Shadow & Light is a charming 28-minute video documentary (William Farley, director) about a great Bay Area local artist, Elaine Badgley Arnoux. The film is good, but Arnoux (now 82) is great. Terrific art and an even more fascinating attitude. No distribution yet for the video, however. Rumor is that producer Mary Morrow is trying to get a PBS deal. You can see an 8-minute preview on YouTube. Minor aside: Farley, a respected local filmmaker uses, a bit of a fascinating technique to get a 3D-like effect from panned still images. I wanted to ask how he did that but didn’t have a chance.
General
MVFF: An Education (B-)
Coincidentally (?) we saw An Education here in Mill Valley on the same night it opened in New York and Los Angeles. I was surprised that the director, Lone Scherfig (Italian for Beginners and Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself — both great) was here and not at one of those major cities. But thank goodness she was, because her Q&A made me appreciate a lot more about this film. Unfortunately, others won’t have the benefit of hearing her insights. The early buzz on this film is hot, and by giving it a B- I’ll probably be in the minority.(I just read A.O. “Tony” Scott’s review in the NY Times. He loved it. Don’t read his review, as usual, unless you want to know most of the plot.)
Technically, it’s a coming-of-age film, but with a darker-than-usual twist. Jenny (Carey Mulligan) is a 16 year-old girl in London in the 1960s. David (Peter Sarsgaard) is the sleazy older man who pursues her. It takes a long time for us to understand just why David is sleazy, but we sense from the beginning that something isn’t right. The problem is that there’s no benefit to us, the audience, from waiting to learn what’s up. We just have to wait.
Mulligan is suddenly the new It girl, and she deserves the attention she’s getting for this role. She is terrific. This is actually her first major role, having made this film two years ago when she was 22. But the rest of the film isn’t at the level of her performance. Sarsgaard is just his usual placid self. Alfred Molina, playing Jenny’s father, is at first a buffoonish stereotype whom we later have trouble accepting as warm and sincere when the plot takes a turn. The music and editing are awkward. Cinematography just mediocre.
The film will get a lot of attention due to Mulligan’s great performance, and luckily she’s on screen in virtually every scene, but this is one that the more I think about it, the less I like it. I keep thinking of all the ways in which it could have been better. I loved Sherfig’s earlier films, so I have hope for her future. Maybe it’s because this is her first in English. Maybe it’s the larger budget. (Italian for Beginners was a dirt-cheap Dogme 95 film.) Let’s see what the audiences say. I’m expecting to take some flak for this one.
MVFF Precious (A)
Opening night at the 32nd Mill Valley Film Festival, and what a great start. Precious is adapted from the novel Push by Sapphire. I haven’t read the book, and I’m glad my memory is so bad that I didn’t remember anything from the overly narrative film-festival program. I went in blind, and I won’t ruin it for you. Precious is a 16-year old obese black girl growing up in Harlem. Her life sucks, and this is the story of that roller coaster. If that sounds boring or not your cup of tea, you’re probably wrong. This film has it all. Superb in every category: direction by Lee Daniels (Monster’s Ball), script, cinematography, editing, music and some of the best performances this year. Gabourey ‘Gabby’ Sidibe’s only previous role (she told us) was as a pirate in a college production of Peter Pan. She’ll blow you away. Paula Patton is also great. But the Oscar goes to Mo’Nique who plays Precious’ mother. I had to remind myself she wasn’t the real thing. As Lee Daniels said after the screening, you won’t forgive her, but you will understand her. (Daniels also deserves an Oscar nomination for this film.)
Lee Daniels gave me the impression this would be marketed by Lion’s Gate as a black film to black audiences. I hope I misunderstood him. It’s so much more than that. A limited opening in the U.S. is set for November 6. You’ll have to look for this one, but it’s worth it.
AudioDocumentary.org
We’ve added a new widget to the SpokenWord.org homepage: Featured Collectors Recommend. Our first featured collector is David Maxon of AudioDocumentary.org, a terrific web site for anyone interested in audio/radio program that goes beyond just the news. David is constantly adding to his collection of recommended programs, but you should also go to AudioDocumentary.org. There’s a lot more there than the programs he recommends on our site.
MP3 vs. Vinyl
Interesting article by Devin Coldewey on CrunchGear about John Meyer’s work comparing the “fidelity potential” of various audio recording formats from wax cylinders to MP3, reel-to-reel tape, wav/aiff, DVD, DTS, etc. Here’s the complete table. I agree with Devin, “His methods are scientific in a way, but also questionable.” Consider in particular that the audio mastering process (when properly done) targets a particular release format and environment, and that can make more difference than almost anything else. Regardless, it’s a fun comparison.
Google IMAP4 is Broken
At least it’s not just me. Google’s IMAP4 service for corporate mail accounts (and probably not regular Gmail) has been intermittent at best for about a week. I can use email with the web interface, but not via IMAP4 from my desktop client or my iPhone. POP3 service does not appear to be affected. Being discussed (without no resolution) on the Gmail Help Forum.
API Update
Major update to the SpokenWord.org APIs today. Methods now include:
Many more API methods to come. Let us know what you need.
The Snow Leopard Chronicles
I’m hardly the first or only person to encounter problems with Snow Leopard, but maybe if I tell my story it will save one or two people some grief.
As far as I can tell, most people who upgrade should have no trouble with Snow Leopard. Allow an hour to make the change and enjoy. Personally, I’d wait a few weeks so that Apple has time to publish at least one round of patches/updates, particularly because I didn’t really see any advantage after the update. Maybe it boots and shuts down a bit more quickly, but that’s about it.
After the Snow Leopard upgrade there were all sorts of pop-up acknowledgment windows. You know the kind: you don’t really read them, you just click OK. But once I did, I couldn’t start any applications. No Firefox, no Mail, nada. I had to reboot. TIme after time. It turned out one of the popups should have given me a hint of a known problem with kcSync. I finally Googled it and found the fix. I depend on 1Password, a great utility for managing passwords and keeping them synchronized across multiple devices. I knew in advance I’d have to upgrade to a beta version, but it wasn’t that simple. The kcSync problem (a MobileMe issue) was the villain.
But my big problem was that I use my honkin’ Mac Pro (11GB RAM, 2.5TB disk + 3TB Drobo) as a serious development machine. After the install I found I couldn’t run Apache, MySQL or PHP. Ugh. Because the versions of Apache and PHP previously supplied by Apple weren’t particularly recent, I had installed and configured custom versions of all the standard LAMP utilities. Installing Snow Leopard caused them to stop working.
Ten hours later, I’ve finally got a reliable development machine again. I’m also glad of one thing: Because Apple now ships fairly new versions of Apache (2.2.11) and PHP (5.3.0) I’ve moved all my code and dev sites to run in that more-or-less standard environment. No longer do I have two or three versions of Apache and PHP running on my system. I still forget where things are, but at least they’re only in one place. I also installed a sweet 64-bit version (5.1.38) of MySQL, which seems much faster than the previous 32-bit revs.
A special thanks to Super Sysadmin Tim and folks on Twitter (@walterchisenski, @mrblog, @jrnoded) for helping me find things along the way. May your own upgrade be smoother.
Mobile Apps Are the New Content
Last week I posted on Twitter, “Mobile apps are the new content,” and I was surprised at the number of responses, many of which strongly disagreed. Anne Thomas Manes commented, “I disagree: Still need a model to support content delivery to mobile devices. i.e., apps and content are different things. We have good models for delivering apps, but not content, e.g. delivering e-books.”
So let me explain my post without the limitation of 140 characters.
When mobile devices began including decent browsers, publishers repackaged their content as small-format web pages. But now that the iPhone, Android-based devices and others allow users to download and install apps, publishers are instead wrapping their content inside dedicated applications. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal were among the first to do so. Now even local newspapers, NPR and other print, television, radio and podcasting outlets are doing the same. Why bother? Why not just settle for browser-based views?
First it’s a matter of controlling the user experience. Particularly for streamed and downloaded audio and video, you can do a far better job using a device’s application framework than within a browser window. But even more important to publishers is the opportunity for persistence. When you retrieve content with a browser, you have the option of setting a bookmark for the publisher’s web site. But if the publisher can convince you to download a dedicated app to your mobile device, it’s there (complete with icon) until you delete it. In the iTunes store many of these content-wrapping apps are “Free!” Well, so are those publisher’s web pages, but that just doesn’t sound as good as getting a free application, does it?
Back in the 1970s, we paid thousands of dollars for applications on minicomputers. In the ’80s, with the advent of PCs, most apps (word processors and spreadsheets, for example) cost a few hundred dollars. When the Internet arrived in the 1990’s, we bought applications for US$29.95. The trend is obvious: roughly an order of magnitude decrease per decade. Now in the 2000’s we’ve followed that trend down to the US$1.00 level. Of course this goes hand-in-hand with the increased volume of application purchases and the decreased costs of software development and distribution, so the economics continue to make sense. (One developer can write and publish a simple app on his own. That wasn’t the case in the days of complex programs delivered on floppies or CDs. Consider that iLike.com will build an iPhone app for your band for only $195.)
My comment that “Mobile apps are the new content” also refers to the impulse-buy nature of mobile apps. What was the first impulse-buy content for mobile devices? Ring tones. Next, as Apple rewrote the rules of music distribution, came full-length songs for US$0.99. We’ve learned to purchase music online as whimsically as we buy magazines or chewing gum at the supermarket checkout counter. But think about applications. They used to be only for our desktop and laptop computers. And we certainly didn’t download and install apps as casually as we now buy music. But mobile apps are different. We now download them on a whim, particularly the free ones. And have you ever bought a 99-cent app just to check it out and maybe never used it again? That’s a buying pattern that used to be associated with content (print magazines, for example), but never with applications.
It’s the combination of publishers regularly wrapping media into applications and our acceptance of apps as impulse-buy items that makes me say that mobile apps are the new content.
I’m a TWiG
Not that I could ever fill his shoes, but it was my privilege to cover for co-host Jeff Jarvis on Leo Laporte’s new show, This Week in Google. I was clearly out-geeked by co-host Gina Trapani and first-time TWiT guest Mary Hodder. Lucky for me, I was on an audio-only ISDN connection to Leo’s studio, so my mug didn’t appear on the live video stream during the taping.
Blogarithms 
