Editor B announces that ROX #93 is up and available for perusal.
Money will get you through.. no, wait…
via FLOG: there’s a stop-motion Freak Brothers movie in production. Dear God.
Pelted
Viv and I also saw Narnia tonight, finally. Viv liked it considerably more than I did. She did not notice the three-hour running time; I did, and I also noticed some scenes which appeared to refer to cut scenes presumably excised to sweeten the DVD, something which irks me a bit. The excisions should be seamless; apparently, though, Viv did not notice and so perhaps I’m being overly critical. Viv did remark, over and over again, how similar the film appears to attempt to be to The Lord of The Rings. I rather thought the filmmakers had tried to push nearly as far away as they could, given the subject matter (and the New Zealand exterior locales and the use of WETA in production). It’s more a case of Lewis’ book and Tolkien’s book having been creatively gestated by two close friends. The similarity of settings and so forth is a direct consequence of the dons having chosen the fantasy milieu to work in.
Like the book, I felt the film was uneven, veering from effective to boring with little warning. Lewis’ key insight in the narrative is the juxtaposition of the recognizable tropes of fairy tale and children’s literature (Alice in Wonderland meets Rapunzel) with modernity in the form of the jarring experience of war and sacrifice the children undergo. It’s a heavy message when read as a kid, and the flaws in Lewis’ execution don’t lessen the jolts a kid feels on reading it for the first time.
Read as an adult, I got fed up with Lewis’ pulled punches and uncontrolled veering from surreal vista to sugary kid stuff, but the essential charm of he book was still available to me. In the film, I was pretty much bored by the climactic events at the Stone Table as visualized by the filmmakers. In the book, the girls’ horror at what they see is conveyed by Lewis at least partially by decorous misdirection, as I recall it, which forced me as a child to personalize the visualization and supply the images myself.
Anyway, none of this really adds to anyone’s understanding of the film but mine. The animal cgi was mostly great, and I hope someone comes up with a way to use the technology in a film that really will blow me away.
Mars
The NYT previews an IMAX film, in 3D, about the odds-beating Mars Rover program. Space and 3D: two great tastes that would go great together, if there was any way to actually experience depth perception beyond 100 yards in a vaccuum.
Spencer and Viv and I had the pleasure of viewing the Ron Howard / Tom Hanks jernt aboot ye Luna, which is also a space-themed 3D IMAX film, and I think that Spence and I also screened “Space Station 3D” chez IMAX. Seriously, it’s the best.
DVD 2 iPod
HOWTO Rip DVD Movies To Your iPod Using Free Software.
QUERY: do I have to help?
D'ohmage
The night before Thanksgiving, while out carousing with a subset of the usual reprobates, I appear to have lost the Minolta D’image that i so valued for its’ image quality and movies. Front runner for replacement is a current-gen Elph, but the proprietary rechargeable battery gives me pause.
This also means I have to bust out the feared Kodak to document the end of the house project until I can finalize my camera decision.
bust
sorry, folks, something’s awry between iPhoto and flickrexport this evening, so no photo updates on flickr for a while.
It’s too bad, really. We found some stamps in the house, one of which appears to be a russian 20-kopek stamp dating to 1889.
La laa, la la laaa
What do you call a workday that begins at 6 am and ends at 8 pm?
In other news, we bought the floor for the house’s large family room over the weekend, about $1.5k, in a thicker-plank red oak than the existing oak that was under the carpets. On the whole, the remodel is on track to go over our hoped for budget, but not ridiculously so, and the pace that our contractors are keeping is stunning, measured by the yardstick of hearsay.
My mom’s birthday was Sunday, and I called minutes before her midnight, from work.
On Saturday Viv and I had lunch with League brothers Manuel and Jeff and ex-Seattleite daymented, and afterwards took them over to the house to see the remodel in person. It was great to see all of them and interesting to have guests at the house, dust, remodelers, and all.
An oddity about the weekend was that each day was scheduled to within an inch of its’ time, beginning at 8am and ending at 10 or so, and none of my activities involved alcohol.
On sunday, Viv and Spence and I also went to see “Magnificent Desolation,” a Tom Hanks / Ron Howard 3-D IMAX film about the moon landings. It was pretty good, but I was preoccupied. At least I did note with pleasure that the movie dealt directly with the problems the filmmakers had set for themselves: a) re-enactments of Moon-landings beg the re-enactors to address the Capricorn One scenario (pace OJ) and b) the much-remarked-upon single most distinguishing optical feature of the Moon’s surface is a lack of long-range dimensionality, calling into question the wisdom of such endeavors as, oh, as 3-D film concerning lunar exploration.
There were indeed, I’m happy to report, some wonderful, intimate 3D sequences covering such things as lunar rover travel, the landing process and suiting up for lunar EVA, and a lovely postmodern remastering of the LEM’s lunar liftoffoff. Alas, though, I was too preoccupied to properly focus on the film.
My ISP finally deigned to provide service and apparently I am now the proud owner of yet another new router and, according to the service person, “one IP address.” This, of course, make me insane with rage, but having worked such a long day, the form it takes is restricted to involuntary eyelid twitches. I have considered contracting these twitches out to Danelope, as he is ever so much more amusing when fueled by irrational hatred, but have declined to do so, on the grounds that he should actually purchase them from me as an ancillary inspirational resource.
Shortly, as well, the new whybark.com box should arrive. It remains an open question when I will have the time to configure email and web and database dervishes on the device.
In conclusion, why can’t I receive my hard-copy New Yorker on Mondays? It would give me something to look forward to.
If Dan could see this
Danelope may be interested to learn that Werner Herzog will be in town attending four screenings of his films at the NWFF.
Some statements.
The video iPod is not yet in Apple stores.
There is an Apple-hosted page on converting or creating video content for your iPod here. In essence, downsize it to spec using Quicktime 7 tools.
There is a page here which covers working with Tivo To Go content, importing and exporting it to and from the DRM the content comes wrapped in. In essence, use one of a few tools to save it as plain MPEG.
Unknown until tested are the undocumented features that may or may not be found in association with the S-Video out port on the new iPod dock; in particular, can the S-Video port support higher-resolution playback than the built-in screen’s native resolution of 320 x 240, quarter-VGA. Standard NTSC is 640×480, if I recall correctly.
Finally, will the iTunes store’s current podcast support seamlessly allow videobloggers to deliver content? Could an extant podcaster with a currently-supported podcast stream available through the Store slipstream video content to the new device?
Hmmmm.