Recently in Abject Geekery Category

How desperate does Hollywood have to be to vandalize its own movies?. According to the usually reliable projectionist crowd over at Film-Tech.com, Deluxe sent out film prints of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull that had the audio tracks deliberately fucked up as part of some monumentally misguided plan to catch pirates down the line by tracing the audio glitches in their pirated recordings. (The audio tracks of bootlegged movies are often of much higher quality than the video, since pirates have figured out how to tap directly into theatrical sound systems.) The mob at boingboing reports what seems like a high occurrence of anecdotes about screenings of the film where the soundtrack fell back to analog -- or dropped out entirely. If this is true, it's a massive "fuck you" to moviegoers, much worse than those annoying orange dots that serve the same supposed anti-piracy function. My local theaters have a hard enough time maintaining the integrity of picture and sound without the distributors making their lives even more difficult. Just unbelievable. (Via Movie City News.)

It was a terrific year for Hollywood movies — if I’m unhappy with anything about my final top-10 list, it’s the absence of non-English-language films. Yes, that’s partly a function of a lack of moviegoing adventurousness on my part, and I should take the rap for that. But the foreign-language films I enjoyed the most — The Lives of Others, The Host, the first section, at least, of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly — just didn’t seem to quite belong in this company. (The much-lauded 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days — which I won't see until next week — is a 2008 film for my purposes.)

The films here are also dominated by men. They’re directed by men (the single documentary is the one woman-directed exception) and they deal with traditionally male concerns — cooking, adventure travel, police work, drilling for oil, hunting down and killing your tormentors. You have to go all the way down to number eight to find a movie with a female character who does more than just play sidekick (unless you count Angie in Gone Baby Gone, which I don’t), and that doesn’t make me happy. I could have slipped Day Night Day Night, Margot at the Wedding, Red Road, or even Black Book onto the list for the sake of gender balance — though none of those boast what you’d call female role models. (Maybe I could have listed Juno.) You can pretend they’re there if you like, but they weren’t my favorites.

Again, it was a terrific year for Hollywood movies. These are the best ones I saw.

With the arrival of this new R-rated promo-clip montage, it becomes obvious that Warner Independent is still trying to figure out what the fuck to do with Michael Haneke's sure-to-be-unpleasant Funny Games remake.

One of my favorite things about the Manhattan screening rooms where press screenings typically take place is the pitch darkness you fall into before every show. The room dips to an even black — and the best ones are designed thoughtfully enough that you won't even be distracted by a red "Exit" sign during the show. Also the sound is excellent. Reference-level dynamics might not be everybody's cup of tea, but there's a tightness and immediacy to the mix that you just don't get in a larger room, even when that room is properly tuned up for audio.

Sadly, your average multiplex does not boast particularly good sound — nor even a particularly dark room. I grew up in Colorado, and when I moved to New York in 1994 I noticed a definite uptick in presentation quality in Manhattan theaters, where theater management is likely to be hassled by filmmakers themselves if the specs are out of whack. Of course, New York theaters have their peculiarities, too — unidentifiable odors, radically uncomfortable seats and/or angles of sight, sudden explosions of indecipherable verbalese from the octogenarian gentleman in the back row, and the intermittent but unmistakable rumble of subway cars running underneath the floor.

The very best venues in Manhattan tend to get everything right most of the time, and it's a pleasure to see movies in those theaters. In the suburbs where I actually live, that's not the case. The dominant chains (National Amusements and AMC/Loews) have built impressive theaters and come frustratingly close to maintaining standards of exhibition. But almost invariably there's something wrong at every suburban screening, be it soft focus, poor sound, a dirty projector gate, or bad framing. It all gets me thinking about how great it would be if movie-theater patrons actually demanded some level of respect from their multiplex tyrants — but as a practical matter it seems the queen simply expects us to eat cake. I saw Lars and the Real Girl in White Plains, NY, with the picture framed very poorly — the bottom of the image was cut off, and there was too much headroom at the top of the frame, which allowed the regular intrusion of boom mics onto the screen. (This is actually an indicator of Bad Projectionist Syndrome. Read on.) My complaints during the screening and afterward were both ignored.

On the other hand, I did successfully badger the manager on duty in Greenburgh, NY, to get a screening of Casino Royale precisely into frame after some of the opening credits were projected on the black masking below the screen, instead of the screen itself.

Here's my list of things that paying theatergoers deserve — and that careless theater management routinely screws up. If you suspect your local theater is guilty on one or more counts, you can take it up with the theater manager. If you don't like confrontation, or if you just don't get satisfaction, a letter to corporate headquarters may be in order. Often, you'll get an offer of free passes to a future screening in return. It's a nice gesture, but I'd rather pay for the screenings at a theater that gets it right. (It's not impossible — the worst transgression I've ever seen committed at my local arthouse, the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, NY, was a screening of Rififi that was projected at 1.66:1 instead of the intended 1.37:1, which resulted in the slicing off of eyeballs in the film's centerpiece musical number. I complained afterward by mail and received a quick and apologetic response from management.)

Anyway, be patient with me. This might turn into a little bit of a rant.

So I just saw the Saturday-night sneak of The Golden Compass and I have to say that while the film's signature polar-bear smackdown is much cooler than just about anything on current release, the last reel represents one of the dumbest things a Hollywood studio has done all year. Yes, Philip Pullman's novel had a cliffhanger ending — but it was an actual ending, and a pretty great one at that. The movie has no ending; it only has a swelling of strings, an extended VFX shot, and a slow fade to black. Kid-flick audiences are likely accustomed to their status as second-class citizens, and non-readers of Pullman's trilogy don't know just how egregious the elision really is (basically, the story's emotional payload has been excised, or at least deferred to the opening reels of a potential second film), but there's something deeply unsatisfying about an ending that explicitly promises a confrontation that it declines to deliver. It represents, I think, a failure of nerve. If Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy was the product of a studio with big, swinging cojones, this is a release from a studio that's scared of its own shadow — a studio that had no business adapting the notoriously problematic His Dark Materials trilogy in the first place.

Moviegoers — even some cinephiles — probably don't know as much as they should about aspect ratios. It took the dominance of DVD to educate mainstream consumers about the difference between "widescreen" and "pan-and-scan" formats, and many viewers don't even care about the distinction as long as their TV's screen is fully filled. (Making matters worse, new HDTVs have a different aspect ratio from conventional sets, meaning that movies that appear full-screen on one will likely be letterboxed on the other.) Here's a crash course.

Not long ago, a friend emailed me to say she had recently NetFlix'd a "little B movie." She said she enjoyed it, but her tone suggested that she was reluctant to go too far with an endorsement of such a lowbrow film. Had I seen it, she asked?

The name of the movie was Exotica. Why did that blow my mind?

It's time for some shameless self-promotion aimed at my day job. I didn't write Film & Video's new story on the obsessive visual-effects work that went into Zodiac, but I did build the Flash presentation that presents video clips and before-and-after slides showing some of the results. Crack VFX guru Barbara Robertson actually wrote the story, which goes into great detail on the digital imagery that saturates the first third of the film. I did write the new F&V; story on creature effects for The Host, which isn't as detailed but has some tidbits about how San Francisco VFX shop The Orphanage communicated with Bong Joon-ho back in South Korea. (Also, if you've ever muttered to yourself, "Hrmm, possibly there is some connection between Tod Browning's Freaks and Bong Joon-ho's The Host, but I can't put my finger on it", well, wonder no more.)