I’ve been using a Letus 35mm lens adapter of late, and recently added a selective focus lens to my kit of primes.

You will recognize the effect from TV commercials - also, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly used the exact same lens for some parts.

This video was directed by my friend Jarred Alterman for the artist Francis Friday. I was the Director of Photography for the things which aren’t Francis Friday’s actual personal history super8 films.

Cast Iron Gates by Francis Friday video link

Yesterday Jesse and I put our Wolf Man movie online… check it out :)

I saw it earlier this year dubbed in Italian because I had a hunch that the lapdance would be in the European release - sure enough, it was. It was nice to rewatch it in English, too. The extended version is better than the one released theatrically because the cut scenes are some of the most entertaining in the movie - one where Kurt Russel gets to play up the “weird” thing to the max, and the lapdance, which was shot with just about as much love and care as the spectacular chase at the end.

A few things:

• For the majority of the movie, it appears as though Tarantino used an out-of-date telecine transfer machine. It gives the picture the look of how most people used to experience trashy movies when they rented them on VHS. During the second part of the movie (at the beginning of the diner scene), the transfer falls more into line with current standards for DVDs. It’s an interesting choice for an expensive DVD.
• Feet. People have been talking about Tarantino’s foot thing since his scene in From Dusk Till Dawn with Salma Hayek, but it really really comes through in this movie. I hope to someday show him my foot films and photos!
• The soundtrack is, as ever for Tarantino, spectacular.

The movie of the year opens in NY today. Expertly done documentary; there’s a great deal of humor, and spectacular depth. A really excellent film about war. Trailer here.

I was a very big fan of The Power Of Nightmares (available at the Internet Archive, also serialized by Wholphin) by documentarian Adam Curtis.

A new series of his was broadcast last month in England, called The Trap. I watched it following links from Disseminate, and I’d recommend that anyone do the same. The Trap is an idea-driven piece that discusses the how over recent decades ideas from Game Theory, political philosophy, economics, and psychology have subverted a meaningful definition of freedom even as the USA and Britain claim Freedom as the central principle of government. Curtis uses really fun film clips and a great soundtrack (Brian Eno, Yo La Tengo) to make an abstract and depressing (but important!) story highly engaging. Definitely check it out.

It’s like V for Vendetta, but for rightwingers.

Karl Marx (our friend) has been working on an album-length remix of Holst’s “The Planets.”

It is complete, and listenable/downloadable at this new webpage. Happy birthday, Mark.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of seeing Werner Herzog speak at the New York Public Library. (Event info.) He spoke with the Director of Public Programs there - apparently a friend of his - and was as insightful and entertaining as I could have hoped.

Some memorable things he said, while they are still fresh in my mind.

• Eating vitamins is a sign of the mistakes of the modern world. People eat handfuls and it is “too disgusting to talk about.”
• Environmentalism is very important, but people should not overlook how horrible it is that languages are rapidly dying: of 6000 spoken now, more than half will be dead by 2050.
• It is unpleasant to talk to French people. Relatedly, it is amazing that anyone with even a tiny functioning brain could have said something like the famous Godard quote “Film is truth 24 times a second.”
• Mick Jagger is a great screen actor who has never been used to his full potential and it is a great disappointment of Herzog’s career that he hasn’t released a film using Jagger’s screen presence. (This was in a discussion of how picking actors is an important skill for a director, and Herzog also mentioned that it was a sign of his own talent that he saw how Mr. Jagger could perfectly portray a retarded Englishman who quotes from Richard III).
• Fred Astaire is just about the greatest actor in American movie history, in spite of - or maybe thanks to - his “insipid face.” The program began with a clip of Astaire taping and singing a song called “Please Don’t Monkey With Broadway,” which Herzog said perfectly represented how film is an imaginative medium - since while the song purports to be about the charm of Broadway, nothing could be further from the reality of New York.
• Every important cultural trend of the past 50 years originated in California, except for militant Islam.
• News about Anna Nicole Smith (even though it’s a shame she died) is currently much more interesting than any other form of entertainment and illustrates well some of how the modern world is a disaster.
• While his mustache was a very fine one indeed, he felt as if he were hiding behind it, so now he shaves.
• He doesn’t really like movies and only went to two last year. At hotels he finds that he becomes bored of TV programming and switches to porno.
• He was friends with Lotte Eisner (author of The Haunted Screen, a book I got at the Neue Galerie a few years ago) and gave her permission to die when she was old and blind. She did die a few weeks later.
• He thinks James Joyce books are not really that good and in the event of a huge catastrophe which required picking books to be saved, his should be saved as an example of literary dead ends. He likes Conrad, Kafka, and Hemmingway better from that era and thinks Cormac McCarthy is a good current writer.
• While he believes that tourism is sin and destroys the places people visit as tourists, he believes his films are not sins because their exotic locales are part of the intense metaphors in the movies. Metaphors for what, he can’t quite say.
• His friend Errol Morris used to be obsessed with the serial murderer Ed Gein. One of Gein’s hobbies was gravedigging and using the skin of the recently dead for various disgusting purposes. The graves he chose were located in concentric cirles around Gein’s mom’s grave, and Morris (and subsequently Herzog) was fascinated by the question “did Gein dig his own mother’s grave?” Herzog suggested that there was only one way to find out: go there it dig it themselves to check if the body had been tampered with. Morris stood him up in Plainfield, Wisconsin and Herzog now believes that this is a good example of a question more interesting if left unanswered.

Here is a photo that may be the gesture he made for how the French talk. His newest film is called Rescue Dawn - here is a trailer. It is a dramatization of the amazing documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly.

An Inconvenient Truth (see it if you didn’t yet) seems to have had the DVD cover, poster, etc. designed by a fan of the great horror manga Uzumaki.

Uzumaki is a wonderful comic series in which a whole town becomes obsessed by/ infected by the uzumaki, or spiral shape. People go mad and slowly die in a spiral-related way. The first victim is cremated and the smoke from his body forms a huge spiral over the town (some subsequent victims also have this effect). The idea is so weird that even the far-from-perfect film adaptation is quite fun.

A tribute?

I thought the main theme of The Queen was how Tony Blair sells out his progressive beliefs as soon as he thinks it will make him more powerful. He betrays the principles of everyone who believes in him to support a conservative power figure who doesn’t even respect him. (I assumed the inspiration for the film was in large part based on current events - and that’s why it resonates with viewers who didn’t think they cared about official Britain’s reaction to the death of Princess Di.)

I haven’t noticed any other people who interpreted the movie this way, though - in fact I think I’ve noticed that many think it portrays how dignified the asinine institution of the monarchy is, so I thought maybe the movie was just comforting and reinforces what you already believe (whether it’s that the Queen is truly noble or that Blair is truly a sellout). But I was glad to read on Mark Rabinowitz’s blog that the screenwriter is a peace advocate: so much so that his Golden Globes speech was cut off. Good for you, Peter Morgan. And I think my portrait-of-Tony-Blair-as-a-sellout interpretation of The Queen is the correct one.

Some obvious similarities between the Mel Gibson film and the Jackass oeuvre:

1. Running toward the camera in slow motion, pursued by a huge ferocious animal. (It was this shot in Apocaliptico, exactly like the opening credits of Jackass Number 2, that made me laugh out loud and comment how similar the films are.)
2. Eating testicles.
3. Extracting venom from a poison arrow frog (my friend saw this on Wildboyz and in Apocalypto on the same day).
4. Making a big joke of injury inflicted on a penis.

I’m sure there’s lots more. It definitely wouldn’t have looked out of place if one of the Mayans had a selfportrait tattooed on their back, either. I liked Apocalypto.

UPDATE: A few obvious ones that ocurred to me after I wrote this

5. Digital video
6. Bee attack

The Departed and Flags Of Our Fathers were great, and I urge anyone to see both.

I found these meta-moments amusing:

1. In The Departed, one of the main characters gets to enact a film director fantasy and beat the shit out of his production team for not properly shooting an expensive, elaborate, and critically important sequence.

2. In Flags Of Our Fathers, the central point is how disgusting it feels to reenact important historical events for a large audience. They build a set and put on a show at a football stadium, for a mass market audience, and discuss how phoney and miserable it is to walk up a fake mountain at Iwo Jima. This scene is shot just as phoney as the plaster rock, though, with incredibly unconvincing rear projections for the football stadium audience.

Finished this music video I’ve been working on over the summer.

View it here.

Thanks to Gutz, who sang this song at 125% speed fifteen or twenty times. Gutz on MySpace.

Tony Jaa is the most amazing working martial arts star. Yesterday Mark and I saw him give a demonstration at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens and it was absolutely out-of-control. He did this form and used this high kick to launch an autographed soccer ball into the audience, among other things.

I learned that the upcoming film The Protecter (already released around the world besides USA as Tom Yung Goong) will be edited differently for the US market, so I’ll definitely go when it opens on September 6 to compare notes with my Tom Yung Goong DVD (short review: at least two of cinema history’s best action scenes, maybe more).

I also learned that Mr. Jaa has a cameo in Bodyguard. Not available on Netflix; I guess I’ll have to head to the Fulton Street mall in Brooklyn.

I can’t find a schedule of other live appearances, but he was clearly recently in Washington DC, and I bet he’ll be in LA around the time The Protecter opens. I can’t recommend seeing him in person highly enough.

In the category of wonderful Tony Jaa news: I read a report that he will be directing Ong Bak II, and that it will showcase Thai weapons as well as hand-to-hand (& knee-to-face) techniques.

Miguel: They should make a plugin which detects which areas are out of focus and applies more blur to them, narrowing depth of field even further
Sam: There’s probably a way to simulate that
Miguel: If digital cameras can tell the difference, so can After Effects
Sam: All you’d need is a plug in or operation that would give could give a black and white ramp for amount of detail in contrast
Sam: Which you could use to drive a lens blur
Sam: But yeah… that would be a good plugin

At Monkeytown. Selfish Me is screening at 10.30 PM on May 18. I’ll be back from LA on Monday night; can’t wait to see the film on the huge screens.

(Check out the rest of the Monkeytown film screening & other fun events calendar, too.)

Check out a new music video for Don Lennon, directed by my friend Sam Stephens. Last Comic Standing.

Shot on HDV, a format Sam says is a pain in the neck to manage in post-production (weird compression and huge files). I was the Director of Photography, and my main note about HDV is that the built in displays do not support sharp focusing. Most (but not all) of the soft shots are intentional, the rest I blame on a low-resolution monitor :) The best solution would be an easy button to zoom the display 4X or so in.

Don Lennon is a great singer and a nice guy. He gave me a cd at the end of the shoot and I listen to it lots. donlennon.com | MySpace

My friend Matt directed this commercial for Firefox; he is in contention for some cool prizes.

I was the Director of Photography for the short. We shot on the AJ-SDX900, a nice powerful camera. Still, even with the 2/3″ chip size, it’s imposible to acheive any depth-of-field.

It’s been a lot of fun having a comment thread underneath the video; I even sorta like reading the mean ones.

Matt’s webpage is here. Good luck in the competition.

One thing that the contest has reminded me of is an unpleasant feature of 24P quicktimes: especially when the car is driving, you can see that 2 of every 5 frames are unsightly combinations with hard lines in them. It’s a distracting display problem (some of the Firefox Flicks have it even worse - we had only the one handheld shot).

Hello everyone! The Tribeca Festival screening schedule has been posted! So get your asses in gear and go see “Too Tough to Die”!

An interesting blog by John K. (The creator of Ren and Stimpy, among lots of other achievements.)

Fans of Being There will be happy to hear that the director Hal Ashby intended to make all the raw footage available to editors-in-training. Edit your own Peter Sellers vehicle! Sounds fun. The link is to a long & interesting story that ends with asking for money because they need to book studio time to get the footage digitized.

When I mentioned it to Karl Marx, he was unaware of the upcoming Samuel Jackson film Snakes on a Plane, the terrifying story of an airplane with lots of snakes on it. Maybe you should try to get on the soundtrack, Mark.