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You, too, can read a movie.

A fantastic post today on Roger Ebert’s blog about analyzing the visual effect of movies.

In simplistic terms: Right is more positive, left more negative. Movement to the right seems more favorable; to the left, less so. The future seems to live on the right, the past on the left. The top is dominant over the bottom. The foreground is stronger than the background. Symmetrical compositions seem at rest. Diagonals in a composition seem to “move” in the direction of the sharpest angle they form, even though of course they may not move at all. Therefore, a composition could lead us into a background that becomes dominant over a foreground. Tilt shots of course put everything on a diagonal, implying the world is out of balance. I have the impression that more tilts are down to the right than to the left, perhaps suggesting the characters are sliding perilously into their futures. Left tilts to me suggest helplessness, sadness, resignation. Few tilts feel positive. Movement is dominant over things that are still. A POV above a character’s eyeline reduces him; below the eyeline, enhances him. Extreme high angle shots make characters into pawns; low angles make them into gods. Brighter areas tend to be dominant over darker areas, but far from always: Within the context, you can seek the “dominant contrast,” which is the area we are drawn toward. Sometimes it will be darker, further back, lower, and so on. It can be as effective to go against intrinsic weightings as to follow them.

It must be the disgruntled ex-academic in me, but I love practical textual analysis like this. There’s much more; you must read the whole thing.

And fuck everybody, now that I think of it.

As you all know, we lost a true comic master yesterday when George Carlin died at the age of 71.

As I wrote before, he was the only comic who never seriously tried to be more than that. Sure, he did a few movies, and one failed sitcom which he had to know didn’t have a chance of getting off the ground. But standup was his true art form and his true gift, and no side project or diversion was ever allowed to overshadow it. Consequently, he had an unmatched capacity to reinvent himself, morphing from successful mainstream comic to countercultural icon, to warped observational comic (think Jerry Seinfeld with cursing and pussy references) to raging critic of the social scene. I don’t know that there’s been anything like it in the annals of American comedy. Richard Pryor started out as a Cosby imitator before finding his true voice, which he eventually lost to drug abuse and a shitty movie career; Steve Martin walked away from the stage while at his peak; Eddie Murphy and Robin Williams allowed themselves to be turned into noisome family entertainers, though Williams occasionally still trots out his decades-old shtick; Jerry Seinfeld did his greatest work in a TV studio, not on stage; and Jay Leno, despite doing some hundred-plus dates a year, hasn’t delivered any memorable material since taking over the Tonight Show. (Bill Hicks’ impersonation of Leno blowing his own head off with an Uzi (“What the fuck did I do with my life?! I used to be funny!! BRTRTRTRTRTRTRT!!”) was funnier than anything — perhaps everything — Leno has done in the last two decades.)

For the last 20 years, despite occasional flavors of the month, Carlin had no rival as the preeminent American standup. The ladder of American comedy has lost its top rung.

An OS X by any other name

Daring Fireball notes that Apple appears to be firming, and subtly reshaping, the identity of its operating systems. The Macintosh now runs “OS X Leopard” (note the lack of “Mac”) and the iPhone and iPod touch run “OS X iPhone.”

I’ve always found it somewhat peculiar that the mobile version of OS X was named after the iPhone (in developer communications it was originally “iPhone OS”) when it also runs on the iPod touch and, presumably, other unnamed touch-based devices to come. I originally thought they should submit to the obvious and call it OS X Mobile, but then realized three things:

  1. That would be obvious, and rather boring.
  2. OS X is already “mobile,” given that it runs on laptops. (Duh.)
  3. “Mobile” in the technology world has basically become synonymous with “crippled.”

Still, OS X iPhone sounds bizarre, flying in the face of the very change Apple is making with the “original” OS X in that it appears to tie it to a specific device. I thought OS X Touch would be a better choice, encapsulating its chief point of differentiation from its progenitor. But that prompts yet another question: might Apple be planning to evolve the iPhone OS beyond strictly touch-based UIs?

Gear Fab

I once told a colleague that EMI could release a straight dump of the Beatles’ master tapes — every inch of chatter, false starts, tuning, George getting pissy at Paul — and I would buy it. EMI hasn’t given me that opportunity, so I make do with what’s available. Which is why this book is having me salivating.

Ask my computer to shut up.

Bill Gates is, yet again, claiming that speech-driven user interfaces are about to become the Next Big Thing in computing.

Sure, he’s been saying that for a long time now. Ten years at least. I think Bill is taking the broken clock approach on this: say something often enough, long enough, and the laws of probability declare that you will eventually be right. You may laugh at me for predicting snow tomorrow … but give it six months. Then who’s the wise guy, huh?

Enough already. The gulf between Gates’ financial/business success and the acuity of his technological vision is stunning; there is probably no comparable figure in any industry who has been so wrong in the field of his supposed expertise. His obsession with voice-driven UIs – which probably stems from nothing more than too many Star Trek reruns back in the dorm at Harvard — is just one example of his propensity for mistaking his own geeky fetishes for technological inevitabilities.

No one wants voice computing, except for David Pogue, and he’s a Mac user. The din of an entire office running speech-driven computers boggles the mind. Not to mention that voice interaction is much slower than customary manual interaction. This technology has been around for years now, and if people wanted it, it would have taken off already. You know two-way video phones have existed since the early eighties? Probably you did. No one wants those either.

At this point I am tempted to draw a parallel between Gates’ obsession with vocal interfaces and the unhinged swearing that many a Windows user has directed against his or her recalcitrant machine. But I’m taking the high road.

In the meantime, will some tech journalist kindly grow a pair (pardon the metaphor, female readers) and ask Gates to either let the subject die or offer a plainspoken explanation as to why this decade-old prediction stubbornly refuses to come true?

Yeah, this frozen turkey leg would do it.

Let’s say I’m at the mall, browsing through some tchotchke store. The Oriental Trading Company, perhaps, or Pottery Barn. No, actually I hate those places and never go into them. I don’t hate Crate and Barrel, so let’s say I’m in Crate and Barrel, browsing the kitchen shit. (Everyone buys their kitchen shit at Crate.) I pick up a hefty hand-sized object: a vase, a lemonade pitcher, a three-pack of trendy barbecue sauces. (Mango Chipotle?) Invariably, on weighing any handheld object, my mind immediately poses the question:

I wonder if you could kill a guy with this?

Perhaps it’s a guy thing. I just have a peculiar fascination with the inherent deadliness of non-lethal objects. I may be rare, but I know I’m not alone. George Carlin once mused that you could kill someone with the Sunday New York Times, if you were sufficiently motivated. I’m actually not convinced; Jason Bourne may be able to do remarkable things with a rolled-up magazine, but the Sunday Times is too hard to roll up and would be too soft and yielding to deliver a killing blow. Now, a frozen newspaper is a different story. Anyone who’s had a paper delivered to their home in winter knows that a newspaper frozen to your front step is like a slab of rock. Hell, I’d wager you could kill someone with a daily Times if the weather were cold and icy enough. Of course, many objects become deadlier once frozen, particularly food items, so perhaps the point is redundant.

Another way to amplify the deadliness of ordinary things is to put a bunch of them together. A potato, for instance, isn’t much of a threat by itself. Put a dozen or more in a sack, and you could do some serious harm before they all turned to mush. A sack of frozen potatoes would pretty much make you a one-man killing machine.

Some household objects that used to be deadly are now no longer so. Telephones used to be made of bakelite and contained metal bells and wiring and rotary mechanisms; a few swift applications of one of those suckers and you’d have someone on the ground in no time. Now phones are all circuit boards and light plastic, no guts to them at all; it’d be like trying to hit someone with a plastic mug.

Anyway, here is a partial list of single, common, non-frozen benign objects small enough to be easily wielded by hand and which can be turned into lethal weapons with a little determination.

  • A Chia Pet.
  • A laptop computer. (Think of it: you can beat someone to death with technology that, a generation ago, would have taken up an entire room!)
  • A bridal magazine. (Jason Bourne could fight his way out of a Turkish prison with one of these.)
  • A tub of Oxi-Clean.
  • One of those “executive” bookshelf stereos. (Anyone owning one of these, of course, might well deserve to be killed anyway.)
  • A flute. (A clarinet, being made of wood, would probably crack under repeated blows.)
  • A pepper mill.
  • A Lladro figurine. (“Happy anniversary, sweetie.” Thwack.)
  • A child’s car seat. (Pretty intense irony, huh? You know it.)
  • A toilet plunger.
  • A piggy bank. (You’d probably need to kill with the first shot, but at least you’d get some money out of the affair.)
  • A jar candle.
  • A wet-floor sign. (The irony! It’s too much!)

So next time you’re out shopping, and find yourself hefting a particularly large cantaloupe or a nice anniversary clock for someone’s mantel, ask yourself: what would it take? How would I have to grip this thing? Are there any edges or points I could use to my advantage? How many blows could I get in before the job was done or the object itself fell apart?

Makes the time in Pottery Barn or Pier 1 Imports a lot more fun.