Film: One for the Money, One for the Art
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In a year of surprises, some unknowns soared, and some big names plummeted.
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Peter Jackson is money in the bank.
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Independent filmmaking allows for human-scaled productions that leave film formulas behind.
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Obviously, that can and does happen. The more pertinent question is, should that much time, energy and money be spent on a movie when it aspires to nothing more than visual coolness?
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The videocassette in film: an unsettling innovation, a romanticized artifact, an LP in an MP3 world.
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How much a given movie makes or costs to make affects me less than how many movies are being made, and I find myself wondering: how many is too many?
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A great assortment of movies for the weekend.
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Long gone are the days when a film held on to one story and fleshed it out through the
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Hollywood players pick sides in the competition between the HD DVD and Blu-ray standards.
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When everything gets an API then everything you can imagine will be possible if you can write a script.  And sometimes, to give you an idea, all that has to happen is that a wall come down. The latest, most intriguing such wall was the paywall at the NY Times. Now all of a sudden we find the wealth of information published by the NY Times over many decades is available without tariff. More important, we can point into the archive. We've gotten so accustomed to the wall, that you actually have to think when it may be possible to go in there, as if it left behind a wall in our minds, even after the wall on the web is gone. For example, the first episode of Ken Burns's The War, an epic series about World War II from the American perspective, cited several NY Times articles. If you looked carefully you could see the dates, and the actual headlines, and then if you have a browser handy, as I do (I have an iPhone) you can actually read the article while the narrative continues. Today this is mostly a gimick, but I suspect as we get used to having history so available (like having a library microfilm machine, which I used to spend whole days playing with when I was a kid) it will change our sense of information, perhaps as much as anything else that's ever been on the web. Take movie reviews for example. What a thrill to be able to read a review of a movie that I love that came out in 1932! The reviewers back then were more forgiving, less sarcasting, more enthusiastic. Consider their review of the Hollywood Revue of 1929, a favorite of mine that I've only seen once (I'd pay for a DVD, if it were available). They loved audible movies (that's what they called them) as if the term "talkie" was as elusive as "podcast" was in the summer of 2004. Again, we've just scratched the surface. Wouldn't you like to have NY Times movie reviews integrated with Netflix? Or have Yahoo's movie rating service available on the NY Times site. And I have to wonder whether they really have gone all the way. You can't see the reviews unless you're logged in. Can Google's robots, therefore, see the movie reviews? Unless the've made some special arrangements, it seems not.  It would be helpful to get a technical guide to the newly hatched NY Times on the Web, or (as in the old days of software) a reviewer's guide, so we get some ideas of what to look at. Clearly a lot of work went into opening up the Times archive. I'm going to be in NY the week of October 8 and will have some time toward the end of the week. If anyone at the Times would be willing to spend some time with me reviewing what's now open, that would be helpful. In any case, at least the Times today is somewhat more available to be integrated into the fabric of the web. That's some progress. How much, remains to be seen. Postscript: Kottke did a great job of skimming the surface of the newly opened Times when it first came online, just one week ago today.
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A little money is actually a lot, but a lot of money may not be much.
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Arts & entertainment: Going to the movies doesn't have to mean a faceless multiplex - the little, independent filmhouse is alive and thriving, writes Peter Bradshaw
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These days, anyone with a digital camera and a laptop can make a movie. Which may be why it's harder than ever to actually get that movie seen.
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Films use artwork the way they have long used music: to set a mood.
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The big-screen moviehouse savior finally restates its financials.
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The film has many an interesting nugget about it.
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Small-budget movies are making bigger hits than big-budget movies.