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Mark Romanek, Jonathan Glazer, Anton Corbijn and Stephane Sednaoui will all be in attendance at a Film Comment Selects event moderated by Michel Gondry and observing the release of the four new Directors Label DVDs collecting their music video, commercial, and short-film work. The blessed event occurs on Tuesday, Sept. 13, and tickets ($15/$12 for Film Society of Lincoln Center members) should be available real soon now. I'm assuming the projection will take place from DVD, although it would be great to see some higher-quality sources. (I know the Beastie Boys have lately been finishing videos in high-definition, but I wonder how many older clips actually exist in anything better than NTSC or PAL resolution.)
Anyone remember the article in Film Comment some years back accusing Romanek of outright thievery for lifting ideas and images from famous painters, photographers and other artists in his videos? Guess there's no hard feelings.
Posted by Bryant Frazer at 07:38 PM | Comments (0)
WRITIN' FOR A LIVIN'"I've got a credit on this movie and still nobody has any idea who the fuck I am."
War of the Worlds screenwriter Josh Friedman (no, the other War of the Worlds screenwriter) has a blog. He's already blogged a WGA arbitration story, for which I'm always a sucker, and promises to write about his experiences working on The Black Dahlia, finally coming to the screen via Brian De Palma and based on one of the best books I've ever read.
Posted by Bryant Frazer at 12:05 PM | Comments (0)
"Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner ..."
I'm not normally one of those readers who loves to read elaborate pans of bad movies, but this Ebert review of Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo had me LOL for some reason.
Posted by Bryant Frazer at 01:36 PM | Comments (1)
Yep, I went and did it. I've long coveted Web pages that are heavy on graphics and color, so after keeping it simple (stupid) for quite a few years, I've gone and revamped the place. Whether this makes me look clever or foolish, I'm not quite sure. But revamped it is.
I spent an awful long time trying to make this work as a full-on CSS layout, but CSS is stubborn. I knew I wanted the key image in the page to be a big graphic with type burned in. I knew that I wanted vertical nav-style bars on either side of it. And I knew I wanted the thing to fit comfortably in an 800x600ish browser window. But it's a hell of a thing to try and get CSS markup to conform three columns to precisely the same length, and as I was reading up on absolute and relative positioning in an effort to wrestle a relatively minor display discrepancy between Firefox and Internet Explorer to the ground, I realized that using a nested table, rather than CSS, would solve the problem elegantly. And then I started to wonder how a great big table would handle the niceties of my three column layout and, bam, the whole thing fell into place in an evening.
The page still boasts quite a bit of (messy) CSS mark-up, and I plan to work on it as a continuing project. The rest of the site is full of ancient HTML pages that could use a good facelift so maybe I can brighten up the joint -- even if I never get around to figuring out a relatively simple way to serve all the reviews dynamically (or at least offer dynamic listings from a reviews database that can enable complex searches while still linking to the static pages).
If you know anything about page design, you'll note that I'm not a particularly elegant HTML coder. Rather than using screwdrivers and tiny chisels, I'm the guy hitting the blasted thing with the flat side of a hammer over and over again. But I hope you get some pleasure out of the enhanced imagery. And if you can think of any ideas for regular non-review content to fill that big gaping hole at the bottom of my middle column, please let me know.
Posted by Bryant Frazer at 10:42 PM | Comments (7)