JCVD and RocknRolla: Comebacks I’ve Seen

I have seen two interesting movies in recent weeks, two projects that mark the comeback attempts of two men whose careers have seen better days.
The first movie was RocknRolla, Guy Ritchie’s return to his roots, the crime comedies Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. Between Snatch and RocknRolla, Ritchie directed his wife Madonna in Swept Away, one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen (although I saw it at an anti-Valentine’s Day party where the partygoers suggested dialogue that made the screening fun). I have been advised to avoid Revolver, the next movie in his filmography, so I haven’t watched it.
RocknRolla has a lot of the touches that Ritchie brought to Lock, Stock and to Snatch, but it’s not quite of the same quality—the editing seemed muddled somehow. Where in the early movies, the characters and relationships were established by a rapid pace, a fun narrator, and some great performances , RocknRolla doesn’t seem to do the same. Sure, there’s rapid editing, narration, and some great performances, but it’s really not clear as to what One Two’s relationship is to rest of the London underworld portrayed in the movie. In the first two movies, it was quite clear as to who and where the characters were in their world, and Ritchie’s failure to achieve the same in RocknRolla took me out of the movie as I wondered who these people were.
Guy Ritchie’s comeback has started as his marriage to Madonna comes to an end in the glare of the media klieg lights, but he’s still not as sharp as he was ten years ago. RocknRolla is entertaining, and there are some amazing things in it (Toby Kebbell’s performance as rock star Johnny Quid is one of the best I’ve seen in any movie in 2008).
JCVD is the 2nd comeback movie I’ve seen this month, and it succeeds much better than Guy Ritchie’s movie. Jean-Claude Van Damme, the king of the action movie during the VHS years, makes a comeback with a great performance as a burned-out version of himself.
The movie itself is directed by French director Farouk El Mechri, and it is a stylish, fast-movign Rashomon –type story, showing Jean-Claude in a spot of trouble that is both hilarious and gripping. Van Damme’s performance is world-weary and touching, the martial art gymnastics ignored in favour of his acting chops, and he carries the movie over some pretension that could have torpedoed it with a lesser actor. A soliloquy, featuring Van Damme floating amongst the studio lights, could have been horrible, but Van Damme pulls it off and it becomes moving (no pun intended) as he looks back on his life and shows the price he’s paid.
I hope Van Damme and Ritchie both succeed in their comeback efforts—Van Damme was a revelation in JCVD, and Ritchie’s first two features are still favourites of mine.

Capturing from the HV30

Having spent my half hour on Yonge shooting with the brand-new HV30, it was time to capture. I’m using Final Cut Studio 1, so Final Cut itself is version 5.0.4 on my 1.6 GHz G5 tower. I connected the HV30 to the G5 via the Firewire 400 port on the front panel, with my capture drive plugged into the Firewire-800 port to keep the two devices on separate busses.
Setting the in and out points for batch capturing is the same as regular DV, but doing the batch capture itself seems to run into timecode errors on a regular basis. I seemed to hit an error every other or every 3rd capture, but clicking on OK sent FCP back to work and it would capture everything okay during the 2nd or 3rd attempt. The capture window for HDV is different than the one for regular DV, and you don’t get the image mirrored in FCP as you capture. Not a big deal as I normally watch the camcorder’s flip-screen during capture.
Capturing the first shot, the 24p, took no more time than usual, once I’d gone through the first timecode error message. Putting the clip on the timeline prompted a red render line across the top of that window, so I started to render. FCP said it would take 9 minutes to render the 30-second 24p clip, but I think it was closer to 4 minutes. Exporting said clip to QuickTime (without conversion) took seconds—it must spit out the render file pretty much as is. Here’s the 24p footage after Youtube got its hands on it:

I exited FCP and set up a new project in order to capture the same clip using Apple’s intermediate HDV codec. The 30 second 24p intermediate clip didn’t require rendering, and the export prompted a warning of 11 minutes, which was probably less than 2 minutes in total. Here’s what the lower-res 24p footage looks like:

Exiting FCP again, I set up a 30p project file. As with 24p, FCP indicated rendering was needed. The 30-second 30p clip generated a 2-minute estimate but actually took about a minute and a half to render, so it’s clearly less complicated for FCP compared to the 24p clips. I’m no engineer, but I’m guessing that it’s easier to pull the 30p data off the 60i tape feed from the camcorder. Exporting the 30p clip took a few seconds. And here’s the clip:

The next setting was the plain-Jane HDV, the 1080i format. Capture wasn’t a problem, and putting the clip into the timeline prompted the red render line. FCP initially reported 12 minutes to render, but the counter fluttered between 10, 11, and 12 minutes in the first 30 seconds or so. In actual time, the rendering took about 10 and a half minutes, so for 1080i, FCP guessed fairly accurately. Again, the export to QuickTime took 4-5 seconds, and this is what it looks like:

Capturing a clip shot in regular 60i standard-def DV was problematic. The easy setup choice for DV didn’t work—I kept getting timecode errors. I went in and played with the manual settings (mostly by selecting something else and then going back to the proper setting), and it started to capture. I got the audio rate mismatch error message when it was done, so I’ll have to go back and try to match what is undoubtedly not a 48k sample rate on the camcorder. Strangely, I had to render the clip once I plopped it into the timeline—clearly it’s not pure DV or I’ve missed a setting somewhere (the clip appeared fine in the viewer, but was a tiny square in the middle of the Canvas view before and after rendering). I went back to the manual the next day and realized I had left the HV30’s export setting at HDV instead of switching to standard-def DV—I’ll do a another test with the other setting to see how it turns out. Exporting this first attempt to QuickTime took just a few seconds. Here’s what it looks like (don’t squint too hard):

Finally, I set up a FCP project to compare the 24p and the 24p Apple Intermediate codecs. FCP didn’t seem to like me mixing the two on the same timeline as the image sizes changed when I dropped the 2nd type into the timeline. I set up some graphics and some split-screen action to compare. Rendering took about 2 minutes, and the export took less than 5 seconds (clearly, those render files are going straight into the QuickTime files). Here’s the comparison as it appeared:

This clip took very little time for Compressor to convert to the Youtube settings as detailed at Ken Stone’s site (here’s the article that I followed to set up Youtube 4:3 and widescreen presets) compared to DV clips (it takes at least 3 hrs to render a 2-minute DV clip, so the two formats are clearly quite different). The other HDV clips took much less time than past DV clips I’ve converted using these settings, too.
The Youtube website itself took longer to upload those clips, so any speed gains in Compressor seemed offset by slowdowns with YouTube. I had assumed that HD footage would take longer for both steps, so it’s a fair tradeoff.
Next time, I hope to have my 2nd field trip tests and results, this time to explore the different manual and preset options, and to try setting the export settings to DV for the old-school shots.

The New Camcorder

And the winner is….

I went with the HV30, the front-runner of my little contest. The DV Shop had the best price I’ve seen (and I’ve bought a lot of stuff from them in the past and I like the store).

I would have shot an unboxing video… if I’d had anything to shoot with. I got the camcorder home, unpacked it (everything that was supposed to be in the box was, happily, there), installed the battery, and left it to charge overnight.

The HV30 battery is a different beast than the Ultura’s battery, so I won’t be able to carry over the old batteries, which still provide me with many hours of power after nearly 9 years of use. When I buy extra batteries for the HV30, I hope they last as long as the Ultura's did!

On the other hand, the HV30’s 43mm lens threading allows me to carry over a few things. My 46mm Canon wide-angle and telephoto lenses will fit on the HV30 once I get the proper 43/46 stepping ring (I’d been using a 27.5/46 stepping ring for the Ultura). And I’ll still be able to use Cokin filters, once I replace the filter-holder ring with a 43mm ring, so I'll be able to use my circular polarizer (the HV30 has neutral density filters built in, but I can add extras as needed).

After setting the date, time, and time zone (all the North American zones represented by American cities, so my HV30 thinks it’s in New York!), I set out to test it. I was looking for something with a lot of movement to better compare 24p, 30p, and the 1080i modes, so I went over to Yonge Street and shot from Beltline bridge overlooking the subway and Yonge.

I brought the manual to figure out where settings were hidden in menus to get started, but the camera is well designed, and I had no problems figuring how to operate it after reading the manual, particularly the menu items listings.

The manual warned about mixing formats on the same tape, so I put gaps on the tape between the different shots. I let the camera roll during the red light on Yonge so I could get a consistent shot for each to compare, and the subway added movement on the other side of the screen at random moments.

I kept the HV30 in the cine-look recording program for all the shots, as well as the daylight white balance setting (for sunny outdoor shooting), just to make comparing the different formats more scientific. I’ll play with exposure, shutter speed, and other settings in a future outing.

After about a half hour, I’d shot footage in the 24p, 30p, and 1080i HDV formats, and I also shot some standard definition 60i DV as well.

Next time: the first capture.

The New Camcorder Search, Part 3

Having spent the last few weeks studying the camcorder market, I realized I had to develop a list of criteria to make the decision to buy a new camcorder. The falling Canadian dollar also became a factor—with retail prices on electronics undoubtedly to rise as a result, I had to decide sooner rather than later. So… here are the four main criteria in my decision-making:
1. Mini-DV format
2. Firewire/IEEE1394 equipped
3. Final Cut Studio compatible.
4. HD and SD capable

Compression is the main factor behind the first two items. Mini-DV and Firewire are still the best in terms of the least amount of compression applied by the camcorder or computer. Hard drive, DVD-RAM, and flash memory camcorders use higher compression than mini-DV cameras, so tape still wins (until I can afford those fancy P2 card systems). USB-2 is faster than USB, but it’s still not as good as Firewire. I’d rather not add additional compression by using a slow transfer bus.
The third criteria is dictated by the computer I’m using for post-production. I’m not upgrading from Final Cut Studio 1 as explained in an earlier post, so the camcorder has to work with it and the G5. From what I’ve read on various websites and forums, as long as you correctly tell Final Cut what kind of footage you’re uploading, it should be able to accept any SD or HDV camcorder. Mini-DV cams record video as 60i even in 30p or 24p format, but FCS can handle the various pull-down ratios. Most of the problems I’ve read about on the HV20 User and other forums are related to people not setting the right format before attempting to capture. And Adobe AfterEffects has some additional capacity for dealing with pulldown ratios if Final Cut can’t.
Finally, with HD becoming so prominent in broadcast, online, and home entertainment video, the smart choice is to buy an HD camcorder. I still need something that can play SD video for the projects already shot on SD. So it has to be a dual-format camcorder.
Other factors, although not critical, are related to the fact that I’m replacing a camcorder. I don’t think Canon has changed the form factor of their batteries, so my still-good Ultura batteries could be carried over to another Canon (this, of course, gives a boost to the HV30). An XLR mike input would be really nice having used an inline transformer with the Ultura for all this time. And if the new camcorder fits in my camcorder bag, I’ll be happy.
Next week, the decision and the purchase

The New Camcorder Search, Part 2

There are only a few companies that make camcorders these days. I’ve used Canon and Panasonic, and I have only passing use of JVC or Sony camcorders.
A near clone of the HV30 is Sony’s HDR-HC9. Sony has been competing head-to-head with Canon for this HD prosumer market for a couple of years—the HC9 is the successor to the HC7 just as the HV30 is to the HV20. The Sony and Canon camcorders look so similar you need to see the manufacturer’s logo to figure out which one is which--both Sony and Canon made this year’s camcorder in black after making both predecessors in grey last year. I smell corporate espionage….
The first place I went to for research for all the camcorders was http://www.camcorderinfo.com/. This page offers thorough reviews of all major features, and it tests the important stuff—how well the camcorder processes image, colour, etc. In the HC9 review, it compares the HC9 to the HV30, giving the Sony the edge for durability and ease of operation, but gives the Canon the thumbs up for performance and features. I’m prepared to sacrifice ease of operation for performance and features, particularly 30p, so at this point, I was leaning towards the HV30.
Camcorderinfo.com pointed me towards the current JVC and Panasonic models, so I scanned through them to pick out the prosumer products in their lines. JVC doesn’t produce prosumer or even high-end consumer mini-DV camcorders anymore, so they’re out of the running.
The Panasonic model is the PV-GS500, successor to the popular GS400. Physically, it resembles the Sony and Canon models closely—the industry seems to have settled on a specific form factor for palmcorders after 30 years of development. The GS500 is a 3-chip CCD camera, as opposed to a CMOS like the other two, and it has a real live focus ring instead of a sliding switch of some sort (the GS500 has a sliding switch for the zoom, though), although the ring is not marked to indicate settings. In terms of performance, the GS500 does well in various lighting conditions, and the full range of manual settings makes it a compelling option.
I’ve decided to seek out the HV30, the HC9, and the GS500 in retail showrooms to play with them as well as searching the web for more reviews (and prices!).
Next week, the decision-making process.

The New Camcorder Search, Part 1

My needs for a new camcorder are simple: I need mini-DV so that I can recapture stuff I’ve already shot, and I want to continue to use mini-DV tapes as that format still offers less compression than consumer-grade hard drive and DVD-burning camcorders.
The leader of the camcorder pack, out of the gates, is the Canon HV30. This is the successor model to the HV20, the camcorder that brought great excitement and joy to the indie filmmaking scene when it came out in 2007. The HV20 offered, for the first time, a decent HDV camera for less than $1000 USD. The HV30 ups the ante by offering 30p as well as the two formats the HV20 offered (24p and 1080i).
I wasn’t aware of what a CMOS camcorder was prior to the HV20’s arrival, but the image quality is high enough to offer HD capability, something I haven’t worked with yet.
Naturally, the first question is whether or not the HV30 will work with my Mac. I have a 1.6 GHz G5 equipped with Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger) and Final Cut Studio 1, and I don’t anticipate upgrading to anything any time soon. My Mac had no problems capturing 24p shot from Panasonic DVX100 and DVX100A cameras we’ve used, so the next step is to see if FCS 1 can cope with whatever pull-down process the HV30 uses for 24p.
The HV30 comes with a Firewire-400 (IEEE 1394) port (as well as USB-2, HDMI, and component video, and composite video ports), so it’s not a problem getting the signal from the camcorder to the computer. The question is, of course, whether or not the computer and the camcorder speak the same language.
Next time, the other camcorders in the running.

Requiem for a Camcorder

In the spring of 2000, I bought my first camcorder, the Canon Ultura. It was one of the early consumer-grade mini-DV, all-digital camcorders, and it was great—I remember being amazed by how vivid digital video looked compared to the graininess that I’d come to expect from analog video camcorders.
The Ultura was a great camcorder, enabling me to shoot my UK vacation that summer, and then allowing me to start shooting Miller & Mullet and other stuff. The Ultura also served as my capture and export deck for a series of Macs and Mac OS’s, and it never let me down. Until, that is, this summer while I was trying to capture footage for a short my friend Jeff had shot. After 8 years of regular (and sometimes heavy) use, the Ultura’s playback head is kaput. Not even my trusty head-cleaning tape could fix the problem.
I paid $1500 CAD, plus tax, in early 2000, which was a typical price for a camcorder back then. I remember looking at various cameras, including Sony and Panasonic, before picking the Ultura from Japan Camera at the Eaton Centre.
The Ultura is a single-chip camera, but it was a better camera than most that year. Canon had actually put in a better lens in it, much better than the ones used in their ZR-series and Elura camcorders that followed. The Firewire connection worked perfectly, as did the tape mechanism, and I never had to take it for repairs, despite the abuse it received, including shooting a feature during an incredibly hot and humid Toronto summer, capturing the footage from that feature (on nearly 30 mini-DV tapes)….
Canon withdrew the Ultura after a year in production, and I remember the replacement models weren’t of the same quality. Sure they were samller and had more buttons, but the quality wasn’t there (I’m basing my opinion on what I saw in various camera store showrooms).
I tricked the Ultura out with cheap Cokin filters (the key filters being the neutral density and circular polarizer, but I also bought 2 grades of orange for counterbalancing the ND filter, and a blue filter that I never got around to using for day-for-night shooting), so for outdoor shooting, the Ultura did a great job. Indoors, footage tended to be grainy if it wasn’t in a horribly bright room. I tried to go manual as much as possible for colour balance and exposure as the automatic controls tended to over-react to any change in lighting levels. Overall, though, I learned how to avoid the Ultura’s limitations, and I think the resulting video looked better than most one-chip productions did.
The most annoying aspect of the Ultura, though, was the audio jack. I curse whoever decided that a ⅛” plug was a better option than XLR or even 1/4 “…. The transformer I bought to convert XLR to the ⅛” worked great, but eventually you had to find the sweet spot where the plug and jack were both in full contact and the audio was actually reaching the recording head (I went through a series of cheap headphones dedicated to ensuring the audio was making it to two channels at the same time).
So… after spending several hours over a couple of nights trying to capture and recapture Jeff’s footage, I realized my beloved Ultura had reached the end of its working life and was now destined to sit as a memento on my bookcase rather than actually shoot anything.
Next time, part one of my search for a replacement.

Burn After Laughing

I saw the Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading this weekend, and it’s definitely a lot funnier than No Country for Old Men.

Spoilers lurk after this point, so if you haven’t seen the movie, stop here. It’s a fun movie best enjoyed without preconceived notions.

It’s definitely one of the Coens’ funnier movies, with Brad Pitt, Frances McDormand, and Richard Jenkins playing the dumbest characters I’ve seen them do. These three talented actors play gym employees who fumble their way into the Coens’ whacky thriller, and, for me, half the fun is seeing how these smart people play clueless people. Pitt in particular is hilarious with his remarkable gym trainer Chad.

The Coens contrast these three clueless characters with smart characters—Tilda Swindon and John Malkovich play intelligent upper-middle-class characters whose crumbling marriage gets the plot rolling, with Tilda’s Katie having an affair with Treasury agent Harry, played with twitchy energy by George Clooney.

Clooney’s character is what fascinates me the most after my first viewing of the movie, with one scene in particular resonating days afterwards.

I realized I had, while watching, divided the characters into 2 groups, the smart ones and the dumb ones, since the Coens had kept the 2 groups separated into those groupings for much of the first act. I assumed that Clooney’s character, as twitchy and as jogging-obsessed as he is, was one of the smart ones.

Harry, while having an affair with Katie, is also married to a successful children’s book author (Sandy, played by Elizabeth Marvel) and trolls internet dating sites for flings, including McDormand’s Linda. Despite being intimidated by Malkovich’s Osbourne at a dinner party, Harry seems bright enough to be involved with Katie, a doctor. He’s a philanderer, sure, and obsessed with “getting a run in,” but he blends in with the smart characters quite easily. The twitchiness is explained, early on, by his former job as a U.S. Marshal where he acted as a bodyguard, and by his current job as a Treasury agent—he’s in law enforcement, used to constantly monitoring his surroundings. He’s an older man for a field agent, so I had assumed he’d started taking the job home with him and constantly watched his surroundings even when not on the job (we never actually see Harry working).

But at one point in the movie, he reveals a secret project he’s building in his basement to Linda during his wife’s absence. We aren’t shown much of it prior to this scene: just some metal pipe purchased from a store, and some sort of complex metal hinge or mechanism as he works on it (he does, however, keep it locked up in a caged area within the basement, so I assumed it was something related to his job to require the extra security).

The Coens use the moment to not only reveal a great joke, but it also made me realize everything I’d assumed about Harry up to that point was wrong—he was as misguided as the gym trio. It’s a brilliant bit of writing. The thriller genre demands that information be given to the audience bit by bit as they solve the mystery, but the Coens apply this strategy to Clooney’s character (perhaps as a contrast to Pitt’s more obvious character, whose obliviousness is clear from the moment we watch him snap something in a customer’s body by accident).

With Linda at his side in his basement workshop, Harry unveils his device to her and to the audience, telling Linda that it’s a gift for his wife, Sandy. The machine has a seat on it, which Harry rolls back to activate a thrusting pink dildo. A beat later, after the comedic shock has worn off, you realize Harry has built this for his author wife, a woman who has appeared as intelligent and as cultured as Katie or Osbourne during the dinner party. Harry eagerly tells Linda he copied a machine he’d seen in a men’s magazine, building the device for a fraction of the cost. And he’s told her it’s a gift for his wife—he’s forgotten the lie that he and his wife have ended their relationship.

The character of Harry changed for me at that moment—he went from being the long-in-tooth law enforcement man to a sex-obsessed goof who has probably tormented his wife with inappropriate gifts and other whacky behaviour.

The scene doesn’t really advance the plot that much, but it’s not a throw-away gag inserted for laughs, despite the roar of laughter the pink dildo creates when it emerges over and over again from the black seat (a comic version of the alien chestburster from Alien maybe?). It is a clever, and hilarious, means of revealing Harry as a character, tweaking the audience’s expectations. From that moment forward, we realize Harry’s not as smart as he’d seemed to be, and that he isn’t the smooth philanderer we’d assumed he was—he’s a sex-crazed lunatic.

That scene allows the Coens to move Clooney’s character into buffoon county quite easily—in scenes following, he shoots someone in a reflexive moment (followed by a mad panic) and becomes increasingly paranoid as the plot rolls along. His wife, revealed in the scene to likely be long-suffering based on what he considers a gift to her, is on a book tour where she is having an affair of her own with someone presumably smarter than Harry.

The critics are calling Burn After Reading a minor Coen movie, but that scene proves to me that they are still master writers and filmmakers.

Knight is Darkest before the Dawn

It took me a few weeks, but I finally saw The Dark Knight, the Batman blockbuster that’s brought in nearly $450 million USD since its release.

I’m not a big comicbook guy (my collection is less than 20 books, all of them ungraded cheapies, which is peanuts by most collectors’ standards), so I can’t tell you which comic the movie was based on or what was left out, added, etc., but it is one kick-ass movie. The Dark Knight transcends the action and superhero genres—it is a dark, gritty tale with the lead character leading a double life, all the while grappling with the slippery moral slope of a vigilante, officially wanted by police, who fights violent crime with violence.

This Batman is as far from the campy Adam West Batman as you can get.

I liked the first Batman movie when it came out as it was the best superhero movie I’d seen up until that point. Michael Keaton’s portrayal of Batman and a sleepy-eyed, distracted Bruce Wayne were well done. But the subsequent Batman series of movies, increasingly camp and more about spectacle than the story of a disturbed man, treated the world of comicbooks as a childish fantasy. The movies were safe, touching on the troubled psyche of Bruce Wayne, but the filmmakers kept their hands clean.

This new Batman movie not only touches on the troubled psyche, it envelopes itself in it. Violence is not camped up—the cause and effect of explosions, blades, and bullets is shown, the victims display the shock and grief those things create in the real world.

Much attention has been paid to Heath Ledger’s Joker, his final performance before his drug overdose. Ledger’s Joker is breathtakingly evil, profane and funny, and one of the best portrayals of a sociopath I’ve seen. He enjoys mayhem for its own sake, so he not only messes with Batman and the Gotham Police, he takes on organized crime, all for the fun of it. Ledger’s Joker is a perfect counterpoint to Bales’s Batman—each is compelled to do what they do for reasons they may not understand (but Bruce Wayne is more self-aware and troubled by the path he has chosen).

The story of Dark Knight is very well done. For a 152-minute movie, there are no gaps or moments where I fell out of the story or got impatient for a scene to finish. And the plot twists were worthy of a first-rate mystery story, with the Joker’s schemes subtle enough that they weren’t obvious like most Hollywood on-screen schemes are. The audience realized the tricks at the same time as the characters, not minutes (or even hours) before. The screenwriters treated their audience’s intelligence with respect and assumed the average viewer would be intelligent enough to understand everything as it happened.

The pacing of the movie is relentless and, coupled with the performances and the story, makes for a very good 152 minutes.

After seeing the movie, I realized that the Batman franchise has updated itself to our times just as the James Bond franchise has done. In our post-9/11 world, violence and disasters have become real, random, and heartbreaking. Dark Knight, like Casino Royale did, reinvents a sometimes cartoonish character for today’s audience.

Web Video

Over the last few weeks, Mullet and I have been spending a lot of time discussing web video, and I realized haven’t written about it here very much.

When I started buying video gear seven years ago, the 3 major players in web video were QuickTime, Real Player, and Windows Media Player. All three played a range of codecs, but there weren’t easy ways of moving between the three formats. Being a Mac user, I used QuickTime by default, but I did have the other two players on my computer.

The players were all clunky and finicky. It wasn’t uncommon to see reduced frame-rates, lowered resolution, and even minimal action to make things look better.

Back then, I didn’t have a website or even an internet connection. The main means of delivering video was by running the signal from my capture card to my VCR. VHS was king—everyone, amateur or professional, used tape.

When I upgraded and got my G4, I suddenly had a DVD-R burner, and that led me to supplement Final Cut Pro with DVD Studio Pro (a couple months later, the Final Cut Studio bundle came out at a lower price than what it cost me to buy FCP and DVD-SP separately—thanks, Apple!).

Thus equipped, in 2003 I made history at the late, great Second Ciné video show by being the first to submit a video on DVD. But it was still a VHS world, and I backed up that DVD by exporting my clips to my VCR.

When I traded in my G4 for my G5, the new PCI expansion slot arrangement rendered my capture card useless, so I dropped the VHS option completely. By then, DVD burners were cheap enough that the indie world had shifted away from VHS.

DVD seemed to be the new king, unbeatable with its portability and flexibility. You could play it on your TV with a regular DVD player, or you could put it in a DVD-equipped computer. DVD sprouted in rental stores and retailers, offering special features and all the things impossible on VHS (subtitles and audio tracks in different languages, commentary tracks, alternate endings, etc, etc). The disks didn’t wear out like all tape-based technologies do—with care and handling, you would see the same image quality on the 1000th play as you would on the first play.

For an indie producer, you could easily crank out a DVD (maybe not the DVD-9 dual-layer format, but something that worked in most players and nearly all computers) that looked and played the same as the big boys’ disks.

I bought the 3rd edition of Chris Gore’s excellent film festival book in 2005, and we started to base our video efforts on the advice given. Film festivals were still king, and most of the ones that encouraged indie contributions readily accepted all the digital formats.

I bought Gore’s follow-up book on producing indie DVDs and used it as the main guide for our first appearance at the San Diego Comicon in 2006.

But it was at San Diego that I saw the future, and its name was not DVD but web video.

The big 3 players were still in the game, but Apple had introduced a new wrinkle—the iPod and iTunes. With incredible ease, you could download podcasts and listen to them on your Mac or iPod. The arrival of video-capable iPods sparked video podcasting. Flash video had arrived in force, with the help of some serious web video sites like YouTube. The big three media players changed membership, with Real player becoming a distant fourth. In fact, by 2006, I didn’t even have Real installed on my G5 as nobody was putting out video that QuickTime or WMP wouldn’t handle.

Gore and Mark Bell from Film Threat hosted a couple of panels at the con’s film festival (where my costumed appearance got some nasty looks from the black-clad filmistas—clearly a line is drawn in some people’s minds between the film fest and the convention itself!), and I attended a couple of them.

In one panel, Gore and Bell introduced the two guys behind Ask a Ninja as well as a couple of people from Hope is Emo, two of the most popular podcasts. I was still sans-internet at home, so I wasn’t aware of how big podcasting and web video had become. More people were watching these online videos than hundreds of film festivals put together.

But the indie aspect of these productions—Ninja was shot in the star’s apartment (painted up for green-screen production)—made it clear that you didn’t need a lot of money, just enough technology and, of course, a good idea well executed, to build an audience.

DVD suddenly looked less essential, just like VHS. Apple introduced its TV interface, and with flatscreen TVs and computer monitors becoming essentially the same, the average consumer realized they didn’t need a disk or tape to watch movies, TV shows, and indie video. The messy blue laser fight didn’t help, with the traditional market split into 3 different camps—DVD loyalists, Blu-Ray, and HD-DVD. Even with HD-DVD losing the fight, most people I know aren’t rushing into the blue laser world. After seeing CDs largely replaced by web music, most people are expecting the same of video.

So… in the 9 years I have been dabbling with indie video, I have seen it change completely. A physical product is no longer the primary goal since you can find a larger audience thorugh the magic of internet pixels.

Mullet and I are prepping our old feature, Babysitters, for web in small chapters. Our long-in-development DVD project is now a web video project with a DVD version also available. We’ll follow the footsteps of successful web video people like Rob Schrab or the guys behind Chad Vader and put the videos online and make a full-quality DVD available for sale.

More on web video to come. After all, it’s Tuesday. There’ll probably be some new development on Wednesday….

Happy Canada Day, Happy Independence Day

Happy Canada Day to everyone north of the border, and for those of you (all the millions who read this blog) south of the border, happy Independence Day.

I hope everyone has a safe and happy holiday.

Thank you, Ed & Red’s Night Party

Ed & Red’s Night Party will go off the air in August. The new owners of CITY-TV here in Toronto are ridding the station of everything that made it unique in Toronto: Speaker’s Corner, Ed the Sock….

This is a shame—CITY was the fun station, sometimes annoyingly pretentious like Queen West can be, but never boring or entirely predictable like its buttoned-down, blandly corporate competitors.

Ed the Sock started out on the cable access channel with the nefarious Rogers Cable in 1992. Stars on press junkets through Toronto started to stop by a talk show hosted by a puppet who pulled no punches. I never saw the show on cable as I was still an over-the-airwaves viewer, but I knew about it by way of the media and friends who did have access to it.

A mere two years later, the Sock got called up to the big leagues at CITY. The show was a must-see on Friday nights. There were a few sidekicks along for the ride (Humble Howard of CFNY being the first one at CITY, and Craig Campbell in either the 3rd or 4th season). But as talented as they were, the Sock was still the main draw as he insulted guests, the show, the audience….

Ed’s Night Party was, for a long time, the only night time talk show in Toronto and Ontario (probably Canada, too).

The leading national networks, CBC and CTV, both launched high-profile, late night talk shows, the CBC doing a weekly show and CTV doing 5-nights a week. Both efforts were clones of the big US shows, down to the placement of the desk and the guest chairs (with the requisite funny musical director and the house band to one side, of course). Both were entertaining in their own way, but they broke no new ground and both efforts eventually left the air after ratings slipped away due to boredom.

But the Sock was refreshingly original. You never knew what was going to happen on the show next, something that even Letterman couldn’t claim. You couldn’t jump into the middle of the show and know exactly where the show was (opening monologue/comedy bit/first guest… they’re still following this calcified format).

After turning into a day-job wage slave, my nights began to end earlier and earlier, and I stopped watching Ed the Sock, Letterman and the rest at some point. Heck, I even stopped watching Saturday Night Live and missed that whole Tina Fey revival. I didn’t start watching Ed the Sock again until we met Ed and Red at a comic-con here in Toronto.

Ed & Red’s had evolved into a different show from the what I’d watched the first 3 years he was on CITY—the interviews were usually done in the field, and the bikini quota went way up. The comedy remained edgy, however, and Ed & Red are tremendous improvisers, ranging from groan-out-loud puns to edgy barbs aimed at society’s sacred cows. The show self-mockingly went for the young male demographic with spring break footage of wet t-shirt and bikini contests, topless hot tub girls, and some of the dirtiest jokes ever told on Canadian TV.

The show is less predictable in this late incarnation, breaking away from the monologue-sketch-guest-guest-guest format that has solidified the genre into an indistinguishable ritual—only the host, the set dressing, and onscreen graphics distinguish the big American shows (Jimmy Kimmel providing a breath of fresh air but not as popular as a result). Ed the Sock, meanwhile, marching to his own drummer , made his cast of dancers, tub girls, DJs, and his co-host Red into a complete repertory company capable of doing anything.

I hope we haven’t seen the last of Ed the Sock, but I do know that Ed and Red will do well in their next step, whatever form that takes.

CITY-TV, meanwhile, won’t be the same with all the fun tossed out like yesterday’s garbage. I fear the one station that embraced the great city of Toronto will become another bland corporate entity, indistinguishable from the safe, generic, predictable dullness of the other Toronto stations.

Maybe it’s better that the Sock is now free of the new CITY—it would be sad to see him sanitized into something he is not.

Dance of the Sugar Plum Scaries

Our 3rd appearance on Ed & Red’s Night Party aired on Friday (June 6), with the repeat running on Sunday, June 8. As I wrote back on April 24, this was an appearance in a sketch rather than being guests plugging something on the show.
Should Ed & Red post the clip, I’ll link to it here as I think we did some of our best work so far on that sketch.
That leaves one more appearance yet to air. Our fourth appearance is just a cameo, and it should last a few seconds rather than minutes.
You’ll get a chance to meet Ed & Red, as well as Miller & Mullet, at the Paradise Toronto Comicon, which runs July 12-13 at the Holiday Inn on King. This show is dedicated to comic books, so if you’re a fan of sequential art, drop by and say hello.

The Kings of Silent Comedy

My exposure to the silent-era comedians courtesy of Mother’s Pizza led me to research and seek out the great silent clowns, as Walter Kerr called them.

Charlie Chaplin: the superstar of the silent era. His movies seem dated now (theatre-style compositions, a wide maudlin streak), but he is still an important teacher. Chaplin used characters to create comedy rather than stringing together a series of gags (pay attention, Mike Myers), and he spent his career trying to find the perfect blend of comedy and tragedy.

Buster Keaton: a man before his time. Watch any of his shorts or features and you’ll see the roots of modern comedy filmmaking, with the naturalism and cinematography of our movies today. Watch his masterpiece, The General—there’s not a wasted frame in that tightly controlled, well-told story, and the film ranks as one of the best ever made. Where Chaplin’s tramp instantly mastered any task thrown his way, Buster’s poor sap would struggle before mastering anything.

Harry Langdon: the man-sized infant. His comic persona was that of a baby trapped in a grown man’s body, and he puts it to good use by putting that character into unsavory places as often as possible. He was the master of making the little things bigger than the big things. A glance, a stunned stare held for a beat—Harry was the master of understatement, but he made every gesture and beat stronger for it. Watch The Strongman if you can.

Harold Lloyd: the go-getter. It’s possible to watch the development of Harold Lloyd’s “glass character” through the surviving shorts. By the time he’d fully developed the character, he was creating great comedy that rivals that of Chaplin and Keaton. He was the king of the “thrill comedy,” with Safety Last being his finest effort.

Laurel & Hardy: two gods of comedy, no waiting. Most people have seen the duo’s sound-era shorts, but they did quite a few silents as well. I’ve seen parts of their silents in some of the Youngson re-releases. The characters are overgrown children, polite and well-meaning, but placed in their well-crafted stories they fail time and time again. The Music Box is one of the best comedy shorts ever made, but any of their shorts are gems. I love Towed in a Hole and Me and My Pal. Stan Laurel was a great craftsman, writing and editing their output. Their later features aren’t as good as those shorts are, but they are still a lot of fun. Laurel & Hardy took action and reaction and set them to a comfortably slow pace, allowing the gags to build on each other, with some of the finest physical comedy on film.

Interestingly, these great clowns, all long-gone, have official websites. There is hope that future generations will know their work.

Blockbuster Season, 2008

When I was a kid, I worked for Dickie Dee Ice Cream, pedaling one of those white ice cream carts around the south end of Oshawa, where I was more the neighbourhood mobile nutrition centre than the floating dessert vendor. My favourite product was the grape Blockbuster, one of three flavours of a Creamsicle™-type ice cream bar.
But say the word blockbuster to me now, and I tend to think of the big popcorn movies that come out in the summer, what the industry types called the tent-pole movies (not sure if they still do or not).
This year, Iron Man led off the pack, opening at the beginning of May and doing quite well. Let’s hope that the inevitable sequel(s) maintain the same quality as this one.
The next big movie was the Narnia sequel, which I haven’t seen. The trailers for Narnia 2 give me the impression that the movie is much of the same as the first one, so I’ll probably skip it. It’s nice to see fantasy epics returning to the big screen in the wake of the LOTR trilogy, but the first one felt like a Harry Potter retread rather than a source of Rowlings’s scribbles.
This past weekend, I saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (hereafter shortened to Indy 4). This movie was as entertaining as Iron Man was, and it’s a worthy addition to the franchise. I went in hoping it would be better than Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and at least as good as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Fortunately, there’s no Jar-Jar Binks to be seen. Dr. Jones fist-fights his way on and off trucks, sneaks into booby-trapped ruins, and still manages to teach archeology to classes filled with enamored young women. The movie doesn’t drag, with godless Russian commies taking the place of the Nazis of the earlier films, and the movie is kind-hearted in its treatment of the characters in the world of the 1950’s. It’s not a documentary, so the plot holes are pretty easy to ignore—it’s pure, escapist fun intended to allow you to put the world aside for 120 minutes of adventure, which is how I define the summer popcorn movies.
There are a few other movies I am looking forward to seeing this summer.
Three high-profile superhero movies promise to make comic-con crowds dress up as more than just Imperial storm troopers this summer. The new Batman movie, featuring the late Heath Ledger, is coming out, as is a sequel to the excellent Hellboy movie.
I’ve only seen one trailer for The Incredible Hulk, so I haven’t decided whether it’s something to see (the 60’s TV cartoon is still the best Hulk experience, hands down, with a rockin’ theme song).
Tropic Thunder looks like fun: Ben Stiller, Jack Black, and Robert Downey Jr. playing war-film actors stuck in a real war. With a supporting cast that includes Steve Coogan and Nick Nolte, this should be a lot of fun. Downey plays a white actor who dons blackface to get a role, which has generated some controversy, but I’m sure it’s more a source of comedic gold than something racist. I saw posters at the theatre this weekend, and Downey’s makeup cracks me up. I hope the movie’s as funny as that poster….
There’s an Adam Sandler movie coming out—to come out in prime-time, it must be pretty good by Sandlerian standards. He plays an Israeli agent who just wants to style hair in New York. So… he’s a martial arts expert with a funny accent. You Don’t Mess with The Zohan may be my guilty pleasure this summer. Or it may be two hours wasted.
One controversial comedy is on its way: Mike Myers’s The Love Guru. Hindu organizations are up in arms over this movie’s portrayal of their religion, which will undoubtedly drive ticket sales up for the first weekend. The first trailer was the most unfunny thing I’ve seen in a long time, to the point that I was shocked they would put it out in the first place. The second trailer was actually funny, so I’ll probably end up seeing this one. Guru is a throwback to the politically-incorrect movies of Peter Sellers, such as The Party or The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu, where he impersonated people of other races. Today, that type of racial comedy is somewhat risky, with the unwritten rule being that you have to be from the ethnic group being mocked in order to mock a group of people. Still, in a world where Larry the Cable Guy’s white-trash, homophobic, xenophobic semi-routines have propelled him into making a series of what could be called next generation Pauly Shore movies, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised to see a white guy from Scarborough play a South Asian man. Still, the true test of a comedy is whether it’s funny or not. I have my doubts.
I may actually go to the theatre to see a Uwe Boll movie for the first time ever. Postal is getting decent reviews from the blogosphere, and it features the mighty Dave Foley, one of my favourite comic actors.
Surprisingly in the testosterone-soaked world of the blockbuster, the movie generating the most mainstream press these days is a chick-flick, Sex in the City, starring the ubiquitous Sarah Jessica Parker. Not my cup of tea since I don’t collect shoes or purses, but at least I have an excuse to ignore infotainment shows for the next few months….

Robert Downey Jr is Iron Man, Ozzy

I actually went to see a movie on opening night last week: Iron Man. I’m not a fan of opening nights, generally—on Friday nights, movie theatres are crowded, fanboys are high on carbs, small children are screaming.

If I think a movie is likely to disappear within a week of release (either it’s really horrible or it has such a limited release nobody knows about it), I’ll go to a matinee that weekend. For the movies that seem to have enough buzz that I’m sure they’ll be around for weeks or months, I wait until at least the 2nd weekend to catch a matinee. Or I wait until the movie goes to the 2nd-run houses here in the city.

Iron Man is well worth the annoyance of going to a multiplex on Friday night in the city’s heart. The two morons who shouted out what they thought were funny things at the beginning of the movie eventually got into the flick and shut up—it was that good.

Robert Downey Jr. makes the movie work—he charms the audience with his portrayal of Tony Stark, a character with the same wild streak he has. The best casting decision of the popcorn movie season is casting Downey in this movie. They took the X-Men approach in casting good actors (as opposed to casting the prettiest people they could find), so the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow and Jeff Bridges fill out the cast. They also got around the faceless superhero problem seen in the Spiderman movies by showing Tony Stark inside the costume (making the costume another foil for Stark’s wit).

The script was written not as a fanboy superhero movie, but as a character-based action flick featuring a protagonist who happens to become a superhero. The filmmakers (Marvel Studios in their first step away from collaborations with movie studios) were smart enough to realize that the drawing power of the comic book heroes is not the fighting and explosions (as cool as they may be) but the writing. DC may have created some of the iconic superheroes of the 1950’s and 60’s, but Marvel was king in the 70’s because they caught the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate mood and created flawed and complex heroes. Spiderman, the X-Men, the Hulk, even the bland Fantastic Four, all had their doubts, fears, prejudices. The Superman comic bored me when I was a kid, frankly. An invincible hero saves the world—you knew a chunk of kryptonite was just waiting around the corner.

Where superhero movies succeed or fail is not in how spectacular the effects are or how many villains they fight at the same time—it’s the writing, stupid. Are the characters interesting? Is the story compelling? Most of the time, Hollywood gets it wrong and thinks the visual spectacle is more important. Maybe it is to some people, but the power of storytelling is stronger than that of the visceral thrill. Compare the tepid stories and weak characters in the Fantastic Four movies to the stronger choices made in the telling of the X-Men or Spiderman, or, similarly, Superman Returns to Boredom versus Batman Begins to Not Suck.

So… Iron Man moves to the top of my favourite superhero movies list. Sadly, it displaces one of the best Channel 101 series I’ve ever seen….

Two More Socks for Miller & Mullet

This past weekend, we completed two more appearances, our third and fourth, on Ed & Red’s Night Party. Back in December, I had written about our second appearance and our experience in a multi-camera situation.

Our third appearance is a cameo, at the end of an episode where Ed the Sock has decided to sell his studio and has allowed potential buyers to look at the place while they’re shooting. We cap this gag with our arrival with our bags packed at the end of the episode, and we may appear in the closing credits, fighting beside the desk. As in our earlier appearances, the producers gave us a very loose description of what we were to do (a cue line and the instructions to fight beside the desk), so we went out and did it. It was fun, but I don’t think it was as good as our earlier appearances. Maybe the editing will prove me wrong—I’m going on my gut response to what we did without having seen the raw or edited results. I think I wasn’t fully prepared for the cameo, and I think it will show. Mullet said he wasn’t comfortable with it, either. But it’s in the can, and the only thing to do is learn from the experience and move on.

Mullet has plenty of improv experience, so he’s more adept at winging it. But I’ve always worked better in situations where I plan things out in advance, like with a script. As a duo, we realized after the cameo that collectively we work better with a plan.

Our fourth appearance is our first appearance in a sketch rather than as part of the show itself, so the producers gave us more structure this time. Without giving too much away, we were part of a parody of high culture, ballet to be specific.

The producers shot it before the actual episode as an isolated segment. This meant we didn’t have to worry about any cues outside of the sketch itself. After the dinner break, we went into the studio to work it out and shoot it.

They’d told us the day before what we were to do in the sketch, so we’d had time to start thinking about what we were going to do. We talked over what I would do and what Mullet would do and what our motivations would be. We came up with a pretty good idea of the beats we’d follow, who would do what and when. If the sketch was to change, we’d have to rethink things, but we were prepared, at least, to adapt our plan or come up with something new, if needed.

We weren’t alone in the sketch—there were 6 others appearing on-camera (Liana K., 3 of the bikini girls, and 2 dancers)—so we had some logistics to work out on top of the beats of the sketch itself.

At first, we went with the two dancers to the studio floor with the director and the crew. The dancers worked out their moves with the music and then Mullet and I walked through what we had planned. Everyone laughed at the right times, so we knew we’d made the right plan.

We had to change one thing—I was facing away from the closeup camera, so I had to turn to my left instead of my right. Not a big deal—Mullet helped by approaching me on my left side. A few more walkthroughs and we were ready to go.

We got to use breakaway props for the first time. We had enough props to do one take, so we didn’t even rehearse with them. When the props were unpacked and placed on the set, the producer made sure cast and crew knew where they were and that they were fragile. Fortunately, the props broke in the sketch and not before.

I liked one of our final rehearsals—it got a laugh from the rest of the people on the floor, and it felt good. We did one more to make sure the cameras were in the right place, and then it was time to go to work.

Liana and one of the girls introduced the segment, the dancers danced, the other bikini girls heralded my entrance, I did my thing, Mullet came out and did his thing, we broke the props, and it was done. All in one take with all four cameras on our set. I ended the sketch on the floor, trying not to breath hard after a bit of a workout, until they’d made sure everything in the trailer was okay. Then we were done.

I liked that second-last rehearsal better than the actual take, but I was working to the audience of cast and crew in the rehearsal—that laughter wasn’t there during the take because they’re all doing their jobs when the tape is rolling. We did get applause backstage from the other people there, so it must have looked good on the monitor there.

I’m looking forward to seeing both performances. Watch our website www.millerandmullet.com or join our Facebook page for updates on airdates.

Upgrade Update and Why DVD Studio Pro is Teh Suck

First, an update on my upgrade plans. I’ve eliminated one option from my ongoing post-production software. Way, way back in an earlier entry, I wrote about upgrading from Final Cut Studio 1 on my G5. I played with Red Giant’s Magic Bullet suite and came away impressed. I also played with Adobe AfterEffect’s demo (which I haven’t blogged about yet). Last week, I started to research my third option, Final Cut Studio 2. That’s when I discovered a problem with FCS 2: my G5.

I have a 1.6 GHz G5, the low-end model of the first release, the slowest G5 ever made. I have a stock model, with an extra gigabyte of RAM. The original graphics card is the stock GeForce FX5200 Ultra, a card that isn’t certified to power Color or Motion 3. The card I would need is the Radeon X1900 G5 Mac Edition, which is no longer available new (Amazon and eBay prices range from $250 to $350 for used and "new" cards. Apple carries an X1900, but it's the version for the Mac Pros).

My G5 turns five in August, so I have to ask, “Is it worth spending $300 to upgrade an old computer so I can spend another $600 to get Color and Motion 3?

I’m not convinced my colour-correcting or motion-graphics skills are worth $1000. And there’s no guarantee my G5 will run the apps efficiently. Therefore, I’m taking Final Cut Studio 2 out of the equation. And then there were two….

And now our second topic. Last week, we got the Ed & Red appearances dubbed from VHS to mini-DV. I was able to capture the footage, edit everything in Final Cut, use Compressor to convert the footage for DVD, and then set up a project in DVD Studio Pro.

I’ve always found DVD Studio Pro to be the problem child of Final Cut Studio. It works great up until I start a build or format a DVD. I don’t recall any projects where I didn’t have to trash all the build files and start over. Sometimes, each disk I burned required me to trash and start over again. Clearly, Apple doesn’t care about the DVD—it’s the interwebs, stupid!

The Sock DVD is just for friends and family who missed our appearances, so I did a barebones project, with four options: both complete shows, the excerpts of us, a main menu, a menu for each show, and a disclaimer video to make sure nobody plays it around kids or at work. Nothing fancy, or so I thought.

So as I started to burn a test disk, the app crashed. One moment, it was on screen, the next, I was staring at the Finder. This happened every time. I trashed all the build files and folders, rechecked the project—everything I’d done in the past that had worked I did. But nothing worked, even after rebooting, checking Software Update for anything related to Final Cut Studio 1, sacrificing a goat to the gods, etc., etc.

So I trashed the video and audio files and re-rendered everything through Compressor again. I started from scratch and reprogrammed the DVD. But as I started to drop the video from one of the shows into its track, DVD Studio Pro again vanished. This happened each of the four times I tried it.

A third trip through Compressor seemed unavoidable, so I went back into Final Cut and removed the chapter markers from the troublesome track. Compressor churned out new files, and I went back into DVD Studio Pro muttering things about Steve Jobs. I put together the entire project from scratch, for the third frigging time. Then, sure I was ready to toss the G5 off the balcony, I clicked on Build/Format again, but opted to build a disk image instead of burning directly to disk. Then I went into the next room and watched TV to bring my blood pressure down.

To my shock and horror, DVD SP actually worked. I had a working disk image on my hard drive. Using OS X’s Disk Utility, I burned the image to a blank DVD and, lo and behold, I had a working DVD. So… hopefully… this is a workaround that continues to work going forward.

DVD SP allows you great control over every aspect of your DVD, so I am frustrated by Apple’s inability to prevent it from blowing up real good….

Influences, Part II: The Marx Brothers

I first saw the Marx Brothers courtesy of a Buffalo TV station—one of them used to broadcast old comedies on Sunday mornings. I think I saw their first swansong, The Big Store (1941), first, and despite it not being their finest work, I was hooked by Groucho, Harpo, and Chico.

If you’ve never seen the Marx Brothers before, I’d recommend watching their movies in chronological order (The Cocoanuts (1929) and Animal Crackers (1930) are adaptations of their Broadway shows). If you want to jump in head first, start with the next 3 Paramount movies, Monkey Business (1931), Horse Feathers (1932), and Duck Soup (1933). The start of the downfall is their first MGM movie, A Night at the Opera (1935). With Zeppo in tow, the boys attacked high society with a zeal that must have been like what the Sex Pistols did to music in 1977.

I like the Four Marx Brothers a bit better than the trio—Zeppo adds something that is missed in their later movies. As a wooden parody of the male love interest, his scenes in Monkey Business are pretty good (“the trees are lovely” while escorting a lovely lady around the deck of an ocean liner is my favourite Zeppo line and scene). He doesn’t do much in the other movies other than help move the exposition along (one scene in The Cocoanuts features him doing nothing other than saying “yes” to Groucho).

I initially liked Harpo the most—he’s an amazing clown, and with his silent act he gets in some great physical business. Alone or with Chico or Groucho, he gets a lot done, with the most visibly anarchic attitude. Harpo was a force of nature.

I think Chico’s best scenes are those where he plays with Harpo as they try to pull some scam on someone, usually Margaret Dumont (they do some great physical comedy together, such as the effort to escape from the gamblers in Horse Feathers or stealing a painting in Cocoanuts). I also like Chico’s scenes with Groucho as they mangle the language and the logic of language. The Chico-Groucho scenes are the ones most remembered (the contract scene in Opera, the map scene in Monkey Business, and the Why a Duck scene in Cocoanuts). Chico is a great con artist, ignorant and sometimes stupid, but shrewd enough to fleece you without you knowing it.

Groucho is probably the best-known brother today, and his machine-gun delivery and non-sequiter style still influences comedy today. Groucho would have been a great standup comedian if he were born into this era.

The greatest Marxist scenes involve all four (or three) brothers: the stateroom scene in Opera, the passport scene in Monkey Business, the speakeasy sequence or the lecture in Horse Feathers, for instance.

At Paramount, the Brothers were the romantic male leads—the leading lady was either Margaret Dumont or Thelma Todd. Both of these actresses were great comediennes, and the Paramounts would not have been the same without them. Todd, a gifted physical and verbal comedian, holds her own against Groucho in two of the Paramounts, playing a sexy femme fatale. Dumont, matronly and stuffy, represents the upper class and spends her time (and in some of the MGM’s) as the target of Groucho’s half-hearted efforts to woo her money into marriage. In both cases, you don’t expect the romance to last long after the movie ends as the boys move onto their next scam.

At MGM, the Brothers became the helpers for the romantic leads, and the movies aren’t the same. Although they were never as sentimental as Chaplin was, the later movies don’t have the same bite to them as the early ones. By giving up the role of the male lead, the boys became secondary to the plot. MGM wanted to sell tickets to women by featuring more romance, so you can blame your great-grandmother for it all.

Still, a bad Marx Bros. movie is better than no Marx Bros. movie….

Earth Hour, YouTube, and Web 2.0

We had a big media blitz for Earth Hour here in Canada this year, and I decided to do my part and shut off all lights and appliances for an hour on March 29th. This I did.

But I did run one electrical device: my camcorder. I put my trusty ol’ Canon Ultura on my tripod and parked it in front of my balcony window to capture the beginning and end of Earth Hour. I used my Canon wide-angle adaptor (similar to this but not the same model) on the Ultura to make sure I got as much of the landscape as possible, so the balcony railing and the ceiling above it are both curved—but I caught a much wider angle than I would have otherwise.

I captured it the next morning to my hard drive, used Final Cut to edit it, and sent it through Compressor to prepare it for YouTube. I sped the footage up to 1000%, so each minute of video became 1.7982 seconds. I must admit I was impressed with Final Cut’s abilities to do so—with frame blending, it became seamless. Watching the headlights of cars showed how smooth Final Cut can be.

Here’s the video:



You’ll see someone slide the screen door open and then the balcony door several times—if I do this again, I’m putting a moratorium on going out on the balcony until after the camera’s shut off!

After I’d rendered and exported the video to QuickTime, I used a Compressor preset I’d obtained from Ken Stone’s website. The tutorial you’ll find there (by Brian Gary) is quite thorough, and I’ve been really impressed with the quality after YouTube finishes rendering. One thing to remember—you can ignore title-safe and action-safe as your entire video ends up on YouTube.

As I was waiting for Compressor to finish rendering, I wondered what the world in front of my balcony looked like on video on any other night—would it be a noticeable difference? So 24 hours after Earth Hour, I shot more video, with the camcorder in approximately the same spot.

I captured the subsequent night footage, sped it up and exported it to QuickTime as before. Then I brought both clips into Motion, where I planted them side-by-side with a background and text to try to make things clearer. I considered doing a wipe back and forth between the two clips, but side-by-side made the most sense for quick ‘n’ dirty video. I sent it through Compressor and then uploaded it.



As of tonight (April 1), the first video has 137 views and the second has 98. Some people have added comments, the “honors” link shows that the videos were in the top videos for their category, and I feel I’ve made a small contribution to the Web 2.0 phenomenon. Interestingly, the first video I put up, Hotdog, has gone from my 3 test viewings to 22 views since the other videos first appeared. I have no idea how anyone wathcing environmental videos would respond to Hotdog’s somewhat scatological bent….

I have had some time to think about the impact of these videos given the comments people have made—there was a 2-person mini-debate about global warming in the 2nd one—and I think I should have made clearer that I was shooting a great swath of residential space, where streetlights from a few major roads as well as row upon row of residential streets, dominate the landscape. The busiest stretch of highway in North American, the 401, crosses just below the horizon as well, so a lot of those lights were not part of Earth Hour. If I’d been able to shoot the skyline from my tiny bathroom window, I would have cpatured the CN Tower and the bank towers downtown going dark, as well as parts of Riverdale and the Beaches. So, in hindsight, I would have put in captions or title cards to put things in context—I didn’t intend the comparison video to present Earth Hour in a negative light (no pun intended).

If I’m still in this apartment a year from now, I’m definitely repeating the experiment and I’ll post all 4 videos for comparison.

One Near-Hit, One Bomb, One Classic

Over the Easter weekend, I saw two comedies on the big screen. This is the first double-movie weekend I’ve had in a long time—I used to go once a week or every other week, but I haven’t been motivated to leave my DVD player much in the last year. Good comedies are scarce in recent months, so most of my movie choices have been from the comparatively consistent flow of good and great dramatic and genre movies.

On Good Friday, I saw The Grand, an improvised mockumentary a la Christopher Guest. Directed by Zack Penn, it boasted a cast including a few of my favourites: David Cross, Woody Harrelson, Dennis Farina, Michael McKean, Judy Greer, and Ray Romano, with many other fun performances. It wasn’t a great movie, but it wasn’t terrible, either. I’m not sure how Penn’s methods differ from Guest’s, but Guest can always find the comedic gold with his actors through conflict. I don’t think Penn did that as well as Guest can, so other than David Cross’s Larry feuding with Gabe Kaplan’s father character, the other characters didn’t really bicker or fight, so it lacked the punch and pathos of a Guest movie has in spades. I’d recommend The Grand as a rental as it was a lot of fun just the same—Michael McKean’s absent-minded developer steals his scenes, as does Werner Herzog. Dennis Farina isn’t given much to do, as is Judy Greer, which is a shame given how much fun those two actors can be.

The other movie, Be Kind Rewind, laid an egg on Easter Sunday (sorry). I really wanted to like this movie—I hoped it would be like watching Channel 101 on the big screen. It ended up being more like Channel 102, sadly. The plot is goofy enough, but Michel Gondry (who I only know from the marvelous Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) wastes the talents of Jack Black and Mos Def by chasing what should have been a subplot as his main plot.

This movie has more loose ends in it than any movie I’ve ever seen. I suspect this movie was butchered in the edit bay because the creator of Eternal Sunshine couldn’t have created such a sloppy mess here, right? Let’s see—a romantic subplot is set up in a charming little scene and then completely ignored… Black’s character takes on a power station and gains superpowers in a hilarious sequence that is later nullified with a funny pee scene)… a rival video store run by another kindly neighbourhood man which seemed to be set up as a possible merger partner and therefore a solution to the other store’s closing—what the hell was the point of introducing all of this if nothing is done with it? The story of Black’s character taking on the power station and the superpowers he gains would have made for a much better comedy if they’d stuck with that as the main plot. The making of fake movies was funny the first time (Ghostbusters, which was featured in the Be Kind trailers and got me excited about seeing it), but the other movies weren’t funny not because they weren’t funny but because they showed not the finished movies but the making of them--in a fucking montage!

I’d recommend you wait for Be Kind to wind its way into the discount DVD rental pile. There are a few things in it well worth seeing (Jack Black and a chain-link fence is one lighting-fast but hilarious visual gag), but I wished I’d had a scan button in the theatre.

So what’s a guy to do after watching 2 disappointing movies? Fire up the DVD player and watch some proven comedy.

I watched all three seasons of Bottom over the last few weeks, and it restored my faith in character-based comedy after Sunday’s fiasco. Bottom ran for 3 seasons in the UK, written by and starring Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson, our heroes from the last entry.

The two leads, Richie and Eddie, are much less angry than Rick and Vyvyan, but the relationship has some similarities. Richie and Eddie are flatmates in a rundown London neighbourhood, with Eddie supporting them with his welfare cheques. Rick comes across as the bitchy wife type, and Eddie is an alcoholic who prefers spending time with his buddies Spudgun and Dave Hedgehog (the latter played by the Young Ones’ Christopher Ryan).

Mayall and Edmondson did a number of tours in the UK with the characters, and the show has a definite theatre feel to it—most of the scenes take place in the living room/kitchen area of their multi-floor flat.

On tour, the two were noted for being able to drop the script and improvise around flubs, comment on the performances, etc., before returning to the story. I think you can see the results of this in the three series of the TV show. All 3 series (1991, 1992, 1995, with 6 episodes each) were good, and there was no decline in the quality of the show. The last episodes are as funny as the first ones, and they spend more time outside of the apartment.

The episodes aren’t as tightly plotted as The Young Ones. Sure, there’s a main plot for each episode, but the scenes feel more like distinct sketches. In one episode (Smells), for instance, after returning home after not picking up women, the boys head out and obtain a spray that will make them irresistible—and then head off to the pub to test it out. The apartment, sex shop, and pub scenes could all stand on their own as sketches, and you could remove any one of those and still have a pretty funny episode (which would still make sense plot-wise).

There’s still a lot of violent slapstick, toilet humour, and two people who hate each other yet couldn’t function without the other. Edmondson and Mayall were inspired to write the show after appearing in a production of Waiting for Godot, and there is a certain bleakness to the characters’ lives. However, instead of lives of quiet desperation, these guys live lives of loud desperation. Definitely a highlight of 1990’s British comedy just as The Young Ones was in the 1980’s.

I haven’t seen the Bottom movie, Guest House Paradiso, which followed the TV series in 1999, but it’s definitely on my list, as are the taped performances from the 5 tours. Next time I’m in England I’m going to be buying some region 2 DVDs….

The Young Ones

Ask us who our biggest influences are, and we’ll likely include The Young Ones near the top of the list, along with the Marx Brothers, Laurel & Hardy, Abbott & Costello, Rush, etc.

We often have to explain who The Young Ones are—the show didn’t run here in Canada until the 1990’s, long after they’d left the air in the U.K., and only on MuchMusic, Canada’s music video channel, at weird hours. The show centred on four college roommates (a revolutionary poet, a punk, a hippie, and a con artist) who, for me, personified the punk aspects of the new wave of British comedy in the late 70’s and early 80’s.

For more information about the show and its place in the history of comedy, check out this Wikipedia article.

I once worked with a real-life anarchist, and he was the one who recommended The Young Ones to me. I bought a VHS tape of the first 3 or 4 episodes, and I loved it. I eventually got all four tapes to complete the collection.

So why The Young Ones?

First, the show is very funny. I still laugh after many repeated viewings. Like all great comedy, it’s not predictable, and the inherent friction between the four main characters drives the show and the comedy. The Young Ones was my first forays into the 80’s new wave of British comedy, so it was as refreshing to me as Monty Python’s Flying Circus was when as a kid I saw the reruns on PBS.

Second, for a TV show, there was a lot of physical comedy. TV relies heavily on the verbal branch of comedy, so I’m always pleased when I see good physical comedy on a TV show (Three’s Company, for instance, is one old show I’ve rediscovered as a great source of slapstick—John Ritter was one of the greats). In its day, the usual grim types criticized The Young Ones for the cartoonish violence, as was Rik Mayall and Ade Edmundson’s earlier work with as the Dangerous Brothers. But the violence is so over the top that a small child can tell that it wasn’t real or to be emulated. Rick embeds a pick ax in Vyvyan’s skull, yet Vyvyan survives. Vyvyan is the most violent, frequently using his trusty cricket bat to restore or destroy order, but he resorts to using frying pans and even a window to punish Neil, the hippie, for being himself. The Young Ones were so physical that there were a lot of master shots and medium shots to capture the action, and very few closeups as you find with most verbal comedy. As a result, the show often feels like a filmed stage play rather than a sitcom.

Third, the structure of the episodes was disjoined and surreal. The A-plot revolved around that week’s adventure with the four main characters, but it the writers weren’t afraid to make the plot somewhat non-linear, such as “Bambi” where the boys conduct a mission to the laundromat, then hop on a train to be on a gameshow. The writers also interrupted frequently with cutaways and brief b-plots. The diversions varied, ranging from live action scenes to the use of puppets (including Vyvyan’s pet hamster Special Patrol Group as well as skating vegetables, a shark, filmmaking flies, and cannibalistic rats). The live action scenes usually segued between scenes of the main plot and had nothing to do with the rest of the show. My favourite is the Narnia parody in “Flood.” Alexei Sayle would also appear, as their landlord Jerzy Balowski or one of Balowski’s relatives, and do a standup bit, sing a song about his Doc Martins (“Oil”), or even become part of the A-plot. The structure reflects how they wrote the scripts: Ben Elton would take the material Rik Mayall and Lise Mayer had written together and incorporate it into the material he’d written, making for a melding of styles, plots, and ideas. This was no American sitcom with a strong A-plot supported by a comic-relief B-plot.

The Young Ones was a big influence on our first video effort, Babysitters. We wrote the script separately—Mullet was two time zones away that summer—so we unknowingly emulated the way the writers worked on the show.

The Young Ones’ spirited anarchy puts it in the same part of town as the Marx Brothers. They attack the status quo with a glee and energy that draws the audience in—you find yourself rooting for them. It’s classic outsider humour—us versus them—and we identify with the outsiders in this case. The four leads are all poor (except maybe Mike who seems to be running some sort of underworld empire at times), and they end the series as homeless bank robbers on the run. They follow the tradition of the Marx Brothers, who frequently played penniless immigrants who conned their way into the halls of the wealthy.

Even when they are shown amongst their fellow students, the Young Ones maintain their outsider status. The party they host in “Interesting” reveals Rick to be awkward in a social situation. Later, Rick is mocked by a bomb-plotting anarchist after he discovers Rick is just a posturing rebel. Vyvyan’s friends are violent punks, the extreme outsiders, yet he admits he’d like to join the police force. Neil’s hippy friends seem the most like him, but in another episode, “Cash,” he becomes a police officer and arrests them at another party. Mike is the only one to not have outside friends shown in the episodes, but he seems to be the most connected of the group (has employees running a roller disco, got Bambi a TV commercial job, and is blackmailing the dean).

The Young Ones has a strong political streak, with frequent references to Margaret Thatcher’s government. Being Canadian, I can easily substitute “Thatcher” for “Mulroney,” and I immediately remember a time when a conservative government polarized the country during the economic and political turmoil as well as the Cold War rumblings of the 1980’s. The show contains the uncertainty and pessimism of the early 80’s quite well.

When The Young Ones first aired in 1982, the top sitcoms here in North America were Family Ties and Cheers, alongside existing shows like MASH, Buffalo Bill, and Webster.
When the second series of The Young Ones ran in 1984, Who’s the Boss, AfterMASH, and Night Court were starting out here. None of these shows were anything like The Young Ones, so it’s little wonder that the show didn’t air here until long after—and on specialty cable channels. Fox apparently made a pilot for an adaptation of the show with only Nigel Planer crossing the Atlantic, but the network decided not to make it a series.

Next time, a rambling look at another Mayall/Edmondson collaboration, Bottom.