Tag: film

A good review of Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle. And a good critique of what works based on the Philip K. Dick get wrong.

That review,here, is worth reading for anyone watching or interesting in watching the Amazon Prime series.

Anyone interested in works based on the novels of Dick should focus on this key quote (I added the emphasis):

Pop culture has exalted many of Dick’s wilder stories and novels. Since the release of Blade Runner (1982, based on the short novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) and Total Recall (1990, based on the story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale”), his pet motifs of false realities and artificial identities have captivated filmmakers. …Along the way to becoming popcorn entertainments, Dick’s motifs have shed a lot of their existential baggage. Today, the revelation that capsizes everything a movie character once believed about himself and his world is just another mind-blowing plot twist. No sooner have we gasped Whoa! than the film has moved on to the next chase scene, martial-arts display, or explosion. Nobody sits around questioning their own reality or humanity the way Dick’s protagonists do. Those questions, however, were the whole point of Dick’s fiction

That’s a great critique of even the better works based on Dick, like Blade Runner. Whenever you see or plan to see a film or TV series based on one of his works, it’s better if you can read the novel first. Doing so will add much more complexity and richness to whatever you are about to see.

The modern history of comic based Hollywood movies is here

The modern history of comic based Hollywood movies is here (via VOX) and it’s great. It starts with this:

Though they both center on a certain caped crusader, Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins (2005) and Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever (1995) couldn’t be more different. One is regarded as a cinematic treasure; the other is viewed as beautiful, colorful garbage

It goes on to review how films centred on superheroes have been progressing since Tim Burton’s Batman in the beginning of the 1980s and reviews films all the way to 2015. There’s been significant change in the genre in that 35 years, as you might expect. And it looks like it is about to undergo another change.

Like alot of genre films, it’s can be easy to dismiss genre films like this as something outside the mainstream of cinema and not worth discussing. My own view is that comic book films are films first and foremost, and when good directors like Nolan and Burton direct them, you end up with really good films. This has always been true for genre films, not just super hero movies.

For fans of such films, or film in general, it’s well worth a read and a consideration.

How to look better for your webcam

Sure, you can get a better webcam. But if you spend any time on web conference calls, it pays to read this, too: Strobist: How to Improve Your Cheapo Webcam’s Picture Quality. For example, following the article, the image that the webcam produces goes from the bluish one on the right to the better looking one on the right.

Well worth reading.