chris caines

What do you think of Treme so far? We’ve been enjoying it, a change of pace from The Wire certainly (and strewn with Wire references if you care to trainspot). I found it hard to believe someone wasn’t about to get killed in the first couple of eps. Used to the slow character building now, only 4 eps in but looking forward to it each week. Doesn’t have the air of a series made by some people given a blank cheque after the success of a hit, though on the other hand you can’t imagine anyone being given the opportunity to make something like this in many other circumstances.

Saw that movie from last year “Gamer” last night rugged up on the couch supping herbal tea treating my cold with hearty chicken stew and TV time. I didn’t think they made B movie scifi flicks like this anymore, films like Escape From New York and Videodrome. Usually a collection of earnest alternate scifi ideas cribbed from literary scifi of the previous decades and done with trashy intensity and a sense of fun. I for one am glad these films are still around and Gamer is a pretty decent example helped along by the Gladiatoresque looks and performance of its star Gerard Butler and the first person shooter aesthetics of the camera and cgi work.

The novelty of having a Hollywood film deal with social networks and gaming as a setting alone makes it worth a look. But there are also good performances and pyrotechnic pacing to enjoy amongst the schlock. Trailer:

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We watched Moon last night down here in the holiday shack, the surf a constant pounding white noise and the moths flying into the projector beam up onto the fibro wall. It was directed by Duncan Jones, famously the son of David Bowie & is his first feature. It is a weird collection of 70s sci-fi riffs joined together into what feels like an elegant though unadventurous cover version.

The look and feel is equal parts Silent Running, Dark Star, Solaris, 2001, Alien and the TV series Space 1999 and the later Star Trek series. It is also owes a lot to the stories of Phillip K Dick and Thomas Disch, even early Arthur C Clarke. It doesn’t do much with these ingredients except join them together and re-present them, though it does so with conviction and heart. One thing you can see them going for that doesn’t quite work is the tone of mystery and horror contained in some of these source films. Finding out what happens (which I won’t reveal in case you haven’t seen it) feels quite procedural, though gripping in a low key way.

Still, it is great to see someone trying to do something psychologically challenging with science fiction as it is rarely attempted in cinema post Star Wars with any of the depth you find in the written form. Clint Mansell did a fairly over the top score, heavy on complex synth textures which I enjoyed and was prominent in the mix filling lot of the space left by tracking shots across empty moonscapes.

The months leading up to this past new years it seemed everywhere you went people were compiling best of lists from the year & the decade. I always discover a bunch of new music & movies (book lists are not so good) trawling through these but rarely feel compelled to offer one of my own. Perhaps this is because in any given year my favourite bits of media weren’t released in that year or I find it difficult to apply any sort of hierarchy of devotion to the things I was absorbed by through a calendar year.

The other night we were at home watching Where The Wild Things Are and a little way in we realised that one of the central beastie characters was being voiced by James Gandolfini (Tony Soprano). Not only that, but the hairy big headed Wild Thing (called Carol) was acting exactly like a slightly more childish version of Tony and the Soprano element was the best thing in a fairly ordinary film.

Later browsing through best of cinema lists from the 2000s I realised that none of these films had the impact of the TV series I’d watched over past decade, particularly the past five years. Nothing had the power, humour or pure narrative immersion of shows like The Sopranos, Deadwood, 30 Rock, The Wire, Mad Men, Love My Way, The West Wing or Breaking Bad. For me no cinema of this period came close.

Partly this is because these series watched the way we and a lot of others watch them (as box sets or file collections) are in some ways a new form. Thirty sometimes forty hour feature films. Usually with multiple episodes watched back to back, disc after disc devoured in a sitting. Aside from epic theatre (Wagner’s Ring Cycle for instance or the Mahabharata) or the experience you can sometimes have with a novel this isn’t a common media consumption experience. Although it is becoming more common with gaming as games become larger and more fictionally immersive.

It took us six months to watch the Sopranos on DVD during the first half of this past year and nothing is as effective (or affective for that matter) as getting to know characters over that timespan in building narrative immersion. One of the other things that makes these story worlds so compulsively watchable is that unlike most cinema I can’t predict what is going to happen next. Partly this is the effect of the episodes being written in real time as production happens, but also the passage of time in world events and the simple fact that actors, writers, directors change, move on and in some cases die while a series is being made.
All of this is not to say that there weren’t great movies made during the past decade (I have a list of 30 or so I loved) but that it seemed increasingly less vital as a form. Some of my favourite cinema experiences from this time were so because they were large scale immersive spectacle blockbusters (Avatar being the most recent example) and massive size and seat shaking sound is one thing my loungeroom can’t do.

New short video piece just completed tonight. Its a collaboration with John Cheeseman who wrote a short text based around the title Flags of Convenience that I’d had laying around for a while. I used the text as a stimulus for some imagery and another text I wrote to animate in counterpoint to the spoken text from John. I recorded John & Jes Tyrrell reading his text over the phone and then spent an inordinately long time composing some sound to underpin an edit of the voice text. The sound didn’t fall into place for me until I used it as material for a performance at the launch of an issue of Runway magazine where somewhere in the live mix I worked out how to deal with the unruly textures. You can download a 1280 x 720 mpeg4 version of it here (just right click and save as), its 150mb. Or see a low res streaming version below.

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Just finished giving a lecture on creating imaginary space in pop music and as I was preparing, searching through my files I got sidetracked into watching Mystery Train by Jim Jarmusch again, wonderful film and wonderful soundtrack in a bombed out Memphis. In other news, had a great theatre experience on friday night seeing Holiday, which was a bit like an old ghost train, strapped into airplane seats with cheap VR goggles on being fed, prodded & splashed, very inventive theatre. Still on till Saturday.

Still on the cinematic imaginary there is a great show at First Draft Gallery that includes holograms by David Lawrey & Jaki Middleton from a remembered back to the future. Still on for a week or so.

And if you haven’t read it – here is the Bruce Sterling keynote from Webstock in NZ recently.

We watched Swimming Pool the other day which I enjoyed mightily. Jes had seen it before & I hadn’t and after the twist at the end (which you’ll be familiar with if you’ve seen it) I argued with her about a meaning of it that was consistent with a realistic reading of the film, she thought it was more about interior imaginative states & a few days later I now agree. While I think its a wonderful film it is a bit clunky as a plot device ( I won’t spoil it, please go and get it out and see it ) and makes me reflect on how hard that sort of interior life is to represent in cinematic realism. Remains of the Day & Fight Club are always two examples that come to mind where the thing that those novels do so well (making the reader know more than the character) are less easy in the film versions.

We came back across on the ferry last night trying out the new XDCAM EX3 all the way, which I’m very impressed with. On getting home moving the footage into Final Cut was less than straightforward. Turns out apart from the latest version of FCP (6.05 which I had) you also need a variety of software addons from Sony to get it to work. None too clear from any of the included docs or from anything other than deeply forensic googling for that matter. The real bits and pieces required are listed here. I was filled with dread at the thought of installing Sony driver software which is usually made, as they say, of fail. My fears were misplaced however and the files transferred flawlessly.

Footage below is originally HD at 25p. I’ve slowed it to 50% and crushed the blacks slightly in FCP before running it through the FLV compressor. I’m keen to try the overcranking to 50p that the camera will do if you shoot at 720 rather than 1080.

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We stayed up in the mountains on the weekend, firstly with David & Joyce for a deluxe gastronomic experience inside the Black Modular & secondly further up the hill breathing the rarefied air of the Grose Valley. I’d even brave the huntsman spiders to be able to live up there, though I know its the commute that would kill me.

In other news I’m swimming in new gear, just got a Canon EOS1000D for all its Black DSLR glory and its ability to shoot frames in drive mode till the card fills up, surprisingly absent in the SLR world.

And getting delivery soon of a new imac, have a copy of windows at the ready, just so I can finally play Grand Theft Auto 4 without having to buy a console.

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I was waiting for someone, sitting at a window at Kinokuniya on george st when I took some stills with my little ixus.