Wednesday, July 31, 2002


Mexisex
Michael -- I caught up with "Y Tu Mama Tambien."  I liked it (especially the heroine's breasts--perhaps the best natural (?) pair I can remember in a film). However, as the days have gone by since I saw it, I find the film's theme sticks a bit in my craw.  If I am reading it right, the film is saying that Mexico's problems are the result of the Mexican elite, who--boiling over with homoerotic tendencies that their "macho" code won't let them express--end up "fucking over" everybody else (the poor, the women who tend to the macho men so faithfully) and, of course, are destined to end their days as pathetic, deeply compromised fucks.   Somehow this reminds me of "American Beauty" and various other films in which gay writers express their apparently deeply held opinion that the only true love is homo love, and if hetero men were just honest enough, they would all turn homo. (Didn't that book you sent me ages ago, "Crackers," have a rather funny chapter on the delusions of grandeur of the Village Voice homo crowd?)  Also, it seemed rather "inorganic" (story-wise) that the two friends who had spent the night in a threesome couldn't handle the concept; I would have thought it more likely that they would have just made some jokes about it and gotten on with their lives.  So my final comment is that the film had the makings of greatness, but it was sacrificed to a rather small-minded judgmentalness.   What think you?  Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at July 31, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Pixelvision Reredux
Friedrich -- I forget where I picked up these facts, but I'm pretty sure they're trustworthy. Film has 4X the dynamic range of the best video. Film has about 3X the pixel-type info per frame as the best video. Film is more sensitive to tones than video. All the information in only one film frame would equal 40 megabytes of uncompressed computer space. All that said, your points are excellent and well-taken. I'm all for anything that makes it easier to bypass the usual channels. Now that I've got a digital still camera, for instance, I'll probably never use film again even for snapshots. And all hail your concept of Napster for video, so far as distribution goes. If and when I write something book-like, I'll probably self-publish it rather than submit to the traditional publishing process. Who, if all else were equal, would choose to wrestle with the industrial publishing complex? And it's thanks to computers I'll be able to do that. That said, and speaking strictly as a consumer (rather than a potential producer), it does seem to me that the cyber-propagandists are pushing video imagery on us a little too quickly at the movie theater. It isn't dense enough yet to hold the attention. George Lucas himself seems to know this. In an interview in Film Comment, he admits that the computer-video image has a long way to go. Personally, I find it as dead and flat as a pancake -- do the mind and eye register how much information has been compressed out of existence? The one movie I've seen where I thought the video image worked well was "The Anniversary Party." Have you seen it? Seriously annoying (revelations, carrying-on, anguish, a party that goes to hell, confrontations, etc) -- but shot well, and edited to allow for the faster way we seem to read video images. The imagery fell apart only in the closeups. For some reason, video doesn't (yet?) seem capable of producing the dreamy-iconic effect film closeups can. And without dreamy closeups of actresses, I'm not much interested in movies, gosh darn it. I find it interesting that, in the world of TV, when people making a commercial want a dreamy-transporting-fictional feel, they shoot film. When they want what they've made to seem "real," they shoot video. So, typically, I'm divided. Though I do love passing hours in the erotic trance state that watching a movie can throw me into. But, come to think of it, I enter that state all too seldom at the movies recently anyway, given the theme parks that movies have largely become. So fuck it. Or, by and large, fuck it. (Take that, George Lucas. Who, by the way, argues in his Film Comment interview that no matter what it is that gives a celluloid movie image its magic, computers and videos will eventually be able to mimic the mechanisms.) Maybe it's like the early CDs, which were cold and lifeless, however accurate. If the powers that were... posted by Michael at July 31, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Pixelvision redux
Michael -- I don't know if you saw the announcement by a new company, Foveon, that claims that they have developed an imaging chip that (1) has much better color than previous electronic "photography" systems and (2) collects more data per square inch than film.  Of course, Foveon's technology may or may not deal with issues such as video's relative inability to create whites as white or blacks as black as film.  But in any case, you can create quite beautiful images with video if you allow for its quirks.  I mean, look at early silent films, shot on film stock that probably has nowhere near the technical capabilities of today's best products.   Anyway, the real reason to back video rather than film is that film is dependent on a deeply entrenched distribution channel that holds more or less total power over what gets seen by the masses.  Who cares if your movie is beautifully photographed if nobody will distribute it?  I say, we need Napster for videos.  Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at July 31, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Friday, July 12, 2002


Moviegoing: "Star Wars: Attack of the Clones"
Friedrich -- Did I mention that I dragged the wife to the latest "Star Wars"? Showing at the Ziegfeld, digitally projected. What a turkey, as bad as the last one even if more richly produced. As David Ansen put it in Newsweek, by this point you either buy into the "Star Wars" world almost religiously, or you shake your head and say, basically, go figure. But it was bad, bad, I can't tell you how bad -- as bad as any Ed Wood movie, and considerably less fun. (To paraphrase one reviewer on Amazon, I defy anyone to tell me what the movie's story was.) At least the Ziegfeld's air conditioning was first-class. All that said, I was there to see what the movie looked like, digitally projected. (The world of moviegoing has come to a sorry pass when perfectly good and willing movie buffs go to a movie just to see what the computers have been up to.) And the answer is.... not bad. After about a month of use, the image was eerily perfect. Not a scratch to be seen, not a dust fleck, not a shimmer or a shiver. And the colors were perfectly consistent all through the movie. But the image was also dilute and flat -- I muttered to the wife at one point, "If a good celluloid movie image is like snappy fresh-squeezed orange juice, this is like watered-down Tang." It's a decent facsimile of a movie image, but it's sterile, and missing that je ne sais quoi. I think of it, for some reason, as chi -- that Chinese word for something like (so I gather) the life force. Maybe I should just say zing. For one thing, the digital image just isn't dense enough yet. We moved up to the front-ish part of the theater at one point, and there you really register that the image simply needs more pixels. Darks are especially bad -- things get lost in a kind of dim, apricot-jam murk. But judging digital projection from a Lucas movie is an odd challenge, because Lucas doesn't ever aim for poetry or even glamor or sex. He wants his imagery to be clean and functional, no matter how spectacular. ("Gladiator," which I didn't enjoy, did have a very juicy look, at least by comparison to the new "Star Wars.") And the digitally-projected image is certainly at this point a perfectly clean and functional image. But that's its problem, too. Watching it is like watching a PowerPoint presentation that happens to move. I wonder if these problems will be solved as the computers and projectors get better. In other words, are more pixels all that's needed to solve the missing-chi problem? But I can't help worrying that when art gets sliced and diced into discrete digital bits, something falls away -- the connective tissue, the flow, maybe the poetry. But maybe I'm being sentimental. Your thoughts? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at July 12, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Kubrick re-redux
Friedrich -- You and the wife ought to chatter about Kubrick sometime. I occasionally have something halfway interesting to say about work I don't enjoy, but not with Kubrick. Watching his films, at least post-"Strangelove," I feel pinned down like a butterfly. All those centered compositions, those blaring overhead lights, those plunging spaces, those ultra-deliberate tracking shots -- all of which I take as an image of cerebral control, the cage of intellect, if you will. And I get restless, I look for escape, and come away exhausted, rattled and speechless. Kubrick always seems to go at things intellectually. Even with the acting: his hope seems to be that if you ponder and insist long enough, and bear down hard enough, something strange and wonderful is likely to occur. (The hope of every obsessive workaholic?) To my mind, sometimes it does (Malcolm Macdowell) and sometimes it doesn't (most everyone else in the movie). But I suspect I'm just demonstrating how out-of-sympathy I am with what Kubrick's up to. Am I wrong in thinking that, as he moved past his hustling-and-perverse early stage, he got overdeliberate and his humor left him? But I can sense the wife getting ready to tell me I just don't get the real brilliance of "Barry Lyndon." Which I'm sure I don't. I've always been fascinated by the fact that Kubrick meant so much to some people. (Does he still?) Of all filmmakers, why him? Clearly, geeks can relate to his work. And, clearly, frustrated adolescents with superman fantasies can relate to it too. I'm guessing too that, like Woody Allen, Kubrick was "our boy" to people in the business. Some of Woody and Stanley's movies are super, some are lousy. But both guys got cut an enormous amount of slack by the business. And both became, at least in certain circles, almost-officially-certified geniuses. How these two? Why these two? Also: when you think back to your infatuation with Kubrick as a college kid, what occurs to you now? Do his movies still mean something similar to you now? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at July 12, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Kubrick redux
Michael -- I think your remark about Kubrick's tendency to set up one "number" after another is exactly on point. He wants, in the context of a narrative film, to create a series of little theatre pieces. It's perfectly analogous to Hogarth's serial paintings, except that Kubrick prefers a much more reductionist asethetic (Hogarth has a little too much life going on in the corners for Stanley, or at least for the later Stanley.) Many of Stanley's formal devices are designed to force the ordinarily "naturalistic" film aesthetic into a theatrical context. Think of the use of symmetrical compositions in "Paths of Glory" which even manage to theatricalize the execution scenes, held outdoors in natural light in deep focus (!!!). Or the obvious rear screen projection behind Slim Pickens as he rides the bomb down to glory in "Dr. Strangelove." While this approach has always held a definite appeal to me, it only works for me as long as it is in tension with a strong narrative (which sets up opportunities for humor, irony, etc. in his rather static theatre pieces). I think the disappointment of his later films for me is that he didn't find good enough strong stories to provide tension to his rather obsessive focus. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at July 12, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Wednesday, July 10, 2002


DVD Journal: "A Clockwork Orange"
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- The wife and I watched a documentary about Stanley Kubrick (from Cinemax?) the other night. Well enough done to get us interested in Kubrick again, so we rented and watched "Clockwork Orange," my first time looking at the film since the early '70s. I tend to blank out in front of Kubrick's late movies, love though I do "Lolita" and "Strangelove." I get bored and don't have much to say. But the wife's a Kubrick buff ("Barry Lyndon" four times!), and got me seeing that "Clockwork Orange" is like a caustic, downtown, off-off-Broadway musical -- a conceptual director's version of something Jacobean and sardonic, like "The Beggar's Opera." It's one "number" after another. I found myself taking the movie -- and semi-enjoying some of it -- as a (too long) Richard Foreman production. (Have you seen Foreman's theater stuff? Much less narrative than Kubrick, but brilliant and obsessive in a similar way.) I dug up Pauline Kael's pan of the movie and realized that she'd missed its point. She didn't like the movie, so she set up a straw-man version of Kubrick, and then bashed away at him. An exciting piece to read, and (at least when she steps down from the debating podium, stops making a case, and just writes about what she doesn't like about the film -- ponderous, slow, overwrought, etc) perceptive and fair in spots. But not, by and large, about the movie the wife and I watched last night. I remember what a Kubrick nut you were, and would be curious to hear your 2002 reflections about what it is you find/found interesting about his work. I'm sending a tape of the documentary out your way. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at July 10, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments