Trump’s inauguration cake symbolizes his approach to the presidency

Masha Gessen, writing for The New York Review of Books:

Better yet, take the cake. On Saturday it emerged that the inaugural-ball cake that Trump and Vice President Mike Pence cut with a sword was a knock-off of President Obama’s 2013 inaugural-ball cake. Obama’s was created by celebrity chef Duff Goldman. Trump’s was commissioned from a decidedly more modest Washington bakery than Goldman’s, and the transition-team representative who put in the order explicitly asked for an exact copy of Goldman’s design—even when the baker suggested creating a variation on the theme of Goldman’s cake. Only a small portion of Trump’s cake was edible; the rest was Styrofoam (Obama’s was cake all the way through). The cake may be the best symbol yet of the incoming administration: much of what little it brings is plagiarized, and most of it is unusable for the purpose for which presidential administrations are usually intended. Not only does it not achieve excellence: it does not even see the point of excellence.

Barry Jenkins’s favorite Criterion films

It’s always fascinating to see the films that inspired a brilliant filmmaker. Here are the films Barry Jenkins (Moonlight) chose from the Criterion closet:

  • Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander
  • Satyajit Ray’s The Apu Trilogy
  • Andrew Haigh’s Weekend
  • John Cassavetes: Five Films
  • Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dekalog
  • Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine
  • Joel Coen’s Blood Simple
  • Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl
  • Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding
  • Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher
  • David Gordon Green’s George Washington
  • Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon
  • The Essential Jacques Demy
  • The Complete Jacques Tati

Criterion has also compiled a “Best of” Closet Picks video as well.

(hat-tip: Jay Cheel)

Reactions to the 2017 Oscar nominations

The Academy announced their 2017 Oscar Nominations yesterday morning. A few reactions:

  • Meryl Streep getting nominated for an Oscar and NOT Amy Adams for Arrival is some real bullshit.
  • Suicide Squad has more Academy Award nominations than The Handmaiden (which, yes, wasn’t even submitted for consideration). Passengers has more nominations than Silence. Up is down. Left is right. Dogs and cats, sleeping together. Mass hysteria.
  • Hell or High Water surprised me with a few nominations including Best Picture (???) and a Best Supporting for Jeff Bridges (the last one is deserved but I didn’t know if it would happen).
  • Michael Shannon was great in Nocturnal Animals but he was only in the movie for like 15 minutes? I guess if Tommy Lee Jones can win for The Fugitive, anything’s possible…
  • In 2010, Mel Gibson was caught on tape telling Oksana Grigorieva that if she was “raped by a pack of niggers” it would be her own fault. Now he’s been nominated for Best Director and Best Picture via Hacksaw Ridge. THAT’S HOLLYWOOD FOR YA, FOLKS! (for more on this, read Britt Hayes over at ScreenCrush)
  • Pixar totally shut out this year. Not a surprise: All of the Best Animated Film nominations are better than Finding Dory.
  • I hope Moana wins because I freaking love that film, but KUBO winning would also be great because after the tepid box office performance of that film, Laika needs a victory.
  • All your base are belong to La La Land (14 noms). It will destroy all other contenders this year.

Over at /Film, Jacob Hall has a great piece on this year’s biggest snubs and surprises.

The Odyssey empire

Over at BackChannel, Jane Porter has an interesting story about Odyssey and how it entices college students to churn out thousands of pieces for almost no money:

“These types of networks have petered out because it is resource intensive to work with contributors,” says Claire Wardle, research director at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism.

That’s where Odyssey believes it has developed a secret sauce with its Invisible Hand. Despite the ominous name, it’s a workflow tool that organizes stories by subject matter and content, ranking their newsworthiness, topic, and popularity. Stories that come in are ordered and organized from most relevant to least depending on a range of factors, and then funneled to the editor focused on the pertinent topic, such as sports or politics.

First, the algorithm feeds stories to community editors—locally based individuals who are not paid for their job—to be edited. Then they’re sent off to content strategists — the company’s name for its in-house editors, who are all responsible for managing 20 communities each comprised of around 12 to 25 writers. That means a content strategist is editing anywhere between 240 to 500 stories per week. The Invisible Hand is what keeps these editors from losing their minds, managing their workflow so they don’t waste time sifting through stories to determine what their priority should be.

Theoretically, Odyssey’s model provides a nifty way to scale content production. In reality, as the piece gets into, it’s a lot harder to make people contribute high-quality content in perpetuity unless you’re paying them handsomely.

The insane camera moves of ‘La La Land’

[Update: All the videos have now been pulled from Robbins’ account. Some are being released separately as exclusives now. I’ve tried to re-embed the videos as they originally appeared here]

Steadicam operator Ari Robbins has worked on dozens of projects over the years, but his work on La La Land is exceptional. We all know La La Land has great camerawork but it wasn’t until I looked at his Instagram that I understood how much manpower went into some of the shots.

Here’s a photo showing the rig they used for the opening number of the film:

A post shared by Ari Robbins SOC (@steadijew) on


I can’t believe these whip-pans were actually done in-camera (I suspected digital trickery might be involved, but nope):

And this shot from the number “Someone in the Crowd” is mindblowing:

A post shared by Ari Robbins SOC (@steadijew) on

The Hollywood Reporter also has footage on how they did the final “Someone in the Crowd” sequence:

Also: Deadline has footage showing how they shot the final sequence of the film.

(Thanks to Steve Ho from the Slackfilmcast for bringing this to my attention)

Review: Slack Threads are great, but have a few big usability issues

I’m a Slack junkie, so I was excited when they recently announced they’d finally be rolling out a Threads feature. I was particularly keen to try it out since I recently launched a Slack community for the /Filmcast podcast. Would threads make it easier or more confusing to organize conversation in a freewheeling channel with hundreds of users?

Slack threads allow users to essentially convert any message into a thread, and then add replies to that thread. Replies are only one message deep (they cannot go further), and show up on the right-hand pane, which is otherwise used for giving info on the thread as a whole.

Slack also compiles all threads into a handy “All Threads” view that lights up whenever someone responds to any of your threads.

This feature is particularly beneficial for replying to earlier messages in channels. If a message appeared hours ago and the entire channel has moved onto a different topic of conversation, it’s a lot easier to make a thread and reply — the original user gets a notification, and the conversation can continue on that topic while the channel is blissfully unaware.

Overall, I think the threads work really well and help to declutter conversations when they are used correctly. However, there are a few issues with threads right now as they are currently implemented:

Converting messages to threads – The ability to convert any message into a thread doesn’t work too well with how people typically use Slack. In many of my Slack Teams, thoughts come out in a series of incomplete messages, often with crosstalk. A single one of these messages would be inappropriate to start a thread with. Thus, being able to group multiple messages into the start of the thread would be helpful.

Moreover, it would be really useful if the user could give some kind of cue (via the UI or otherwise) when they want to start a thread. In our Slack, we’ve taken to putting “Thread: [Topic here]” or something similar. But it’s not always clear what’s better as a thread, or what’s better as further conversation in the channel. Sometimes people use both to respond, creating confusion.

Ways to resolve
– Develop some kind of usage convention, or educate users on proper etiquette when it comes to creating threads
– If possible, allow users to group multiple consecutive messages into a thread

The “Also send to #channel” button – Slack offers you the ability to send any message in a thread back to the general channel. Let me be clear: This button is an abomination and must be changed or destroyed. It’s not that the concept of sending a thread message back to the channel is a bad one; it’s more that the messaging around it is very confusing.

Most people, when they see that checkbox, are going to want to send the message back to the #channel. Why wouldn’t you? Your message is important and the channel should read it, right? We have a lot of first-time users in our Slack and initially, every single one of them clicked on this checkbox. This resulted in exchanges like the one below in the channel itself:

The threads were making the actual channel much more difficult to read. Thus, we had to lay down a ground rule about not checking that checkbox. The results have been much better since.

In short, “Also send to #channel” is terrible messaging. It should say something like, “Do you think this message is important enough that you want to barge into the main conversation with it, interrupting everything else going on over there? Then check this box.” But I understand why they didn’t put that there. Maybe a happy medium would be appropriate?

Ways to resolve
– Do more to explain the dire consequences of sending a thread reply back to the channel
– Remove the button completely

Other thoughts: In addition to blanket “no sending threads back to channel” rule, our Slack has also developed some channels that are “thread only.” This means every single message must be a thread-starting message. This has led to much more organization and readability in channels like #oldermovies, where you can just scroll up and see a bunch of movie-specific discussions to dive into. It would be ideal if there was some way to “force” people into threads for certain channels, or get them to understand that by posting a message, they are actually starting a thread.

Overall: I really like the Threads and I hope Slack continues to take steps to improve their usability. But I  think that a lot more education could have gone into the roll-out, which would’ve saved a lot of confusion and headaches.

What it feels like to not love ‘La La Land’

In this week’s SNL, Aziz Ansari stars in a sketch that captures what it feels like to not adore a film that everyone else is on board with. It can be a lonely, lonely place.

(Bonus points for capturing a lot of the best complaints against La La Land and the somewhat unconvincing rebuttals to them, not to mention the weird tension between people who La La Land lovers and Moonlight lovers)