Inglorious Annagramattica

Kinda wish she'd been our wedding videographer:

Read more of "Inglorious Annagramattica"

Gotta love the French...

Almost everyone's heard of the Milgram experiments in the sixties; a participant is ordered to administer increasingly high voltages to an actor who feigns death. Along with the Stanford Prison experiments, Milgram's research is one of the major reasons modern university research has to go through an institutional review board (IRB) that examines the ethical implications for human subjects. Well apparently the French are familiar with the Milgram experiments too, and came up with the nifty idea (in an apparent bid to solidify their trade relationship with Japan) of making a game show:

Read more of "Gotta love the French..."

Life Under Arctic Ice Sheet

Looks like things are cookin' under the polar ice. NASA drilled below the half-mile-thick Ross Ice shelf to an isolated underground sea and found this:




We all know what happens next ... Killer Prawns from Outer Space!

Read more of "Life Under Arctic Ice Sheet"

Chatroulette Meets Pianoman

The other night I was having dinner with some folks and had a single, enormously uncomfortable encounter with Chatroulette. If only we'd met someone like this guy (Via Sullivan):

Read more of "Chatroulette Meets Pianoman"

Bigelow: 2, Sanity: 0; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Hate the Oscars

If any of us set out to list the gripes that range from annoying to down-right infuriating about the Oscars, we'd run out of web space before entries. But let me put it to you simply: name a single award ceremony where three of the top four awards (best picture, director, male and female actor) went to the folks that you felt deserved it. You might point out that, it's in the nature of selecting among the top five (or ten?!) in each category that people will disagree over which was best. Fair enough. But every year in the post-Oscar soul searching I get an earful and see a string of articles about various categories where the wrong person or film wins.

This year, I've mostly seen congrats to Bigelow for netting best picture and best director. And the coverage has been positive (yay for breakout women!). But a cold dose of reality: The Hurt Locker was a decent, but only marginally above-average film for an Oscar nominee. It had solid direction, some key performances, interesting editing, and a lousy, lousy script.

The only thing that made me want to vomit more than screenwriter Mark Boal's egregiously inflated ego while accepting two awards was the absolutely f*ing ridiculous line that starts the movie off: "War is a drug." And the only thing that could rival that line for vacuousness is a performance by Keanu Reeves -- and thankfully, he introduced The Hurt Locker at the Oscars, which means we got to actually hear Keeanu deliver the line with the appropriate depth of thought and sentiment.

By the way, as Keenu began to say that "War .... is a drug" I ducked behind the couch -- instinctively I suspected that he was violating the Pauli exclusion principle. But then I blinked and realized that Pauli's rule only applies when the two objects have some sort of substance.

Contrast, for a moment, the way that Bigelow's movie opens with say, the new Star Trek. In Star Trek, as you recall, it's not (per a grade-school essay) a f*ing quote, or even an image, but a naked sound -- an evolution of the particular flavor of Star Fleet sound effects that marked how J. J. Abrams' movie would both engage and depart from Trek films past. That was a brilliant use of sound editing, no? Of course, The Hurt Locker won the f*ing Sound Editing award, too.

I could go on about how "War is a drug" degrades the complexity of war, perpetuates the stupidity of "The War on Drugs" mentality, or even the "War on Terror." I could note that in fifty years they'll still be studying Avatar as a key chapter in the history of cinema, and film students won't even recognize the name "Hurt Locker" except on trivia night, as the answer to "Which film won Best Picture instead of James Cameron's 2009 classic, Avatar?"

Instead, I'll just recommit to last year's resolution: when Oscar night rolls around next year, and I'm inevitably dragged to another Oscar-watching party, I'm bringing headphones and a good book.

Read more of "Bigelow: 2, Sanity: 0; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Hate the Oscars"

Benjamin and the digital aura

Wonder what old Walter would make of a video like this:

Nobody Beats The Drum - Grindin' from nobody beats the drum on Vimeo.

This video as sweet example of the growing movement to recreate the digital aura through analog effects. I think Benjamin would eat this up. I think that the logic of it also suggests that his anxiety about the loss of aura in the age of mechanical reproduction was premature. It's pretty clear, despite the near perfect reproducibility that digital technology offers, that it can also offer something deeply "authentic" and deeply unique. It's not as if virtual worlds and video games create themselves.

Read more of "Benjamin and the digital aura"

Dog crack

Videos like this really put me in my place. There's no way The Talented Videographer will ever love me like she loves this video. (Via Sullivan)

Read more of "Dog crack"

Is Avatar is a remake of The Dark Crystal?

Last night we put in one of the all-time great films of the 80s, Jim Henson's Dark Crystal. In it, a young male "Gelfling," raised by a technocratic race, has to leave after a prophecy is discovered that predicts a resolution to the conflict between the world's races. He is taken briefly under the wing of a natural scientist who studies the world and knows what the larger conflict is all about. But he's then separated from her and flees to the jungle to escape some large black pursuing creatures.

The forest is filled with flora and fauna that remind you vaguely of underwater life, from giant sea anemones that suck their fronds back into a central trunk, to small white seeds with helicopter fronds which fly. The gelfling is attacked by a small dog-like creature, but is saved by a strange gelfling woman of the forest, who knows its secrets and can talk to the animals there. She teaches him how to ride giant striding horses, and later, to fly. She has the same high-cheekboned features he has -- though they both remind you vaguely of Michael Jackson.

It turns out that another clan of the technocratic race (we don't realize they're related until the end) is exploiting the resources of the planet by sucking "essence" out of its creatures. There's a final battle, the rule of the technocrats is over thrown (and they fly off into space), and the races of the world learn to live in harmony. So, yes, Avatar is a remake of the Dark Crystal.

I'm not saying that Avatar is exclusively based on The Dark Crystal. There is clear indebtedness to Frank Herbert's Dune as well as Tolkein's Lord of the Rings. Most important, the tie-in to video games and virtual worlds was an inspired innovation. But if the plot as well as visual production of Avatar doesn't draw heavily on Jim Henson's masterpiece, I'll eat my shorts.





This also reinforces the incredible achievement that The Dark Crystal represents. In the age of CGI, no one will ever make a movie with the complexity of Henson's using exclusively analog techniques again. It's also a testament to the imaginative work and vision that it took to realize a world that is every bit as rich and detailed as Avatar's using cloth, wood, and strings.

Read more of "Is Avatar is a remake of The Dark Crystal?"