Archive for January, 2010
When we were trying to figure out how to create the SPLASH effect for episode 10 of Coma, Period., after exhausting our library of effects videos, we finally decided that to get what we wanted, we’d have to shoot it ourselves. Practicals, baby! So we went to the market for some milk, and Jazz and I filmed a bunch of clips of her dropping a metal ball into a bowl of milk. I found the results beautiful in themselves, and finally decided to just edit them together into something. This isn’t some amazing piece of art, but maybe you’ll find it enjoyable.
Here’s the final product, which you’ll see before the credit sequence:
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Oh, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, your overlong title is only the first of your many many problems. The phrase “Wolverine fights a helicopter” should clue you in that this at least approached the big budget bad movie thrills one hopes for from this sort of train wreck, but it also means enduring the most wilting pansy origin for a super-hero name I have ever seen.
I have such distaste for the film that I shall use Comic Sans in my humorous image, just out of spite.
There are a million places online where you can read scathing reviews of this film, so I’ll be brief. Here are 4 things I learned from X-Men Origins: Wolverine
1) No man, no matter how long and pretty his fingernails, nor how many HBO sports specials he narrates, will ever look cool bounding on all fours across a battlefield. He will look stupid.
2) If Ryan Reynolds is in your movie, pay him more money and keep him onscreen for as long as humanly possible. He is the best thing about your film. (see also)
Computer graphics approximately equivalent to those in X-Men Origins:Wolverine
3) Whenever someone says “We can’t let you walk away,” what they actually mean is “I am about to totally let you walk away, but several years from now there will be some repercussions for this!”
As a fan of comic books and the X-Men, and sort of Wolverine, there is only one thing I can commend the film on. They truly nailed that thing that stupid team-up comics always do, where the heroes meet, and fight for no reason, and then decide to fight the bad guy together. This happens at least three times. It might actually apply to every single fight scene, but to be sure I would have to watch it again, and I won’t.
I just don’t understand why you had to make this particular Wolverine movie, instead of one where he fights ninjas, or where Robot Wolverine befriends a little girl named Elsie Dee (get it?) who is a bomb.
BAD-BAD <————X——–———–> FUN-BAD
Characters you care about: 1 (Ryan Reynolds)
Bullets sliced in half: 1 (by Ryan Reynolds)
Drinking requirement to enjoy: Heavy
Available on: All over the goddamn place
Find yourself wasting endless hours online, distracted by a constant litany of emails and pokes and pings? Can’t stay off Facebook for long enough to keep focused on your Great American Novel? Can’t stop compulsively checking the Bunny Blog? Then what you need is a healthy dose of the ironically-named Freedom.
Freedom is a donationware OS X app that shuts down your network communications for a specific period of time. Nothing short of a full reboot will revoke this shutdown.
A communication disruption can mean only one thing: productivity!
You have your choice between shutting down just your internet access or all access including your local network. You’ll need an administrator password to make it go.
Freedom is a handy escalation from another ironically-titled app I was using for a while, SelfControl, which disables access only to a specified list of URLs. If your only vice is espn.com or comaperiod.com, you can just block those sites. Me, I prefer the ironclad veil of silence of Freedom. I used to enjoy incredible productivity on airplanes, with zero distractions, but now even that is in threat. Freedom is here to liberate me. As a man once said, “Hell is other people.”
As another man once said, “Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves,” so here’s the link! Go get yourself some Freedom now!
Last Friday the American Cinematheque screened another installment in its “Blows Up the Internet” series, this time featuring STRIKE TV. (The first was apparently Dr. Horrible and the third will be Crackle.)
photo credit by Genevieve Webster
Our web series, Coma, Period. was featured second, and I got to join a panel together with Steven de Souza (writer of Die Hard and Unknown Sender) and Timothy Dalton (played James Bond in License to Kill). Susan Miller (writer on the L Word and Anyone But Me), Matt Enlow (director of Mountain Man) and Andrew Miller (creator of Imaginary Bitches).
It was a fun night with some good episodes, notably Joe & Kate and Speedie Date. It was real neat to see Coma, Period. on the big screen. Dan’s coma is so amazingly, blindingly white!
Every Sunday, I watch a bad movie. At first it just sort of worked out that way (what a way to end the week!) and now I do it on purpose. Some of these movies are fun-bad, and some are just atrocious, but there’s always something of value in every bad movie, even if it’s just the hangover, so it is your good luck, dear reader, that I shall be sharing my findings with you! Thanks to the holiday weekend, Bad Movie Monday starts on a Tuesday. Get over it.
We begin Bad Movie Monday with a little gem called Superstarlet AD. Made in the far flung year 2000 and distributed by Troma, which is usually not a great sign, the movie is certainly better than Babylon AD, or 10,000 BC, both of which probably cost approximately their budgets minus fifty bucks more than Superstarlet AD.
You can watch this “trailer,” but really it will only tell you two things: this movie was actually shot on film, and the filmmakers have a pretty decent sense of humor and strangeness.
I have an unabashed love of movie titles. A good title sequence is a work of art all on its own, and can bring incredible value to a film - in mood, story, and production value. Nobody knows this, or analyzes it, better than The Art of the Title, a site/blog that features great movie titles, detiled analysis, and interviews with some of the biggest title designers out there. If you’re interested in the thught process behind some of your favorite title sequences, this is the place, and f you just want to watch some incredible titles, everything is available in SD, HD, and even for iPhone.
Some of my favorites:
The numbers are in, and the Wall Street Journal put together a graph of consumer movie spending in 2009, compared to 2008.
This echoes a lot of Hollywood whining about slumping DVD sales, but as usual I find it hard to have much sympathy for their plight. In every other category (including DVD rental!) sales are up versus the year before. Growth in theatrical spending, in fact, nearly compensates for the loss in DVD sales alone. So I would like to offer the world’s tiniest violin as a concession to those who thought DVD was going to be a cash cow forever. Maybe I should offer a history book as well.
(image blatantly stolen)
Online transactions are still a tiny slice of the pie, but nearly doubled over the past year. If that trend continues then digital delivery will be a viable mechanism within a couple of years, which bodes particularly well for indie filmmakers with direct access to the means of distribution. Despite a lot of big talk, it didn’t happen last year. Will 2010 be the year when someone steps up with a substantial platform for online film?