Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Test 4

by Michael Bergeron

The end of December is a dead zone for your humble scribe as far as movies are concerned. I’ve already seen everything that cinema audiences are flocking to currently. More than a couple of high profile movies won’t even open in Houston until early to mid-January – titles like Letters From Iwo Jima, Pan’s Labyrinth, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, Miss Potter, Notes On A Scandal, The Good German and Children of Men. Houston does present itself as a bit of a backwater town now and then.

Meanwhile local auds are just adjusting to The Good Shepherd and The History Boys, or if Santa left you a hunk of coal in your stocking Black Christmas.
With end of the year kudos being extended for many current films you’d think it was the best month of the year to see films. For me, that would be last March when I saw V For Vendetta and Thank You For Smoking. Those two films along with the fall release Little Children get my vote for best trio of films of the year. Other exceptional films would include the dense Brick; the tense Hard Candy; the documentary The Bridge; Happy Feet; natch Scorsese’s The Departed; Emilio Estevez’s emotional Bobby; and the dystopian tinged road movie Children of Men. Those were my best, here’s the rest.

That’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy the length and skullduggery of Good Shepherd or the infectious rhythms of Dreamgirls (none of the film’s songs are anywhere as good as a Motown hit), nor the minimalism of a Clint Eastwood war romp, or the animated rumbles of Cars, the grief of The Queen or the sheer intensity of United 93. And I definitely sat on the edge of my seat for most of Apocalypto, and thought The Fountain was way over the heads of the studio and moviegoers alike. Likewise I laughed like a hyena at Borat and disavowed fast food after Fast Food Nation. Perhaps the coolest single shot from any film was the swooping crane discovery sequence from The Black Dahlia, otherwise a misfire from Brian De Palma.

When you see as many films as I do it’s not so much about what you like, but about what you can’t wait to end.

Two films epitomize all that is wrong with filmmaking: Stranger Than Fiction and The Holiday. The former was a Huckabees wannabe metaphysical comedy that painted itself into its own lame corner. It has to be good because it’s absurd seems to be director Marc Forester’s mantra. Oddly his badly reviewed Stay was more interesting than anything in Stranger Than Fiction. Will Farrell seems destined to be the George Gobel (a popular comic actor from the 1950s) of this generation.

The Holiday just sets the right mood with the most impossibly beautiful people making love to each other. What’s wrong with that you may ask? After two reels of foreplay Cameron Diaz and Jude Law hop in the sack and after consummating their relationship she still wearing her bra. Welcome to PG-13 filmmaking. The Holiday has brilliant thesps like Kate Winslet overacting, and natural hams like Jack Black downshifting his usual kinetic method. Nancy Meyer’s direction oversimplifies the romance a film like The Holiday needs to sustain interest, but then again she turns out holiday pap like this on a regular basis (anyone own a DVD of What Women Want?).

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

War Games

The film is set late in the Cold War period, opening on a U.S. Air Force base where its missile launch crew receives orders to launch nuclear missiles at the Soviet Union; when the base's Commander (played by John Spencer) fails to launch their missiles, this is revealed to be part of a larger psychological experiment by the military, testing whether U.S. missile crews would do the same in the event of a real nuclear attack. It is mentioned that twenty-two percent of crews tested failed to launch their missiles, prompting NORAD to install an automated computer system, the "War Operation Plan Response" or WOPR, to oversee launching of U.S. nuclear missiles.

The film's protagonist, David Lightman, is introduced as a hacker in high school, whose gaming addiction has resulted in low grades, which he covers up by illicitly accessing the school's computer database and manually adjusting his reported grades, as well as the low grades of a girl he has a crush on, Jennifer. While performing a computerized telephone search in an attempt to locate and play the games of the fictional "Protovision" in Sunnyvale, California (incidentally the real life location of the then-ubiquitous Atari), David discovers a connection to the WOPR, although without a password, he is unable to gain access to anything more than a list of games.

War Games

The film is set late in the Cold War period, opening on a U.S. Air Force base where its missile launch crew receives orders to launch nuclear missiles at the Soviet Union; when the base's Commander (played by John Spencer) fails to launch their missiles, this is revealed to be part of a larger psychological experiment by the military, testing whether U.S. missile crews would do the same in the event of a real nuclear attack. It is mentioned that twenty-two percent of crews tested failed to launch their missiles, prompting NORAD to install an automated computer system, the "War Operation Plan Response" or WOPR, to oversee launching of U.S. nuclear missiles.

The film's protagonist, David Lightman, is introduced as a hacker in high school, whose gaming addiction has resulted in low grades, which he covers up by illicitly accessing the school's computer database and manually adjusting his reported grades, as well as the low grades of a girl he has a crush on, Jennifer. While performing a computerized telephone search in an attempt to locate and play the games of the fictional "Protovision" in Sunnyvale, California (incidentally the real life location of the then-ubiquitous Atari), David discovers a connection to the WOPR, although without a password, he is unable to gain access to anything more than a list of games.

Thursday, July 5, 2007

Sun Ra

To configure this script, first, set the variables inside the script of Step 1 per the comments. As you can see, you can specify more than one iframe on the page in which the script should dynamically resize.

Secondly, for the code of Step 2, be sure the ID (ie: "myframe") matches the ID entered into the script, so the script knows which IFRAMEs to adjust. You may also change the width attribute (ie: 100%) to a different value, as the script only changes the height of the iframe, but not the width.

Thirdly, in the script of Step 1, there is a variable that toggles whether browsers that don't support this script (non IE5+/NS6+) should still see the iframe(s) or not. Generally you should choose to hide the iframe in these non compatible browsers (Opera 7 included), as the iframe's height is hardwired in these cases, and part of the external page most likely will be clipped and unviewable to the viewer if the external page's height exceeds the iframe's default height.

Last but not least, as shown in the demo above, you can actually use links on your main page to load a page into your IFRAME (with the IFRAME automatically resized to that page's height of course). To do so, the link should look like this:

Osiris Jones

To configure this script, first, set the variables inside the script of Step 1 per the comments. As you can see, you can specify more than one iframe on the page in which the script should dynamically resize.

Secondly, for the code of Step 2, be sure the ID (ie: "myframe") matches the ID entered into the script, so the script knows which IFRAMEs to adjust. You may also change the width attribute (ie: 100%) to a different value, as the script only changes the height of the iframe, but not the width.

Thirdly, in the script of Step 1, there is a variable that toggles whether browsers that don't support this script (non IE5+/NS6+) should still see the iframe(s) or not. Generally you should choose to hide the iframe in these non compatible browsers (Opera 7 included), as the iframe's height is hardwired in these cases, and part of the external page most likely will be clipped and unviewable to the viewer if the external page's height exceeds the iframe's default height.

Last but not least, as shown in the demo above, you can actually use links on your main page to load a page into your IFRAME (with the IFRAME automatically resized to that page's height of course). To do so, the link should look like this:

Spaghetti

In the middle of a commercial shoot, inspiration struck Michel Tcherevkoff. The photo of a leaf lay upside down on the table, and he heard himself say: “Hey, that looks like a shoe.” Shortly thereafter, the photographer went tripping down fantasy lane on a whimsically inventive project called “Shoe-Fleur.” Using flowers and leaves as raw materials, Tcherevkoff fashioned them into a collection of shoes that would never walk down a runway but would convey him and his feats of fancy to the Museum of Art and Design in New York.

Jokes and Jokes

In the middle of a commercial shoot, inspiration struck Michel Tcherevkoff. The photo of a leaf lay upside down on the table, and he heard himself say: “Hey, that looks like a shoe.” Shortly thereafter, the photographer went tripping down fantasy lane on a whimsically inventive project called “Shoe-Fleur.” Using flowers and leaves as raw materials, Tcherevkoff fashioned them into a collection of shoes that would never walk down a runway but would convey him and his feats of fancy to the Museum of Art and Design in New York.

Chevy Freedom over Tejas


“After all the ink that’s been spilled describing, previewing and hyping the Apple iPhone, does it deserve the attention? I’d have to say yes,” reports Ryan Kim (San Francisco Chronicle). “The lure of the iPhone is that it makes you want to use it. It’s actually fun. Do we say that about any phones? Hardly. It’s not really the physical design, which is a marvel of simplicity. It’s what happens when you pick it up and use it. There is nothing intimidating about it. Rather, it’s inviting.” “The cell phone, the most personal of technology devices,” Kim concludes, “has just gotten a whole lot more personal.”