I haven’t bought it yet, but will at some point. The internets are aflame with upset Final Cut editors – “pros” who see FCPX as a dumbing-down of the program. It brings necessary updates (64-bit, background processing of renders etc.), but eliminates crucial pro workflow features (XML, EDL, tape support, dual monitor support, 3rd party hardware support etc).

Fair enough. But really? Since when do pros update on the first day?

Granted, the fact that it can’t even import old projects is pretty crazy. And the way the Mac App Store works isn’t helping, as people can’t try a demo or anything, so some must have paid $300 just to discover a crucial feature is missing. The obvious answer is that FCP 7 still works great, and the solution for now is to use both, whichever one works best for the project at hand. But Apple screwed up by pulling Final Cut Studio from their stores, making it hard for some to do just that.

I’m very happy with the new direction though. Even though the Final Cut we’ve all known and loved for over a decade brought lots of welcome innovations that Avid is still trying to copy, it was nonetheless based on a tape-to-tape / film editing metaphor. That metaphor needed to get chucked – the whole interface needed to be rethought. Who better to do that than Apple?

I don’t like bitterness. Yet it’s hard to avoid. it’s hard to be a realist without being a cynic, and harder still to be a cynic without becoming bitter.

I try not to hate the Oscars. In my youth I watched them naively, as a celebration of the year’s film. Then, when I realized that Kubrick and Hitchcock had never won for best director, and that Dances with Wolves beat Goodfellas for best picture and director in 1991, I watched them socially, ironically. Then as uplifting middlebrow discharge continued to triumph over the adversity of challenging film, I watched them angrily. Then I stopped watching altogether.

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Man. Just getting over a week-long flu that had me thinking I was turning into a zombie. But now I live again, and have enough energy to sort through a bunch of half-finished blog posts and give them the kick in the blog they need. Here we go

I decided to jump on the ‘year in review’ bandwagon and make some frickin’ lists. These are not going to be ranked, and they are not attempts to argue that you should like these things. They’re simply things I liked, compiled as a personal thought aid, and shared just in case anyone might find them interesting.

So, movies.

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I have not seen this film but the trailer makes me want to:

Via Ebert and I think also MeFi recently.

Something’s been bugging me for a while: is Banksy’s film Exit Through the Gift Shop a hoax or not? I saw the film when it came out and loved it. I heard some rumblings questioning its authenticity, but didn’t think too much about it. While I was in Windsor, a bunch of the artists went to see it, and most didn’t like it. Their reason, more often than not, was that it was a self-celebrating fake documentary. So there were a few discussions about what exactly might have been faked – but no one knew for sure.

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The Social Network does what it does to perfection – it makes a thriller out of a heap of code. It pays attention to the details. It treats the characters even-handedly.

But it fails at one big thing. The big topic is of course Facebook, and the site is far from a main character in this story. We catch glimpses only; the odd screenful. The blue glow on Zuckerberg’s face as he writes code.

A few months back a few private IMs of Zuckerberg’s circulated. One contained the following:

Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend’s Name]: What? How’d you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don’t know why.
Zuck: They “trust me”
Zuck: Dumb fucks.

Another went as follows:

Zuck: So you know how I’m making that dating site
Zuck: I wonder how similar that is to the Facebook thing
Zuck: Because they’re probably going to be released around the same time
Zuck: Unless I fuck the dating site people over and quit on them right before I told them I’d have it done.

These show how restrained Sorkin and Fincher actually were in their depiction of the man. I mean, it’s just the kind of black humour all of us practise in private with our friends. But it’s the sort of thing that can become public all too easily nowadays, thanks to this brave new world we live in, thanks to services like Facebook.

Facebook and its ilk have changed how we communicate, what we mean by friendship, what we consider public and private, what we know about each other. They have changed our society fundamentally.

The film does not explore this at all. It does present the simple irony of a friendless man creating the world’s largest social networking site, but that’s it.

So it’s a real missed opportunity. The direction they did take this project – a docu-drama thriller, along the lines of All the President’s Men – also steers the ample public discussion of the film almost exclusively towards the issue of its veracity. Is that what the characters were like, is that the correct sequence of events, etc. There is some consideration of morals and ethics, but the techology’s impact on society gets next to no attention.

Does that make it a bad film? I’m not sure. On the one hand, I don’t believe you can criticize a film for not being something it didn’t try to be. On the other hand, if the significance of the subject matter is lost on the creators, how good a job did they do?

This is a little late, but what the hell.

I took it pretty easy with TIFF this year. I only saw 9 films. I missed a few I really wanted to see – I asked for them but got my second choice. I tended to not bother going in those cases; my head just wasn’t in the game. I gave a bunch away, too.

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On Sunday I got back from another 4-day jaunt to Windsor for the continuing SRSI. The project is pretty incredible. I wish I had some short segments to share but I’m well behind on the editing part, sadly.

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Say, I made this promo that I like. You may like it too, if you like shooting. The movie airs tomorrow night on Space.

Development of my media center app of choice, Plex, has seemed stagnant of late, with their blog only updated with new plugins for Danish sports channels and the like. But all was not as it seemed. Deep in the dark, there were rumblings. And lo!

At the end, we decided, just like with our plug-in framework, to throw out the existing code and rewrite it from scratch… The ground up rewrite not only results in an extremely powerful library for personal content, but also sets the stage for providing many benefits beyond just the library itself.

Plex’s new Library, Alexandria, is thus teased. Hopefully it won’t be burned down by the Christians and blamed on the Romans, like the real one.

Shutter Island has many delights. Even a sub-par picture by Marty Scorsleazy is sure to be full of masterful craft moments, as his crew is top notch. This one is no exception: shot by Rob Richardson, edited by Thelma Schoonmaker, designed by Dante Ferretti, the names are as predictable as they are excellent. One surprise is old Scorcese pal Robbie Robertson as music supervisor. In the Kubrick style, there is no original score, so this job is more important than simply finding pop songs to play in the background of bar scenes. Even more Kubrickian is the inclusion of Ligeti and Penderecki (you might remember us from such modernist horror scores as: The Shining), but there’s also some Eno, some Cage. One powerful piece is “On the Nature of Daylight” by Max Richter, a beautiful, languid, melancholy, near-minimalist string piece. The soundtrack is great. (So is the film, by the way.)

Shutter Island’s last act is full of surprises. Perhaps the greatest – not a spoiler! – is the song that plays over the credits. It’s surprising because it’s a mashup, of the aforementioned Richter track with Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter Earth”. It’s also surprising because it’s a beautiful mashup, perhaps the greatest I’ve heard. The only credit for the composite work is “mixed by Robbie Robertson”. Quite a set of ears on that dude, to say nothing of the brain that thought of blending these two sources that are so dissimilar but also simply made to be together. Have a listen, but also chase down the originals to see what I’m talking about.

Right now I’m working on a documentary about artists in Windsor, Ontario.

There, I said it. I’m not sure what manner of resistance has taken hold of me, but I’ve found it difficult to actually post about this, despite having resolved a couple months back that I wanted to blog about the whole process. Part of it is when you want to post about something important to you, the standards go up from the usual “write a bunch of shit that’s on my mind and post it, quick” to something more involved that butts right up against your already constrained free time, as your time is already full doing the thing that’s important to you. Something like that.

Let me bring you up to speed. This may take more than one post as I’m going to post something today, that’s for damned sure, but I don’t have long to do it.

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In this reporter’s opinion:

• 25th Hour
• Children of Men
• Mulholland Drive
• Memento
• United 93
• Zodiac
• Spirited Away
• Martyrs
• Cache
• Donnie Darko
• Grizzly Man
• Surfwise
• LOTR trilogy
• Batman Begins / Dark Knight

I’m too lazy to be too fussy about it, so that’s not necessarily in any order, and I’m sure I’ve forgotten something great, or failed to see something mindblowing. I haven’t put films from this past year which is probably a mistake, but it feels too hard to make an accurate judgment of anything so recent.

My conception of an ideal film is something that makes you think and feel. Preferably both, but films that provoke only thought are better than those that provoke only feeling (Forrest Gump can make you sniffle, but that doesn’t make it a wonderful film). I measure the greatest films by how much I reflect on them afterwards, and that is often a combination of thoughts and feelings. As a consequence I love open-ended, somewhat mysterious films whose meanings are elusive, rather than films that tie everything up into a neat little bow.

I know, the last two entries on that list don’t quite match those criteria. I just added them because I’ve probably watched them the most, so they would be more in the ‘guilty pleasure’ category.

I thought King Kong was amazing in the theatres. When I watched it at home on DVD, I lost interest halfway through. It felt sagging, bloated. Dark Knight blew my mind on Imax, but when I got it home the dialogue felt wooden and speechy, the structure confused.

You see where I’m going with this.

Avatar, in the theatre, in 3D, is an experience I’d recommend to anyone, even though it may well result in headaches and exhaustion. Your optic nerve gets a real workout. The visual richness of every frame is heightened by the 3D in a way that makes my other 3D experiences – Final Destination, Up, Ice Age 3, Dr. Tongue’s 3D House of Slave Chicks) – seem like cheap parlour tricks. It wasn’t just action (although there was plenty of that), there was beauty, wonder. My Avatar-mates and I all admitted to tearing up at some point during the proceedings.

The sheer CGI-ness of the thing is also overwhelming. This film is essentially set in the Uncanny Valley, yet as a tale of exotic adventurism, of failed conquest of the irrational, of getting outside your body and putting on a new skin, it certainly works. By the end of it, the humans were the ones that looked weird. Avatar will be a legendary drug movie for some time to come. (And no, I’m not saying I was high seeing it, although I kind of felt like it after.)

But will it be celebrated as much as some of the more gushing reviews would have you believe?

In order to answer that, we’d have to answer my opening question: which is the true experience, the 3D Imax blowout or watching it at home on DVD or even Blu-Ray? The practical answer is the latter experience, as ever since VHS took root, home theatre revenues have dwarfed theatrical box office. If a movie is the sum of all its viewings, Avatar’s cracks will show up. Its stock, underdeveloped characters, its all-too-angelic indigenous peoples, its blunt allegory, its “Unobtanium”. I’d say it’s the worst Cameron script, which isn’t really much of an insult, but still.

But if we are allowed to be idealists, optimists, to judge a movie in the best possible light in which it can be seen – which for Avatar involves kooky glasses – we might well see it as a glowing blue planetful of awesomeness.

Here’s a set of photos from our Star Wars promo shoot I mentioned last week. Big christmas card potential here, I’m thinking.

There is no question in my mind that cameras like this are the future for many of us.

By us I mean those interested in both still and motion picture photography. I’ve been into both fields for a while, both by hobby and trade, and it still blows my little mind to think I could afford a thing like this. It’s been a long, gradual and perhaps predictable time coming, but that doesn’t make it seem any less crazy. When I was in university we shot on VHS, and people were saying Hi-8 video was the future. Then it was the DV “revolution”. I split on a cheap DV handicam with some friends. But you still couldn’t get a nice image with these things – you could imitate video stuff, but never convincingly film. For that you needed to shoot film, which was a mulit-thousand-dollar proposition for camera rental & processing. Soon, we were lucky enough to be able to shoot on early pro HDCAMs like the Sony F900, but that was still a half-million dollar camera. A few short years later, the Red is here at $20,000, which is mind-blowing to anyone in the industry.

And now we have sub-$2,000 video SLRs like the GH1. Cameras with great optics, all-digital workflow, 1080p24, compact size, full manual control. Interchangeable lenses, decent low-light shooting. Total craziness.

These are amazing cameras, but they have kinks. I’m sure in a year or two this category will have stabilized, the feature set will be clear, and choices will be easier. The next iteration of the GH1 (might I guess GH2?) will solve a lot of the problems with this thing. Because yes, there are problems.

• no video out – you can put HDMI or composite out when reviewing shots, but not while capturing. This makes it very hard to do a lot of things where the director and camera operator are not the same person.
• poor audio support – the GH1 has a surprisingly decent built-in mic, and an optional mountable shotgun mic, but most of the time, I’d want to hook up a wireless lavalier mic. You can do that, but the audio in is a minijack that auto-levels the signal. For best sound, you need to record into a separate audio field recorder and then sync in post. That’s a couple hundred extra and a big pain in the ass.
• low bitrate – the camera has great optics, but the files it saves are too low a bitrate. Sometimes this bites you, sometimes it doesn’t.
• AVCHD – I find this to be a shitty codec, which causes headaches in post as it must be converted to something Final Cut can use (still haven’t figured out how to get it into the Avid). When you combine AVCHD’s interframe compression with the low bitrate, especially in 1080p24 mode you get compression mud in certain situations, like fast camera movement and/or complex detail (grass, especially). This sucks. There is an MJPEG mode that is mud-free, but it’s only 720p30 and is still low bitrate.

I don’t want to sound complainy here. The GH1 has a lot going for it. Mainly:

• I found the still modes to be awesome. I may not be the best judge, not having used a lot of DSLRs, but I’ve gotten some great photos out of this thing.
• The flip-out LCD is a lifesaver. Every camera should have this.
• the kit lens is impressive. It’s the equivalent of a 28-280mm zoom, which gives you a lot of options. Its silent autofocus is another engineering marvel for an SLR. I really never thought I’d use autofocus, but it’s quite smart.
• An advantage of the category in general: these cameras are really small compared to video cameras, and thus really stealth. You can get away with a lot. Except you’ll have to put up with people posing as they wait for the ‘click’.
• This is another categorical feature, but one that compares favourably to most video cams, even much more expensive ones: interchangeable lenses. I’ve picked up a fast 50mm FD lens and the results have been really satisfying.All the cameras in this category, which right now includes the Canon 5DMkII and the new 7D, suffer from strange, idiosyncratic drawbacks.

Like I say, I’m figuring in a year or so the dust will have settled, each manufacturer will have figured out the featureset they need, and eliminated the needless problems. Red’s cheaper camera Scarlett will theoretically be on the market, too. No matter how you slice it, it’s a great time to be shooting, and it will continue this way for the forseeable future. Perhaps one day we will simply exhale a fine mist of microscopic flying camera bugs and then let our algorithms cut it together, but until then…

I was going to do separate, detailed posts for everything I loved, but I’m going to have to freeball it here quickly or I’ll never get around to it. So here are all the rest of the films that I saw:

Dogtooth

Along with Ondine, Enter the Void and Hadewijch, one of the best I saw. It’s a brilliantly inventive Greek film about three kids raised to believe some crazy bullshit. Works as a comedy, drama, and parable.

Ondine

Neil Jordan sure can write. He makes what could be a jumbled mess of genres and topics come across as a modern fable. Quite impressive – also great music & Irish people, including Mr. Farrell.

The Loved Ones

Entertaining, unpredictable, and shallow Australian horror-comedy. Fun, better than most US horror releases, but ain’t no Citizen Kane.

Youth in Revolt

Felt like it had a half hour cut out of it. Meandering, charming Michael Cera flick that I’m sure will kill at the box office.

Cell 211

Superior Spanish jailhouse thriller in which a prison guard poses as an inmate during a prison riot / revolution. Will undoubtedly be remade stateside starring Sly Stallone and Ving Rhames or whomever.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

Yes this movie is real, hilarious, and (hopefully) the start of the world’s most unlikely film franchise. It’s refreshing to like Nick Cage in a movie again, but he’s still performing and not acting. Come for the iguanas, stay for the lucky crack pipe.

The Ape

Fascinating film with little substance but some great technique and some psychological insights. For more, read Ram’s review-, with which I agree.

Backyard

Riveting, powerful Mexican police thriller about murdered women in Juarez that winds up being about much more than that.

Perrier’s Bounty

Entertaining Irish Guy-Ritchie-alike. That’s Tarantino-alike twice removed.

Symbol

Patience-testing but ultimately rewarding surrealist comedy about a Mexican wrestler and a guy who wakes up in a mysterious white room. Battling with Trash Humpers in my mind for weird-funny champion of the festival. Need to learn more about this dude

The Disappearance of Alice Creed

Workmanlike but unremarkable low-budget British thriller.

The Front Line

Italian historical thriller falls down as its confused structure doesn’t help us sympathize with some left-wing guerilla/terrorists.

Videocracy

Documentary about Berlusconi and his media empire. Floats around the edge of the ring with three topical, eccentric characters, but never lands the knockout punch.

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That was everything. Phew. It was quite a week. I also wanted to jot down some impressions of the fest as a whole, but we’ll see what Lady Time gives me this week.

Stuff I wrote up already:
Enter the Void
Trash Humpers
Hadewijch, Daybreakers, Valhalla Rising
My angry day two post

I’m a couple days late with these write-ups. Clearly I would make a bad film critic.

Gaspar Noé‘s Irreversible was a hugely shocking and audacious film, and someone’s slipped a tab in his drink since then, as Enter the Void amps it up a few dB in scale, ambition, technique, discipline, and frustration. In a nutshell, it’s modeled on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and follows a small-time drug dealer as he gets high, gets killed, and navigates the afterlife. It takes the concept of the point of view shot to a whole new level, and applies a strict video game perspective to each of multiple states of being. Oscar’s real life is seen in the first person, with the camera literally where his eyes are, and includes blinking, his thoughts (muttered monologue), and even his DMT-induced hallucinations. His deathbed flashbacks to his past life are shown in the third person, with the back of Oscar’s head visible in the foreground. His bodyless ghost-floating is seen from spiralling overhead shots.

These techniques are applied unrelentingly. If Oscar’s spirit wishes to follow a different friend, the camera flies across the city and finds that friend. And if a scene is to play out from this point of view, it does so, all from above, with no cutting in to closeups.

It’s a grimy neon afterlife that Noé has us enter, as Oscar the ghost drug dealer navigates a nighttime Tokyo populated by drug-addled artists, predatory dealers, and most importantly his stripper sister, with whom he has a quote unquote special bond. Oscar’s past, while not without some cliched happy moments, is scarred by a violent, traumatic incident. Noé shows us everything in unnecessary detail, as if to rub our noses in the gore of human misery.

It’s a sleazy and somewhat dull world, to be truthful. Oscar and his sister never take on the dimensions of real characters and it’s hard to form any bonds with them. I get the impression that this film is a cautionary tale, and Noé does not respect his characters. The dialogue is consistently mundane. A particularly frustrating scene toward the end, which could have been powerfully emotional, is almost laughably blunt.

Noé is anything but subtle. When I tell you that the film’s based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, I know this not because I’ve read it or because it’s visible in the corner of the frame on a character’s shelf, but rather because the characters talk repeatedly about it, describing its contents and laying out the course of the film for those up in the cheap seats.

Also, the purity of the technique starts to get in the way of the storytelling. The need to ghost-cam fly across the city to follow different characters basically adds a 30-second whip pan every time we switch from A- to B-plot. Likewise, the playing out of long take scenes in single overhead shots gets tiresome, and bloats an already challenging film past the two-and-a-half hour mark.

That’s the frustration, that Noé doesn’t climb down from the lofty heights of the concept and the technique and make a real story out of this thing. All the same, he’s achieved some amazing shit here, and fans of formalism and/or the seedy afterlife will want to check this film out.

So much of film reception is expectation. I went in to this Harmony Korine film having heard bad things, and was just saying to Jenn “we may well walk out of this,” when Korine concluded his introductory remarks by saying, basically, if you’re the sort of person who walks out on movies, might as well do it now. It was a challenge (a throwdown, hell no I can’t slow down) that I accepted almost unconsciously, and I realize now it reset my expectations to near zero.

If you are expecting an experimental work of artistic merit, Trash Humpers may well fall short. I don’t think Korine is playing in the big leagues with this one, which is not to say he couldn’t if he tried. However, if you treat this as a bizarre sketch comedy feature, one step weirder than Tim & Eric, say, you may well enjoy it, as I did.

The Trash Humpers are four southerners who wear creepy old-person masks and, well, hump trash. And trees, and walls, and whatever else. They also smash TVs, vandalize things, break into homes, and kill people, all the while muttering, grunting, singing atonally and/or laughing like sick hyenas. There is no plot to speak of, only a collection of scenes featuring the central characters, and other supporting characters drift in and out freely. The film is shot on VHS, meant to capture an archival quality, as if you might find the tape in a dead person’s things and wonder just what the fuck they were up to. As such, the director/cameraman Korine is also one of the Humpers, and shows up more and more toward the end of the film.

One one hand I’m tempted to criticize the film for lacking cohesion, and argue that it could have benefited from a more targeted sense of mystery. You can’t help but project some onto it (was there a falling out among the humpers? Whose baby did the lady humper steal?), but I do not imagine this is a Mulholland Drive-level puzzle waiting to be solved, if by Korine’s own explanation of it afterwards. I’d also propose it might fare better as a YouTube channel rather than a feature. On the other hand, it’s easier to just let the film be what it is, which is a fuckin’ weird 76 minutes of weird shit going down.

Mmm, my third day of TIFF was much better. Perhaps it’s equal parts personal adjustment to queuing and crowds (something I go way out of my way to avoid in regular life), better choices of film, and all around better luck. I mean, no one likes rushing around to line up for films you find okay or kinda hate, but if the films are good, you take it with a grain of salt, yeah?

Bruno Dumont’s Hadewijch was my starter in the morning, and I was quite into it. I confess it’s the first Dumont film I’ve seen, but won’t be the last: it’s a fascinating meditation on religion perfectly married to a compelling plot.

Daybreakers was next. I tried to only get tickets to films that weren’t about to get a release, but in certain cases I couldn’t help myself. If you say “sci-fi vampire film,” I mean I’ve actually watched Bava’s Planet of the Vampires, know what I mean? This had its flaws – wooden dialogue, a little too earnest – but made up for them in sheer inventiveness and entertainment value. Despite the daylight scheduling, the screening was classic midnight madness, with a whooping crowd and a great warm-up from Colin Geddes.

I finished the day with the brooding Viking film Valhalla Rising, another film from a filmmaker I’m slightly ashamed to be unfamiliar with, Nicolas Winding Refn. It was like Bergman doing Conan the Barbarian, with perhaps a little too much emphasis on mood and enigma at the expense of depth. But it gets bonus points for a disembowelment and a mute, one-eyed protagonist like someone from a Leone flick.

My scheduling was still poor today, with a scant 15 minutes to get from film to film, but my trusty bike got me there on time. Directors were present for all three films, but because of my rushed scheduling I only got to hear the Q&A for the last one, which I regret. It’s probably better to allow a lot more time between flicks, especially as they tend to start late.