2012-01-24
An Oscar Reply
Seriously, though, last year was a parade of remarkable films; that’s not something you would conclude from these nominations.
War Horse???? It’s ET with a horse. Horse runs home.
Midnight in Paris? It’s a postcard extended to two hours.
Moneyball? A baseball movie where the audience’s attention span is the only meaningful antagonist.
Tree of Life: There’s a reason why the best movies tell stories. Visual poetry that’s more than two hours needs to be serialized.
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close: Schtick.
What a disappointing year for film-making.
What about the stuff that didn’t get nominated? More along the lines of Tree of Life as beautiful, heartbreaking films - but ones with more of a narrative - there are Melancholia and Norwegian Wood (although I don’t know if the latter counts for 2011, and it may fall into the Foreign Film ghetto anyway). Drive was a little flawed but definitely interesting and well made. Charlize Theron was unfairly overlooked for Best Leading Actress for Young Adult (although I accept it probably didn’t deserve a Best Film nomination), and although Gary Oldman represents Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the nominations for him and for Best Adapted Screenplay are far from enough recognition for that picture.
Perhaps it’s not so much a disappointing year for films as a(nother) case where you shouldn’t trust the MPAA to be your guide in what to see.
(via joshuanguyen)
2012-01-04
post/15309479657
2011-12-19
post/14470226871
evalilith, replying to my Lego post.
I don’t assume girls don’t like Lego; I’m sure there are plenty (perhaps even a majority) who love it, or would given the chance to play. (I have a nasty feeling that as the older brother I hogged the bricks when I played with my sister as a child.) I love to hear that friends have bought their niece one of the Creator sets.
Perhaps think the point I was trying (and probably failing) to make is that, as the article makes clear, that there are parents (and perhaps girls) who have decided that Lego is somehow for boys, some children’s imaginative reuse of minfigs notwithstanding. Their own sales figures and market research back that up.
I don’t particularly like it any more than the thousands of people who’ve commented on the Friends launch, but I am maybe more forgiving of Lego-the-corporation in making an effort to design, and (yes) market, products for a part of the population who aren’t buying as much of their stuff.
2010-10-21
iPhoto ‘11 and Letterpress Printing
iPhoto 11 prints letterpress cards
Which is kind of weird.
What i think they mean is that they have a bunch of pre-letterpresed cards, printed with a design which you can slot your photo into. Your photo is then digitally printed over the top of the letterpressed card. Not sure how they could scale it otherwise…
Anyone? Bueller?
If you watch the video of the keynote, about 22 minutes in is the introduction to the letterpress feature, including the video that’s embedded in iPhoto ‘11. That shows cards which take a photo as an insert on the inside.
Still, it’s an interesting choice of addition to the things you can print from the application.
2010-04-03
post/493100352
styledeficit on the iPad.
My take? The publishers want it to be CD-ROMs. They want it to save their businesses. It might, but I wouldn’t bet on it, and anyway, that’s not what’s interesting. What everyone else does - the everyone else that built so much of the content on the web that we care about daily - that’s interesting.
Is it closed? It’s more closed than an Apple ][, but then so is pretty much every computer of the last thirty years. I’m sure there were people in the 1980s who would have argued you can’t be creative with a mouse.
Will a proprietary format win? Well, maybe if you count Objective C, and maybe for digital magazines, but the web is powerfully corrosive.
Am I worried? No. I’m sort of excited. But it’ll take a while for us to really see what happens.
