The Conquest of Mexico
I couldn’t make it through Jodorowsky‘s The Holy Mountain, but I was amazed by this early scene. There is a huge amount of effort and budget gone into this one little section.
Pete Hindle
Pictures and stuff from a guy who likes coffee.
Tag: film
April 18, 2010
Bah Bah Bah BWAH Nah
I sat down few days ago and made a concerted effort to watch Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It’s a long, slightly flawed movie, but in the third act something interesting occurred to me. It wasn’t the fact that the alien spaceship was very cool, in that pre-CGI filmmaking way, nor anything else to do with the craft that Spielberg put into the film.
Instead, it was the fact that most of the new media artists I know would give their left tit to to make something that looked as kick-ass as the alien communication device. Which was made in 1976, but looks equal to Jenny Holzers latest.
In fact, the scene where they finally communicate with the alien spaceships has a lot in common with most new media gigs, shows and festivals I’ve been to. There is the epic lightshow with some minimal music (which isn’t really meant to be understood), there is a king-sized MIDI controller at the centre of the action, and everybody on stage is a man who is old enough to know better.
Also in common with most of these new media events is the crowd: it’s always a lot of men, standing around. Looking cool.
I was a bit concerned that the main character, Roy, decides to leave his family and run off to hang out with the aliens (it seemed unrealistic) but he had driven his wife and children away by building a large-scale model of a mountain in their front room. I actually thought the model was quite cool though, but perhaps the previous decade of living with artists has prepared me for living with batshit insane people. Hey, coming back to find a scale model of Devil’s Tower in the living room would be a pleasant surprise compared to some of the things I’ve seen flatmates drag back.
For anybody like me who made it to the end of this movie, I’ve created an iPhone ringtone of the five classic tones. Now you can use your iPhone to make peaceful contact with beings from another planet, show your appreciation for classic sci-fi that depicts a hopeful vision of humanity, or simply nerd out in an audible way. Simply right-click close encounters ringtone and select your operating system’s version of “save to disk” in order to download it as a hand-crafted* m4r file.
* it really is a hand-crafted ringtone, by the way. I spent about five minutes in Garageband making it. I have no idea what other devices an m4r file works on, so anybody not using an iPhone is on their own if they want to use this.
January 26, 2010
Lord of Light: Why Cameron’s Avatar is just the latest reincarnation of Barnum-style showmanship
I knew it was a bad sign when, halfway through the film, I started regretting not going to Maplin’s. That’s not how it should work if you put the cash down to go and see the latest Hollywood blockbuster; you shouldn’t have the urge to stifle a yawn halfway through, let alone think about checking your emails, or going shopping for obscure electronic parts.
Avatar is, as I’m sure you know, the latest film from James Cameron. His previous works are mostly massive hits, with a strong sci-fi flavour, and Avatar just happens to be his most sci-fi flavoured yet. It’s about blue aliens on another planet, but it also happens to be in 3D.
Most of the computer animated films that have come out recently have been available in 3D and regular 2D, so it’s not so unique for a film to be in 3D. And, at the start of the showing (after the trailers, so you knew it was important), there was an advert for Sky TV, which promised to deliver 3D television to your living room, starting later this year.
Take away the uniqueness of being in 3D, and Avatar becomes a slightly silly retelling of Pocahontas. The film is designed to be seen in 3D, almost as a textbook of ‘filmography using 3D techniques’, and thus we have a lot of very crass shots that utilise the new techniques for changing perception of depth.
Cameron’s previous sci-fi work used urban locations in a sinister way, reflecting the future from darkened streets, giving us paranoia about the urban and suburban surroundings of everyday – but Avatar’s computer-generated forest removes any skill needed to compose a shot using existing locations. Between the lack of mise-en-scene and the need to force three-dimensionality into every shot, this film become the most visually boring blockbuster that I’ve seen in a long time.
This isn’t the first time that Hollywood has become obsessed with 3D filmmaking. The late seventies and early eighties saw a bunch of movies made in three dimensions using the old red/blue glasses technique. And then, later on, all those movies were de-3D’d, so that they could be released on video and DVD, because people didn’t want to sit around and watch Amityville 3D whilst wearing stupid glasses.
The new technique for 3D also requires stupid glasses, which come in different styles depending on what cinema chain you go to. Mine were uncomfortable, and gave me a bit of a “Buddy Holly/Hoxton twat” look (see above). After about an hour I started occasionally slipping them off to relieve the pressure building up around my eyes – badly designed glasses give me weird face-ache – and found that watching Avatar without the 3D-enabling devices wasn’t that bad. Not great, but not that bad.
The idea of this new wave of 3D is to make watching a screen an unbelievable experience, but it’s misguided because it’s just a a screen. When you’re in a cinema, you might be happy to wear an odd pair of glasses to get that special effect, but at home? With the kids and the dog and the dinner on your lap? If you do invest in the ultra-swish home 3D cinema system, at some point you’ll be bound to end up watching 3D programs without the special glasses.
And that’s when you’ll find out that it’s not that much different. A little less focused, a little less worth watching – the fuzzy backgrounds of 3D films without the special glasses on make the craft of cinema inaccessible.
Avatar’s great failure is that it thinks 3D is important enough to overcome plot and pacing, and whilst it is visually impressing, it’s not visually stunning. But it was a film that could not fail – too much money had been poured into it. Perhaps backing was secured because 3D films would be impossible to pirate, or because the new technologies would sell thousands more flat-screen TV’s. The film obviously lies at a pinnacle of complex capitalist network, with layers of merchandising, advertising, and even advances in technology behind it. It is a great spectacle to behold.
But it’s failure is it’s function as entertainment – it’s so slick, so perfectly presented that there’s almost nothing for you to wonder over, after you leave the cinema. And I literally mean wonder, in the sense of wonderment, because the crass materialism at play behind Avatar leaves nothing fantastical in the film.
Endnote: While I was deeply disappointed in Avatar, I have managed to sneak in two SF references in this blogpost. There’s no prize, but feel free to drop me a line (or leave a comment) if you spot one.
October 11, 2009
The Non-Art of Subtitling and the Reductionist Use of Humour within Critical and Artistic Elements of the New Media Artwork
On Friday, I left the house for Datarama, Newcastle’s software version of Dorkbot. Well, maybe it’s a more artistic, friendly version of Dorkbot, without all the posturing that can be seen at the Limehouse. That’s not strictly important.
What is important is that, whilst there, I presented my resubtitled version of Gran Torismo.
Gran.Torino.subtitles (that’s the subtitle file, you’ll need your own copy of the film to watch it with)
Now, I have a deep problem with this work. Born out of my constant need for procrastination, whilst trying to work on a thesis-like document for my Masters degree in Digital Media, it is a collection of bad jokes that destroy whatever craft has been put into play in the creation of Eastwood’s Gran Torino. Torino might be a very good film; I have no idea. Almost immediately, rather than watch it, I began subtitling it using the cultural reference points of Clint Eastwood as a famous person.
I’m making it available as a file for others to look at and use, if they want to. The humour is crude and full of swearing, so don’t expect many shining examples of wit, and I only did the first ten minutes or so of the film. It is not, however, an exercise in art – it is an exercise in ill-placed mockery, and should be seen as something crude.
May 13, 2009
Nerd Night: Reboot to Win, or how the Geek Genre took over the Blockbuster
This is a piece written for Kino Bambino, a local zine run by film fans in Newcastle. You’ll be able to pick up a copy from the Star and Shadow, amongst other places, from 14/05/2009 onwards.
Have you noticed a trend with summer blockbusters? I have. They like to take a well-known nerdy book, film, or TV show, and make a new, shiny version of it. Currently, we can see this happening to the Star Trek universe, which has been operating since the sixties as a sort of Rosetta Stone of sci-fi TV.
The earliest forms of Star Trek were glorious technicolor slices of cheese; later versions of the show have a sort of po-faced seriousness that scared off sane people from watching anything like it. In a sort of no-man’s land there were an increasingly cheap series of films that never got any better than Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn, despite going all the way up to Star Trek X. I’ve seen all of them, and I can hardly remember what happens in Star Trek X (‘Data dies’ is all I can remember from that 90 minutes of my life.)
And this summer, we get what they are calling a ‘reboot’ of the franchise. Why? Well, Star Trek is just too big a money-spinner for Hollywood to ignore. The last TV version of Star Trek was so dull that nobody watched it, so a big-screen re-imagining lets the suits play merry hell with the existing universe of Trek – which is no bad thing.
Star Trek’s universe was reliant upon the idea of evil aliens being bastards to us poor benighted citizens of the universe. This is dumb, and ignores practically 90% of plot-lines. Where are the evil humans trying to take things over? As a race, we practically live for taking things over, and we’ve thrown up some of the most evil bastards ever. When you combine the two (Jeffery Archer, I’m looking at you here) you get great plotlines, which make for great movies.
The new Star Trek is about making the original series sexy again, the same way that Planet of the Apes got made over, the same way that GI Joe is getting a tummy-tuck and boob job later this summer, and the same way that Star Wars got botoxed to within an inch of it’s life in 2004. But the sad part is, it doesn’t make any difference.
Star Trek doesn’t need any new fans; people dress up like Klingons at the weekend anyway, so it’s a fair bet that they’ll spend a fortune on anything with the prefix ‘Star Trek’. The reason that the franchise got rebooted is so that your mum knows what’s on at the cinema, and that’s because the economics of modern Hollywood means crushing as many people into the stalls as possible. And everybody has a slight fondness for Trek, somewhere, even if it’s just Spock and his neck pinching.
But it’s not your mum that’s going to watch the film four times and then go home and Facebook his mates about how great it was; it’s your average nerd who’ll be proletising this new Star Trek. Anything with an inbuilt fan-base that loves it already is going to get picked up by Hollywood over the next half-decade, and then flogged to within an inch of it’s life as the moguls seek to earn some money.
So stand by for a flood of films that have your less sociable friends grabbing their coats and heading out: later this year, Maurice Sendak’s ten-sentence children’s book “Where the Wild Things Are” will make a splash. We’ll also see more Harry Potter and Transformers, and a sequel to horny-but-celibate vampire movie Twilight. As long as you’re not looking for something original, there’s plenty of geeking out that can be done at the cinema.
