It’s been a month since I got the Kindle 2 and I’ve now read a few hundred of what we used to call ‘pages’ on it – apparently now you call them ‘locations’. So I thought it would be worth reporting back in.
Again, I was thankful every day for the slim size of this thing compared to the monstrous hardcover it immediately replaced. The next bonus was that I was carrying essentially as many books as I wanted at the same time. I don’t often feel the need to reread part of King Lear, but I suppose now I can. It would be very nice for frequent travelers – if they let you bring it on the plane I guess.
The screen: beautiful and far superior to reading off a backlit screen OR from a cheap paperback, but not superior to a nicely-printed hardcover. Also, the fixed font still seems restrictive.
The wireless capabilities of the device are mostly liabilities in Canada. The coolest wireless features (email your kindle documents, surf the web, auto-grab news feeds) are not available here, so you’re really only using wireless if you want to buy books from the kindle, or if you’re syncing your last-read position with the iPhone app (which is now available outside the US, BTW, and is awesome). For that, you get a pretty substantial battery drain – at least two weeks with wireless off turns into only a few days with wireless on. So I’ve taken to only turning it on when needed.
I have found Calibre to be quite cool. OK, it needs an interfacelift – it has the rugged bad looks of a java app. Also, it’s pretty slow. But feature-wise it impresses. You can convert pretty much any source (rtf, lit, pdf, doc etc.) to kindle format. It has a bunch of free news feeds pre-set up, including many newspaper sites. On your kindle, these look remarkably like the official newspapers you would pay $15/month to receive automatic, battery-killing wireless delivery thereof.
The two cool things I have to mention: one is instapaper’s kindle export. The auto-email to kindle doesn’t work here, but you can manually export your instapaper articles all at once and drag them onto the Kindle USB-stylee. Talk about “read later”, and in style. The other thing is I came upon the link to Annabel Scheme the other day, a novella with a free ebook version. It’s PDF which works on the kindle reasonably well, and the story is GREAT. I honestly wouldn’t have read 128 pages of PDF from my computer screen. That makes me think of a glorious world where I’m grabbing juicy morsels of lesser-known yet tasty author-fruit from the low-hanging boughs of the intertree, and slurping them down in e-ink luxuriousness, and some of the promise of said intertree becomes a little more real as its fruit gets more pleasant to consume.
There’s something very retro futuristic about the Kindle right now. Any black & white e-reader, really – under the shadow of the almost assuredly upcoming Apple tablet, or even of near-future advances in e-ink screens (colour screens, touch screens, combo OLED & e-ink screens), the objects seem, despite the permanence of the ink on screen, even more fleeting than gadgets normally are.
That said, I’ve found I’ve read a lot more since getting the Kindle. This could be a passing fancy, and perhaps the reading will subside once a shiny new gadget comes along (or Mass Effect 2 comes out), but for now, I can’t complain.
Some questions about this tablet thing, that have made me doubt its existence. Questions that the excellent Daring Fireball article also addresses, but does not answer – no one has answers right now.
What is the screen like? If it’s LCD, is Apple really expecting to succeed in the ebook market? The single defining feature in a suddenly-cluttered, apparently reasonably successful market is the e-ink screen, notable for the absence of backlight and close resemblance to print, but also for many side effects that make them bad for other uses (low refresh rate, monochrome, poor contrast). Apple may well view readers with some condescension – “no one reads any more” – and if so, they may settle for an LCD, which is good for everything except reading. But if they have actually tried to solve the problem, they may have something cool up their sleeves. Perhaps two layered displays? Does the backlight turn off when a book is opened? I’m very curious.
How are you supposed to type on its presumed on-screen keyboard? Do you hold it in one hand and type with the other? Do you hold it with both hands and type with your thumbs? The latter is actually more than doable on a 7” screen, and would probably work on 10” as well. But that leads to the next thing-
Is it really going to be a grand? That’s laptop money even for Apple (and at the netbook price range, three laptop money). While that makes my heart sink because it means I wouldn’t buy it, it also makes me a little excited because it means that Apple may be trying to replace the laptop, not slide in alongside it in a rather crowded gadget matrix – phone / “smartbook” / netbook / laptop / desktop. That’s ballsy stuff, although I remain skeptical of the value of a keyboardless computer. I sure as hell head to a computer when I have to type anything more ambitious than “LOL” on my iPhone, despite being comparatively good at thumb-bashing.
I think Apple may well have arrived at the tablet form after experimenting with netbooks – one can imagine they are both trying to solve the same problem. I’m just concerned that throwing out the keyboard throws out more good than bad. Then again, the Nexus One’s lack of a hardware keyboard may indicate that smartphones are evolving away from such dangly bits, like the arms of a tyrannosaur. So will we learn to stop typing and love the screen?
Whatever, it’s exciting stuff for the gadget nerd. I’m almost as hyped as I am for the final season of Lost, and that’s saying something.
Shit dude, forgot to post this here. It’s a massive 40-something-samples-in-8-minutes mashup frenzy featuring Slick Rick, Big Baby Jesus, Chewbacca, Fucked Up, Raffi, Ella Fitzgerald, and whatever else seemed like a good idea at the time.
We no longer imagine the newspaper as a city or the city as a newspaper. Whatever I may say in the rant that follows, I do not believe the decline of newspapers has been the result solely of computer technology or of the Internet. The forces working against newspapers are probably as varied and foregone as the Model-T Ford and the birth-control pill. We like to say that the invention of the internal-combustion engine changed us, changed the way we live. In truth, we built the Model-T Ford because we had changed; we wanted to remake the world to accommodate our restlessness. We might now say: Newspapers will be lost because technology will force us to acquire information in new ways. In that case, who will tell us what it means to live as citizens of Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor? The truth is we no longer want to live in Seattle or Denver or Ann Arbor. Our inclination has led us to invent a digital cosmopolitanism that begins and ends with “I.” Careening down Geary Boulevard on the 38 bus, I can talk to my my dear Auntie in Delhi or I can view snapshots of my cousin’s wedding in Recife or I can listen to girl punk from Glasgow. The cost of my cyber-urban experience is disconnection from body, from presence, from city.
I don’t know if that’s true – I personally don’t feel less connected to Toronto now – it’s one of many neighbourhoods I live in. Then again, I read the newspaper every day in some form or another.
44 days, to be exact, when I was still evaluating the PS3. Since then it basically went Demon’s Souls – Uncharted 2 – Dragon Age – Little Big Planet (PSP). I didn’t finish Demon’s Souls, but hope to someday. I totally loved it, and would consider it one of the better games of the year. Many have said that of Uncharted 2, and I can see why, as it has great writing, excellent pacing, and plenty of gameplay variety. However, it seems a little old-fashioned. Perhaps it’s me personally rather than the industry as a whole, but I feel like we’ve moved on from linear story-based games that are trying to be like movies. The game does not allow you to make any choices other than which order to shoot the bad guys. I realize this was the case with Halo as well, and many other A-list games. But my tastes have gradually shifted.
Oh yeah, Halo ODST. Almost forgot about that one, as it was a bit of a flash in the pan. It’s interesting to note that said linear storytellers Bungie actually shifted to a non-linear, architectural model for the sections of ODST. It was certainly well-made, but short, and not really worth a full game price. Had a few epic sessions of firefight though – one game lasted two hours. Damn.
Not that it’s much different from what Bioware has been doing for years, but Dragon Age is more where I see the future of games, where every aspect of the game (gameplay, story, etc.) changes based on the player’s choices. It’s a party-based action RPG with excellent writing, mission design, and an extremely detailed world to explore. Sure, it’s elves and wizards which is a little played out, but despite that the material is strong. I’m nowhere near finished it, but still plugging away.
I rarely buy full-price PSP games, but I made an exception for Little Big Planet for some reason. I’ve never played more than the demo of the big boy PS3 version, so I don’t know how the portable game compares, but I’ve really enjoyed my few hours with this one. It’s generally a pleasant, relaxing experience playing through the story missions – I’m not a huge platformer fan but this is good stuff. I’ve played very few player-made levels, and haven’t tried to create them yet myself, but I aim to, and that’s all that counts, innit?
All the while I can never resist buying and barely playing iPhone games. The iPhone is an amazing games platform, blah blah. Great, your game uses all your batteries and then your phone is dead. A phone call interrupts your game and when you go back, it didn’t save. Or the game takes five minutes to load. Or the touch controls suck, again. Or it’s a dumbed-down version of what would be decent on another platform. I’ve definitely played some great iPhone games, but most of them I never spend more than half an hour with.
Not sure why I keep buying them.
The latest is Rogue Planet, gameloft’s attempt to rip off Advance Wars. Gameloft is like the iPhone’s Asylum studios, churning out cheap knockoffs of well-known franchises. Some of them are good in a workmanlike, the-gameplay-is-engaging sort of way, but they all feel soulless, with no originality or inspiration to be found.
It’s december – there are a million games out, and no time to play them. I’m hoping to try out the new Zelda, Assassin’s Creed 2, Borderlands and even Modern Warfare 2, but I probably can’t do everything I want to between now and the release of Mass Effect 2 and whatever the latest Final Fantasy is. But whatever – when it comes to video games, too much of a good thing is still a good thing.
I am now the proud owner of a Kindle. It was an extremely generous birthday present from my sisters. I’ve been researching and discussing ebook readers a lot with my pal Ari – it’s a fascinating emerging market. I probably wouldn’t have shelled out the bread for one at the moment, but I’m certainly happy to have one, to learn about its capabilities, and to learn more about the entire field.
The screen is a wonder. It really has to be seen to be believed. When I first looked at it I thought the “plug in the power cable” message and diagram were a sticker on the screen, but no, that’s how things look. Virtuality has never looked so physical. It literally uses no power unless you’re turning the page.
The font is actually really nice – a serif that’s flirting with sans. You can adjust the text size, but not the font, which struck me as odd, if the sort of thing Apple would do, and you sense that this product is very much the result of an emulation of Apple’s attention to design detail.
The interface leaves a lot to be desired. Your instinct is to touch the screen, but no, you’re stuck with a nipply little joystick, a keyboard(!) and a handful of other buttons. The low refresh rate of e-ink displays make it feel klunky no matter what, but that’s one of those tradeoffs that goes with the territory. Luckily, most of the time you’re just going to be pressing ‘next page’, and that works fine.
You can buy books from the Amazon store on the Kindle itself, and as I’m sure you’ve heard, they get zapped near-instantly to the device, thanks to its always-on cell radio or whatever they call it. You can also plug in to your PC via USB and transfer things that way. There’s also a free app called Calibre that can work like iTunes to your Kindle’s iPod, and will also convert files (including Epub, PDF, RTF, HTML) into Kindle-optimized formats.
You can store thousands of books on this thing, so I loaded it up with some public domain Dead White Guy Classics via Feedbooks. Also, my current book is James Ellroy’s Blood’s a Rover, an enormous hardcover that gets tiring to lug around. I had previously downloaded a pirate .rtf ebook of it (which I feel was within my moral rights, doncha think) to try and get it on my iPhone on those days I wanted to carry my camera instead of a half ton of paper, but the document converted poorly. Calibre did a great job and now I can consume hard-boiled political conspiracy fiction in a much lighter package.
Back to that cell network connection. Here’s where things get shady, probably because the towering death lords we call the Canadian telecommunications oligopoly have entered the room. In the US, you can do the following with your Kindle:
email documents to it
sync with an iPhone app
surf the entire web for free
In Canada, you can do none of these things. Also, every transaction has a $2 surcharge added to it, so a $10 new release becomes $12 and a free public domain book becomes $2. I think what is happening is that Kindle doesn’t yet have a deal with Rogers, Telus or Bell, so the prices reflect the ludicrous roaming charges that those companies bill to AT&T. No one even knows what network this thing is connecting to – none of the parties involved will talk about it. That suggests negotiations are still ongoing. Be that as it may, the last thing we Canadian nerds needed was another sign of what a technological backwater we have become.
If you were going to hold out for a future, more awesome ebook reader, I can’t say I blame you. It seems like a new one is announced every day (Nook, motherfucker!), and undoubtedly future models will feature touch screens, colour, will fire lasers & brew killer espresso. And in Canada, you may want to wait unil Sauron, Hitler and Emperor Palpatine (or whomever manages the affairs of our telecom providers) allow the device to reach its true potential.
Regardless, right now, the experience of reading on this thing is quite pleasant, as is the slim size, and the generous storage. It’s the Tardis for book nerds, and I’m definitely happy with it so far.
“Buddha” is equal parts biography, analysis of myth, and historical contextualization. The first two go hand in hand – as with Jesus, none of the source literature about the Buddha was written when he was alive, and over the years much mytholigical sediment has accrued, not least because no one was really in the business of providing a historical biography. They were interested in selling a religion. Armstrong keeps both balls in the air through the course of the book, to great effect.
The historical context, however, was the most interesting. As little as I knew about the Buddha going into this book, I knew even less about Northern India, c. 500 BC. Armstrong situates it in The Axial Age, a time of great social upheaval and multiple revolutions in thought, in multiple regions across the world. The Buddha, Socrates, Confucius, and Zarathustra are idiomatic, but it also includes Plato, “the authors of the Upanishads, Lao Tzu, Homer, Socrates, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Thucydides, Archimedes, Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Deutero-Isaiah”. That’s a pretty sweet all-star team you got there.
More specifically, Armstrong’s emphasis on context allows you to see what Buddhism’s innovations actually were. Buddhism is unique amongst today’s religions in its godlesness and emphasis on ‘enlightenment’. That would not have distinguished it from the competition at the time – such concepts come from the contemporaneous yogic tradition. The innovation was the concept of the ‘middle way’, which was essentially “not too hedonist, not too puritan.” The notion of the non-existence of the atman (self, ego) is the other key new thought that I can’t say I’ve totally got my (selfish, egomaniac) head around.
If you’re at all curious about the origins of Buddhism, the life of Buddha or spirituality in general, I’d heartily recommend this book.
Juice and some other friends do this clothing sale once a month, and it’s on tomorrow. Thanks to this sale, I have a killer wardrobe – you may have to sift through some junk, but there are great finds every time, including brand new stuff from stores. If you live in Toronto you should totally check it out.
Because I have to get back in the blog posting habit.
First, about 10.6.2 breaking Atom-based Hackintoshes – lots of FUD like this article. Really, everyone? “Puts an end to the hackintosh”? Was 10.6.1 that bad? In my experience, your apps aren’t going to go incompatible with a x.x.x release. Nevermind that the mydellmini.com champs are surely on this shit right now and it will be sorted within weeks.
Second, because of this, and ‘cause ranking shit is fun:
The Wire
The Sopranos
Deadwood
Lost
Breaking Bad
Mad Men
Arrested Development
Tim & Eric
Battlestar Galactica
Firefly
With props to Dollhouse (sorry to hear you’re cancelled). It had massive problems, but on the strength of “Epitaph One” alone, deserves to enter the TV pantheon.
Yes, it works. The guide is good. A couple things I ran into: if your Mini has trouble waking from sleep, reboot it, press F2 to get into the BIOS settings and make sure “USBBIOS Legacy Support” is disabled. More details here. I also ran into problems with the bluetooth – it was causing the system to hang when looking for WiFi access points after waking from sleep. I’ve disabled it until I can find a solution. And the shitty trackpad is indeed shitty. The updated driver mentioned on Gizmodo fixes its jumpiness, but your real saviour is the handy “Trackpad” system preference that NetbookInstaller threw in there, which lets you tap to click, two finger scroll, etc. Also, I had problems with bluetooth/wifi until I updated to 10.6.1 (but AVOID 10.6.2 as of this writing – see below!)
I’ve been a user of Mac notebooks for many, many years. I have fond memories of many of them (not so much the Mac Portable thatwas a hand-me-down from my grandmother). Perhaps my favourite was the 12” PowerBook – light, small, yet a powerful computer in its day; I cut a film on that thing. I love my current 15” MacBook Pro, but the 5.x pounds is a lot more to carry around than you might think (I’d make a terrible soldier).
Apple simply won’t sell you something in the Netbook category (which we might call small, cheap subnotebooks, generally $300 – $500). The closest you will get is the MacBook Air, which at $1600 is too much. We wants it, but still.
Your $300 at dell.com certainly doesn’t buy you an Air equivalent. Its power might be impressive if you travel back in time to 2004. The 1.6 gHz single core Atom proc chokes on HD video, and 1 gig of RAM isn’t a whole lot these days. The keyboard is 90% of a real keyboard, the trackpad is poor, the 10” pushes the limits of usability, you’ll be out in the cold when it comes to tech support – and you have to look at a Dell logo below your screen. Sheesh.
But for the bulk of one’s computing, for surfing, email, writing, some web design, this thing is perfectly capable. And it is SMALL. I can carry it and my SLR with no problem. (That’s the arts-nerd equivalent of armed to the teeth.) Six hours of battery is nothing to argue with, either. It’s a hell of a lot of computer for not a lot of scratch. You should get one. The pics on the innernette don’t often express the size well, so here’s a snap I took:
A parting thought. As I said, the 10” screen is a challenge. It’s not insurmountable, but you kind of have to have only one thing happening on screen at a time, you try to minimize app chrome, etc. In short, I can see that if Apple was looking into netbooks, they would have wanted to make fundamental changes to the way the OS works. A modified iPhone OS X would almost be the way to go. So I wonder if the rumoured Apple tablet had its roots in netbooks. Let’s just hope they don’t do that software keyboard shit again.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that there’s a big thing going down about whether 10.6.2, the latest version of Snow Leopard, works on Atom-based netbooks like the 10v. Sounds like if you use software update to install it, you’ll be screwed, but there “are possible fixes”:
http://www.mydellmini.com/forum/general-mac-os-x-discussion/15050-osx-10-6-2-a-10.html#post118298. I’m not personally in a huge rush – 10.6.2 doesn’t make your computer turn into a unicorn or anything.
There’s an HMV near where I work. In the 90s, this chain sold CDs. (You may remember it from the rip n’ return days, when a liberal exchange policy meant you could buy, rip and return CDs at the original price). Over the course of this decade, it gradually transformed into a DVD outlet, with CDs now relegated to a hits strip at the front and some meager racks at the back.
In the past few years, video games have made an incursion, taking a great deal of the front area. Blu-Ray has of course made an appearance, and even iPod accessories.
In short, the store is a microcosm of the modern entertainment media landscape.
I went in there last week. A whole boatload of DVDs are selling at $6, including many good ones. Racks of old games for $20. A security guard yawns by the door. The place is a ghost town.
Distractro enters. He is covered in flashing lights. There is a video game console embedded in his back. DISTRACTRO: What’s up, man? Have you checked out Gizmodo lately?
D: Nah man. Just trying to write here. DISTRACTRO: Ew, with that font? Gnarly. You know there are some really great monospaced fonts these days, what was that post with like ten of them? Bet if you googled it…
D: Oh yeah, there was— no! Later, I’ll worry about that later. Okay.
(WRITES) DISTRACTRO: Pretty dark in here. I mean, that’s cool, if you’re cool with that.
D: I can open some blinds. Here- D opens blinds in the living room, then the kitchen. Distractro quickly takes D’s place at the computer and begins to tap at the keyboard.
D: No! What are you writing! DISTRACTRO: Nothing… META–DISTRACTRO enters. Small FIREWORKS are constantly firing from his body, and his head is spinning around rapidly. META–DISTRACTRO: YOOOOOOOO!!!!
D: Fuck it. YOOOOOOO!!! D begins to dance, as “Boom Boom Pow” or some equally nightmarish single begins to bang from the speaks.
I wanted very much to like this book. I wanted to agree with everything in it. The general thesis is that the corporation’s influence has been so great that our entire society, our culture, our minds are now corporatized – we think like corporations without realizing there are other ways. The hook is almost irresistible, too: Rushkoff was robbed outside his apartment in Brooklyn, and when he posted about it on a neighbourhood mailing list, people wanted him to shut up about it lest he bring their property values down.
The book has many fascinating sections, especially the parts about the origins of corporations, the origin of branding (with Louis XIV’s minister Colbert, although some internetting has me questioning that passage), post-WWII home ownership and racism, and the bias inherent in central currency, to name a few. Unfortunately, all of these are awash in a sea of stream-of-consciousness ranting that makes it hard to discern the overall point at any given time. Certain ideas that need more room to kick their legs,like the bias of currency, simply drown.
Most disappointingly, Rushkoff reserves only a few pages at the end for suggestions of how to counteract corporatism. There’s only one real idea, about establishing local currencies, but as the problem with central currencies was so poorly argued earlier, it fails to impress. Likewise, it’s hard to tell whether his theory of corporatism is at all sound, since Rushkoff’s ranting distracts him from the legwork required to establish the theory’s subcomponents.
The PS3’s hardware is unassailable, both in terms of included features (WiFi, Bluetooth, swappable HD, Blu-Ray), and in terms of build quality, at least compared to the unfortunate Xbox 360.
The OS software is where things get interesting. The overall interface (the Xross Media Bar or XMB – is X pronounced ‘k’ now?) is clean and minimalist, although it scales poorly. That’s evident in the interminable settings tab, and also if you have a lot of games or videos, as it always gives you a flat list – is it incapable of hierarchy?
The PS3 has many capabilities, many of which I fear I will never use. You can see that this thing is an actual computer (which was a promise about the PS2 that was never really true). It’s got a decent web browser and lots of features – heck, it connected to my printer and I’m sure it would print up photos if I let it. I understand the media centre capabilities of this thing are quite decent – format support is fairly broad (although not broad enough for my tastes). Unfortunately, I already have computers that do these things much better. Sorry, PS3.
The Playstation store feels like an actual store and less like a creeping huckster contagion that infects everything – the Xbox 360’s approach.
However, the download / install procedure is a baffling ordeal. On the 360 this just works. The PS3 seems to like to install, moreso than it likes to let you play games. Every time you download something, it needs to install afterwards, but it doesn’t do this itself. It waits until you want the thing, and then tells you it’s “Installing…” My worst experience of this was with Burnout Paradise, a 2 or 3 gig download, then an install, then – outrageously – a sequence of five(!) software updates that had to be downloaded and installed, which completely occupied the PS3 for a good hour. Why the fuck couldn’t those have been applied to the file on the server?
So far, I don’t know too many people with PS3s, so I haven’t tested many of the online services like friends lists and chat and all that – an area of weakness compared to the 360, as I understand. Well, at least you don’t have to pay for it.
The Games
I bought a few games, both through the online store and on Blu-Ray.
There is a refreshing amount of experimentation going on in the available downloadable games like FlOw, FlOwer, the PixelJunk games, Noby Noby Boy, Everyday Shooter. Home is also a noble idea. It’s not one that works in practise at present: what the hell am I supposed to do in there?
The PixelJunk games are fantastic, or at least Eden and Monsters are. I’m in love with Eden. It’s minimalist, beautiful, addicting, and can be played in 10 minute bursts. Monsters seems like it got too hard too fast, but still ranks with the best tower defence games I’ve played. I wished there was more to Noby Noby Boy. And yes, Burnout Paradise at $20 is a truckload of awesome.
On disc I’ve mostly played Uncharted and Metal Gear Solid IV. They are spectacular, really – great examples of current generation A-list games, with engrossing stories that imbue the gameplay with significance. MGS certainly has its quirks. But I’m willing to view them as a strength, as I was a huge fan of Kojima’s auteurism in the past MGS games (although I’ll admit to gradually tiring of the stealth gameplay). I also picked up Valkyria Chronicles and Ratchet and Clank Future, but haven’t spent much time with them. A man only needs so many games at once. If I became suddenly unemployed or they added an extra couple days to the weekend, I’d be trying Killzone and Little Big Planet for sure.
More recently I’ve become quite taken with Demon’s Souls (more on that in a separate post), but that may get punched in the face by Nathan Drake shortly.
Blu-Ray
A post like this seems like it needs a section about Blu-Ray, but I confess to not being the enthusiast I thought I was. Well, I guess I just spent a week watching three films a day in theatres, so give me a break. I did rent a flick and it looked amazing; it’s definitely the best quality home HD option, far better than either Rogers HD feeds (which generally suck, with visible macro blocking and poor lowlights) or HD rentals on Xbox / iTunes, or even downloaded .mkv files. Then again, I’m having a hard time making myself buy Blu-Ray discs. It just feels like it’s not worth the money. When DVDs were new and fresh, I bought a whole bunch of them. Now I have shelves full of the things, and I can count on one hand the ones I’ve watched multiple times, so the bulk of them weren’t worth the money. And it’s clear that my film collection of the future will all be on some 500 terabyte hard drive. So I’m hesitant to go through the whole thing again, at least until prices drop. I can see myself renting the things fairly frequently, though.
Summing the Hell Up
The PS3 slim is a nice piece of work. It used to be that the PS3 was the $700 console with a crappy games lineup. Now, the console is $300. Sony’s game library is strong, and and we still haven’t seen the old Sony standbys like God of War, Gran Turismo and Final Fantasy. Blu-Ray is the only remaining HD disc format, and the PS3 the only console that offers it. Sony even outsold the Wii in September.
There is no question in my mind that cameras like this are the future for many of us.
By us I mean those interested in both still and motion picture photography. I’ve been into both fields for a while, both by hobby and trade, and it still blows my little mind to think I could afford a thing like this. It’s been a long, gradual and perhaps predictable time coming, but that doesn’t make it seem any less crazy. When I was in university we shot on VHS, and people were saying Hi-8 video was the future. Then it was the DV “revolution”. I split on a cheap DV handicam with some friends. But you still couldn’t get a nice image with these things – you could imitate video stuff, but never convincingly film. For that you needed to shoot film, which was a mulit-thousand-dollar proposition for camera rental & processing. Soon, we were lucky enough to be able to shoot on early pro HDCAMs like the Sony F900, but that was still a half-million dollar camera. A few short years later, the Red is here at $20,000, which is mind-blowing to anyone in the industry.
And now we have sub-$2,000 video SLRs like the GH1. Cameras with great optics, all-digital workflow, 1080p24, compact size, full manual control. Interchangeable lenses, decent low-light shooting. Total craziness.
These are amazing cameras, but they have kinks. I’m sure in a year or two this category will have stabilized, the feature set will be clear, and choices will be easier. The next iteration of the GH1 (might I guess GH2?) will solve a lot of the problems with this thing. Because yes, there are problems.
no video out – you can put HDMI or composite out when reviewing shots, but not while capturing. This makes it very hard to do a lot of things where the director and camera operator are not the same person.
poor audio support – the GH1 has a surprisingly decent built-in mic, and an optional mountable shotgun mic, but most of the time, I’d want to hook up a wireless lavalier mic. You can do that, but the audio in is a minijack that auto-levels the signal. For best sound, you need to record into a separate audio field recorder and then sync in post. That’s a couple hundred extra and a big pain in the ass.
low bitrate – the camera has great optics, but the files it saves are too low a bitrate. Sometimes this bites you, sometimes it doesn’t.
AVCHD – I find this to be a shitty codec, which causes headaches in post as it must be converted to something Final Cut can use (still haven’t figured out how to get it into the Avid). When you combine AVCHD’s interframe compression with the low bitrate, especially in 1080p24 mode you get compression mud in certain situations, like fast camera movement and/or complex detail (grass, especially). This sucks. There is an MJPEG mode that is mud-free, but it’s only 720p30 and is still low bitrate.
I don’t want to sound complainy here. The GH1 has a lot going for it. Mainly:
I found the still modes to be awesome. I may not be the best judge, not having used a lot of DSLRs, but I’ve gotten some great photos out of this thing.
The flip-out LCD is a lifesaver. Every camera should have this.
the kit lens is impressive. It’s the equivalent of a 28-280mm zoom, which gives you a lot of options. Its silent autofocus is another engineering marvel for an SLR. I really never thought I’d use autofocus, but it’s quite smart.
An advantage of the category in general: these cameras are really small compared to video cameras, and thus really stealth. You can get away with a lot. Except you’ll have to put up with people posing as they wait for the ‘click’.
This is another categorical feature, but one that compares favourably to most video cams, even much more expensive ones: interchangeable lenses. I’ve picked up a fast 50mm FD lens and the results have been really satisfying.All the cameras in this category, which right now includes the Canon 5DMkII and the new 7D, suffer from strange, idiosyncratic drawbacks.
Like I say, I’m figuring in a year or so the dust will have settled, each manufacturer will have figured out the featureset they need, and eliminated the needless problems. Red’s cheaper camera Scarlett will theoretically be on the market, too. No matter how you slice it, it’s a great time to be shooting, and it will continue this way for the forseeable future. Perhaps one day we will simply exhale a fine mist of microscopic flying camera bugs and then let our algorithms cut it together, but until then…
A brief note: this was a very low-budget shoot by our standards, so we shot it on my GH1. I’ll post more GH1 details later, as I’ve now had a fair bit of time with the camera and it’s worth reporting back in about that.
I was going to do separate, detailed posts for everything I loved, but I’m going to have to freeball it here quickly or I’ll never get around to it. So here are all the rest of the films that I saw:
Dogtooth
Along with Ondine, Enter the Void and Hadewijch, one of the best I saw. It’s a brilliantly inventive Greek film about three kids raised to believe some crazy bullshit. Works as a comedy, drama, and parable.
Ondine
Neil Jordan sure can write. He makes what could be a jumbled mess of genres and topics come across as a modern fable. Quite impressive – also great music & Irish people, including Mr. Farrell.
The Loved Ones
Entertaining, unpredictable, and shallow Australian horror-comedy. Fun, better than most US horror releases, but ain’t no Citizen Kane.
Youth in Revolt
Felt like it had a half hour cut out of it. Meandering, charming Michael Cera flick that I’m sure will kill at the box office.
Cell 211
Superior Spanish jailhouse thriller in which a prison guard poses as an inmate during a prison riot / revolution. Will undoubtedly be remade stateside starring Sly Stallone and Ving Rhames or whomever.
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
Yes this movie is real, hilarious, and (hopefully) the start of the world’s most unlikely film franchise. It’s refreshing to like Nick Cage in a movie again, but he’s still performing and not acting. Come for the iguanas, stay for the lucky crack pipe.
The Ape
Fascinating film with little substance but some great technique and some psychological insights. For more, read Ram’s review-, with which I agree.
Backyard
Riveting, powerful Mexican police thriller about murdered women in Juarez that winds up being about much more than that.
Patience-testing but ultimately rewarding surrealist comedy about a Mexican wrestler and a guy who wakes up in a mysterious white room. Battling with Trash Humpers in my mind for weird-funny champion of the festival. Need to learn more about this dude
The Disappearance of Alice Creed
Workmanlike but unremarkable low-budget British thriller.
The Front Line
Italian historical thriller falls down as its confused structure doesn’t help us sympathize with some left-wing guerilla/terrorists.
Videocracy
Documentary about Berlusconi and his media empire. Floats around the edge of the ring with three topical, eccentric characters, but never lands the knockout punch.
—-
That was everything. Phew. It was quite a week. I also wanted to jot down some impressions of the fest as a whole, but we’ll see what Lady Time gives me this week.
I’m a couple days late with these write-ups. Clearly I would make a bad film critic.
Gaspar Noé‘s Irreversible was a hugely shocking and audacious film, and someone’s slipped a tab in his drink since then, as Enter the Void amps it up a few dB in scale, ambition, technique, discipline, and frustration. In a nutshell, it’s modeled on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and follows a small-time drug dealer as he gets high, gets killed, and navigates the afterlife. It takes the concept of the point of view shot to a whole new level, and applies a strict video game perspective to each of multiple states of being. Oscar’s real life is seen in the first person, with the camera literally where his eyes are, and includes blinking, his thoughts (muttered monologue), and even his DMT-induced hallucinations. His deathbed flashbacks to his past life are shown in the third person, with the back of Oscar’s head visible in the foreground. His bodyless ghost-floating is seen from spiralling overhead shots.
These techniques are applied unrelentingly. If Oscar’s spirit wishes to follow a different friend, the camera flies across the city and finds that friend. And if a scene is to play out from this point of view, it does so, all from above, with no cutting in to closeups.
It’s a grimy neon afterlife that Noé has us enter, as Oscar the ghost drug dealer navigates a nighttime Tokyo populated by drug-addled artists, predatory dealers, and most importantly his stripper sister, with whom he has a quote unquote special bond. Oscar’s past, while not without some cliched happy moments, is scarred by a violent, traumatic incident. Noé shows us everything in unnecessary detail, as if to rub our noses in the gore of human misery.
It’s a sleazy and somewhat dull world, to be truthful. Oscar and his sister never take on the dimensions of real characters and it’s hard to form any bonds with them. I get the impression that this film is a cautionary tale, and Noé does not respect his characters. The dialogue is consistently mundane. A particularly frustrating scene toward the end, which could have been powerfully emotional, is almost laughably blunt.
Noé is anything but subtle. When I tell you that the film’s based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, I know this not because I’ve read it or because it’s visible in the corner of the frame on a character’s shelf, but rather because the characters talk repeatedly about it, describing its contents and laying out the course of the film for those up in the cheap seats.
Also, the purity of the technique starts to get in the way of the storytelling. The need to ghost-cam fly across the city to follow different characters basically adds a 30-second whip pan every time we switch from A- to B-plot. Likewise, the playing out of long take scenes in single overhead shots gets tiresome, and bloats an already challenging film past the two-and-a-half hour mark.
That’s the frustration, that Noé doesn’t climb down from the lofty heights of the concept and the technique and make a real story out of this thing. All the same, he’s achieved some amazing shit here, and fans of formalism and/or the seedy afterlife will want to check this film out.
So much of film reception is expectation. I went in to this Harmony Korine film having heard bad things, and was just saying to Jenn “we may well walk out of this,” when Korine concluded his introductory remarks by saying, basically, if you’re the sort of person who walks out on movies, might as well do it now. It was a challenge (a throwdown, hell no I can’t slow down) that I accepted almost unconsciously, and I realize now it reset my expectations to near zero.
If you are expecting an experimental work of artistic merit, Trash Humpers may well fall short. I don’t think Korine is playing in the big leagues with this one, which is not to say he couldn’t if he tried. However, if you treat this as a bizarre sketch comedy feature, one step weirder than Tim & Eric, say, you may well enjoy it, as I did.
The Trash Humpers are four southerners who wear creepy old-person masks and, well, hump trash. And trees, and walls, and whatever else. They also smash TVs, vandalize things, break into homes, and kill people, all the while muttering, grunting, singing atonally and/or laughing like sick hyenas. There is no plot to speak of, only a collection of scenes featuring the central characters, and other supporting characters drift in and out freely. The film is shot on VHS, meant to capture an archival quality, as if you might find the tape in a dead person’s things and wonder just what the fuck they were up to. As such, the director/cameraman Korine is also one of the Humpers, and shows up more and more toward the end of the film.
One one hand I’m tempted to criticize the film for lacking cohesion, and argue that it could have benefited from a more targeted sense of mystery. You can’t help but project some onto it (was there a falling out among the humpers? Whose baby did the lady humper steal?), but I do not imagine this is a Mulholland Drive-level puzzle waiting to be solved, if by Korine’s own explanation of it afterwards. I’d also propose it might fare better as a YouTube channel rather than a feature. On the other hand, it’s easier to just let the film be what it is, which is a fuckin’ weird 76 minutes of weird shit going down.
Mmm, my third day of TIFF was much better. Perhaps it’s equal parts personal adjustment to queuing and crowds (something I go way out of my way to avoid in regular life), better choices of film, and all around better luck. I mean, no one likes rushing around to line up for films you find okay or kinda hate, but if the films are good, you take it with a grain of salt, yeah?
Bruno Dumont’s Hadewijch was my starter in the morning, and I was quite into it. I confess it’s the first Dumont film I’ve seen, but won’t be the last: it’s a fascinating meditation on religion perfectly married to a compelling plot.
Daybreakers was next. I tried to only get tickets to films that weren’t about to get a release, but in certain cases I couldn’t help myself. If you say “sci-fi vampire film,” I mean I’ve actually watched Bava’s Planet of the Vampires, know what I mean? This had its flaws – wooden dialogue, a little too earnest – but made up for them in sheer inventiveness and entertainment value. Despite the daylight scheduling, the screening was classic midnight madness, with a whooping crowd and a great warm-up from Colin Geddes.
I finished the day with the brooding Viking film Valhalla Rising, another film from a filmmaker I’m slightly ashamed to be unfamiliar with, Nicolas Winding Refn. It was like Bergman doing Conan the Barbarian, with perhaps a little too much emphasis on mood and enigma at the expense of depth. But it gets bonus points for a disembowelment and a mute, one-eyed protagonist like someone from a Leone flick.
My scheduling was still poor today, with a scant 15 minutes to get from film to film, but my trusty bike got me there on time. Directors were present for all three films, but because of my rushed scheduling I only got to hear the Q&A for the last one, which I regret. It’s probably better to allow a lot more time between flicks, especially as they tend to start late.
Man my festival experience is not shaping up well so far. The weeks preceding it are full of articles with words like “buzz,” “star” and “carpet” which make me rage-tingle a little. My first film – my fault for choosing it, I’m sure – is a 900-hour-long art travesty that features 5-minute takes of people sleeping. The film this morning is Rwanda: The Day God Walked Away which is actually fairly decent, but still smacks of art-colonialism as the funding and writer-director are French. I skip Jennifer’s Body because a sandwich now sounds like a more exciting proposition, and then at the AMC for All Fall Down, which hardly sounds like a line-up attractor, I’m forced into Satan’s Own Line which contains people who are lining up for two other, surely more “buzz-worthy” films, and we are all screamed at by ferocious, sex-starved volunteers to pack closer together, then told my film will in fact leave the line, then when I do I’m told I should get back in the line – to the back of the line I just left. What the fuck? I impulsively walk out, whether because of personal sense of outrage, my introvert’s severe dislike of lines, or a purely rational calculation that I would rather pay the $10 value of the ticket than remain in that art scum fattening pen.
It’s too bad, I would have liked to have seen that film.
The whole festival so far has a villainous feel to it, Mos Eisley for corporate sponsors, Indiewood marketers and the aspirational middle class, where people line up to exchange cash for artistic cachet. Because of the money I paid, I can now have a delightfully scathing opinion of Face, or a somber, scolding recommendation for the genocide flick, or crow that I’ve seen the shitty Diablo Cody film two weeks before it sits empty in regular schmuck theatres.
Maybe I should stick to my fucking downloads.
Nah, I’m sure this will get better, it’s the weekend and the daytime screenings will thin out during the week, and I think my picks will be more agreeable even as of tomorrow. But I’m starting to think Jesus invented Blu-Ray so I could avoid bullshit like this.
There’s an impressive roman-a-clef aspect to Mad Men. Female identity is a strong theme in episode 302, as indeed it always is on the show. (Mild spoilers follow) The episode opens with the opening to Bye Bye Birdie, as Ann-Margret’s “25-year-old pretending to be fourteen” annoys Peggy. She asks, why does Pepsi want us to copy this in order to lure women, when it’s only men who are interested in her? Don passes on the conventional wisdom that men want her, thus women want to be her, leaving Peggy to mull that over. She performs an hilariously bad Ann-Margret imitation when alone in her apartment, and then later experiments with her own ability to make men want her (and thus make her want herself), by initiating a one-night-stand with a young student. She appears to be modestly happy with the results.
Meanwhile, a seemingly unrelated plot sees Don and the others woo and then reject the business of some developers who plan to tear down Penn Station in order to build Madison Square Gardens. I know little of New York history, but I read in the Globe today an article about Jane Jacobs that mentioned she was a key player in the public outcry against this development. Jane Jacobs, of course, as an involved and thoughtful activist and citizen, would be a much healthier model of female identity than Ann-Margret, but circumstances conspire to deny Peggy awareness of her. Fittingly, this detail is also denied the viewer. It fits in perfectly with some dialogue elsewhere in the episode, about cities, living downtown vs. commuting, Betty’s dad’s need to ‘get out of the city’.
The episode is titled “Love Among the Ruins.” Which seems apt.
This is my first year attending the Toronto Film Fest in a serious way. By serious I mean I have a 25 daytime ticket package, I have the week off work, and I will be seeing 3+ films a day.
I generally attend a few screenings a year, either free passes through work (most often for Midnight Madness, which I adore), or going with a friend to something. But nothing comprehensive, and I confess to having a slightly negative view of the festival. I’m not a huge fan of celebrity culture, so the people who are drawn to that often bother me. Some of the film selections are questionable (every year there seem to be a lot of mainstream Hollywood flicks that are about to be released in theatres). And the process for getting advance tickets is so byzantine that it has turned me off doing it until now, despite my overpowering love of watching movies all day.
But thanks to the expert guidance of some TIFF vet friends, here I am, about ready to drop my order book off, having waded through an overcomplicated but doable selection process.
The site Tiffr (found via funkaoshi) was a huge help. The official TIFF site looks decent at first glance but the illusion quickly crumbles when you do something foolish like try to search for a film. Then you notice how it sometimes remembers your film list, sometimes not. Instead, Tiffr is like a benevolent parasite – you click a bookmarklet to shortlist films as you browse the TIFF official site. After that, your shortlist can populate a planner screen where you see the films you want to see in all their chronological, overlapping glory. Once you’ve made a series of frustrating compromises and finalized your schedule, you can print it, export to iCal, etc. (here’s mine, for whatever it’s worth to you.)
I’m cautiously optimistic about the upcoming festival experience. I think I’ve picked some decent flicks, and I’m frickin’ thrilled to have a week off work to do nothing but watch theoretically awesome movies. However, I understand there are at least a couple more Soviet bureaucratic hoops to be jumped through before I have my tickets, and possibly some lining up, so I’ll just wait and hope for the best.
