The Future Is Now

Two news items that I'm putting together:

1. Digital film delivery is coming soon to movie theaters. Supposedly the system will be encrypted, but I wonder how long before it gets hacked to either: A) steal the movie, B) put up on the screen your own video (or more likely, insert something in the film). (via MSNBC and Gizmodo).

2. An expert system (or AI?) has been found to be practicing law without a license. (via Wired). The system supposedly helped out people fill out bankruptcy forms, but the courts ruled that it was practicing law as it was making decisions (in this case, incorrect ones) and personalized counsel. Sci-Fi reality.

Disrupted Narratives

The New Yorker has an extensive article on the disrupted narratives that have appeared recently in modern cinema, citing examples such as Pulp Fiction and Memento, and then dissecting Guillermo Arriaga and Alejandro González Iñárritu's trilogy of "Amores Perros", 21 Grams" and "Babel". It seems to especially focus on the latter, and perhaps comes to a conclusion that not many others have voiced (I can't say, I haven't seen Babel yet).

I was surprised that such a long piece describing the filmmakers who play with traditional chronological narratives and their resultant films would completely leave out David Lynch. Omission for brevity's sake? Laziness? Who knows.

One small point that is made by David Denby (the writer) is that digital cinema is both ripe and rife with cut-ups in narrative: the former since the technology allows it and latter because of this ease of use. I expect to see far more of this in the future.

How far can the envelope be pushed? There have been some scientific studies on how the human mind recognizes things like words. It turns out that you can scramble the internal letters, and as long as the first and last letters are left in place, comprehension can occur.

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, olny taht the frist and lsat ltteres are at the rghit pcleas. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by ilstef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Can the same be said for any story? How far can one go in slicing and dicing the story before it becomes unrecognizable and incomprehensible? Isn't life just a set of clips that we put together to make sense of the whole thing?

We are the StrangE

Or WATS for short is a possibly seminal moment in do it yourself digital film-making. Or so Wired says. Produced entirely in what looks like the director's home office, this strange blend of computer and stop motion animation (Str8nime as the term has been coined) has to be the direct result of playing too many video games as a child.

M dot Strange makes filmmaking history, creating every frame in the entire 88 minute feature film himself as a one man production powerhouse with his trademark "Str8nime" style. Str8nime is a bold and vivid new style that is a mixture of Strangeness, 8-bit videogame culture, and Japanese Anime. With several more feature films currently in development, the future of cinema is guaranteed to be a little well....Strange.

That's probably why I like it. It's currently being shown at the Sundance film festival, so hopefully the full length feature is released soon.

In the meantime check out the trailer on YouTube, or one of the various downloads available at the site.

David Lynch's Inland Empire

I had the good fortune to catch Lynch's Inland Empire. The director himself was present to introduce the movie (with a very interesting short improv piece with himself and pianist who's name I cannot recall) and he stayed afterwards to generously answer questions from the audience (most of which were a waste of time, although some were enlightening - not the questions, but at least the answers).

If Mulholland Drive was a Mobius strip of a movie, then Inland Empire is a hypercube, it's infinite facets reflecting both inwardly and outwardly.

Much has been made of Lynch switching completely to digital video on this production (NYT, Wikipedia). During the Q&A after the film, Lynch said that the experience was completely liberating and that 'he was done with film'. He went on to say that the freedom you get with DV is such that you can let a shot go and go until you attain something that you never would have had with film, which is so expensive to shoot that the constraints completely limit the artist.

Is machinima, then, the playground of the mind? There are literally no constraints except for time and imagination. Is that too liberating for some who much be constrained to produce great works? Are the infinite possibilities too much to contend with?