christopher's lives (v5.3)

    Didn’t get a lot of movie time this past month, but, here’s some thoughts on what we did get to see, in reverse chronological order.
    
    
Battlestar Galactica
    I just wanted to make a few comments on this before I get into the actual movies. Terra and I have watched the pilot mini-series and the first four episodes in this last couple weeks and I love it so far. I grew up on sci-fi, but, I think sci-fi really changed in the early 90s or so. I watched the first season of ST:TNG back in the day but then lost interest in Trek altogether – especially when the god-awful fifth movie came out (followed by the god-awful sixth and god-awful seventh, etc.). But I still love the first four films and I can sit through most of the old episodes. So, as they say, “Kirk is my captain”. And I have tried various sci-fi stuff over the years and just have seen very little that is any good, especially on tv. Most sci-fi seems to have turned into action, popcorn stuff in a future/tech setting, but, little actual thoughtful stuff. Sci-fi is supposed to be about IDEAS. Good science fiction leaves you thinking and discussing long after you have seen it. 1954’s The Day The Earth Stood Still is a good example, 1982’s Blade Runner is one of my favorites, and a good recent example would be 1999’s The Matrix. Who am I to define what sci-fi is? Good question. So, perhaps all I am doing is referring to a sub-genre.
    Anyway, what I have seen of BSG so far is great sci-fi; sci-fi as I understand great sci-fi to be. And just great in general. Great premise, great stories, great characters. And I really love the sound design. I am really looking forward to seeing more and I already have so many questions.
    
    
Primer
    Speaking of great sci-fi…
    I watched this in bed on my PSP. This is my fourth time or so to do this – I still haven’t watched it any other way. I love love love this movie. I love the small scale, just a couple of guys with little lives. And, made for $7,000, this truly is a ‘garage movie’. And sci-fi of concepts, no special effects needed. I also love the way it is filmed and acted – I always feel like I am just looking in, the acting is so natural I forget I am watching performances.
    This is on my mental list of greatest science fiction films ever made. And such a unique twist on the whole time travel concept.
    
    
Vanilla Sky
    Wow, um, what to say. I remember loving this movie – watched it several times with my wife and liked it enough to listen to the commentary a couple times. And, Terra had seen it and has been wanting to see it again.
    Well, we didn’t really like it. Not sure why. Though, this was the second in a Cameron Crowe double feature. We watched Almost Famous, followed by this. Maybe it was too late at night to appreciate, maybe it couldn’t measure up to Almost Famous. Dunno’. Anyway, something just didn’t click. We both felt it took too long to tell the story. Just sitting there waiting for the surprise ending and not really getting much else from it. I have no idea how this happened.
    But, I want to give it another chance some time.
    
    
Almost Famous
    I didn’t know if Terra would like this one or not, so, I went easy on her and started off with the much shorter theatrical cut.
    I knew I loved this movie but I had forgotten how much. This easily is in my top twenty of all time and I have really been thinking it deserves top ten placement.
    This is real comfort movie material here. And it is all about the people. I want to spend more time with these people. (Maybe, like is said of the main character, they make me feel cool?) I was absolutely smitten with this film every moment it was on and I converted the director’s cut plus commentary and put it on my PSP the very next day so I can spend some real quality, personal time with it. Speaking of the commentary – this film has the best. commentary. ever. At least, if you love the film.
    I have seen it many times and, again, I remember loving it, but, anytime I have considered watching it in the last year or so, I kept finding myself trying to remember WHY I loved it and couldn’t really think of anything. Like, maybe it was just the sort of thing I was into back then. I finally chose it one night because Terra loves Frances McDormand and I thought she’d love her in this one. And I expected to like it, but, I was just totally carried along the whole time.
    I have that little list of ten movies I can’t live without on my sidebar, and I may very well bump one to add this one to the list.

     By the way, see also August Rush for a movie about the love of music.
    
    
JFK
    This was the director’s cut we watched and boy was I sorry. She had never seen this film and even the theatrical cut is just way too long. But, she loves mysteries and didn’t know much about the whole Kennedy assassination thing and I grew up in the Dallas area, so, I’ve heard it all. The problem is that Oliver Stone always takes forever to tell a story. I can’t even say it is always worth the journey. I think Natural Born Killers is and this one probably is. Obviously, you come to this one for the last forty minutes and have to sit through the first (what feels like) five hours to get to the finale.
    Yes, this is a great film, but I would almost condone invasive studio control over a director’s work in this case :P
    
    
Iron Man
    Meh.
    I am biased, I don’t like action movies. Any movie that you can sum up to someone in terms of “this happened then that happened then this happened” etc. is an action flick. I used to have a practice that, whenever I watched a genre film in a genre I was not fond of, I would make it a double feature so I could compare them to each other rather than compare one to a “real movie”. But, even if I had done that and watched this with, say, one of the new Batman movies, Batman would win hands down.
    Tony Stark was an interesting character and was well-acted, but, all that did was point out how everyone else in the movie is a cardboard cut-out. And, the plot was totally color by numbers. You knew the guy in the cave was going to be dead, you knew Jeff Bridges was going to become the bad guy, this is all typical comic book stuff. Then it was combined with typical popcorn flick stuff – action sequences and pratfall humor, etc..
    A genre film is always predictable but tries to tell the story this time around with enough stylistic and interpretive differences to try to be a replacement for the previous versions and perhaps this succeeds somewhat for the superhero movie – I don’t know the genre very well. But that doesn’t make it a good film – it will be forgotten in fifty years, it leaves no legacy, it will not endure. I read Ebert’s review and just couldn’t believe his high praise for it and he even called it one of the best of the year.
    There are much better films out there that tell a story of a bad man becoming a good man and making his wrongs right and no special effects or suspension of disbelief are required. And they WILL endure, so, if you haven’t seen them, that’s ok, they’ll still be around when you are ready.
    
    
L.A. Story
    There was a day that Terra and I wanted to have a “light movie day”. Nothing deep, nothing to explain or ponder, just entertainment.
    Heh, um, I had a REAL problem finding many like that in my collection. Just to be clear, remember I have a huge LaserDisc collection of all kinds of movies, but most of them are in storage and my DVDs and Blu-Rays are only movies I love. There are plenty of “light” movies in my LD collection.
    Anyway, I love L.A. Story. It is a very romantic love story. But, there is so much more to it – it fits into my category of ‘movies that can’t figure out what they wanted to be’. But, it is another movie I say “watch it until you don’t laugh at the jokes anymore”. Sure, it works great as a comedy (see also American Psycho for a satirical view of L.A. life) but, if you want to get the full impact of the fantasy romantic side of it, watch it until that’s all you see.
    On that note, though, it sort of failed us as a “light” movie because there were more than a few moments that I couldn’t help but pause and call Terra’s attention to something subtle. In that way, Clueless is another ’see also’ for this one. I know so many teens that love Clueless and don’t seem to see that they are being made fun of. It works so well on the surface level that it is easy to miss the underlying messages.
    There is a scene or two in L.A. Story that seem to be only there so someone could get a cameo (I’m looking at you, Rick-Moranis-as-a-gravedigger scene!), but, there are a couple scenes that are so magical. For instance, when they go for a walk and feel young again, not middle-aged and hopeless, thinking love can never find them again – they now feel so much hope, like they have their whole lives ahead of them all over again. At least, that’s my interpretation of that scene. And I still get teary when she is on the plane to leave and I always hear his words spoken earlier about what he would do if he could to stop her from leaving.
    (I have on my to-do list to make a blog post about movies that make me cry. But not today.)
    
    
Fletch
    This is just a comfort film. I have seen it more times than I can count since I was a kid. I always love Chevy Chase’s shtick. The story is ok, the acting, whatever – none of it is anything special but I love Chevy Chase in pretty much anything. I can sit through a bad movie if it has Chevy Chase in it and this is probably my favorite.
    BTW, this was the first in our “light movie day”, followed by L.A. Story.
    
    
The Matrix
    One of the greatest science fiction films ever made and I stand by that ten years after seeing it the first time. And an action move I actually like – the chase scene at the beginning is so exhilarating and a big reason why I got the game Mirror’s Edge – just so I could live something similar. And, I love the visual style of it – I wish I had a poster of the group shot of them behind the phone, the first time they all go into the Matrix.
    My main complaints with this one are as an action film, oddly enough. The fight scenes should have been done by real martial artists. Watch an old Jackie Chan film – these guys move like old men. In fact, Jackie Chan at his age now, moves faster than these young actors.
    But, this one is full of great science fiction, semi-cyberpunk moments and ideas.
    Oh, I almost forgot, this was the new Blu-ray release we watched and, um, WOW! IT looks absolutely stunning.
    
    Too bad they never made any sequels :P
    
    
So, that brings this post to this month’s bottom line:
    
Was Ready To Re-Watch It As Soon As It Was Over: Almost Famous
Would Rather Re-Watch Any Other Film In This List Than This One: JFK

i was just complaining on twitter a couple weeks ago (one, two) about the netflix rating system being very restrictive…  one star = hated it, two = didn’t like, three = liked, four – really liked, and five = loved…
there are SO FEW films i want to give a five-star rating, but, according to their system, if you love it, give it five stars…  and, since you are doing this for the social aspect of finding like-minded people, it only really works if you abide by their system…

so, it got me to thinking about what i WISH i could change them to and i came up with a couple ways of looking at it:

since i have a large movie collection, one way i thought was in terms of what i might say about a film as a collector:
5 = “I own every release ever put out on LaserDisc, DVD, and Blu-Ray”
4 = “I have the Criterion DVD, is there a Blu-Ray release date yet?”
3 = “I’m waiting to come across it on sale”
2 = “I have a badly compressed file i downloaded off BitTorrent sitting on my media server, but that’s good enough”
1 = “It’s been on my NetFlix queue for months…  Near the bottom.”

and, being a home theater enthusiast and loving to watch movies with people, i was also thinking of how i might rate movies as a host, so to speak, if someone were to suggest watching a certain movie:
5 = “Great idea!  Here, have the best seat!”
4 = “Sure, it’s been too long since I saw that one”
3 = “Um, ok, that’s cool, but make sure you’ve looked at everything else first”
2 = “Hmm, well it’s in the sell stack, but, I could dig it out if you really want to see it”
1 = “WHAT???!!!  NO I DON’T OWN THAT!!  WHAT DO YOU TAKE ME FOR?!  GET THE HELL OUTTA MY HOUSE!!”

Why I hate Microsoft

DTS Online – Consumer – Home Theatre – DVD Title Search

Chicago Sun-Times – Roger Ebert – Movie Answer Man

Museum of Hoaxes – Time Travel Spam
Wired News: Turn Back the Spam of Time

Achaea – Dreams of Divine Lands
IRC Roleplaying – Dungeons and Dragons Games Looking for Players

The Morning News – Tricks of the Trade

SpamTown :: Current Spam-Blocking News And Information
Welcome to Spam Town. We don’t make spam, we learn to live with it.

i may do this more often…

Watching Laserdiscs in the Digital Age
great, detailed, new(!!) article by Josh Zyber on dealing with the problems trying to get laserdiscs’ analog video to look good on modern digital monitors…
wish we had had this article when we went shopping…

in our case (large-ish, much loved laserdisc collection and seven players; less than a hundred DVD’s and a progressive scan DVD player; multiple video game consoles; almost nothing VHS; small space, modest home theater system), we decided to go with EDTV (Enhanced Definition TV, 480p) and wait for HDTV to be worth the trouble…
specifically, the Samsung TXN2745FP (if that page redirects you, just hit back and it loads fine), which is definitely a step up from a standard interlaced image and flatscreen is great, but, though there are days we love it, we aren’t very satisfied with it most days… the choice to go EDTV was probably a sound decision (again, in our case, ymmv), but, the model we got has what appear to be power supply issues that are very common for this model from what i read online from other owners…
and thus far, we have not gotten around to doing much about it but complain amongst ourselves…

and for anyone who is wondering what the big deal is, here is a fantastic article that explains video definition differences pretty clearly and defends EDTV as a better choice than HDTV at this time…
ProjectorCentral.com – The Difference between HDTV, EDTV, and SDTV

http://features.engadget.com/entry/1882345133499767/

there is much to agree with in both the article and the comments thread…

as an added bonus, there is a great anti-microsoft rant in a user comment…

among the highlights:

If you told a stranger to Earth what they get away with on the desktop, they’d think their babelfish was broken.

When DVD Spells B-A-D
Some Great Films Suffer in Transition To New Format
November 12, 2003
By FRED KAPLAN
The New York Times

a great article about things that drive us nuts about the dvd industry/format and why we are not giving up on our laserdisc collection any time soon…

for instance, here he adresses a great example of some of the issues at the very heart of the matter…

Digital technology seems, on the face of it, a preposterously inadequate medium for storing movies, and we should gape in wonder that DVDs yield coherent pictures at all, much less the gloriously sharp, detailed images they churn out under the best of conditions. Consider: A DVD stores only 17 gigabytes of data. A two-hour film, transferred to digital data and otherwise untreated, would take up more than 150 gigabytes.
So the data must first be massively compressed, mainly by digitally sampling a frame, then sampling only the information that changes in subsequent frames.
This is no big deal for a scene of someone standing still against a blank wall. But it’s a major challenge for a scene of someone running through traffic surrounded by dozens of flashing lights and moving objects.

while ld video definitely has its own issues, it is NOT compressed and cav laserdiscs even store actual individual frames of film, something no other format does even today…

If a film is old and damaged, the compression machine will “read” random dirt and scratches in the same way it reads motion. If the machine’s operator doesn’t pay attention and make adjustments, or if the machine is subpar, the digitized image will be full of waves, zigzags and other distracting distortions.
Similar problems can plague color or, if it’s a black-and-white film, the gradations of gray. When transferring film from a negative to a print, someone has to practice the fine art of “color timing.” The same thing has to be done, though electronically, when transferring it to DVD. The job can be done well or it can be done badly.
“The main reason a lot of DVDs are so bad,” says Robert A. Harris, president of the Film Preserve, one of the top film-restoring companies, “is that the people making them don’t know what they’re doing and don’t care what they’re doing.”

well, why should they care??? they are going to price these things to sell to any shlub, so, they will not bother… dvd regularly cheaps out, while makers of ld knew they could not sell them at the prices they were asking unless they threw in GOOD extras… Boogie Nights is a great example… criterion paid for the john holmes documentary the film was based on, but when the dvd came around, new line was not willing to pay for it… the dvd was around $30, the ld was nearly $100… but, you get what you pay for… and, right now, many ld collectors are selling off their discs at insane prices, therefore, now is a great time to buy…

Doing a DVD right takes time and money. A good Telecine machine, which transfers film to an image suited for television, costs about $2 million. Use of an outside lab’s Telecine facilities can cost up to $1,000 an hour.
The Criterion Collection, which produces some of the finest DVDs of classic films, routinely takes months to make a digital transfer. Lee Klein, Criterion’s chief technician, says: “If there’s a scratch, we draw it out frame by frame. When there’s 12 pieces of debris on each frame, it takes a long time.”
Most studios don’t bother.
Some simply take the master that was made for laser disc, or even for VHS videotape, and transfer it to DVD. This was an especially common practice in the infancy of DVD, four to six years ago.

and he gives a few good examples in the article of lousy dvd’s, showing the widespread apathy of dvd makers… their attitude is getting better, so, i hope by the time hd-dvd is the standard, they will have learned and can offer a consistently worthy product…

i am NOT saying that laserdisc is necesarily better in every way to dvd, my point is that laserdisc is still a viable format today, for those willing to pay, and should not have been discontinued so early (the last u.s. laserdisc release was in 2000)… many ld collectors out there are already regretting selling off their collection when they are left with substandard dvd’s, or even no dvd release available, such as the theatrical cuts of close encounters and star wars… and those two are great examples because there will NEVER be a dvd release of them…

laserdisc is a format for the serious film lover, dvd is the next vhs, the format for the masses…
what hd-dvd will be remains to be seen…

after you get past the first few posts, anyway…

covers some usual ld vs. dvd stuff, with some dvhs stuff thrown in and even a couple chinese formats… also interesting are some good numbers about compression of audio formats on dvd, superbit dvd, dvhs, and ld, which is a very important point of comparison in home video formats…

i still say laserdisc is very worthwhile, dvd is a transitional format, hd-dvd will be here eventually and that format will be much more worth having than current dvd… dvd will be remembered for its faults… dvd will be like discovision is to the modern laserdisc…

if hd-dvd hurries along, dvd may some day end up as “obscure” as ld (in the mass-market mind)…

How Film Is Transferred to Video

i dug this up since it covers the whole original aspect ratio vs. pan&scan thing covered the previous post…

some damn good info and pretty much covers all one needs to know, though, as usual, i am not sure it adequetly explains the point of anamorphic video…

in a nutshell, your tv only has a certain number of scan lines to display the image… and those scan lines cannot come anywhere close to matching the resolution of a frame of film…
widescreen films on video have black bars at the top and bottom, taking up sometimes as much as half of your screen and thus half of those precious scan lines that weren’t enough to properly show film even when you were using all of them…
now, you COULD ditch the bars and use all the scan lines, but, then you lose the shape of the image… in other words, you basically zoom in on the image, but then, of course, you either have to cut off the sides or distort the image, stretching it vertcally…
hence widescreen tv’s and “anamorphic squeeze” buttons on standard tv’s… the proper shape is kept, with little to no scan lines wasted on nothing but black bars…

meh, it might make more sense if you read it again after you read the article at the link… it is not the easiest thing to explain without examples…

i doubt it…

this article is much more optimistic than i am, though, i agree that a large part of the battle is educating the cinematically ignorant…

Last year, something remarkable happened in the world of cinema. Blockbuster Video, the country’s dominant rental chain, announced that from that point on it officially preferred widescreen DVDs to pan-and-scan (also known as “full screen”). For those movie buffs who had been eagerly watching this battle, the news came as a shock. In the fight for the hearts and minds of viewers, widescreen and its film-geek adherents had won an unexpected and glorious victory. Just a few years earlier, Blockbuster had discouraged widescreen DVDs, on the grounds that customers confused by the letterbox format thought they were defective. Now, the chain was conceding what cinephiles had argued for years: that widescreen was the superior way to watch a movie at home, even if it left black bars at the top and bottom of your television screen.

Anyone who scrounged for widescreen tapes during the VHS era will understand the historic nature of the announcement. Back then, widescreen tapes were tucked in obscure corners of the video store. When film buffs advanced the moral argument against pan-and-scan—that it butchered the filmmaker’s vision and cut out as much as half of the picture—they were met by a blank stare from store clerk and casual fan alike.

the rest is here…
How Widescreen Won – The way we watch movies at home has changed. What happened? By Bryan Curtis

(it even mentions laserdiscs and Criterion, properly crediting the format and company with the initial victories in the original-aspect-ratio-vs.-”foolscreen” war…)