My soul weeps. Twentieth Century Fox is remaking the 1951 science fiction classic, The Day the Earth Stood Still.
Sci Fi Wire reports Kathy Bates may appear while Keanu Reeves and Jennifer Connelly are already signed. I love Connelly, but sobs wrack my soul when I think of Keanu Reeves uttering the immortal phrase, “Gort! Klaatu barada nikto.”
Perhaps we’ll get lucky and the writers will stay out on strike forever.
Pity the poor corn farmer. It seems that with all the illegal exchange of movies over the Internet, the corn farmers are the ones who are really suffering. At least this is what the NBC Universal would have us believe:
Because of our nation’s interlocking economy, two-thirds of the lost earnings and lost jobs are in industries other than motion picture production. For example, in the absence of movie piracy, video retailers would sell and rent more titles. Movie theatres would sell more tickets and popcorn. Corn growers would earn greater profits and buy more farm equipment.
So there you have it, straight from the mouth of NBC Universal, to the Federal Communications Commission, in explaining why the government needs to clamp down and require that ISPs examine network traffic for copyrighted material. It’s not for their own bottom line, it’s for the corn farmers.
For god’s sake, won’t someone think of the corn farmers?!
My amusement continues! Not only has the AACS Licensing Authority threatened to take legal action against every web site that has reproduced the AACS processor key, but they’ve revoked the key itself. Discs with the new key will not play on old players until they’re updated. The HD-DVD discs with the new keys start shipping on May 22.
The amusement comes from the news that the new key was cracked almost a week before the updated discs hit store shelves. The beta version of Slysoft’s AnyDVD HD software, released on May 17, will copy HD-DVD discs and strip the AACS protection. It’s been successfully tested on the shipping version of The Matrix Trilogy.
Friday night, I saw Spider-Man 3 with Tanya. We saw it in Imax at the Gloucester Silver City Cinema and I’ve never seen an Imax film there. I work at an Imax theatre and we’ve shown a couple of the Harry Potter films so I have seen ‘regular’ films in Imax before. What’s new to me about Silver City Gloucester is it’s designed to show Imax conversions of conventional films exclusively. In my estimation, the ‘tallest’ aspect ratio the screen can accommodate is 1.85:1 so the 1.33:1 Imax movies could not be shown there.
Typical commercial films like Spider-Man are shot on 35mm film. The Imax film frame is ten times larger and they cannot simply enlarge the 35mm image to get an acceptable Imax result. While I can’t say for certain, I suspect the 35mm print goes through significant computer-based processing before it’s used to make an Imax print. The image quality impressed me. There was very little of the grain present in large-screen projection of 35mm prints. However, there was a softness to the image I wasn’t accustomed to because I’m more familiar with Imax films shot in Imax. Still, this softness was at least as sharp as a 35mm print, if not more so. What really impressed me was the steadiness of the image. This is a strength of the Imax projection process.
What disappointed me was the theatre itself. It used what was a 35mm theatre before retrofitting for Imax projection. Because of this, the screen wasn’t the monster you see in purpose-built Imax theatres. They did widen the screen as much as possible, but it appeared to me the theatre itself wasn’t enlarged so the screen width was limited by the side walls. They did take advantage of all the space however, making the screen bigger than in regular cinemas.
I suspect most people wouldn’t notice the difference. The difference is certainly there, but is it worth a 30% price premium? This depends of how much of an improvement you can see.
We arrived only minutes before the film started and walked into the pre-show presentation showing off the sound system. Unfortunately, the only visual portion of the presentation were laser graphics, which did nothing to illuminate the theatre. Thus, we were behind about ten people who also couldn’t see where they were going or if there were any empty seats. An usher armed with a flash-light did finally arrive, but one flash-light is only of help to the first people in the group.
Tanya got us seats in about the fifth row. Frankly, the size of the screen made the film too big at our viewing point. Conventional films are framed assuming the viewer can see the entire image without having to turn his or her head. This was not the case where we were seated. The fifth row at an Imax film is a choice seat, while the fifth row at a conventional film projected in Imax is too close.
I wasn’t impressed by the mother who sat beside us with two kids about five years old. Children so young seem to have little appreciation of the volume of their own voices. They either whisper, or talk quite loudly. Of course we experienced more of the latter than the former. Particularly disappointing was Mom’s reaction upon hearing one of her children say the monsters were scaring him. The first time she responded, “Why? It’s just a movie.” The second time she just shushed him. Lovely.
And then there was the jerk-off with the laser pointer. And the guy in front of us who seemed unable to resist checking his Blackberry a few times during the film. No wonder so many people have forsaken theatrical viewing for DVD.
As for the film itself, I think it is the worst of the three. Instead of just telling is a good story, the writers seem to have fallen all over themselves to wrap up the trilogy, and underscore the superheroes’ humanity. For a summer blockbuster, there is far too much navel-gazing and crying in this film. Wait for the DVD, if you must see it at all.
Spider-Man image ©2006 Sony Pictures Digital Inc.
Continuing on the theme of surprises, I had a whopper on Saturday night. The theatre is in the midst of the annual CBC Imax film festival. I enjoy it because I see new films, and because it shakes up the routine. On the other hand, I dislike it because it shakes up the routine.
The worst part is I’m not familiar with how each film starts and ends. If I start a film, and see and hear nothing when it’s supposed to start, you can understand how I might grow concerned with amazing speed. Cirque du Soleil: Journey of Man is just such a film. I typically keep a close eye on the elapsed time, which serves as a count-down before the film starts, and have the lights down, sound system switched, and dowser open about a second before the count-down reaches zero. Most films start right on time so some sort of image hits the screen just as the lights fade completely. The Cirque film has two or three seconds of silent blackness before anything happens. Of course, this is plenty of time for me to start thinking I’ve made some sort of dreadful mistake. Because the film festival is just over two weeks long, I don’t have time to become familiar with any of the eight films in such a short time, especially since I work only three shifts during the festival.
The surprise I mentioned is more properly labelled a screw-up and it was completely my fault. We can have six films mounted and ready to run at any given time. Since we’re rotating through eight, periodic changes are required. We use a battery-powered lift to swap films because your average 40 minute Imax film weighs more than 100 kilograms. It’s like a forklift, but you push it rather than drive it. To make a long story shorter, I lowered a film print into the one currently being shown. The platters touched, and this caused more friction than the drive motor could overcome, yanking the film out of registration. The projector started making an odd noise … a good sign film was being chewed up at 102.9 metres per minute. By the time I stomped on the emergency stop button, twenty seconds of film was trashed.
I’m completely embarrassed it took me so long to realise what was happening but I was bombarded by stimuli which didn’t seem to make immediate sense. The most pressing was the platter on the lift starting to tip, and the last thing I ever want to be the cause of is a film dump. There was the weird sound from the projector, and I also noticed the tension arm moving, which it never does in the middle of a film. It all should’ve added up in my head, but things only completely clicked into place when I saw the image on the screen looking like there was no flicker or pull-down shutters in place. Emergency stop.
Part of me would’ve preferred to see the film break. The damage to the print would then be limited to a few metres, rather than thirty metres. But Imax film uses a polyester base, which certainly can become mangled, but is very resistant to breaking or tearing. If there was sufficient force to break the film, it’s likely the projector itself would have been damaged. Happily this was not the case. A ten minute test showed the projector weathered my screw-up with no ill effects.
My boss will certainly take heat for this as a replacement reel will have to be ordered to replace the damaged portion. I’m not sure how much of the heat will trickle down to me. It is possible I will be fired. I think it unlikely because although others have been let go for similar mistakes, it’s always been the last straw with a number of other problems leading up to the ‘big one.’ The last time I caused film damage was 1989. Even so, other than this significant aberration, they’ve been pleased with me working part-time and filling in during vacations and emergencies as far as I know. We’ll see what happens, but I’ll accept whatever they decide even if it’s the golden handshake.
The chief projectionist came in to effect temporary repairs and he was very amused at my saying the last time I had damaged film was in 1989. He was a pre-teen at the time.
The real kicker of this whole event was the film I damaged was Niagara: Miracles, Myths, and Magic. Niagara was pretty much the only film showing at the theatre I first worked at. I lost count after running it 2500 times. Even after not seeing it for almost two decades, I still cringed at the music. You could say it’s not my favourite Imax film. Having it involved in this incident doesn’t make me like it any more, despite the long absence.
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