Electric Shadow

The New Logo

Unless you've never visited before, you noticed a new logo on the site as of this morning (see right). I like it so much that I'm ashamed I didn't spend a couple of hours making it years ago.

I didn't use an external service or hire a friend. I bought Pixelmator for $30, warmed up my old graphic design muscles, and executed a cocktail napkin sketch I drew almost three years ago. The old, "generic four-hole off-kilter film reel" icon was low-res, fuzzy, and awful, buoyed by garbage kerning and…well, everything. Better than nothing doesn't mean good.

What I wanted (which I ended up with) was something that could play a little trick on your eyes and be three different things: a film reel in profile, a dead-on POV of a six-bullet revolver chamber, and a fancy boot spur.

I also narrowed these text fields by about 200px. I like them better this way, and the revised color schema site-wide feels more at home. Hope you all like the changes and upgrades. Feedback is welcome as always.

Thelma Schoonmaker on "Testing Patience"

If you don't already know Thelma Schoonmaker's name, you almost certainly know her work if you've ever seen a Martin Scorsese picture. The NY Times ran a piece talking with her about editing long movies, specifically her work on The Wolf of Wall Street:, and she does better than most critics I've read thus far in defending the pace and lingering final shots in the 3-hour masterpiece:

David Denby’s pan in The New Yorker thrice mentions its three-hour duration, while Michael Phillips of The Chicago Tribune describes a scene that “goes on two minutes too long,” before lamenting that “those minutes add up.” But Ms. Schoonmaker said that was precisely the director Martin Scorsese’s design. “A film like ‘Wolf’ is intended to be sprawling,” she said. “Marty wanted things to go just a little too far in the scenes sometimes, to test the patience of the audience just a bit. Because that’s what the whole movie is about.”

Academy Award Nominations

I like to recognize nominees that sound odd as Oscar-nominated each year, like Norbit. I'll get that out of the way before looking at surprises and disappointments. Without further ado, congratulations to "Academy Award Nominees"...

Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa (Makeup & Hairstyling)

The Lone Ranger  (Makeup & Hairstyling, Visual Effects)

The Book Thief (Original Score) 

Prisoners (Cinematography, Roger Deakins...who will tragically probably not win, yet again) 

The Great Gatsby (Costume Design, Production Design) 

Lone Survivor (Sound Editing, Sound Mixing) 

Karen O of the YeahYeahYeahs (Original Song,  Her)

Pharrell Williams  (Original Song, Despicable Me 2)

Alone Yet Not Alone (Original Song, a Christian pop song) 

The most unbelievable snub: American Hustle was shut out...of Makeup & Hairstyling. If there were a single category it was made to win...

It's easy to poke fun that a Jackass movie has been Academy Award nominated, but I'm completely serious in saying Bad Grandpa is one of my favorite movies of 2013, and captures true modern America better than most documentaries or narrative features do. I have to emphasize once again that I am 100% serious, no joke.

The biggest mistake in my mind is not nominating Thelma Schoonmaker for editing The Wolf of Wall Street. Likewise, how on earth does Pacific Rim not get visual effects and technical nominations?

 The Grandmaster  received nominations for Cinematography and Costume Design, but not Foreign Language Feature, which genuinely surprised me, based on the money Weinstein Co put into it.

On the Documentary Feature side of things, I want The Square to win most of all. If you haven't seen director Jehane Noujaim's Control Room, you're missing out big-time. I'm sad to see Stories We Tell passed over. Sarah Polley's movie is magnificent, and different than what generally gets recognized as an "Oscar doc". Blackfish  is being mourned, generally in the same breath as commentary that it being nominated would have symbolically done so much for animal rights, or that SeaWorld execs must be dancing and high-fiving. The amount of attention it's gotten thus far has done as much as Hollywood awards would likely do for it. There's no way it would've won had it been nominated. It's a very effective television-friendly documentary, but on a completely different scale than the films that did get nominated. I wish it were aired on a US broadcast network during primetime on a weeknight. That would do exponentially more for its cause than an Oscar nod.

Inside Llewyn Davis is a great movie with an outstanding central performance by Oscar Isaac. It'll get latter-day appreciation and love. Will Forte will get the same for his performance in Nebraska.

Did Sony just not submit Evil Dead for Makeup? 

 

A Hint of the Blues

I wanted to operate the site on the rules of black & white cinema (those two colors and shades of grey only) from launch until I started tweaking things in a focused way. I wanted to get the thing up and running and clean, albeit unideal and not as pretty as I would like. The time for refinement has come, and it will see a new logo/masthead alongside other things sprinkled in over the coming weeks.

As unspectacular and un-custom as this site has been thus far, you would never assume I used to be a web developer. Looking at current standards, that was the literal dark ages of web development. Back in those days, you were really daring if your links were a color other than primary blue. Blue text on a website still means "link" to me, and I hate underlining, the Cro magnon to italicized text's Homo sapiens. Hence, all-new, all-blue links (and therefore post headings).

I'm always interested in feedback as to what you respond to as readers. Based on my metrics, more people come here looking for a way to watch import Blu-rays than literally anything else I write about. The increased output this week has felt good, and I have a lot of things in the cooker, so to speak.

This Year: Complete Batman '66 TV Series on…Blu-ray?

In addition to this tweet from Conan O'Brien, I've reached out for confirmation regarding Blu-ray or DVD format ("no comment"), uncut/unedited ("no comment"), and new supplemental features ("no comment").

What I was told, that "everyone is going to be very happy", makes me comfortable placing a heavy bet that it will have been remastered from film source for Blu-ray, as the episodes originally aired (edited down previously for syndication), and with a boatload of extras. This is how WB can kick off their Batman 75th Anniversary Year in style.

Next on my wish list is giving Bill Finger long-overdue co-creator credit on the character and universe.

The reason this has taken so long is a longtime dispute between FOX (who own the show), and Warner Bros (who own the characters and overall license). I heard rumbling last summer that the two sides had finally settled on a split where one side would get toy licensing and the other home video and streaming rights, but San Diego Comic Con (which had Batman '66-branded bags yet again) came and went with no official announcement.

My baseless speculation upon prior rumor is that FOX somehow will benefit from SVOD/streaming rights, having relinquished physical media release and licensed product rights to WB. If FOX has good lawyers, they may still have some sort of interest or stake in the backend of both, but only lawyers and file clerks will ever know for sure.

GOTHAM: Bruce Wayne and Jim Gordon, Before Zero Year

Hitfix has the details from the TCAs, where FOX president Kevin Reilly offered a few breadcrumbs worth noting:

Executive-produced and written by "The Mentalist"'s Bruno Heller and produced by Warner Bros. Television, the show won't have "a bunch of characters you've never heard of," Reilly promised. "We see Detective Gordon, before he's a commissioner, all the characters you know, Bruce Wayne, the Penguin, all of them. It's Gotham teetering on the edge, and we see what makes these characters become who they are, [like] Catwoman. It's an operatic soap that has a slightly larger-than-life quality to it."

I've loved Bruno Heller's The Mentalist, and the story of Bruce Wayne lends itself to TV so much more naturally than movies. Dark, gothic, and full of angst works when in the least Gossip Girl-y hand possible. This is something of a pre-origin story, occurring even earlier in the Gotham timeline than Batman: Year One by Frank Miller, or the currently-running re-origin story Batman: Zero Year by Scott Snyder. Heller is what should inspire a great deal of confidence here.

Michael Douglas is Hank Pym in ANT MAN for Edgar Wright

Marvel just made the announcement on their own site, showing another move toward leveraging their own platform and reach, and not relying as much on "exclusive" outlet reveals. It's now firm that Paul Rudd is playing Scott Lang. a former criminal who becomes the second Ant Man in Marvel continuity.

"With Hank Pym's rich history in the Marvel Universe, we knew we needed an actor capable of bringing the weight and stature to the role that the character deserves," said Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige. "We felt incredibly relieved when Michael Douglas agreed to step into the part with the charm and fortitude he brings to every character he inhabits, and couldn't be more excited to see what he will do to bring Hank Pym to life."

I eagerly anticipate every Edgar Wright picture, and I also look forward to every Marvel movie. Mix in script collaboration with Joe Cornish, and you can count me as beyond excited with this additional piece in the puzzle now set. An older Hank Pym up against a protagonist anti-hero Scott Lang makes the mind reel with possibilities. Making changes to chronology and continuity as compared to the comic source can be dangerous (and sometimes awful), but I trust Wright/Cornish more than I could anyone with this material.

Variety erroneously ran the story as an exclusive (still labeled that way as of this writing) and their headline indicated Hank Pym would be the villain of the piece, both of which have been acknowledged on Twitter by the post author.

Armond White Expelled from NY Film Critics' Circle

It's rare that the expulsion of a film critic from their critics' organization gets this much attention, or this much applause. I can't think of a time when a story like this was even news. Owen Gleiberman writes up the wherefores in a nigh-eulogistic tone, but Armond White is a man no one would ever call Caesar, nor this action some sort of sinister plot against him.

The reason that the whole incident, to me, was sad is that Armond White is a critic I have defended, and at times championed, for being an extraordinarily vital voice: not a soft one, to be sure, but a demanding and even important one. As a critic, he is passionate, perverse, furious, infuriating, insightful, obtuse, humane, ruthless, fearless, out of his gourd, and, at his best, outrageously exciting to read. A lot of people despise him, because he can be a bully in print, and he wears the I-stand-alone perversity of his opinions far too proudly, like a military armband. Yet much of the dismissal of Armond is itself way too dismissive. He’s an embattled critic, but one who is often at war with the lockstep tendencies in our culture, and that’s a noble crusade. Sure, there are days when he says that a Transformers movie (or a bad Brian De Palma movie) is superior to anything by Richard Linklater or Steven Soderbergh, and you want to go, “Enough, stop!” But there are other days when he slices through the piety of adoration that surrounds certain movies. He’s a reckless master at unmasking cultural prejudices.

My friend Jeremy Smith rightly pointed out White's opinions on De Palma and Spielberg being amazingly incisive on Twitter, and there's a great deal of his writing that cuts through versions of reality promoted by filmmakers and their "teams" in an effort to make them look more uniquely brilliant.

Of course, he also called White Chicks and Little Man two of the best movies of their respective release years.

Martin Scorsese Presents: Masterpieces of Polish Cinema

The good people at Milestone Film & Video are theatrically distributing an impressive array of digitally restored Polish films, only two of which I've seen (1981 Palme d'Or winner Man of Iron and 1964's The Sargossa Manuscript, both wonderful). The series kicks off in February at Lincoln Center. I've included the full press release after a cut.

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A China-Sized Door Opens for Nintendo

This is the biggest news on the business side of console gaming in 13 years, ever since consoles were banned in China back in 2000.

Consoles such as the Wii U and Sony Corp.’s PlayStation were banned under a 2000 rule to protect youths from the perceived corrupting influence of video games. Nintendo’s prospects for meeting its sales and profit forecasts this year depend on winning sales amid new devices from Sony and Microsoft Corp. released in the past two months.

“Nintendo has to explore markets in Asia, including China, in order to increase its sales and profit,” said Tomoaki Kawasaki, an analyst at Iwai Cosmo Holdings Inc. in Tokyo. “China is a promising market, even though there is a risk games will be pirated.”

In the same way Western companies like Google/Android (and to an extent Microsoft) have had trouble making nice with Chinese censorship laws, I can see some issues for both Microsoft and even Sony that won't be as big an impediment for Nintendo. I have a feeling Nintendo will be quicker to integrate Weibo and Weixin (WeChat) than Sony or Microsoft, for example.

XBox One's Kinect integration, along with the wild west that is XBox Live, pair for a very significant pair of stumbling blocks to get past, but they'll surmount them. Microsoft has doubled down investing in-country:

Microsoft and BesTV New Media Co., a subsidiary of Shanghai Media Group, in September said they formed a $79 million gaming venture to take advantage of the new rules.

The violent and extreme content of many of the Xbox's most popular games may make things more difficult, to be honest, and their draconian standards for banning and bricking consoles remotely due to suspected piracy won't go over well.

Sony's past security issues with PSN accounts might be a difficult trust issue with Chinese consumers. That Sony is an Eastern company more accustomed to dealing with strict and sometimes odd censorship laws will help them, as will the less CCTV-ish features of the PS4 as compared to Xbox. Their stronger Asian developer/publisher gives Sony a major lead with content from genre that traditionally appeal more to Chinese and Japanese gamers.

Though diminished over the last generation, Nintendo's characters carry a great deal more embedded brand value with dedicated game players and especially kids. This is especially true of Eastern players who are not as First Person Shooter-obsesssed and whose lives revolve around their mobile phones more than in the West. The re-opening of the Chinese market, more than any single event this decade, convinces me that Nintendo will revisit their cell phone gaming strategy, but not in the manner that some have insisted that they should.

Like Apple and Amazon in their own respects, Nintendo does things a certain way for long-held business and design principles, no matter what John Gruber thought (with followup) last September, and for the exact reasons that he was soundly rebuked by John Siracusa. Nintendo's signature games rely on end-to-end design planning that includes Nintendo controlling the physical control scheme. They are still and will probably always be a conservative 100-year-old company run by 100-year-old men.

A Nintendo phone is not a crazy proposition, but it'll be done their own unique way if it were to happen. I just hope it isn't called Wii Phone U.