Freyburg

Despite being identified with cutting-edge effects, rampaging dinosaurs and menacing tripods, Steven Speilberg is at heart a throwback to the old school of filmmaking. In an interview with Ain’t it Cool News and a bevy of other sites sent down to the set of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Spielberg explained how he refused to shoot the film digitally, how he says “No” to George Lucas, and how he still cuts his films on a Movieola. Having said that, he does concede that the film’s effects will be “70 percent practical and 30 percent digital.”

Hollywood’s writers are again threatening to strike, this time because they feel they aren’t getting enough of a piece of the new media pie. They’re proposing to get residuals whenever something “airs” on the internet. How they propose to actually do such a thing remains to be seen.

Well, I’ve got news for them…get your own damn pie. Hollywood was clearly running out of ideas long before the writers decided to up their demands, and it’s high time for independent producers to step up and circumvent the entire Hollywood system. With internet distribution clearly up tot the task, and with tastes radically changing from Hollywood pap to more lo-fi offerings, this is the chance video podcasters and indy moviemakers have been waiting for. The movie industry is once again cutting off its nose to spite its face Let’s help it out.

John Simpson is best known as a foreign correspondent for the BBC who has covered wars, revolutions, elections and other far-flung, important stories. His column in the Daily Mail delves into the somewhat more frou-fou world of celebrities, and his observations of the very human, somewhat flaky ways of the famous are pretty amusing.

Vancouver (and Malta) technologist Darren Barefoot noted a recent interview on the Q podcast (a show on CBC hosted by Jian Gomeshi) which featured an interview with filmmaker and big thinker Peter Greenaway, the creator of films like “The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover” and his most recent “Nightwatching.”

Greenaway makes the very good point that cinema, in terms of something where people put aside two hours of unmitigated attention for a bunch of pictures on screen, is a dying medium. He contends that kids today are knee deep in interactivity and laptops, and that as such, new art that takes advantage of these forms needs to be created. In that kind of world, a straight-ahead “film” doesn’t stand much of a chance. I’d like to think otherwise as I love everything about movies, but it’s hard to argue with a guy who once guest-curated the Louvre.

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Hot on the heels of Radiohead’s decision to market and distribute their new album themselves (for whatever price fans feel like paying), NIN’s Trent Reznor has announced that as of now, Nine Inch Nails are free agents and will not be seeking a contract with a record company now that their contract has expired. (Kudos, btw, to Duncan Riley at TechCrunch for having the guts to go for the obvious Kent-Brockman-esque “nine-inch-nail-in-record-industry-coffin” wordplay in his headline; he’s a braver man than I!)

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Warren, Steven and Chris the Third Guy yandered on for a record-breaking 30 minutes before commenting on the Sound of Drums, the penultimate episode of Series Three and not a bad bit of adventure and mayhem besides. At the very least, it’s better than Last of the Time Lords, coming up next week. (feed, web, direct download)

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Wired has an interesting article about the Miro Project, an open source initiative that aims to make online video as easy as TV to access, and to spread as broad a number of viewpoints as possible. I’ve used the Miro Project on and off, and I don’t think it’s all the way there, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction. And Nicholas Reville, the driving force behind Miro, wants to overthrow TV, which I certainly can’t fault.

Around the same time tidings of the iPhone first started coming to light, rumours of a Google phone started swirling about, and continue to this day. But the International Herald Tribune dismisses any notion of the search engine giant’s building out hardware, and instead postulates that Google is working on some sort of operating system to make phones easier to use. That sounds much more reasonable to me, especially since Google and Apple are partners on many different projects.

In a perfect storm of surreality, Eighties consumerism and just plain weirdness, view this video of Devo hyping the Pioneer laserdisc player, all while wearing weird headpieces.

North Korea’s decision to give up its nuclear ambitions is due n no small part to China acting as a go between between the Hermit Kingdom and the United States. And China may be the key to ending the deadlock between Iran and the U.S. The New York Times Week in Review breaks it down.