In theaters: Were the World Mine

Fans of musicals, foes of Prop. 8, Shakespeare buffs, and anyone who likes solid entertainment that's a little bit thought-provoking should check out Were the World Mine. It opens in theaters this weekend in San Francisco, Berkeley, and New York. We saw it at Frameline and loved it.

Audio complete!

I just finished setting the audio levels on my big video project. All I have left to do is color correction. The audio went much faster on this half of the project because of the new technique I started using. Tonight I had to pull down three out of four tracks in the middle of a hymn. There was only one mic left recording the hymn, so I had to make up for the other tracks. It would seem like the best thing to do was to fade the three tracks out gradually while turning up the one remaining track at exactly the same rate. And that's exactly right. The transition isn't perfect, but it's pretty close.

Star Trek trailer

The Star Trek trailer is up on the elaborate official site now. I was kind of dismayed that the movie's not coming out until May. Also, the teaser trailer was better. But the movie looks good. I like origin stories.

Quick take: Gattaca

In response to my recent post about non-action, non-thriller sci-fi movies, someone kindly lent me a DVD of Gattaca. More about the DVD itself in a later post. But as for the movie, first of all, it's an excellent film. Writer-director Andrew Nicoll found a good balance between mythic, futuristic, sociological, and suspense elements. The cast, which amazingly brings together Gore Vidal and Ernest Borgnine (!) along with stars Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman, and Jude Law, is superb.

You'll notice I mentioned "suspense elements." Gattaca has plenty of suspense. I'd even call it a thriller, of a sort. There's definitely a conspiracy. But the story is so original that it won't fit into any pigeonhole. It defies the conventions of a typical thriller: It pits one determined man against a sophisticated bureaucracy, but in a very original way. And the plot doesn't come close to answering all the questions the screenplay raises, leaving a delicious sense of mystery.

But along with being the rare sci-fi movie that's not a (typical) action or suspense film, Gattaca is also a (less rare) gay movie with no overtly gay characters. The film opens with the first of many of what I'll call, to avoid giving too much away, male shower scenes. (They're not what you think, and yes, this is a movie that passed the "What the hell?" test right out of the gate.) Then there's the situation of having two young, smartly dressed, impeccably coiffed men living together in a starkly modern luxury loft. One of them being Jude Law. And there's more, but it's all behind a sort of curtain. Gayness is never "there" in the story, either spoken or unspoken, but it doesn't have to be. After the closing scene, featuring one of the oddest and most inspired wardrobe choices ever, I just laughed out loud. Gattaca is the sci-fi film as a modern Hays Code movie.

History break: Internment camp yearbook

Not much of a film or video angle on this, but I just had to share: My friend AngryAsianMan points out an amazing artifact from the University of California's digital historical library. It's the entire 1944-45 yearbook of Newell High School, which was at the Tule Lake internment camp for Japanese-Americans. All 80 pages have been scanned. Apparently it was a good-sized school.

What could we learn from a document like this? The questions it raises are fascinating. Apart from faculty, this was an all-Japanese-American school. How did these kids see themselves? How did they see their surroundings, which are wonderfully evoked in illustrations by a girl named Flo Oshiro? How did the experience of being only among their own kind for a few formative years shape their attitudes and lives afterward? Were some able to be class president, star baseball player, or cheerleader who wouldn't have had that chance in the public school in their hometown? What kind of culture grew up there, for that brief, exceptional time?

Of course, history tells us that these kinds of things weren't on the minds of most Japanese-Americans at the time. Internment was an extended limbo, full of annoying privations, and they just wanted to go home. But looking over this yearbook just makes me wonder. The most tantalizing page is at the end, the one titled "Autographs." There are none on the copy scanned and posted here, but I'd love to read one filled with notes and signatures. What thoughts did these young classmates share with one another in their old-fashioned penmanship -- some looking toward a summer in a small camp all together, some about to graduate with nowhere to go, some about to volunteer to fight for the country that had interned them?

I do have a couple of film recommendations here: The documentary Topaz was shot surreptitiously at the Utah camp of the same name by internee Dave Tatsuno and is well worth checking out if you have a chance. And apparently, some of Tatsuno's footage was used in the Topaz baseball drama American Pastime, which I've heard is quite good.

The importance of b-roll

A few weeks ago I shot a case-study report on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence and the network switches they use. I shot in several locations at UC Berkeley and my subjects were incredibly helpful and accommodating.

The main interview took place at SETI's lab. There were a lot of silly little space-oriented things around the room along with actual scientific instruments. After the interview was done, I took a closer look at the opposite side of the room and found some toy aliens. What better to represent SETI's mission? I also noticed a bunch of equations on a whiteboard, the perfect symbol of scientists at work. I had a lot more shooting to do, so I packed up my tripod and get ready to go, but then I grabbed a few seconds of each of these with a handheld camera.

I didn't edit the piece myself. I turned it over to our video producer in Boston, Nick Barber. I sent him 17 minutes of material, and a lot of it was this kind of extra "b-roll" footage. Those little handheld shots made it into the piece and I think it added a lot. (Plus, I couldn't resist the stunning view from the Space Sciences Lab. It was a gorgeous day. Some of that made it in, too.)

As seen on TV

The other day after we saw Changeling, we came home and watched an episode of "Mad Men" (Season 1). In this case, the TV show was better than the movie. Partly this was due to the exceptional writing, acting and direction of "Mad Men." But I wondered how much it had to do with the eight or nine hours of buildup that preceded the "Mad Men" episode we watched.

Are movie-quality dramas like "Mad Men" and "The Sopranos" raising our expectations for feature films? In one sense, features can't match the series: They just don't have the running time. A good series can develop like a novel. I first realized this back in the late Eighties when I would come home after working swing shift and watch "Hill Street Blues" reruns at 1 a.m. This wasn't so good for my dreams, but I got to see an entire season in just a few weeks because the show ran nightly, in sequence.

To build up a set of characters like some of these series have, but in just a couple of hours, is done by the best, but it's very difficult.