Ed's Web

THEM THANGS, ‘ritualistic iconography’ (some images NSFW). Another blog of the neverending-stream-of-images kind, but in hip black and white. I like it. (via None00)

Nick Gentry, for instance, uses floppy disks as canvas.

An article about the CD revival of the 2020s. (via The Null Device)

Which I’m actually unsure if it’ll ever happen. It seems plausible at first, but unlike vinyl the compact disc is actually quite a sophisticated and unstable media. It’s unlikely many discs will survive into the 2020s, let alone players in good working order (this is why you’ll never see a Lomography-style revival of late 90s VGA digital cameras). I think CDs will instead go the way of the floppy disk or the VHS tape: charming pieces of retro plastic.

An absurd, over-the-top action sequence from the Indian film Alluda Mazaaka. So, who’d win a fight between Chiranjeevi and Chuck Norris? (via Igor Pascoal)

Newsweek points us to the very interesting Internet Archaeology. Of the above, they comment “This is where it all began to go wrong”.

I agree.

How to do… almost everything. It’s a big page. I never knew that instead of washing, you could just freeze your jeans for a week. Or that you could chill wine by adding salt to the ice bucket (which makes perfect sense now that I recall my Chemistry classes).

Ah, web typography. When I did my first website back in 1997, things were pretty much limited to a choice between Arial and Times New Roman. Then Microsoft introduced Verdana and a couple of others, and people found out they could get away with really small font sizes. Georgia was lovely but not for everyone, and Trebuchet… well it just replaced Arial in my mind. The fact remains, for the last twelve years designers had less than a dozen sure choices for web type, fonts readily available in both Windows PCs and Macs. Windows Vista introduced a few pretty good fonts (such as the Candara that used to be this blog’s first choice), and that had designers writing ridiculously large CSS font stacks in order to maintain a small amount of control. Some did go all the way and wrote scripts that replaced HTML text with Flash movies which had some font embedded, but that’s a pretty crude solution to a problem that should be easier to solve.

It took ten years but finally most browsers support font embedding. Internet Explorer is a nuisance, as always, because despite being the first browser to support embedding (since I first started making websites, in fact!), it does so through some peculiar font format which is incompatible with everything else. Anyway, I finally jumped right into the @font-face bandwagon. You should be reading this text in CartoGothic (Font Squirrel also has a pretty friendly tool to help with the CSS and the conversion to IE format); and the headlines should be set in Jos Buivenga’s Delicious. If you are using one of the latest browsers, that is. Enjoy!

Update: screw that, using CartoGothic brings too much of a lag on page load. So it’s back to Trebuchet. But I’m keeping the titles set in Delicious.

Newbie Fashion Tips for Grown-Up Men (via Lifehacker).

I have the same problem the writer of this article had: no pressure at all to dress up. Which all fine when you’re in your twenties and don’t work in a bank. But now that I’m past thirty, even though I don’t intend to start wearing a suit, I think I should start dressing a bit more like my age. So that I don’t become one of those sorry middle-aged fools who dress like they’re not.

Anyway, nice to see I got the dark colors part right.

Boing Boing linked the Howtoons how-to guides for kids and adults alike. Such as this Visual Communication guide, a godsend for someone as inept at drawing with pen and paper as me.

There should be more things like this. It really pisses me off the fact that despite the exponential growth in access to information, there’s a thorough lack of great explainers in many areas. I wonder, for instance, if I could have learned any degree of programming without the kid-friendly ZX Spectrum programming books I read back in the day. I probably wouldn’t.

Quentin Tarantino himself curated an exhibition of alternative posters for Inglourious Basterds.

While working in After Effects, I moved the location of some files, and while they were unlinked I got this result: I love it. It’s a shame I can’t render it like this…

This image got me drooling like Homer Simpson. (via É Como em Tudo!)

When I saw this I imagined Wes Anderson directing a horror film in which three brothers go on a journey to India… but somehow end up in the jungle (not in the desert like in that other movie) being chased by killer elephants. Perhaps it’s the Futura. I’ll print a t-shirt. (via Pedro Quintas)

Amazed by the color pictures of London in the 1940s I posted the other day? Here’s
London in color film, 1927.

Shooting the MGM Lion Logo (1924). (via Newsweek at Tumblr)

Reminds me of this. (via Igor Pascoal)

Toby*spark’s Live Cinema Documentary. An amazing intro to cinema as live performance (way past VJing). (via CDM)

Joe Stevens’ Vans and the Places Where they Were is a fascinating typology, despite the windowless vans’ inherent creepiness.

Nearly ten years ago I got a Fuji MX-2700 as a birthday present. Despite its 2.3 megapixels and its fixed zoom lens it was as expensive back then as a decent laptop computer or a lower-midrange DSLR are now, not even accounting for inflation. Basically it was the most expensive present someone ever gave me, so I really made the most of it - the lackluster electrical appliance was my camera of choice for the next five years, despite my affairs with analog Yashicas and Nikons bought on eBay. Late 2005 I finally decided to give the Fuji a rest from being utterly crap, as in the meantime I was starting to get fed up with getting beter results from a BenQ toy camera that didn’t even have a viewfinder. So I got a somewhat better BenQ (how I love thy cheap electronics) for about 100 euros, and a couple years later, while at Fnac browsing a crate of items that have previously been on display at the store (therefore likely to have been abused by overeager button-pushers), got one of the worst and ugliest cameras Canon ever made for 50 euros, so I could go and hack it.

So anyway, last week I finally decided I should buy a proper digital camera. I can’t afford a good DSLR (say, a 5D Mark II?), and if I’m buying a DSLR nothing less than a fullframe sensor makes sense - anything less is a camera for wearing on weekends, impressing the clueless hipsters in the downtown cafés while making a fool of yourself in front of anyone who actually knows his optics (the people you really intended to impress). But I digress: If I can’t buy a fullframe sensor, at least I should do myself a favor and buy a lighter, smaller camera, so I thank my friend Ivo for pointing me the kind of small point-and-shoot camera a real photographer would buy: the Panasonic LX-3. Nevermind this camera is the Leica D-Lux 4 minus the logo and 300 euros. He had me sold with the f2.0 lens.

An in fact the camera feels like Quality. It has the size it should have for its abilities, unlike the junk SLRs you can get for the same price. And the way the lens is so well thought out sets it apart, a symptom of why the LX-3 is great: it can’t zoom past 60mm (35mm equiv.), but in a camera this small and (relatively) cheap, why would you want a tele (and the inherent loss of aperture, bigger body)? Are you a chromatic aberration nut? Good thinking by the Panasonic engineers there.

In a nutshell, the Panasonic is a good solid photographers’ camera. And I only wonder why are there so many crappy point-and-shoots being sold by the same 330 or so euros. Oh, because those come in pink. But nevermind those: the LX-3 is definitely highly recommended.

Not long ago I wrote about my first computer, which my father got me for my seventh birthday. But I had never seen an advertisment for it before. (via Pedro Quintas)

Rodney Ascher’s The S From Hell. A docu-horror short film about… a corporate design Manifestation of Evil?

Stuff I’ve been sharing on Facebook lately:

SnapSort, a photo camera comparison service. The Panasonic LX3 seems to win against every pocketable camera in its price range, but it’s a shame the site’s criteria isn’t more transparent. And I’d love to be able to do a reverse lookup, for instance, to list cameras sorted by low light performance.

360 degree views of airplane cockpits. That’s a lotta buttons.

In B-flat, a YouTube video orchestra.

The Sixty One, an alternative music internet radio. It seems many users are unhappy with a recent redesign, but having discovered this last week, I just love it. And the idea of completing ‘listening quests’ so your music recommendations have higher reputation may sound ridiculous - and it probably is - but I just can’t resist literally playing along.

Next time people ask me about my pay as teacher, I’ll send them a link to this video.

Andrew of The Null Device wrote about the intelligent dogs of Moscow that have learned to use the city’s subway system, as apparently London’s pigeons do too. Apropos of that, a blog dedicated to interspecies friendship (‘friendship’ meaning: not in the process of killing each other while photographed/videotaped).

Another great blog discovery is Unhappy Hipsters. It’s just cynical captions appended to images from some interior design magazine, but still.

A trailer for Oliver Stone’s Wall Street 2. I was shocked to find out about this, but soundtrack notwithstanding, the trailer got me interested. I can’t think of a sequel, by the same director and with the same lead, done this many years after the first movie.

Again via The Null Device, a news report on news reporting. Priceless. By professional defect, I sometimes catch myself looking at the utter dullness of TV news reports. Here in Portugal, newsmen love their shots of buildings’ signage - no piece about the economy is complete without three or four ugly shots of some sliding door with the words “Ministry of Finance” in it. And loads of shots of people’s lower bodies walking a busy street. An international classic.

The Oatmeal’s How to suck at Facebook. I think I’ve met every single type of user described in the comic.

Alex Gaiodouk’s deadpan photography. (via lightgreen)

More here.

A Kodachrome photo of Picadilly Circus, London, in 1949. More here.

Something to try.

Boing Boing posted this little gem from There, I Fixed It. Are those letters red electrical tape?

Married To The Sea is one great webcomic. I would post a lot more here if it wasn’t such bad form, because I was really undecided about which illustration I should pick. So I settled for the seagulls. Living in a city where seagulls are a health hazard, I really believe that’s what they mean while they chatter overhead. (via Drive-by Blogging)

I really dig Xplanes’ Sunday Fantasy feature. This is a Goodyear advertisement published right after the end of World War II in Europe. Why are airships such a cliché in positive views of The Future? Perhaps because airships are quiet and gentle.

I beg to differ: In my opinion, if airships ever become a common feature of our skies, that only means we’ve really scorched our atmosphere for good.

Hm. Perhaps I can, actually.

I can’t explain my fascination over this image. But it stays with me. (via Pedro Quintas)

An interesting post about the Bullitt car chase sequence. It’s incredible that forty-two years later it still is considered the greatest chase ever put to film, and in fact I’m hard pressed to think of car chases as great as the one on Pater Yates’ film. I can only remember William Friedkin’s The French Connection or John Frankenheimer’s Ronin - that generation of directors must have had a special knack for staging chases. (via the very interesting Selvedge Yard)

Alex Roman’s The Third & The Seventh. This video shows what really matters in CG: even though the long shots may not be the very best architectural renderings I’ve seen (the textures look rather flat sometimes), the lighting, the camera moves and the small details (specks of dust, etc) make for one really engaging piece.

All done by a single person using a desktop computer - this is what William Gibson meant when he coined the expression “Garage Kubrick”.

…then again - a good reminder. Perhaps I’ll print and frame this. (via Pedro Quintas)

Hm. I was never much of a tutorial person (I rather just go and recklessly do whatever I want to do), but some of these will probably provide me with the kind of AE training I’ll need soon.

Having turned thirty last April, that would seem like a logical good time to look back at my life in the past ten years. Instead, I’m glad I waited until the end of 2009, for there were still very important lessons to be learned in the last eight months of the decade.

It’s a terrible cliché to say I’m not the same person I was ten years ago. In fact, I’m pretty much the same person, to an irritating degree. Self-improvement only takes you so far, and the quirks, habits and little vices are hard to get rid of. I may have become less and less and less naïve about things, more and more cynical. Considering the worldwide hopefulness of the end of the 1990s (technology will save us all! long live The New Economy!), it’s not hard to come to the conclusion weltschmerz played a role in my life in the 2000s. Not that I spent the decade watching far too much CNN or reading far too much about, say, peak oil (perhaps I did), but because of the everyday manifestation of said weltschmerz: precarity.

The 2000s were a time of disillusionment because a lot of people found out they had bought into a scam: the whole thing about finishing college, getting a decent job, marrying and having kids. Here in Portugal, what people got instead was a job market that treats creative experts as hands for hire, in which a salary is a luxury as many of your ex-classmates are willing to work for free in the vague hope of getting paid, someday. Most can’t wait for that someday. Of the twenty-something Film Studies colleagues I graduated with, only a handful got some degree of involvement with actual video production. All others had to find something else. Being a ‘veteran’ of the 2000 dotcom collapse, I couldn’t say I was surprised at my narrow prospects upon finishing my college degree. I was very lucky to get a teaching job, but my going back to Multimedia for my Master’s is my way of moving on in dire times.

At twenty, I would have never expected that ten years on I’d still be living with my mother or driving the same car. That’s what I can manage with a (low) fixed income for only a college semester out of every year. Many of my generation trick themselves into believing they’re adults via a parent-sponsored faux-independence, something I’m in no position to enjoy or have any desire to. Many others have had the good fortune of being able to move on. But many others still are caught in a jam, half-adult, half-adolescent, working on ways of getting Fortune to show herself, unable to pay rent every month until then.

My freelancing never quite taken off. Not in the years before college, not after. Despite holding myself to being good at what I do. Perhaps I’m not very good with people: something the 2000s made quite clear is that the medical/psychological community is set into diagnosing everyone with syndromes I may or may not have, as if there was this perfect and immaculate template of ‘normality’, with no room for differences among people, among personalities. Yes, I am too verbal-minded and sometimes oblivious to non-verbal cues. Also I didn’t look at people in the eye much, but when I realized this, I didn’t go after some pityable explanation and started taking some meds. Instead, I made an effort to look at you in the eye.

The decade also held a lot of lessons about friendship and behaviour. I discovered the most vague, meaningless and still dangerous word there is: ‘values’. It’s not exclusive of right-wing demagogues. It is, if not in the mouths, at least in the minds of people who are willing to meddle in the affairs of others, to judge others in a bad light. Friends don’t judge. Never ever. A friend is someone who’s There. Ten years later, many of my best friends, which I love, would be people with no values, as defined by ex-friends and enemies. I’ve learned to be intolerant of one thing and one thing only: people being inconsiderate.

Finally, here’s a lesson most people don’t take to heart, wonderfully metaphorized in that crazy May 26th 2004. Just minutes after FC Porto, the club I had supported since a kid, had won the most important trophy in club football, I attended the first ever proper screening of one of my films, a documentary called O Zero. That was a poignant reminder one shouldn’t live through the superficial, or worse, through the achievements of others. One only lives through oneself. I was proud that day. Prouder than most in the celebrating masses.

Yesterday I indulged myself into writing my longest post ever, about my favorite films of the decade. Re-reading it, I see I left out of lot of things I should have talked about. I completely negleted non-portuguese and non-american movies (I should have mentioned Cidade de Deus, Rois et Reine, The Beat My Heart Skipped, In the Mood for Love, to say just a few - perhaps someday, when I write a rigorous appreciation of 00s film). And I also forgot to mention the return, around mid-decade, of 1970s-style political/paranoia thrillers (think Syriana or Michael Clayton), perhaps because unfortunately no timeless classic is to be found among the many good films of the genre. It’s telling that the best film so far about the Iraq War (and by a large margin) is the aggressively apolitical The Hurt Locker.

But still I haven’t shut up about film. That’s not only because of my film studies. It’s harder to properly evaluate the decade’s other arts in the last day of the 2000s. I’ve read a lot, but mostly stuff written much longer ago. By taking a quick glance at my shelves, I’d be tempted to nominate Douglas Coupland’s JPod or The Gum Thief as books that capture the decade’s cynicism and disillusionment pretty well, except they are not that great as works of literature. I’d mention Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves post-modern mindfunkiness as a classic waiting to be discovered, but published in 2000 it is essentially informed by a breakdown of the 1990s slacker way of life. Then there’s also Neal Stephenson’s 2400-page novel Baroque Cycle, which chronicles the period coincident with the lifetime of Isaac Newton with a sci-fi sensibility, resulting in the most interesting literary Heavy Meal of the decade (page-wise). A shame it was followed up by Anathem, which I have no doubt in calling Disappointment of the Decade.

What about music? At the end of every year I’d make pretty weak jokes, mentioning, say, my favourite records of 1995 as my favourite records of 2005. What happened was that during the 2000s I completely ceased to care about music, not going to that many live gigs too. Or perhaps I still care about music, but not with the kind of neuroticism I had in the 1990s. Still, I think this was the decade music was finally overwhelmed by postmodernism, resulting in no new styles to speak of, perhaps because the new toys of the 1980s and 1990s (we’re talking digital) are the same old toys by now - so accessible to the point Auto-Tune became a recurring joke. But thankfully there was more to the decade that now ends besides the pitch-corrected vocals: The White Stripes, M.I.A., LCD Soundsystem and TV on the Radio became regulars on my playlists, and Radiohead, Portishead and Boards of Canada continued there with their new releases. Perhaps I listened to far too much Beirut, and Nouvelle Vague made the journey from pleasant to over-ubiquous musak, but was a nice constant in my playlists for a brief moment.

A very special mention to the portuguese act A Naifa (video). Their album Canções Subterrâneas was a perfect revision of traditional fado, incorporating electronic instruments and lyrics about being unhappy despite recycling, using public transportation and not watching television. How more contemporary can you get?

Happy New Year!

So those were my favourite films of 2009. But what about my favourite film of the 2000s? My answer is as obvious (if you have been paying attention to this blog) as it is surprising:

David Simon’s The Wire (2002-2008). That’s right, my favourite film (or should I say my favourite work of moving image art to be more accurate) of the decade was a TV show, despite the fact I went to a movie theatre some seven hundred times in the last ten years, and obviously that means a lot more films if I count the stuff I caught on video or television. Hardcore cinema critics and pseudo-buffs are no doubt readying their torches and pitchforks after reading this, because they don’t understand the following: The Wire is a sixty hour movie. Not a single part of a single episode in any of its five seasons is skippable, and the overall story arc is so flawless it must be treated as a single work of art. It’s the film equivalent of the twelve hundred page novel. A bit too much to fit in an usual two hour screening, so you get to see it in small parts on television, although I’d be more than happy to pay to attend a marathon screening. The Wire defines and makes sense of the 2000s, of how turbo-capitalism conquered all - including hearts and minds - thus stripping people of their worth. What to do then? How do we cope? The Wire’s finale shows us the way character is reincarnated, what’ve seen is one among seemingly endless loops of human condition. If we change in some way - or even die -, someone will step into our shoes. People will be the same everywhere.

The value of blogging for such a long time is that I can read the my favourite film lists for 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002 and 2001. I love going out to watch a film in a dark room, despite all the convenient gadgets that appeared during the last decade - HDTV sets, streaming set-top boxes, Internet downloads, etc. - and my love of going to the movies makes me enjoy most of the movies I watch (I think those film critics that rarely rate anything over two stars must secretly hate their jobs). So the following is a highly subjective view of film in the 2000s, and often the context played as strong a role in my appreciation as the film itself.

Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind first and foremost. I went to see it three times in a row! Who else but this frenchman to deliver a drama that blends campy sci-fi concepts and lots of film nerd trickery into coherent and naturalistic love story? And I disagree with everyone who says this is a sad movie, I’ve seen it in a period of personal distress and in fact it did help me recover.

Ghost World, The Royal Tenenbaums, Punch-Drunk Love. Terry Zwigoff, Wes Anderson and Paul Thomas Anderson’s films all had a vibrant indie quirkyness that made you feel like the coolest person in the neighbourhood for watching (P. T. Anderson later directed There Will Be Blood, which I found one of the most brilliant movies ever on an intellectual level, but that’s another story). The first half of the decade was actually a great time for American independents - the brief moment in which market forces gave these authors, grown out of the 90s great age of independent film, all the resources they needed - but still before the damaging moment ’indie’ became a marketing category (probably around the time of Little Miss Sunshine’s Oscar campaign), leading to uncritically acclaimed crap such as Juno, the Benedict XVI-approved anti-abortion pamphlet disguised in Ghost World clothing. In 2006 there was, however, one quirky American indie film that stood out:

That was Miranda July’s Me and You and Everyone We Know. There are few things hardly as great as entering a movie theatre knowing nothing about the film you’re about to watch (there are no known actors, no known director, having seen no trailers, read no reviews), and two hours later leaving the theatre knowing you’ve just seen one of the great films of the decade. Miranda July’s is not primarily a filmmaker, so I felt none of that carreer-defining urgency you often get from independent directors. It’s a quirky little American indie film, but it’s also fearless and careless. I like that.

And what happens when you get a veteran director to do an indie-style flick? Probably a bad idea, but Jonathan Demme was more than up to the task. A couple of days ago I praised Rachel Getting Married, but what I didn’t tell you then is that movie was also watched in a context. Like Jonathan Levine’s The Wackness which I had watched a few months before, it provided eerie moments of identification, and among the most amusing post-film discussions I ever had with a friend. But to delve into that would be something for my novel…

And what can I say about Benoît Delépine and Gustave de Kerverne’s Aaltra? Comedy of the Decade, perhaps, despite being surely Most Inappropriate Film of the Decade too. Aaltra blends the offbeat with the darkest humour imaginable, and you’ll often find yourself embarrassed to be laughing (and you will) at the wheelchair-bound travelers.

Genre film, then. I’ll deal primarily with the only genre I have a degree of affinity with - science fiction. The 2000s was not a great decade for that, as everyone was busying themselves with Lord of the Rings-type fantasy and superhero adaptations. Some true science-fiction tentpoles were shockingly bad (I, Robot or Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, which I won’t even bother linking), and the only good recent one - Avatar - is itself a marriage between fantasy and science-fiction, more of the former in fact than the latter. But there were a few bright spots in the bleak landscape of sci-fi nowadays (a statement I would also extend to books): Steven Spielberg did score a hit before that spectacular miss with Minority Report. Danny Boyle’s Sunshine missed the chance at becoming a great classic of the genre with that horror/slasher ending, but did deliver some of the greatest sci-fi images of the decade. Moon, directed by David Bowie’s son Duncan Jones looks and feels like a science fiction film of the 1970s - in a great way. And then, the only timeless classic the decade brought us - a Soylent Green for the 21st century:

Alfonso Cuarón Children of Men. Not only it updates, at long last, our collective vision of futuristic nightmare, it does so in a frighteningly realistic way: of course we do not expect the implausible event of worldwide sterilty being the catalyst for doom as it is in this film, but we can too well imagine things such as raging climate change or energy crisis leading to a year 2027 pretty similar to Cuarón’s depiction. Perhaps this one too is one of the great films of the decade. All of the films I listed here so far - like the quirky indie one - are deliriously and deliciously avoidant (and I like them), but Children of Men, like The Wire, defines the noughts in a way others don’t. The Wire might be a very long essay on turbo-capitalism. Children of Men is by contrast a small cautionary tale about the Bush/Blair doctine of international relations.

This was also an interesting decade for Portuguese film. As always, the institutions are reacting very slowly to technological innovation and to a generation change, so the great Portuguese films I enjoyed watching are probably not those seen with great interest at the Film Institute or by our film critics who generally have such a narrow-minded view of authorship and le cinema they become cannibalistic fetishists, hating (not a strong enough word) far more movies than the few put out by the authors they love. And yet, these films I’m talking about have a merely incidental commercial appeal (ostensible efforts at commercially successful films in Portugal always have ended up in total artistic disaster). Therefore they somehow slipped through the cracks of the system.

João Canijo’s Noite Escura, perhaps the most academically acceptable of the lot, set a Greek tragedy in a roadside brothel. But more insteresting is the fact this was one of the first portuguese films I had ever seen that was perfectly acceptable from a technical standpoint. No more faded film stock, no more unperceptible dialogues - shit that needlessly drives people away. All of a sudden low-budgeted Portuguese films looked and sounded… okay (here’s a sigh of relief). That was 2004. The following year, Marco Martins’ Alice became an unexpected hit, and all of a sudden it seemed as if we portuguese could crank out decent, watchable films if we just learn to ignore the old cranks and their apostles, and dismiss the sleazes in for a quick buck in the film production business. Even Miguel Gomes, out of the film criticism heart of darkness that lead to pretty bad short films, cranked out a surprisingly good movie in 2008 called Aquele Querido Mês de Agosto. And I’d also highlight Tiago Guedes and Frederico Serra’s Entre os Dedos, or this year’s 4 Copas by Manuel Mozos. We even had a science fiction film in this decade, and a good one! Solveig Nordlund’s Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude, an adaptation of J. G. Ballard’s Low Flying Aircraft.

What about moments in movies? There were perhaps too many to be interesting, but I would definitely highlight Bill Murray singing More than This in Lost in Translation, which placed Roxy Music’s song in top of my personal list of Top Songs that Are So Depressing It’s Funny. There was also another very funny moment, halfway David Lynch’s Inland Empire. Jeremy Irons’ character, a film director, is seen in a seemingly endless monologue trying to instruct his gaffer to place a light just right. I burst out laughing like a maniac during that scene, the only person laughing in a packed room full of bored people. I had spent the previous days working in Corações Plásticos. My job? Getting the gaffer to place the lights just right.

It’s that time of the year yet again: My favourite (and not so favourite) films of 2009, chosen among the sixty-one features I watched in a movie theatre (picking up from my last year’s dismal less-than-weekly film-going).

Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married felt unique among all the films I’ve watched in 2009. It didn’t feel like a movie at all, instead I left the theatre feeling I had attended that wedding and met all the characters. Demme’s use of improvisation and Anne Hathaway’s performance gave the film a truer feeling than perhaps a documentary about a real misfit attending a real wedding could (and there lies the genius of it). And then there’s the soundtrack. Loved that soundtrack.

Ursula Meier’s Home was a film with a simple concept. A family lives next to an unfinished motorway, and have all the fun people do when they’ve got a large area of asphalt all for themselves - eg. playing hockey. But one day the motorway opens for traffic. What used to be one kind of paradise became traffic noise hell, and slowly the family falls into madness and despair. It’s a simple idea that proves you don’t need sophisticated situations and villains - a family fighting against the lack of silence will do for one of the most engaging films I’ve seen.

Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker. A prime example of the stupidity of portuguese film distributors is that I had to go watch what is perhaps the prime contender in the coming award season in a shitty screen in an expired mall in the suburbs of Gaia (itself a suburb) because it was the only screen in all of northern Portugal showing this movie. But it was perhaps appropriate I watched The Hurt Locker in a shithole I had last went to watch Starship Troopers (that was twelve years ago), because this is no glossy picture. It’s a raw depiction of the daily life of a bomb squad in Iraq, and a soldier-centered portrait of war addiction. Parts of this film are so unexpected that I honestly felt as watching some kind of bizarre Wile E. Coyote cartoon, except the characters are real people and that ACME stuff is massively deadly. I disagree with the Slashfilm critic that said Avatar was a far superior (metaphorical) film about the Iraq War. James Cameron knows very well Avatar’s audience is very wide-ranging so he did make not-so-subtle points about war and imperialism, which is fine by me. But The Hurt Locker is another kind of movie, presumed to be watched by people who know all that and appreciate a movie that skips the too-obvious criticism. This is Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket territory.

Between watching RocknRolla on January 1st and Sherlock Holmes last Saturday (the two Guy Ritchie films being nice-but-not-great bookends to my film-going year), there were many other films I found great in 2009:

Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler made the 1980s feel like an entire lifetime ago. Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona was a fun pleasant surprise. Zack Snyder’s Watchmen didn’t disappoint in its adaptation of my favourite comic book. Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino felt like a perhaps-somewhat-premature farewell to Clint-the-actor, and could perhaps do without the singing in the end credits. Tony Gilroy’s Duplicity was a good caper - and I do love capers. Steven Soderbergh’s two-volume fighting diary of Che delivered some great filmmaking while showing the man in your t-shirt did kill people, demistifying the argentine revolutionary. Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control was a cool film - and that’s all I wanted, really. Oliver Hirschbiegel’s little film about revenge Five Minutes of Heaven delivered exactly what its director set out to do. Public Enemies showed yet again how much we as an audience tend to assign meaning to a movie’s technical medium, and that Michael Mann’s a genius in the way he teaches us to stop envisioning the past in black and white, documentary truth in handheld video, night time in saturated blues. Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds was an orgasm of alternative history. Gianni di Gregorio’s Pranzo de Ferragosto was a lovely little comedy, and perhaps the best I’ve seen all year. James Gray’s Two Lovers was a solid drama to start the Fall season. Tom Hooper’s The Damned United was a pretty unique sports film - a real story about a 1970s English football manager - which I still can’t tell whether I really liked it that much. I found Duncan Jones’ Moon among the best science fiction films of the decade, and surely the best of the year. I welcomed Tetro as a good comeback from Francis Ford Coppola after his last film’s utter debacle. And finally, James Cameron’s Avatar, despite being a very predictable Pocahontas in space (the Disney version), is well worth the (3D) ticket price, just for the visual gorgeousness of it.

There were unfortunately not many portuguese films of note. I did like the austere visuals of Sandro Aguilar’s A Zona and Manuel Mozos’ emphasis on simplicity in his 4 Copas.

Finally, in a year I didn’t catch many bad or mediocre films, there was one undisputable Champion of Suckiness, with the potential to start a flame war just for saying so: J. J. Abrams’ Star Trek. Let’s just say that I can warm up to blue natives riding dragons over floating mountains. But time-travel and parallel universes (exploited by writers that show no guilt in weaving Deus Ex Machinas into the story) make me mad!

Alain de Botton’s talk A kinder, gentler philosophy of success is one of the most inspiring things I’ve seen lately.

Famous photographers and their cameras. That’s William Eggleston holding the Leica.

Merry Xmas! (via xplanes)

Jason Kottke has been doing a great job tracking 2000s Best Of lists. And to be honest, you could devote a whole blog to those. I’ll do some lists of my own in due time, but this one I did enjoy: Movie Posters of the Decade. (via Natalia on Facebook)

Love this xkcd. While teaching practical use (i.e. video editing) to kids who often reason and behave as if the computer is a black box with elves, fairies, unicorns and glitter inside, I’m always trying to offer a glimpse of the real beauty: Layer upon layer of progressive abstraction that allows for billions of very simple elements, such as what are basically on-off switches, to create something incredible complex, for instance a dramatic chipmunk.

Having started building websites in 1997, I guess I could say “CSS techniques I wish existed” back then, but still this is a pretty good recap on the kind of knowledge that often slips past the cracks in my self-learning (I’ve only had a couple of months of formal webdesign training, and that was back in 1999).

Gerard Van der Leun found a stash of photos of Los Angeles taken by Ansel Adams in the early 1940s. I love the pulp magazines in the front. (via Kottke)

An impressive gallery of bankrupt and closed-down shopping malls. (via BoingBoing)

The excellent Basic Sounds blog (move over, VVORK!) links the NatGeo International Photography Contest winners.

“So, ‘Slacker’ or ‘Clerks’?”

We had spent dinnertime watching the trailers for the movies I had in my computer. I was at my friend’s in Lisbon, and since she was feeling a bit sick I decided to stay home with her and watch some film together. We had already spent some time pitting trailer against trailer, and by then already crossed off the list films such as Brazil, Son of Rambow, Mister Lonely, and a few other still unwatched movies I had ripped to my laptop while packing for my six-day trip down south. In the final round we had Richard Linklater’s first feature versus Kevin Smith’s. Her pick.

“‘Slacker’”, she said.

Best film choice of the year. We watched it and after it was over we went silent for a while, perhaps letting out a timid “Wow”. It’s easily the most influential thing I watched in a long time, and I just couldn’t believe I hadn’t watched it before. Especially since it turned out you can watch the entire film for free on YouTube.

Later the same night I watched Clerks. Not quite the same thing.