Click here to view the embedded video.

I know, there are so many ‘funny’ videos you just have to share with your friends. So you send them an email. But for god’s sake, not with a 5MB movie in attachment! For all you know, he/she might not even be able to play that MOV/WMV/XVid movie anyway. Don’t send a movie, send a link!

WHY EMAILING VIDEOS IS BAD

1. Email makes big files bigger
   Binary files (like videos) are encoded, or rather exploded, by your email program (Outlook/Hotmail/Gmail/…) as text-only Base64 MIME attachments. Your 5MB file is transformed into a 6.85MB text file before is sent. Email is a very inefficient way to share videos with several other people.
2. You hurt the recipients
   Your email will have to be downloaded before the recipient can see it. If he is on a slow connection, this might mean 15 minutes of obnoxious delay before he can continue working, start receiving the emails that arrived after your ‘cute puppy’ movie. The movie, if it is not deleted, will add 5 MB of storage to the Inbox. If his Outlook/Exchange quota is 100MB (not uncommon on corporate email systems), you just ate 5% of all the place he has to store contracts, meeting reports and office gossip.
3. You hurt yourself
   By sending a 5MB video, you force your email program to upload a 6.85 MB file to your mail server. If you’re on a basic DSL line, this will easily take up to 10 minutes, during which all your other Internet activity will go very slow. You also add a big chunk to your “Sent Items” folder, bringing you closer to your quota limit.
4. You hurt the Internet
   All those forwarded videos make for a huge amount of unnecessary traffic that eats up bandwidth at ISPs and inspire them to keep prices high. Not that they needed the extra inspiration.
5. It’s force-feeding-video, not video on demand
   You are forcing people to download the whole file before they can decide whether they want to see it now, or ever at all. Youtube and the other sites have a very easy-to-use ‘Send video link’ form that will give the receipient the link, with a screenshot and the description text. Then he/she can decide when, where, how and *IF* to watch the video.
   (Yes, this is less a problem with web-based mail like Gmail or Hotmail)

HOW TO FORWARD A VIDEO LINK

1. public, popular movie
   Don’t think you’re the first one to have seen this movie. Chances are it’s featured on Youtube, Google Video, DailyMotion, Vimeo, in multiple versions (FR subtitles if that’s what you like), in a format everyone can view, available to send as just a link “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RgL2MKfWTo“. Less that 50 characters for a full 1:14 of hilarious time loss.
2. private, ’secret’ movie
   Even if you have a movie you recorded/made yourself and want to show only to a limited number of people (”OMG, Britney, you were, like, *so* drunk!!“), then upload it yourself to Youtube, Flickr or Vimeo, put a password on it and send link+ password to those recipients. It will be so much easier for everyone to forward that secret video that no one was supposed to see (”788 views just yesterday? How’s that possible?“).

We thank you.

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Cloverfield (released in Feb 2008)

“Five young New Yorkers throw their friend a going-away party the night that a monster the size of a skyscraper descends upon the city. Told from the point of view of their video camera, the film is a document of their attempt to survive the most surreal, horrifying event of their lives.”
from Wikipedia

Produced by J.J. Abrams (from Lost/Alias).

At least this time, they’re telling the story in less than 3 hours, instead of four or more consecutive seasons.

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Enjoy the beautiful French animation movie “En Tus Brazos” about how nothing can stop a tango dancing couple … not even fate. It abounds with creativity, sentiment and argentine tango.

Directed by François-Xavier Goby, Edouard Jouret and Matthieu Landour. France 2005
(via tangobaby)

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Click here to open file in stand-alone player

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“The original Roxanne was blonde and blue-eyed, but she also had huge bajoongas… I figured since I can’t be blond and blue-eyed, I’ll at least have her bra size. So the bajoongas got big: they were out of control.”
from Mendes perks up for new role

If you’re a demanding movie-goer, don’t see this one. The bad acting is not fully evened out by the abundant cleavage. But try to use the word “Bajoongas” at least once in the next week. You’ll love the way it bounces in your mouth.

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• Lions Gate Entertainment (Canada): originally founded by Robert Altman. During the 90s known as Cinépix Film Properties. Revived as Lionsgate in 1997 by Frank Guistra. Have bought Artisan Entertainment in 2003 (The Blair Witch Project, Requiem for a Dream …) which also owned Vestron Pictures (Dirty Dancing). Bring out ‘daring’ movies: Fahrenheit 9/11, Irreversible, Saw, Hostel.
• Touchstone Pictures (USA): started in 1984 as division of Disney in order to bring movies that were for more mature audiences. First release: Splash! Last year’s releases: The Guardian, The Prestige and Deja Vu. Also has TV division: ABC Television Studio (Desperate Housewives, Lost and Grey’s Anatomy)
• Focus Features (USA): art house films division of Universal Studios (since 2002). Produced recent gems like Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, Motorcycle Diaries, The Constant Gardener and Brokeback Mountain. Also does action/horror movies under the brand Rogue Films: Assault on Precinct 13, Shaun Of The Dead …
• Castle Rock Entertainment: started by Rob Reiner (Spinal Tap, When Harry Met Sally) et al in 1987 with funding from Columbia Pictures (Sony). Name inspired by “The Dead Zone” by Stephen King. Apart from Reiners films, not very successful. Sold in 1994 to Turner Broadcasting, later Time/Warner. Biggest success: animation movie Polar Express (2004).
• Miramax films: started in 1987 by the Weinstein brothers. Sold in 1993 to Disney. Under the Weinsteins, Miramax had a history of buying the rights to Asian films (e.g. Hero), only to sit on them without releasing them for some years. The Weinsteins left in 2005. Famous movies: The Crying Game, Sex, Lies and Videotape, Pulp Fiction, Chicago.
• The Weinstein Company: founded in 2005 by the above cited Harvey and Bob Weinstein. First release: Derailed. Most recent release: Hannibal Rising. Next Release: Grind House (Tarantino). They also have a subsiduary Dimension Films: Scary Movie 4.
• New Line Cinema: founded in 1967 by Robert Shaye and Michael Lynne. Sold in 1994 to Turner Broadcast, later Time/Warner. First hit movie: A Nightmare on Elm Street. Lots of good movies: Lord of The Rings trilogy, Austin Powers, Magnolia, The Mask. Recent hits: Snakes on a Plane and Wedding Crashers.
• TriStar Pictures: founded in 1982 as joint-venture of Columbia (then a subsidiary of Coca-Cola), HBO, and CBS. When the latter 2 dropped out, became Columbia Pictures in 1987, which was taken over by Sony in 1989. Famous movies: Terminator 2, Basic Instinct, Jerry Maguire, Seven Years in Tibet. Not making very successful movies last couple of years.
• United Artists: found in 1919(!!) by Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and D. W. Griffith. The company did not do too well and was almost dead in the late 1940s. In 1951 Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin offered to run the company for 5 years and if profitable, buy it. That worked and they went public in 1956. They releases the Beatles’ movies in 1964/1965 and also backed the first James Bond movie. The company was sold to TransAmerica in 1967 and continued to prosper, working with Woody Allen, Robert Altman and Brian De Palma. Krim and Benjamin left in 1978, and the first project by the new management, Heaven’s Gate, completely bombed. It was sold to Kirk Kerkorian (MGM). In 1990 it was sold to Giancarlo Parretti, who went bankrupt within the year. Taken over by Credit Lyonnais, it was sold again in 1997, again to Kerkorian. MGM took over most of its titles and franchises. In 2005 it was bought (along with MGM) by a consortium including Sony and Comcast. On November 2, 2006, MGM announced that actor Tom Cruise and his long-time production partner Paula Wagner were resurrecting United Artists. Some famous movies (and this is really a hard choice): the Rocky series, the Bond series, the Pink Panter series, The Graduate, Apocalypse Now, Bowling for Columbine, Capote.
• Orion Pictures: founded in 1978 by the above mentioned ex-management of UA together with Warners Bros. While it started out strong (10, Life of Brian) and did well in the 80s (Terminator, Amadeus, Platoon), it went into bankruptcy from 1992 till 1996 and was sold to MGM in 1998.

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Check out the following interview with six of the main voice actors from The Simpsons: Dan Castellaneta (the voice behind all the characters cited above), Julie Kavner (Marge Simpson and Patty/Selma), Yeardley Smith (Lisa Simpson, but also played in As Good As It Gets), Nancy Cartwright (Bart Simpson – is actually a woman!!), Hank Azaria (Moe Szyslak, Chief Wiggum/Carl Carlson, Apu Nahasapeemapetilon …, but also known as an actor in Mad about you, Along came Polly and Quiz Show) and Harry Shearer (Mr Burns/Mr Smithers/Ned Flanders/Kent Brockman/Rev. Lovejoy/Principal Skinner … but also the bass player in Spinal Tap – cucumber … pants … remember?).

Parts 2 and 3 can be found on Memorable Movies!

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One very pleasant discovery halfway was the excellent Japanese remix of “September” (Earth Wind and Fire). It starts off all sampled and cut up, but I recognized it quite fast (I have a thing for sampling). So who was responsible for this funky rework of an already fabulous original?

I did some Googling when I got home and I found the following reference: “September” – Shinichi Osawa (via cduniverse.com). I found no other reference but Shinichi also appears on a Earth, Wind & Fire Remixes album by Soul Source (aka Ken Yanai). On that album, however, Shinichi remixes “Brazilian Rhyme” and September is remixed by Fantastic Plastic Machine aka Tanaka Tomoyuki. Shinichi is also the DJ behind Mondo Grosso, and I actually own “Vibe PM” on Dimitri From Paris’ Monsieur Dimitri’s De-Luxe House Of Funk, remixed by Masters at Work. All this namedropping just to state that there is a whole Japanese house-scene that I was not aware off. Great discovery times ahead!

UPDATE: apparently it’s a mashup of Fatboy Slim’s “The Joker” (remixed by ATFC) and Earth Wind & Fire “September” (remixed by Fantastic Plastic Machine), and the mashup was created by Shinichi Osawa. All the samples I found online only let you hear the “September” part, so you can’t hear the cut ‘n paste work Shinishi has done.

This is the YouTube clip:
(video deleted by Youtube)

If you need to be reminded how ridiculous the fashion habits were in the seventies: here’s the original:
(video deleted by Youtube)

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Ants: A bug’s life (Pixar – 1998) | Antz (Dreamworks – 1998)
Monsters: Monsters Inc (Pixar – 2001) | Shrek (Dreamworks – 2001)
Oceans: Nemo (Pixar – 2003) | Shark’s tale (Dreamworks – 2004)
Wild animals: Madagascar (Dreamworks – 2005) | The Wild (Disney – 2006)

Hyperactive nut-focused squirl-ish creature:

Ice Age II (Blue Sky – 2006)

Over the hedge (Dreamworks – 2006)

Rats:

Ratatouille (Pixar – 2007)

Flushed Away (Dreamworks – 2006)
(Actually there are even more rat movies: Ratatouille, Flushed Away, Rats Amore and One Rat Short)

Pinguins:

Surf’s Up (Sony Animation – 2007): pinguins

Happy Feet (Warner Bros – 2007): pinguins (check this one, great trailer!)

Martial arts chubby animals:
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Warner Bros – 2006)

Kung Fu Panda (Dreamworks – 2008): title says it all

And what else can we expect for in the near future (but no known imitators yet):
Bee movie (Dreamworks – Fall 2007): bee sues humans
Horton Hears a Who (Blue Sky – 2008): elephant and mini-people – based a Dr Seuss story
Everyone’s Hero (Fox – 2007): baseball

(inspired by blog.macgeneration.com)

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Some of the camera work was interesting, sometimes the lack of soundtrack was also interesting (if you’re into shot gun sounds), but overall it was a waste of time (a lot of people left the theatre during the movie). Other people might disagree, but I think the movie sucked. Michael killed one of his babies.

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Add one more superlative to Paramount’s “Mission: Impossible: III”: it is the largest digital release ever, playing on more than 170 digital cinema screens throughout North America. And all digital preparation and distribution to those screens was handled by Kodak Digital Cinema.
from http://www.dcinematoday.com/dc/pr.aspx?newsID=487

(Digital cinema is obviously of much better quality than this pixelized image – this just says “digital”, doesn’t it?)

Paramount set high standards for the digital release of “Mission: Impossible: III.” The studio insisted it only be shown in theatres with 2K cinema grade projectors and DCI-level security (…).
“Mission: Impossible III” is eight reels long, with soundtracks in multiple languages. In its digital release, it needed to be encoded in two different compression formats, packaged for four different server brands, and distributed via hard drive and satellite. The movie was encrypted to prevent piracy, so a unique pair of ‘keys’ – software codes – for each screen had to be created and sent separately. (…)
Beginning in April, Paramount began delivering the digital masters to Kodak’s Laser Pacific facility in Hollywood. Kodak technicians compressed and encrypted each reel and packaged them to play on the different screens. Kodak and Paramount collaborated on final quality control.

StarWars Episode III (2005) also needed to be prepared in 4 different formats. The promise of the DCI specification is of course that in the future, a movie can be packaged in only 1 format and work on all brands of cinema servers/projectors. Kodak would get a DCDM (Digital Cinema Ditribution Master) from Paramount, and prepare a single encrypted DCP (Digital Cinema Package) to ship to all theatres. It would then also distribute 170 keys for decrypting. Encryption key size is measured in bits, a 2048-bit RSA key for public key encryption is rather big, for symmetric encryption, an 128-bit AES key is already considered quite strong. This just to point out that secure delivery of a key file < 10KB is a lot easier than that of the 300GB movie file. I might write an article about that soon.

Digital cinema in Belgium
In Belgium, Kinepolis also shows the movie in digital version: in Brussels, Antwerp, Gent, Leuven, Hasselt, Kortrijk and Braine L’Alleud.
A lot of those digital projections worldwide will be played on Barco projectors, since they are one of the market leaders and have a close relationship with Kodak. One of the formats Kodak had to convert to, is “MXF Interop” (MPEG2) for XDCinema’s Cinestore line of Digital Cinema servers.
Kinepolis started in Harelbeke (1970) and is now an international group with 21 digital cinema theatres. Barco started in Poperinge (1934) and is now one of the world leaders in digital projection with a very optimistic CEO. EVS started in Liege (1994) and created its digital cinema subsiduary XDCinema in 2000. XDCinema and Barco are partnering to provide the digital cinema screenings at the Festival of Cannes this year.

With so many large players based here, Belgium will be an interesting playground for digital cinema.

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(…) the movies you just kind of figure everybody ought to have seen in order to have any sort of informed discussion about movies. They’re the common cultural currency of our time, the basic cinematic texts that everyone should know, at minimum, to be somewhat “movie-literate.”
from rogerebert.suntimes.com

That is a brave thing to do, because movie buffs will never agree on what those 100 movies should be, so his effort is bound to get contested. Which is what I’m going to do now.

Looking at his choice, I would say the said Mr Emerson is English speaking and born before 1960. Look at the histogram:

Quick stats
85% of the listed movies are English spoken (mostly American). 70% of the movies were made before 1970. The best decade was the fifties (20 movies – from Hitchcock, Kurosawa, Wilder, Kazan, Godard …), then the seventies (19 movies – from Coppola, Scorsese, De Palma, Altman) and third the sixties (18 movies – Fellini, Kubrick, Bergman, Lean, Nichols).

Best Directors
Obviously, no female directors in the list, no Jane Campion or Sofia Coppola.

with 4 ‘essential’ movies

Howard Hawks

Alfred Hitchcock

with 3 ‘essential’ movies

Billy Wilder

Francis Ford Coppola

Stanley Kubrick

Steven Spielberg

with 2 ‘essential’ movies

Akira Kurosawa

Elia Kazan

Federico Fellini

Fritz Lang

Luis Buñuel

Martin Scorsese

Orson Welles

Ridley Scott

Roman Polanski

Victor Fleming

Foreign movies
It’s been a sery silent last 30 years for non-english, non-US movies, one would conclude by looking at Emerson’s list. France and Germany started strong the first half of the 20th century, Japan had a moment de gloire around ‘50-’55, Italy had some luck with Fellini in the early sixties, but since then it’s been really quiet. I’m not a big expert on early European film, but I’m just wondering. Bertolucci? Kieslowski?

Recent movies
Only 6 movies from the nineties make it onto the list:

• “GoodFellas” – 1990 – Martin Scorsese
• “The Crying Game” – 1992 – Neil Jordan
• “Schindler’s List” – 1993 – Steven Spielberg
• “Pulp Fiction” – 1994 – Quentin Tarantino
• “Fargo” – 1995 – Joel & Ethan Coen
• “Fight Club” – 1999 – David Fincher

I’ve seen them all, except for Fight Club, and they’re all good movies, but couldn’t that list be longer? Shouldn’t one at least have seen “Silence of the lambs” to understand “I’m having an old friend for dinner”? And what about … *he says while shifting his legs* “Basic Instinct”? What did “Thelma and Louise” do for emancipation and girl-girl action? The “Lion King” – ‘Hakuna matata’ and all that? Isn’t that more relevant than “Nosferatu” in this day and age?

Checklist
The list is of course a good checklist to see what great movies you still have to sit through. I just did the counting, I haven’t seen half of them yet (I’m around 45%). I have a feeling that if someone would make a top 100 of the last thirty years, I’d be way above 50%.
Remarkable fact: Victor Fleming – a name that did not ring a bell with me – finished “Gone with the wind” and “The wizard of Oz” in the same year: 1939.

Ironically Fleming was brought in on both pictures to replace other directors and smooth out the troubled productions, a feat he accomplished masterfully.
from IMDB

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