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Archive for October, 2009

What the Wild Things Are

26 Oct

To start with, this isn’t going to be a review of Where the Wild Things Are, per se; rather it’s intended as a dis­cus­sion of the film for those who’ve already seen it. As such it could con­tain spoil­ers, and in any case I’d cau­tion you against see­ing it with the bag­gage of pre­con­ceived notions. (Then again, if you’ve ever read the book, you already have pre­con­ceived notions about this film, most of which will prove to be quite wrong.)

That said, I will offer up this one state­ment as a review: I don’t really believe this is a film for kids. (There are qual­i­fiers to be attached, but I can’t get into them until after I’ve dis­cussed it, below.)

Briefly, if you have a five-​​year-​​old who loves the book, avoid tak­ing him or her to the movie until you’ve seen it your­self. The kid will pos­si­bly be bored, pos­si­bly spooked, and you might come out of it feel­ing any range of emo­tions from dis­ap­pointed to bewil­dered to dis­turbed to just plain wrung out.

I did like the film, quite a lot; but I don’t really think it’s suit­able for young kids, that’s all. And if you’re an adult who loved the book as a child, be aware that this movie is not a sim­ple retelling of the book. The movie is for adults who loved the book as kids, but who are now grown up, and who know what that means.

So. Discussion and pos­si­ble spoil­ers fol­low.
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Posted in Why Culture Sucks

 

No, not dead.

18 Oct

Just up to my into.

Thought I’d pause for a moment to rumi­nate, though, on the nature of what works and doesn’t in the lens.

Now I can’t take a stu­dio shot to save my life. This is not often true. Many, and I mean many, pho­tog­ra­phers are just bril­liant at por­trait pics. Well, I’ve never really tried it; I don’t have the por­trai­ture back­ground and I don’t have the con­trolled umbrel­las and flash light­ing that you need to make it all work.

Besides, it’s all so … stiff. Posed. So it’s not my thing.

I think that’s prob­a­bly all right. My time lens­ing, after all, has yielded results such as this and this. I seem to have a knack for grab­bing sub­jects, putting them in ambi­ent space, and say­ing, now stand like this … think happy thoughts … done.

(Actually it’s more often like see it, grab it before the sub­ject knows it’s hap­pen­ing. Reflexes, I guess.)

Relevance is the lat­est round from this kid. I’ve known him a cou­ple years, and he’s a senior in HS now, and his mom asked me to do my thing for one more go-​​round. (He has plans to basi­cally escape, as fast and as far as he can, when he turns eigh­teen. Good for him.)

I shot 157 frames. This was a good one.
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Posted in Artiste's Tantra

 

Why won’t Flash CS4 install on my Mac?

05 Oct

You could spend umpteen skil­lion hours deal­ing with Adobe, or you could give this a shot.

I have all the sys­tem require­ments in place. Mac OSX.4.11 or later. Plenty of RAM. Dual core fast box, even if it’s not Intel, but the Motorola chipset.

So when I try to run the Flash CS4 installer, it just hangs. I get a blank win­dow say­ing “Installer Alert”, but no con­trols, no mes­sage, nothing.

What to do?

Well, after 30 min­utes lis­ten­ing to on-​​hold music from Adobe’s tech sup­port, and another fif­teen min­utes telling the rep I will not cre­ate a new user account just for CS4, and will absolutely not for­mat my hard drive for their damn asi­nine vec­tor ani­ma­tion engine, I found out what it was, sort of.
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Posted in Geekulon