movies


26
Sep 12

Journalism, Avengers, something for everyone

Did you know that the history of video has recently been re-written?

British photographer Edward Raymond Turner patented color motion picture film in 1899, but the credit for the first fully functional system went to George Albert Smith’s Kinemacolor in 1906. Researchers at the National Media Museum recently discovered that Turner had in fact shot a few rolls of color film that were languishing in the museum’s archives and set out to see if they worked.

Edward Raymond Turner had no idea in 1899 that you would see this:

From the first parrot, the first people shot in color, to the biggest blockbuster of 2012, re-imagined by the people at Honest Trailers:

A friend had this to say about that trailer:

OK, as a Marvel pseudo-expert, allow me to punch some holes in this “honest” trailer. First, Bruce Banner has ALWAYS been able to turn into the Hulk, just not the other way around. He spends most of his life trying NOT to turn into the Hulk. If you want misunderstood character, see Edward Norton’s Hulk. Anger is what sets off the Hulk, not heart rate. However, in the very first Hulk comic, he changed whenever it turned night. Back stories change. But this one got it right.

Second, every true comic fan knows who Thanos is. If you don’t know who Thanos is, then you aren’t a fan, you are someone who went to see a movie. And that’s fine. But don’t hate because you like superheroes with S’s and bats on their chest so you know who to root for.

Third, Loki didn’t die at the end of Thor, he just let go. He’s a god. He’s immortal. He also has inter-dimensional teleportation capability, see character back story.

And that’s what happens when the comic book set chimes in.

Story about news of the day: Alex Green is the editor of the student newspaper at Bryan College in Dayton, Tenn. One of his professors, he learned, was leaving school. Green started looking into into the public records and learned the professor was facing of “having attempted to meet with a minor child” at a gas station. He wrote a story. School president Dr. Stephen Livesay ordered it killed.

So he publised it himself, out of his own money. He also emailed a PDF version. As you might expect, all of this earned a big reaction.

All of that to get you to the latest, from Jim Romenesko:

This morning I talked to Bryan College Triangle adviser John Carpenter and asked: Are you aware that Alex Green called and asked me to remove the post?

The adviser said he was.

Did you or someone else at the college tell him to make that call? I asked.

“I can’t comment on that,” Carpenter said.

OK, that answers that question, I thought. (Someone else I talked to this morning believes the editor “has been guilted” by the college president to believe he did something wrong by publishing a story about a professor charged with trying to hook up with a minor. Green hasn’t returned a message that I left this morning.)

And that, friends, is a president big timing a student. (For even more, here are notes from a meeting the president had in the aftermath. He would not allow that meeting to be recorded because he can flex that particular puny muscle.)

Update: Now President Livesay says “In hindsight, this may have been a mistake.”

Yes sir. For all sorts of reasons. First, while The Triangle is a class project, and thus under the purview of the administration, Green published this of his own accord after you shut him down. Second, you overreached in your reaction with regard to the intrepid young report. Third, from the university’s PR perspective you’ve now made this much bigger for you than it had to be.

Sure, this is a private school, and we can talk all about the case law. But there should be more to the ethical and moral leadership of students than the case law. The good folks at Bryan, as Dr. Livesay said tried “doing the right thing to protect the privacy of a man charged, but not convicted, of a crime” briefly forgot about their other obligation. Seems that everything is being righted now.

By the way, the Student Press Law Center has a great guide for private school media.

Quick links: When the Tuscaloosa News won their Pulitzer last year for tornado coverage, an important part of that was how they used Twitter. But don’t tell the Associated Press, which is vowing to not break news on social media.

Moving away from their paywall, The Times and the Sunday Times will allow their stories to be indexed by Google, or at least the headlines and the lead. They’ll come around.

Facebook discovers re-targeting, which ad-sellers have been using for years.

From Neiman, something we’ve been saying for a while, too, students really need to know digital research. In some respects, this is a “Can you find it?” era.

On my Samford blog I wrote about perception and elisions as they pertain to quote accuracy.

A picture! On my Tumblr! And more things, of course, on Twitter.

And, now, for no reason whatsoever, a shot of the fountain in Ben Brown Plaza on the Samford University campus this afternoon:

fountain

I work in a beautiful place.


31
Jul 12

The et cetera of Tuesday

Things that are overrated:

NBC’s coverage of the Olympics. Tape delays and poor editing choices all around. Record early ratings, but record complaints too. Will those people stick around long enough to make this a loss leader? Can NBC show any event in a real way, rather than editing it for “drama.” Sports are not fiction. And fiction hurts credibility. The thing about credibility: it transcends organizational divisions. People aren’t noticing and complaining about things that NBC Sports is doing. They’re complaining about NBC. That should concern a 20th century network vainly trying to figure out the 21st century.

Sitting still with a hurt wing.

Having something else (my neck) hurt while my shoulder is recovering from surgery. One thing I could stand, I guess. There seem to be no comfortable positions when you have two things in pain. My neck, then, can stop hurting any time.

And so I did not ride my bike on the trainer today. I opted for mere discomfort instead.

We watched The Dark Knight Rises this afternoon:

If you’ve been avoiding all contact with this film until you could see it don’t worry: nothing in that trailer is actually in the movie. And I won’t tell you that Darth Vader is actually Batman’s father. You won’t hear it from me. (But Rocky did win the big fight.)

If you have seen the movie: OMG! I can’t believe that one scene!

OK, I will spoil one thing. This is a still from the opening shot:

Gordon

I’ve thought, through the entire series, that Gordon was the best character. He proved it again in this installment, but still it feels like you never really get the chance to know him.

One other thing, I love the composition of that shot. I’d like to watch the movie again to study how they frame the quieter scenes. A lot of them are worth observing. But this one in particular is terrific. Two pictures of Harvey Dent. The large one, looking over all of us. The smaller portrait, sitting over Gordon’s shoulder. The exposure on half his face a bit darker this time.

For an action film, there were quite a few little gems like gems like that.

The film is worth seeing, if you’re on the fence. You need the previous two movies to make it go, if you’re one of the four people who haven’t caught them yet. It is possibly not the best of the series, but aside from a few lines of dialogue that should have been punched up, it is a quality story.

Oh, two other things. On IMDB we learned that the person who designed Bane’s coat spent two years on it. Remarkable. Also the studio wanted more Riddler. But, if you read the notes on IMDB, you’ll see that Christopher Nolan et al resisted that as “too derivative.” An odd thing consider, if you read all of the notes on IMDB or all of the comics (I don’t); many things from this movie started in the picture books.

Finally, I saw this banner in the lobby of the movie theater:

Opera

And they say you can’t get any culture in a small town. I’m mildly curious about that. Opera, at the movie theater. That’s an interesting showpiece. I should probably check that out sometime. It might make up for having watched stinkers like Sleepy Hollow, She’s All That and Phantom Menace in the same building.

And the last Twilight movie, we watched that there, too, but I block those out. With that in mind I might need something useful like a bit of opera in the movie theater.

More tomorrow, perhaps a less painful and more cheery oeuvre!


28
Jul 12

Some stories

Thinking of some of my word nerd friends, I’m going to work in a word I like, one that crept up elsewhere today and sounds fun to say. I mean the feeling of the word and not the construct of the definition the language has provided. It would ordinarily never find a special place in this ordinary blog.

Here is that word: misanthrope.

It is a person who dislikes humankind and avoids human society. A philanthropist, meanwhile, is of course, a person who tries to promote the welfare of others. We probably all know people of both kinds.

I’ve yet to meet an anthrope, however.

It reminded me, for some reason, of when I was a public speaker — one of the things I wish I were better at — I would speak to a lot of high school kids. This was when I was in college or even high school myself, which is no easy thing. Without a wide separation between the speaker and audience you have a tenuous dynamic, and, what’s more, delivering a speech to your peers is a bit of an odd experience for the speaker.

Anyway. Before the speeches I’d always talk to the important people and visit with people that liked to shake hands and do all of that. When I could I’d find the most trusting kids there and let them challenge me: give me five words I can’t get in this speech. I’d “bet” them a dollar or something, just for laughs, and take their random words: suitcase, picket fence, monster trucks, whatever.

Then there was inevitably a place in the speech where I could drop in a list of outlandish words. If I couldn’t get them all in casually, I could do it rhetorically: “You could think the most important thing on earth are puppies or suitcases or picket fences or high yield interest rates or monster trucks or misanthropes.” It was inane, but an easy private giggle.

(I never took money off of anyone. I abhor gambling. I have a distaste for all manner of betting that involves an actual exchange, I don’t even like to linger near slot machines to admire the lights and sounds, so don’t think I was stealing from trusting kids. It was something funny to do. And maybe it kept someone from being taken in by a real con.)

Every now and then, too, one of those lists of words bubbles up in my memory. They’re always worth a smile. People will think up the most random terms when you ask them to think that way.

From the PC World has Caught Up With Us Department: Friends of ours just retrieved their daughter from summer camp, where she no doubt made up many silly words and spoke in a vocabulary full of pop culture references you and I wouldn’t understand. One suspects there was swimming, and a careful attempt by camp counselors to avoid poisons of oak and ivy.

You hope the kids had S’mores and other delightful things. There was sinking. Perhaps some canoeing. The whole summer camp routine.

Except, we were told, for ghost stories.

Ghost stories are right out.

It seems that some years back, at this camp or another one, no one was clear, a particularly good ghost story was told and that turned into a problem for one of the kids. That child was quickly no doubt noticed, stigmatized and isolated, just in case things took a turn toward Lord of the Flies.

Then that poor child’s parents (and wouldn’t you like to know what kind of people they are?) found out about it. Soon after the family’s lawyer found out about it …

And now they just tell lawyer stories at camp.

I watched a movie a few days back I’ve been meaning to mention. One of those middle-of-the-day movie channel listings that never got a lot of wide publicity when it was in theaters. But it was the middle of the day, I haven’t been able to do much post-surgery, it had decent actors — and also Ben Affleck playing Ben Affleck — and was topical, so fine. The Company Men:

Yesterday was business as usual. But today, life has other plans.

So this is a big company and Affleck’s character is the first to get downsized as a redundancy. He was a hot shot sales broker who’s now adrift with a family and a mortgage he can’t afford.

“I’m a 37-year-old, unemployed loser,” he tells his wife, and himself, when he hits bottom.

And then Chris Cooper gets canned. Cooper is the kind of actor that, if I made movies, could take any role in my production he wanted. I like his work, even when he isn’t even trying hard. He tries a few things here and almost all of them are splendid. He’s a part of the old guard, you see, he came up when this big public company was just a small ship building outfit. And now he’s an executive nearing 60 and what is he supposed to do?

“I’ve got one kid in college and another going in the fall,” he worries. And he was worried when the first round of cuts didn’t even nab him.

And then there’s Tommy Lee Jones, who was one of the original people from the company. He’s the old guy with a conscience, sorta, making waves until he’s edged out by his best friend. But as Craig T. Nelson’s evil boss character reminds him, his stock options are worth millions.

So the movie is about finding yourself, or trying to, when you have lost this important part of the western cultural identity.

Kevin Costner is in this movie too. He’s a contractor. Ben Affleck’s brother-in-law. He gives him, and some other down on their luck guys, a few jobs in the winter time. He’s working overtime on a house just to get the house done so he can pay his small crew. Meanwhile the company that’s cutting people is expanding into glorious new headquarters.

The movie is meant to be antagonistic toward the evil, misanthropic (there’s that word again) corporate world. It means to portray the small business owner, Costner, who didn’t build that, as a port in the storm. The guy that does something, the man that builds something with his own hands, he’s a lot more sure of himself than a mindless corporate automaton who only moves phantom numbers.

“Easy work, huh Bobby? Pretty much like moving comp reports from the inbox to the outbox.”

Except Costner’s dealing with his own tempest. But he’s one of the good guys, and the movie all but forgets him. He’s all but a Greek hero, you see, because the economy is off — People getting fired or fear for their jobs don’t expand their kitchens, which then impacts the hardware store, so they fire a few people, and also the carpenter, this pervasive fear just manages to seep into every aspect of a community, it is almost as if there should be some economic name for that phenomena — but he’s still working hard so he can help out the even littler little guy. But he’s being played by one of the two biggest actors in the movie and is a great story, so let’s almost ignore him. It was odd.

It is nice, once in a while, to see a movie tell a story without a lot of explosions. It had that going for it. And, also, Ben Affleck.


4
Jun 12

Burned lots of watts, ate lots of pizza

I rode a spin bike today with a device that measures wattage, the true indicator of how badly the people in front are punishing you. The more watts you’re putting out the more you’re working.

It seems I can generate enough power to turn a very small turbine. But only for a few moments.

My bike’s computer doesn’t register watts, which is probably good, because I’d start concentrating on my lack of power and do who knows what. Besides, I mean, pedal harder.

But, res firma mitescere nescit, and all that.

So I tried reading up on watts, at least to the point where the formulas kick in. If you get enough formulae elsewhere in your life you really don’t want it in your recreation. So I tried to find things like your typical cycling wattage, just to see how far human physiology — by which I mean someone else’s, not mine — can go. This, like so much of everything, is variable, which is the firma part of the Latin, I guess.

And since I had to look up American Flyer to get the expression right, and since someone made a spoof trailer about the movie:

Which is not especially a spoof since that’s the precise plot of the movie. But, look: Kevin Costner! WIth something under his nose!

We had dinner with our friends Kate and John last night. Pizza. A big table of hungry people devouring smallish sized thin crust pizzas. And then ordering another one. Or maybe two more.

They were good.


16
May 12

Still grading things

I will only say this about the grading of things: it takes time.

But you get a lot of pleasant surprises in final papers. Some of them are of the “Nice job!” variety. Others are a pleasure derived from seeing a student’s hard work, or how far they’ve come. Others are purely unintentional.

For example, somewhere early in the school year we made a joke about the word plethora in a news story. It was funny, we had a good laugh and one of the editors of the Crimson tried to sneak it into copy whenever he could, as a way to amuse us.

I ran across that word in a final paper today and now I no longer think of it as simply a Three Amigos bit:

Now it is a teaching moment. The word, not the scene from the movie.

This could be used in a classroom. Ken Burns’ enthusiasm is still contagious:

And, finally, this. This was on television late tonight. I wish it wasn’t. I watched an hour, mortified, before I could finally stop:

I saw Pauly Shore years ago. (Don’t judge me. I took a date who I knew loved his gimmick.) He does a decent standup routine. His father opened for him. Dad killed.