Tagged: film RSS

  • Dave 10:43 am on February 19, 2010 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , film, ,   

    No wonder people share files 

    I love watching films and I love listening to music. I work for a living and have no problem buying films and music.

    It’s taken a very long time for the big companies to finally realise how to deal with music – make it good quality, usable anywhere, good value and easy to get at. I love MP3 shops like Bleep where you can get very high quality tracks at a price that seems reasonable given that there isn’t somebody producing discs, shipping them across the country or even around the world then having the overhead of a physical shop to sell them in.

    These days there are streaming services like Napster and Spotify which are good enough so that you can listen to pretty much anything for less money per month than it used to cost to buy a CD in a shop. Because of the good value of these, I pay for one of them and enjoy using it (Napster, mostly via a Squeezebox in my case).

    Movies on the other hand are a completely different kettle of fish – it seems like music was when the original Napster first arrived. The movie companies doing their best to sell you a crippled piece of crap with your film in it. Because films are sold in a variety of formats with various kinds of rights management attached to them, I’m wary about buying anything because I don’t know if I’ll be able to play it in the future. I already know I won’t be able to enjoy it out of the confines of whatever the seller thinks it should be used in.

    iTunes movies are a complete no no. Tied to the computer or one of their own devices. Apple still get away with this kind of behaviour with music too, iTunes really being a shop that you have to install software to buy from and that software only really working well with devices sold by Apple. Until it’s all opened up for any device by any manufacturer I won’t use it.

    It should be possible for me to buy a film and watch it on anything I want to watch it on and not have restrictions like this.

    I would buy more films if they weren’t crippled.

    TV again is behind the times and suffering as a result. If a TV show is made anywhere in the world, usually the rights to distribute it are carved up in to different territories and people in these territories can’t view content that originates from a different one. The end result of this is that a TV show is made, appears on some companies online TV service and everyone not in that country sees a message saying they can’t watch it. It’s not the 1970’s any more.

    So how about a TV programme shop, selling TV programmes from across the world for reasonable amounts of money in an open format so that people can choose to watch what they want where ever it comes from.

    The actions of these companies to try and protect their media is driving proper customers away – a lot of people don’t download music and movies because they don’t want to pay – they do it because it’s easier and you don’t feel like they’re being screwed by buying some strange format thing that only works on a device they tell you it should run on in an area of the planet that they have also dictated.

     

  • Dave 11:14 pm on January 5, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: film, , whitby,   

    Whitby and film 

    Abbey

    Whitby

    Whitby was cold but lovely. A trawl around the place, a wander up to the abbey and dinner in the Magpie Cafe.

    I’ve been using film a lot recently so I have a bit of a backlog of stuff to look at and upload when it’s all developed and scanned. A few things have made me use more film again recently. I needed a new document scanner and discovered that I could get one that scanned negatives at quite a good price compared to when I looked in to it a few years ago.

    So I got hold of a Canon 8800F (it doesn’t cost anywhere near the suggest retail price on the Canon web site though!). It is so much better than my old defunct scanner – it works for a start! The things that impressed me were it’s build quality – it feels very sold, and it’s speed. Scanning documents is very quick and easy. Negatives take a little longer if you whack the quality settings up to very high resolutions, but my test scans so far have really impressed me. The default Canon software for scanning negatives is very quick and easy to use. You can load up a few strips of film and then you’re presented with thumbnails for each negative and you just tick the ones you want to scan.

    The software also came with Silverfast which is more serious. I think this will take longer to get the best out of. I’m going to get to know this better when I start going through all of the new negatives. My initial impression though is that you can do an awful lot of tweaking to make sure you get a top notch scanned image. You can even choose the film manufacturer and type to use preset scan settings (and then further tweak them should you so wish). The upgraded version can even do multiple scans to significantly increase the dynamic range of the resulting image – I’m going to want to try that in their demo version to see if that really lives up to the hype though and if it’s worth the money.

    Related to the new scanner, I thought that if I’m scanning film, my collection of film cameras are a motley crew of cheap Lomos and a Holga. They’re all nice in different ways, but I really wanted a standard compact film camera with a proper lens. I didn’t want to go down the film SLR route – that could just end up getting silly and having more lenses and assorted paraphernalia. So, after doing a bit of digging I found a second hand Olympus Trip 35. It had been serviced and seemed to work very well. It also had a 40mm F2.8 lens attached to it – with focus controls that work exactly the same as the Holga – you choose between person, a few people, lots of people and a mountain!

    So, I took a 24 exposure colour film’s worth of images with this Olympus camera and we’ll see how well I judged the focus (and everything else for that matter) when I get the negatives back.

     

    • Diana LeRoi-Schmidt 5:23 am on January 20, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Very cool Dave! I'm looking forward to seeing your film shots. I need to pick up a film scanner since I am now accumulating sleeves and sleeves of negatives.

  • Dave 8:19 pm on November 25, 2008 Permalink
    Tags: film, kitchen, norway   

    Kitchen Stories & O’Horten 

    Recently, I’ve seen a number of films that aren’t the sort of things I’d normally watch. This is due mainly to having two consecutive 3 months trials with LoveFilm, the online DVD rental company. Their service works so well and seems good value so I’m still using it after the trials ended.

    Anyway, the point of this, is that I recently watched a film that bowled me over – Kitchen Stories. It’s a few years old but up until a few weeks ago I’d never heard of hit. It’s just lovely really and a breath of fresh air compared to a lot of the current crop of Hollywood pap.

    The reason I found this in the first place was because I saw the trailer for O’Horten which is the latest film from the director of Kitchen Stories, Bent Hamer. This trailer looks charming and lovely too. I’m really looking forward to this now that I’ve watched Kitchen Stories.

     

  • Dave 3:15 pm on August 17, 2008 Permalink
    Tags: batman, darkknight, film, imax,   

    The Dark Knight 

    I eventually got to see The Dark Knight yesterday at the BFI Imax in London. The first thing that struck me when I entered the auditorium was the sheer size of the screen. I mean, I knew Imax screens were big, but this was just mind blowingly big – about 25 metres tall by all accounts which makes it the biggest in the country.

    Size isn’t everything of course – the film itself looked lovely. Several sections had been filmed for Imax and the quality of these stuck out hugely. During those scenes, even though the screen was huge, you could see all sorts of tiny details all over the place. It would have been nice if the entire film had been done that way, but the film stands on it’s own merits so I can’t really grumble about that. The Joker character played be the late Heath Ledger was great. That character could have so easily been a one dimensional over-played caricature, but he came across as a genuine and believable loony-tune/psychotic criminal genius which has got to be difficult to do!

     

  • Dave 6:32 pm on June 13, 2007 Permalink
    Tags: film   

    La Cabina 

    I didn’t know that La Cabina was called La Cabina until yesterday. I saw this short film when I was a child and at the time I was glued to the screen, completely enthralled by what I was seeing. I have never forgotten it – it really had an impact on me.

    I get quite disillusioned with film when there are so many lazy variations on the same themes being released, clouding the view and making finding the good stuff harder and harder. When I watched this again last night, I was just as enthralled as I was when I was a child. Even though I can’t understand the language and there are no subtitles, that doesn’t matter in the slightest, the story tells itself visually very well.

    The clip above from YouTube is the first part and the other three are on YouTube as well if you get sucked in and fancy watching the whole 35 minutes. I can’t recommend it enough.

     

  • Dave 12:09 pm on June 7, 2007 Permalink
    Tags: film, , starwars   

    Star Wars – The Exhibition 

    Fett

    Whilst in London last weekend, I went to County Hall in Westminster to see the Star Wars exhibition. I kind of like the Star Wars films – well, some of them and this exhibition was being talked about as being quite special.

    I found it to be overpriced and underwhelming. There were some nice thing in there but considering there are six films worth of material covering a huge number of locations, having such a small collection of these things on show is a disappointment. When you’re paying £16.50 to get in, you hope that it’s because of the amount of effort that has gone in to making the exhibition possible. If I’d gone to see this exhibition as a family and spent about sixty quid (2 adults, 2 children (at £12.50 each) for example) I’d be livid.

    It’d be easier to be sympathetic if it was cheaper – a lot cheaper.

    Tags:

     

  • Dave 6:04 pm on November 12, 2006 Permalink
    Tags: film   

    The Prestige 

    I went to see The Prestige on Saturday. I thoroughly enjoyed it. The director has a good track record in my eyes though – I enjoyed Memento and Insomnia and was relieved when Batman Begins didn’t do what the other batman films did and stink!

    The prestige follows two friends who’s rivalry as magicians gets quite serious (understatement). Initially Christian Bale’s accent grated but once I was caught up in proceedings I’d forgotten about that. It was nice to see David Bowie in a good film as well, playing Nikolai Tesla.

    I didn’t take in any reviews before watching this film and I try whenever possible to know as little as possible about a film before watching it so that I can be truly swept away as the director might have intended. These days it’s difficult – most of the movie companies are that desperate to drum up business that there are often promotional documentaries showing you behind the scenes clips before films have even been released. There are also interviews with the stars explaining bits about their character and how certain parts of the plot affects them. All in all, this kind of thing adds up to dispelling the illusion before it’s even begun.

    I loved this film, and I haven’t come out of the cinema in a long time thinking that. I did read some reviews afterwards though – and this one in Empire magazine summed it up quite nicely:-

    Odd, but brilliantly so. It’s a small film that feels big, a period drama that looks modern, defying comparison to anything but Nolan himself (4/5 stars).

     

    • premiump 10:13 am on November 13, 2006 Permalink | Reply

      I really want to see this. Nothing you have said here changes my mind.

    • publicenergy 10:27 am on November 13, 2006 Permalink | Reply

      I didn’t want to write too much and spoil it at all. I did hear the Mark Kermode podcast review yesterday and it was their film of the week.

    • premiump 7:43 am on November 17, 2006 Permalink | Reply

      I watched The Prestige last night with a friend. It was simply superb!

      Q: Were they “ever” friends?

    • publicenergy 10:11 am on November 17, 2006 Permalink | Reply

      You’re probably right! – I suppose they knew each other, that’s probably the best you could say about them!

  • Dave 11:28 am on February 5, 2006 Permalink
    Tags: film   

    Groundhog Day 

    GroundhogdaySix more weeks of winter. Well, that’s what Punxsutawney Phil says. The weather forecasting method of watching a groundhog emerge from it’s home and casting a shadow or not seems like something the BBC should look into (and most other weather forecasters for that matter) to improve their accuracy. Over the last few years spending more and more time outdoors I’ve become increasingly aware of just how inaccurate weather forecasts are. It’s one of the puzzling things about modern life with so many wondrous pieces of technology and science that I still don’t know with any kind of reliability if I’m going to get rained on when I go out!

    I won’t bother posting this exact post again tomorrow for a cheap laugh!

     

    • publicenergy » Start of 9:49 pm on March 20, 2006 Permalink | Reply

      [...] Punxsutawney Phil was right. It’s supposed to be the start of spring and yet the temperature is going to hit a low of -10 degrees Celsius tomorrow night. Now, -10 seems to be a bit on the cold side for England in March. [...]

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