Scott Bush

Do you enjoy a peanut-butter and pesto sand­wich? How about an ice-cream sun­dae cov­ered in vin­daloo? Ever seen a hilar­i­ous Shake­spearean com­edy fol­lowed by a dark and mur­der­ous Greek tragedy? That was our expe­ri­ence (the plays, not the strange food com­bi­na­tions) in Dec. and Jan. as we attended the first two entries in the Seat­tle Shakespeare’s Company’s 09–10 sea­son: Twelfth Night and Elec­tra.

The two plays could not have been more dif­fer­ent, but I’ll start by men­tion­ing how they were the same: pro­fes­sional. If you’ve never been to an SCC per­for­mance, you should check one out. The the­atre, located in the bot­tom of the Seat­tle Cen­ter, is inti­mate and wel­com­ing. The sets are usu­ally sparse but ade­quate to sup­port the act­ing, which is always top-notch. My wife and I have been season-ticket hold­ers for four years now and after 14 plays I’ve yet to see an actor trip, appear out-of-character, or miss a line (that I could tell, at least). This troupe is, in one word: excel­lent. (more…)

Lil­lian Gish as Romola. Your screen’s not broken–it’s sup­posed to be in black-and-white.

A cou­ple weeks ago a friend invited my wife and I to join him at a movie. “Great, a free movie!” I thought. “It’s a silent, black-and-white movie from 1924,” he added. “Oh great,” I thought, “just what I want, a movie with no color or sound.” But he sold it as a “cul­tural expe­ri­ence,” so we agreed to meet him at the Para­mount in down­town Seattle.

An organ very sim­i­lar to the one being played live at the Para­mount dur­ing the movie.

While I cer­tainly wouldn’t call it a block­buster, see­ing Romola in all its silent glory and accom­pa­nied by (what I’m told is) a beautifully-restored Wurl­itzer organ was worth­while expe­ri­ence. The story, in brief, is essen­tially polit­i­cal. It’s set in the Ital­ian city of Flo­rence when the Medici fam­ily ruled. A man mar­ries for polit­i­cal ambi­tion, becomes a bad guy, has a baby, shuns his step­fa­ther (who later kills him), and oh yeah–a priest is burned at the stake. Hmmm… sounds a bit all over the place. If you want a more fleshed-out syn­op­sis, one is avail­able at IMDB.

See­ing a silent film made so long ago high­lighted some inter­est­ing points.

Melo­drama

The exag­ger­ated over­act­ing shown in par­o­dies of old movies is true. There were times watch­ing Romola when I nearly laughed because of how fake the char­ac­ters’ actions seemed. Then I remem­bered… that was how it was done in those days. With the poorer-quality cam­eras, black-and-white film, and no sound, the actors relied on their histri­on­ics to con­vey emo­tion. Still, it’s hard to take it seri­ously today. Most over-acted scene? Romola dis­cov­ers her dad has died in his chair. She runs around the room, wav­ing her hands in the air and then clasp­ing them to her breast, eye­lids flut­ter­ing as though she’d swoon. Puh-lease!

Far fewer cuts

In watch­ing this film, I was struck by how long the scenes went with­out a cut. The cam­era was (in my rec­ol­lec­tion) always stationary—not too sur­pris­ing given that it was 1924 and cam­eras weren’t exactly tiny. And edit­ing was done man­u­ally; no Final Cut Pro or Pre­mière to do the work. Those facts help explain why time between cuts could be mea­sured in min­utes, not sec­onds or even frac­tional sections.

Later that evening we watched a TV show (I know, that’s a lot of watch­ing in one day) and I was amazed at the fre­netic pace of the cuts. It’s no secret that the rapid­ity of cuts has increased dra­mat­i­cally over the years, but wow. Try it your­self: begin count­ing as soon as you see a cut or tran­si­tion in the cam­era angle. Get to three? It’s rare; many cuts hap­pen in a sec­ond or some­time less.

And it’s not just TV, either. The web­site Cin­e­met­rics com­piles a data­base of the aver­age time between cuts of all sorts of films (a cool project in its own right). Some analy­sis on the dis­tri­b­u­tion of the “Aver­age Shot Length”:

Is there a trend to be found in the dis­tri­b­u­tion of longer and shorter ASL data across the data­base? Even a rough esti­mate shows there is. It is not by chance that the slow­est film of those posted on cin­e­met­rics so far was made in 1902 and that the fastest was made in 2000. No one knows bet­ter than our crew how com­plex the ques­tion of edit­ing is and how many fac­tors affect the cut­ting tempo of films, but if we are asked “do films become faster in the course of film his­tory, yes or no?” cin­e­met­rics says yes. True, we have not yet inspected every film ever made, but 294 film selected by 22 peo­ple for dif­fer­ent pur­poses is a decent unbi­ased sample.

So, does the cut fre­quency in out TV and movies shorten our atten­tion span, or help us adapt quicker? Call me an old fuddy-duddy, but I think the for­mer is more true. But is that such a hor­ri­ble thing? If the major­ity of the “inter­faces,” for lack of a bet­ter term, we inter­act with today (and increas­ingly in the future) are quick-paced, then it’s a use­ful skill. As long as the art of appre­ci­a­tion of the long, still shot (or just the abil­ity to sit still for 15 min­utes at stretch read­ing or think­ing) isn’t lost, I’m not sure it’s so bad.

“Inter­ti­tles” actu­ally work pretty well

Inter­ti­tle from silent movie “The Jazz Singer”

Finally, I learned that silent film’s back­story and dia­log com­po­nent, the text plac­ards that appear at inter­vals to share infor­ma­tion (they’re called inter­ti­tles), aren’t really so bad. I’m used to watch­ing sub­ti­tled movies so per­haps thats why I actu­ally sort of liked them.

It’s inter­est­ing how our expec­ta­tion is that a silent movie with inter­ti­tles wouldn’t be able to explain the story well enough: There’s no talk­ing, after all. But a sur­pris­ing amount of information—in con­text of the film’s action, of course—can be con­veyed by a few well-crafted lines. And not all of it is dia­log, either; Romola had a fair bit of expos­i­tory infor­ma­tion. Sure, it’s not like what we’re used to, but it works in its own way. Sort of like short sub­ti­tles that only appear when there’s noth­ing else on the screen.

With the release of the new Star Trek movie this Fri­day, and the announce­ment of the Kin­dle DX, it seemed appro­pri­ate to share an obser­va­tion I’ve had for a cou­ple of years now. Our level of tech­nol­ogy in 2009 is approach­ing what Gene Rod­den­berry envi­sioned for the Star Trek uni­verse of the 24th cen­tury. Maybe not in trans­porter tech­nol­ogy (though Tena­cious D has already asked that the sci­en­tists get work­ing on the tube tech­nol­ogy) or holo­graphic doc­tors, but cer­tainly in infor­ma­tion dis­play devices. To wit:

At left are “PADDs,” or Per­sonal Access Dis­play Devices, were used in the Star Trek shows to share infor­ma­tion. In many scenes, an offi­cer would hand some­one a PADD and say some­thing like “here are the duty ros­ters you wanted,” or there would be a half dozen of them scat­tered over a desk.

At right is Amazon’s upcom­ing ebook reader, er… “wire­less read­ing device,” the Kin­dle. It can down­load books, mag­a­zines, and pur­port­edly text­books. Not shown here are the iPhone and iPod Touch, which serve quite well as ebook read­ers in their own right thanks to the dozens of ebook and other “media-consumption” appli­ca­tions, for lack of a bet­ter term (I’m think­ing here of the WSJ news reader, Pen­guin Clas­sics, and many others).

So, are we there? Do we have 24th cen­tury tech­nol­ogy? Hard to say for sure, since it’s only the 21st cen­tury and I’m com­par­ing a prop from TV shows over a decade old to a future a cou­ple cen­turies hence. But I can draw some con­clu­sions, mainly about how the pro­duc­ers of Star Trek (indeed, most every­one at that time) mis­judged how infor­ma­tion would be shared in the future.

That con­cept is the net­work. The “cloud.” The inter­webs. In the mid 90s, the then-nascent World Wide Web wasn’t mature enough to spark the imag­i­na­tions of pro­duc­ers. They were still locked into the par­a­digm of a “device that con­tains infor­ma­tion,” rather than a “device that con­sumes infor­ma­tion.” Sure, the egal­i­tar­ian world­view espoused by Star Trek came though in the ease with which these PADDs—presumably very valu­able, high-tech devices—are passed around with­out worry to cost or own­er­ship. But just a decade or so on, the real­ity of infor­ma­tion exchange facil­i­tated by the Inter­net has anti­quated the show’s vision of the dis­tant future’s infor­ma­tion medium. Con­tent now comes to your device and is shared out from your device to oth­ers. You don’t pass your iPod or Kin­dle to some­one to give them your duty ros­ter or what­not; you sim­ply e-mail, blog, upload, or tweet your con­tent to the net­work for their retrieval.

I may be read­ing too much into this. Okay, I most cer­tainly am. But I do feel it’s worth not­ing that devices like the Kin­dle, iPod, and lesser-known devices like Sony’s ebook reader present an inter­est­ing advance­ment in infor­ma­tion con­sump­tion. Newspapers—at least, those printed on dead trees—are a dying breed. Jour­nal­ism isn’t dead, but that medium is dying out. These devices and their ilk are replac­ing paper for a grow­ing seg­ment of the mar­ket­place and for an expand­ing demo­graphic. It’s an excit­ing time to be a con­sumer, pro­ducer, and observer of information.

One thing I know for sure: any sci-fi show will be dated to the era in which its pro­duced. In another cou­ple decades tech­nol­ogy will make today’s cutting-edge com­mu­ni­ca­tion meth­ods look like Dr. Who step­ping into a phone booth. (Wait, what’s a phone booth again?)

So, I’m enjoy­ing a cof­fee at Zoka’s near Green­lake, and as I step out of the restroom a poster catches my eye: Night of the Liv­ing Dead. Hey, I love George Romero’s genre-defining flick as much as more than the next guy. But what was strik­ing was who was putting on the pro­duc­tion: Seat­tle Children’s Theatre!

Appar­ently, the the­atre has injected camp, com­edy, and a lot of Seat­tle ref­er­ences to make it palat­able to young­sters. Accord­ing to the Seat­tle Times story:

SCT direc­tor Linda Hartzell says her pro­duc­tion is intended for kids 13 and older…

Kids, I know, are desen­si­tized to vio­lence thanks to the expo­sure they receive on TV (any law/cop drama), movies (just about any of them), and video games (Grand Theft Auto, Max Payne, etc.). I’m not sug­gest­ing that these things should be reg­u­lated any more than they are; I don’t know enough about it to judge. But I do think that a children’s the­atre should not be remak­ing zom­bie movies into plays for kids. Call me old fash­ioned, but I think such an impor­tant cul­tural and artis­tic venue ought to pro­duce plays that are pos­i­tive, encour­ag­ing, and per­haps chal­leng­ing… but cer­tainly not hor­ri­fy­ing. How­ever jus­ti­fied by the “com­edy” added to it, or the fact that gummy worms stand in for real human intestines, the fact remains that the dead don’t stay dead and come after the liv­ing. That’s not the sort of topic a tween should be deal­ing with; at least, not at a play put on by one of Seattle’s most rep­utable theatres.

All that said, I think a campy pro­duc­tion ver­sion of Romero’s 1968 clas­sic is a good idea—but for adults, not kids.

Upon read­ing the title of this post, did you imme­di­ately hear the “thwap, thwap, thwap” of exag­ger­ated sounds of blocks and strikes that are the hall­mark of kung-fu movies in the 60s and 70s? If so, then you already know and respect the name “Shaw Broth­ers.” If not, let me intro­duce you…

Every­thing you prob­a­bly know about kung-fu movies—poor sub­ti­tles, bad Eng­lish dub­bing, extreme close-up zoom, hard-to-follow plots, etc.—has its gen­e­sis from the films of this amaz­ing movie pro­duc­tion house. A num­ber of web­sites do a great job explain­ing the his­tory and pro­lific nature of their movies and stars (includ­ing house­hold names like Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung), so I won’t try and repli­cate that here.

Instead, a brief list of Shaw Bros. kung-fu movies you sim­ply have to see:

Two Cham­pi­ons of Shaolin (1978) — Broth­er­hood and revenge are the cen­tral themes, which is typ­i­cal of a Shaw Bros. pro­duc­tion. Excep­tional fight­ing and an intri­cate plot with char­ac­ters con­flicted about where their loy­al­ties lie make this a great one. Oh, and the Chem­i­cal Broth­ers mas­ter­fully edited and “enhanced” this movie to cre­ate the video for their song Get Your­self High:

Heroes of the East (1979) — My favorite aspect of this film is its inclu­sion of Japan’s mar­tial arts, not just China’s. The story revolves around a Chi­nese man’s arranged mar­riage to a Japan­ese woman who prac­tices mar­tial arts. Nat­u­rally, they argue about what is bet­ter, kung-fu or karate. This leads to a con­tin­gent of Japan’s best mar­tial artists com­ing to China to face Ah To (played by Gor­don Lui). Sword, spear, staff, darts, fists and feet clash as Ah To uses forms of kung-fu (includ­ing drunken box­ing) against karate, kendo, nin­jitsu and other Japan­ese arts. What I loved about this is although kung-fu wins out, it’s done respect­fully to Japan’s mar­tial arts rather than vil­i­fy­ing them. Take a peek:

Five Deadly Ven­oms (1978) — A total clas­sic! This film fea­tures kung-fu based on five ani­mal forms (cen­tipede, snake, scor­pion, lizard, and toad), each of which is prac­ticed by a stu­dent of the same mas­ter. One stu­dent must seek out and end the tyranny of these rogue pupils. This film (and other SB films) heav­ily influ­enced the hip-hop group the Wu-Tang Clan. It’s bet­ter seen than described. Here’s the final fight of the film:

There are a ton of excel­lent Shaw Broth­ers films. My rec­om­men­da­tion is to get some friends together and watch the three above; if you like them, check out more. It’s help­ful to have friends to watch with since the plots can be hard to fol­low, espe­cially if you’re not famil­iar with kung-fu story lines or can’t read two lines of sub­ti­tled dia­log in under 2 sec­onds, which seems to hap­pen some­times. It’s just part of the magic.

It was The Ruins alright… specif­i­cally, it ruined my din­ner, which I almost lost while watch­ing this one. Not scary, but gory and gross (remem­ber Kathy Bates bash­ing James Caan’s legs in Mis­ery? The Ruins has a scene that puts that to shame).

In the “pro” col­umn is an excel­lent con­cept: a Mayan tem­ple cov­ered in a dia­bol­i­cal man-eating vine. It’s sequestered by the locals, avoided by birds, and appar­ently only a cab ride away from a party resort. Another pro: actor Jonathan Tucker (Jeff in the movie) looks a hell of a lot like Chris­t­ian Bale. Made me think I was watch­ing Bat­man on vaca­tion in Mexico.

In the “con” col­umn is just about every­thing else. It’s end­ing suf­fers from the typ­i­cal “let’s keep the hor­ror going!” syn­drome (The Ring is the only movie that did that well). A few scenes feel like they’re shoe-horned in from the book, such as Stacy’s accu­sa­tion of infi­delity between Amy and Eric. If I read the book (which I won’t, but Matthew Bald­win did and pro­vides a review over at Defec­tiveYeti) I’m sure it would seem less forced. The first major “attack” of the vines in the tem­ple was unbe­liev­ably cheesey (think Muppet-show qual­ity), but later inter­ac­tions with it were much bet­ter and the under-the-skin stuff actu­ally looked good, too.

In ret­ro­spect I may be too hard on it. It grossed me out, couldn’t watch dur­ing a few scenes, and was tense while antic­i­pat­ing some­thing bad about to hap­pen. That pretty much sums up this sort of movie.

Oh, and kudos to my friend Tara. At the open­ing scene, she cor­rectly iden­ti­fied the only char­ac­ter to sur­vive until the end. Her guess? The only actress she rec­og­nized, Jena Mal­one (she was in one of my favorites, Don­nie Darko, and voiced a char­ac­ter in Miyazaki’s Howl’s Mov­ing Cas­tle). It’s a pretty safe bet in a hor­ror movie.