Wrestling no doubt has a certain appeal – nicely shaped bodies (and butts ;-) ) with not so much on them and two males "hugging" one another firmly…. I already noticed that way back in school, but I sucked too much at it, so that I never pursued it outside school lessons (we do have a reasonably successful wrestling club in the town where I live, in particular the girls/ women, though). Still, it’s not the most popular sport here in Germany unlike in the US where every school seems to have a team in addition to their football and basketball teams, which brings me to the topic.

One such wrestling team is part of the story of Win Win, a little movie that made an impression at TIFF last year. I’ve questioned the value of festival reviews and awards a couple of times, but this time they weren’t that far off and the movie actually was good. Unlike the promotional materials may suggest, it isn’t exactly a comedy nor is it a problem child nor a family man in trouble kind of film. It has moments of all of that, but never goes too deep with either. This allows it to flow naturally and unobtrusively, but strangely this is also the single biggest problem of the whole thing. It doesn’t really give you enough to establish a deeper relation with the characters. Despite the film being about 110 minutes, it never takes the time to really explore the motivations and backgrounds e.g. of the drug-addicted mother of Kyle or his own relation with her. When the film reveals something, it often only tells you what you were guessing all along. This makes in particular this part of the story feel unnecessary and unbelievable. Rather the film should have focused on the more quirky sides of some of the characters, making this more of a comedy and buddy movie.

This brings us back to the wrestling, which holds everything together as all the main characters are involved with it either as trainers and coaches or in case of the kids as the guys on the mat. In those moments the movie shines and is actually quite funny when it takes a play at the adults’ unrealized dreams and everyday trepidations and the youths’ shortcomings in sports and their puberty problems. Funnily, this could have been easily achieved by showing more of the training and competitions in order to show how the team mates interact with one another and measure their opposition, how he trainers respond and work out a strategy. It could have provided a nice analaogy to their otehr lifes. It would also have helped to give a feeling of time passing with a certain continuity, which is a bit absent here. You only get random glimpses and it often feels like "How did they qualify and train for that competition again?" A little more of that would have made what is still a good movie a real great one. Despite my criticism, I can still recommend the movie. It’s entertaining and you won’t be bored along the way, which is the most important thing.

Fridays can be good, after all. Having escaped the impending doom of urological surgery on Friday after the pre-OP examination on Thursday resulting in a cancellation, I was actually able to take advantage of some lucky coincidences. If you regularly follow this blog you can imagine how important this is to me, I was able to snatch some tickets for Cirque du Soleil‘s Immortal show right after the sale started at 9 AM. Either someone in Montreal is reading this blog or it really is a sheer case of luck that they are making a stop again in our area just as they did with Alegria. I’m not necessarily a fan of Michael Jackson and I’ve always been somewhat skeptical about the The Beatles and Viva Elvis shows as the idea of combining known and beloved classic hits with a new show feels a bit strange and I also think that original shows with the music composed to suit conceptually work better, but it will definitely still be impressive. It’s funny that this show has been in the works for so long (I seem to recall some "Coming Soon" notes having been on their website as far back as 2007 or 2008 that quickly disappeared again), but only came to fruition after the man passed away, making this no doubt appear as one more of those quick cash grab shows like there are so many… On that note I’m curious what Madonna and the Cirque have in store for their Super Bowl performance. Will YouTube be my friend?

It would seem that the marketing train just isn’t gaining momentum and not leaving the station. To me, nothing else explains those half-assed attempts like the latest one for Photoshop, which are seriously underwhelming. Liquify brushes larger than 1500 pixels? RLY? So that fashion photographers can make those skinny bitches look even more skinny with a few strokes less? *argh* To be fair, though, and that is probably what many people do not realize yet, the background saving thing is valuable. Not so much for just being there – even large files save reasonably fast on mundane single harddrives these days, if only they spin reasonably fast, but rather for what other venues it may open up. While I don’t agree with the eternal request for auto-saves (people should simply learn how to structure their workflows and manage their files as versions rather than working on the same forever and then losing everything in a crash), background saving might offer a solution. Imagine how the program would do an Image –> Duplicate at fixed intervals and then save the duplicate while you keep working on the original. Similarly, this may even allow to run batch processing in the background while still being able to work. Still, despite all this, I’m missing something that really excites me as much as I appreciate workflow enhancements….

I must admit that when it comes to HD I’m a late comer, at least where my private viewing pleasure is concerned. Which is nothing short of weird, given that in my professional life of course we are pointing out the advantages of higher res footage whenever we can to our clients and already the world is on a rampage towards 4K because HD doesn’t seem good enough anymore.

There’s some good reasons for my holding back, though. Long before anyone could ever dream of HD, I already had a sizable DVD collection and I’m not gonna buy all of that over again. It’s not just a matter of money, but ultimately I find I’m watching some films regularly and repeatedly while others catch dust on the shelf after their first screening, including my favorite series. Not much point in adding more relics to the pile. Furthermore, and that’s probably the more important reason, like everyone I have some favorite genres and kinds of movies, but amongst them is not necessarily much that would require HD. Okay, I can admit that I occasionally drag out The Matrix movies and even Star Wars and even enjoy them in an odd way, yet on some level I prefer stuff that has a "real story" and at least a hint of intelligence. A turd like Ironman will remain a turd despite explosions perhaps looking more impressive in XXL while on the other hand a brilliant movie like Schindler’s List will touch you even when compressed as the most crappy YouTube video at half the original DVD resolution.

All that being said, there is one thing that always has bothered me – how bad some of my favorite movies and series look. Not because they are just your normal PAL/ NTSC, but how they were produced on a budget and somewhere down the line they degraded so heavily, they missed their chance to really look great, whether it’s the CG stuff in Babylon 5 looking all a bit too simplistic and plastic-y or the extremely skewed colors in Star Trek – The Next Generation, which made the red uniforms look more like a dark purple/ lilac. Thankfully, and that’s another of those weird coincidences, the limitations of the time that prompted them to work on video to do effects digitally now turn into a saving grace. While the excitement about the video revolution in the late 80s and early 90s may have had them do all their post-production electronically, the original plates were shot on good old chemical film. This now allows this footage to be re-digitised, cleaned up and finally be presented in a manner like it was probably meant to be. That has now happened for a selection of episodes as an appetizer and I must say I’m more than pleased with the result.

I watched The Inner Light right away. Especially the richness of the colors is amazing and you do notice background details that you did not see before. However, you have to keep in mind that this is still a product aimed at the television market at the time. The framing is still 4:3 and the composition of most shots is molded to fit that. You couldn’t crop them to 16:9 no matter how much you wanted without destroying valuable scenery. Likewise, there is the occasional bit of defocus, which may not have been critical back then, but will only show up now. Conversely, the higher resolution will make some of the production design and make-up work look a bit crude and unsophisticated. Unlike in today’s series like Battlestar Galactica you won’t find microscopic stenciling and display readouts just to please fanboys with a "Please do not fart in the turbolift" somewhere. Still, TNG never looked that good and I’m already looking forward to the first full season…

One of the more odd (in a positive way) things about my illness is that you get around a lot. You often visit cities you haven’t been to in years just to visit some specialist doctor and when you do that, you are introduced to new examinations and treatments every step of the way, gradually turning you into sort of an expert on some parts of the human body. Today I had again one such little excursion to my ophtalmologist and she scanned my eye with some high-res digital camera. If you remember Minority Report, they do it there all the time to track people and dump personalised advertising on them and of course for security authorities to chase them down (but who needs that when people carry GPS phones and are trackable already…), but this was not at all like that. Just a flash of green light and then some…. Luckily my retina so far is okay, but I guess the bad news of the day is that my intraoccular pressure is too high from the corticoids and my field of view already impaired. *yikes* Let’s hope this won’t turn into a glaucoma…

As CS6 creeps nearer, inevitably we get more scraps of info on the various products (or at least products that we simply assume will be in the final package) by various routes. The latest new product to join the ring (if, like me, you don’t care for Edge and Muse and don’t count them) is code-named Prelude. Obviously they didn’t really show that much, so speculations run high and everyone draws comparisons. To me it looks like a massively pimped amalgam of OnLocation and Adobe Media Encoder, combined with a new unified XML-based project and exchange format (but your grandma could have predicted it – signs and portents) and the usual ingredients like thumbnail previews for storyboard layout, all that metadata stuff and what have you. I’m still 100% sold on Avid, but if Adobe are serious enough, they could now at least be competitive in an area where they have fallen flat on their face all those years. Asset and footage management simply sucks even in CS5.5…

Ah, Adobe, what has become of thee? Aside from never seeming to truly fix their tools, now their marketing sucks just as much. One such feeblish attempt is this so-called sneak peek at Photoshop CS6. For one, it doesn’t really tell us anything that my mom couldn’t have predicted – after buying one or two companies over the last years that specialised in RAW conversion tools, it was only a matter of time to see this worked into a new Camera RAW module. Two, the only other thing it gives us is something about UI improvements. Okay, those things may look minor, but in day to day can be more valuable than any addition of grandiose new features. Still, nothing to write home about and ultimately, which makes this a failure alltogether, is the simple fact that just by watching this official video, you get a ton of hits with screen recordings from leaked prerelease builds, most of which present much more and more interesting stuff. Of course one can’t be 100% sure which development state those videos represent so you don’t know which of these features will actually make it into the final product…

Or to the less French-y people: Element is alive, at least according to this post. If it only has half the features that the images hint at (blobby surfaces, a shattering engine, subsurface scattering plus the already excellent looking rendering), this might become a classic as Particular or of course Video CoPilot‘s own Optical Flares.

Edit: A kind little bird informed me about some incorrect spelling in the title that didn’t make sense in the way I meant it. I guess that’s what you get for posting early in the morning when your mind still wanders and craves this first cup of tea to rev up….

One of my dirty little secrets is that I always have had and still have a keen interest in military aviation (and scale aviation modeling) and in my downtimes at hospitals or doctors’ waiting rooms I have quite gotten back into reading pertinent literature. Thus I have been following the ongoing plight of the Joint Strike Fighter quite a bit. Now I’m not going into conceptual arguments about military/ government spending, as it always ends up like that memorable quote from the movie Contact ("First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?") and the F-35 is an expensive piece of flying technology for sure, but I’m actually pleased to see the program move forward now. At least that way I’ll have something interesting to read for a while…

…obviously not always.