Wednesday, May 16, 2007
It's Good To Be A "Select City" (*)
by Tom Bozzo
Even if the fee were advertised as a new upholstery on the Sundance jet charge, going back to the old, less ad-barraged, days was totally worth it. This is also a grain of salt with which to take market researchers' pronouncements that ad-supported video streaming will kill off iTunes-style pay-once-and-never-watch-an-ad downloads. The "advancement" is DRM technology that will make the ads "unskippable." As if the technology of getting up and going to the kitchen/taking a leak during commercial breaks hadn't existed in the pre-TiVO stone age. My informal survey of DVD mastering practices suggests that unskippable ad content is becoming a bit less prevalent, perhaps (correctly) reflecting the desire of content owners to avoid inducing rage that can follow from such "features." Especially when you need to wait a frackin' eternity with a preschooler to hear some loser explain in a pathetic "Thomas" voice how you can visit the Thomas frackin' Product Gallery before getting to the hot engine-on-troublesome-truck action.
Meanwhile, sick as I am (despite limited movie-going) of Marcus Theatres' pre-show announcement reel (*****), it does theoretically remind patrons to SHUT THEIR FRACKIN' CELL PHONES OFF. That lesson was lost on one woman, whose phone rang audibly over the theater's surround sound ("Away From Her" not exactly having an earsplitting soundtrack) and who then audibly took the call in the auditorium. Vigilantism did the trick, as my boss pulled an Erin and before I could turn my head to locate the offender he had gotten up and told the loud-talker to take it outside. (Update: Apparently, she just took the call back to her row, where we couldn't hear her.)
As for "Away From Her," it was no barrel of laughs, but not the total downer you might expect from a film about early-onset Alzheimer's. I'd expect it to be played as a straight-up weepy by Hollywood, or worse a morality play about duty to one's stricken spouse, which would make the endeavor about as appealing as early-onset Alzheimer's itself.
(*) As in "Now playing in select cities."
(**) We preliminarily agree with Janelle à Paris that it wouldn't be a bad thing were Peet's to be the brand of American coffee hegemony.
(***) No TV-style ads, that is. No complaints about the preview for Paul Verhoeven's "Black Book."
(****) Some Sundance opening glitches: a misspelling of "purchase" on a screen in the mall kiosk; the online ticketing function works with Firefox 2.0 for ICBM (******) but not Firefox 2.0 (or Safari) on the G5 iMac this morning. Maybe Steve Jobs can have a Word with Mr. Redford.
(*****) Which is in large part product-placement ad for the refreshment stand, and otherwise tries to tug at the patron's heartstrings with rapid-fire editing of clips from action-packed 'mersh blockbusters. That's somewhat out-of-place at Marcus's Westgate Art Cinema, which will retain its 3 screens of art-film programming despite its proximity to Sundance's 6.
(******) Intel-Chip Based Mac, specifically, my work-issued MacBook Pro — now visibly snappier when running WinXP under Parallels thanks to a second gigabyte of RAM.
Three cheers for Sundance 608:
- Real butter on the popcorn.
- Real coffee (**) at the concession stand, a.k.a. Caffe 608.
- No ads (***) before the films.
Even if the fee were advertised as a new upholstery on the Sundance jet charge, going back to the old, less ad-barraged, days was totally worth it. This is also a grain of salt with which to take market researchers' pronouncements that ad-supported video streaming will kill off iTunes-style pay-once-and-never-watch-an-ad downloads. The "advancement" is DRM technology that will make the ads "unskippable." As if the technology of getting up and going to the kitchen/taking a leak during commercial breaks hadn't existed in the pre-TiVO stone age. My informal survey of DVD mastering practices suggests that unskippable ad content is becoming a bit less prevalent, perhaps (correctly) reflecting the desire of content owners to avoid inducing rage that can follow from such "features." Especially when you need to wait a frackin' eternity with a preschooler to hear some loser explain in a pathetic "Thomas" voice how you can visit the Thomas frackin' Product Gallery before getting to the hot engine-on-troublesome-truck action.
Meanwhile, sick as I am (despite limited movie-going) of Marcus Theatres' pre-show announcement reel (*****), it does theoretically remind patrons to SHUT THEIR FRACKIN' CELL PHONES OFF. That lesson was lost on one woman, whose phone rang audibly over the theater's surround sound ("Away From Her" not exactly having an earsplitting soundtrack) and who then audibly took the call in the auditorium. Vigilantism did the trick, as my boss pulled an Erin and before I could turn my head to locate the offender he had gotten up and told the loud-talker to take it outside. (Update: Apparently, she just took the call back to her row, where we couldn't hear her.)
As for "Away From Her," it was no barrel of laughs, but not the total downer you might expect from a film about early-onset Alzheimer's. I'd expect it to be played as a straight-up weepy by Hollywood, or worse a morality play about duty to one's stricken spouse, which would make the endeavor about as appealing as early-onset Alzheimer's itself.
(*) As in "Now playing in select cities."
(**) We preliminarily agree with Janelle à Paris that it wouldn't be a bad thing were Peet's to be the brand of American coffee hegemony.
(***) No TV-style ads, that is. No complaints about the preview for Paul Verhoeven's "Black Book."
(****) Some Sundance opening glitches: a misspelling of "purchase" on a screen in the mall kiosk; the online ticketing function works with Firefox 2.0 for ICBM (******) but not Firefox 2.0 (or Safari) on the G5 iMac this morning. Maybe Steve Jobs can have a Word with Mr. Redford.
(*****) Which is in large part product-placement ad for the refreshment stand, and otherwise tries to tug at the patron's heartstrings with rapid-fire editing of clips from action-packed 'mersh blockbusters. That's somewhat out-of-place at Marcus's Westgate Art Cinema, which will retain its 3 screens of art-film programming despite its proximity to Sundance's 6.
(******) Intel-Chip Based Mac, specifically, my work-issued MacBook Pro — now visibly snappier when running WinXP under Parallels thanks to a second gigabyte of RAM.
Tuesday, March 06, 2007
Bullets of Stuff I Might Have Blogged About In Greater Depth
by Tom Bozzo
- The good news: tea-leaf readers report that the Apple Store is coming to Madison (via Badger Blues). The bad news: it's coming to the thoroughly miserable West Towne Mall. Apple would have been an excellent anchor for the new retail space at Hilldale — and having it across the street from work wouldn't suck. Nor, from Apple's perspective, would be having the Sundance Cinema and Whole Foods for neighbors.
- Dep't of self-answering questions: in the Wisconsin State Journal blurb (link n/a), Tom Alesia wonders how Sundance will differentiate itself from the Westgate Art Cinema, just a couple miles southwest. He then describes how Sundance a bar (including a rooftop patio in season) and a cafe, plus the Cap Times account notes the stadium seating — none of which Westgate has. Plus, Sundance will be one minute's walk from the Hilldale Great Dane and Son of Restaurant Muramoto. Go figure.
- All good news: the Sundance Cinema won't show commercials before films. Previews are presumably accepted as part of the experience. To Robert Redford: [smooch].
- But I'm really thankful that Marcus Theatres has run Westgate as an art cinema, especially when visiting Delaware (where there's a larger and generally as-well-to-do population) and seeing that the only alternative to multiplex fare is a drive to Philadelphia. There can be benefits to relative remoteness, even though it would be nice to be able to hop on a train and be disgorged in midtown Manhattan a couple hours later.
- Back to Apple: one of the recent Microsoft court cases revealed a memo suggesting that Microsoft had used continued development of Office as a (cough) lever with Apple in the pre-iPod, pre-iMac, pre-OS X 90s, when its future was unclear. Among other gems, Mac Office users were seen as guinea pigs for new Windows Office features. Not obviously featured: gratitude to Mac users for nurturing the Office cash cow when Lotus and WordPerfect ruled the DOS world.
- It's worth remembering that Mac Word 5.0a did almost everything its bloated descendents do (real-time spell check being the major innovation worth the CPU cycles) while running well on computers with one thousandth the processing and storage capacities of contemporary systems.
- One reason I haven't been blogging: learning the ropes of the new rules in Civilization IV. (To Mrs. Coulter: it's truly wise to ban Civ while major real-life projects are a-pending.) Civ IV has been just about as addicting as the original Civilization — which also ran well, back in the early '90s, on computers that couldn't display Civ IV's irritating start-up animations. There's no good reason why the Civ IV game engine couldn't run well (with functional graphics) on the iPhone-minus-the-phone that will presumably be the next-generation iPod. But Civ IV's performance on dual-core Intel Macs is middling, and it's performance on late-generation G5s is appalling.
- Maybe computer science departments should have bloatware remediation courses in their curricula.
Labels: Apple, Cinema, computers, Madison, MSFT, Random Bullets
