Quips notes 13.12.04

Another consistently good magazine that I've found to be increasingly useful, while critiquing movies, is Movie Maker magazine (http://www.moviemaker.com/). It's a trade publication out of New York, that always seems to feature at least a couple of really worthwhile articles and a whole bunch of interesting pieces within each issue that I've managed to pick up. About making movies - intended for aspiring, novice and seasoned movie makers - written by those in the business.

The Second Annual Edition of Movie Maker's 'Beginner's Guide to Making Movies 2005' is the issue that I keep going back to time and time again. There's an incredible amount of information locked within these pages, frankly. From screenwriting and character development to financial and equipment start up info, production and post-production outlines to getting your finished film seen, each chapter is a potential gold mine of advice. I like it as a useful reference, for whenever I need to more fully explain a certain aspect of movie making while writing why I did or didn't like, say, the cinematography or editing or direction, within the context of enjoying the over-all end result. I can simply refer to what the pros suggest are the right ways of doing things, and apply that to my critique if necessary.

Of course, Movie Maker magazine isn't really intended for what I use it for. Movie critics are more than probably the least likely people expected to read it, in the minds of its publisher and editorial staff. That's one of the reasons why I enjoy it. Movie Maker tends to take a bare bones, nuts and bolts approach to what it calls 'the art and business of making movies'. So, it's like being given access to some of the knowledge that film makers have, without my needing to save up for film school.

It seems as though most critics are more interested in the hype magazines that are available, from the States and from here in Canada. The ones that are basically print extensions of the much larger studio marketing machines that crank out photos and pithy blurbs for celebrity watchers and cinemaholics to gobble up every month. Perhaps that's the reviewers' fault, but perhaps that's more the fault of their editors, who seem to really only let their film critics venture outside of what their primary job description is, whenever the paper has enough space to fill for a quick line up of up coming releases per each season. Or, the accounting department has decided that a number of 'indepth interview' pieces are needed to justify sending the movie critic to Cannes or Toronto, Sundance, or where ever. Then, the movie critic gets to be a journalist. Which is apparently what most of them started out as, before getting paid to see movies for free. Thumb fetishist Roger Ebert, for instance, was a Sports journalist, long before he won a Pulitzer as a movie reviewer.

And, yes. Some of those glossy hype magazines are quite glossy and impressive-looking. I suppose I'm just not interested enough in all of the movies still existing in whatever level of pre or post-production to really pay much notice. At least one entire magazine is devoted to movies being made in Western Canada, called Reel West (http://www.reelwest.com/), as an example. Intended for Canadian movie makers but, from what I've seen while flipping through its pages, mostly just cites titles that I know will probably never reach a theatre audience outside of whatever capital city they're shot in. Titles that could very well end up going straight to video. Or, only become distributed in foreign markets such as the UK or the Middle East. So, I can't really see how my knowing about them - other than knowing that a relatively large number of Canadian movies are getting made, kinda, sorta - should in any way affect what I'm doing with the weekly reviews that I write, submit online, and post on my own website, Stephen Bourne's Movie Quips (www.geocities.com/iamstephenbourne/moviequips.html). Sure, the mere evidence that they're being made does stand against an earlier blog posting that I made, regarding the number of Canadian studios not apparently doing much in the way of actually making movies. However, without a reliably robust enough network of distribution, does their effort really matter to moviegoers? Well, no. Does knowing about them make it any easier to see any of them, if few or none of them appear outside of a far flung location shoot's city limits? Unlikely. So, I'll simply make an effort to see the ones that do manage to make it here - to a movie theatre in the Nation's Capital - if they run long enough for me to notice that any of 'em have actually made it this far.

A perfect example of that happened recently, when I did notice that a new Canadian movie was being screened nearby. In a western suburb of Gatineau, in Quebec, mind you. At a multi-screen theatre that seems to play both English and French versions of movies. In this case, for about four days. It wasn't clear that this particular movie, director Don McKeller's 'Childstar' (2004), would only be given such a short screen life, until I discovered at the last minute that it was no-longer playing on the day that I could make the trip to go and see the flick. Either a new American blockbuster or the latest big screen wrestling extravaganza from the States ended up taking its place by the end of the week. The Canadian movie was merely filler. Afforded little to no advertising budget, beyond the simple newspaper listings sent in by each theatre. Which is too bad, but there you have it.

Thanks for checking in.

Quips notes 02.12.04

I had to laugh earlier today. Apparently, .net magazine (www.netmag.co.uk) is celebrating its ten year anniversary in the latest issue.

Now, I realize that this probably isn't as humourous to anyone else as it is to me, but .net magazine was one of the first internet-related magazines that I remember stumbling upon years ago. Years ago as in shortly after I'd first allowed something called The Internet into my home via an ugly and strangely blinking, Hayes 2400 baud modem that shrieked like a banshee being beaten to death with rusty chainsaws everytime I went online. Back when there really wasn't much of a world wide web at all. When a lot of stuff was primarily text-based and non-graphical (remember ascii drawings?). Where those who did add inline graphics to their sites actually apologized for the slowness of their pages, and dial up bbs' - where the addresses were simply phone numbers your computer dialed so that you could virtually chat with people at a tediously slow speed in newsgroups - being run off of people's dedicated home phone lines were still the norm.

That would have been 1995. When Telnet was king. A year after I'd mistakened an internet public access terminal for a computerized catalogue station at the Ottawa Public Library, and almost instantly realized that this rather clumsy, simple-looking electronic bulletin board that I'd read about in novels, and had seen wildly dramatized in a few movies, might be something worth investigating further.

I didn't get very far, though. No browsers really existed for that text-based interface and, according to the fun timeline featured in this December 2004 issue of .net, Netscape had only just been released and Microsoft's Internet Explorer was still a year away. I knew about Mosaic, but, well, trying to figure out how to somersault through a University hub using Archie or Gofer to find the simplest, giga-syllabic URL just seemed like too much of a hassle for me to figure out something called a browser at the time. I felt enough like a geek merely knowing how to check my email, and unintentionally being in the right place at the wrong time when a fairly chirpy television news reporter was lurking around that public access terminal for warm bodies to put on camera for her piece about how the internet would bring the swift demise of book-reading and public libraries. I guess she figured the internet of 1994 was all moving pictures and gramaphonic recordings - much like the then-believed reigning, endangered technology: television - where internet users would soon forget how to read...

It's amazing to me that .net has survived an entire decade as a printed publication, frankly. A magazine that's still produced through offset printing and distributed worldwide intended for the purpose of telling people about the internet somehow seems equivalent to a radio show about television in some respects. Even though at least half of the world's population likely doesn't have an email address or easy access to a web-enabled computer these days, the idea that a print magazine devoted to highlighting an assortment of its facets and educating readers about pretty well every aspect of the web - from telling you about worthwhile websites to telling you how to create and maintain worthwhile websites - truly astounds me. It probably shouldn't, but I still remember how the growth of wide spread computer use in the homes and at the workplace would (apparently) create a paperless society. This supposedly included the death of print media, such as magazines. As it stands, .net magazine has proved to be a consistently useful source while other internet-related magazines seem to have sprouted up intended for specialized niche groups of programmers and designers or as glossy catalogue-like consumer porn for early adopters looking for the next coolest internet-related toy. Quite honestly, I've yet to find another print magazine like .net and am glad that it still exists.

I suppose the main reason why I find it noteworthy that .net magazine has lasted this long is because it was through it that I was introduced to html coding. Back in the mid-Nineties. The articles were so concise and easy to follow that I was able to do each step as explained, and actually end up with a website that worked. To me, this was a revelation, because I knew nothing about manually coding anything beyond whatever I'd happened to recall about Basic, from a high school computer science night class that I'd previously taken as an extra credit one winter, as a teenager. Html looked a lot like Basic coding. So, I guess that made it easier for me to pick it up and play around with manually coding a website from scratch. Even though one of the first serious websites that I'd created and had gone live with featured bright yellow text on a white background, because the computer that I was using at the time wasn't good enough to run a graphical browser that would have allowed me to actually see the silly coding mistake I'd made with the colour. Ah well. Live and learn.

As it's turned out, I still end up using some of the stuff that I'd learned from reading and copying from that early issue of .net magazine. Specifically while continually updating my movie reviews website, Stephen Bourne's Movie Quips (www.geocities.com/iamstephenbourne/moviequips.html), on a weekly basis. For instance, I'd have no clue how to embed a new string of javascript or quickly fix a bad link within the mess of existing source coding if I didn't have a basic understanding of my website's back end architecture. Particularly if the newly introduced coding needed to be tweaked in order to work properly with the automatically created coding cranked out by the simple layout software that I use nowadays. I'd be like most people who primarily browse the web for leisure and like to add stuff to their personal website. The coding itself would all look like useless jumbled gobbledegook to my eyeballs, if I hadn't picked up that issue of .net magazine almost a decade ago.

Thanks for checking in.