Sony G90 manual Follies & Frolics, Barco Vision Watch

E D I T O R I A L

Follies & Frolics

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Let it be said, at this the half-way point of summer (as of the writing), the neighborhood multiplexes find themselves wishing they could either get rid of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace or at least move a surviving copy of it to one of their lesser screens. Most of you probably know the terms that George Lucas stuck the exhibitors with: (a) a 12-week min-

imum run and (b) on their biggest screens. It is even said that Lucasfilm is demanding 90 percent of the box-office gross for the entire 12 weeks. Unheard of terms. And not soon likely to be repeated.

Instead of being a Titanic-buster, as the marshmallow- cloud prognosticators foresaw, the fourth Star Wars install- ment looks a bit more like Dennis the Menace in its measur- ing up to the Cameron box-office juggernaut. And so we have the lovely irony wherein the biggest venues in the local plex may be less than half full, while across the hall, in a smaller theater, folks are getting turned away from the likes of Wild, Wild West, Austin Powers, Big Daddy, and other such intel- lectually stimulating and spiritually instructive treats. Me, I’m just glad that Lucas hasn’t cornered the popcorn concession, demanding a cut there as well.

I had hoped to have a few “real” films under Current Attractions in this issue and was prepared to review one for- eign flick no longer much about (The Dream Life of Angels) and even an artistic failure with plenty of meat on the bones (Mike Figgis’ The Loss of Sexual Innocence). Eyes Wide Shut opened just in time for me to squeeze in a few observations.

But I was able to catch Run, Lola, Run, which is an exhil- arating film, as full of energy as any dozen others and perhaps a significator of where film is going at the end of the century. When I walked out of the theater, mind abuzz with the images I had just encountered, I felt almost a guilty pleasure, know- ing that Lola marks the end of film as we know it. Well, maybe that’s an exaggeration; but still, for some time movies have been abandoning traditional narrative formats for the hyped- up visual experience and Lola takes that hyped-up energy to the edge. And when you metaphorically peer over that edge into the abyss, you’ll have to ask yourself, “Just where do the movies go from here?” Will they all become machine-gun fire multi-media collages, going even further than Lola, which is a multi-media treat (animation, live action, stupendously well- employed Dolby Digital, wall-to-wall-papered rock)?

I can’t imagine this German import not becoming one of the most successful foreign/art-house films ever. Yes, it has subtitles (oh horrors!), but you hardly need them to keep up with the action, which has the virtue of being pure movement (cinema’s forte) once Lola sets out on her run, repeated three times over with a different outcome each time. At issue is sav- ing her dope-dealing boyfriend’s life, which means she has to come up with $100,000 (Deutsche Marks) within 20 minutes or else. There is a cast of characters whose paths she crosses (or doesn’t) during each run, and as the camera pauses to con- template each, you see a rat-a-tat barrage of still photographs of each’s future, which changes according to the circum-

stances of the encounter with Lola. There are, additionally, two beautifully done bridge passages after the first and sec- ond runs, which show, slyly, why she gets another chance at changing the outcome. There is a surprising amount of heft, emotional meat on the bones, in this seemingly slight virtuoso exercise in the craft of film, and buried within its telegraphed shorthand staccato outbursts, a reservoir of deep feeling. And such mordant, dry, macabre humor to keep the tone ironic and post-modern. All this is in vivid, day-glo color, filmed in almost every medium one can think of, but done in such a way that it all coheres and makes perfect artistic sense (unlike, say, Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, where Stone is showboating with technique, failing to relate it to content). Like I said, it may well make you feel as high as a kite, but what in the world do you do for an encore?

Barco Vision Watch

In the first chapter of our adventure, Projector Installation: The Real Menace, I took a shot at Barco’s official Long Island installation folks at Gavi. That was written on deadline. Between then and the time the folks at Gavi saw the unfavor- able mention in the last issue, the company sent its men back again and again in an effort to get the 708 data-grade projec- tor working at the level I needed in order to make solid and sound judgments about everything from laserdiscs and DVDs, enhanced and non, to HDTV when it finally arrives at the Sea Cliff studios.

Part of the problem the first time out was that Gavi’s folk did not remount the Barco so that it was correctly distanced from the 8-foot Stewart screen. Instead, they used the ceiling- mounted plate Sony had installed for their projector. Thus, I couldn’t get an accurately sized 4:3 picture, which meant I couldn’t watch full-screen discs (this means anything before l954 and Latter Day stuff either made for TV or not – IMAX, e.g.). Then on a subsequent visit, I found the team had put in an anamorphic widescreen setting without supplying another for standard widescreen discs. So non-anamorphic DVDs and laserdiscs looked really weird, being squeezed as they were into aspects that ranged up to 3:1 for a 2:35.1 disc. There have been more visits and now I am waiting for Gavi to get its color analyzer back (it’s in California) so that we can check the grayscale and color temperature. I’m not satisfied with the colors as rendered – for one thing, the whites aren’t as pure as I’d like, and either some transfers (mostly of foreign films) are a bit “pink” or the set isn’t fully dialed in just yet.

Meaning? The installation of a front projector is tricky business, especially with the advent of anamorphically enhanced DVDs and of HDTV. And we shall be addressing the topic in detail sufficient unto the day.

HARRY PEARSON

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF