No Boundaries

The Big Fella

Today’s the big day. I just love the Oscars. This, because I love the movies and am drawn to thought-provoking film; over-represented in the Oscars. Let me preface by saying that I haven’t seen either of the two films which are going to sweep the whole shabang. These being: Precious and The Hurt Locker. The first deals with the subject of incest which is a topic that I just don’t want to visit. I’m sure it is a splendid film that I would benefit from seeing. But it’s just not my cup of tea. Not a place where I’d enjoy spending any time. The second deals with men who deal with explosives, and I’ve spent a fair amount of my life as a professional dealing with explosives, and this is a place that, for personal emotional reasons, I don’t want to revisit.

So, having said all that, here’s my take on this evening’s proceedings:

• Best Picture: District 9,
• Best Actor: Colin Firth,
• Best Supporting Actor: Matt Damon,
• Best Actress: Meryl Streep,
• Best Supporting Actress: Maggie Gyllenhaal,
• Best Animated Feature: Up,
• Best Art Direction: Avatar,
• Cinematography: Avatar,
• Best Directing: Avatar,
• Best Documentary Feature: The Cove,
• Best Writing: District 9,
• Best Original Screenplay: A Serious Man.

All of that goes out the window, of course, because some combination of Precious and The Hurt Locker is likely to steal the show.

There are a few gross oversights, I think, in the omission of the films Sunshine Cleaning (entirely) and Julia & Juliet (from most categories).  I would have tossed nominations to Sunshine Cleaning for best picture, writing, supporting actress and supporting actor, and Julia & Juliet should have gotten nods for best picture, writing, directing and supporting actor.   I would have gone with Sunshine for taking best writing and Stanley Tucci for best supporting actor (in J&J). He is brilliant in this picture and out-shows even Meryl streep, who is a tad overdone (pun intended). There are also a whole passel of documentaries that I think should have received greater consideration, as a lover of that particular genre.

I give District 9 more credit than it is due because I think it a courageous film, in unusual ways and on many levels. I’m curious with the inclusion of Blind Side and Inglorious Basterds in some of the categories.

When viewed through the prism of the Oscars, this past year in film was perhaps a bit of let-down. There are many good films but nothing outstanding. Avatar complicates this because it is absolutely brilliant when considered technically and fairly mediocre when considered otherwise. This is another year and, with tomorrow, we can all look forward again.

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I need to both: wrap-up Sundance while I can still remember all of  it, and post my Vancouver images from last November. But I’m currently enthralled, although less and less every day, with the above-titled phenomena.  And I mean phenomena in the scientific sense of the term. I think business schools will be studying exactly what happened over the last week-and-a-half  for a long time to come.  My focus has shifted from the merits of Flash, which was the core of the debate, to Twitter, social marketing campaigns and how everything is very different these days.

My personal opinion about what happened is:  Apple, having opposing lines of business: selling gizmos and selling stuff that runs on gizmos, crossed something of a rubicon.  They were faced with either marketing their device with an obvious and important feature missing or giving up the ability to control and monetize all sorts of things that run on the device.

Apple chose a bold and aggressive path.  They targeted Flash as very bad for almost anything (or Adobe as lazy at any rate) and themselves as providers of a forward-looking salve to the badness in having excluded it. Once that sort of argument is made, retreat isn’t likely. None of this is good for Adobe, but I think, in many ways, it has turned out worse for Apple.

Fresh from a Sundance seminar on social-network marketing, I quickly installed my Tweetdeck when I first heard of the missing Flash content. With the search terms Flash and Ipad, I monitored, every now and then, as the tweetstream unfolded. This proceeded and has outlasted any conventional media coverage and, to me, was just incredible in both sheer volume and the varied directions of the content.

The tweets took three general forms:

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The second thing which just came up last week was the newly interminable issue of Flash vs the Ipad. This rhetorical phenomena has caused me to download tweetdeck and even tweet, if only a morsel or five. Six maybe. Seven. But I intend to put away the tweetdeck as soon as everything dies down. It is moments like these when the twittery is most hyperbolic. I think both sides are a bit full of it on this one.

The current status of the debate, per my little tweetdeck, is: “Flash is terribly buggy and an historical web practice already” vs” the internet will consist of vast holes filled with blue lego icons if Flash is excluded”.

Quietly, yesterday, Communications Arts selected a webpick of the day (26000 Vodka) that puts almost all four trillion of these tweet-rants, on both sides, to rest. The concept is degradation.  This, simply put, is: knowing that not everything can be supported on every platform, a developer can present the lowest common denominator technology first, determine if a more sophisticated technology is supported (either by asking the user to choose or directly evaluating which technologies are supported on the device), and then make use of the highest level of technology that will work or that the user finds most comfortable.

In the majority of cases, it’s not all that more difficult to build a site that will provide the best experience that the current technology can provide (using Flash, Silverlight or whatever) , and degrade to something that will offer a less vibrant and innovative, though stable, experience on devices which don’t support those technologies.

So neither the “Flash is dead”, nor the “myriad of lego boxes” arguments have merit. A lesser tier of content will make it’s way to the Ipad via the web.  The App Store will be the source of any sophisticated stuff which runs on the device, and this will be entirely preselected by Apple. Hulu likely will never be welcome.

This will be a good thing for Flash beyond the Ipad controversy because currently many netbooks and other gizmos are not well suited for running large Flash applications.

Beyond this relatively simple and elegant solution, here are a few of my thoughts:

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Because Sundance constitutes an onslaught upon one’s thought capacity, I decided it might be good to post here and there throughout rather than wrapping things up at the end. By the end it is difficult to remember what one was thinking at the beginning.

My first day brought me to to a day-long seminar on the marketing of independent film via the various tools, social and otherwise, that constitute the “new media”.  With the exception of one gathering of the mega-webites, the seminar was not well attended which was a bit of a surprise.  The event, organized by Jigsaw Global, was nicely put-together and informative, if only skimming the surface, very lightly, of the subjects at hand.

Presenters included the director of i-Phone gaming for the Adult Swim Network (something to do with after hours programing on the Cartoon Network I think) on building film/television related aps for the i-Phone, a web consultant on the general makings of a new media marketing strategy, and the Microsoft queen of twitter who unveiled a new Windows 7 twitter utility called Look.

There were also two impressive panel discussions: the first was arbitrated by Kara Swisher, of the Wall Street Journal’s allThingsD.com, and involved the content potentates of most of the new media powerhouses including Oprah, Youtube, Facebook and mySpace as well as a token filmmaker and the fellow who did the social media marketing for last year’s Indy films’: “The Cove” and “Food Inc”.  The second panel involved what I would call a PR procurement chain that began with a filmmaker in this year’s festival extending through various obscure new media functionalities to a actual real-life new media designer at the bottom of the food chain.

A few thoughts:

Things are not well in the movie business.  This is not a surprise but things are particularly terrible in the Indy movie business.  This was made most cogent as one filmmaker shouted from the crowd: “People won’t finance our films if they can’t sell them”.  The malaise appears to extend even into the iPhone realm where downloads of film studio aps are falling far short of expectations, and the number of available aps is swamping the potential for any given ap to achieve profitability.  Throughout this presentation I kept thinking: wait until Flash hits the iPhone ap market in the middle of this year.

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Kevin Spacey in Shrink holds up well in a mixed up plot/world.

I had revelatory experience the other night.  Watching Letterman (I’m one of those who’ve fled NBC ;  I just don’t get the other fellow), I noted Kevin Spacey bringing up the subject of Jack Lemmon.  As a kid I loved Lemmon. “Save the Tiger” was one of my favorite flicks at fourteen. Strange but true. His portrayal of complexly mixed-up guys in dramas, lost somewhere in the vast triangular space between what is expected of them as American men, what is human nature, and what is morally appropriate, as opposed to the goofball repartee for which he is more widely appreciated, is what I found so marvelous.  He mastered the conflicted American male best until Spacey came along.  I’ve done a quick search looking for anything re: “Save the Tiger” (a quick trip down memory lane, for which the interweb is so lovely) and had a bit of a triple-take when I saw the 1973 poster.  The graphic of Lemmon standing in a solid gray suit is every bit of the Spacey of today.

Spacey is arguably, also, one of the  foremost masters of the craft of his era, in the same form as Lemmon, and now the connection is made.  Spacey is a follower of Lemmon (in the pre-Twitter sense) and, considering the work of both, he’s modeled most of his best work after the best work of Lemmon.

The subject of his Letterman appearance was “Shrink”, the premier of which I attended at this year’s Sundance.  The film left me feeling mixed.  Spacey’s performance was solid as it usually is, as was most of the rest of ensemble cast.  Spacey plays a potted-out (in the marijuana sense), emotionally ravaged knit-wit pretending to be of service to several other knit-wits of various neurotic Southern-Californian stripe.  This goes along until a real person enters the doctor’s suite and then he must confront what it is to be human again.  The concept is lovely but the script falls short, being more than slightly contrived.  I still would see it though, solely for the performances. Continue reading