Month: May 2004

One of the many pleasures of owning an inexpensive multi-region DVD player is being able to purchase DVDs from around the world and watch them at home. (Well, I suppose an expensive multi-region player would do the trick as well.) But one of the problems that sometimes occurs with European DVDs (or North American DVDs sourced from European tapes) is that they have been recorded in the PAL video format, which runs at 25 frames per second instead of the film-standard 24 frames per second. If care isn’t taken, the film simply plays 4% more quickly on video.

My friend …

I’ll admit that I’m torn by the trailer for the upcoming digitally-enhanced and restored version of George Lucas’ arty, dystopian exercize in style, THX 1138 (1971). On the one hand, the trailer is marvelously structured, and the film itself is such a radically incongruous debut for one of today’s most popular feel-good entertainers that it’s virtually a movie from an alternate universe. If the film had been a critical or financial success, who knows where it might have steered Lucas in subsequent years? As a true anomaly in the filmmaker’s oeuvre, it’s one of those fascinating, forgotten relics of …

Film critic, theorist, and writer Susan Sontag doing what Susan Sontag does best in the latest issue of New York Times Magazine, writing on the photographs from Abu Ghraib and what responses have said about deeper cultural and political truths:

Shock and awe were what our military promised the Iraqis. And shock and the awful are what these photographs announce to the world that the Americans have delivered: a pattern of criminal behavior in open contempt of international humanitarian conventions. Soldiers now pose, thumbs up, before the atrocities they commit, and send off the pictures to their buddies. Secrets