12.30.2007

CHUD MB Thread: Books about Movies

12.28.2007

Thomas Edison's Frankenstein

12.22.2007

Books in 2007, the best

Basket Case
Skinny Dip
The Quick Red Fox
Deadly Shade of Gold
Roving Mars
The Road
Carter Beats The Devil
The Trench
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Bright Orange for the Shroud
Meg: Primal Waters
Crooked Little Vein
Plum Lovin'
Lean Mean Thirteen
No Country for Old Men
Darker Than Amber
Live and Let Die
wooden boats


Best book I have read all year and well worth taking my time to read it.

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12.21.2007

Hellboy: The Golden Army Teaser Trailer

The "Aw crap" line at the end makes me laugh out loud every time:

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12.19.2007

Paul Pope Piece

Merry Christmas from the Family - Robert Earl Keen

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12 Yats of Christmas

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12.12.2007

Miller's Crossing New Orleans Locations

From here:

The pre-planning for "Miller's Crossing" began with four single-spaced pages of location descriptions written by the Coens to communicate to their early collaborators the precise look, feel and camera needs of each location in the film. (The most laconic was the description of Verna's place: "Modest one-bedroom apartment, large living room. Verna doesn't care where she lives, and neither do we.")

Armed with these notes, the Coens and line producer Graham Place visited three different cities before settling on New Orleans, where economic factors and a preservation movement dating from the Thirties had left many buildings from the Twenties intact. Working with production designer Dennis Gassner and location manager Amy Ness, and aided by local assistant location manager Jimmy Otis, they started finding or building the locations that would be combined on film to create the imaginary Prohibition-era city in which the story takes place.

New Orleans cooperated. For the scenes in Leo's club, which displays the tasteful oldworld style of its affluent proprietor, the members of the city's staid International House opened their doors for the first time to a film crew. During the days when the downstairs dining-room was needed for filming, the members took their lunch in a smaller upstairs room, where little cards on the table informed them that they were being inconvenienced "to facilitate filming in New Orleans."

The merchants on Magazine Street in the less affluent downtown area, which boasts several blocks that still look like the Twenties, imposed severer restrictions. To avoid interrupting commerce, angles were carefully calculated and scheduled to permit a "walk-and-talk" scene to be shot in one day. With the help of sprinklers, Picayune Street (named after the city's leading newspaper) became the location for a rainy nighttime "walk-and-talk" with Tom and Verna. Fireworks erupted on Church Street, which became the scene of a shoot-out between police and the denizens of Leo's social club, The Sons of Erin. And a tiny Dickensian alley locked away behind an ancient gate became Rug's Alley, where a hood named Rug Daniels loses his life (and his toupee) early in the film.

The hardest location to find was Caspar's Great Room, a gigantic panelled room ("they don't call it the Great Room for nothing") where Tom confronts the up-and-coming gangster Johnny Caspar, whose club is still a shabby affair ("a down-and-dirty speakeasy, gaming place, clip joint") because the proprietor has put all his money into his home. Due to its shifting soil, New Orleans is not a city where things were built big - the typical New Orleans house is a lot of small connecting parlors - but the filmmakers found their Great Room in Gallier Hall, the former City Hall named for the architect who brought the Greek Revival style to New Orleans. Its large English-style rooms are now rented out for wedding receptions and other functions requiring lots of space, and two of them, considerably rebuilt, served as Caspar's Great Room and the Mayor's Office in the film. The exterior and foyer of Caspar's house were filmed at the exclusive Louise S. McGehee School, another New Orleans institution which had never played host to a film crew.

Leo's home, which is the scene of a nighttime attack by a pair of hit-men, was put together out of four separate locations, including Northline, a street in the Old Metairie section of town where the filmmakers blew up a car, and two constructed sets. (The making of this complex sequence, which took several weeks to shoot, is described in the March issue of Premiere.)

All the sets that had to be built were housed in a huge garage on Annunciation Street owned by the Toye Brothers, a local real estate firm. Here, for example, the filmmakers built Tom's apartment, with its semi-circular living room which had to be, the filmmakers told Gassner, "like the inside of Tom's head."

The scenes in Miller's Crossing, the majestic forest where destinies cross and where the Coens brought to life their seminal image of thugs in the woods, were filmed on a treefarm ninety minutes from the city, with the overcast skies the company had planned on when they scheduled their stay in New Orleans for late winter and early spring.

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Dave Matthews - Grace is Gone

Helps when you know the proper name of the song:

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The Wire - Cole's Wake

Something like this for when I die:



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The Wire



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12.10.2007

New Indiana Jones Teaser Poster

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12.09.2007

Books in 2007, Bond

Basket Case
Skinny Dip
The Quick Red Fox
Deadly Shade of Gold
Roving Mars
The Road
Carter Beats The Devil
The Trench
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Bright Orange for the Shroud
Meg: Primal Waters
Crooked Little Vein
Plum Lovin'
Lean Mean Thirteen
No Country for Old Men
Darker Than Amber
Live and Let Die

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12.07.2007

Speed Racer Trailer





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4am:7

New one. Goes good with my hate of the world lately. From Warren Ellis.

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First Competitor for the Lunar X-Prize

From Wired:

The Google Lunar X-Prize folks held an event at a space investment conference in San Jose to announce their first fully-registered competitor.

Odyssey Moon, a startup based on the Isle of Man, and run by Carl Sagan mentee, Bob Richards and the CFO of satellite-provider Inmarsat, Ramin Khadem, plans to land a rover on the moon within the next seven years.

"For Odyssey Moon, the race is just the beginning. It is our intention to seed and then lead private lunar commercial enterprise." said Richards. "It's our goal to lower the cost of lunar access by an order of magnitude."

The lunar prize, launched in September at Wired NextFest, offers $30 million to the first private company to reach the moon with a rover by December 31st, 2014. X-Prize founder, Peter Diamandis, said he expected a variety of competitors and that someone would win the prize.

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12.05.2007

Fairytale of New York

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12.04.2007

Where MLS Should Market

12.03.2007

Penny Arcade on Why We Game

Tycho:

People play games (videogames included) for a number of reasons, and those motivations make different types of games more appealing than others. We're not measuring laser-cut slabs of aluminum here, with precise angles and volumes. We're talking about a context in which the weight of each element depends on the person viewing it. I will often read a review of a game I have played and cry aloud at its content, as though they were making false claims about demonstrable, physical phenomena. It's like I am gesturing with my whole body at what is obviously a pumpkin, and being told that the object on the table is, in fact, an opossum. They aren't liars, or villains. They are gamers. They simply have a different sort of metabolism, one that craves peculiar, to my mind heretical fare.

A good example of this playing out is in the guitars for Guitar Hero and Rock Band. When the Rock Band guitar is working, I vastly prefer it: its size and shape are much closer to electric guitars I have played, and the strum bar is thick at the outer edge to be gripped like a pick. Its operation is largely silent, without the characteristic click of a microswitch, designed (I am sure) explicitly to be quiet. Some people love that click, though - it means precision - and for the player who craves that fifth star, there is no higher virtue. Stars in single player are, for me, irrelevant. I'm sure this makes me a scoundrel. I only care about stars in co-operative multiplayer, where I see them as an index of our indomitable band spirit. I want a measurement of our unity. I'm playing the same game for an entirely different purpose. I wouldn't notice if it did click. When the song begins, I enter a trance.

That's a pretty serious distinction - people who play games in order to excel at them, and those who play games as a conduit to fantasy - and its only one axis of the diagram.


Gabe:

Tycho talked about the different reasons people play games in his post and I thought it was pretty interesting. It's a conversation we've had before and I think it's something a lot of gamers probably don't think about. I remember it came up while we were both playing Metroid Prime: Corruption. I was talking to him about how I was getting frustrated because some of the boss battles were really giving me a hard time. I realised I don't play games for the challenge. I don't need or want to be punished by a game for making mistakes. I play games for what Ron Gilbert calls "new art". I play to see the next level or cool animation. I don't play games to beat them I play games to see them. Coming to that realisation was actually sort of important for me.

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