SXSW08 favorite and shortlist contender for this past year's Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary In a Dream (reviewed here) opens today at the Cinema Village in NYC. Buy tickets here, because you must see this theatrically if you have the opportunity. An excerpt from my review last March: "Jeremiah's film charts his family history beginning with his father's relationship with his mother Julia, proceeding to pick up characters as we go and constantly touching back on the past and completing the detail work around the whole picture. The symbiotic joys and pressures of maintaining the family Isaiah and Julia built frame the film, always centered around the destructive elements of their life together repairing and reconstructing it through all the crises they face. The film picks up in real-time at a decisive moment when that capacity to rebuild comes into question." Showtimes (daily 4/10-4/16): 12:50p, 2:30p, 4:20p, 6:15p, 8:00p, 10:00p Director Jeremiah Zagar will appear with his parents (subjects from the film) at the 8pm and 10pm shows tonight, 4/10. Jeremiah will appear on his own at the 8pm and 10pm shows on Saturday and the 4:20pm and 6:15pm shows on Sunday.

Shawn Levy caught the following on Gus Van Sant's Twitter page before it disappeared: "My next film is Dustin Lance Black's adaptation of Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test". It's going to be really funny." On the one hand, I wonder if that's actually Gus Van Sant, but the fact the post got removed makes me wonder...

I wasn't born until 1983, so I've only heard stories from friends and their parents about the summer of '77. You didn't have to be a "geek" or a "nerd" or a five year old who loves CG to go see Star Wars. From what I understand, the entire population of the United States saw it a hundred times and everyone owned a copy of Frampton Comes Alive! in those days. When I think of what I saw last night, I recall all those stories about how people kept going back to see Star Wars over and over again in '77. With the help of a highly gifted and disciplined writing team, JJ Abrams has done what many considered impossible: he has truly opened Star Trek up to the masses. You don't need any sort of track record with Trek to jump on, have a hell of a time, and want to go again. They've gone one step further and created something that even the most die-hard fans can respect and roll with, much to the surprise of some. I thought that I was taking my wife to a screening of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan where we were also seeing 10 minutes of the new movie. When we arrived at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar, there was a security task force the size of which I'd never seen for one of these things. It looked like 12-20 people in suits ready to give us a thorough "wanding" before we went in. I wanted to dismiss it as a reaction to the Wolverine leak. Friends told me "oh, I've seen that many before," but something was off. Another friend floated the idea we were unwittingly watching the new one, which others of us had thought as well. "Five weeks early? No way," said a friend. Thinking like a former publicity guy, I said, "how much more loyal of an audience could you get than people who'd come out at 10pm on a Monday night to watch Star Trek II?" They could have shown this new Star Trek to a room full of the people who spent $72 million seeing Fast & Furious this past weekend and the reaction would've been just as huge. Different in nuance, but just as big. Alamo Drafthouse founder Tim League started us off as our emcee, nearly foaming at the mouth when talking about what he would do if anyone threatened the Alamo's piracy-free perfect record. He introduced Harry Knowles, who further amped up the crowd for what even he thought was going to be Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Then, the cat's tail poked out of the bag when he introduced Damon Lindelof, Roberto Orci, and Alex Kurtzman. All three are producers on the film (the latter two wrote it) and they "wanted to be here in Austin instead of Australia." Really? Star Trek II started up. In a scene taken from many a Butt-Numb-a-Thon, the movie ran out of frame and burned out. Tim asked the Producers Three to take the mic and improvise while he figured out what was going on. A couple jokes about Lost later, and a gentleman with an unmistakeable silhouette slightly disguised by a coat and hat walked up carrying a film can. It was only Leonard Nimoy, who had a bit of fun with us and then announced that we were attending the film's true world premiere. Whoever organized this event deserves a raise. Then we jumped right in to the new movie. It opens on intense action with a score that resembles Terminator 2 more than space opera. Also missing are the long, dreamy titles over space used in previous installments. I could go on listing things that have been changed for the better, but I'd be typing until the movie opens. Suffice to say, the beast has gone through a complete transformation, and absolutely for the better. It had to change to survive. What's resulted is rooted in what the fans love, and celebrates it without trying too hard to live up to what some spent decades constructing and yet others have spent decades worshipping devoutly. To use the source material but effectively start from scratch, the writers employed the plot device that has always done well by Trek: time travel. Time-traveling bad guys change the flow of history to the point that none of the established characters are the same as they once were. Different people than you remember live, love, and die. There's a marked lack of exposition for a long while. Then, Orci & Kurtzman get said what they need said and move on. Bruce Greenwood grounds the movie early on in a scene with Kirk at a bar. Chris Pine puts his own spin on Kirk that faithfully captures what hotshots like him are all about at that age. There have always been smart, capable guys who do stupid things for the hell of it, wanting a direction for their life to drop out of the sky. Karl Urban "plays Southern" as Dr. McCoy more authentically than any European or Australian who's tried in recent memory. Simon Pegg steals each scene he's in where he opens his mouth, which is to say...every scene in which he appears. Everyone else is great, but I don't want to go on forever here. The Enterprise crew all do impulsive, stupid things, but that's what that age is like, isn't it? I'll add that Anton Yelchin is fine as Chekhov. Don't let early reports from footage screenings convince you his pronunciation "gag" ruins things. He plays it straight, and it worked for me as a speech impediment of some sort. Star Trek has never been this visually dynamic. The camera work is full of lens flares, reflections, and focus effects that really sell the atmosphere as being less steady and...overly-tidy than before. You also have a more nuts n' bolts, gaskets n' pipes styled Enterprise, where the ship feels like a labyrinthine submarine merged with an aircraft carrier. The mixture of practical and CG alien and creature effects are also fantastic, with all kinds of new stuff never seen before in the franchise in terms of design or quality. Star Trek is an unrelenting, slam-bang naval war movie that rarely catches its own breath, even to hold for laughs. Shades of swashbucklers and submarine thrillers alike are all over the storytelling and smash-bam-kaboom stuff going on throughout. It's packed to the gills with plenty sure to thrill people looking for escapist heroism with a healthy dose of optimism. There's plenty of room for interpretation for those who want to look for some allegory that is or isn't intended. The key is that Abrams and his team have bottled that '77 stuff of legend. Looking at the rest of the summer slate, Star Trek is going to own the return business crown. They're opening at the beginning of the summer and they'll have legs even after other releases come out big and then subsequently drop off just as big. That doesn't even take into account the underperformers that fizzle every summer. The smartest move Paramount has made in recent memory (no offense intended) is pushing this back from Christmas 2008. Here's Alamo's blog entry on the event. Cole from Film School Rejects has never watched any Trek of any sort and loved it. Rodney Perkins chimes in with a brief but decisive opinion. The fan community has nothing to worry about either. Back with more later in the day. I have to grab some shut-eye.

Time Warner Cable, recently divorced from Time Warner proper, wants to take the internet back to 1998, and Austin is next on its list for expansion along with three other cities. Time Warner Cable recently conducted a "trial run" of metered broadband internet billing in Beaumont, Texas and consider it having been a great success. Beaumont is best known as the setting of Footloose. Their "test" flew under the radar because it wasn't a major metro, but now they've woken a sleeping giant: tech industry-rich Austin. How It's Supposed to Work Not since the days of "1000 hours free" AOL has the general public dealt with the concept of "running out of internet usage." Back then, it was measured in time: hours, instead of the proposed total Gigabytes of throughput. Once you go over a certain bandwidth cap, they charge you overage fees like your cell phone company does when you go over on minutes. Minutes are a quantifiable thing that most people can wrap their heads around. When you get into discussing downstream/upstream and bandwidth usage, you fly over a lot of heads. There are implications TWC isn't taking into account and/or don't care about. Many, many people won't get why doing one thing or another "uses" so much of their limit, like when they watch something on YouTube, since they don't think they're "downloading" anything. People who don't know any better will limit their internet use as much as possible at home, for fear of "going over," and instead spend more time online recreationally at work than ever before. TWC will tell you that they are doing this to help support infrastructure upgrades (bullshit, they've done nothing for years on that front) and their continued ability to provide their service. This is about money, but not the way they're presenting it. When, Where, and (Allegedly) Why Almost immediately, Greensboro, NC will start going with the new metered scheme. This summer, it spreads to Rochester, NY as well as Austin and San Antonio, TX. What do all these areas have in common? A lack of competition in broadband providers. As an Austin resident, I can say people who've heard are up in arms and those who have an option are planning to jump ship ASAP. Least lucky are those who live in Round Rock, the suburban home of Dell headquarters. Many of those living there and in other 'burbs work in high tech industries and telecommute remotely on a constant basis. TWC is their only option, with no AT&T DSL or Grande Cable to run to. A friend told me he's seriously considering having a T1 line installed to the tune of around $300 a month based on what he's projected his automatic overage would be month to month. On the subject of heavy bandwidth usage, it is absolutely preposterous to argue (as TWC does) that this is a good move for the broadband industry as a whole on the basis of killing off the BitTorrent users sucking up all kinds of bandwidth. It is true that this move will put BitTorrenting Gigavores on their own terms as to how much they're willing to spend to download all manner of copyrighted material, but this really causes a lot more problems than it solves. BitTorrent freaks will abuse university and business networks. It won't stop them. Just as peer-to-peer sharing like Napster evolved into BitTorrent, it'll move faster than any provider or corporate establishment can keep up with. I'm not defending what people are doing, just saying that's how this always happens. TWC says that 86% of their customers wouldn't notice a 40GB per month bandwidth cap, since they do "standard" web browsing and email checking. In the age of YouTube, Hulu, and broadband-hungry advanced web applications, this is an illogical proposition at best. If that were true, then 86% of their customers would have just stayed on dial-up. The market is already full steam ahead on the streaming, on-demand media train. Large, high-quality digital files will be downloaded frequently and in large volume. The online landscape has been terraformed by broadband availability spreading like wildfire, and that proliferation has been predicated by the concept of bandwidth being all-you-can-eat. Stifling Innovation and Competition a Gigabyte at a Time TWC can't sell ads, charge a distribution fee, or brand content that they don't control. This whole metered usage scam is all about bandwidth discrimination for TWC's gain. The secondary intent is to keep the U.S. in the technological dark ages when it comes to set top technology. This is why the U.S. is so far behind countries like Korea when it comes to IPTV and truly intuitive on-demand services. It's like making every road you already pay taxes on a toll road and then attaching a mileage tax to cars in addition to levying an excise gas tax. This brings me to what I believe is really behind all of this: VOD and digital content revenue. When a TWC subscriber rents or buys a movie digitally that's 1.5 to 2 Gigabytes on average at current compression rates. It's about the same when they watch something streaming from a non-TWC set-top box or a home theater-connected computer (HTPC). TWC provides the pipe but doesn't get a piece of the profit. Unlike people who play World of Warcraft or other online-linked games, movies and other passive content are extremely mass-market things that people already demand in huge volume. When TiVo and DVR-alikes became user-friendly and cost-effective, everyone forgot VCRs ever existed. TWC is a great example of a monopolistic company that wants to continue charging a premium for substandard product. For this strategy to work, TWC would have to succeed in single-handedly de-evolving thousands of sites, services, and software. Unless someone allows them to get away with forcing everyone to subscribe to their anti-competitive services, they've shot their own feet clean off. When other major service providers start "test marketing" metered billing is when we'll see the federal government step in to regulate, but not before. I'd like to be optimistic and think Austin and San Antonio can cause a big enough problem for them to put on the brakes here and now, but I know that's not likely. EDIT:: 5 April 2009, 3:44pm I realize I neglected to mention the impact on VOIP services and providers like Vonage and Skype, who consumers consciously choose over TWC and AT&T due to better reliability, pricing, or service. Is this all a precursor to a telecom crash?

I've long

Yesterday I spent my entire workday looking forward to running by the store, purchasing An American in Paris on Blu-ray, and settling in to enjoying one of my favorite films in the best home viewing format possible. I was planning on buying the disc, taking my wife to a nice dinner, and having a nice night in to ourselves. I walked into Best Buy, a gift certificate in hand, ready to hand over cold hard cash for instant gratification. I made a beeline for the New Release rack...this would be an in-and-out trip. No American in Paris. Gigi or South Pacific, for that matter. No sweat, this happens all the time with catalog releases. I head for the Blu-ray section. As I pass, I note two copies of Let the Right One In: Lousy Subtitles Edition, around five copies of I Am Legend (one of Ben Lyons' Great Films of All Time), and plenty of other sundry things. Still no Warner Classic Musicals. What gives? I get a bit more anxious as I head for the Musicals section, and alas/alack, only the DVDs that have been around for half a year. Just what the hell is going on here? I ask the clerk who is "calibrating" (not playing) the Rock Band guitar to help me find this movie. We'll call him "Andy." Andy: "Which movie?" Me: "An American in Paris." Andy: "Yeah, never heard of it." Me: "Today was the street date. Could you check available stock?" Andy: "I mean, I didn't see it when we put stuff--" Me: "Would you mind terribly checking [with dread] whether you carry it in-store?" Andy: "Yeah, I guess, hold on a second. [thirteen seconds pass] Yeah, it's online-only, dude." Me: "So what do I do with this Reward Zone thing?" Andy: "Uh, you can still use it online." Me: "How long until I get it from them?" Andy: "Uh, probably like end of next week. [click click] Oh, wait, it's backordered." Me: "Thanks for your help." A number of internet searches later, I find that Best Buy, Target, Wal-Mart, and even Fry's (who carry tens of copies of new Criterion Blu releases) do not carry An American in Paris, Gigi, or South Pacific in store! Are retailers shifting to only carrying loss-leaders and ditching catalog releases? Blu-ray is still an enthusiast and affluent consumer format. Do they realize they are burning the very early adopters who are supporting Blu-ray and actually buy things first week? This isn't an April Fool's Joke, but I wish it were.

Personal business has kept me out of the loop and off the radar for the most part. Best of the Festival - Narrative Features Me and Orson Welles Best of the Festival - Documentary Features

Jeff has already addressed the Houdini fantasy thriller to be produced by Summit based on a book that reads like fan fiction. I was reminded of Elvis Presley's letter to Richard Nixon back when I heard this Houdini book was being published. In it, Elvis offers his services as a "Federal Agent at Large" against "The Drug Culture" (ha!) and "The Hippie Elements." Just because Elvis sent Nixon a letter and met with him does not mean he was living some sort of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind-style secret life as a spy. Similarly, the correspondence Houdini sent to a friend in Scotland Yard is just as unsubstantiated of proof. Who wants to bet they slap a "based on true events" label on the poster? I think people would be interested in a movie about Houdini, and I find the label of America's First Superhero more fact based on public perception than exaggeration. I can't help but wonder why no one has managed a straight-up biopic without all the bullshit conspiracy theories superseding the fascinating life he had. The Tony Curtis film is good but not great, with a factually erroneous conclusion. Death Defying Acts was enjoyable, but more like an issue of Marvel Comics' "What If...?" than a substantive biopic. What's next, Thomas Edison, Master of Destruction?

http://blog.originalalamo.com/2009/03/24/alamo-now-rocks-cutting-edge-digital-3d/