inky:mappeal:

Prolost - Your New TV Ruins Movies

TVs are designed to do one thing only: sell. To do so, they must fight for attention on brightly-lit showroom floors. Manufacturers accomplish this in much the same way that transvestite hookers in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district do—by showing you everything they’ve got, turned up to eleven. You want brightness? We’ll scald your retinas. You want sharpness? We’ll draw a black outline around everything for you. Like bright colors? We’ll find them even in Casablanca. Oh, and since you associate “yellowing” with age and decay, we’ll also make the image as blue as a retiree’s bouffant on Miami beach.

and on the feature of Motion smoothing in LCD flatscreens (interpolating extra frames) :

Filmmakers were not content to make movies with video cameras until those cameras could shoot 24p, because video, with its many-frames-per-second, looks like reality, like the evening news, like a live broadcast or a daytime soap opera; whereas 24p film, by showing us less, looks somehow larger than life, like a dream, like a story being told rather than an event being documented.

This is interesting since, well, James Cameron just announced higher framerates as the future of cinematic whatever.

I liked this bit too:

Now I’m going to do that internet-unfriendly thing I try to do every so often, which is make a nuanced point.

criterioncorner:

Did Akira Kurosawa’s IKIRU Directly Inspire BREAKING BAD? 

…uh, apparently. funny you should ask.

Vince Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad, was recently a guest on NPR’s Fresh Air, and during the show — unprompted — he launched into this idea about how Kurosawa’s 1952 masterpiece IKIRU informed Gilligan’s sensational AMC show. it’s fascinating to hear him unpack the parallels between Watanabe-san and Walter White, to see how one idea was contorted and disfigured into something so sinister, but due caution to those unfamiliar with the ending of IKIRU:

“There’s a wonderful Kurosawa movie from the 50s in which a man, a mid-level, very much a Walter White-type, or rather, Walter White, I suppose, inspired by this man. This man is very much a mid-level corporate guy who finds out he’s dying of cancer. And in the last months of his life what he chooses to do is a very good thing, it’s to build is playground, a small playground in Tokyo for the children in his neighborhood.

And this haunting ending of this movie is this man swinging on a swing set in this playground that he’s managed to build after a surprisingly hard go of it. And the snow is coming down and he singing a Japanese children’s song, and it’s just haunting and beautiful. And, of course, Breaking Bad is anything but that. It’s the flip side of that. It’s a man doing terrible things once he is freed by this knowledge that he does not have long for this world.

But I think what the two stories to share in a sense is the idea that if we found out the exact expiration date on our lives if we found out when we were going to be checking out, would that free us up to do bold and courageous things, either good or bad things, hopefully good things, then I think there’s a lot of that involved in Breaking Bad.”

heyoscarwilde:

The original screen worn costumes for Christopher Reeve/Superman, Lynda Carter/Wonder Woman, Adam West/Batman and Burt Ward/Robin.

scanned from Superman:The Complete History, Wonder Woman:The Complete History and Batman:The Complete History :: Chronicle Books :: various years

carlovely:

TRUE LOVE <3

now-watching:

#TCMParty #CarnivalOfSouls

A #TCMParty tag? I can dig that.

vhshitfest:

This little piece of heaven is why I love running a VHS blog. It showed up at my door today in an envelope with no return address. I peeled the package open expecting some tape I’d won on Ebay weeks ago and had forgotten about. When I saw a white tape without a case I was skeptical to say the least. After that whole Blood Frenzy DVD-R situation I get nervous every time something seems amiss with one of my orders. I pulled the blood-drenched video out and a huge smile immediately came to my face. It felt like I was six years old all over again and had just woken up on Christmas morning to find a Super Nintendo and a Ren and Stimpy game (you know, the one with that level where you’re in Stimpy’s nasty mouth) under my tree. Well, not quite that good. But I still was super giddy to pop this in. Because of the “Watch Me <3” my parents suspected it was some weird strip tease video from one of our many loyal female fans. Sadly and thankfully, it wasn’t. It was a “pseudo” (?) snuff short film.

It featured a fake celebrity tied down and being tortured. It looked like it was shot on video, which is always a nice added bonus when it comes to newly made horror films. A guy, who looked like a grown up version of that one weird scummy rat kid from newer seasons of Degrassi, was torturing someone and forcing him to sign an autograph for him.

We find out two things about the tortured guy: he offers to fund this guy’s movie he is making, so he must be rich, and he is a pussy, because he pisses all over himself. Blood splashes on the camera a couple times and it all feels very realistic, which I assume is what they were going for. At the end, a website (http://piecesoftalent.com) flashes on the screen. After investigating that site I believe this is a marketing gimmick to advertise a feature-length film. A great gimmick, I might add. It got me 100% hooked and now I want more. I watched the trailer on the site and the movie looks really well-done. I’m hoping whenever it becomes available I get a copy. Wink. I urge everyone else to check out the website and keep your eyes peeled for when the movie is released.