Category: flix

…is one of the most hilariously bad movies I’ve ever seen.

The acting is bad. The writing is ridiculous. The main character has makeup that makes her look like she’s 60.

The direction is I’m pretty sure done while drunk. Actors walk in front of lights and perform like in a kindergarten vegetable play (to quote Michael Litfin). Sometimes they completely flub a line.

The editor put this weird kaleidoscope transition that is so brief it looks like it’s left in on accident.

Tura Satana is in it!

The violence is also funny. Ten minutes in, someone gets shot in the face, and she spins around crosseyed before falling to the ground. An enemy agent is tortured into confessing by pulling her hair.

Tons of wacky spy gadgets: brain implants. Pocket flamethrowers. Microfilms, truth serum, silenced guns, exploding cars…

Watching an extra in the Special Features of “Blue” where director / cinematographer Krzysztof Kieslowski describes (in 1994) the construction of the cafe/sugarcube scene and the logistics required to make sure it took exactly 4-5 seconds for the coffee to diffuse through the sugarcube.

He also describes why he chose each close-up and the philosophy of the scene.

In the extra in the disc of “White” – he describes the beginning, where the main character enters the courthouse cut between shots of the suitcase on the conveyer belt.

This beginning was re-cut. He describes the intentional primitive images in all three films – a wheel on the road, a suitcase on a belt, and some wires in “Red.” The hero is intentionally awkward in movement and in dress, originally using long shots to let the audience absorb the hero’s mannerisms. However this was too long, so it was re-cut with the suitcases.

The hero is “marked” by a pigeon, which has tradition behind it in addition to the director “marking” the character for emphasis. Also it’s humiliating: Kieslowski describes “White” as being a movie about humiliation. Look at his face when he wipes the poop off his shoulder.

The suitcase is seen in the beginning and is meaningless. But it is a preview that we see later when we know what is in it (actually I kind of assumed there was a body in it, but that is probably because I watch too many yakuza movies).

“Red” is the best of the three. Irene Jacob is super hot, and her every movement is posed to match the light position exactly. The color choices are also the most strict of the three: every item in every shot is black or red.

The plot is the most self-referential: all the elements refer to each other at the end: the billboard image and the still from the news, and the young and old judge, with the same women and same experience with law books. In fact, the same experience with the “other man”: the young judge loses his blonde gf to the model’s photographer, but the photographer essentially loses his model to her England trip where the young judge is. The main characters from the previous two movies also make a very brief cameo.

I just saw Martin Scorcese’s “After Hours.” Shlubby New Yorker “Paul” gets stranded in SoHo and encounters a zany cast of freaky NYC characters while trying to get home however he can. He sees a murder, a suicide, performance art, bad sculpture, a punk club, and a vigilante mob led by an ice cream vendor all while trying to escape back home. While charming, it is ultimately plotless.

As with many of Scorcese’s works, it should be watched on as large a screen as possible with the lights low. If you have to, watch it on a laptop in the dark with the screen 6 inches from your face. The atmosphere is important.

A 27-year-old Linda Fiorentino is super damn hot, super sassy, arty, and mean.

After Hours is sort of the best-of-genre whose name I don’t really know, so let’s call it the Urban Bullshit movie. People in New York are so crazy!! They are so so crazy. Their zaniness is endearing at first but ultimately hostile and eventually life-threatening. One of the hallmarks of this kind of story is many of the “problems” would melt away if the protagonist grew a spine and asserted himself to irrational behavior. Another hallmark: the protagonist is from somewhere “safe” (generally the suburbs) and is trying to get home, and the plot happens almost entirely in one single night. Other examples might include “Adventures in Babysitting” and “Detroit Rock City.” Maybe the second Babe movie.

Scorcese describes Allan Dwan’s movies “Brewster’s Millions” (1945, I’ve only seen the Richard Pryor remake!), “Getting Gertie’s Garter,” and “Up in Mabel’s Room,” all movies with implausible but still non-fantastical frantic happenings. Also by Dwan “The Inside Story,” which sounds like a 1940s version of “Twenty Bucks” (1993). Scorcese mentions that the very fast pace is essential to these kinds of movies.

Back to After Hours for a second: it’s definitely worth watching, but actually the best thing about the DVD release is Martin Scorcese’s commentary. He tells the entire history of the project, and what he’d been doing before that, and how the movie industry was changing at the time (1985). Scorcese is a true film historian, and I learn more about film and film history every time I listen to one of his lectures or commentaries.

In an aside, Scorcese describes lecturing in Beijing, with Shirley Sun, director of “Iron and Silk,” and Peter Wang, an actor in “Chan is Missing” (Wayne Wang), who later directed “A great wall” (also written by Shirley Sun). Peter Patzak (sp?) was in there somewhere. Anyway, he realizes in retrospect that the audience contained the budding “5th Generation” filmmakers in the audience, including Zhiang Yimou, Chen Kaiga, and Tian Zhuangzhuang.

After Hours is lit very sparingly, using mainly available light, sometimes only camera light. They reached a pace of 16-18 setups a day, which is insane (usually a Hollywood movie does like 7). The elaborately descriptive shot list was provided to the crew, so everyone knew what they were doing.

A cool trick: a couple scenes have Paul running as fast as he can, but the production didn’t have a track or a stabilized truck mount. So they had him run in a big circle around the camera (30 feet?), with things in between him and the camera to create depth and the impression he is running under and behind things (a scaffold and traffic easels, etc). The camera simply pans in a circle.

One thing no one in the commentary mentioned: there’s a Kafka reference in After Hours… it’s the “Before the Law” segment from “The Trial.” Except the guard is now a bouncer at a club.

RoboGeisha sorta looks like Machine Girl (after seeing the trailer I now realize there’s a reason for this; it’s the same director and visual effects team), but also like CASSHERN, which was awesome– that was a virtual set movie (like Sky Captain) but it was about fighting robots in a post-apocalyptic world. It’s based on a 1980s cartoon.

I’ve been watching a lot of retro Japanese and modern Japanese film recently (leaving what, exactly? “Classic” film I guess? Contemporary horror?).

So far I recommend:

• Sex and Fury – a “pinky violence” samurai movie, like Lady Snowblood. In an extra “oh this is what Tarantino was talking about” reference, it also has the actress from “They Call Me One Eye.”
• Ecstasy of the Angels – a gritty 1960s piece about a revolutionary cell betraying each other
• Detective Story – a recent Miike movie. It combines a… Detective Story… (duh)… with his usual wackiness. There’s a super scary half second in it about 20 minutes in which ends up having nothing to do with anything

This is a great, if very lengthy, documentary/sampler of Italian Neo-Realism. It’s a bit like taking a film study survey course!

Directors and their films:

• Italian epics:
  • Giovanni Pastrone: Cabiria (1914)
  • Alessandro Blasetti: The Iron Crown (1941), Fabiola (1947)
• Roberto Rossellini: Rome, Open City (1945), Paisan (1946), Germany Year Zero (1947), The Miracle (1948), Stromboli (1950), The Flowers of St. Francis (1950), Europa ’51 (1952), Journey to Italy (1954)
• Vittorio De Sica: Shoeshine (1946), Bicycle Thieves (1948), Umberto D (1952), The Gold of Naples (1954)
• Luchino Visconti: Ossessione (1943), Giorni di Gloria (1945), La Terra trema (1950), Senso (1954)
• Federico Fellini: I vitelloni (1953), La dolce vita (1960), 8½ (1963)
• Michelangelo Antonioni: L’avventura (1960), L’eclisse (1962)

In the Antonioni segment, Scorseze mentions a few other directors and films influenced with the Neo-Realist style:

• Jean-Luc Godadrd: My Life To Live, Breathless
• John Casavetes : Shadows
• Luis Bunuel: Viridiana
• Ingmar Bergman: The Silence, Persona
• Oshima Nagisa (大島 渚): Cruel Story of Youth
• Glauber Rocha: Antônio das Mortes
• Imamura Shōhei ( 今村 昌平 ): The Insect Woman (にっぽん昆虫記 Nippon konchuki)
• Alain Resnais: Hiroshima Mon Amour, Last Year at Marienbad

Good lord why did I watch this. Wasn’t the book bad enough?

Made in 1987, the story is just depraved, and I’m not talking about the incest (which either is not in the movie or I spaced out during that part).

At every opportunity, the most dramatic thing happens, even if it is completely improbable. Example: protagonist is pretty, blonde, innocent. She is her daddy’s favorite; he even says so. So her father not only dies in an accident which is never explained, but on his birthday, and when they are preparing a surprise party for him. Every drop of melodrama is milked from the scenario.

Basically the movie is an exercise in repressed sexual reference. Petty-evil mom played by Victoria Tennant (playing a similarly spoiled character as in All of Me) stands subservient and has her clothes ripped off before being whipped by her bible-toting mother and father. Doomed-to-die blonde dad flirts with his favorite daughter, the protagonist played by a very young Kristy Swanson.

I feel like porn is more honest; normally I would have liked this movie but since it’s an adaptation of the book it has no plot development. This is basically a romance/fantasy for preteens.

BUT you know what was great? Christopher Young did the score. Which I guessed, because it sounds just like the Hellraiser movies!

Someone needs to do a “What’s Up, Tiger Lily?”-style redub of Hard Candy.

It’s the reason I don’t see Ellen Paige movies… she’s so so bad in it, it might be just the writing, but it’s also a really smug movie that is just annoying and pointless.

I think it’s meant to be, Is he a child molester? Is he not? What is her big plan?

But wait, who fucking cares?! There’s absolutely no investment in either character. Doesn’t matter; you’ll be more interested in the victims in a slasher movie who you see naked for two minutes before they get killed by the axe-wielding maniac.

What kinda sucks is I really like the fashion-y cinematography in it. I guess I’ll just take screencaps of it for later analysis.

If you haven’t seen Hard Candy, aka “the Ellen Paige pedo movie,” picture Ellen Paige acting like a gangster rapper, and it’s not meant to be funny… now picture Ellen Paige monologing like a Bond villain as she tortures some guy, also not meant to be funny…

That is like 80% of Hard Candy.

I just saw Art School Confidential, by locals Terry Zwigoff / Daniel Clowes. I really liked it.

You know what was awesome, is both the leads, judging from the behind-the-scenes footage, are English. They have accents when they speak; yet in the film they have very American voices. Kudos! I kind of want to watch it again now.

I am a sucker for Dan Clowes; I own a whole bunch of his comics. My favorite is “Like a Velvet Glove Cast In Iron,” which I usually describe as sort of like David Lynch. Except somehow I don’t feel like I’m humoring Clowes when I read it, unlike watching Lynch’s more impenetrable imagery.

What that means is unlike tape where you have the laborious process of figuring out where all the takes are, and separately sampling them onto the editing system hard drive, you have all the footage already in files. The downside is, you have ALL the footage, even the bad takes. The rough footage for “Devious, Inc.” takes nearly 500GB.

Editing HD is painful on my dual 2GHz pre-Intel G5. Rendering about 20 seconds, with color correction, takes around 15 minutes. Editing this way is next to impossible.

So! There’s a workaround process that I’ve patched together. In summary:

• import all XDCAM footage
• convert all footage into your Final Cut Pro project
• render all the footage down to a smaller size; this creates a new project
• do all your editing in the new project with the smaller size
• when you are done, disconnect all the media… and reconnect them to their original, hi-res counterparts

Import the footage

Importing XDCAM EX data is easy– the card looks like a drive. You just copy the entire file structure over.

You can view the files in the utility provided from Sony. The utility as well as the FCP plugins for importing only work on Intel processors, however. Bummer.

Make your FCP project convert the footage to Quicktime

In FCP, import the footage. Unlike tape, which is what I’m used to, you no longer use “Log and Capture.” Instead, you use the file-based “Log and Transfer.” If you don’t see this, your FCP is misconfigured. I actually had to reinstall FCP as well as my entire operating system (Leopard) so be prepared.

In Log and Transfer, you can view the clips. Because I need all the footage, I just selected EVERYTHING. I did this in smallish batches (about 40GB each) because occasionally when I added a huge list of files to the queue, the entire application crashed!

The transfer process actually doesn’t take long– once I figured it out, importing everything took me the daylight hours of a single Saturday. The reason for this is there is no rendering happening: all that is going on is the XDCAM EX files are being wrapped in a Quicktime file. BUT this means that the resultant files are going to be roughly the size of your original files! Better have a large hard drive handy; I’m using a 1TB.

Now you’ve imported everything. Make sure there are no folders when you import everything. The reason for this is you want to be able to see every single file, in order. The XDCAM files are numbered sequentially, and if you had good on-set file naming discipline, they will all be unique… However, we had a couple software engineers and a guy who actually does professional radio, all people who are known for being pretty precise and anal-retentive, but we STILL had clips with the identical file names.

When imported into FCP, this means that the file names will end in things like “_001” and “_002.” Why is that bad? Well, if you import in a certain order, those files will be named in one order… if someone else imports in a different order, their files will be named differently. Also, your reel information may get messed up, which will kill you when returning to hi-res from low-res.

Move all your files

This part is very important. Quick Final Cut Pro.

When you import files into Final Cut Pro, generally they end up in a folder called “Capture Scratch.” We need to find that folder in Finder, and move all your imported files for this project into a new one we’ll call “hi-res clips” or something evocative like that. Since I edit a bunch of things in parallel, I have a whole bunch of folders for a whole bunch of projects… obviously, the hi-res clips will be in the proper project.

Start FCP again and make sure the clips still play. If not, find and reconnect them with Reconnect Media: Select all the clips, and right-click (hold control key down while clicking on a clip), and choose Reconnect media from the menu. Find your clip! Do it!

Rerender to a small size

Now we’re ready for the first scary part: converting all the footage to low-res.

• Select all the clips. All of them. Use “Select All.”
• Right-click (hold down the control key and click on any highlighted clip)

. Choose the Media Manager from the menu that appears

• Here we are in the Media Manager. Isn’t it pretty.
• We want to rerender to something SMALL. Make sure it’s at least roughly analogous to your original footage. Since my original footage was shot at 24 frames per second, or technically 23.98, I’m choosing “Recompress” media at “Offline RT JPEG” at 23.98. This will look crummy but will be real small
• Base media on file names. This will let you play with the files on your file system without getting confused.
• Also select “duplicate clips and place into a new project”
• BEFORE YOU START, look at how much space the new renders will take. Is it what you expected? Do you have enough space? Mine was a savings of something like 90%.

This step could potentially take a long time. Rendering the 450GB+ (close to 500GB, I forget exactly) on my 2.4GHz Intel Core Duo MacBookPro took over three days. Which is a marked improvement from my initial attempt to render on my pre-Intel G5 tower… that estimate was over six days! Imagine what happens if the computer crashes! You get to start over!

Edit

Archive your old project somewhere safe. You may need it later.

Now archive all your lo-res clips somewhere logical. I have mine in “lo-res clips” right next to “hi-res clips.”

So now you’re in your new project, which is an exact duplicate of your other one, except now all the clips are in low-res. Now you can start organizing your thousands of clips of footage into bins so you don’t lose your mind trying to grapple with dozens of hours of footage…

Make your sequence. While having the sequence selected, make sure the sequence settings are set to your original footage. Even though the clips in the sequence are your low-res format.

Now do some editing or whatever.

Print lo-res

For previewing: making a low-res preview file. This is for posting to servers so the Director, and Producers etc can see your work.

Choose Export to Quicktime File. However, the settings are important: your sequence is a hi-res sequence. So if you used Current Settings, it will re-render all your lo-res footage as HD. That would be dumb. Select your compression type from the pulldown (in my case Offline JPEG 23.98).

Print hi-res

At some point someone will want to see your edit at high-res. Who knows why! Producers and Directors, what do they know!

I usually copy the entire project at this point. Disconnecting and reconnecting repeatedly seems to me a recipe for clips with misset configurations.

You don’t disconnect ALL your clips, oh no no no. Just the ones in the sequence to be rendered. One (of many) ways to do this is to make a new bin, Select All the clips in the sequence itself, and drag them into the new bin. You now have a bin of just the clips you used in your edit! Ta daaa.

Now select all of them in that bin, do Reconnect Media again, as described above. There’s actually the ability to reconnect the media to a different file here, which is what we’re doing. Reconnect to the hi-res originals!

Watch your sequence. Isn’t it pretty?

Occaisionally you will see a weirdly scaled-and-cropped clip, or all of them. Like you’ll see just the actor’s eye, the scale is so huge. The way to fix this is to select all the clips and choose “Conform to Sequence” or something.

Now render, if necessary, and output. I always use Export to Quicktime File, carefully choosing the proper settings, which are generally the Current Settings.

And, since you copied your project beforehand, you can continue editing in low-res.