l-dopa

Spiderman 3 Trailer here!

Nah, just kidding. It’s actually here. And, it looks pretty darn good, even if for whatever reason it completely ignores the real story behind how Spidey got his black suit*.

~jeff

*The last part of that sentence should of course be read in your interior “Comic Book Guy” voice, which honestly is the way I hope you read the entire site. Worst. Footnote. Ever!

Long before Morgan Spurlock gave us the film “Super Size Me“, an entertaining but often-times whiny, obnoxious and more than a little self-righteous look at the media-driven eating habits of Americans, author and investigative journalist, Eric Schlosser, released the non-fiction best seller, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. While Spurlock’s work is a relative Cliffs Note on the battle of the American People vs. Nutritional Common Sense and the Corporate influence to keep the fight unfair, Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation is an immaculately researched, fact-heavy juggernaut that throws enough punches to stun even the most jaded reader. However, it is tempered with such eloquence that it often reads with the ease of a Garrison Keillor-approved essay on the dusty, long and winding road through the history of all things Americana. It fascinates by offering a historical perspective on the growth of the fast food industry moving in lock-step with the emergence of new technologies and consequently the new habits of the industrialized American. It moves with melancholy tales of migrant workers pulling grueling shifts in the slaughterhouses and suffering dehumanizing injustices at the hands of their superiors with no hope for recourse and no legal ground on which to mount a defense. And it infuriates by revealing the industry’s perspective of the consumer– a rather accurate portrayal that we are naught but cattle whose every move can be predicted and affected thanks to number-crunching technology that is nothing short of military-grade, and trade publications that delve so deeply into the minutiae of the psychology behind our habits, as well as the habits of small children and infants, that they can only be described through Orwellian reference.You are correct if you’ve arrived at the idea that I am a big fan of this book. I am not a militant vegan or even a passive “make-up-my-own-rules” vegetarian (chicken and fish are meat, asshole). And though the occasion is rare, I do, in fact, treat myself to fast food from time to time, with none of the Evil Empire corporations exempt. However, for whatever reason*, I purchased this book shortly after its release in 2001-2002, and I cannot recall a time before or since that I so savagely devoured a work of non-fiction from cover to cover. It’s that good, and at the risk of punching myself in the face for saying it, I would even go so far as to call it a triumph…but…

Sadly, and with frigid irony, this book– championed many times over as a shining example of investigative journalism at its most deft– is getting the McTreatment as a feature length film to be released later this year. Now, I know what you’re thinking: “What’s so bad about that? Nobody reads anymore and this will make it easier for message to get across,.. you know, like a Michael Moore joint”. I would agree were it a big screen interpretation of this fine work. However, rather than an interpretation, it is to be released as an adaptation. More specifically, a “fictionalized thriller”, written for the screen and directed by Richard Linklater, and featuring the likes of Ethan Hawke, Kris Kristofferson, Avril (fucking) Lavigne, Luis Guzman (you’d know him the minute you saw him) and Greg Kinnear.

Oh well. In any event, it looks to make the film adaptation of I, Robot look like nothing short of an artistic conquest.

Anyway, if you’re bored, check this link to what’s new regarding the ultra stoop-o-phonic, futuristic, George Jetson kind of number crunching sheeb these corporations are digging on these days.

*Perhaps it was my love for all things conspiracy theory (conspiracy fact for those of us in the know. ~wink~)

My friend Kelsey Flynn and I were bored — ok, I was bored, she probably had better things to do — and we made an animated ad for the Firefox Flicks ad contest. This uses the “Ghettoshop” rotoscoping script I’ve been working on for a while. Enjoy! (H.264 video, so QuickTime 7 required):

• 30-second long version, the one we submitted.
• Longer ‘director’s cut’ version, with different music.

~jeff

Link (requires QuickTime), found on the excellent site the Panopticist.

~jeff

Oh, I want to see this so bad. Comes out July 7th, 2006.

~jeff

Link to Kelsey Flynn’s Cliff Notes’ summary of “Brokeback Mountain”; video in Flash 8 format as per our earlier discussion. I did the music, and in case for some weird reason reason you didn’t pick up the obvious reference, the fuzzy-guitar+tremolo-surf soundtrack is a direct homage to Neil Young’s incredibly sparse and textural score for Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 western “Dead Man“.

~jeff

“The Corporation” sounds like an interesting documentary, inexplicably available in its entirety on Google Video:

THE CORPORATION explores the nature and spectacular rise of the dominant institution of our time. Footage from pop culture, advertising, TV news, and corporate propaganda, illuminates the corporation’s grip on our lives. Taking its legal status as a “person” to its logical conclusion, the film puts the corporation on the psychiatrist’s couch to ask “What kind of person is it?” Provoking, witty, sweepingly informative, The Corporation includes forty interviews with corporate insiders and critics - including Milton Friedman, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, and Michael Moore - plus true confessions, case studies and strategies for change.

…while it’s wonderful that this film is freely available, I can’t quite imagine watching an entire (three hour!) movie via a web page. Too bad it’s not available via some format I could burn to DVD.

~jef

Really great, brutally honest article on Roger Ebert here. I’ve always enjoyed his work; it’s nice to find out more about the man and his surprisingly interesting life.

~jeff

About two months ago, my girlfriend and I spent a day at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, a.k.a. “Mass MoCA“. It’s a wonderful museum, in a gorgeous part of Massachusetts, and well worth a visit.

While there, I took some video, and I finally got around to editing and animating it last week. Here is that video:

View (requires QuickTime 7 or VLC).

~jeff

…and one of them sucks. My wife was out of town this weekend, so I went and saw two movies in the theater all by my lonesome. Only one of them was remotely worth it.

A History of Violence
David “Balls Out Weird” Cronenberg’s new movie is fucking awful, despite having a lot in it’s favor. Viggo Mortensen, Ed Harris, William Hurt, an interesting premise. The basic idea is that a small town guy might just be a mobster with a hidden past that he has completely given up. Problems start from the first thirty seconds of this movie. And it goes downhill from there. Cronenberg is adept at creepy, but he is unable to leave that behind when he makes a sentimental outing. The result is a “feel good” movie that involves watching people try to breathe after they have had their face shot off/punched in/stabbed/immolated. The dialogue is awful. The acting, though noble I guess, can’t make up for it. The plot starts out badly, then takes a turn for the stunningly bad about halfway through. All in all, this movie isn’t worth the film it is printed on, and if I find someone distributing it via Bittorrent, I will personally turn them in to the RIAA for distributing such a waste of time. Don’t rent it. Don’t Netfilix it. Please god, shoot a puppy before you watch this film.

Stay
Now, I didn’t know much about this movie when I went in, and I think that is for the best. It was engaging from beginning to end. I haven’t liked Ewan McGreggor since Shallow Grave and Trainspotting, but he does a great job here. The film is reminiscent of Memento, in that you are a bit confused through the whole thing, but it is far more tantalizing than frustrating. The ending may seem like a bit of a cop-out, but I don’t know how else such a complex story could have been wrapped up. I don’t think I’ve ever actually gotten goose bumps from a scary scene in a film before. I’ll go see it again, just to wrap my head back around it.

Here’s a little 7 second animation I made a couple months ago on the lovely “Bridge of Flowers” in Shelburne Falls. It’s compressed to be iPod video friendly (320×240@700 kbps).

MAYBE A HANDY TIP: when compressing and creating video for use in a browser, in iTunes, in QuickTime, in VLC, and on an iPod, rename the file to end with .mp4; Web servers and browsers (even Safari!) don’t seem to always like the .m4v file extension…. honestly, I don’t understand why Apple needed yet another MPEG-4 file extension.

MAYBE NOT: While I’m off on an incredibly nerdly tangent, you know what’s a bummer? Both the Sony PSP and the Apple iPod use H.264 format MPEG-4 video, **but** one of those machines I just mentioned apparently uses a non-standard file header format (I’m looking in your direction, Sorny) so video files will have to be prepared separately for each device. How lame is that, especially because it’s one of those so-close-but-so-far situations; all the video data is correct, it’s just the *header* that’s different and the PSP chokes on it. Maybe Sony could “fix” this in one of their upcoming firmware releases, so people who’d like to prepare downloadable video for handheld devices don’t have to make two ever-so-slightly different versions of the exact same MPEG-4 file.

~jeff

Friend of ldopa.net Jon Land got all married up in NYC to the wonderful Jill Shuler this weekend, and what’s even better is that they thought to invite us ldopans to the whole thing. Thanks so much, Jon, and congratulations; everyone had such a great time. I haven’t picked out your wedding gift yet, but I’ll just give you a hint: blank DVD-Rs… I’ve said too much already.

Here’s the happy couple dancin’.

~jeff

I’ve been working on this test animation, on and off, for about a week. The music was recorded and the source video was shot all in one day, but it’s taken about a week to animate. I’m very proud of how it came out; the DVD-quality version is really pretty, but since you’re not at my apartment, this smaller QuickTime version will have to do:

Norwottuck Rail Trail (use QuickTime 7 or VLC to view)

~jeff

This is magnificent.

A post-production house organized a competition where assistant editors ‘re-cut’ trailers for famous movies to try and make them seem like different movies . . . . this is the one that won.

~jeff

The Island’s not a bad movie. It talks about interesting stuff: corporate misspent government money, cloning and medical ethics in the age of biotech, and humanity’s crisis in the face of impending posthumanity.

Nonetheless, it’s pretty much Logan’s Run, Blade Runner, and a handful of other good science fiction movies from the 70s and 80s. Logan 5 becomes Lincoln 6 Echo. Jessica becomes Jordan. And so on. There are scraps of Blade Runner dialogue here and there, too, but you know what?

It works out for the best.

By knocking off a bunch of creative movies, it is, of course, less creative, but the source material’s so good, and it’s drawn from so selectively, that it works out to be a decent movie. It didn’t need as much stuff blowing up, but the plot’s not bad. I just wish there was less technobabble when they were talking about the technology that makes the story happen. We all recognize a McGuffin when we see it, but you don’t have to rub our noses in it.

Also, Scarlett Johannson is real purdy.