TV Tropes: Waste An Afternoon

It's far too easy to get lost in the infinite links of TVTropes.org, which breaks down the myriad familiar tropes of popular storytelling. So naturally, I highly recommend it.

The hat trick of "Ten Minute Retirement" followed by "Foe Tossing Charge", leading to a "Slow Motion Fall" makes me laugh out loud.

See also "Big No", "Compressed Vice", "Alien Sky", "Zepplins From Another World", and the very true "Rule of Cool".

Daft Tron

Somehow I missed the news that Daft Punk is going to score the new Tron sequel. Hot damn, that is awesome. The only downside is I have to wait until 2011 to see it.

Blast!

Resumé Item

For anyone who's interested, there's a little taste of what I do over at MTV.com (apologies for the ridiculous fact that you have to sit through an ad for one movie before you watch an ad for another). That behind-the-scenes piece was cut by one of our editors, and I did the online - adding final graphics and doing the color correction, cutting in the audio mix, and delivering the final tape.

More of our work will start hitting the web as the summer gets going, so there may be ore as the weather gets warmer...

[link courtesy of io9]

5 Reasons Luke Skywalker is a Complete Idiot

Missing? "But I was going to go to Toshi Station and pick up some power converters!" That aside, though, it's a fun little feature.

What has Luke had to look forward to after the original trilogy? Mostly trying to start up the whole Jedi Order by himself, which is a ton of work, and watching Han have almost constant sex with Leia.

See the list over at Topless Robot.

Sometimes Nothing Can Be A Pretty Cool Hand

Boy, I got vision, and the rest of the world wears bifocals.

Sad news today: Paul Newman has passed away.

He was a real movie star... turning in classic performances more consistently than most. An artist in the truest sense of the word.

I never met him, but I almost worked at the Hole in the Wall Camp after graduating from college, and did sit a few rows away from him during a play at Wesleyan.

Many of my generation (and younger) think of him as the "Newman's Own Guy." It's sad that we young'uns caren't as familiart with his performances as we should be... But adding a philanthropic, high quality, and good tasting food company to a filmography like his? I have to ask: Is that such a bad legacy to have?

We should be so lucky.

Enjoy a classic scene, in just about the right mood. It's quiet, so crank up the volume.



'Wait a minute - you didn't see Lefors out there did you?'

'Lefors? No, why?'

'Thank God for that. For a moment there I thought we were in trouble.'

Gun Play

Phil Mellinger takes a look at The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly through the lens of games theory:

Three men in a triangle -- each with a gun, a rock at the center of the three. It is up to each man to evaluate his situation. All are excellent shots. Who do they shoot?

A fun, if simple analysis of this scene. Now, if only someone could prove who shot who in Reservoir Dogs, then we'd be talking.

One Of The Voices Is Gone

Yesterday, we all lost a long-standing friend; Don LaFontaine, the Voice of a thousand trailers, has died, at the age of 68.

Don was one of a handful of men who do the majority of the trailer voice-over in the US. I've had the pleasure of working with a few of these gentlemen, and they're all a bunch of pros, who can do this is their sleep. You may recognize Don's voice from the trailers for Terminator 2, Batman Returns, or Shrek. The intro to his website should seem awfully familiar, and Ain't It Cool News has a fine assortment of his greatest hits, including a nice featurette at the end of their YouTube links.

We still have Hal Douglas, among others, so we'll continue to hear great VO like this; yet Don will be missed; he is the voice of the movies, and will continue to be for some time yet.

Seeing that Hal is 84 years old (!), I'm starting to wonder... what will the next generation of Trailer Voices be like? Who will it be? I suspect they'll look for a near-identicle replacement, but those are some tough shoes to fill.

Thanks for the good times, Don. See you in another life.

"Tell It To Me In Star Wars"

Brilliant explanation of the Uncanny Valley.

Here's Wikipedia with a little more.

Best Review Quote Ever

Amanda Seyfried's publicist should start ordering t-shirts:

[Seyfried] is shot in such warm close-ups that you almost want to spread her face on your toast.

Ladies and gentlemen, David Poland and his review of Mamma Mia: The Movie.

Fortune & Glory

Well, it's time.

Several months of trailers and TV spots, subway poster plastering and internet reviews, and I haven't seen a one of 'em. The two screenings of Iron Man I saw both had the Indy trailer loud and large, but thanks to my thick fingers, all I heard was the muffled refrain of "The Raider's March" and saw not a thing. I've seen the title card flash by on my DVR once or twice, but that's not so bad.

I made it.

Today has been a hectic one – work has been wildly busy, the kind where a million little things keep popping up before you finish the old ones. Ugh. Plus, try coordinating 26 people all attending the same Indy screening tonight. It's a big list, and a bit of a logistical challenge.

But it's all worth it.

So I'm off, first to get the tickets printed, then off to a bar for a much-needed beer. Or two. Or... well, we'll see.

And then, well, you know the rest.

Fortune and glory, kid. Fortune and glory.

See you on the other side...

Sunday Clip Show: On Shyamalan and Television

A few clips from the past week.

On the film front, a film clip (with introduction!) from M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening has been making the rounds. This features, hands down, some of the worst "sizzle" editing I have ever seen. This is the kind of piece we do at work a lot, hyping the movie using film clips and trailer bits, combined with interviews and behind-the-scenes footage. The studios want these to be slick and cool, like trailers, and editing pieces like that is a lot of fun, and can be good.

But this is plain embarrassing.

Shyamalan is a pretentious hack (at least these days), and laying abrupt cuts to random film clips, flash frames, and repetitive ominous sound effects don't class him up, even as he tries to invoke Friedkin, Coppola, and Hitchcock. Plus, I usually enjoy Mark Wahlberg, but he's trying too hard or getting bad direction, because he is terrible here.

Lame.

Moving on to more interesting things, all of the major networks have released their TV schedules for next season (How I Met Your Mother was renewed, so rejoice, and watch that show). Here're the schedules for Fox, CBS, ABC, and NBC. With these announcements come two previews for new shows, each made by a big name in TV entertainment.

Fringe comes from J.J. Abrams, creator/co-creator of Felicity, Alias, and Lost, as well as director of Mission: Impossible III and next summer's Star Trek reboot. His TV shows (for the most part) have been met with a lot of favor, but MI3 got banged around pretty hard. I for one enjoyed it and felt that, with the exception of the slide down the Shanghai rooftop, it was a well made spy flick. Sure, it was a carbon-copy of the Alias pilot, but that some damn fine storytelling the first time, and transitioned well. And, as you all know, I am looking forward to Star Trek…


Which makes the Fringe trailer all the more depressing. I loved The X-Files and enjoyed a lot of Alias, but this looks derivative and unoriginal. As far as this preview shows, I can see no "hook" or idea that grabs me and sets this apart from the myriad sci-fi shows that have been released in the 15 years since Fox debuted The X-Files. Government conspiracies and hot female FBI agents are old hat, and no, casting Pacey from Dawson's Creek doesn't count as interesting.
This show could still be good and surprise me, but as of now, I'm not holding my breath. Unless John Noble (Denthor from Return of the King) sets his son on fire for real this time…

It's interesting that the spin this show is gong for is that science and technology have advanced to the point where we can't control them; I guess all of the "fringe" events are a result of science, then. The X-Files was a lot more flexible in this regard… for every genetic hybrid, there was a body-skipping spirit, or something that science couldn't begin to explain. That was, essentially, the whole point of Scully – she stood in for scientific understanding, and couldn't comprehend so much of what happened, as Mulder was able to with his more visceral beliefs. Of course, Scully was the religious character, too, so…

There's a lot more to be said about the philosophy and character relationships of The X-Files, and this isn't the time or the place. Maybe later, but for now, I digress.

Next up, fan favorite Joss Whedon has a new show coming out, too, called Dollhouse. Oddly enough, it looks a bit like Alias, yet manages to seem pretty fresh and interesting. I dig the concept, and like that the central premise and conflict are laid out for us; we get good guys and bad guys from the start, most played by known (and charismatic) actors. This and Caprica are probably the two new shows I am most excited about; the fact that Dollhouse is a mid-season replacement debuting in January is a bummer, but c'est la vie.

And, of course, both of these shows are on Fox, so, if they're good, we can look forward to having them cancelled after about 12 episodes (see Firefly, Wonderfalls, Futurama, Arrested Development, Drive, and this page). I try to tell myself that at least Fox airs these shows in the first place, but the sting of Firefly is hard to ignore.

Basketball and Movies

Considering how many posts my good friends Kevin and Will have thrown up about the recent NBA regular season and playoffs, I couldn't resist this.

In the talkbacks to The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, "Magic Rat" said...

Lord of the Rings is the Michael Jordan to Narnia's Dominique Wilkins to the Golden Compass' Vince Carter.

I don't even know who all of those guys are, and I still cracked a smile at that, agreeing completely.

Technology Horrors and Making Movies

Read this blog entry for the ultimate movie-making nightmare. In the old days, the danger was destroying your actual film stock; in the digital era, it's all about losing your video data.

Considering the manpower, time, and money that go into making even a low-budget movie, the physical end result is staggeringly small. A few miles of film, a couple dozen video cassettes… or a several hundred gigabytes of abstract data.

The "all digital workflow" is always brought up as the coming Big Thing. Shoot your footage digitally, not to a tape, but to files on some kind of computer drive, either solid state (P2, Flash) or traditional (spinning platter hard drive). No need to capture or digitize footage into a computer-friendly format, because it's natively stored that way. Edit the original files at full resolution. Never have to worry about going back to tape, or negatives, or anything. Glory, hallelujah.

Overlooking some fundamental flaws in this logic (try doing offline editorial for a feature with uncompressed HD media, 4k files, or anything of finishing quality, and feel the pain), there is a danger inherent in this thinking – that this makes the movie-making process simple and easy. It goes something like this: "We don't have to have to worry about film labs and transporting stock, telecine and vaulting negatives. We don't have to worry about dubbing tapes and digitizing, using rented decks on a fully built-out edit system. We can build a cheap Final Cut station on my buddy's old G5, and buy a couple of firewire drives to edit on. We don't have to worry about the technology, we can be cheap and worry about the art!"

The digital workflow is not the magic bullet. For every worry you manage to avoid, you introduce one.

You don't need AC's on set loading film canisters, but you need someone whose entire job is to track which cards/drives have been shot, which have been transferred, and which can or cannot be wiped and reused. You either need a computer and electricity for reliable hard drive storage on set, so you can back your cards up in the field, or you need enough cards that you can afford to wait until the end of the day, and have someone spend the downtime transferring the data – preferably in an organized and careful fashion. Your media is your movie, so you want it taken care of!

You don't need to vault negatives or tapes, or deal with dubs and prints and telecines. Except that you do. All of those procedures are, essentially, backing up your media by making copies, and then storing the originals. The nice thing about tape dubs and film negatives is that you pay someone else to have the expertise to make accurate "copies" for you, so you don't have to worry about it. But if you're treating the digital workflow as your cheap solution, you probably don't realize that you have to do the same thing with your digital media, and so have no expert available to you. Someone has to import every clip, using the metadata from the shoot. This takes time and drive space. Then (especially if you're shooting uncompressed HD, 2K, 4K, or RED), you need to generate a proxy, or transcode the media to a video format easier on your system, that takes up less space. This requires even more time, and still more drive space. Now you're ready to work… but you should make copies of everything to a different set of drives, and ideally also a tape-based computer backup, and store those at a different location. When your drives fail (and they always will) or your facility is broken into, you don't want to lose everything, like those poor people from the blog posted above.

And, because you're doing this cheap and easy, odds are the only person available to do all of this is the editor. He may or may not be up to the task; there are a lot of video editors out there who know just enough about software NLEs to enable them to practice their craft, which is editing movies, and not much else. If this is the case, you need a strong assist to take care of all of this administrative BS, which is yet another cost and consideration, and he still may not be experienced in the formats you chose to use.

This has been kind of a rant, for which I apologize. This all comes from feeling bad for the people who lost their movie, yet being frustrated with their stupid decisions. Every few weeks, a friend or a friend of a friend asks about ways to shoot a movie with direct-to-disk cameras, and I give my advise, only to be told they're trying to do it cheaply, and won't do any backups or transcoding. It makes me want to pull my hair out. You don't edit your film using negatives on a flatbed, do you?! It all comes from this willful lack of common sense; people need to think about these things, and not just assume that, because the marketing tells them it's easy, that it actually is.

I am not any kind of feature film expert, but I am knee-deep in post production and current video technology, and I tell you now, if it can go wrong, it will, especially if you assume it won't.

Backup your stuff. Treat it like a film negative. Because it is. And once it's gone, you can't get it back.

[c/o Little Frog in High Def]

Dear God No

Someone needs to slap George Lucas and tell him he has bad ideas. Rick McCallum didn't do it, and apparently Steven Spielberg doesn't either. So whatever happens, it's up to us, to us.

Says FOXNews:

Lucas had a lot to say about the new "Indy" and its future… "But I have an idea to make Shia [LeBeouf] the lead character next time and have Harrison [Ford] come back like Sean Connery did in the last movie. I can see it working out."

No George, you see dollar signs. Something "working out" looks, much, much different.



[c/o AICN]

Gore Verbinski Directing "Bioshock" Movie

So says Variety, here and here.

This sounds exactly like a Universal project; Doom, Chronicles of Riddick, Pitch Black, Serenity, even Children of Men and TV's Battlestar Galactica all fit in with this type of science fiction adventure story. That list of titles, however, leaves a dubious taste in one's mouth; I seem to have inadvertently typed it in ascending order of quality, starting at the very bottom of the barrel and going up towards a potential tie at the top. Clearly, this is no sure thing, especially with John "Star Trek: Nemesis" Logan scripting.

Gore¹ has worked exclusively with Dreamworks/Paramount and Disney, at least as a director, and his first picture with Universal could be exciting. I don't have an Xbox 360, so I never played Bioshock myself, but I was able to watch Jamie play a few times, and it looked like a rich and interesting world. One I'd be interested in seeing on screen, done right. If Gore can reign himself in (and have a good, finished script when he goes into production) à la Curse of the Black Pearl, this could be a lot of fun.

There's no release date yet; my money is on Summer 2010. That gives us two years to see if this will turn out to be more Doom (shudder), or more Serenity (yay).

Either way, I guess this means Jerry² (and Disney) will be waiting on Pirates 4…




[1] - That's right, I said Gore. After over three years of working continuously on Pirates of the Caribbean, we've earned the right to call them by their first names. [⇪]
[2] - Jerry Bruckheimer. See above. [⇪]


[c/o CHUD]

Go See <em>Iron Man</em>

The summer movie season begins today, with Iron Man.

It's every bit as fun as it looks, has excellent pacing, and feels exactly like what a summer popcorn flick should. Great action, well-told story, perfect performances, excellent effects, only the merest bit of shoe-horned romance, and an above-par post-credits stinger for a sequel (so wait until the roll is through!).

A few of us went to a midnight screening at the Arclight Cinerama Dome; director Jon Favereau and star Robert Downey, Jr. were both in attendance, and primed the audience with some (brief) words. New trailers for The Incredible Hulk (so-so), The Dark Knight (awesome!), and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (closed my eyes and plugged my ears and only heard the muffled refrains of the "Indiana Jones March," so good for me) screened before the film, and set a pretty excellent mood.

Iron Man rocked. Hard.

Add in a solid episode of Lost, some rousing Mario Kart Wii, and delicious pizza from a new local place beforehand, and I had a pretty excellent night – and it's only Thursday, a school night at that!

If only Tracy was in town... but I'll meet up with her in Davis tomorrow, and then off to San Francisco with Dan and Sahra.

This is the start of an excellent few days...

To The Rescue... Here He Comes...

It is accomplished; I have purchased my tickets to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crustal Skull. Opening night, at the Hollywood Arclight.

Hell yes.

To date, I have still managed to avoid seeing any video advertisements, though print ones have managed to seep in... not the final one-sheet (which apparently has a lot of mild spoilers), but the myriad billboards (some just showing the teaser poster image, some with just words, and some featuring a few plot-ish points) here in L.A. are hard to miss. Plus, my subway stop looks like this:

I still consider my self amazingly unspoiled, and that's pretty exciting.

To keep the mood, here are the trailers for Raiders, Temple of Doom, and Last Crusade. If you want the newest trailer, I encourage you not to – look at how much the original trailers spoil! – but if you must, you're on your own.

Salvage on the High Seas

I read a couple of amazing stories this past week, but none was so preposterously cinematic as the true story of the team of specialists called in to save a capsized freighter in the north Pacific. High Tech Cowboys of the Deep Seas: The Race to Save the Cougar Ace, a Wired article by Joshua Davis, follows the group from Titan Salvage on their real-life adventure:

Right now, it doesn't really matter how it happened. What matters is that the Cougar Ace has become a multimillion-dollar ghost ship drifting toward the rocky shoals of the Aleutian Islands. What's worse, according to the crew, the ship is taking on water. The Coast Guard alone doesn't have the capability or expertise to handle this kind of emergency, and officials fear that the ship will sink or break up on shore. Either way, the cars would be lost, and the 176,366 gallons of fuel in the ship's tanks would threaten the area's wildlife and fishing grounds. Mazda, Mitsui, and their insurers would take a massive hit.

The article is long, but gripping, and will obviously be made into a movie. It reads like a pitch for a film – not in the cheesy, "wouldn't-this-be-a-cool-movie-Hollywood-wink-wink-nudge-nudge" Tom Clancy way, but in the "this-happens-in-real-life-OMFG" way. Corporations, the environment, and individual lives could all be destroyed if they fail. There's a finite amount of time to accomplish their goals. The conflict and setting are high concept and exciting. And the guys who make up the team are the stuff of Jerry Bruckheimer's wet dreams:

They're a motley mix: American, British, Swedish, Panamanian. Each has a specialty — deep-sea diving, computer modeling, underwater welding, big-engine repair. And then there's Habib, the guy who regularly helicopters onto the deck of a sinking ship, greets whatever crew is left, and takes command of the stricken vessel.

And did I mention that the team leader, Senior Salvage Master Rich Habib, not only has an unlimited master's license, but he looks like an adventure hero, an "Indiana Jones" of the water. He reminds me of Jammer from The Abyss.

All of my talk regarding this story-as-film is to show what an incredible read it is. We forget, sometimes, just how extreme real-life adventures can be. The stakes are high, lives are lost, technology can be mixed with elbow grease and physical feats of wonder. And occasionally, reality has down-beat and mildly ironic triumphs.

Check it out.

[c/o kottke]

Charlton Heston, RIP [Updated]

Tonight, Charlton Heston died at age 84.

Despite extreme-right-wing political views that make me cringe, Heston starred in a lot of treasured movies from my childhood – Planet of the apes (obviously), Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments, The Omega Man, The Three (and Four) Musketeers, True Lies... and later in life, I discovered Touch of Evil and Soylent Green (which, despite the now-comedic ending, is actually a funky little film).

In the coming days, keep your eyes peeled for too many jokes about Heston's famous "from my cold, dead hands" line (regarding gun laws in the US).

I choose to respectfully decline that gag, and instead call attention to his credits from 1997 - 1998, where he was credited in six different films as "Narrator" ("Actor" entries #11 - 15, and "self" entry #45). Well done.

He may have been crazy, but he leaves behind a collection of performances I'll be watching the rest of my life. In a lot of ways, he was my first view of "Old Hollywood," an era even farther away now that he's passed.

Bon voyage.





[Update]

I found this great tribute Richard Dreyfuss wrote back in August of 2002, when Heston announced that he had Alzheimer's disease. A wonderful piece, and sadly relevant today.

That's The Head Of My Department

Jeanine Basinger, the head of the Wesleyan University film program, just got profiled in Variety (again):

According to filmmaker-thesp Domenica Cameron-Scorsese, "Jeanine teaches with positive reinforcement while putting the fear of God into you." Her policies are legendary, draconian -- and inarguably effective: No missed classes. No extensions. No exceptions. (She even holds her senior seminar on Sunday!) "Jeanine would say your only excuse for tardiness was death," remembers "Cold Case" producer Liz Garcia.

But once students get past those warnings, their reward is a class more fulfilling, engaging and stimulating than any they're likely to encounter in any discipline. Basinger's quick wit and deadpan sense of humor are as legendary as her intellect. On the recent crop of magic-themed films, ("The Prestige," "The Illusionist"), Basinger quipped to former student Marc Longenecker, "Magic in cinema is a bit like ventriloquism on the radio."

That humor is an integral part of Basinger's teaching style, which is peppered with personal anecdotes and highly original notions. Her three rules for mastering film: Watch two movies every day (to absorb history), take drum lessons (to learn rhythm) and study physics (to understand space and time).

While I never took drum lessons, I bag my hands around constantly, and like to think I've got a well developed sense of rhythm. The other two I do pretty well on, so much as working life allows.

I could pull quotes from just about every part of this article, as it all resonates – which should be no surprise, since this is the exact program I went through. I will call attention to one last bit, though:

...Basinger's teaching is founded on the premise that film's form and content are inextricable. Unlike most other film schools, where production and critical studies are separate, Wesleyan's undergraduate program, "was conceived as a wedding between history, theory and production," Basinger explains. She is intimately involved, as are all the faculty, in the editing and writing process of students' senior film projects. "Jeanine's classes bridge the gap between film appreciation, film criticism and filmmaking," concurs [Paul] Weitz ("About a Boy")... She assigns no books – though she's written 10 herself – because she insists that students study films by watching them. Writer Jeremy Arnold recalls the moment when a Basinger neophyte asked what he should focus on while viewing that day's movie: "Everything," she replied.

Amen.

Great piece, and worth a read. Especially if you want a glimpse on how I think about movies, as her department was truly formative in that regard.

[c/o Leanne]