September 2005 Archives

The New York Times has a short article on the guy who created the romantic comedy remix of "The Shining." He's already getting calls from Hollywood studios.

Looks like the awards show voting season is underway in the US, too--the IMDB reports that the first Oscar screeners have just gone out.

Two pieces of awards-show-season e-mail arrived in my inbox today, signifying that the season has begun in earnest:

1. Cinea wants to remind me to register the DVD player they sent me last award season. It's been sitting unregistered in a shelf since then, and I don't intend to register it this year, either. For those of you unfamiliar with the technology, a Cinea DVD player allows studios to send out screener DVDs that can only be played on the Cinea DVD player--and only on the Cinea DVD player of a single person, at that. I'm afraid that, if I register my player, I'll be contributing to Cinea's installed user base, which will encourage studios to send out Cinea-only DVDs, and I resent having to wedge a second DVD player into my already-crowded TV cabinet. Still, if there's some Cinea-only film that I feel I really have to watch in order to vote this year, I will bite the bullet and register the damn thing.

2. BVI wants me to know that next week, they'll be having screenings of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Cinderella Man, Sin City, and Goal! next week.

I'm not surprised that Cinderella Manand Sin City are getting pushed for awards, and it makes sense to push Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, given how fond the British are of the original series. I'm interested that the list includesGoal!--a film that looked to be fairly bog-standard, based on the reviews I've seen.

I went over to the Raindance Film Festival hoping to use my hard-won festival pass to get into NightWatch, which is supposed to be an exuberently over-the-top Russian fantasy thriller. Alas, it was sold out, perhaps because it's been labeled the must-see film of the year by Quentin Tarantino. (By which I mean that Quentin Tarantino has decreed it a must-see film, not that it is a film that must be seen by Quentin Tarantino.)

Instead, I watched the best films of Straight8, an annual filmmaking competition in which filmmakers are given a blank cartridge of Super8 film and challenged to shoot a short movie with it. The catch is that you have to hand in your film cartridge undeveloped, which means (1) you can't do any post-production on your film, and any edits have to be done "in-camera" by turning the camera off, pointing it at the next shot, and turning it back on; and (2) you don't get to see your finished film until it's projected onscreen at to a full theater.

In its adrenaline-fueled let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may spirit, the event reminds me of the 48 Hour Film Challenge, although in other respects it's completely opposite. The 48 Hour Film Challenge requires your film to be more-or-less improvised on the spot, but the Straight8 festival, by demanding that you edit your entire film on camera, requires a great deal of advance planning.

In any case, the results were interesting. Some were only successful in context. Others-- in particular, a quirky short about a guy who grows colour televisions in his garden-- would be charming and funny even if you didn't know the restrictions under which they were made.

I hadn't heard of the event before today, but now I'm highly tempted to enter it next time around.

I'm really looking forward to seeing this new, heart-warming Jack Nicholson film. (Link goes directly to a quicktime file.)

I just returned from a 5-day trip to Tunisia (about which I hope to write more later) to discover that I've won a free pass to every film at the Raindance Film Festival. Given how many free screenings I'm expecting to see over the next few month, this doesn't seem entirely fair, but that's not going to stop me from spending most of every day next week gorging myself on movies. (The festival actually starts tonight, but my co-author and I are contractually obligated to deliver "The Government Manual for New Wizards," our sequel to The Government Manual for New Superheroes, by October 1, so I doubt I'll have much movie-gorging time for the next few days.)

(NOTE: IF YOU ARE MY FRIEND HUDA, PLEASE IGNORE THE PREVIOUS PARAGRAPH AND READ THE FOLLOWING ONE INSTEAD.)
I just returned from a 5-day trip to Tunisia (about which I hope to write more later) to discover that I've won a free pass to every film at the Raindance Film Festival. Unfortunately, I plan to spend all next week hard at work on a long-overdue film treatment for my producer friend Huda, so I won't be able to go to any screenings. I'll probably give my pass to my identical twin Jackbo, so if anybody were to think they saw me spending all day at Raindance when I should be working on my treatment for Huda, it would an entirely different person who looks exactly like me but goes out and does fun things when I am hard at work.

I've always assumed that the lyrics to "Scarborough Fair" were nonsense, but at a recent concert, my wife's singing group performed some old English folk songs, and I was intrigued to read the following in the program:

Scarborough Fair tells the tale of a young man, jilted by his lover, who jokingly tells the listener to ask her to perform a series of impossible tasks, such as knitting him a shirt without a seam and then washing it in a dry well, adding that if she completes these tasks, he will take her back.

This makes even more sense when you read the complete lyrics to the song-- Simon & Garfunkel omitted some of the verses, including:

If she tells me she can't, I'll reply
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Let me know that at least she will try
And then she'll be a true love of mine

Love imposes impossible tasks
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Though not more than any heart asks
And I must know she's a true love of mine

One more of life's mysteries, cleared up at last.

There's a great Yiddish word--

Actually, let me start again.

There are a million great Yiddish words, and among them is "zitsfleisch." It literal means "sitting flesh," and it describes the ability to sit patiently for long periods of time.

It's an essential quality for a truly obsessive movie lover. I think I've got pretty good zitsfleisch. I can happily watch three movies in a day, and I've watched seven movies in a single 48-hour-period on more than one occasion.

But I must tip my cap to Noel Murray, a film critic for The Onion, who recently watched seven movies in one day, and was able to say something coherent about each of them. Now that's zitsfleisch.

I just received a flyer from a group called Dash Arts. Rather alarmingly, their upcoming season includes a play called What We Did To Weinstein. Speaking on behalf of Weinsteins everywhere, I hope the answer turns out to be "Gave him chocolate cake."

Having reached his 50s, Jackie Chan is starting to talk about abandoning stunts and fight scenes. This is certainly reasonable enough; most twenty-year-olds couldn't put their bodies through the kinds of punishment he regularly undergoes in making movies, even if he has become more willing to use wires and special effects as time has gone by.

Still, I'm saddened by the news. Drunken Master II (which was released in the US as "Legend of the Drunken Master") is one of my all-time favorite movies. Drunken Master II's script is nowhere near as brilliant as the one Comden and Green wrote for Singin' In The Rain, of course, but the two movies stand together in my mind as the great cinematic expressions of the sheer joy of movement. And Shanghai Knights showed that Jackie can still deliver breathtaking fight scenes when given a director who appreciates his skills, and a script that plays to his strengths.

I realize he's not retiring from film altogether; he's just looking for roles that won't require him to run down the side of a skyscraper, or spend two weeks filming a fight scene. Still, it's the end of an era.

I would just like to announce that I hate, hate, hate Internet Explorer.

As I understand it, at one point, all the major forces involved in programming for the Web got together and agreed on something called CSS, which is short for "cascading style sheets." To oversimplify a bit, it's a way of controlling the look of webpages.

So, right now, I'm I'm working on a new feature for the PR site for my book. It's ready to go, except for one problem--it looks like crap in Internet Explorer. So my options are:

1. Release it with proper CSS coding, thereby making it look like crap in one of the most commonly used browsers on the planet;
2. Rewrite it with crappy CSS coding, so that it looks good in Internet Explorer but crappy everywhere else;
3. Come up with a clever hack that will make the various bugs in Explorer cancel each other out, so that the page looks equally good in all browsers.

A real programmer would have no trouble doing #3. Indeed, google for "Explorer CSS hack" and you'll get tens of thousands of resuls. But the problem is, I'm not a programmer. I'm a writer, just trying to cobble together a funny website for a funny book. I really don't want to spend day after %(*&ing day muddling around just to get the (*&$£ing text to line up properly in $(*&ing Internet Explorer.

The days are getting shorter, and the air chillier. That can only mean one thing: awards show season is on its way.

True, voting for the BAFTAs, the Oscars, the WGA awards, and all the others are still months away--but I've already started receiving a trickle of e-mail invitations to special film screenings for BAFTA members. Movie addict that I am, when I see these first few invitations flutter into my inbox, my heart leaps as joyously as if they were the first changed leaves of autumn.

Last year, I wrote a giant single post about the movie-filled madness that is awards season. This year, I'm going to try to write about things as they happen, to give you more of a sense of the steady onslaught of screenings that fight for an awards-show voter's attention.

As always, I want to emphasize that I don't speak for BAFTA, or anybody else other than myself...

As I think I've mentioned before, one of the odd effects of living abroad is the feeling of distance when tragic events take place in the US. I've therefore found myself fascinated and moved by the Katrina-related photographs posted on Flickr.

This photo, this photo, and especially this one struck me as some of the most powerful depictions of the storm's force I've seen.

Other photos have a sense of documentary immediacy; some drive home the extent of the devastation or offer
frightening images of objects unmoored. Some even manage to make beautiful art out of the horrible storm and its aftereffects.