Movie Make-out

A not-very-interesting article at the New York Times about various movie downloading devices pointed me at this article at iLounge on the differences in video quality between Blu-Ray, high def AppleTV, high def cable, (upconverted) standard def DVD, and standard def AppleTV — obviously teeming with comparison photos.As you would expect, Blu-Ray wins out in all comparisons, but seeing the difference is… uh… neat. What’s kind of surprising is how the color reproduction on the HD cable images is absolute shit.

One thing I would have liked to have seen, though, is images of non-upconverted standard DVDs, but whatevs.

This clever bit of self-parody, an ad for Verizon’s FiOS TV and FiOS Internet Services, is more entertaining than every Michael Bay movie I’ve seen combined.

Considering how ass my AT&T DSL connection is, fiber-optic internet — with speeds up to "50 Mbps or 30 Mbps downstream and 20 Mbps or 5 Mbps upstream, depending on where you live" — would definitely be awesome. Someday… sigh.

(Source: AICN)

This is pretty old, but fuck it. It makes me smile.

Despite the fact that I agree with Lynch about this, I’m also inclined to agree with Robert Redford in this article from the Hollywood Reporter a week back, about how phones are a promising new venue for short films (not unlike the ones I’ve reviewed earlier this week!).

Ideal, no. Certainly not. But webcartoonists downgrade their work to 72 dpi approximations of an 300 dpi (or higher) original, for the sake of exposure, and more and more short filmmakers (you know, one who make short films, not dwarfs) are willing to do more or less the same thing for exposure or a few extra bucks.

I know this much: if it weren’t for iTunes, I wouldn’t have seen Six Shooter, A Gentleman’s Duel, The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello, or any number of other terrific live action or animated short films. So it can’t be all bad.

Ricky Gervais talked to Empire Online about his upcoming film, This Side of the Truth. Obviously, I love The Office; Multiplex has a similar sensibility, I think. (It’s been compared to either of the versions more than once, anyway.)

It’s not exactly related to the movie, but I found this particular bit in the interview interesting:

“I want to make The Apartment, I don’t want to make Team America,” he insists. “Team America’s one of the funniest films I’ve ever seen, but I don’t want to make that. I want to make The Apartment or When Harry Met Sally or Play It Again, Sam. There’s someone better than me at doing Borat and Team America – there’s someone better than me at making The Apartment too, actually, but I love that Trojan horse. I love the idea of starting off spikey and then everything being alright. I love that kind of comedy… I’m always trying to make something classic. Even though The Office looked like this drab, miserable thing, we gave them a nice ending.”

The Apartment is probably my favorite movie, and I’m a huge fan of Team America and When Harry Met Sally, as well, so it was cool to see Gervais mention those specifically. (I suppose this means I need to rent Play It Again, Sam.)

This Side of the Truth is being co-written and co-directed by Gervais and Matthew Robinson and co-stars Jennifer Garner, Jonah Hill, and Rob Lowe. The film centers around an actor (Gervais) who discovers the ability to lie in an alternate world where no one else ever has.

When I was a kid, I would eat up "making of" TV shows and special effects-related shows like the Leonard Nimoy-hosts Lights, Camera, Action. One for The Dark Crystal that appeared on HBO — and now on most of the DVD editions — left a huge impression on me, particularly sequences with Brian Froud drawing a Skeksis (making a point to mention he always started from the eyes) and behind-the-scenes footage of performers on stilts rehearsing for their parts as Landstriders. And if you’re a special effects nerd like I am, you’ll find these articles interesting:

The second part of SuperheroHype!’s Hellboy II set visit shows some glimpses at the creatures from the Guillermo del Toro film, including some words on how each of them was accomplished; it’s particularly interesting to note that they used mostly practical effects, except for long shots and fighting-heavy shots. Practical effects almost always look so much better than CGI; textures, lighting, and particle effects just don’t cut it without a lot of money behind it…

…as in the films discussed in a pair of articles at Variety on CGI lighting and particle effects. The lighting effects article largely discusses the improvements in the technology as seen in Transformers, while the particle effects is largely specific to the Dust in The Golden Compass — both superb examples of cutting-edge work in each field.

UPDATED (3:26 pm): Coming Soon has added a somewhat less interesting article called “The Effects of The Spiderwick Chronicles”— less interesting because it pretty much just reads: “CGI, CGI, a little more CGI, aaaand some CGI thrown in for good measure.” Even so, a few sentences near the end about how (and why) they built a digital model of a historic house is kind of cool. The Spiderwick Chronicles opens wide on Thursday, February 14.