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Chaos Cinema: A video essay detailing the decline and fall of action filmmaking

You learn something new every day! I love that there are people out there who do this kind of thing for a living.

Chaos Cinema is a two part video essay by Matthias Stork analysing well constructed action sequences and techniques; the recent Hollywood trend of faster, overstuffed, hyperactive action filmmaking; how sound design has improved dramatically to compensate; its effects on dialogue, and the rare occasion where it is used well.

Chaos cinema apes the illiteracy of the modern movie trailer. It consists of a barrage of high-voltage scenes. Every single frame runs on adrenaline. Every shot feels like the hysterical climax of a scene which an earlier movie might have spent several minutes building toward. Chaos cinema is a never-ending crescendo of flair and spectacle. It’s a shotgun aesthetic, firing a wide swath of sensationalistic technique that tears the old classical filmmaking style to bits.  Directors who work in this mode aren’t interested in spatial clarity. It doesn’t matter where you are, and it barely matters if you know what’s happening onscreen. The new action films are fast, florid, volatile audiovisual war zones.

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Going to Movies with a Critic: A must-see for any movie buff!

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This just made my Saturday! A wonderful 25 minute video taking us behind the scenes and thoughts of Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel in a classic episode of At the Movies titled Going to Movies with a Critic.

Both Ebert and Siskel talk about their thoughts before going into a movie, their expectations, their pre-movie rituals, where they sit in the theatre, what they’re thinking during a movie itself, and how they analyse and review it afterwards. 

David and Margaret? Puh-lease.

If you’re a movie buff, or even mildly curious, you *have* to watch it!

Going to Movies with a Critic

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Nerdist Writers Panel #1 – A fascinating insight into writing for television

I was listening to TWiT this week, feeling strangely nostalgic while stumbling home, reminiscing on all the hours of laughs and knowledge it has given me, and an introduction to podcasts in general. I’d listened to the LOST podcast religiously for years of course, but TWiT got me listening to so much more, making commutes not a complete waste of time in the process. When I stumbled across the page for this Nerdist podcast via /r/television, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, and had never even visited the site before, but knowing I’d hear Damon Lindelof talking LOST again for at least a small part of proceedings was enough, and 100 minutes later, I feel like writing a pilot!

The Nerdist Writers Panel series is an informal chat moderated by Ben Blacker (co-creator of The Thrilling Adventure Hour, writer on CW’s Supernatural) with professional writers about the process and business of writing. Covering TV, film, comic books, music, novels, and any other kind of writing about which you’d care to hear. Proceeds from the series benefit 826LA, the national non-profit tutoring program. Recorded live at Nerdist Industries at Meltdown Comics in Los Angeles. 

Episode one features: Damon Lindelof (Lost); Jane Espenson (Buffy; Battlestar Galactica; Torchwood); Erin Levy (Mad Men); Drew Z. Greenberg (Buffy; Warehouse 13).

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Patents, trolls, Google, and the rest of this mess.

It’s been a fun day in the world of technology, and for all the wrong reasons. David Drummond, Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer at Google kicked things off with, what in hindsight I’d see as a good ol’ fashioned bitch.

But Android’s success has yielded something else: a hostile, organized campaign against Android by Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and other companies, waged through bogus patents.

I’m pretty sure “bogus” hasn’t been put in quotes as much in a day. Ever.

Now is as good a time as any to provide some background on the broken software patent system by pulling out some dialogue from a recent episode of the greatly insightful This American Life podcast, When Patents Attack!

Companies that make no products, but go around suing other companies that do make products, over supposed patent infringement are so common in Silicon Valley these days that there’s a derogatory term for it. Trolls. Or patent trolls.

Because patents are so broad…

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The National – About Today

Watch it in full screen. The immersion adds an unbelievable amount to it.

“Today
You were far away
And I
Didn’t ask you why
What could I say
I was far away
You just walked away
And I just watched you
What could I say

How close am I
To losing you

Tonight
You just close your eyes
And I just watch you
Slip away

How close am I
To losing you

Hey, are you awake
Yeah I’m right here
Well can I ask you
About today

How close am I
To losing you

How close am I
To losing”

What can I say? This song is a mess of melancholy beauty. Matt Berninger’s baritone voice, the violin, the addition of the brass, the simple, yet deeply emotive lyrics, and the elation at 5:15 when it kicks into overdrive. I love it. I really, really love it. I was at peace and oblivious to the torrential rain surrounding me while walking home today, and felt this very out of place entry deserved a place on this blog.

The first version I heard of About Today was the live performance (audio only) that sits on The Virginia EP, but I was on the train today and saw the version above and fell in love all over again.

My only regret is that they didn’t play this live when I saw then at The Enmore earlier this year.

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12 Monkeys [spoilers, duh]

12 Monkeys. Bleak, dystopian time-travel sci-fi done right.

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Time travel and paradoxes. Hollywood finds this impossible to do well, and time and time again, I’ve hated how this school of time travel has been subscribed to by TV shows and films, but I loved the way 12 Monkeys approached it.

12 Monkeys was pretty clear with its time travel rules and what I’d classify as an unhappy [happy for me] ending. Cole gets a second chance, seeks a new life filled with hope and happiness, dies. Boom! Its ending however, leaves some room to be discussed.

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Farewell, Mr. Potter

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Boy, have they come a long way. 

Sometimes, you lose track of how ridiculously big the Harry Potter franchise has become, but then you hear it’s raked in $95 million in a day, and is set yet again, to break all kinds of box office records, and for once, I’m ok with that, because Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 was a magical end.

It’s been 12 years since the first Potter book graced my hands, and I still remember a car ride to Kiama being all I needed to get through the Philosopher’s Stone. I was a voracious reader back then, but by the time I finished the Deathly Hallows, reading had become a rarity for me, and more than anything, I was just glad it was over.

I’d never bothered with the films, but I remember how much I loved the Half-Blood Prince, and with my love of film slowly increasing, I thought it fitting to see it on the big screen, and saw the others in preparation over a few days. The escapism and wondrous nature I got with reading them initially were replaced with feelings of “Why am I bothering with these childish movies?” They did get somewhat better, and I didn’t mind the Half-Blood Prince or part 1 of the Deathly Hallows, but they were nothing special.

I loved part 2.

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Requiem’s ‘villain’ is hope, not drugs

Requiem for a Dream is my favourite film, and a film that is strangely untarnished in my mind, because I’ve hardly read anything about it, as much as I love it.

I came across a discussion today on /r/movies, and that comment took a few seconds to process, but yes, now I’m wondering how I did not see that earlier.

Requiem’s “villain” is hope, not drugs

Aronofsky’s films are all thematically heavy on addiction / obsession [Pi, The Fountain, The Wrestler, Black Swan], but where these others are told through one main character, Requiem really brings to the fore the shared mindset of addiction across vastly different circumstances and lives.

It’s a bit obvious isn’t it? It’s called Requiem for a Dream. It’s about the collection of souls crushed by a dream, the real cost of having hope. Go through each character and you’ll see that each addiction is about hope to either alleviate or escape from a situation. It’s not the drug that’s the enemy, it’s the peoples use of escape.

Yes, it is a bit obvious, and I did see it on some level; I just hadn’t seen it crystallised on paper.

Is addiction / obsession always fuelled by hope though? In the case of this film, it feels that way, but of Aronofsky’s in general, I’m not so sure.

Either way, another viewing this indeed warrants.

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Google+ a week in. Sort out your symmetry! And other musings…

It’s been a week since my initial thoughts on Google+, and my uses for it have changed rather heavily!

The core 6 or 7 peeps I converse with on Wave everyday, yeh, we’re still using Wave for that. We gave it a go, and apart from us having perfected how we use Google Wave and feeling way too comfortable with it, the asymmetry of Circles as they currently stand, didn’t sit well with us. Ok, me anyway. Stand, sit, sheesh, I need to learn how to write…

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I noticed it a day in. I just explained it terribly. Today’s TechCrunch post crystallised things.

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Err, Google, can you bring back realtime search until it moves to Google+…?

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via @googlerealtime

That’s rather lame, and no wonder I haven’t been seeing realtime results tonight. And really, they needed to disable the whole thing to test out integration with Google+? 

Considering how pathetic the Twitter search is, Google Realtime, and its timeline view have saved me many a time in trying to find old tweets, and it’s been fantastic in trying to determine whether issues I currently have with a service or website are shared by others across the web, the most recent example being Tumblr’s genius idea to remove the importing of RSS feeds >.<

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