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.

Anyway. It’s not that I feel like I’ve now seen everything I need to see. On the contrary, my DVD shelf alone is still bulging with wannasee 2002 releases (R’Xmas, The Isle, Ice Age, even an Academy screener of Die Another Day to which I was toying with the idea of eventually getting around), and there are a handful of movies still in theaters that could very well figure among my year-end favorites (chief among them About Schmidt and Catch Me If You Can; I never know exactly what might tickle my capricious fancy but, gawd, what an abrogation of duty for me not to get off my duff for the new Spielberg, huh?).

How can I face myself? Easy. I blame the studios for bottom-loading the calendar year. For even the casual "prestige" moviegoer, December 2002 was denser than ever, with Hollywood dropping Oscar bait into theaters like bombs over Baghdad in George W. Bush’s wettest dreams. Really, does anyone with a full-time job, a home or social life, and a lack of pathological dedication to the films of the cinema manage to see everything they’d like during the Oscar run-up? Sure, if you camp out in Toronto or at Lincoln Center for those respective film fests you’ll get a head start on awards season. But I can’t imagine that it makes fiscal sense to appeal to the over-24 demo only during one month out of the year. (With the Oscar telecast being moved up a few crucial weeks next year, perhaps the tail end of the year will loosen up a bit as studios scramble to build earlier momentum.)

Anyway, I’m a member of this organization called the Online Film Critics Society, which has positioned itself as a sort of accrediting body for Internet-based film writers. In some ways, the idea that there needs to be a clearinghouse to help publicists tell the difference between "legitimate" online critics and mere hobbyists is testament to the fact that online writers (me included) are little more than operators of their own vanity presses. It just so happens that the web is the most efficient press ever invented. The most tangible benefit of OFCS membership is probably the wave of videotapes and DVDs that flood in from the studios at the end of the year. I’m grateful for each and every one (even though I can’t quite bring myself to queue up Antwone Fisher or The Banger Sisters), since they often help me fill shameful holes in my cinephilia at the end of each year. Among the terrific 2002 films that I saw only after receiving screeners are 8 Women and Late Marriage.

But, at the same time, I’m kinda horrified by the notion that Academy voters and critics’ groups make any kind of aesthetic judgments on a film’s merit based on looking at these things on their teevees. I mean, you could argue that seeing a film like Gangs of New York on DVD, rather than on a proper theater screen, is bad enough. But how about the fuzzy VHS tape of One Hour Photo, as clean and chilly a film as I’ve seen since Kubrick kicked it, that I received from Fox Searchlight? If that's the only version of One Hour Photo you've seen, can you say that you've really seen the film at all? More to the point, I can imagine that if I saw the cagey Read My Lips in an actual movie theater, where its impressive audio work was allowed to create truly cavernous spaces inside the hearing-impaired protagonist's head, I may well have graded it a notch or two above the B I actually gave it.

And even when you get a good-looking DVD, it generally includes big ugly scrolling banners declaring ownership of copyright (aimed at discouraging pirates) and you’re lucky if it includes the multichannel theatrical soundtrack (discs from Miramax and Universal Focus do; discs from MGM don’t). The screeners are great as a fallback, and nobody knows better than I do what a pain it is to schlep from the suburbs into the big city (more than an hour, each way) just to catch a limited-release film in some Procrustean back-alley art house. But I do hope that everyone who takes films seriously will continue to take the effort to see them in their native environment — projected in 35mm up on a nice big theater screen, where they really belong.

Then again, I was bowled over when I fired up my screener of Gangs of New York — even through my cheapjack home theater system, the quality of the soundfield was notably superior to that of the shopping-mall multiplex where I originally saw the film. Moreover, my multiplex experience was broken up by a couple of Neanderthal parental units who brought a toddler to the screening and then, when my wife leaned over to whisper a gentle shush after said child made loud noises through the first 45 minutes of the movie, went utterly apeshit on us. (End result: the troglodytes were escorted out of the theater, but my wife was hit in the face by a flying soda cup.) After this sort of encounter, the home-viewing experience seems awfully attractive. I guess my point is that DVD, while sometimes necessary, is never quite as good as the real thing.

Also on the subject of DVD, are distributors like Kino International really so fucking Top-Ramen poor that they can’t afford to release a decent disc of a prestige art-house title like The Piano Teacher? The image is mediocre — I'm guessing it may have been transcoded from a PAL master, which is shameful enough. (Certainly the film is sorely lacking a high-resolution 16x9 transfer for DVD. That's a no-brainer these days.) Worse, the credits clearly specify that the film, which features the type of masterful sound design that’s typical of Michael Haneke's work, was mixed in Dolby Digital, a six-channel theatrical sound format. The DVD, sadly, is only recorded in two channels, which means many of the subtleties of the sound mix are unavailable to the home viewer. At $30, this is the type of release that demonstrates just how badly the home-video world still needs the sensibilities of third parties like The Criterion Collection and, hell, Synapse Films, third-party movie lovers who are pretty much hell-bent on doing justice to other people’s art.

Stan Brakhage once opined that, in his mind, there was no possibility of video being art, mainly because the filmmaker loses control of the essential image — on film, a color is more or less absolute, while on video, he said, "color is wherever you turn the knob." Well, that's true. To this day, I don’t know if the cinematography on Roger Dodger is obstinately murky, or if the VHS Academy screener I watched just hazed out all the details that theatergoers could make out in the darkness. The question becomes not "What film did you see?" but rather "What version of that film did you see?" The clarity of DVD — and especially the amount of image filtering that takes place before a film is compressed to fit on a disc — is simultaneously a blessing and a curse. If you watch Citizen Kane on laserdisc, there is rain beating against the window of Bernstein's office as he tells the story of the girl about whom he's thought every day of his life. If you watch it on DVD, the rain is not there — at least not all of it. Much of the pounding rain has been removed, processed out of existence, apparently in a bid to remove fine detail from the video master to make the movie compress better.

Of course, many films are being transferred to DVD exceptionally well, and some savvy distributors are trying to use it as a primary distribution medium for cinema. (If it's on DVD, is it still cinema?) As DVD becomes more and more prominent — Monsters Inc. actually made more money on DVD in the U.S. than it did at the North American box office — I suppose it will become more and more the responsibility of the critic to come to terms with it, and of filmmakers and studios to make certain that the integrity of the image and sound are maintained throughout all aspects of the distribution process.

My music video of the moment is Audioslave's "Cochise," which Mark Romanek directs with the dry but welcome sense of humor that previously informed his video for Beck's "Devil's Haircut" — a Midnight Cowboy knock-off that makes me smile every time I see it. In "Cochise," the bandmembers (ex-Rage Against the Machine) arrive by pickup at a huge scaffold, already perched at the top of which is the singer (ex-Soundgarden) brooding behind a microphone. The band members take an elevator up and pick up their instruments as the intro to the song thunders away — the drummer actually smacks the first drum hit as he sits down — which is rather thrilling. But as the song begins, the fireworks start. Volley after volley of pyrotechnics launches into the sky behind the band as it tears into the Zep-influenced rave-up. I'm not talking about some garden-variety heavy metal light show, but rather an unstoppable, recklessly indulgent, self-parodic display. The show is also the literal presentation of the fireworks that the supergroup is obviously meant to ignite in your CD player. It may actually be too much muscle for the song, which I liked better when it was called "Whole Lotta Love," but it is a lot of fun. (Plus MTV2 plays it about 20 times every day, which makes it almost inescapable.)

There are a couple of videos I hadn't seen before archived in decent resolution (320x240, which is, what, Video CD?) at Romanek's Web site. The Bowie clip was a very minor effort, but the one for Johnny Cash's cover of Nine Inch Nails's "Hurt" is both bizarre and moving. I couldn't believe he recorded this, and now I can hardly believe he let Romanek make that video. But I'm glad he did.

There's more good news for music videohounds like me. Palm Pictures (whose 1 Giant Leap DVD includes a terrific Tim Hope video for "My Culture" by Maxi Jazz featuring Robbie Williams) is following up on its recent Hype Williams - The Videos, Vol. 1 DVD with releases compiling videos by directors Chris Cunningham (The Aphex Twin's amazing "Come to Daddy" and Bjork's beautiful and creepy "All Is Full of Love"), Michel Gondry (the mindbending "Let Forever Be" for The Chemical Brothers, the Lego-mad "Fell in Love With a Girl" for The White Stripes), and the one and only Spike Jonze (those terrific all-dancin' Fatboy Slim videos, Bjork's Dancer-in-the-Dark-prefiguring "It's Oh So Quiet"). I don't know what the final track line-ups will be, but I just can't wait. Fuck Chicago, man. These are the directors who are doing really exciting things with the combination of music and cinema. If only we could get collections from Romanek and David Fincher ...

Steve Erickson asks whether I've been clocking any downloads of Krzysztof's balls lately. The answer is, of course, "hell yeah." At this writing, they could be seen in this thread at the very popular Fark.com (scroll half of the way down the page; somebody had stolen the image from my review of Snatch, of all things). As I just said to my wife, "Fucking Farkers should know better, so fuck 'em."

Ralph Poole remains oblivious to the risks of not reading your own Weblog archives (scroll a third of the way down).

So does Hector Lima. (Scroll all the way down to the entry for April 19, or 18/04/02.)

Whup, Letterman's on. I'm gonna go watch me some TV and get me some sleep.

In December, Regal Entertainment Group said it would install digital-projection systems in 375 theaters during 2003. Regal has cut a deal with Turner Broadcasting System and NBC to show programming from those networks before feature films. That means, according to various news reports, that moviegoers in key markets will soon be enjoying a 20-minute programming "pre-show" block, comprising four three-minute shorts plus advertisements, that will screen before features.

Moviegoers in Colorado and California got to watch a Rose Bowl game in HD at Regal theaters last year, and these folks have already broadcast stuff like Korn and Tom Petty concerts into movie theaters. This is no doubt good news for the beleaguered multiplex industry, which must be salivating at the prospect of getting out from under the thumb of Hollywood, and I don’t think it’s a blow to cinema history if Just Married gets squeezed off of a few screens once a week in favor of Monday Night Football. But can it be more than a matter of time before shot-on-video pro-wrestling epics start charting on the weekend box office reports? And should that matter to me, as long as I still have an arthouse to go running to? More to the point, is Adam freaking Sandler's Eight Crazy Nights necessarily a higher form of entertainment than the Super Bowl? If not, why do I feel so defensive about all this?

You know that part of the Madonna song from that James Bond movie where she sings, "I will avoid the cliché?" Well, the Online Film Critics Society didn’t. The group, of which I'm a member, just voted The Two Towers best movie of 2002. Far From Heaven apparently came in a close second.

On the heels of the news that Abel Ferrara's early porn film, 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy, is now available on DVD comes the wild rumor (via Mobius, natch) that Wes Craven directed his own hardcore feature, titled Fireworks Woman. Oh, I want to believe, I really do. Since these things come in threes, there's also a query at Mobius about porn films on which Barry Sonnenfeld may have been cinematographer. If you've got the goods, please let these folks know. Thanks buds.

Battle Royale dominates Mike D'Angelo's poll of undistributed films from 2000. Fortunately, a lot of this stuff is available cheap on Asian DVDs, and Wild Zero is actually coming from Synapse Films (along with Singapore Sling!).
http://www.synapse-films.com/

As part of my quest to promote the forthcoming By Brakhage DVD from Criterion, I've been posting some stories about Stan Brakhage to the Criterion Collection Forum. Nothing earth-shaking, but maybe of some interest.

Oolong is dead. Long live Oolong.

This is our cat Krzysztof. These are Krzysztof's balls. I'm no expert on cat anatomy, but it seems to me that Krzysztof has him some enormous testicles. Certainly his behavior would seem to reinforce that theory, in as much as figurative ballsiness is related to actual size of balls (which, as far as I know, is not at all, so never mind except inasmuch as it makes this story a little more interesting). In fact, Krzysztof's aggression recently landed another of our cats, Jones, in the hospital. Quite literally. (She had an abscess that needed to be drained after Krzysztof hooked a filthy claw into her neck, causing an infection that created a lump the size of a gumball underneath poor Jones's jaw. The yellow thing sticking out of her in this picture is a "drain" that had to be sewn into her skin for five days. Why Krzysztof refuses to clean his claws like a decent feline is beyond me.)

But never mind all that. I've gotten my back up recently over something that's commonly known as bandwidth stealing. Now, obviously, I love it when people link to deep-focus.com. I don't even mind, so much, when they republish my work without asking me, as long as I'm credited. And it bothers me not at all when they transfer my images to their own Web servers and use them on their own pages. I mean, I don't own the movie stills I've appropriated. I say "my" knowing full well that the images aren't really mine. I may have grabbed them from video or DVD, hunted them down at some Belgian Web site, and even done some Photoshop work on them, but I have no illusions that I've got any business getting all high and mighty about this stuff.

Increasingly, however, people are not transferring my images to their own Web servers, but simply linking to my images in their own HTML code. This is just bad manners. To a Web browser, it looks like the images at Deep-Focus.com are actually originating at the remote Web site. But in reality, the images are sucked off of my server and embedded in someone else's Web page. That drains my bandwidth, which is expensive enough already, thank you very much.

This pisses me off, but it is, fortunately, limited to a few images. My access logs told me earlier this year that the image of Vin Diesel from my review of The Fast and the Furious was being downloaded more quickly than the review itself by a factor of 10. Ouch. More recently, I found that the key image from my City of Lost Children review had been picked up by the masses. Specifically, it was downloaded about 3000 times in December. To keep that in perspective, the review itself has been downloaded about 150 times over the same period.

So I've decided that, from now on, if somebody is hijacking enough of my bandwidth to attract my attention, they're going to wind up serving their viewers not a tasty image of Scarlett Johanson and Thora Birch in Ghost World (720 unaccountable downloads in December), not an admittedly super-cool image of Takeshi Kitano blowing his own brains out in Sonatine (more than 200 hijacked downloads in the month), and not even that gorgeous picture of Nicole Kidman from The Others (about 100), but instead a color photo of Krzystof's furry balls, with "Deep-Focus.com" plastered across the bottom of the image. Meanwhile, the real images will be moved into a .htaccess-protected directory on the server, where they'll be locked down so they can't be accessed from outside of this domain. I truly want to leave the majority of the site wide open, but a man's gotta defend himself and shit.

I hope this gave all y'all some amusement. New reviews coming soon. Happy new year. And thanks for reading.

-bf-