If you love someone, you're supposed to show that person your love every day of the year, not just on one in the middle of February.
But if we must: Happy Valentine's Day :-)
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
"We now return you to our regularly scheduled blogging"
On January 25th I posted that I was going to be taking a break from blogging for awhile. It wasn't anything like my Lenten abstinence from blogging last year (although that's not too bad a thing to consider doing again this time either). It was because a number of things had come up in my life that demanded attention and I needed to focus on them before the blogging. There's been a few posts I've been able to squeeze in when time allowed (I just had to do something for the 10th anniversary of Star Wars Special Edition, incidentally the A New Hope one is running on HBO on the TV behind me) but otherwise, it's been nothing like my usual publishing frequency.
Well, as of last night I can finally get back in the saddle again and ride hard.
Thanks to a lot of people who helped out during this period, from coming so far to help with a project to something as simple as offering up some thoughts and prayers. In so many ways, I doubt that I could have gotten through the past month without them.
Okay well, now y'all know that I'm back working The Knight Shift. Expect stuff to start shipping out of the factory starting now...
Saturday, February 10, 2007
It's "that video" from this past week's LOST
Lisa and I watched this week's Lost episode, "Not in Portland", last night off the DVR. That's twice I've seen this episode so far, but I've lost count at how many times I've watched this scene. It's so... weird, even for Lost. And that's saying something!
Well if you want to see it again or if you've never seen the show and are wondering what some people are talking about, here is the scene in Room 23, where Kate and Sawyer and Alex go to find Karl:
Anna Nicole and the crazy astronaut woman ZZZZZzzz...
Both stories are sad and tragic in their own ways.
But we do not need wall-to-wall coverage of these stories.
There are things going wrong in this world that demand our attention. Instead we continue to be captivated by the cult of the celebrity... to the detriment of ourselves and our children. Because I can think of literally dozens of news stories that in a sane world would warrant this kind of coverage. Instead it gets wasted on, pardon me for saying this, a hard-living woman who not too surprisingly died too young and another woman who drove 900 miles wearing a diaper to attempt to kill a rival.
Meanwhile the government continues to take away basic liberties, we are being taxed and spent out the wazoo, we are drowning in debt, part of our land is becoming a third-world nation because the borders are being overrun, people are dying every day in a war that only the most deluded seem able to find a rationale for...
We don't need any more Anna Nicole Smith coverage. We don't need any more Lisa Nowak coverage. Just like we didn't need 24 nonstop O.J. coverage over a decade ago. Let due process in both run their course. There's no need to make these two incidents more a spectacle than each already is.
Thursday, February 08, 2007
Happy Birthday to John Williams!
John Williams, perhaps the most well-known composers of the modern age, the mind who did the music for the Star Wars movies and Indiana Jones and Jaws and Jurassic Park and the first few Harry Potter flicks and Schindler's List and Lord only knows how many other movies (and TV shows, and themes for Olympic games, etc.) is 75 years old today.
Here's saluting a great man on reaching an epic milestone. And here's to looking forward to many more wonderful film scores (I still believe he's going to do the music for Star Wars Episodes 7-9 someday). Thanks to Darth Larry for posting word about today's wonderful occasion!
"We're the Government... and You're Not"
This is one of the most dastardly devious things I've ever seen on YouTube...
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
Okay, tonight's LOST...
...was one of the best hours of television I've seen in a heap many moon.
I'm still wigged-out by that weird room that Alex's boyfriend was strapped down in: it was like the Lodovico Treatment from A Clockwork Orange on crack cocaine. Who is "Jacob"? On the screen it flashed something like "God loves you just as he loves Jacob": that's the second episode in a row that "Jacob" has been mentioned.
Just had a thought: was this "the room" that Mrs. Klugh threatened Walt with in the episode "Three Minutes"?
I'm gonna watch this one again tomorrow sometime. In the meantime, g'nite!
Behold "The Doomsday Machine" Special Edition
One of the first episodes of the original Star Trek that I saw (the very first was "The Enemy Within") was "The Doomsday Machine". I think that one easily ranks among my top three all-time favorite episodes of anything Star Trek. In case you've never seen it, "The Doomsday Machine" is basically Moby Dick in space: the Enterprise comes across another Starfleet vessel that barely survived an encounter with an ancient sentient war machine. The commander of this other Starfleet ship is obsessed to the point of madness with destroying the machine.
For the past few months the guys in charge of Star Trek (is that still Berman and Bragga?) have been broadcasting the original Star Trek series with the "special editions" treatment: remastered and with upgraded special effects. Well, this week "The Doomsday Machine" gets the treatment. What does it look like?
Here's a shot from the original version of the episode, showing the Enterprise and the doomsday machine...
And here is a shot from the remastered episode, showing the 2007 rendition of the doomsday machine...
I've never seen classic Star Trek look this good. This is definitely one I'll be looking to record on the DVR! For more pics from this episode aim your phasers here.
LOST returns tonight!
In the final moments of the last episode of Lost, Jack had agreed to do the surgery on Ben. In the middle of the operation he turned the tables on his captors: Jack made an incision in Ben's kidney. He then demanded a radio to talk to Kate and then laid it all down: if the kidney doesn't get sewn up in one hour, Ben dies. Either Kate (and presumably Sawyer) get away to safety and radio that back to Jack, or the Others are going to have to find themselves another leader (which maybe Juliet wants anyway...).
I've been so wrapped-up in finishing my film that I totally forgot until while just talking to Mom on the phone that Lost returns tonight: the first episode since November 8th. It comes on at 10 p.m. EST (one hour later than usual, to give the American Idol juggernaut some leeway). I'll probably file a report here later, giving my reaction to the show.
FACING THE GIANTS: Finally a Christian movie that gets it
About a month ago my friend Chad did a review of a movie called Facing the Giants. It just came out on DVD this past week and a couple days ago it arrived at our place via Netflix. Well, I'm still busy putting my own movie together, but Monday night Lisa and I watched a good part of it and we finished up last night. So what did I think about Facing the Giants?One word: "Wow!"
Yes! At last! To say that I am astounded would be undercutting it. And not just because this movie is the production of a Baptist church in Georgia but absolutely looks as if it had a multi-million dollar budget poured into it (I think they only spent about $100,000 on this)...
...No, what really impresses me about Facing the Giants is that this movie "gets it" so far as Christian filmmaking goes. Yes, it is very much a Christian movie. But it does something that is very rarely - actually I don't know if it's ever been done this successfully before - done with Christian cinema: Facing the Giants is entertaining in addition to its message, instead of trying to be entertaining because of its message.
That's probably going to rub some folks as being blasphemy: like I'm saying that Facing the Giants is putting worldly approval before righteousness before God. But there are two things that I would like to point out about Christian filmmaking in general. First, full-length features are supposed to be entertaining. Or if not "entertaining", at least still make you feel as if the time watching it was well spent. Too many Christians in the film industry try to make "the message" the whole reason why people should want to see their movies... when it doesn't work that way at all. And so we wind up getting turkeys like Left Behind (hilariously discussed in Rod Dreher's classic article for National Review called "Do Fake Boobs Go to Heaven?"). This is one medium where noble intent alone does not a good movie make. As it is, we get situations where the producers of a Christian movie have to practically beg people to come see their movies...
...Ummmm, guys: if you just make the story engaging and fun, people will want to come see it on their own anyway. Facing the Giants made more than $10 million when it came out in theaters (to limited distribution and with little promotion, I might add). That's a hundred-fold return on Sherwood Baptist's investment.
Second, as Christians we should feel compelled to give everything that we do our best effort. Or rather as Grant Taylor (played by Alex Kendrick) in Facing the Giants comes to realize: do your best so that you can give glory to God, not to yourself. And sometimes you have to push yourself and even go through some pain in order to do that. Striving for the goal that God has set for us is never supposed to be easy: God puts these things in our lives to build us up, not to win some prize. Winning is a secondary thing... but we are still supposed to run the race to win all the same, as the apostle Paul taught us to do.
What does that mean when it comes to Christian filmmaking? It means doing your darndest to make a good movie, and that means having something more than less-than-stellar production values. Yes, I know that most Christian filmmakers are faced with limited funds compared to the resources of a big studio, but if there's any way at all to squeeze in just a little more quality into a project, then the filmmaker should do so. But a lot of these Christian movies look as if they are products of the Ed Wood School of Filmmaking: fast and cheap and without care. Again, with these movies people are supposed to want to see it because of "the message", according to their producers. It's almost like those TV commercials for personal computers back in the early 80s: almost always the spokesperson would talk about all the productive things that a computer could do and then maybe, just maybe, they might be used for a little fun. Most Christian films are all business and no pleasure, and the producers will spend 90% of the budget on the serious and hardly anything on making the thing look good. Quite honestly, I think that's lazy filmmaking. Worse: it reflects horribly on Christians who are trying to do things for God's glory. If we can't give it our best for Him, what is the rest of the world - that we are trying to witness to - going to take away from that?
A third point I could also make, even though it has nothing to do with Christian filmmaking per se, is this: Facing the Giants was shot on location in Georgia, with an almost entirely local crew and cast of actors. And it proves something I've been thinking for awhile now: that if you want to produce a top-quality movie, you don't have to go to Hollywood to get it made. The acting in Facing the Giants is as good as any coming out of Tinseltown... and the fact that these are ordinary people makes Facing the Giants all the more honest and convincing. You wanna make a film? Do your community a favor: put your friends and neighbors in it. Acting is easy, and the behind the scenes stuff isn't too hard either: give everyone a shot at being in the movies.
Well, I gotta get back to working on my own movie. But I just had to take a break long enough to recommend Facing the Giants and call attention to how this is one movie that is hitting on all the right cylinders. Many other Christian filmmakers would do well to learn from its example.
And, it's just a heckuva good movie. I'll probably be buying it for my own DVD collection soon.
Monday, February 05, 2007
Something beautiful
Brian Hodges - AKA Darth Larry - is not only a bigger Star Wars geek than me (is that possible?) but he's also an accomplished cello player. Here's a video of him rehearsing - along with his wife Betsi on piano - something called "Rachmaninoff Sonata" for a recital he gave a couple months ago...Recital Warm-Up
Add to My Profile | More Videos I like posting stuff like this, not only because it demonstrates the talents of good friends but also because it makes me look good when others see that I got the hookup with high-class cultured folks :-)
Add to My Profile | More Videos
The KWerky family grows as it tries to get ON THE LOT! Report and pics from filming
For almost two weeks I've had to refrain from posting at my routine frequency. Some real-life things have been happening that demanded a lot of personal attention. It'll be at least another week or so before I'm probably going to be back at full posting strength, but for the first time I'm ready to "tip my hand" a bit on something that I've been working on.Dawn Swartz and Chris Otto on the set at Cafe 99 in Reidsville, North Carolina Part of the set during filming at the Reidsville Family YMCA Looking down the hallway on the set at Reidsville Family YMCA The "class photo"
Front row: Tristan Stamper
Second row: Dawn Swartz, Selassie Amana, Chris Knight
Third row: Chris Otto, Tyler Richardson, Doug Smith, Olivia Woody, Ed Woody
It all started almost three weeks ago, during the season premiere of American Idol. During the first commercial break we saw a promo for the upcoming Fox show On The Lot. It's something like American Idol for filmmakers: everyone is invited to make a 5-minute short film and submit it. From all those thousands of entries, sixteen will be selected to compete on television. Those chosen will have to make one new film a week, with the viewing audience voting on who to keep returning in the ensuing weeks. The person who wins receives a $1 million filmmaking contract. The executive producers of this lil' venture are reality TV legend Mark Burnett and some guy named Spielberg...
We saw the promo and the first words out of Lisa's mouth were "Chris, you should try out for this."
Then the next day at least a half-dozen other people told me that I should take a stab at On The Lot, including the girl who worked on Lisa's teeth at the dentist office and my mother-in-law.
I'd actually heard of On The Lot last summer and had thought of trying to put something together for an entry, but then the school board race happened and everything that I would have liked to occupy myself with went straight out the window for more than three months. The deadline to submit a film is February 16th: just a month to conceive a story, write a script, do casting, find locations, shoot the thing, and then everything involved in post-production. Definitely a tall order even in the best of circumstances. But with all these people encouraging me to go for it, I've taken it as a sign that I should at least make the attempt, even if it doesn't get any further than the "auditioning" stage.
I spent the day after first seeing the promo trying to think of story ideas. Two of them kept coming to mind. The one that I thought was the more challenging to attempt is what I opted to use. By 4:30 the next morning the first draft of the script was finished. A few days after that I posted a casting call on Tarheelfilms.com (a terrific resource for North Carolina-based filmmaking and casting). I said in the ad that this was for an On The Lot entry. Before the next four days were out about 350 people had responded!
Well, I went through all of them, and it wasn't easy. Casting went on almost right up 'til principle photography. In the meantime I worked on a lot of other things involving production. Friday before last I did the first bit of filming at Cafe 99 in Reidsville. I then spent the next week lining everything up for principle photography the following Saturday.
That happened this past weekend. There are two very quick scenes that still need to be filmed but otherwise, we got all our shots in.
I can't begin to say how much fun we had! One of the most exciting aspects about filmmaking for me is meeting wonderful new people and getting to know them as we work together. Well, Saturday our little production family welcomed three new members: Selassie Amana, Chris Otto, and Dawn Swartz. My longtime friend and collaborator "Weird" Ed Woody, his wife Olivia (both members of the cast in this project) and their son Tristan arrived at our place Saturday morning. Then Doug Smith - a guy I used to work with - arrived. It wasn't long afterward that Selassie, Chris and Dawn got here (Chris also brought his girlfriend/secretary Abby, and my own lovely lil' "spousal overunit" Lisa was there too 'course :-) That was ten people in our living room total... and four of them (Chris, Abby, Dawn, and Lisa) were all graduates of University of Georgia! So the Uga wallpaper on our computer's desktop was naturally a big hit with the crowd.
We had a round of introductions and then "got down to business". I got up and told everyone a little about what KWerky Productions (the lil' outfit founded by Ed and me) is, what we've done before, what makes us unique, how we love to have fun, and how we work with only the best people that we can find. The newcomers were told how they were now joining a family... like the Mafia. And just as the Mafia, if they really wanted to be part of us then they should understand what it was that they were possibly getting into. At that point I told them that there was a video that they needed to see and that if they wanted to leave after that point, they could: "Nothing will be said," I told them. Without further ado I hit "play" on the DVD player and everyone watched the following...
Well, I could say more, but I'll let the pictures speak a little about what happened throughout the day on Saturday...
Front row: Tristan Stamper
Second row: Dawn Swartz, Selassie Amana, Chris Knight
Third row: Chris Otto, Tyler Richardson, Doug Smith, Olivia Woody, Ed Woody
After the film has been finished, I'm going to put together a reel containing the bloopers and some of the other things that happened during production. In the meantime, the submission deadline is next Friday (the 16th) and there's still two tiny scenes to shoot, plus everything that comes with post-production. But as much as wound up getting done in the past three weeks, I'm pretty confident that it will all be wrapped up in the next few days. Until then, expect me to still not be able to chime in on this blog as much as I usually do... but now y'all know more about what's up.
That's all for now. Oh yeah: way to go Colts! :-)
Sunday, February 04, 2007
Two days later...
There'll be a more full report on this page in the next day or so, but I just wanted to go ahead and say that since yesterday morning this has been an awesome experience. Everything went well yesterday and a lot of new friendships were made. Especially thanks to Selassie, Chris, and Dawn, who I got to meet in person for the first time yesterday, and I pray it's sooner rather than later that we get to work together again.
There's gonna be more to come, including pictures and a video, coming real soon. In the meantime I'm sort of spending tonight both relaxing a bit and working some with what we got in yesterday (I'm rooting for the Colts in the Super Bowl but since there's gonna be only two movie commercials during the game - which is what I always like to watch for - I'm not really interested in watching much).
Friday, February 02, 2007
Twenty-four hours
If I can get through the next twenty-four hours alive and sane, I will be a happy man.
I'd thought about posting a picture of one of the many rolls of duct tape that were purchased today, but that might have been too cryptic.
More coming soon.
Thursday, February 01, 2007
THE DEATHLY HALLOWS hits July 21st
The seventh and final Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, will be published on July 21st.
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Star Wars: Special Edition arrived 10 years ago today
It was ten years ago today, on January 31st 1997, that the cinematic re-issue of Episode IV: A New Hope kicked off the arrival of Star Wars: Special Edition in theaters.To say that this was a big thing when it came would be a severe understatement. I don't think even we die-hard Star Wars fans were expecting what happened starting that day in the winter of 1997. It was truly a wonderful time whether you were an old-timer fan or a newcomer to the series (and there were more than you might have thought). The Special Editions were such a huge event that I felt it was worth commemorating here.
George Lucas first said in 1994 that he was considering re-releasing the first Star Wars movie with "upgraded special effects". It wasn't long afterward that word came that before he started working in earnest on the prequels, that he was going to give this "enhanced" treatment to all three of the original movies for a theatrical re-release in time for the Star Wars 20th anniversary.
The hype for what would become known as the Special Editions started to crank up in the spring of 1996. This in itself would be important to note because I can't help but think that how word on the Special Editions came out really did become the model for how info about movies gets dispersed across the Internet. First came a series of pilfered photos from the upgraded version of A New Hope showing the newly CGI-enhanced dewbacks (those lizard things that the Stormtroopers rode on) and it wasn't long afterward that the public got a look at the computer-animated Jabba the Hutt, for a scene that was cut from the original release of the first movie. Then a list of some of the forthcoming changes got leaked. I think the one that really whetted the appetites of a lot of die-hard fans was the news that the final scenes from the re-issue of Return of the Jedi would show celebrations all over the place, including on the galactic capital planet Coruscant: a place that had been written about but never shown in a Star Wars movie. Every time something new came out it was all good.
It went on like this throughout the summer and then fall of 1997...
...and then it got out that among the changes that Lucas was implementing was making Greedo shoot first.
Then all Hell broke loose.
There's no way I could describe the furor this caused and do it any justice. And it absolutely has to be mentioned in the context of talking about the coming of the Special Editions. A lot of fans said Lucas had no right to change his own story like this. Some started leveling the charge that Lucas was "raping our childhood". My take on it? If Lucas was doing all of these other things to enhance and make better his legend, I didn't have any problem with it. Having Greedo shoot first actually made a lot of sense to me: it didn't make Han out to be such a cold-blooded killer. Although how Greedo could have shot and missed from that close-by is still something I struggle with cognitive dissonance about.
January 1997 arrived and the public hype machine went full-tilt wacko. Pepsi led the way with its gonzo promotional product tie-ins: something that everyone got to see in a big way with this commercial that ran during Super Bowl XXXI...
...and we had to sit through at least fifteen minutes of trailers for upcoming movies! It might have been closer to twenty. There were so many trailers that by the time a new one started up most of the people in the audience were groaning "NOOOOO!!" (as one guy screamed out "We've waited twenty years for this!").
Well, at last, there was that 20th Century Fox intro. Then the "new" Lucasfilm logo: the fancy one that turns into gold or bronze or whatever (instead of the plain static blue "old" logo that was regular text). Then the "A long time ago..."
When that honkin' big yellow Star Wars logo filled the screen I went pure nuts. Ed and Gary had to hold me down. Lord help me, I was in tears...
We watched the movie, and were "oohing" and "ahhing" every "new" little thing that we could spot. One funny thing that happened was the scene where Luke is playing with the model of his T-16 Skyhopper: as soon as he did that someone's arm stood up out of the audience... holding the real-life toy of the T-16 and started playing with it along with Luke!
We had a great time watching A New Hope Special Edition. I saw that one four more times in the theaters while it was out. Three weeks after A New Hope's re-release came the Special Edition of The Empire Strikes Back, and then three weeks after that (it was originally going to be two) it was Return of the Jedi's turn. So for a month or so after that, all three of the original Star Wars movies were playing in theaters simultaneously, with some theaters running all three. Counting all three movies, I saw the Special Editions fifteen times during their theatrical run, most of those times with people I knew.
Well, there's not much else I know to add to what's already been said except that I naturally went a little nuts for the merchandising, like the soundtracks for all three Special Editions and more action figures 'course. My favorite piece of Star Wars memorabilia that I bought during that time is still the Darth Vader cap that I bought at the Air and Space Museum in Washington while we were there for a winter term class a few weeks before the Special Editions debuted.
It was an amazing time to be a Star Wars fan: one that I don't know if the release of the prequels even approximated. Maybe in another ten years or so, for the 40th anniversary, and after there's been plenty enough time since a Star Wars movie was shown in a theater, there could be something like this happening again but with all six movies. I don't know if it's possible to capture lightning in a bottle again, but it would sure be fun if it did happen.
So let's hoist aloft our glasses of blue milk and raise a toast to Star Wars: Special Edition on the occasion of its 10th birthday as we remember how it brought a legend fully back into public consciousness... and this time, to stay.
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
The zampolits have come to America
This isn't becoming very much of a break from blogging, is it? This is the third post I've made since I declared last week that I would be refraining from my usual blogging routine. But as with the previous two, if it wasn't severely important then I wouldn't be making it at all.
I've said once or twice on this blog that the way things are going in America, that we owe an apology to the leaders of the old Soviet Union. At least they were honest enough about having one-party rule instead of trying to fool the people into thinking otherwise. In the past few years I've watched this country adopt so many marks of that regime: warrant-less searches, seizure without hearing, suppression of reasonable dissent, refusal to respect the right to privacy...
...now comes something that I never, ever expected to see: the coming of zampolits to America.
A zampolit, in the days of the Soviet Union, was a "political officer" assigned to units of the Soviet military, to ensure loyalty to the party and to make sure that party decisions and policies were carried out. The zampolit was a member of the party and not the military... but he had the authority to over-ride the command of military officers and remove them if he so wished. The zampolits were one of the big mechanisms in place that kept the armed forces from overthrowing the Communists. They were part of the system that kept the dictators in power for so long.
"Political officers" aren't a good thing, for obvious reasons.
So please forgive me if I'm being irrationally alarmed by this article from The New York Times:
Bush Directive Increases Sway on RegulationMaybe there is a substantial difference between these "political appointees" and the zampolits... but they certainly do seem downright similar in function. Namely, that being to increase the power of a central figure.By ROBERT PEAR
Published: January 30, 2007WASHINGTON, Jan. 29 — President Bush has signed a directive that gives the White House much greater control over the rules and policy statements that the government develops to protect public health, safety, the environment, civil rights and privacy.
In an executive order published last week in the Federal Register, Mr. Bush said that each agency must have a regulatory policy office run by a political appointee, to supervise the development of rules and documents providing guidance to regulated industries. The White House will thus have a gatekeeper in each agency to analyze the costs and the benefits of new rules and to make sure the agencies carry out the president’s priorities.
How is that possibly a good thing?
Just something I felt led to take note of, for future reference.
