast forward. 3 clicks for rewind. I was so excited when I read about this. I get obsessed with tracks and need to hear them over and over again.

For example,

The track Money on The Game’s new album. Lyrically, it’s typical Game dreck. Unnecessary name dropping, metaphors that make no sense, and pretending that the west coast is still relevant. I mean, the track starts with the lyrics

Kanye told me that Jesus walks in 0-4
but I grew up around impalas and drug lords
Welcome to Los Angeles, palm trees and drug stores
All we know is rocks and presidents like Mount Rushmore

and it goes on like that for 5 minutes. But one does not listen to Game for lyrical content, one listens to Game because he has a great ear for beats and flows really well. The production… it’s got this catchy loop of Betty Wright singing “money… over money.” There’s an overlapping guitar sample. This is one of the better Cool and Dre productions in recent memory. The Game manages to sort of stay on topic and weaves the chorus around the Betty Wright sample. I love it. I wish I could the say the same about you tracks 7, 8, and 9.

My dexterity sucks. Here’s what happens when I try to rewind using the iPhone remote.

1. Clicked too slowly - oops, pause then play.
2. Clicked too slowly - oops, skip track, pause.
3. Clicked perfectly - rewinds to the beginning of the current track. But I wanted to listen to the previous track

Smash! I’m never going to be able to pull off the sometimes 6 clicks it takes to get this to work correctly. I’m not upset, I love this feature. Combining the microphone and the remote was genius, and this makes it even easier to use the iPhone as an iPod while it’s in your pocket. I just wish I could pull off rewind more successfully. I swear I don’t have the rum fits!

There will be no references to the file format in this here post.

Next week

I’m going to the Toronto International Film Festival next week. I’m excited for several reasons — going on a mini-vacation, seeing a bunch of movies, hanging out with strangers, and being in a city I only lived in for a year. My friend Mollie, who works in “the industry” thinks it’s weird for “regular people” to go to film festivals. She may be right, I have no idea. I decided to do the out of town ticket selection and get the 10 ticket package just so I’d have some guarantees. Five days ago they sent me this large packet with a movie guide and somewhat complicated instructions that I was then supposed to send back the next day. There are approximately a bajillion movies showing, but I sort of narrowed it down to 50-ish and then chose 20-ish as primaries and alternates. I didn’t get all my primaries but mayhaps I’ll see them anyway. Some of these I don’t remember selecting but they do appeared to be dog-eared in the movie guide book. My current schedule:

• The Brothers Bloom - I really enjoyed Brick and Mark Ruffalo makes my loins tingle.
• Slumdog Millionaire - I think Boyle can be a bit hit or miss but that kid is so cute. A Hindi version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? If that isn’t a formula for… something, I don’t know what is.
• Control Alt Delete - I’m hoping this one ends with his girlfriend coming to terms with his addiction to internet porn.
• Goodbye Solo - Because I’m still mad at myself for not seeing Man Push Cart. Also, I enjoy tears.
• Pride and Glory - Wasn’t this supposed to come out a while ago? Anyway, yeah!
• The Dungeon Masters - A documentary about dungeons and dragons players should be entertaining. I will go in expecting to laugh, but at some point realize that they are people too.
• The Wrestler - Say what you will about The Fountain… actually don’t, because I really liked it. Aronofsky is > your life.
• RocknRolla - I’m crazy skeptical about a new Guy Ritchie gangster movie… but Thandie Newton!
• Miracle at St. Anna - Because I’m secretly trying to figure out which film will have the most black people in attendance.
• Chocolate - Because I literally couldn’t keep myself from jumping up and down during Ong Bak, and omg in Tom Yum Goong Tony Jaa has an elephant thrown at him, and I’ll be seeing this at midnight, and hopefully in a theater full of action movie fans, and omg this will be awesome.

While we’re here

Fuck talking bout the recession, the shit’s depressing

The Recession drops tomorrow, I hope you’re ready. Jeezy is the Michael Phelps of hip hop.

The black and white USDA flags in this video are kinda hot

Or maybe it’s just my iPhone, I don’t know.

Samples we love from movies we love #78

Nas feat Jay-Z - Black Republican (Prague Philharmonic - Marcia Religiosa).

Recalled while rewatching The Godfather II earlier today. Black Republican, from Nas’ Hip-Hop is Dead, noteworthy for being the first post-feud Nas/Jay-Z collaboration.

Bonus! Things you should do #95

I know, I know, I don’t need to remind you… it’s already on your calendar, etc etc, but Zombie Strippers comes out today. Guaranteed to be trash. Take one for the team, tell us how bad it really is.

• Creepy, desolate, old house.
• Being left alone in said creepy, desolate house.
• Creepy disabled/orphaned children.
• Masks or burlap sacks on said children.
• Creepy old woman.
• Creepy contacting the dead scene.
• It’s never daytime.
• Caves. I hate caves.
• Random loud things falling. Who keeps a collection of pipes in a closet??
• Watching the movie in a theater where one can’t take a breather every 30 minutes.

The Orphanage is full of cliches, yet engrossing at the same time. Lesser movies make me groan when these things happen, but I was in suspense the entire time. It doesn’t do anything groundbreaking, but it’s refreshing to see a horror movie these days that isn’t just torture porn.

This is the part where I throw in a plug for The Devil’s Backbone, that movie does not get enough love.

Random reference to another movie: The Wizard of Gore!

Mamet’s essay on aesthetic distance in Bambi vs Godzilla is all I could think about every time the (obvious) miniature of Manderley appears on screen during Rebecca:

An actor portrays a pianist. The actor sits down to play, and the camera moves, without a cut, to his hands, to assure us, the audience, that he is actually playing. The filmmakers, we see, have taken pains to show the viewers that no trickery has occurred, but in so doing, they have taught us only that the actor portraying the part can actually play the piano. This addresses a concern that we did not have. We never wondered if the actor could actually play the piano. We accepted the storyteller’s assurances that the character could play the piano, as we found such acceptance naturally essential to our understanding of the story, but when the camera tilts down to the actor’s actual fingers, we, in effect, experience this:

FILMMAKER - I’m going to tell you a story about a pianist.
AUDIENCE - Oh good: I wonder what happens to her!
FILMMAKER - But first, before I do, I will take pains to reassure you that the actor you see portraying the hero can actually play the piano.

We didn’t care till the filmmaker brought it up, at which point we realized that, rather than being told a story, we were being shown a demonstration. We took off our “audience” hat and put on our “judge” hat. We judged the demonstration conclusive but, in so doing, got yanked right out of the drama. The aesthetic distance had been violated.

Maybe this is a little unfair. It is an old movie and IMDb claims that Selznick was unable to find a suitable location, but what I can’t figure out is if it would have been okay to not show it at all. The grandeur is captured by the interior. Curiously enough, the blue-screened driving scenes don’t bother me at all, as these seem to be somewhat more essential to the story.

A zombie attack can strike quickly and without warning. A single infection can turn into a full blown epidemic in a matter of days. I hope the zombie infection simulator clears any doubt you might have about this. For added readiness, I recommend the zombie survival guide.

dolapo just got back from watching 28 weeks later. He thought the gore, pacing and score were enough to make up for the plot oddities. He was entertained throughout–though he’s pretending it had a better ending.