I had the privilege of being the photographer of the Advanced Leadership Initiative’s “Revitalizing Cities” Think Tank, held this past weekend at Harvard Law School. One of the main events at this conference was a panel featuring many members from the cast of The Wire. Some of you may know that Harvard Law School actually offers a class based on the series (side note: I regard it as the best television show ever made). That class’s professor was able to wrangle the cast to join us for a moving panel about the need for change in urban areas all across the country.
All of these photos were shot using a Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 L IS USM II lens on a Canon 7D. A few quick notes:
The Canon 7D’s low-light performance is pretty great. Even at ISO 1600, images are still quite usable (or at least, up to my standards). The same can’t be said of the Canon 50D, which I also shoot with.
Some people argue that shooting in JPG saves time. But in a situation where you are shooting a lot of different lighting set-ups in rapid succession, even the camera pre-set white-balance options may not encompass your white-balance needs. I am glad to shoot in RAW and edit the images afterwards at my leisure.
I’ve found that even with image stabilization activated, it is difficult for me to get a clear shot at a shutter speed of anything under 1/125th of a second. Hopefully, I will continue to improve this rate as time goes on.
Doesn’t the Empire take a huge economic loss from the lost productivity of an entire planet? They were presumably paying taxes and providing resources to the rest of the Empire. Presumably the loss of that planet’s output would have to be made up by increased output from other planets that were either slacking in productivity due to rebellion or threatening to rebel and withdraw from the Empire altogether. It doesn’t seem to make good economic sense.
One of the cool things about doing what I do is that sometimes, people send me things for free. Such was the case last night when someone named “Alphonse” and with the initials “AAA” (is this a real name?) gifted me a package through Amazon that contained two photo books: Jeff Bridges’ Pictures and Banksy’s Wall and Piece. First of all, Alphonse, if you’re a real person and you’re reading this, thanks so much for the awesome gift! It made my day.
I haven’t had too much time to dive into either of the books, but they both look incredible. In particular, Bridges’ book, which I didn’t even know existed, has tons of awesome behind-the-scenes shots from his decades as an actor. Very cool, and especially salient to me given my developing photography career.
I wanted to share some quick tidbits from the book, which is essentially a compendium of Banksy’s street art.
Here’s Banksy’s foreward, which lays out his motivations for his work:
I’m going to speak my mind, so this won’t take very long. Graffiti is not the lowest form of art. Despite having to creep about at night and lie to your mum it’s actually the most honest artform available. There is no elitism or hype, it exhibits on some of the best walls a town has to offer, and nobody is put off by the price of admission. A wall has always been the best place to publish your work.
The people who run our cities don’t understand graffiti because they think nothing has the right to exist unless it makes a profit. But if you just value money then your opinion is worthless. They say graffiti frightens people and is symbolic of the decline in society, but graffiti is only dangerous in the mind of three types of people; politicians, advertising executives, and graffiti writers.
The people who truly deface our neighbourhoods are the companies that scrawl their giant slogans across buildings and buses trying to make us feel inadequate unless we buy their stuff. They expect to be able to shout their message in your face from every available surface, but you’re never allowed to answer back. Well, they started this fight and the wall is the weapon of choice to hit them back.
Some people become cops because they want to make the world a better place. Some people become vandals because they want to make the world a better looking place.
Few people make a more convincing case for the decline of The Office than television writer Myles McNutt. I’ve known and respected Myles since before he was rich and famous (and we’ve had him on the /Filmcast a number of times to talk TV), and I’ve particularly been impressed by his work at The AV Club, as he does weekly Office recaps.
McNutt approaches the show and each episode as though it has the potential to be something transcendent, informative, and/or moving. And why shouldn’t he? At its best, that’s what The Office was, a celebration of the foibles of American working life. Lately, though, the show has been uneven and mired with inconsistent characterizations. The penultimate Michael Scott episode, “Michael’s Last Dundies,” exemplifies this. Myles writes:
I know some of you don’t care if an episode of The Office means anything and that you just want it to be funny. I also know that wanting the show to have a sense of meaning or purpose renders me pretentious for some of you. However, “Michael’s Last Dundies” obviously wants to take on a particular meaning given that final song, to be about “the best in every one of us” that Michael believes the Dundies should represent. As a result, I think it is perfectly fair to hold the show accountable for the fact that the rest of it was built around a transparent set of bits being played by two actors, not two characters, and to wish that the big picture was more than just a musical afterthought in Carell’s next-to-last episode.
As Steve Carrell wraps up his time on the show, it’s instructive to look back and see how the show has changed. Be sure to check out Myles’ other recaps of the show.
Drew Grant from Salon has a different take on this week’s episode, though it doesn’t necessarily conflict with McNutt’s. She argues that The Office can recapture its spirit if it “could go all the way back to its Schadenfreude roots and get mean.”
[Update: The creators of FilmPulse have responded to the tidal wave of criticism leveled at them]
Yesterday, I started seeing a few isolated tweets about a new online show named “FilmPulse” pop up on my Twitter feed. Most of them were incredibly derogatory in nature, so I sought out more information on Google. I couldn’t easily find anything, but this morning my colleague Devindra informed me of the details: FilmPulse is ComingSoon’s attempt at a new video film talk show “focused entirely around today’s hottest and most interesting topics.” ComingSoon is a pretty big, heavily-trafficked website, so any attempt that they made into the film commentary/media space was going to be closely watched. In this case, I think the amount of attention went far beyond their expectations.
The first episode just debuted on Tuesday, April 19th, and people had some pretty strong opinions about it. Legendary blogger Anne Thompson was no fan, and Quint from Ain’t It Cool News declared that if AICN had launched a similar show, he would have quit. Even the commenters at ComingSoon didn’t seem to enjoy it. One of them wrote, “This is the worst thing I have ever seen on the internet, and I saw a video of that American hostage being decapitated in Iraq.”
Let me preface the following by saying that I pretty much never write about other podcasts/shows unless it’s to praise them (look through the archives of this blog and you’ll hopefully see that I’ve consistently held to this). I believe that as professionals, it does us no good to tear each other down. That being said, the intense interest and hatred for this show leads me to make an exception, and to try to critically evaluate what is it about this show that inspired such a strong reaction.
I’ve watched the entire 15-minute episode, which consists of a 3-minute discussion between two unnamed hosts about film ranking service Flickchart, followed by a 12-minute interview with Morgan Spurlock with one of the hosts (Update: As Will Goss points out in the comments below, they are actually named with a quick lower-third at around 3 minutes into the show. Their names are Vic and Julian). Let’s take these segments one by one, starting with the latter:
The Spurlock Interview – This is a fairly boiler-plate interview with Spurlock, who is almost always a dynamic speaker. I found nothing particularly offensive about the interview and it seemed as though the interviewer actually took the time to do a little research into Spurlock’s career and tried to ask some probing questions. It’s not the best interview I’ve ever watched with Spurlock, but there is very little that makes this interview worse than what dozens of film/entertainment journalism outlets put out on a weekly basis (except maybe for the host’s egregious mispronunciation of the word “meta”).
The Flickchart segment – This is really what seems to be generating much of the controversy for the show. FilmPulse begins with a rambling 3-minute discussion of how films are ranked, leading to an endorsement of FlickChart. One tweeter remarked that “according to FilmPulse, pre-90s films have no cultural relevancy/artistic merit. I’d have a joke about that but it makes me too fuckin angry.” So what did they say that was so offensive? Here’s a rough transcript of how it opens:
***
Host #1: When someone recommends a movie, there’s a few things you can do to avoid wasting an hour and a half of your time. First point is, is that film privileged as a classic? Is that the context in which the recommender heard of the film? If so, they may be privileging it because it would be politically correct to do otherwise.
Host #2: I think the problem is that we were born at a time when films were getting really interesting. I think there was a lot of really interesting independent filmmaking going on in the early ’90s and we were around for that. Before that, if you actually watch some movies from the ’70s that are considered classics like Bullitt or The French Connection, they’re incredibly boring to people our age because we saw The Matrix when we were 10.
Host #1: And IMDB reflects the trends of those ’70s films particularly strongly. Those were very likely rated by people who saw it when it came out. If I saw a black-and-white film today, it would knock my socks if that’s all I had to compare it against.
Later on…
Host #2: …it’s a new generation. It’s time for the next generation of voices.
Host #1: That leaves room for a tool that actually does a better job of ranking, leaving out the cultural aspect. And that would be Flickchart…
***
There are a couple of things in this exchange that are worth noting. First of all, the hosts never actually say that they subscribe to the views of this “new generation.” But they do strongly imply it. It’s this kind of tone deafness that I think internet film writers are lashing out against. From a presentational standpoint, you only have one chance to make a good first impression. If you devote the first two minutes of your first episode to explaining why the knuckle-dragging yahoos from your generation (which you heavily hint that you are a part of) think some of the sacred cows of film history are “boring,” you are probably going to catch a lot of crap from it.
What’s sad is this: the hosts kind of had a point! The generation of today DOES view films differently. They do expect more flash, more action, quicker edits, better special effects, and so on. But rather than delving into the root causes of this, or evaluating this from a normative perspective, the hosts focus on how to give people what they want, i.e. how to use a service (Flickchart) to circumvent conventional wisdom about classic films. That’s what people find so galling about this opening salvo.
More broadly, I believe the hate against these guys highlights a number of trends. Online film critics are constantly fighting an uphill battle in the realm of legitimacy and credibility. Can quality film criticism still survive in the internet age? Several prominent film critics have decried the democratizing power of the internet, how it gives a megaphone to anyone with an opinion, and how it financially rewards those with attention rather than those with quality. The sight of these two hosts discussing the datedness of black and white films was a direct provocation for these people. After their brutal criticisms were out in the open, the bandwagon-hopping was swift and brutal.
Beyond that, FilmPulse’s first episode, and the furor surrounding it, is instructive in terms of how difficult it is to make a good show as a general matter. From the outset, one needs to be able to answer the question: why should the audience care about what you are about to say? The most unequivocal thing I can say about this show is that the hosts failed to adequately answer that question. That being said, I speak from experience when I say that starting a show is a tricky, difficult, harrowing proposition. If you heard my first podcasts, you’d probably opt never to listen to me again. But that’s what is so great about content-creation: it’s always a process of refinement, of bettering oneself and one’s product. It’s this learning experience that makes the whole enterprise so exciting. And it’s why I can forgive even the crappiest of first episodes, so long as you learn from your mistakes and try to move on.
Will these guys get a second chance to do the same? Only time will tell. Here’s their initial episode. Judge for yourself.
It’s sad, but it’s also … great, really. Imagine if you’d seen everything good, or if you knew about everything good. Imagine if you really got to all the recordings and books and movies you’re “supposed to see.” Imagine you got through everybody’s list, until everything you hadn’t read didn’t really need reading. That would imply that all the cultural value the world has managed to produce since a glob of primordial ooze first picked up a violin is so tiny and insignificant that a single human being can gobble all of it in one lifetime. That would make us failures, I think.
Drew McWeeny has published his review of Marvel’s upcoming Thor. In addition to being one of the first published reviews of the film, it also (as usual) contains some pretty smart insights about superhero films and film criticism in general:
[I]t’s both very funny and a nice humbling reminder that critics are defined by their overall diet of movies. We are only ever as good as the movies we are given to write about, and when I’m done with all of this in the future, will the sum total of my work be varying opinions about how well people crafted movies that primarily deal with dudes in funny costumes beating the hell out of each other?
There’s a great piece at Capital New York that probably has the best forecast for what will become of this AOL/HuffPo marriage:
So, my final, gut prediction, which I would be very pleased to see falsified: Arianna Huffington will create a vital and interesting news desk that in the short term garners AOL praise as a remarkably ambitious and high-quality web-native news operation. It will gain traction against other web operations and will even look, for a while, like it’s making a little bit of a run at the big guys, like cnn.com and nytimes.com.
Traffic will increase—slightly. There will be reports of budget overruns and creative disputes. […] Within a year, several of the most high-profile editorial hires will leak out to a variety of other news organizations, some old and some new. Before long you will be wondering what happened to all those names. And finally, the fast-and-cheap view of “journalism” will return to AOL-Huffpo, amid reports of mild success after a rocky start, all judged on pageviews and profit margins; the “quality” and “journalism” buzzwords will be forgotten parts of the corporate lexicon. Because, to borrow a phrase from Buch, journalism and the “content” strategy of AOL are misaligned.
If I was a betting man, that’s where I’d put my money.
