Isegoria

Rebels Without a Clue looks at Nation of Rebels, a new book by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, men of the left with a certain conservative sensibility:

Above all, though, Heath and Potter are as dismissive of the modern Left’s worldview as P.J. O’Rourke is. “You can’t even organize a commune, much less an entire society, based upon the assumption that people will behave like saints,” they tell us. “Consumerism…always seems to be a critique of what other people buy…. [The] so-called critique of consumerism is just thinly veiled snobbery or, worse, Puritanism.” They sum up aptly the countercultural message of the film, American Beauty: “[It] is simply not possible to be a well-adjusted adult in our society…. The alternative [to perpetual adolescence] is to ‘sell out,’ to play by the rules, and thereby to become a neurotic, superficial conformist, incapable of experiencing true pleasure.” To which they respond: “The greatest weakness of countercultural thinking has always been its inability to produce a coherent vision of a free society, much less a practical political program for changing the one we live in.”

The Christmas classic that almost wasn’t demonstrates that the network suits can be — gasp! — wrong:

When CBS bigwigs saw a rough cut of A Charlie Brown Christmas in November 1965, they hated it.

“They said it was slow,” executive producer Lee Mendelson remembers with a laugh. There were concerns that the show was almost defiantly different: There was no laugh track, real children provided the voices, and there was a swinging score by jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi.

Anat Levin, Dani Lischinski, and Yair Weiss demonstrate Colorization Using Optimization:

Colorization is a computer-assisted process of adding color to a monochrome image or movie. The process typically involves segmenting images into regions and tracking these regions across image sequences. Neither of these tasks can be performed reliably in practice; consequently, colorization requires considerable user intervention and remains a tedious, time-consuming, and expensive task.

In this paper we present a simple colorization method that requires neither precise image segmentation, nor accurate region tracking. Our method is based on a simple premise: neighboring pixels in space-time that have similar intensities should have similar colors. We formalize this premise using a quadratic cost function and obtain an optimization problem that can be solved efficiently using standard techniques. In our approach an artist only needs to annotate the image with a few color scribbles, and the indicated colors are automatically propagated in both space and time to produce a fully colorized image or sequence. We demonstrate that high quality colorizations of stills and movie clips may be obtained from a relatively modest amount of user input.

Definitely check out the video examples.

Supermoine translates from French as Supermonk. That’s all I’ll tell you. Just watch the video.

(Oh, and John at Drawn says that vikings will be the new pirates. How long until ninjas are the new vikings?)

Any fan of South Park and Monty Python must naturally watch South Park’s tribute to Monty Python.

Anne Thompson analyzes the economics of filmmaking in Hung Up on Tentpoles, Studios Think Too Big:

In Hollywood, there’s a studio price and an indie price. There’s a two-tiered system in place. On the studio side, the top movie stars cost $20 million against a share of the gross, and the top directors command $10 million (unless you’re Peter Jackson coming off ‘The Lord of the Rings’).

Movie stars know the rules today: Sucker the studios into paying your price and go to the indies for the quality parts that will sustain your career. If you’re George Clooney, you recognize the value of putting yourself in quality work that will stand the test of time.

No studio is going to admit the obvious: They can’t afford to make all their movies at top-tier prices. And if they only make a few tentpoles a year, what are they going to do with the rest of their slate? None of the studios is willing to slash the fat from their motion picture divisions.

Larissa MacFarquhar summarizes Baudrillard on Tour:

Baudrillard, the French philosopher, is best known for his theory that consumer society forms a kind of code that gives individuals the illusion of choice while in fact entrapping them in a vast web of simulated reality. In 1999, the movie “The Matrix,” which was based on this theory, transformed him from a cult figure into an extremely famous cult figure. But Baudrillard was ambivalent about the film — he declined an invitation to participate in the writing of its sequels — and these days he is still going about his usual French-philosopher business, scandalizing audiences with the grandiloquent sweep of his gnomic pronouncements and his post-Marxian pessimism.

Tad Stones describes his early efforts to get Hellboy Animated:

I first pitched Hellboy as an animated prime time show about ten years ago while I was still at Disney. (Hey, they claimed they wanted fresh ideas!) I even produced a little video reel on Adobe Premiere, complete with an animated Touchstone logo. No interest, of course. I was given several logical reasons why it wouldn’t really fit on prime time television, most of which can be summed up in the sentence, ‘It’s not The Simpsons.’ Ironically, I now work at Film Roman Studios where the entire first floor is taken up by artists working on The Simpsons.

[...]

Years later I got really close. [...] But as we worked on the show, it became obvious the executives wanted it safer, calmer and much more kid-friendly than the movie. My favorite exec quote: “Why do we need antagonists?” Finally, after the feature film disappointed at the box office, our production was shut down, fittingly, on Friday the 13th.

Now he’s finally getting his chance to do it right.

(Hat tip to Drawn.)

The Relevance of Romance explains why a piece of light entertainment is pertinent to our times:

Historical romances are usually as much about contemporary times as about the past, and the new film The Legend of Zorro is a perfect example. Typically, historical romances center on the replacement of an unjust social and political order with a just one. Westerns and vigilante stories, by contrast, tend to concentrate on establishment of rule of law in areas that have either never been civilized (Westerns) or where civilization has broken down (vigilante stories).

The fascinating thing about Johnston McCulley’s Zorro novels and stories is that they combine all three genres: set in Old California in the 1840s, they are simultaneously historical romance, Western, and vigilante story. As a result, they show establishment of rule of law as a central element in the replacement of an unjust social and political order and the bringing of justice and peace for the common people.

That makes the Zorro stories highly relevant fables for our time, as the United States works to establish rule of law in Iraq and fight off a global terrorist threat. It is also what makes The Legend of Zorro particularly pertinent to current political debates.

I’ll happily settle for a cheap reproduction. From ‘Metropolis’ film poster sells for record $690,000:

A poster for the classic German 1920s film ‘Metropolis’ has been sold for a world record $690,000 to a private collector from the United States, the London gallery which arranged the sale said on Tuesday.

The sale beat the previous record for a movie poster of $453,500, set in 1997 by a poster for the 1932 film ‘The Mummy,’ the Reel Poster Gallery said.

Graphic artist Heinz Schulz-Neudamm designed the sepia-colored poster featuring the futuristic skyline which helped make Fritz Lang’s film famous.

The art deco poster is one of only four known copies in existence. The Museum of Modern Art in New York and Berlin’s Film Museum have one each while another is in a private collection.

Romancing the Globe examines the amazing global popularity of telenovelas:

Accounts of the global impact of Latin American soap operas, or telenovelas, are now legion. In post-communist Russia, the Mexican hit Los Ricos Tambien Lloran (The Rich Also Cry) became the country’s top-rated show; roughly 70 percent of the Russian population, more than 100 million people, tuned in regularly. Latin American telenovela stars often find themselves mobbed at airports in places as distant as Poland, Indonesia, and Lebanon. In postwar Bosnia, U.S. diplomats intervened to ensure that the Venezuelan show Kassandra could stay on the air in the midst of a tug of war between Bosnian Serb factions for control of the media. In Israel, the Mexican novela Mirada de Mujer (The Gaze of a Woman) was broadcast with both Hebrew and Russian subtitles to ensure that recent Russian immigrants wouldn’t miss an episode. And in the United States, the Latin American shows have become top sellers on Spanish-language networks, which have themselves outpaced English-language networks in some major markets, such as Miami and Los Angeles.

In all, about 2 billion people around the world watch telenovelas. For better or worse, these programs have attained a prominent place in the global marketplace of culture, and their success illuminates one of the back channels of globalization. For those who despair that Hollywood or the American television industry dominates and defines globalization, the telenovela phenomenon suggests that there is still room for the unexpected. Indeed, the success of telenovelas is often celebrated as an example of reverse cultural imperialism or, as one academic memorably called it, “Montezuma’s Revenge.”

Aidan Wasley calls Star Wars: Episodes I-VI “The greatest postmodern art film ever.”

(Hat tip to Slashdot.)