Notice anything different? Yep, after three years of the same old blog, I got the itch to try another redesign, this time taking at least some advantage of the new features offered in Movable Type 4.2, and embarking on the project with a partial understanding of CSS principles. (The book CSS: The Missing Manual by David Sawyer McFarland was a huge help in this regard. Simple techniques that I've struggled with for the better part of a decade have become stupidly clear to me over the last few weeks — and please don't blame McFarland for the stupid kludges and inefficient hackwork that characterizes my behind-the-scenes work here.)

This page (http://www.deep-focus.com/dfweblog/index.html), which has long been the main index page for Deep-Focus.com, is no longer the hub. It will remain here as a bloggy interface, and if you prefer it by all means keep it bookmarked. But I've created a home page (http://www.deep-focus.com) that crams more separate entries into a smaller space and allows a certain degree of categorical organization that may become helpful as the site evolves further. Do check it out. For the first time, I have Movable Type functioning as a kind of database for movie listings — there are many infuriating limitations, but for the first time I should be able to maintain various indexes (all movies from 2008 sorted alphabetically or by letter grade, for instance) more or less automatically, without typing the listing out in HTML every damned time I want it to appear on the page. Movable Type even makes the thumbnails for me. I know there are still a few glitches — right now letter grades aren't showing up with individual entries, so I have to figure out where to put those — but this place has always been a work in progress. Whatever you think of it, I hope this is an improvement.

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.)

Sweeeeeet. The "e" stands for "electronic" as well as for "English". Mais oui. Now I don't have to keep typing sentences into translate.google.com and hitting just to figure out what those crazy French critics at Cahiers du Cinéma are on about this month .... Google Video has Iraq: The Hidden Story, an utterly engrossing hour-long piece from Channel 4 on the difficulties television journalists are having getting the real story out of Iraq — as well as the general squeamishness of television producers in the U.K. and the U.S. when it comes to airing graphic war-zone footage (some of which is included here, so be warned) that could influence public opinion of the current military escapades in the Middle East .... If you're like me (and you have a decent computer and a fast Internet connection), you've already loaded up and become mesmerized by the globetrotting wonders of the Google Earth software. Well, Google Earth became a huge time sink for me over the Presidents Day weekend as I found this old post at WFMU's Beware of the Blog in which DJ Mark Allen discusses various film locations that can be viewed from a satellite's eye using the system. I was most fascinated by the overhead images of the park from Blow-Up, but he has instructions for finding locations from La Dolce Vita, Heathers and even Friday the 13th. A category search for film locations at Google Earth Hacks turned up more time-wasting goodies, including the houses from E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial and Poltergeist. (I am a child of the 80s. I can't help it.) The dudes who wrote Deja Vu totally had a copy of Google Earth loaded up — I actually started getting frustrated that the system wouldn't let me move forward and backward in time.

Here are the top 20 search terms that led people to deep-focus.com and the Deep Focus Weblog this month, linked to the pages they're likely to lead to in a Web search. I don't believe any further comment is necessary on my part.

1) nipples
2) "howard stern"
3) emanuelle
4) destricted
5) "private parts"
6) "funny games"
7) rent
8) "world cup death watch"
9) "don't look now"
10) titanic
11) "scarlett johanson"
12) "breaking the waves"
13) videodrome
14) brown bunny sex scene
15) dunst
16) "wings of desire"
17) "larry clark impaled"
18) "requiem for a dream"
19) "sony lincoln square"
20) "tongue tornado"

Those who follow this sort of thing might be interested to know that the Academy has tweaked a few of its Oscar rules this year. First, this will be the first year that New York Academy members will have any chance to influence the final five in the best foreign-language category — after the L.A. committee (which watches all 60 submitted films, a task that represents no small time commitment) narrows down a nine-film short list, the process will enter "Phase II," in which a new committee consisting of 10 members of the original L.A. committee sit down with 10 L.A. Academy members who were not on the original committee as well as 10 New York members to pick the five nominees that will appear on final ballots.

Got it?

Essentially the Academy is trying to get some members involved in the process who haven't the time, inclination and/or geographical proximity to commit to 60 non-English-language screenings. It's hard to tell what effect this might have on the final list. Even if New Yorkers have substantially different tastes from their L.A. counterparts, they'll only make up a third of that second committee. More likely to make a difference is the fact that two-thirds of the decision-makers in the second phase will be more casual viewers — maybe they're less enthusiastic about unknown quantities, or maybe they're enthusiasts who are just too busy to make 60 consecutive dates with Oscar. Anyway, whether this ends up making the picks more adventurous or less so, someone in the Academy decided the change was needed.

Gone this year is the requirement that a submitted film must be in an official language of the country submitting it. "So long as the dominant language is not English, a picture from any country may be in any language or combination of languages," the Academy said in a press release. Any relaxation of arbitrary rules in this category looks like a good thing to me, but I've got one question about the "from any country" language above — does this mean the U.S. gets to submit a film? (Hell-o, Mel Gibson's Apocalyptico?) Or should this more accurately be described as the award for best foreign-language non-U.S. feature film?

The Academy also tightened up some of the docu requirements and knocked the number of films nominated for sound editing from three to five. You can read the full release at the Oscars Web site.

Being a big ol' geek, I was immediately intrigued by the presence, right up there in the opening titles, of a screen credit for the "digital colorist" on Hard Candy, one Jean-Clement Soret. Fortunately, I get paid to be a big ol' geek -- so I got Soret on the phone and asked him to describe the digital-intermediate process. The resulting interview, which discusses a post-production workflow, is mainly of interest if you happen to be contemplating a DI on a project you're working on. But I got Soret to talk a little about Danny Boyle's upcoming science-fiction film, Sunshine, which already has an interesting Web site.

The flashy credit boils down to Soret having worked successfully with director David Slade on commercials and music videos and therefore willingly taking on Hard Candy's DI for a much smaller fee than the work would normally demand. It's both a thank-you for that and an indicator of how important Slade thought the digital grading process was to the film's impact. I expect to see more of this kind of recognition in the future, as the colorist becomes a higher-profile collaborator with the director and/or cinematographer on any given shoot -- I'm not sure whether I'd really look forward to the era of the celebrity colorist, but I also don't expect it to go quite that far. (I'm mixed, by the way, on the merits of Hard Candy itself -- but more on that later in the week.)

After seeing The Piano Teacher on Sunday night and the terrific 8 Women on Monday, I've decided to call 2002 a wrap and start formulating a top 10 list. I didn't mean to send off the year with an Isabelle Huppert double-header — didn't even realize she was in 8 Women when I sat down to watch it — but seeing these two back-to-back really made me appreciate her skills as well as the very different types of performance that Haneke and Ozon elicited from her.

The Butcher Boy (Jordan, 1997)

(i remember liking this an inordinate amount in theaters and would appreciate the opportunity to check myself if only warner would release the bloody thing to dvd. was pressed on laserdisc in a tiny quantity and i held one in my hands at the virgin megastore but passed in favor of making rent for the month so my loss i guess)

The Double Life of Veronique (Kieslowski, 1991)
(though this is a miramax property it is available only from paramount in an ugly pan-and-scan version i mean what kind of idiot pans and scans art films anyway)

Gun Crazy (Ulmer, 1950)
(a low-down low-budget classic and maybe my favorite film noir ever)

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Akerman, 1975)

(it's utterly crazy that a movie so revered is so completely unavailable on tape or disc anywhere in the world)

Cold Water (Assayas, 1994)
(ditto, plus the added spectacle of virginie ledoyen at 17)

Out of the Past (Tourneur, 1947)
(robert mitchum gives one of the great performances in film history in maybe my favorite film noir ever)

Persona (Bergman, 1966)
(yo mgm: this thing was recently restored for distribution in the u.s. but the only decent video version is almost 10 years old and missing shots from the opening montage so get off your collective ass and do bergman proud before the man dies for christ's sake)

Prospero's Books (Greenaway, 1991)
(the image laserdisc was a terrible botch with a cropped picture and truly bad sound)

Sunrise (Murnau, 1927)

(this was released by fox on laserdisc for about 20 minutes at the end of 1997 when i was poor and couldn't afford to buy it)

Until the End of the World -- super-extended version (Wenders, 1991/6)
(i skipped this when it showed at the director's guild theater in manhattan mainly because i didn't feel like having my ass pinched for five hours, but also because wim wenders told me himself, to my face, more than two years ago, that it was coming out on dvd. thanks bud.)