The Shining, feelgood movie of the year

To describe it would be to ruin the joke. Watch this.

Thanks Kier-La!

Octo headlining at Emo's

09262005(003), originally uploaded by weevil.

The Octopus Project will be playing at Emo's in Austin on the outdoor stage tomorrow night with Voxtrot, Prince Klassen, and Tree Wave! I'll be out there hooting and banging on piñatas, so be sure and come.

Blue Velvet, Frame By Frame

This is utterly insane. This person is "analyzing" Blue Velvet Frame By Frame on his blog. He's about 31 frames into it... He hasn't even got to the first title card.

**update**

Tim Trentham writes:

It looks like that guy pulled the frame by frame analysis. I get a 404 when I try to hit it. [...] Actually, mentioning a frame-by-frame analysis, [,,,] reminds me that there's a project that I've been wanting get going for months and have finally started. This
guy took screen captures from Hitchcock's Vertigo and then went out and took digital shots of from the same perspective 45 years later. I'm going to do the same thing with Slacker now that I've got the Criterion version. I've had it planned ever since I heard it was finally coming to DVD. Austin has changed so much since Slacker was filmed, 15 years will be almost as impressive as 45. At the rate I'm going, it'll probably be a several months before I'm finished.

Actors are evil.

People ask me why I always say I am not an actor.

It's partially because I fear people like this.

Found Via Paul Slocum

Ivan Brunetti's Starlet postcards

Cartoonist Ivan Brunetti has a nice collection of movie starlet postcards up on his website.
Link

Creased Comics blog

scan0027, originally uploaded by creasedcomics.

Artist Brad Neely (of "Wizard People Dear Readers" fame) has started a blogger and flickr powered blog of his awesome surrealist cartoon "Creased Comics", of which I am a huge fan.

Fantastic Fest! :: Horror, Sci-Fi and Fantasy Film Festival: October 6-9, 2005 - Austin, Texas

It's time to get your tickets to the first annual Fantastic Fest in Austin Texas, a weekend of SF, Horror and Fantasy films that promises to develop into something big. The first year's lineup includes Herzog's Wild Blue Yonder, the uncut & extended version of Sin City, a sneak preview of A Scanner Darkly and a revival screening of cult classic, The Last Wave. It's going to be very awesome, and you'll want to be able to say that you were at the very first festival, when your great-grandclones ask you what all the hubbub was about those old-time projected "cinematographs" that people "watched" back before World War 4.

Stay Free! Daily: Jem Cohen's film "Chain" in NYC

Jen Cohen's (Benjamin Smoke, Instrument: Fugazi) new film sounds promising:

CHAIN (99 min. Color, 16mm)
As regional character disappears and corporate culture homogenizes our surroundings, it’s increasingly hard to tell where you are. In Chain, actual malls, theme parks, hotels, and corporate centers worldwide are joined into a monolithic ‘superlandscape’ that shapes and circumscribes the lives of two women. One works for a corporation, the other is a young drifter.

I used to have reoccurring dreams of being trapped in sprawling underground highschool/shopping mall/prison complexes, unable to find an exit. I'm interested to see Cohen's vision of how a similar sprawl might look and function in reality.

The film is currently showing at the IFC Center through Sept 27

Ananova - Artists erect giant pink bunny on mountain

An enormous pink bunny has been erected on an Italian mountainside where it will stay for the next 20 years.

Link

Dazed and Confused, Criterion Edition

I was going to wait until it was official and on the Criterion page before I posted, but Chris Garcia already spilled the beans in the Austin American Statesman. Criterion is going to put out (at long last) a Dazed and Confused disc.

Also, in just a few minutes AMC will be showing Kahane's making of Dazed documentary, so catch it if you can. It should also be included on the disc when it's available.

Thanks for all the mail! Evidently a lot of people happened to watch the doc and took the time to write! Very cool.

QT Fest comes to a close

Last night was the closing night of QT fest, and since the movies were mainly encores of films we had already seen during the week, I spent most of last night socializing with the Alamo staff and the other festival-goers. Here's a quick movie clip from my phone of me playing Kier-La's insanely hard horror trivia board game All the colours of darkness.

Eastern European stop motion

It's already been boingboinged, but these clips of Eastern European stop motion animation are cool.

2001 A Space Odyssey: Unwrapping the Slit Scan sequences

Greg Ercolano has used some SGI hardware to 'unwrap' the Slit Scan photography in the 'stargate' sequence in 2001, revealing patterns used to make the images.

While watching Kubrick's "2001 A Space Odyssey", I thought it would be fun to write some software to unravel the slit scan artwork in the psychedelic sequences of 2001, to see what they were.

Link

The Revolution Controller - Gizmodo

I don't post a lot of game stuff on here, but I am a gamer, and I do think a lot about the potential of interactive media.
I'm excited about these images of the controllers for the upcoming Nintendo Revolution console. Nintendo seem to really have their heads in the right places for this. Current console controllers are a confusing array of buttons and joysticks that make learning even simple games difficult for new gamers, and contribute to the widening gap between hardcore gamer nerds and people who think games are only for teenage boys with socialization problems and unfortunate complexions. The revolution controller is wireless, one-handed (unless you are also using the analog joystick) and looks well laid out (well, that power button could be problematic if somebody gets mad).

The most intriguing aspect of this controller is the mouse-esque features. Two sensors are placed by the television and they track the movement of the controller. So the bad news is that you may actually have to move around to play these games. Yeah I know, breaking a sweat will definitely suck. A fishing demo made best examples of this 3D movement detection at the keynote.

For those of us (me) who aren’t too in love with the idea of swinging a controller at the television to play a game, this is where the accessory port comes into play. This is a small port at the base of the controller that allows other accessories to be plugged in. The pictures show an analog control stick that could easily replace the 3D movement.

Miyamoto, often thought of as the father of Nintendo, said the idea for the controller was to make something simple, straightforward and could reach out to new audiences by utilizing modern technologies.

There's video of a Nintendo demo at IGN that demonstrates people swinging it like a sword, etc. Could be very fun.
The more I hear about this console, the more I want it. For one thing, they're going to open the platform up to developers and homebrew games, and also they're going to offer free downloads of nintendo games from past consoles that will play on the revolution in emulation.

CitizenPod ACL Clickguide

Citizen Pod is offering another downloadable festival guide for the iPod, in this case for the upcoming Austin City Limits Music Festival.

Robert Wise, 1914 - 2005

Blue Water, White Death

Another night of QT 6, the highlight being Blue Water, White Death... It seems like the sort of movie that The Life Aquatic might be trying to emulate, but here any twang of irony is out the window, although lots of laughs are still to be had. Absolutely amazing footage of great whites blindly attempting to eat anything and everything, and weird middle aged men in floating cages filming them while they're at it. A singer-songwriter serenades you as it progresses with some cringeworthy melodies... Awesome.

Thanks for everybody who responded to my cryptic whiny post earlier, I'm embarrassed that I even said anything now. But thank you anyway. It's nothing that a torrent of movies, gadgets and video games can't blot out. Thank Wotan we've got a hundred years of careful technological innovation in the science of ignoring the pain of being alive. Glad to be a part of the march towards everlasting emotional displacement.

BTW, Kier-La, I am looking forward to whipping you soundly at the Barney Miller board game you got...

Waking Life at the Joynes Reading Room

Thanks to the UT Honors Center Joynes Reading Room for inviting me out for a showing of Waking Life and discussion tonight. I had a great time and all the students seemed really sharp and cool.

Also, happy birthday to Bob Sabiston, who is evidently now (aside from being a ninja, an awesome artist, and an OS X programmer) also a registered Nintendo DS developer.

Can this year be over already?

This week I feel like I've given about 5 quarts of blood and didn't get a cookie in exchange. Sorry I haven't been posting, it's hard to get excited about any of my pet fixations when the world appears to be coming unglued and my personal life is a little like a jetliner crashing into the ocean of a doomed planet being pulled into an exploding sun that's being sucked into a black hole. But I will elect to leave the details off of this page. Suffice to say, things are potentially looking up, if I can just hold on a little while longer. Many thanks to my friends for helping to keep me from slipping even deeper into a zombie-like coma of despair.

Last night I managed to peek my head in a couple of screenings at the Quentin Tarantino film festival. I probably won't have time to see any more, but it was fun to get to go at least once. It reminded me of the past festivals and carefree times long gone.

The Fifth Annual Media That Matters Film Festival

The Fifth Annual Media That Matters Film Festival is now online. You can get the DVD of this year's films here.

More about Soundtrack Automator actions and podcasting

Andy from the Soundtrack Pro team writes:

We saw the comments on your blog [regarding the automator actions that install with Soundtrack Pro and how they might be used in podcasting workflows] We would like to thank you for the kind words and offer some solutions to the points you brought up.

Automator action for AAC/MP3 Export
Since STP shipped without support to write these types of files [...] we wanted to share the workflow of using the iTunes action in conjunction with the STP automator actions.  These were demoed together at NAB and work really well together.

Andy included a couple of example automator workflows for Soundtrack Pro- the first uses the method he mentioned to automatically create an AAC file (or you could set it to .mp3 if you desire), and the second can be used to make a 'preview' clip for the iTunes music store.
They're available together here.

With a little tinkering you could use these together with a Transmit action for a quick "export to mp3 and upload" workflow. I can't figure out a way to get an upload to return a file path on the server to send to an Ecto action, or else you could have the workflow automatically blog the file as well. if you're using feedburner to make your rss feed, it has settings to automatically format the xml of your post so that it will function as a podcast. Otherwise there are some additional automator actions available for formatting xml that you could add to your workflow.

Note: The previous suggestions were made by individuals and are not sanctioned by Apple. Apple is not resposible for the content of this post.

WaPo- The 'Funny' Side of Life

Andrew has another interview about 'Funny Ha Ha' and 'Mutual Appreciation' out, this time in the Washington Post. In this piece he has a nice quote, worthy of Herzog:

'Truth is not a litmus test for art,' he says, noting that while cinematography might be the 'truthful documentation of something that is there,' the process of editing is 'completely manipulative and false.' Nevertheless, he says, 'you get at the truth through lying, and you get at lying through the truth.'

Link
Found Via GreenCine Daily

On a side note, I'm sorry for the dearth of posts this week, I've been preoccupied with the onward march of entropy, both personal and national, and I've been nurturing the fuzzy hope that everything fucked up and ruined in the universe will be rebuilt with the helpful prejudice of past mistakes. I've also been making some bizarre video collages for that art exhibition in Madrid, I may post some later.

The Eternal Question of Nose-grabbing

One of the weirdest, lingering things about Dazed and Confused, a movie I was in when I was 15 or so, is people's reactions to one scene where I touch my nose and hair a lot. I probably get at least one letter or instant message about it a week, and it's over a decade later. From what I remember about shooting it (which isn't much), I touched my face quite a few times already (it was a nervous habit) and then after editing it looked like I did it twice as many times. Anyway, I got a comment on one of my photos on Flickr that was pretty much the standard comment, and for some reason I actually thought about it a little today, and decided I would post something, in the hopes that the subject would be put to rest.

i was just wondering if u remember this.. the scene in dazed and confused ( i know the entire movie by heart its one of my favs) when there are a hole bunch of ppl standing in front of the emporium and u are talking to the girl who plays sabrina and then jodie comes and shes like o ' did i hear my name over here? are you usy talking about me? hey kiddo i heard they got you pretty bad! and i told them to take it easy on you' and then you are like ' god no wonder' well in that scnene ( i counted) you toched your face like 7 times in a row!! and shook ur head back and forth for like a minute and a half. i was just wondering if you rmember doing that. me n my pal wre laughing for hours and hours cuz u kinda looked retarted lol

And here's my response:

Last time I checked, 15-year-olds have a tendency to, in fact, often do retarded things... like join a photo-sharing site just to post one semi-literate comment on someone else's photo.

It's funny how the mannered, rehearsed performances in hollywood movies have got us so conditioned that when we see someone acting like a normal, nervous kid, that it seems so jarring.

Anyway, that's all I've got to say about the nose touching stuff. I was googling "mitch nose grab dazed" in the hopes of finding a picture of myself in the act of the dreaded nose grab, and instead found a lot of instructions for the Dazed and Confused Drinking Game where you have to take a drink every time it happens, and also this snippit from an interview with Rick Linklater in The Idler:

Idler: I liked Mitch’s nose-grabbing mannerism.

Linklater: Yeah, you don’t see those reality flaws too much in movies. Everything is polished. The three favourites were Mitch, Slater the stoner for a certain crowd, and for the older crowd, Wooderson. When he came aboard, the whole crew just ignited. He was the spark club. I rewrote the ending to include him, he hadn’t been in it originally. In a lot of ways he delivers what some people see as the gist of the movie: “you gotta keep living, L-I-V-I-N.” And Matthew McCaughey the actor has already been in three other movies.

Idler: What about Mitch?

Linklater: Wiley’s off doing a movie with Winona Ryder. He’s very picky. He’s a cynical kid. He’s very smart, computer hacker type. He would never take it too seriously. People are offering him $100,000 to do like dumb summer camp movies but he says, nah, I can’t do that. And he can barely pay his rent. He was perfect, because his initiation into cool had to be very subtle. From being kind of geeky at the beginning, he becomes about two years cooler than his friends by the middle of the film.

That kind of gave me a warm fuzzy, if not for the fact that I probably should have taken the dumb summer camp movies, and also if I had been a little more picky, I probably wouldn't have done the movie with Winona. It sucked.