Super Volatile

I wish I would not ignore this talk's message.

I regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world operates according to different rules than my regular human world. For me, there is no difference between Ripley from “Alien” and any Katherine Heigl character. They are equally implausible. They’re all participating in a similar level of fakey razzle-dazzle, and I enjoy every second of it.

The gallery of female stereotypes from romantic comedies.

The whole thing, it's clear now, was an intricate prank being pulled on all of us by Banksy, who has never publicly revealed his identity, with Fairey as his accomplice.

An attempt to explain the story of Mr. Brainwash, the main character of Banksy: Exit Through the Gift Shop.

Regardless whether it was a prank indeed or not, it was one of the best movies of last year anyway.

We never saw anything with sound design or music, so we couldn’t really animate anything to a specified beat or audio hits… I’m a really big audio guy, I have been editing and animating to pre-design tracks for over a decade, so to not have that audio direction from the get-go proved challenging. To compensate, we put in a bunch of animation cues assuming that they’d nail the sound design later on… And hearing the sound design that they came up with for some of our sequences was such a treat, it completely changed some of our stuff from where we were taking it… For instance, when Clu takes Sam’s disc and he looks through the clips from Sam’s past, the sound design that they did for that was suuper awesome — what a treat. Thank you, Skywalker Sound.

More on Tron: Legacy's visual effects.

In Tron, the hacker was not supposed to be snooping around on a network; he was supposed to kill a process. So we went with posix kill and also had him pipe ps into grep. I also ended up using emacs eshell to make the terminal more l33t. The team was delighted to see my emacs performance -- splitting the editor into nested panes and running different modes. I was tickled that I got emacs into a block buster movie. I actually do use emacs irl, and although I do not subscribe to alt.religion.emacs, I think that's all incredibly relevant to the world of Tron.

Behind the scenes of some visual effects from Tron: Legacy. I loved new Tron for its stunning visuals and fantastic soundtrack. So I was even more delighted to learn that one of my favourite motion graphic artists, Bradley “GMUNK” Munkowitz was involved in the production of the movie.

This Oscar®-winning short film is comprised of a lecture given to students by outspoken nuclear critic Dr. Helen Caldicott, president of Physicians for Social Responsibility in the USA. Her message is clear: disarmament cannot be postponed.

A movie that got banned in US and won an Oscar as an “foreign political propaganda” in the same year. It represents the political atmosphere of the past, but the underlying problem of nuclear weapons is something still to be resolved.

With that in mind, let's look ahead to what's on the menu for this year: four adaptations of comic books. One prequel to an adaptation of a comic book. One sequel to a sequel to a movie based on a toy. One sequel to a sequel to a sequel to a movie based on an amusement-park ride. One prequel to a remake. Two sequels to cartoons. One sequel to a comedy. An adaptation of a children's book. An adaptation of a Saturday-morning cartoon. One sequel with a 4 in the title. Two sequels with a 5 in the title. One sequel that, if it were inclined to use numbers, would have to have a 7 1/2 in the title.

An excellent article on the current state of Hollywood.

Short movie by Grzegorz Jonkajtys.

My government is being pressured by the USA to criminalize ripping a DVD into a file even if the only thing I do with the file is watch the movie at home on exactly the same device that plays a DVD. I can "buy" some movies on iTunes, but not in HD. And they have DRM that restricts moving them from device to device. I have anxiety about DRM, I never know if the DRM servers will be shut down and I'll be left locked out of my movies, as has happened repeatedly in Entertainment history.

Interesting perspective on movie DRM. I have no arguments to argue with it: legitimate customers are punished for buying original movies (the same with games) while the piracy offers superior user experience (!). Is it only Apple that is capable of solving this problem as it did with music and iTunes?

But as a story about Facebook, it is deeply, deeply flawed. As I watched the film, and considered what it missed, it struck me that there was more than a hint of self-congratulatory contempt in the motives behind how this story was told. Imagine a jester from King George III’s court, charged in 1790 with writing a comedy about the new American Republic. That comedy would show the new Republic through the eyes of the old. It would dress up the story with familiar figures—an aristocracy, or a wannabe aristocracy, with grand estates, but none remotely as grand as in England. The message would be, “Fear not, there’s no reason to go. The new world is silly at best, deeply degenerate, at worst.

Lawrence Lessig's excellent though skewed review of Social Network. As one could expect from Lessig, it will be about how the movie misses the point of freedom of expression on the internet.