The BBC posted the five-part "Pond Life" prequel serial all in one "Omnibus" package, and someone or another uploaded a "Prequel" piece that appears to have only been made available to iTunes Season Pass subscribers.
Electric Shadow
The Daily Grab (4): Team Beverly
Schedule Restored
I posted a couple of backdated Daily Grabs. They resume tomorrow, with more backlogged ones as well as actual daily updates of it. Grabs to anticipate: Tenenbaums, more TNG, Disney animation, musicals, and much more.
A new installment of Discovering Ozu is on its way in the morning, with a couple more before the end of the week.
Regularized Manufacture-On-Demand (MOD) DVD coverage is coming this week, too. Physical media is only dead if you tell yourself that it is.
I haven't traveled so frequently in a long, long time. Combine that with what I'm assuming is a herniated disc at worst and a massive muscle spasm at worst in my back, and AC has been much less updated than I ever promised you dear, loyal readers.
The Daily Grab (3): Shinebox
The Daily Grab (2): Town Meeting
They should have listened to him.
This review is finally coming soon. I've agonized over it.
Critical Path 52: The Art of Making Money
It was a surprise and an honor to be asked by my friend Dan Benjamin to fill in for him on this week's episode of The Critical Path. I've been an avid follower of Horace Dediu's Asymco.com for some time. In the realm of Apple prognostication, many often engage in the sort of praise-heaping that inspires calls of fanboyism, but Horace is always utterly pragmatic in his analysis.
We discuss the Apple v. Samsung verdict, the relative success of the Kindle Fire, and jump from the Amazon connected ecosystem into a contemplation on the future of media distribution. We also question whether Apple can yet be considered an 800-pound gorilla in that world.
Screen Time 3: Rabbit Holes
The third episode of my 5by5 show is up, featuring more "What to Watch" recommendations, a remembrance of Tony Scott, and my interview with the inimitable Richard Kind.
The shownotes for each show can be found on 5by5.tv, but I thought I'd add some value to these posts here on AC by embedding all the video clips linked therein. If you watch all of the clips, you eat up more time than the episode runs.
Criterion Finally Releasing "Qatsi" Trilogy?
Today's Criterion newsletter "wacky drawing" contains three "caught C's". It's been rumored for some time that they would release Godfrey Reggio's three "Qatsi" movies (Koyaanisqatsi, Powwaqqatsi, and Naqoyqatsi), which have no conventional plot, and instead feature gorgeous photography centered around broad themes. Look the movies up, I'm at a loss to describe them (as I think many would be).
Just arrived in New York a few hours ago. Love this town.
Good Will Hunting 15th Anniversary Do-Over
Even though I state on last week's Screen Time that this disc features a revised transfer, it turns out that isn't the case. I imagined slight improvements that are apparently not there. I guess I was just irrationally hard on the original disc, which has some compression issues, but is overall pretty solid in the looks and sounds department.
Screen Time 2: The Third Rewrite
This went up late on Friday. As always, please subscribe and rate the show on iTunes if you want to help support it. Believe it or not, that makes a huge difference.
New this week is a segment (called What to Watch in my head), which covers new things to watch in theaters, on demand, and on disc.
Also new compared to the first week, the format is different: I pre-recorded interviews with some famous types instead of interviewing one of my pals. The interview portion of the show will continue to fluctuate throughout the life of the show.
Notable this week: I call Virginia Madsen "the babe from Sideways" to her face (and she digs it), and Prometheus editor Pietro Scalia does the not-so-Hollywood thing and openly admits that he disagreed with Ridley Scott and the studio on how to let the third act flow.
Behind the scenes trivia: before the interview with Ms. Madsen began, she raved about how insanely cool my 11-inch MacBook Air is. After we finished, she joked, "you're gonna leave that behind for me, right?"
Wait, was she joking?
On this week's episode: Richard Kind. He's one of my favorite actors, and is a guy you probably know better by his face and voice than his name.
Downtime
I haven't traveled for work regularly in ages. Last week's trip to L.A. absolutely destroyed my productivity here. I've got six or seven days worth of Daily Grab(s) posting tomorrow, to make up for my now comical-looking promise of one a day.
The launch of Screen Time has gone well too. That's soaked up loads of time, too.
Moleskine Notebooks Skyrocket 250% in Price Overnight
The new Evernote-compatible Moleskine notebooks are available for pre-order. For 24-freaking-dollars-95 American, you get a notebook that your Evernote app can scan thanks to its "special paper".
Unfortunately, these will be massively successful, which means that the ridiculously inflated price point will stick.
After resetting my password, I realize that I used Evernote exactly once, in 2008. Huh.
The Daily Grab (1): Blu-ray Fidelity
This is a new thing. Every day, a screengrab from a disc I've recently watched or am in the process of watching, sometimes with brief comments.
Tony Scott: 1944-2012
Tony Scott did not simply make good action films. He made films that transcended genre and reduction. That the characters are relatable and realistic makes the movies work when they are coupled with the hyper-reality of his camera. Even the least of his films are entertaining.
At the end of this post, I've included a guide to finding all of his films on disc or digital streaming.
Screen Time 1: One Box to Rule Them All
Thrilled to finally announce the first episode of my new podcast on the 5by5 network. I've been developing this since last year.
My first guest is Ryan Gallagher, paterfamilias of the Hyperbolic Labs network of podcasts. We talk about all the ways we currently watch things on our devices, as well as how we wish we could watch things.
The focus of the show will be the evolving world of screen-based media. Next week's show will include interviews with Richard Kind, Virginia Madsen, and Pietro Scalia. Scalia is the Academy Award-winning editor of Prometheus and Amazing Spider-Man, and we get into the Third Act Problems that the Alien prequel has.
8 Things About the Full Sight & Sound 250
As I noted on Twitter earlier, there are some interesting (or you might say amusing) things to be drawn from the wealth of new data available from today. I picked up on a few (8) notable things after about twenty minutes of poring over it:
Malick's The Tree of Life missed the top 100 by a hair, coming in at an 8-way tie for #102.
After the first 50, which were announced a couple of weeks ago, there are massive strings of ties. This is due to the fact that ranking is not weighted, and is instead in the order of which movies received the most votes, regardless of where a given critic or academic/historian ranked it. For example, Chimes at Midnight, My Neighbor Totoro, Black Natcissus, The Shining, and The Gold Rush are among 17 tied for #154.
It took less than ten votes to be in the top 250.
Only three animated films are in the top 250: Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, and WALL•E.
WALL•E was tied for #202 alongside Manhattan, Badlands, Duck Soup, Saló, Spirited Away, and many others.
Eraserhead got the same number of votes from critics as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.
All but one of Terrence Malick's films made the top 250, with the odd movie out being The New World.
They broke out three specific categories on the main index of The List. Godard's Breathless was the movie by a living director with the most votes, The Third Man was the top British film, and The Searchers was the top Western. We could already know this from the previously-released top 50, but it's interesting that they broke these categories out specifically.
Criterion Collected: November 2012 Release Slate
We're getting Kurosawa's masterpiece of POV Blu-graded, a Pasolini box set in time for the holidays, one of Godard's most incendiary works, Cimino's controversial epic, and yet another great Eclipse set featuring weird Japanese movies. In short: yet another wallet-pain-inducing month.
Once More: THE COLOR OF MONEY Blu-ray Needs a Recall
Back in June, I wrote the first installment of my column at Ain't It Cool News, wherein I lead with an urging to Disney that they should recall the Blu-ray of The Color of Money, one of Scorsese's many great films. A few days earlier, the great Robert A. Harris apparently said the same thing about this disgraceful "25th Anniversary Edition". Harris is one of (if not the) foremost experts on film restoration, having done many of the most high-profile remastering projects in movie history, including no less than Lawrence of Arabia.
This looks like a low-rez DVD screen capture, and I pulled it right from the Blu-ray.
It looks like we've lost on this one, since it would appear that no one cares enough to complain like we did about Gladiator and Saving Private Ryan and other screw-ups in the HD remastering world. I suppose we might see another pass at this release for its 30th Anniversary in...five years.
Blaming John Wayne, or: A Nutjob Killed People and We Must Hang Something
I've debated this subject since High School, and from both sides. That's what academic debate is: sometimes you're defending the rights of the disabled, and at other times, you're defending Japan for bombing Pearl Harbor.
In this case, if we're going to blame the video games cited by the College Station shooter's stepdad, we should blame all of the influences found on his Facebook profile, right? Some items are abbreviated and/or paraphrased:
Joe Kubert 1926-2012: A Brief Note of Anger
One of the greatest and most inspiring comics creatives in history passed away over the weekend. Some massive jerk compared him to Joe Paterno for doing "scab" work like Before Watchmen...in a piece eulogizing a better man than he'll ever be.
Naturally, pissing off a fanboy for daring to do work-for-hire on a property deemed by a few asshats to be untouchable sacred ground is equivalent to covering up the rape of a child. He used the word "unethical" to describe one of the paragons of sequential art. He has since issued an unapologetic "apology". He'd have been better off just fully taking his lumps and admitted that he made an incalculably bad comparison. Instead, his mea culpa was "I'm so sorry that you guys misunderstood my towering critical genius and don't like, get me" (sarcasm added mine).
I recommend against giving this guy the traffic by not going to his site to read this stuff, but you're an adult, police yourself as you see fit. I do fully endorse the recourse I urged in this tweet.