This video blew my math-design-film-oriented mind.

(via kottke.org)

Posted in Design, film Tagged: Design, film, math, science, slowmotion, water, youtube

3. no omg’s

via McSweeney’s

Posted in communication Tagged: god, text, txt

Some reactions from the web:

From what little we can tell, it’s basically like The Seventh Seal meets A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy. Minus any comedy or sex. (the awl)

A gorgeous but too long (at two and a half hours) black-and white treatise on bad behavior in a pre-World War I German village that recalls the darkest films of Ingmar Bergman. (Anne Thompson)

Worth noting (and rarely noted) from Todd McCarthy’s review at Variety, “The pic’s full German title translates to The White Ribbon: A German Children’s Story.” Another Haneke film has a well-known short and lesser-known long title: Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys.

Mike D’Angelo describes the film as acetic and joyless in a podcast interview at GreenCine Daily. He also tells a story about a viewer who tried and failed to get into the party for The White Ribbon in Cannes (an absurd concept – like going to a Schindler’s List party). His reaction, “Once again, Michael Haneke has denied me any possibility of pleasure.”

Posted in film, Film Festivals Tagged: Cannes, festivals, film, Haneke, michaelhaneke, thewhiteribbon, variety

Welcome to the Future. Your newspaper is here. This is the cliché and soon-to-be-outmoded catch phrase in the minimalist advertisement for the Times Reader 2.0.

The New York Times has released a fancy but singular version of an RSS reader with a clean, user-friendly interface, powered by Adobe Air. At $14.95 a month, it is quite costly given that all articles available on the reader are also available for free on the Times website in their entirety. All you end up paying for is an application, only slightly more accessible than most other RSS readers.

As a paid subscriber to the Sunday Home Delivery edition, I was able to download the reader for free. I appreciate the “Most E-Mailed” feature that allows me to see the most emailed articles for each day, updated every 15 minutes. (At nytimes.com, the “Most E-Mailed” lists show the most emailed articles within a specific time frame rather than from a specific date.) Also noteworthy is the inclusion of the Daily Crossword that can be filled out within the application. A brief video demo of the reader is available here.

The order of the categories in the left navigation column is slightly random. For example, Obituaries immediately follows Front Page, International, and National, but precedes Opinion. Upon further exploration, sections that appear only on a specific day in print (e.g. Health, Science, or Weddings) also appear only under that day on the reader.

If the New York Times decision-makers believe their future lies in this software, they need to make it worth $179.40 a year to use their reader instead of another free reader. Either way, the content is the same. For a little less than $180, I expect bells and whistles, which I guess I’m getting by continuing my Home Delivery subscription like a good dinosaur.

Posted in New Media, Reading Tagged: adobeair, future, newspaper, newyorktimes, nytimes, printmedia, rssreader, technology, timesreader

If the letter “e” at the end of “whose” distinguishes it from its homophone “who’s,” then why don’t we have an “e” at the end of “its” to distinguish it from its homophone “it’s?”

Can anyone explain to me how that “e” in “whose” appeared in the first place? If so, why does it not also appear at the end of “its?”

Posted in New Word of the Day Tagged: etymology, words

Before finishing my post about Variety’s new-ish blog, Technotainment (c. Feb 2009, “covers digital media, technology and gadgets from the Hollywood angle”), I read its most recent post. Needless to say, I have scratched that entry which would have touted the blog’s relevance and poignancy at a time when print media is lagging while simultaneously revealing my naïve, preemptive judgment.

The author fails at a couple duties of technoblogging in Hollywood:

1) A technology blog from a major news source like Variety should not tell me things I read about 5 days ago using free, well-known, technological tools. In this case, Twitter.

2) Hollywood = Movies. Movies = Production + Distribution + Exhibition. Distribution is changing dramatically – one doesn’t need to be a technoblogger to know this. However, if one is keeping up with trends in technology as they relate to Hollywood, this news should not come as a shock.

The author claims that the lack of advertising for the availability to rent Steven Soderbergh’s latest film, The Girlfriend Experience, on Amazon.com is a mistake on the part of the distributors, Magnolia Films [sic]. Matt Dentler had already made it clear in a comment that this is something Magnolia Pictures has done in the past and that the advertisements mention the VOD availability. But what he didn’t mention was that the star, Sasha Grey, had tweeted about it on April 30th – the day it became available. So I did it. I posted my first (ever) comment on a blog belonging to someone I have never met. I stated that in addition to distribution platforms, publicity and advertising platforms are changing too (duh).

Personally, the strangest part of the experience was that my shyness revealed itself in my shaky fingertips. My anxiety was not diminished by the fact that the comment was made in cyberspace and not at a Q & A or cocktail party.

Posted in Blogging, film, New Media Tagged: Blogging, distribution, film, hollywood, magnoliapictures, sashagrey, stevensoderbergh, technology, thegirlfriendexperience, twitter, variety

Noah Baumbach, writer and director of The Squid and the Whale, is the author of the Shouts & Murmurs column in this week’s New Yorker. I hardly ever read my entire New Yorker because it usually takes more than a week to get through it, but this one-page verbal purge from a coked-up bee is worth your time. On page 29 in the magazine (but also available here on the website), Baumbach writes a creative piece titled “Buzzed” in reaction to a science experiment covered by the New York Times which found that bees react to cocaine much like humans do: it “alters their judgment, stimulates their behavior and makes them exaggeratedly enthusiastic about things that might not otherwise excite them.” Please enjoy reading it before it is relegated to the Subscribers Only pages of the New Yorker website. Here is an excerpt:

Wouldn’t you love a six-pack of Stella Artois right now? That’s the best beer. Stel-la! That was actually a pretty good imitation, don’t you think? The guy who played him in the movie, the “Streetcar” . . . who am I thinking of? It’s on the tip of my . . . Jesus, what’s wrong with me I can’t come up with this dude’s name? . . . Or how about, how about: a coconut Stella Artois beer?! Wouldn’t that be the best and you could spread it all over your body and it’s U.V. 1,000 or 1,000 proof or something. God I want to sting someone . . .

Also good in the New Yorker this week is Philip Gourevitch’s The Life After (full article not available online), a sort of follow up to his book, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, fifteen years after the genocide in Rwanda.

Posted in Reading Tagged: bees, cocaine, genocide, newyorker, noahbaumbach, philipgourevitch, rwanda, stellaartois

Today, the New York Times published an op-ed by Mark C. Taylor, chairman of the religion department at Columbia University, titled The End of the University as We Know It on the necessary restructuring of the university.

If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured.

For now, I’ll finish my MFA and wait for this restructuring before I consider a Ph.D.

Posted in Uncategorized Tagged: gradschool, nytimes

indieWIRE posted a reproduction of a speech given by Festival de Cannes President Gilles Jacobs at the press conference announcing the Official Selection for the 2009 Festival de Cannes. He asks, “How do you know when an era is finished and another begins?”

He specifically praises the new generation of filmmakers from the East and Far East for reinventing cinema by “constantly stepping outside of the boundaries of the cinema of the past.”

If filmmakers take the festival up on its offer, the Cannes website will host streaming clips of the first five minutes of the Official Selection films at the time of their theatrical release. Apparently, a new era is beginning now:

Since our new website has greater bandwidth, we would like to offer this platform to any of the films in the Official Selection that would like to make use of it, when comes the time of their theatre release. The idea is to present to the audience, and especially young audiences, the first 5 minutes of the film and not the usual typical trailer that extinguishes all desire. Was it Altman or Renoir, I forget, who said that the great artists are at their best in the first and last reel? Let’s hope that Internet users everywhere might drop their games and be tempted to rush to their nearest theatre to find out what happens next. Let’s hope so, for the sake of the artists.

Posted in Film Festivals, New Media Tagged: Cannes, festivals, film, independent film