Canon’s PowerShot SX20 IS has an impressive trio of headline features: a massive 20X optical zoom, a 12.1-megapixel sensor, and HD-quality video recording. If you’re shopping for a bridge camera (a megazoom model that marries the simplicity of a point-and-shoot with the power and flexibility of a digital SLR) the SX20 IS should be near the top of your list.
Kodak’s 12-megapixel EasyShare M381 is a good low-priced point-and-shoot camera for anyone who doesn’t want to fuss with a lot of controls—as long as you’re also willing to deal with a few of the camera’s quirks.
By Steven James Snyder on December 31, 2009Forget looking forward to 2010; I've already been impressed by a handful of 2010 titles.
We've already seen Daybreakers and The Book of Eli - both pretty captivating - and we've already moved on to obsessing about Legion. That is, when I'm not renting old-school sci-fi classics for our “Most Underrated Sci-Fi Masterpieces” contest.
It's a little difficult to look out at a complete year in film. Some release dates are still being finalized, some films aren't even done shooting. And you never know what little indie sleeper is going to come up and surprise you. I just finished watching a fun little thriller called Carriers that I had never even heard of before (I'm going to write up more about that for Monday). So there may be a few notable omissions here.
(More on Techland: What We're Looking Forward to in 2010: Sci-Fi TV)
In any event, here are a handful of the titles that we've already been talking about around Techland headquarters. The trailers have been watched, the expectations have soared. Sign us up now.
Read more here.
From Photojojo newsletter:Coaxing together some duct tape, cardboard, and a disassembled laser, lens-hacker Bhautik Joshi presided over the marriage of a big fat SLR lens and an iPhone.
Despite looking a bit like a hippo riding a skateboard, the “Phone-O-Scope” yielding an attractive mix of low-fi digital grain and classy SLR-style depth of field.
Even better: it’ll work on any cameraphone.
Next up: attaching a telephone booth to a point-and-shoot.
After years of neglect it appears we now know what Apple is doing with the Apple TV: subscription TV services. According to the WSJ, Apple is in negotiations with CBS and Disney to stream their respective content over the Internet to the Apple TV. Yes, it appears as though Apple is gunning for cable and satellite TV providers. Tech journos and Apple TV owners the world over have just squealed in glee.
The service sounds pretty simple and straightforward – subscribe to the channels/shows that you want for a monthly fee. The service is said to be slated for a 2010 launch, says the WSJ. However, no major networks have signed on with Apple. I don't know about you, but I'd jump on board if this pans out. I don't like paying over $100/month to watch a handful of TV shows. Would such a service have anything to do with the vaunted tablet? Probably.
It doesn't matter what Apple wants to do at this point if networks aren't playing ball. And how would this service be any different than their current TV offerings via iTunes? Well, according to “people familiar” with the situation, Apple is looking to pay networks upwards of $4 a month per subscriber on down to $1 a month for basic-cable networks. Another theory is that a “best of television” type package would be available for $30/month with a potpourri of ad-free shows from various networks.
Hmm…I'll have to think about this one for a while. There's nothing compelling about it. Nor is it any different than what's already available.
Robert Downey Jr., left, and Jude Law star in Sherlock Holmes.Since his introduction to the world in 1887 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes has been much celebrated for his cleverness. He's a cerebral detecting machine, able to slip in and out of disguises and make it all look "elementary." But have his steely abs ever been given their proper due? Have we remarked enough on what a cutie pie he is, especially when bantering with Dr. Watson?
No and no, but director Guy Ritchie is trying hard to correct our mistake with his populist version of Sherlock Holmes, which features Robert Downey Jr.'s six-pack in a starring role and Jude Law as his partner more in bromance than crime solving. Ritchie's Holmes is smart, to be sure, as he's been in dozens of movies and television series, but his legendary embarrassment of mental riches isn't going to embarrass anyone. In this movie, his ability to throw a right hook or dodge a flying fist matters just as much as his brain. Our new Holmes fights bare-chested in the street, and when he gets into trouble, he talks through his moves in his head, computing the angle of the blow and the damage it will inflict before actually striking, which we see in slow motion. (See the top 10 movies of 2009.)
This gives Ritchie an opportunity to show the action twice, a technique that worked well enough to provide the backstory on shell games and heists in previous Ritchie movies like Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. But here it feels like he's just trying to maximize the violence because it's so much more fun for him than the brainy stuff. Holmes' actual crime-solving scenes slip by in an unmemorable instant; there's even one central mystery that's resolved by him dipping into a volume called The Book of Spells. Frankly, the guys on CSI use more deductive means of reasoning.
The story begins with Tower Bridge in the final stages of construction — quick, where do you think the final fight sequence will take place? — and Dr. Watson (Jude Law) about to leave Holmes for a girl, Mary Morstan (Kelly Reilly). Holmes is jealous, to put it mildly, and they bicker like something out of a much lesser Judd Apatow movie. "My rooms," says Watson, referring to the Baker Street apartments they share. "Our rooms," Holmes retorts. "My dog," says Watson, referring to the corpulent white dog Ritchie cuts to for an occasional punchline. "Our dog," Holmes says tartly. They'd be "The Odd Couple" if they were funnier and actually mismatched (Law is too pretty to play Watson). (See the top 10 movie performances of 2009.)
The crime involves a member of the House of Lords, Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong, his hair shaped in a shiny black cap that makes him look like one of the Fisher Price little people), with a penchant for the perverse and the supernatural. He's caught by Holmes in the film's opening scenes in the middle of some Satanic ritual and condemned to death by hanging, but threatens to return from the grave. Holmes' favorite dangerous lady, "the woman," Irene Adler is also on hand. She's played by Rachel McAdams, who is saucy and fetching, but we don't believe for a minute that this is really a woman who would give Sherlock Holmes a run for his money. Or rather, the Sherlock Holmes, the one we never imagined was hiding a six-pack under his tweeds. (See a TIME video from London's Sherlock Holmes museum.)
It isn't surprising that Ritchie, a director who essentially keeps making the same glib, lively movie over and over again (with the exception of 2002's Swept Away, which stands alone in defiant atrocity) would turn Holmes into an action hero. Nor does it feel like a sin against humanity or literature; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was fun but he wasn't exactly Henry James. What is surprising is how bland the results are. The explosions and action sequences have an odd cheapness to them and the central plot is one of those dreary take-over-the-world routines. (Blackwood has "set his sights on America." Don't they all?) Even more surprising is that Robert Downey Jr. doesn't manage to overcome all that. In theory, he seems like such a good casting choice for a new Holmes; no actor of the appropriate age working today seems more quick-witted or verbally agile. Holmes was a late-19th-century bad boy, known for dipping into the cocaine here and there, and Downey Jr., reformed though he may be, is still our favorite bad boy. To imagine him in a different Sherlock Holmes movie, one darker, smarter and less desperate to entertain, invigorated by a less standard-issue plot, is to dream of what could have been.
When it comes to Avatar, there are mixed opinions. Some people dig the 3-D. Others think it's an overused and underwhelming device. Some say the story has been sacrificed in favor of the visuals. All I can say is that I've never seen 3-D employed in this manner, and I was blown away by not just the scope and depth of Pandora, but in the realistic weight and texture of the Na'vi characters. In 3-D, these 10-foot-tall blue creatures looked very real to me, from muscle definition in the face all the way down to the way they walk.
The day after my first Avatar screening, I spoke with Jon Landau, the film's producer, and asked him why his CG creatures were a world apart from anything we had ever seen before (except perhaps Gollum in the Lord of the Rings films). “Some people don't quite understand how this new process works, and it's important when you start talking about characters and the quality of the performance. We've devised a system that is performance-focused, it's about giving the actors the confidence that their performances will come through in their CG characters. And we did a test early on to prove this; a 35-second sequence of when Jake and Neytiri first meet that we developed as a prototype. It's the sort of thing that was enough to convince someone like Sigourney Weaver, a true thespian, that it could work. The key to this is that it's an image-based process for facial capture. They didn't wear markers on the face or anything like that, they worked with cameras that filmed their face and then we could do a frame-by-frame, pore-by-pore analysis. The key for us was to make sure that models were built correctly, not just on the outside, but on the inside, that there would be something muscular to the bodies,” Landau explained. (Read Techland's interview with James Cameron)
But he made it clear that developing this motion capture process was not simple, quick or cheap. Landau said the key difference in the case of Avatar was that a studio was willing to bankroll the needed research to make it a reality: “There were hurdles with the studio. The movie we were doing was not based on a TV show, it was not a franchise. It was about blue people with tails. And of course the studio asked us: Could you lose the tails, do they need to be blue? So the studio almost changed. But they always wanted to make the movie and find a way, and so part of what we said was: ‘Most movies have to run before they can walk, just give us the time we need to learn how to walk. Support us with the R&D.' So for 12 months, they gave us the freedom and we showed them this prototype and this concept art and then we were able to prove to them what was possible.”
Landau says he knew this great motion capture experiment was going to work when he first sat down in a screening room with Sam Worthington, who plays Jake Sully. “He and I were alone in a screening room and we get to the scene where his avatar wakes up for the first time and I'm watching Sam and this grin comes across his face. And then he erupts in giggles and turns to me and says: ‘Jon, that was a good giggle, that character is me, that character has my soul.' I knew then, if we can please Sam, we can please an audience.” (Read Techland's Avatar review)
Then again, they've done more than simply please the audience. I've seen the film twice now, and when I look at the character of Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), I see a fully formed performance – brimming with emotions and personality. To me, it's not a blue glob of special effects to me, like Jar Jar Binks was; it's an expressive, dynamic being. And I think it's hard not to recognize Saldana for delivering one of the year's most riveting performances - even if it was filmed in a medium, with a video camera strapped on top of her head. I wasn't shy in telling Landau this, and then I had to apologize for sounding like a fawning fanboy. “No, from your lips to their ears,” he said. “I've been very excited by how much people are taking away from this movie, not just enjoying it at the theater but thinking and talking on their way out of the theater. And when you talk about Zoe, that's not special effects. That's her performance. It's all there. Why can Eric Stoltz get nominated for Mask (1985), playing through all that makeup, but Zoe can't because the skin is created by a computer. There is no difference, in my opinion, none whatsoever. She creates an unforgettable character.”
So now the same team that won over a studio, and then a global audience, with its fictional universe is throwing down the gauntlet to the Academy: Neytiri for best actress.
Anthony Jacobs, founder and president of Perspective Aerials, found a new cheaper way to take aerial shots. The trick? A radio-controlled quadrocopter.
Check out the video here.
It's a lengthy chat, that goes beyond Dollhouse to also talk about Dr. Horrible, the writers' strike, Glee – which he'll be directing in March – as well as his bid to revive the Terminator franchise. But what struck me most about Whedon's answers concerning Dollhouse is how Fox was always unsure of how to promote the series. And more than that: Whedon says he was rebuffed when he wanted to take the series deeper into issues of sexuality and intimacy. "Fox sort of has that reputation for 'sexy' or 'edgy' or blah blah blah, but they don't actually want that and it frustrates me," Whedon tells Ryan in the transcript.
(More on Time.com: Holiday Movies: Previewing the Season's Hot Tickets)
If that's really true, how frustrating for Whedon's fans. Dollhouse's willingness to confront the same questions posed by Hitchcock in Vertigo and Spielberg in A.I., about what we see in others – who they really are, or who we want them to be – was smart and refreshing. They were also quite relevant to the series' premise. But Whedon says "Basically, the show didn't really get off the ground because the network pretty much wanted to back away from the concept five minutes after they bought it."
I'm secretly hoping that another network might pick it up; but until that happens, fans still have a handful of episodes to check out. Ryan touches on that too – singling out the episodes set to air on the 11th and 18th.
Over the last six months, as I've talked Avatar with a good many people, conversations invariably drift back to the look of the thing - focusing on 3-D computer graphics and the blue-skinned aliens frolicking through the forests. But only recently have I begun to fully appreciate how Avatar will offer that unique thrill, of discovering a whole new realm of reality for the very first time. It's clear that James Cameron has processed all this down to the smallest detail - from the layout of the galaxy to the terrain of planet Pandora, the diversity of its ecosystem and the behavioral patterns of its inhabitants.
(More on Techland: Avatar: State of the Art (Marketing))
The more I've had a chance to learn about Pandora, the more ambitious this whole vision seems to be. That's why I was psyched when HarperCollins sent over a link to a browsing program that allows users to skim the new guide Avatar: A Confidential Report on the Biological and Social History of Pandora, which went on sale just before Thanksgiving. Scrolling through the dense and layered back story, I was actually rather captivated, to read about how scientists first discovered this hospitable satellite of Polyphemus, about how it was the planet's strong magnetic fields that led mankind to first discover the lucrative and extraordinarily powerful mineral known as unobtanium.
I know some people out there are starting to suffer from Avatar fatigue, but I find myself getting more excited, the more I read about it all. Learning about the various species of plants and animals, translating English words into the native Na'vi language, and then reading about the latest military equipment being dispatched to aid with the Pandora situation, it becomes clear that two prominent civilizations are about to go head-to-head.
(More on Techland: First Look at Avatar's "Interactive" Trailer)
I used to focus on the special effects and the battle scenes, but now I'm starting to go beyond all that. With Avatar, I'm just stoked to explore this 3-D world, to check out what these creatures and exotic fauna can do. I'm wondering what sunsets look like in this corner of the universe, and what it's like for humans to cross Pandora's terrain by foot or by air. I'm starting to get revved up for all these smaller details that are so often overlooked by filmmakers. Maybe it's a good thing, that Cameron's been working on this thing for the better part of a generation.
Flip through the Avatar book here.
By Peter Ha on December 4, 2009 in Techland News.“As we said earlier this year, OLED is one of the businesses we wanted to reposition to maximize Kodak's competitive advantage at the intersection of materials and imaging science,” said Laura G. Quatela, Kodak's Chief Intellectual Property Officer and manager of the company's OLED business. “This action is consistent with that strategy. Our OLED intellectual property portfolio is fundamental; however, realizing the full value of this business would have required significant investment.”
This is not your typical Alice, but then again this is not your run of the mill Wonderland.
When Alice premieres Sunday night on Syfy, it will offer a radically different take of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, particularly the vision of Carroll's universe advanced by the 1951 Disney animation.
Familiar to fans will be the fears and traumas of the subconscious, externalized here as a whimsical but decidedly creepy landscape. But the differences here outnumber the similarities. In this live-action adaptation, Alice is an adult who fears commitment, the Wonderland is best encapsulated by a casino that provides prisoners with constant amusement so their emotions can be stripped away, and an all-star cast (Kathy Bates, as the Queen of the Hearts; Harry Dean Stanton as Caterpillar; Tim Curry as Dodo) offers a fresh spin on a familiar dynamic.
(More on Time.com: Holiday Movies: Previewing the Season's Hot Tickets)
But where to begin, when it comes to Alice? She's not blonde any more. She wears tights and boots, and oozes quite a bit of sex appeal. She loves chasing men but fears commitment. She goes toe to toe with the Queen of Hearts. I'm currently in the middle of watching the full Alice program – we'll have a complete breakdown of the two-night event tomorrow – but during the intermission I spoke with Caterina Scorsone (TV's Crash) herself, about what it was like to take a plunge down the most famous rabbit hole in cinematic/literary history.
This is a pretty creative spin on a familiar story.
Well people tend to be most shocked that Alice has become a brunette.
Was there ever talk about you dying it all blonde?
There was a brief discussion with the hair designer but [writer-director] Nick Willing thought it worked, in terms of the visual symbolism, that I look like a very different Alice. After all, this is a totally different story, and while we're tipping our hats to Lewis Carroll, we are playing with the themes to make a very different story.
At a full four hours, there's so much to take in here, though. You're not just playing with themes, you've really spun the whole story on its axis. What jumped out at you most when you read the script? I was blown away by some of the commentary in the casino scenes.
That's definitely part of it – bread and circuses. So many people think of America as this new Roman empire, and they see the downfall of the hegemon in all these bailouts and the economy and being overextended overseas. I think people are exploring that notion of this empirical past.
Now most of Alice isn't really a political social commentary, but I think a big message is here is that the culture we're involved in is fascinated with very quick fixes and instant gratification. And you see it on both sides here, in terms of people being trapped in a casino where they are made to feel good, and also the population down there, where they want more and more from these prisoners.
The main threads, though, have to do with this conflict: The quick fix versus sitting in the discomfort of reality. A lot in the movie is about emotional and psychological repression and the wounds that we bury instead of healing. And one of the great things he did with this reinterpretation was to allow it to work on several levels. On one hand you have this wonderfully sexy and fun adventure, but if you want to go deeper this is a sprawling metaphor, using the wonderland as the unconscious. Alice, insensibly a functioning young woman, really has some serious unresolved issues and when she runs through the looking-glass into Wonderland she really has to look at herself and all the memories and scars that have created this emotional situation.
Given all the creative visuals here, how do you even prepare for a part like this. Did you have to audition? How would they have handled that?
I created an audition tape and put a couple scenes together, but Nick was very open to the idea of how Alice would compose herself in this story. And then 3 or so days before shooting began in Vancouver, I was cast, and suddenly there I am, getting all this action-adventure training, practicing my horseback riding and my judo training. And then the next thing you know, you're standing next to Harry Dean Stanton and Kathy Bates, and the whole thing becomes this dreamlike experience.
Did you have a favorite scene, working with such talented people – was there one moment that seemed most like Wonderland to you?
In part 2 [airing Monday night], we shot this fantastic scene between Alice and the Queen of Hearts as this seven-minute-long one-shot. It was blocked fantastically, and here you have Kathy delivering this monologue that's so intimidating – including the great line ‘I am the most powerful woman in English literature,' which I thought was a really interesting way to break the fourth wall – and Alice is going through all the emotional highs or lows. I don't even think I speak, but it's just the way that Alice is going through all these extreme emotional adjustments...any time you get to go on this long journey from point A to B is so gratifying. A seven-minute take is almost like theater.
Given all of this – the green-screen, the legends all around you – did you ever feel like you were Alice, walking through this different universe? It had to be odd to be working so much in front of green screens, after you've focused so much on these tight personal dramas with Crash.
Well, when you're even on a regular movie set, you still have to suspend your disbelief. You're working there with only 3 walls of a room, and you're in costume and you have a camera 6 inches from you and have a crew of 75 watching you. So even there, you have to crank up your imagination. But working on a green screen set yeah, it's almost like reading from a novel, taking those black words and creating a world around you. You have to the same thing. And then you focus on what do you have – these incredible actors standing next to you, and the remarkable costumes by Angus Strike, who did Moulin Rouge, and the fantastic production design. All of that is real, and you can use that to form this new reality.
City visions: A new breed of dreamers, including Frazer Bradshaw (director of "Everything Strange and New," above), is making narrative filmmaking in the Bay Area a reality. (Photo courtesy SFFS)
It's a testament to the programming staff at the Sundance Film Festival that first-time feature filmmaker Frazer Bradshaw's low-key, Oakland-shot domestic drama was chosen to debut there last January. It makes a bold impression without brand names or buzzwords—working instead with solid performances and an inventive score to convey a dissonance between the inner and outer lives of a working-class man. Bradshaw appeared with other outliers and innovators, including Laurel Nakadate, Scott Sanders and David Russo, on a panel I moderated at that festival last year. (The film premiered locally at the SF International in the spring.) I recently got the chance to catch up with Bradshaw over email. His film opens at the Roxie on December 4 with a weekend benefit for co-star Luis Saguar, who passed away this past summer. More
In progress: Amanda Micheli (left), Jeff Zimbalist (center) and Richard Levien (right, photo by Pat Mazzera) received SFFS/KRF Filmmaking grants in 2009 and are busy building their new social-issue feature films.For the great majority of the public, documentaries are still educational films while narrative features are “the movies.” It's the rare fiction feature film that handles social justice themes without condescension and oversimplification. The San Francisco Film Society/Kenneth Rainin Foundation Filmmaking Grants were created to support the local development of lively and intelligent social-issue narrative films, with the hope of strengthening the San Francisco filmmaking community—and bringing more forward-thinking films by talented makers into general release. The grants, which run 2009-13, will be awarded in the spring and fall of each year and the total amount disbursed over these five years will be more than $3 million. The inaugural class for the $35,000 grants consists of Amanda Micheli and Jeff Zimbalist, Fall 2009, Richard Levien, Spring 2009. Here's the scoop on their projects. More
My last movie, The Proposition, was inspired by McCarthy's Blood Meridian. But with The Road Cormac surpassed even my expectations. It is the most poignant love story between a father and son that I know of, so I wanted to above all respect the book and his work, to be authentic and not 'Hollywoodize' it, to use great restraint and focus upon its core qualities. Of course it also meant leaping off a cliff and not knowing how I would land—but I made damn sure to take an extraordinary cast and crew with me. They went there because they shared the same feeling for the material—a timely parable about human goodness, about kindness.
The brave and heartbreaking work of Viggo Mortensen as 'the man' and Kodi Smit-Mcphee as 'the boy' was the key to such a story—they both had nowhere to hide. Charlize Theron makes you understand and feel for an impossible position as 'the woman'. Every other character the man and boy meet was loaded with extra significance since they meet so few, so only a great cast could carry us through.
The Road is also about civilization's slow death where disaster is made to feel physically and spiritually real—it's literally apocalypse now. My brilliant key creative crew lead us to over 50 different locations, across four States in the heart of winter, took us to the sources—Mount St. Helens, Pennsylvania strip mines, New Orleans post-Katrina clean up.
The power of McCarthy's poetic prose will always be near impossible to translate into such a different medium, however we tried to capture the lyricism within the cinematography, a strange majestic beauty in desolate wide shots and real locations, the music, and dialogue taken straight from the book and spoken by talented actors and with the greatest relief we managed to get an unequivocal thumbs up from Cormac himself.
I feel that Cormac's immense talent lies not only in his poetic language but also in his insightful and unflinching view of humanity when stripped bare, of how people behave under extreme pressure revealing the worst and best in humanity with the precision of a scientist—grace under pressure via great characters and story telling. Above all, this is why I'm personally so attracted to his work as a filmmaker. To me the book felt uncomfortably familiar and uncomfortably real which is why we pursued a naked realism; we thought that was in the spirit of the novel. We hope you also will take the journey and see the movie.
—John Hillcoat, director
Viggo Mortensen leads a stellar cast (including Charlize Theron, Robert Duvall and Guy Pearce) in the epic, post-apocalyptic tale of the survival of a father (Moretensen) and his young son (newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee) as they journey across a barren America that was destroyed by a mysterious cataclysm. A masterpiece of adventure, The Road is adapted from author Cormac McCarthy's (No Country for Old Men) beloved, best-selling and Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, which boldly imagines a future in which men are pushed to the worst and the best that they are capable of—a future in which father and son are sustained by love. Directed by John Hillcoat (The Proposition).
Learn how to show a still image for some time in your iMovie project, then zoom/crop/move that image, and then pause on the final image again before moving on.Chris Milk is known for his music video work with artists such as Kanye West, U2, Green Day, Audioslave, Gnarls Barkley, and others.
Click here to see the video.
The San Francisco Film Society is proud to present its robust Fall Season for adventurous Bay Area viewers interested in the finest regional and international cinema.
SFFS FilmHouse Residencies is holding its Fall Open House, Thursday, November 5, 6:00-8:00 pm. Come see the diverse and dynamic works-in-progress of current residents: Serge Bakalian, Christian Bruno, Eugene Corr, Kristine Enea, Marcia Jarmel, Melissa Regan, Rajendra Serber, Sahra Walker, and their teams.
Photo: Eddie Soloway
Dear Film Club Member,From a Photojojo website. Go to the link to see sample videos.
"Missed connection: you and your creativity
It's time you realize that there are other cameras in the sea -- like the Zumi Digital. True, she's no megapixel marvel. She has no interest in aperture or telephoto zoom. She doesn't even have a legitimate viewfinder ...
But if you were to take the Zumi on a date to the movies, she'd pick a documentary over a romcom. Then she'd bring her own snacks, laugh at your dumb jokes, and make all the first moves.
You see, the Zumi has been carefully crafted to take digital images and videos that have the look and feel of vintage film (lens flare, vignetting and all). Her "perfectly flawed" processing chip combined with a macro setting make digital 8MM magic -- making your everyday life look like an art house flick.
The Zumi is unusual, unpredictable, oh-so inspiring and fits in the palm of your hand. It's probably about time you and your DSLR had a "talk".
(Yes, we often fantasize about dating a camera. What?)"
Cleveland from The Cleveland Show, left, and the characters of Family Guy.The trouble with Family Guy is that it seems to want to say everything. It's The Simpsons on Red Bull, with a dysfunctional family — the Griffins of Quahog, R.I. — but twice the outrageousness and thrice the pace. Its signature move is to cut away from a story line for a non sequitur gag (a pop-culture parody, a celebrity spoof, a Star Wars reference). The Simpsons is a satire, but it's rooted in its family. Family Guy is less a half-hour narrative about characters than a delivery system for unconnected jokes the writers can't bear to part with. (See the top 10 TV dads.)
The series is often hilarious; there are so many jokes, it is statistically impossible for it not to be. It has a fantastic sense of showmanship (MacFarlane, who voices dad Peter and others, loves writing musical numbers to show off his Broadway side) but suffers from comic ADHD. A send-up of Family Guy on South Park revealed it to be written by manatees picking colored balls with random joke topics inscribed on them.
But the show's fans love the randomness. This season's premiere (a spoof of the sci-fi series Sliders) was almost self-parody: evil tot Stewie invents a dimension-travel device and takes talking dog Brian (the best-developed "person" on the show) to a series of parallel universes, where we see them drawn as Disney characters, Washington Post cartoons and so on. The manatees were working overtime. (See the 100 best TV shows of all time.)
The Cleveland Show was meant to be a kinder, gentler Family Guy. The Griffins' African-American neighbor Cleveland returns to his hometown, where he marries his high school sweetheart. The pilot showed promise: Cleveland, a good-hearted sad sack, is sweeter and more sympathetic than Peter, and he has actual motivations — starting his life over and connecting with his awkward son and two stepkids. But Cleveland pretty quickly became Family Guy II, with similar characters and dynamics (Cleveland's toddler stepson Rallo is essentially Black Stewie) and the same taste for quick-fire cutaway jokes and pop-culture references (including self-conscious ones about white writers making sitcoms about black people).
MacFarlane's best show, American Dad, is also his lowest rated — maybe because it isn't simply a remake of Family Guy. Yes, its protagonist, CIA agent Stan Smith, is a nuclear-family patriarch. And where Family Guy has a talking dog and Cleveland a talking bear, Dad has both a talking alien (a show-tune-obsessed card with a voice like Paul Lynde's) and a talking goldfish. (See the worst TV spin-offs of all time.)
But next to the frenzied Family Guy and Cleveland, Dad is practically Mad Men. What makes Dad good isn't its political point of view. (MacFarlane, whose liberalism sometimes surfaces on Family Guy, uses Stan to send up post-9/11 jingoism.) It's that the show has a point of view at all. It's about something — satirizing the war on terrorism — and it invests time in its characters without ping-ponging between gags. It's still outrageous: the season premiere had Stan take nerdy son Steve to a Vietnam War re-enactment to toughen him up. (Sending up Vietnam-flick clichés, it played "Fortunate Son" over Viet Cong paintball ambushes.) But by focusing on father and son trying to connect, the episode also ended up touching and real.
It's too bad the same can't be said of MacFarlane's other shows. Sitcoms like The Office (and, still, The Simpsons) prove that the best comedies aren't always those with the most jokes per minute. MacFarlane has the talent to be in their league. But he needs to control his gag reflex.
Because of an editing error, the original version of this article incorrectly suggested that the entire series Family Guy is a spoof of the sci-fi series Sliders. In fact, just this season’s premiere is a spoof of Sliders.
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Big hairy deal, say cynics who've been bred on gross-out horror movies. Show us heads exploding, chests busting, legs sawed off. Yet the packed audience at a late-night screening of Paranormal Activity on Times Square this week didn't need gore effects to be scared witless. Yes, they knew it was only a movie — one that, like The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield and plenty others before it, used "found footage" to give a patina of realism to the fanciful events dreamed up by writer-director Oren Peli and endured by actors Micah Stoat and Katie Featherston (using their real names). But when that door moved, the crowd's collective gasp just about sucked all the oxygen out of the theater. (See the top 25 horror movies of all time.)
The campaign to bring Paranormal Activity to the public is already a movie industry legend. Shot three years ago by Peli, an Israeli-born videomaker, for $11,000, in a week, in his own house, the picture played a few fright festivals in 2007. While DreamWorks considered buying the rights to do a remake with stars, Steven Spielberg took PA home to watch; and when he'd finished screening it... he found his bathroom door inexplicably locked. (He thought the DVD was haunted.) Two weeks ago, Paramount started playing Peli's film at midnight in 16 college towns. Many showings were sold out. Sorry, come back next week, if you dare. No tickets created a hot ticket — the movie grossed $1.2 million in its early, limited engagements — and Paramount stoked the fever by urging fans to go online and "demand" a wider release. More than a million such requests came in, allowing its web site to brag that PA is "the first-ever major film release decided by You."
This weekend, PA has expanded to all-day runs on 159 screens in 44 cities, and according to early reports, it's headed for a box-office breakout — perhaps the highest three-day gross of any films showing in fewer than 200 venues. "Look out cuz there's a freight train coming," an executive from a rival studio told Deadline Hollywood's Nikki Finke, "and Paramount is going to make a TON of cash on this pickup. Cuz they ain't spending anything on it, and who knows where the ceiling is!" The box-office figures will make headlines, give the movie more free publicity and lure bigger crowds eager to learn what all the screaming is about. (See the 100 best movies of all time.)
Beyond the viral ingenuity of the marketing, what's cool about Paranormal Activity is that it's not just a fun thrill ride, but an instructive artistic experience. A horror-movie revisionist, Peli follows a less-is-more strategy; he knows that waiting for the big scary jolt does more damage to the nervous system than getting it. The tension builds slowly, as the very apprehensive Katie, a student, and the skeptical Micah, a day trader, feel the first little emotional tremors. The movie keeps us in its grip — because we never leave the couple's haunted property, and because all we see is what the camera has recorded when held by Micah or Katie, or left on at night to monitor their bedroom. That claustrophobia creates a bond between the couple and the audience; they can't escape, and neither can we.
Peli downplays shock, emphasizes suspense: a shadow creeping across a wall, or the ripple of an unseen form under the bedsheets. The gore scenes in splatter movies carry a sadistic punch, but those are outside most moviegoers' experience. What Peli's interested in is dread, a feeling everyone is familiar with. (Will I lose my job? Has she found someone else? Why hasn't our kid come home yet? What's that strange rash?) Movies take that anxiety, crystallize it and, because fiction demands an ending, resolve it. The threat is provided, the fear made flesh, the monster confronted. All gone — feel better? Horror movies provide vicarious psychotherapy in an hour and a half. PA is different: at the end, it doesn't let viewers off the hook. It leaves them hanging there, and dares them to turn that last shiver into a laugh of relief that the delicious ordeal is over. (See 10 lessons from the summer box office.)
PA really has less in common with modern gore movies than with certain avant-garde films of the late '60s, like Michael Snow's Wavelength, a murder mystery in the form of a single, slow, 45-min. zoom shot through a room, and Morgan Fisher's Phi Phenomenon, an 11-min. shot of a wall clock without a second hand. In Fisher's film, viewers were meant to concentrate so intently that they can see the minute hand move. PA uses a similar strategy: the stationary camera in the overnight bedroom scenes has a time code at the bottom right of the frame. Sometimes the clock spins like mad to show the passing of hours between phenomena — or, in one super-creepy scene, the image of Katie standing motionless, as if still asleep, for two hours straight. It's even more chilling a few nights later, when Katie, clearly the more haunted of the two, again stands still for hours but this time on Micah's side of the bed.
If you're a horror-movie fraidy cat, know that most of the spooky stuff occurs in the bedroom, so — as with The Exorcist back in 1973 — you can steel yourself when the couple goes to sleep. Then too, you may not be scared at all by Paranormal Activity; but as you sit in a movie house you should feel some fraternal pleasure in noticing that the folks around you are preparing or pretending to be scared. And you should be heartened to realize that — in an age of YouTube, iPod and DVR, where people get their visual media one by one — watching a fictional narrative can still be a communal activity. A thousand people sit as one in the dark, as fretful and enthralled as a child hearing a bedtime story, and wondering, What happens next? No, I can't bear it! No, I have to see!
