Miscellany: May 2008 Archives

How desperate does Hollywood have to be to vandalize its own movies?. According to the usually reliable projectionist crowd over at Film-Tech.com, Deluxe sent out film prints of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull that had the audio tracks deliberately fucked up as part of some monumentally misguided plan to catch pirates down the line by tracing the audio glitches in their pirated recordings. (The audio tracks of bootlegged movies are often of much higher quality than the video, since pirates have figured out how to tap directly into theatrical sound systems.) The mob at boingboing reports what seems like a high occurrence of anecdotes about screenings of the film where the soundtrack fell back to analog -- or dropped out entirely. If this is true, it's a massive "fuck you" to moviegoers, much worse than those annoying orange dots that serve the same supposed anti-piracy function. My local theaters have a hard enough time maintaining the integrity of picture and sound without the distributors making their lives even more difficult. Just unbelievable. (Via Movie City News.)

I can only hope that reports of Mike D'Angelo's death are, once again, greatly exaggerated. Even if they come from Mike D'Angelo himself.

Not movie-related, but kinda fascinating, I'd think, for content geeks of any stripe: A Usenet-based team of music obsessives -- known, apparently, as The Whitburn Project -- has been not only working on creating a huge (illegal) archive of post-1890 pop songs, but also maintaining a huge spreadsheet database of song data, including song length, BPM, label, and more. Andy Baio (Waxy.org) is running the numbers. Today, Baio charts average song duration over time, but promises more to come.




Zhang Ziyi appears in a Mercedes commercial. In China.

Check out this slideshow: Liberty City vs. New York City. What's especially interesting is, at low resolution, it's sometimes hard to tell the live-action shots from the videogame grabs.