films

Slate article about the slow death of film projectionism as a career.

John Lingan is doing a series comparing films with later remakes. Here he considers the 1960 Breathless and the one from 1983 with Richard Gere that only Quentin Tarantino likes.

A thorough and engaging Chelsea crawl (as in art) by Michael Salcman. Not a lot of agenda here, just careful description and honest opinion. The walk through the Rauschenberg show is especially good. (Note: The white paintings from the '50s are best known as a group of seven, in a wall-like array that made sense to be described as "airports for lights, shadows, and particles"--Cage's phrase. Gagosian showed a smaller grouping [two or three, I forget], which was truly unimpressive: a bus stop rather than an airport.)

One of the premises of Facebook era social media is that computers can determine who you are based on what you like--that is, your consumer choices.
An art rooted in social media has two possible stances regarding this omnipresent fact: to confront or ignore.
Confronting would mean the old-fashioned critique of capitalism (tired and boring).
Ignoring means you are a clueless person in a state of denial about your basic medium.
Artists are by nature feisty non-conformists who question all premises to arrive at an original idea.
Social media assumes originality means making choices from menu items.
Seems like a doomed premise to make art. The best work consists mostly of research and listmaking from the vast pool of weird, menu-clicking humanity, to find expressions others overlooked. How is this different from the trendspotting or coolhunting of marketers, though?

Here is a list of movies Netflix thinks I might be interested in, based on my past watches:

Bad Company with Anthony Hopkins and Chris Rock - wtf; insulting
The Stepfather - would be interested in seeing the 1987 version again, scripted by Don Westlake and starring Terry "John Locke" O'Quinn, not this recent remake
Labyrinth - seen it
Fawlty Towers - right, because I watched a Monty Python from 1971; next
Enemy Mine - seen it
Barton Fink - wouldn't mind seeing it again
Suspiria - own DVD
A Woman is a Woman - seen it
The Hunted - late Friedkin, I don't think so
Fire in the Sky - doesn't sound interesting

That's one out of ten (Barton Fink) but they only need one to keep me in the system so the computer is pretty clever. If I take the time to rate Barton Fink and other movies I've watched Netflix will gradually build a more and more refined picture of who I am as a movie watcher. This data could then be shared with a larger social networking platform that would introduce me to other Barton Fink watchers who must be a lot like me. We could form Barton Fink groups. Through these groups--who knows?-- I might hook up with some old high school friends who could pass along tips for interesting music to download from indie sites. Eventually I'll give up this blog--what was I thinking, trying to have my "own" expression--and spend all my time chatting and being steered toward new products I can buy for a nominal cost.

Update: Am told that an unsympathetic reader reduced this post to a bullet point about not liking so-called recommendation engines. That's very true, way to simplify an argument. Let's reiterate it: people interested in some idea of "art on the net" at some point are going to have to agree with industry's premise that a machine-aided Daily Me is possible (this reader obviously does) or will cling to the idea that while a human mind can lose at chess or Jeopardy it will always be more subtle and perverse than an "engine." This doesn't rule out the idea of a synthetic person, down the road, with thought patterns based on human ones; it's only to say that from what we've seen of humor from this species so far, it's been mostly unintentional. The AI, when it comes, will likely build consciousness from the inside out rather than springing into existence as an aggregation of influences. It will also likely be very different from us (but still won't like Bad Company with Anthony Hopkins and Chris Rock).

Rich Cohen, exploring the dark side of It's a Wonderful Life in Salon:

Here's my point: I do not think the hidden message vanishes when the movie goes Hollywood and happy. I believe the resolution of the darker movie is, in fact, still there, wrapped around the happy ending of the classic. Look again at the closing frames -- shots of Jimmy Stewart staring at his friends. In most, he's joyful. But in a few, he's terrified. As I said, this is a terrifying movie. An hour earlier George was ready to kill himself. He has now returned from a death experience. He was among the unborn, had crossed over like Dante's hero, had seen this world from beyond the veil. In those frames -- "The Night Journey of George Bailey" -- I don't think he's seeing the world that would exist had he never been born. I think he's seeing the world as it does exist, in his time and also in our own.

George had been living in Pottersville all along. He just didn't know it. Because he was seeing the world through his eyes -- not as it was, but as he was: honest and fair. But on "The Night Journey," George is nothing and nobody. When the angel took him out of his life, he took him out of his consciousness, out from behind his eyes. It was only then that he saw America. Bedford Falls was the fantasy. Pottersville is where we live. If you don't believe me, examine the dystopia of the Capra movie -- the nighttime world of neon bars and drunks and showgirl floozies. Does Bedford Falls feel more like the place you live, or does Pottersville? I live in a place that looks very much like Bedford Falls, but after 10 minutes in line at the bank or in the locker room where the squirts are changing for hockey I know I'm in Pottersville.

Update: Link to Salon article broke; fixed now. That publication used to be good about maintaining links; bummer.

Joe McKay has a "top 6" post up discussing Minecraft and other games, as well as a reconsideration of the original Tron movie (on the occasion of what sounds like an execrable sequel).

Did some blog posts on Tron a few years back (whoops, seven years, time flies). Excerpt from one of them:

The computer graphics were divided among four different companies. In order to communicate the movements the filmmakers wanted (say, in the sequence where a Recognizer chases a tank), the animators hand-wrote numerical coordinates for the horizontal, vertical, and depth axes of each object, as well as variable factors such as pitch and yaw, on a sheet of paper, and the graphics shop keypunched the numbers in: 600 numbers translated into four seconds of film. The movie had approximately 20 minutes of computer-generated footage (including the "descent into the computer," the yes/no-speaking "bit," and other vignettes), all of which had to be painstakingly integrated with the backlit kodalith of the rotoscoped sequences. The "making of" featurette is tres corporate; the Disney execs interviewed basically fib and say the movie succeeded from the get-go, when in actuality the game outsold the film in '82.

Excerpt from another:

The film's director, Steven Lisberger, is just as rooted in digital utopianism as the Pixar folks; in recent interviews he has spoken of how artists can give inspiring form to new technologies, lamented the failed promise of the internet (he believes it's mainly a haven for gossip and p0rn), and dissed the despairing tone of the (original) Matrix. Yet a lot of artists like Tron, perhaps for the wrong reasons: the provisional, cobbled-together look of its technology; its wonderful mix of formal beauty and supreme cheesiness. Also, readers of William Gibson's Neuromancer inevitably thought about Blade Runner when visualizing The Sprawl, but what movie provided a ready template for the blocks of abstract data comprising Cyberspace?

"Did you see the Facebook movie?"
"I did. I really liked the last shot, where Zuckerberg is sending a friend request to his ex-girlfriend, over and over, just obsessively hitting 'send.'"
"He's kind of a creepy, 'smart moron,' isn't he?"
"Oh, yeah."
"And yet you spend hours every day on a site he created. What does that say about you?"
"Oh, you're just mean."

Some literary license taken here; this isn't verbatim but something like this exchange occurred. How cheap is this shot? Normally we'd say the artist is separate from the art but Facebook isn't art; it's a thing people use. Several people have told me about being stalked by ex-friends and ex-lovers on the site. The software seems to facilitate it. One is reminded of the episode of Star Trek (TOS) where Dr. Daystrom imprinted the "n-grams of his own brain" on a supercomputer. His own ambition and unacknowledged psychological quirks caused the computer nearly to destroy the Enterprise during a live demonstration of its starship-piloting ability. Perhaps we need to think more about "creator n-grams" in discussing social media and their underexamined offspring, "social media art."

Update: My own n-grams are faulty. Here's what happened in that TOS episode: "The crew watches as [the supercomputer] pounds the other ships relentlessly. The Enterprise fires on the Lexington, killing 53, then destroys the Excalibur - killing all aboard her. From the Lexington, Commodore Wesley orders the remaining ships to destroy the Enterprise at all cost...."