3D to “Revolutionize” Porn Industry. . .Again? Maybe. Possibly. (I doubt it).
January 26, 2009
Every few years this same story crops up: being such a natural fit, pornography and 3D viewing systems are announced to be forming an alliance that will have us all lolling about having fake sex with 3D images of the already artificial, botoxed, surgically-enhanced, bleached and shaven vixens of Hollywood’s shadow industry. Announced with great fan fare, these stories and their 3D systems never deliver on their throbbing, pulsating promises. But maybe this time it will be different. . .?
A $4 million 3D remake of the Hong Kong softcore classic Sex and Zen is in preparation; only 25 to 30% of this new version will be sex scenes so apparently this is being geared for the imaginary ‘couples market’ niche of the porn world.
But wait, there’s a fly in the lube already! Producer Stephen Shiu Jr. complains. “We’re having trouble finding a male lead who is willing to undress in front of the camera.” For the complete article, (SFW) go here.
Back in the day when I was introduced to the high octane, bullet ballets and swooping kung-fu wire work that have long since been incorporated into the Hollywood film lexicon, to see these films you needed to go to certain video stores in your local Chinatown (for me Lafayette or Bayard Streets below Canal). Bootleg copies on VHS cost $4 and the first time a gwai lo (“ghost person,” e.g. white boy) ventured inside you could expect to wait a longish time before the owner was prepared to sell you anything.
My ‘bible’ in those days was a paperback titled Sex and Zen and a Bullet In the Head by Stefan Hammond and Mike Wilkins. It remains an excellent introduction to the pre-takeover (before 1997) HK cinema.
The back of the book had thumbnails of the movie posters for their essential picks, along with titles in English, Cantonese and Mandarin. I would point to these and the video store owner would dutifully get them (or quickly dub a copy) for me. After a few visits, I evidently passed some sort of test and was welcomed into these stores as a true fan. Now I would get suggestions for new movies, based on my previous selections.
If you’ve never seen The Killer, A Better Tomorrow, Hard Boiled, Project A, Parts I & II, Armor of God Parts I & II or Police Story I, check them out and see what made the pre-Hollywood careers of director John Woo and Jackie Chan the stuff of fanboy legends.
And know this: if it wasn’t for what he learned worshipping at the altar of 1980s & 1990s HK cinema, Quentin Tarrantino wouldn’t even have a job as gaffer today.
TypeDNA – a new Font Manager with ‘Magic’ Features
January 20, 2009
TypeDNA is a robust, standalone PC & MAC compatible Font Manager and plug-in set that seamlessly integrates with all of the most common host applications including Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Microsoft Office. Once integrated, TypeDNA significantly enhances your application’s font capabilities. For example, anyone can integrate TypeDNA with Adobe Photoshop to access a unique algorithm set that analyzes, matches and mixes similar font features. Combined, these grant anyone the power to FIND / SORT / CHOOSE / COMBINE and MANAGE fonts quickly and easily without having to understand formal typography rules.
For the TypeDNA website, go here. To learn more about its ‘magic’ features, go here.
17 Really Useful WordPress Plugins
January 20, 2009
A selection of great WordPress plugins from those wonderful folks at Smashing Apps.
13 Free Web Apps for Designers
January 20, 2009
The folks at Smashing Apps are constantly coming up with links to worthy tools and programs that will help make your working and design life easier. Follow the link below to their latest selection of free web-based apps.
I especially like TinEye, a reverse image search engine. You submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions. And also Spending Diary, which offers a simple way to track and analyse your spending.
“My Bloody Valentine-3D” — 3D film, 1D plot & characterizations
January 20, 2009
Technically, the 3D in “My Bloody Valentine- 3D” is excellent; however, the use this technique is put to here is simply moronic.
This is a horror/thriller with no horror and no thrills despite a very high gore content and extremely gratuitous nudity.* Unless you consider sudden loud noises and the abrupt, unexpected appearances of supporting cast members to be ‘thrilling.’
To earn the ‘bloody’ in the picture’s title you get sequences like this: a buxom midget motel owner is impaled on the ceiling with a pick axe; the top half of a pretty blonde’s head is severed with a shovel in a mine shaft; an eyeball is popped out of one character’s head; the jaw of an old man is ripped from his face and hurled at the camera; a comatose patient awakes after a decade asleep in a hospital and severs nurses and fellow patients in two, disemboweling some of them and placing one woman’s heart inside a box of Valentine chocolates.
You get the feeling that this stuff was written by two stoned 14 year olds, cracking each other up with how ‘outrageous’ they were being. Dude! A word of caution to parents: let them have the pot, but please lock up the lap tops and word processors.
The film is a remake of a 1981 Canadian slasher picture set in a mining town where a pick axe swinging menace slices and dices teenagers trying to have sex on Valentine’s Day. (Teen age sexuality is the number one cause of serial killing, as depicted by Hollywood screenwriters). The original was a low-budget entry in the category of the more imaginative Freddy’s, Jason’s and Michael Meyer’s that continue to spawn sequels today.
What 3D slasher horror really needs is a great genre director like John Carpenter; if only this level of quality stereoscopic filming could have been available to him for the first “Halloween” picture!
Not only does the story of “My Bloody Valentine- 3D” make little sense, the film stoops to outright cheating to deliver it’s ho-hum ‘twist’ ending. Scenes that we originally saw with two characters in them are shown in flash back with only one, so that the reveal of the killer will ‘kinda sorta’ fit. The final shot even sets the stage for a sequel (that I doubt will ever be made) and is the only truly frightening thing about the entire picture.
Given all the above, you’ll probably think I’m crazy to praise the 3D filming but, if you can separate what is being filmed from how it’s being filmed, you have to be impressed.
3D movies can now be produced with excellent depth and no eye strain. The glasses are comfortable to wear and they fit easily over prescription glasses. They simply need better content, if Hollywood expects to pull people away from their wide screen TVs and into theaters for a ‘premium’ viewing experience (and ticket price). “My Bloody Valentine- 3D” cost $13.75 per at my local multiplex.
It really all comes down to the story and the writing. Sadly, for both 2D and 3D cinema technical production today far exceeds both the skill and imagination of our current crop of screenwriters.
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*For the record: I stand in full support of gratuitous nudity, but isn’t it supposed to be naughty or tittalating? Not here it isn’t.
One attractive young actress (Betsy Rue as “Irene”) is required to perform almost her entire on-screen time completely nude, except for a pair of platform heels, for no discernable reason. She even walks out of a No Tell Motel in the buff to confront her fornication partner, a bald trucker, over his illicit videotaping of their rutting encounter.
She’s upset that he filmed them having sex but she stands stark naked in the middle of a parking lot to complain about it?
Rather than arousing the entire sequence came across as merely uncomfortable. It was a relief when the trucker’s bald dome was punctured by the killer’s pickaxe, even if only to allow poor shivering Betsy to run back inside. (Also: didn’t adult human females used to have pubic hair at one time? I’m just saying, is all).
3,000 Free Pet Adoptions — Jan. 24, 2009 sponsored by Hill’s Pet Nutrition
January 16, 2009
Save money. Save a life. Bring Home your New Best Friend for Free!
If you’re considering bringing a dog or a cat into your home this year, you probably already know that I’m going to urge you to check out your local animal shelter first.
Now there’s even more incentive: next week Hill’s Pet Nutrition will cover all adoption costs (which can range from $25 to $300) at participating shelters. The 3,000 free animal adoptions represent the first 10 animals adopted at each of the 300 locations on Saturday, Jan. 24, 2009.
Get involved in CHANGE A PET’S LIFE DAY and open your home to a pet. The first ten adoptions at participating Hill’s partner shelters are free on January 24, 2009. New pet owners will also receive a starter kit that includes free Hill’s® Science Diet® pet food and tips to give their adopted cat or dog the best start in their new life. (from their website).
Pet Animal Welfare Society
504 Main Ave
Norwalk, CT 06851-1038
203-750-9572
For a complete list of participating shelters, go here.
“The Story of Edgar Sawtelle” – a brief review
January 14, 2009
My taste in prose has always tended toward non-fiction. And I’m much more in tune with work like Ted Kerasote’s excellent Merle’s Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog than I am with the more sentimental (and just plain dumb) Marley & Me. I mean, John Grogan and his wife are both journalists and yet they seem to have absolutely no interest in educating themselves about dog behavior or finding a suitable trainer for Marley.
Because I’m known in my neighborhood as a ‘dog person’ a friend pressed his copy of Edgar Sawtelle on me with much encouragement. I tried hard to subtract all the hype, the Oprah Book Club selection and the vehemently divisive reviews and forum comments on Amazon. I wanted to read it as if I knew nothing at all about it and had just stumbled across it.
As I read I grew immersed in the world David Wroblewski creates and found that at 560 pages, it went surprisingly quickly. There are insights into both canine and human behavior than anyone with much experience of either will recognize. As a Shakespeare fan, I liked the loose connection with Hamlet.
(Of course, we all know that the bumpkin Will of Stratford-on-Avon didn’t write a word of Shakespeare’s canon; the real author was Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, but that’s a tale for another entry.)
I loved the dog-centric nature of the book (esp. the parts with Almondine, who is the Ophelia counterpart) and enjoyed the writing style; it seemed one step removed from realism, slightly mythic.
The ending, which seems to raise the most controversy among readers, didn’t strike me as out of tune with the rest of the work. Perhaps because, due to the parallels with Hamlet, I was expecting a downer ending.
After all, in the play all the major characters are dead by the final curtain having been run over by a truck. (“I could tell you more, but suddenly I am run over by a truck.”—Michael O’Donoghue, “How to Write Good”).
So don’t let all the hype turn you off, as it nearly did me, Edgar Sawtelle is worth spending time with.
Supplements Glucosamine/Chondroitin Don’t Work Any Better than a Sugar Pill
January 14, 2009
Dr. Donna Raditic’s column (“Nutraceutical News”) in the Jan./Feb. 2009 of The Bark should be praised for emphasizing the point that “natural”is not always harmless. But I have to take issue with her very first recommendation: glucasamine and chondroitin supplements for ‘joint health.’
As the owner/guardian of two Labs and the spouse of an individual who suffered from hip dysplasia for 15 years and has had two hip replacements, I’ve learned a couple of things about these two supplements: they are enormously profitable for their distributors and their effectiveness is open to serious doubt.
The largest controlled clinical trial of glucasamine and chondroitin by the National Institutes of Health concluded that they don’t work any better than a sugar pill at halting the destruction of cartilage. The full report is available online from Arthritis & Rheumatism, the official monthly journal of the American College of Rheumatology, Sept. 29, 2008.
Dr. Ali Askari, chief of rheumatology at University Hospitals Case Medical Center, put it this way in discussing the study, “The bottom line is that there is no specific difference between the placebo and the glucosamine/chondroitin mix.”
The bottom line for concerned dog owners? Research your supplements carefully.
Flashback to Feb. 1984: John C. Dvorak disses that “new fangled device” the computer mouse
January 13, 2009
In January, 1984 the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a graphical user interface rather than a command line interface was introduced, Apple Computer’s Macintosh.
Of course, the best and the brightest of the day’s tech writers immediately saw it for the game changer it was and heralded it as the next great advance in computer technology. Or did they?
“The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a ‘mouse’. There is no evidence that people want to use these things. I don’t want one of these new fangled devices.”
— the ever-prescient John C. Dvorak in the San Francisco Examiner
Or how about David Bunnell from The Macintosh Reader: “To hold up the Macintosh experience as an example of how to create a great product, launch an industry, or spark a revolution is a cruel joke.”
For more jollies about ‘Job’s folly’ follow the link below:
Jan. 1984: How critics reviewed the Mac – Apple 2.0.
FREE High-Resolution Grungy Paper Textures from Six Revisions
January 13, 2009
Six Revisions has a selection of excellent free high-res grungy paper textures available for download for the price we love best — FREE. Here’s a low-res sample, the link follows below.
High-Resolution Grungy Paper Textures – Six Revisions