Tears and Flapdoodle; or neo-neo goes emo a go-go.

Recently in the NYT magazine, a 5,000 word feature by A.O. Scott appeared that tried to throw a lasso around a group of recent indie features, including CHOP SHOP, OLD JOY, WENDY AND LUCY, BALLAST and other powerful films that include poverty as a subject matter.   De Sica's BICYCLE THEIF is brought up quickly as the operative example of a previous influence, and the bulk of the article is given over to Rahmon Bahrani, director of CHOP SHOP and GOODBYE SOLO, which is welcome and well deserved.  

Almost immediately, the critic Richard Brody over at the New Yorker wrote a retort that tries to tear apart many of the assumptions and assertions of the article, and then A.O. Scott responded...  sadly, this is not on the level of Sarris vs Kael, but I'm glad to see some ink and pixels spilt in service of these fine films.  (It's more like a pissing contest between two pre-teens who can't seem to find their dicks quite yet. )

Some of the basic questions raised however are worth considering, and include thngs like "when did realism first appear in American Cinema, and what are it's roots," and "why do other nations cinema seem more preoccupied with reality while ours has always tended to fantasy," and "is film noir a form of realism or not?"  

But more interesting is the overwhelming internet response - a grassroots chorus of hundreds have dismissed BOTH critics as ludicrously ill-informed and pretentious in voicing their opinions.  To me this speaks more to the subject at hand, the desire to examine and champion some good cinema.  It's as though the audience is resisting being told what their tastes are, and what demographic or social pigeonhole they need to stay within, and why film critics know more than we do in an age where we all have netflix and can see just as many movies in a given year.  And that's a victory of sorts for the audience, but also a harbinger of the way we're all being fractured into separate academies-of-one.  Most comments I've seen on sites that link to these articles are better informed than the critics themselves.  Have we reached a new plateau, and is it time to kill the buddha on the road?  

Red One Part two: What hath RED wrought?

(note: This post continues a discussion from below, regarding the Red One camera, which uses a Super35mm sized sensor to capture a 4K image (much higher quality than HD) and sells for an affordable price, and seems to be on the verge of causing an earthquake in the indie movie industry.)

The Red One is gaining ground each month and it's beginning, in a smaller way to resemble the historical moment when IBM ignored a kid in a garage named Steve Jobs, who put together something he called "The Apple" from existing parts. Sony and the rest of the so-called "Big Three" video camera manufacturers have been caught off-guard and there isn't really any way they can reposition themselves quickly to recapture the market they are losing to Red.

A good summary can be found here, on a RedUser forum, but suffice to say they are big companies with a full line of products to push, and huge R&D teams to support while Red is simply a smart camera build from mostly pre-existing materials. To vastly oversimplify, a RED ONE is a computer with a PL lens mount, built in a garage and priced accordingly, and marketed in a web 2.0 way, the same way that we arrived at Obama and the iPhone. Top that, 42nd street.

The downside for some seems to be that it's hurting camera rental houses rather seriously, already. If the major studios make or buy 500 feature films a year to release on average, and Red has already sold 5000 units and counting, it means there are now more than ten cameras for every feature - the rental market is saturated fully, with no end in sight as newer models are getting ready to be launched, some cheaper and some better, all still relatively affordable and seriously undercutting the hide-bound competition.

In some way, this is merely more good news for indie film makers, since it drives the price of camera rental down due to supply and demand issues. A case study HERE describes how one indie feature producer got three rental houses in a bidding war and reduced his camera package cost for a six week shoot from an initial quote of $18k to less than $8,000 in a single day. It's not good news for camera owner-operators however, many of whom probably are green and overextended, and lacking in good lenses and accessories as well.

There may eventually be some fallout from this, however when the level of support and technical expertise that used to center around rental houses starts to ebb. But the worm is turning, and the camera is emerging strongly (as the maker intended) as an owner-operator model instead of a flagship for a rental house. There also may be a shortage of good 35mm cine lenses, just as there once were fights each summer over at Panavison over the choicest anamorphic lenses, effectively limiting the number of cinemascope films released each year by major studios. Not to worry there, however since RED has begun partnering with optic firms to introduce their own line of lenses (with poor results so far but in plentiful supply).  Still camera lenses area lso being pressed into service, and manual focus and iris Nikon lenses are once again in vogue.  

In addition the the Red, there have also been two DSLRs recently introduced from Nikon and Canon that have the ability to record HD video. Almost as an afterthought, the still camera giants decided that, after adding a live preview capability to their flagship cameras they realized that this meant the cameras could also record high quality video, in short clips at least. The consumer Nikon F90 (retail $1300) shoots 24p 720p HD only but the Canon D5 Mk2 is a wonderment - delivering Full HD video capture at 1920x1080 resolution for up to 4GB per clip (with an HDMI output for an external monitor) and a low light sensitivity that is almost uncanny. Only the lessor resolution Nikon will shoot 24p, ideal for transfer to film for eventual theatrical release, but both herald things to come and are already being adapted and pressed into use by documentary film makers who are pleased with the unassuming profile they present to subjects, many of whom don't even realize they are being recorded.  A NYC based fashion fotog caused a small sensation last fall when he got his hands on a prototype Canon D5 Mark 2 and shot a sizzle reel called REVERIE, which can be seen on the Canon website.  A behind-the-scenes making of video is also available on the photographer's site.  

All of this leaves out the deeper discussion of whether or not the Red camera (and it's tiny DSLR brethren) are worthy of killing film - it isn't, yet, but it damn sure isn't doing film any favors. It's like the punk who shoots the aging gunfighter - he's just as dead, worthy successor or not. Soderberg says he will never go back, after shooting CHE and his next two still in production features on the Red. Editors are not happy with having to wrangle huge amounts of data, and a less-than-smooth workflow that comes with shooting Red/RAW and have been slow-marching directors and producers, who drag many kicking and screaming to the Kool-Aid. And, like I mentioned in Part One, Sundance is not yet awash in SHOT ON RED logos appearing in the credits. There were at least two features in dramatic competition shot on Red, but as of this writing neither TOE TO TOE or THE MYSTERY TEAM has secured distribution.  We'll see about New Directors/ New Films and then Tribeca and Toronto. Word on the street is that all the recent docs hitting fests were shot (and presented) on HD, while the features show a mix of 35mm, super16 and HD still.

Red One camera-Is Digital Cinematography here yet; Part One, or, The Knowing Argentine in the ER

This last weekend was the opening of KNOWING, a sci-fi thriller by director Alex Proyas (The Crow, Dark City). It's awful, don't bother to see it unless you want to check out the cinematography, which isn't necessarily that great either. The money shot (and trust me, it's the only one) involves a 2 minute take where a plane crashes next to a highway and our hero runs into the wreckage as people stumble about in flames, a moderately convincing amalgamation of CGI and stuntmen, in service of a story that would make a cat laugh. The reason I'm bothering to write about it is that the entire movie was shot with a new digital camera called the Red One, an amazing gizmo developed by a California startup helmed by Jim Jannard, the founder of Oakley sunglasses company who has become a CEO-guru figure like Steve Jobs to the party faithful.  

We've seen other digital and analog studio films in theaters before, notably COLLATERAL and MIAMI VICe by Michael Mann, and parts of the later STAR WARS films, but these were all shot on very expensive HD cameras made by Sony and other large corporations with deep pockets.  KNOWING is arguably the first mainstream studio film to come to the multiplex via a pro-sumer camera such as the Red One. 

With a base price of a mere $17,000, the Red One camera itself is basically a sensor like the heart of a DSLR (digital single lens reflex) camera married to a small shoebox-sized computer that shoots with motion picture lenses (or still camera lenses) and then compresses the data into a form that can fit onto 8Gb flash-based memory cards. The selling point is that it does this in a manner that looks remarkably like film, and in a higher resolution than HD cameras costing many times more. ( So called "full High Definition" cameras have a picture that has 1080 lines of horizontal resolution; combined with the width at a ratio of 16:9, makes for a horizontal resolution of 1920 pixels. This creates a frame resolution of 1920×1080, or 2,073,600 pixels in total. This is so called 2K resolution, and the Red One is 4K, and growing.)  It's not strictly video, either - the camera records RAW data in a way that can be manipulated greatly in post.  Again, it's technical but settings like white balance, chroma and luminance can be decided later, which is quite a nice trick, and allows users to manipulate the image with consumer level software like Photoshop, Final Cut Pro and After Effects.  

It was first sold in 2007, but not before introducing the product a year earlier via a user-friendly internet site, which they maintain for the purpose of receiving feedback from users and spreading the gospel of all things Red. The first customers were investors of a sort, putting down large deposits before the camera was even finished being built. Many people thought they were selling a product that couldn't live up to the extravagant claims of 4K resolution (and delivering a film look, from lots more tech here I'm leaving out), but when the camera debuted the critics had to admit they really had something. It's no vaporware, that much is for certain.   What it is for certain is currently being worked out, with KNOWING being the first big budget Hollywood (actually, Australia doubles for Boston here) film "shot on Red."  Others are following, and several top rated TV shows such as "ER" have made the switch already.

Previously, Steven Soderberg chose it to shoot CHE with, (he shoots his own films) and it seems to have served his purposes well.  He wanted a handheld-in-the-jungle look and he got it with a camera that looked better than 16mm ever could have in many ways.  Speaking strictly of the look of the film, part one aka The Argentine is shot with anamorphic lenses and presented in a cinemascope aspect ratio which serves the heroic portion of the tale well, and with a subtly original combination of looks - documentary meets cinemascope, circa 1958.  

Color wise, The Argentine looks like a page from National Geographic - that Kodachrome reversal look, which actually was a smart way to mask one of the Red One's weak points compared to film, a shorter "dynamic range," which translates as the ability to record the brightest highlights and the deepest shadows in a single scene.  Future versions of the camera may deliver the goods, but currently the first generation Red sensor has (in lab conditions) a dynamic range near 11 f -stops, (or doubling of light) which seems to translate to about 8 or 9 in real world conditions, where complex scenes eat up computer speed, and reduce performance.   Modern film stocks can have 11 to 13 and deliver in the field.  

KNOWING looks "pretty good," in the theaters (it darn sure doesn't look like video) and helped the film makers blend a lot of CGI (Computer Generated Imagery, also known as "shit blowing up real good")  into their footage relatively easily.  These days Visual Effects people often work at 4K resolution already, to ensure a lot of detail in the fake stuff, which helps sell it to our eyes.  Transferred to film, and exhibited through a 35mm projector KNOWING has the look of a crisp Blue-Ray DVD, or something slightly less wonderful as film, but most people won't notice.  Some of the shortcomings of the first Red cameras are visible to a trained eye - skin tones pick up "noise," or stray colors like a green or purple undertone, and highlights can be "clipped," or appear less subtle than film.  Mostly it is the lesser dynamic range that makes day exteriors seem less natural. But in a blind side by side test with 35mm it can be hard to tell which is which, even for a trained eye.

here's a random/mundane music video day exterior "presented in HD on your monitor" clip on the net where you can see some of what I'm talking about - but of course the real judging needs to take place in a movie theater. This is 35mm intercut w Red footage -watch it first and then read the comments to tell which is which.
 

Sadly, the director Proyas is correct in a recent interview when he remarked that audiences these days are used to lesser quality due to frequent TV, video game and YouTube viewing.  Without the clearly superior 35mm to compare it to itt gets even harder to notice the flaws of Red's compression codec. Equipped with a time machine,  you wouldn't give this thing to David Lean to reshoot LAWRENCE OF ARABIA with, less he do to you what those nasty Turks in Daraa did to O'Toole's character.  But the Red doesn't claim to be "all that," at least not yet.  It is only Round One but if film is Joe Frazier, he's just watched a kid named Cassius Clay join the Olympic team.  

What this means for Indie cinema is the important question.  Films that shot in the last two or three years on HD video would today have the option of being shot on Red.  As far as I know, we haven't had a breakout indie shot on Red at Sundance or Toronto or Rotterdam, but it's just a matter of time.  It's certainly a competitor to super16mm blown up to 35mm, and it beats the crap out of HD if your final presentation is going to be 35mm film.

The slim, although significant lesson from all of this has to do with the way the camera was developed - outside of the "big three" camera companies for consumer product - Sony, Nikon and Canon and without getting into bed with the biggest cinema camera makers, either - Panavision and Arriflex both have been developing their own digital systems, with roughly similar results but significantly higher purchase/rental costs and, discounting the Red's compression, less pixels to present when it comes time to go back to film. Red One was a surgical strike in some ways that might inflict some real damage to the status quo. The David vs Goliath aspects of this are explained well here, in a RedUser.com  forum by one of the acolytes.  

In summation, there is a window that has been opened here - but for whom, and how long it will last?

(more on all this in Part two, stay tuned) 

The 5 Royales

It's friday here at Only Angels, so let's listen to the cool sounds of hot guitar from Lowman "El" Pauling, aka Pete Pauling's band the 5 Royales. Steve Cropper of Stax-Volt fame was a big fan, and you can here the seeds of his style in cuts like this one, from the mid 1950s. Rock on.

The State of Things

Yes, another blog post about THE F-ING STATE OF THINGS.  

This one will attempt to tease out some good comments made by some friends, whom I hope will continue the discussion here.  My email box is getting filled.  

If you are just tuning in, the discussion began at sxsw this year and concerns the difficulty for film makers have getting a low budget indie feature to an audience these days while still having food to eat, in a changing market where "cars aren't free, and toasters aren't free, but everyone expects content to be free," to quote one wag.    

One solution seems to be, stop expecting to make a living doing this thing, and get used the fact that it is now a DIY world not unlike the scene that the music business found itself in circa 1982.  Just "get in the van," eat top ramen, sleep on people's couches and don't expect for it to get ANY better for quite some time.   But produce your art and enjoy your life anyway.  After all, "the man who wants nothing has everything. " 

In some regards, this is happening via You Tube and low-fi features such as those so called mumblecore films, which might actually be startign to make it onto the radar screens of mainstream cinema.  David Denby wrote a column about Mumblecope in a recent issue of the New Yorker.  Look it up yourself, I forget how to embed links with html... (i'll get better at blogging, I swear) 

Friend S.P. said this about distribution, regarding the films that are getting picked these days for "release" such as it is:

"for all these folks who complain that the "mumblecore" movies aren't sufficiently ambitious or that all the kids are white, I'd answer that the point's well-taken, but the myth of the $2,000 movie is something we've gotta get over.  It's not a myth that you CAN make a movie on that kind of money.  certainly you can, but it involves a huge adjustment of expectations on both sides about what a movie is.  a good $2,000 movie isn't hollywood minus cgi and explosives because you don't have money for those things.  it is a movie where you get the labor of friends to make it...and if you're young and white and from a well-to-do family, thus providing sufficient leisure time for going around planning and making $2,000 features, the people helping you are quite likely also to be young and white and fairly well-to-do.  DUH"

To which I would say ( and I did, elsewhere, which is why I'm trying to gather these thoughts here) 

To me, mumblecore films and their ilk are simply signs that a younger generation is happily busy re-inventing the wheel - they did not grow up in "cinema-church" and are less aware of how the films are possibly echoes of Rohmer and Antonioni all over again, just as many punk rockers had little awareness that Iggy Pop was merely chanelling some rebellious drummers in Congo Square circa 1869. The impulse is the same - make art about and for those who are like yourself. And don't quit your day job, unless you can't help it, and are willing to live like a survivor.

Which bring me to the next level of pondering, and that is, how do you make a GOOD movie and also a marginal-to-good living?  To me some of the best films of recent days have been slyly addressing poverty and marginalization as subject matter, and they seem to be catching the zeitgeist a lot better than anything out of Hollywood or the slackavettes underground.  I'm talking about CHOP SHOP, WENDY & LUCY, BALLAST, FROZEN RIVER, et al.  (Oh, please let there be some "et"s and some "al"s to add to this list.... what have I missed?  Are there more like this?  TELL ME NOW!) These films are what I'd be proud to call decent cinema, not just movies you have to make excuses for but are still relevant.  I wish however they looked a little better sometimes, but they seem to all make a great balancing act out of art and commerce, ie, low budgets.   To me these are the case studies of quality film making worth examining - will these directors get to make more movies, or not?  How did these films fare with exhibitors and DVD sales, etc?  Inquiring minds want to know.

BS has this to say about the parallels of film and the music business, beginning with the observation that perhaps there are "too many movies," which is a quote by a certain festival director who is probably already sorry he said it.  

B.S. speaking:

"Yes, there are too many movies. I remember well the first time we met, at SXSW in 1992, when I interviewed Linklater (cassettes of which still exist somewhere, the great "unpublished" interview, post Slacker, pre Dazed). "Searching for the next
Nirvana" was the theme that struck me then. How punk rok had suddenly been "discovered," after an entire generation of minutemen in a van had gone unnoticed by the so-called "mainstream" and it was as if Seattle was Eden and had somehow given birth to something that of course had been living for years (and of course Patti Smith and Lou Reed and the Stooges and the MC5 and on, could rightfully say Mpls and Austin and LA, etc hadn't birthed anything either).  Anyway, it was clear to me then that being in a band had moved from a community of outsiders to a frat house commodity.

Subsequently, along with movies and the rest that makes up US "culture," it all became (perhaps with pot) this country's most profitable export. My sense of that movement, where what I dug was concerned, is that there was more great stuff out there than ever, perhaps because the money-to-be made drew greater numbers of truly creative people creating something substantial. But that there was also a heckuva lot more shit out there to slog through to find the pearls. That the gold rush sea of oyster shit and pearls, crossed paths with the technology explosion and increasing access to information, creative tools and communication, is to me, what hath now wrought My Space for You Tube's Twittering Facebook.

That this is shaking out to include an element of art becoming free-of-charge, I think in part, is marvelous. Or maybe someone who studied something different in college would call it "a market correction," which is kinda how I feel about the entire economic situation. Too many people here organized their actions around a smoke and mirrors approach to money, and now the day has come when no one can ignore the fact that when you believe in the invisible, the day comes when you see its really not there. And in this country, when what’s not there is money, people pay attention.

But I digress. Yeah, “free-of-charge” is making it harder to have "a career" as an artist, but is the dinner party you describe really the community we want to build?  (ed's note: I was speaking about the phenomenon of goign to someone's house and everyone ends up gathered around a CRT looking at an hours worth of You Tube random humor and vintage Soul Train clips)  What that dinner party scene illustrates to me, is the choice we need to make about whether we try and climb out of the cultural dumpster we made for ourselves, or dive to the bottom and suffocate in our own shit." 

He's making some good points here, I feel.  But then he gets to the meat of his essay, and I hate to make this post so long but you have to bear with me, it really nails something for me here when he continues:

"I trace the dumpster's birth (though surely, there’s a good argument to be made that it started whenever life began) back to Reagan’s election.  I remember vividly, in the summer of 1980, being in high school and watching to my 84 year-old, vodka-drinking, Russian émigré, Grammpa Isadore, stomp around the fire circle at his cabin in northern Minnesota, as he ranted on about how if Ronald Reagan got elected President that fall, it was the end of any leftover vestige of meaning and substance in US life.  He was convinced that the idea we would elect “a got demn actor” as President would debase any standard of excellence and cause a lowering of expectations of performance and ultimately a disappearance of care and compassion from which we, as a society, would never recover.

Isadore died that October, a few weeks before Reagan won."

(ed's note: BS comments on something I plucked from a comment indie producer Ted Hope said he heard from his 8 year old kid, who told his dad he wanted to be a "movie designer," by which he meant he wanted to come up with vertically integrated concepts like Pokemon: the movie, the game, the toy, the cartoon, the trading card, etc.)

BS concludes:

 
"And I don’t know Ted Hope or his son, but that the boy’s dream to create a
product line featuring some cultural commodity of his creation, is sad to me.  
Don’t get me wrong, more power to him flexing his creative self, but either
we’re truly living at the end of the age and it’s a zero sum endgame in which we
all might as well throw up and create the best 30 second fart joke we can, before time’s up, or we gotta reckon with the work that needs to be done, so young Hope can hope to have a vodka fueled rant with an grandson of his own.  One good thing is that people are paying attention, it is “a window of opportunity” as someone else is saying right now about something.   "

And so we arrive where we began - on the precipice of something new, some possibility, and a lot of danger surrounding.  I ask, dear reader - which way from here?

wither distro thread

I started this discussion via email, but it's bursting the seams.  So I took the plunge and started a blog just to keep it manageable.  We'll see where this all leads. I'm not trying to plant any flags with this blog just yet.

here's my original email i sent to  several buddies.

I've spent the last week post sxsw pondering the state of things; both in indie feature and doc film making world and the media world in general as we experience various unwindings, be it artistic, commercial and economic.

Of course one major topic of discussion is revolving around the idea of mumblecore; but in a marxist way the issue is about consumption and production of media content - we now have a younger audience that sees no moral imperative to hold on to the outdated model of Auteurist cinema, feature length movies, or even decent production value as sacred concepts of what to do with your 90 minutes on a friday night.

Naturally, I'm not the only one wondering "wither mumblecore, whither distribution, whither Auteurist cinema, etc?"  

(see link below)

Here is an audio recoding of the same general discussion featuring Ted Hope, who probably gets some of the best ideas across - he mentions his eight year old boy wants to grow up to be a "movie designer" by which he means he wants to create things like POKEMON, ie, the whole concept from toy to movie to trading cards to video game to theatrical feature.   Wave of the future indeed, and if anyone is the next Uncle Walt Disney, it's going to be ted's kid.  

http://cinematech.blogspot.com/

scroll down to "Audio: Talking About the Future of Indie Film, at SXSW"

(apologies for not knowing how to make links work better yet)

it's a lousy audio recording but if you put on headphones these people do bring up all the relevant points that are on all film makers' minds these days. 

this big issues seem to boil down to a few concepts:

how do film makers make a living now that everyone is used to free content?

how are "audiences" changing as they get younger and more used to new media, and is audience the right term?  isn't in moving towards "community"

what are the experimental models that are showing the most success - bit torrent, you tube, etc and how does one make a living from that if the best things are free?

are there "too many movies?"  

if the Peter Jackson model of making more expensive, longer and grander entertainment is supposedly success, why is the real trend in the opposite direction - no one cares about production value so much anymore, and you tube videos are 3 minutes long or less

okay well, garbage in garbage out...  but it was fascinating to me and someone is going to come up with some smart answers soon....

take a look if you dare