Star

A comment on Fred Wilson's blog about Jim Carroll's recent passing reminded me of the Cult song that was featured on the film version of Carroll's The Basketball Diaries. I didn't know there was a video for the song, but here it is, via YouTube. The silver-clad model is supposed to evoke the Lady Liberty, I suppose, but she reminds me a little of the robot from Metropolis.

Alive in Jo'Berg

Hat tip to a commenter on Ta-Nehisi Coates's Atlantic blog for bringing this to my attention. Here's the six minute short Neil Blomkamp made in 2005, four years before the release of District 9:

Destiny Media Update

Destiny Media Technologies (OTC BB: DSNY.OB) mailed out a hard copy investor update booklet this week, which included the web address of a site that tracks usage stats for the company's secure music delivery service, Play MPE: Play MPE Stats. That site currently shows 189,577 "sends" in the past 7 days. Since Destiny Media gets paid per send, I called Destiny Media's CFO Fred Vandenberg to ask him what average fee the company received per send. Vandeberg didn't have an average number, but he said that Destiny generally charged $0.50 per send for major labels, and $0.60 per send for independents. He mentioned that some number of the sends might not generate fees for Destiny if these were between two individuals at the same label, for instance. Vandenberg added that if they found that this sort of traffic represented a significant percentage of the total, then Destiny Media might charge for these internal sends in future contracts.

I also asked Vandenberg about the company's Clipstream secure video delivery software. He said the firm was planning on promoting it more this year, and mentioned one potential application for it: dailies, the raw footage produced every day by film crews, which is later edited and synched to a soundtrack. Vandenberg said that, currently, dailies were transported via courier, so, for example, a film crew shooting in Vancouver might use Fed Ex to send its dailies to an editor in Los Angeles. With Clipstream, the film crew could send the dailies digitally instead. I asked Vandenberg if this was true for crews using old fashioned film stock too, i.e., did Destiny Media have some sort of technology to convert that to digital. He declined to answer that question. Destiny's second quarter numbers should be out in mid-April.

Below is a commercial, obviously modeled on the Mac versus PC ads, for Destiny's Play MPE secure music delivery service.

"Dark City"

In the comment thread of a previous post about Darren Aranofsky's film "The Fountain" ("Nigel Andrews on Darren Aranofsky"), we referred to another ambitious film with sci-fi elements that got mixed reviews, but was considered a masterpiece by at least one reviewer, Alex Proyas's 1998 film "Dark City". Below is the first paragraph of Roger Ebert's review of it (commenter Sivaram should be forewarned that Ebert mentions "2001: A Space Odyssey" in comparison):

``Dark City'' by Alex Proyas is a great visionary achievement, a film so original and exciting, it stirred my imagination like ``Metropolis'' and ``2001: A Space Odyssey.'' If it is true, as the German director Werner Herzog believes, that we live in an age starved of new images, then ``Dark City'' is a film to nourish us. Not a story so much as an experience, it is a triumph of art direction, set design, cinematography, special effects--and imagination.

As I noted to commenter J.K. in the Aranofsky comment thread, there were a few differences between the director's cut DVD of "Dark City" and the theatrical version. One of them was that, in the director's cut, Jennifer Connelly actually sang, instead of lip-syncing as she did in the theatrical version. The clip below, from the director's cut, features her singing "Sway".

Nigel Andrews on Darren Aronofsky

Nigel Andrews of the Financial Times on Darren Aronofsky's new movie The Wrestler ("Fallen star shines again"):

After more than a decade of failure or renegade moonlighting (including a spell as a boxer), Rourke re-enters that well-lit hoosegow, Hollywood. The Wrestler , a Rocky -ish melodrama redeemed mainly or solely by Rourke's performance, is directed by, of all people, Darren Aronofsky. After Pi , Requiem for a Dream and The Fountain - a geek masterwork about maths, an existential drugs tragedy and a film about time and metaphysics - Aronofsky must have decided, "I'll make one for the airheads."

I have no comment on The Wrestler, as I haven't seen it, but I've seen the other three Aronofsky movies Andrews mentions (the first and third of which were also written or co-written by Aronofsky), and liked them all, particularly the third one Andrews mentions, The Fountain.

The action of The Fountain (2006) takes place in three different story lines/time lines: in one, a Spanish conquistador (played by Hugh Jackman) searches for the Fountain of Youth/Tree of Life in Central America for his queen (played by Aronofsky's wife, Rachel Weisz); in the second story line, Jackman plays a scientist in the present day searching for a cure for brain cancer in a rare compound extracted from a tree in Central America, while his wife, played by Weisz, is dying from brain cancer; in the third story line, Jackman is a sort of futuristic, yogic astronaut, traveling with the Tree of Life to a distant nebula representing the Mayan underworld. Reviews for The Fountain were mixed, but here is an excerpt from Glenn Kenny's four-star review in Premiere:

The Fountain is probably the deftest stories-within-stories narrative film I've seen since the very different 1965 Polish film The Saragossa Manuscript (itself based on an early 19th-century novel). By The Fountain's end, the multilayered meta-narrative (which Aronofsky co-conceived with Ari Handel) resolves (or does it?) into a kind of diegetic Möbius strip, to stunning effect.

This may all sound kind of dry and cerebral, and the fact that Aronofsky is currently being compared to Stanley Kubrick (and this film in particular to 2001: A Space Odyssey) no doubt adds to that impression. Aronofsky's work certainly resembles Kubrick's in terms of conceptual audacity and meticulousness of execution (Aronofsky's prior feature, 2000's Requiem for a Dream, showcased a scattershot deployment of a fecund visual facility; here he's got his formidable apparatus under control), but Aronofsky is a romantic with a capital "R," which Kubrick was certainly not. As it happens, each one of these tales is also a love story, and The Fountain is Aronofsky's profession of faith concerning love's place in the idea of eternity. It's a movie that's as deeply felt as it is imagined.

Below is the trailer for The Fountain. Watch it with the volume on your computer turned on to get a sample of Clint Mansell's score, which fits the film perfectly. Incidentally, due to budget constraints, the special effects in The Fountain included almost no CGI.