Isegoria

Frank Miller’s 300 is a graphic novel depicting the Spartans’ stand at Thermopylae. Now it is being turned into a movie, which, like Sin City before it, is to be highly stylized — “operatic” in the words of one of the designers.

You can view the trailer and production journals at YouTube. Naturally, I was drawn to Video Diary 3: Spartan Training and Video Diary 5: Fight Choreography. The actors have a personal trainer who has them clearly performing a CrossFit workout, and the fight choreographers are from the Inosanto Academy — so don’t be surprised if the Spartans fight in a vaguely Asian style.

Liesl Schillinger looks at the French and German remakes of the BBC’s Office — and the US version as well — and draws some conclusions about our varied national cultures:

Watching all four versions back-to-back is not only a strangely unmooring experience — like seeing the film Groundhog Day over and over — it’s a crash course in national identity. And if any conjecture could be made about the cultural differences that these subtly contrasting programs reveal, it might be this one: These days, Germans and Americans are doing much of their living in and around their offices, while the Brits and French continue to live outside of them. Here, in broad strokes, are the chief differences. In the British version, nobody is working, nobody has a happy relationship, everyone looks terrible, and everybody is depressed. In the French version, nobody is working but even the idiots look good, and everybody seems possessed of an intriguing private life. In the German version, actual work is visibly being done, most of the staff is coupled up, and the workers never stop eating and drinking—treating the office like a kitchen with desks. Stromberg continually calls his staff “Kinder,” or “children,” further blurring the line between Kinder, Computer, and Küche.

While Michael Scott also sometimes calls his American office a “family,” his staff knows he’s the kid brother, not the father, and that if there’s to be any Kinder in their lives, they’re going to have to get busy with one of their fellow prairie dogs, because really — who else are they likely to meet, given the stretching parameters of the U.S. working day? We may still talk of “working like a dog,” but the Russians lately have coined the expression, “to work like an American,” reflecting our 24/7 on-call mentality. These days, for Americans, “home office” is not just a place, it’s a state of mind. And it’s perfectly reflected by our version of this global sitcom — in which work is ostensibly cared about (though skimped on), romantic tension simmers on numerous fronts, and the whole enterprise is gently inflated by a mood of eventual, possible progress in work and love — like a bowl of dough that could have used a little more yeast but is doing its best to rise. Vive la différence.

(Hat tip to Dan Drezner.)

I’m a scurvy dog for missing Talk Like a Pirate Day yesterday, but I’ll try to make up for it by pointing you to Pyrats, “a super fun animated short from those talented scallywags at Gobelins animation school,” according to Drawn!

Massimo Polidoro explains Houdini’s Impossible Demonstration, which he made to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the Sherlock Holmes stories — who, ironically, was a true believer in Spiritualism:

“Sir Arthur,” continued Houdini, “I want you to go out of the house, walk anywhere you like, as far as you like in any direction; then write a question or sentence on that piece of paper; put it back in your pocket and return to the house.”

Doyle obeyed, walking three blocks and turning a corner before he wrote upon the paper. When he returned Houdini invited him to take a spoon and remove the cork ball, which had been soaking in the white ink, then to touch the ball to the left side of the slate. The ball “stuck” there, seemingly of its own volition. Slowly, it began rolling across the surface of the slate, leaving a white track as it did so. As the ball rolled, it was seen to be spelling the words: “Mene, mene, tekel upharsin,” the very same words that Doyle had written. The guests were speechless.

Houdini then explained that it was all done with trickery, not psychic powers — but Doyle never believed him.

How it was done:

Berol had been performing for years, both in Europe and America, an act in which a ball dipped in ink would spell on an isolated board the words called out by members of the audience:

“Berol did this by switching a solid cork ball for one with an iron core. A magnet at the end of a rod, manipulated by an assistant concealed behind the board, caused the ball to adhere and move — apparently under its own power. After Berol retired, Houdini purchased the equipment. An assistant in the room adjacent to Houdini’s library had opened a small panel in the wall and extended the rod with a magnet through it. The ball on the slate had an iron center, of course.

“Ernst had not remembered that when Doyle returned to the room, after writing the words outdoors, Houdini had checked to make sure the slip of paper on which Doyle wrote was folded, then immediately returned it to his friend. Before doing so, the magician had switched slips. While Doyle was busy retrieving the ball from the inkwell and taking it to the board, Houdini read the words. His conversation cued his hidden assistant. Once the message had been written on the slate, Houdini asked Doyle for the folded slip to verify his words. He opened the blank paper, pretended to read from it, then switched it for the original as he returned the paper to his friend. Later, Houdini explained this switching process during his public lectures on fraudulent mediums.”

Sci Fi Uses a Web Series to Entice Viewers to ‘Battlestar Galactica’:

Beginning tonight the television series “Battlestar Galactica” will travel from outer space into cyberspace. The Sci Fi Channel, which broadcasts the series, has created online mini-episodes, the first of which is scheduled to be posted at midnight.
[...]
The mini-episodes will go online, one at a time, on Tuesday and Thursday nights until “Galactica’s” season premiere on Oct. 6. They focus on two soldiers in a new city built by humans fleeing Cylons, a race of machines that has wiped out human civilization elsewhere.

A new, old “Lassie” comes home to U.S. theaters &mdash one that resembles the original story:

“Lassie” comes home to another generation of U.S. children this week in a new film that hews closely to the original, dark tale of the loyal collie and her boy in wartime England, instead of the sunny California of the long-running television series.

The sable-and-white collie, Lassie, and her young owner, Joe, first appeared in a 1938 short story in the Saturday Evening Post by Eric Knight, a British-American journalist and writer who spun the story into a 1940 book, “Lassie Come-Home.”
[...]
Like many fans, Sturridge had never read Knight’s book or seen the 1943 film it spawned, and initially assumed from watching the TV show that Knight had created Lassie as an American dog living on a ranch in California with her owner, Timmy.

In fact, the story grew out of a trip Knight took during the Great Depression to England, where he saw people selling belongings to survive, according to “Lassie” historian Ace Collins.

“The prized possession of these people were their collie dogs,” Collins said. “A lot of people were having to sell those dogs to put food on the table.”

“Lassie Come-Home” became the story of a Yorkshire boy whose coal miner father sells the family’s unusually beautiful collie to a nobleman when he loses his job. The duke takes the dog to Scotland, where she escapes and returns to the boy.

Dave Sim discusses his fighting aardvark comic, Cerebus, with the CBC in this interview from their archives:

It began as a satire of Conan the Barbarian mixed with Howard the Duck. But over the years Cerebus the Aardvark turned into something much more, an intricate socio-political allegory, an epic labour of love for its creator and eventually, the longest running English-language comic book story ever. In this 1983 radio clip, cartoonist Dave Sim along with his wife and publisher Deni Loubert, discuss his then young comic and its unlikely hero.

The Wilhelm Scream Compilation is a wonderful piece of movie geekdom. It all starts with a character named Wilhelm in The Charge at Feather River (1953) — sort of:

A scream used for the character Pvt. Wilhelm (recorded originally for Distant Drums (1951)) has since been reused in many films, including the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films.

More on the origin, from Distant Drums (1951):

This film contains the first known instance of “The Wilhelm Scream” (a sound effect of a man screaming, since used in over 70 other movies). During a scene in which the soldiers are wading through a swamp in the everglades, one of them is bitten and dragged underwater by an alligator. The scream for that character was recorded later. Six short pained screams were recorded in a single take, which was slated “man getting bit by an alligator, and he screams.” The fifth scream was used for the soldier — but the 4th, 5th, and 6th screams recorded in the session were also used earlier in the film when three Indians are shot, one after another, during a raid on a fort. Although the “signature” or “classic” screams, takes 4 through 6 on the original recording, are the most recognizable, all of the screams are referred to as “Wilhelm” by those in the sound community. Ben Burtt, sound effects designer on Star Wars (1977), named it “Wilhelm” after the character that let out the scream in Charge at Feather River (1953). He discovered a file at Warner Bros. for this movie, which contained paperwork that was left over from the picture editor when the film was completed. One of the papers was a short list of names of actors who were scheduled to come in to perform various lines of dialogue for miscellaneous roles in the movie. After reviewing the names and even listening to their voices, one person seemed to be the most likely suspect: Sheb Wooley. Sheb played the uncredited role of Private Jessup in “Distant Drums”, and was one of the few actors assembled for the recording of additional vocal elements for the film. It is very likely he was asked on the spot to perform other things for the film, including the screams for a man being bitten by an alligator.