A strange part of the US real-estate boom is the housing construction boom. Across America, brand-new housing developments are sprouting up like kudzu vines, tearing down forests and farmland to build new housing as fast as possible. Behind this are many factors: immigration, ongoing white flight from the cities, the growth of suburban sprawl, the emergence of technology boom towns, and other geographic and economic factors.

The dominant architectural style of this new growth has an overt “country” look, a kind of caricature of 19th century quaint Americana: gabled roofs, whitewashed siding, twisting rolling streets with absurdly Anglophilic names like “Greyswallow Terrace” and “Cedarpost Square” (names obviously generated by a computer program, as they have absolutely no relevance to the actual landscape or history of their location), plenty of grassland (although, generally, a sad lack of trees). They stretch across the landscape as far as the eye can see, and the consistency of their style strongly evokes the conformity of the 1950’s Levittown housing model.

Sometimes they are single-family standalone dwellings (”McMansions“, the fatter and more ostentatious cousin of what I’m talking about here), sometimes they are multiple-unit buildings with a single-family façade. Occasionally these “homes” (they never call them “houses”, always “homes”) will have a slightly-urban “townhouse” feel, with splotches of red brick and perfunctory sidewalks, but even these units will generally be topped off with the requisite white siding and pointed roofs.

The general style seems, I think, to be a hybrid of the country estate and the urban housing project, marrying the illusion of landed aristocratic luxury with the logistical efficiency of cookie-cutter subsidized apartment life.

Unfailingly, this housing trend always reminds me of the movie Back to the Future Part II. MORE…

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I saw Dreamgirls this weekend — it was great!

I’ve been to my fair share of movies where the audience broke out into enthusiastic and spontaneous applause before, but they’ve almost always applauded some kind of triumphant action scene, never clapping and cheering for an individual performer. Which is to say that they are applauding the film itself, not the humans in it.

That is, until this weekend. Jennifer Hudson got at least three full rounds of applause from my Brooklyn audience, whose boisterous cheering for the performance (and singing along occasionally) almost seemed to suggest that Ms. Hudson was actually up there on stage in front of us to hear our appreciation.

For most of my “young adult” life (that is, my teens and twenties) I despised musicals. I thought they were phony and vapid — why in the world would a pair of New York street gangs suddenly form up into chorus lines and sing in the middle of the alley? Why would a group of sailors on shore leave suddenly burst into song and synchronized tapdancing on restaurant tables? It was silly to me, not worthy of the serious taste I liked to think I had.

And yet countless critical “top ten” lists include Singin’ in the Rain. This always baffled me. How can this be?

Well, over the years I’ve started to notice that I think I actually do like a lot of musicals. I may in fact, have liked a lot of musicals all along — but only certain kinds: I’ve realized that I pretty much only like musicals about musicals, or at least musicals about people who sing and dance and perform. MORE…

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On election night last week, we were channel surfing and comparing the coverage by the various networks. We ended up for a spell at Comedy Central, where Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert exchanged snappy banter with each other in a kind of parody of network news coverage.

Surprisingly, there was a part of me that found it a little tiresome, and I thought to myself “Why don’t these guys just talk like normal people and tell us about the election results, instead of all this rehearsed repartee?”. They were acting out scripted set-peices and skits, or riffing on the results by digging into a selection of pre-planned gags and jokes.

Of course, this is Comedy Central, so the scripted quality of the “reportage” is to be expected. Still, despite our deep appreciation for CC’s two “anchors”, we grew impatient and craved the hard news coverage that only a real network can offer. So we resumed by surfing on over to Oppositeland: Fox News.

I immediately noticed that the narrative and theatrical quality and structure of Fox’s coverage was really no different from Comedy Central’s. Each pundit was talking to the other pundits as if the other person didn’t already know what they were going to say, and yet it was clear that everyone knew exactly what everyone else was going to say. Their conversations were fake in every way — not quite scripted, exactly, but so incredibly contrived as to be basically a kind of vaudeville act. MORE…

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I toyed with the idea of going to see Snakes on a Plane last night in order to be able to write a negative review about it with more credibility.

I even considered the idea of making it seem like I went to the theatre with the expectation that the movie would be fun, thus lending my negative review the credibility of an aggreived victim of entertainment industry hype.

But (as should be pretty obvious by now) I have no desire to see the movie, and I do not actually expect it to be fun. In fact, I am 99% sure that the movie is complete crap, even without seeing it.

I have the intellectually honest “right” say the movie is probably god-awful for the same reason that the “prefans” who’ve been psyched about the film before seeing it had the same “right” to expect that the movie was probably going to be awesome. But I think I am more correct than the prefans for two reasons:

1. I think I’ve been better at reading between the lines of the movie’s reviews, the previews, and Samuel Jackson’s own statements about the movie: All are unified in stopping noticably short of saying the movie is actually a good movie, usually saying that the movie is, at best, “so bad it’s good” — a genre of movie that I don’t think should be rewarded with unquestioning praise, or for the most part even made in the first place.
2. If I have to be told in advance — by the makers of the film, even! — that the movie is going to be “so bad it’s good”, then my anti-marketing bullshit detector kicks in and alerts me that maybe the movie is just plain bad.

What’s worse, the broader movie industry’s embrace of this movie is obviously and depressingly cynical and crass. Watching Samuel Jackson and Jon Stewart talk about the movie on the Daily Show, I couldn’t help but read between the lines a little:

JACKSON: I’m pretending to be excited about this movie just so I can get people to go see it and I can make a ton of money.
STEWART: I’m pretending to be excited about this movie because every time I mention it the audience goes crazy. They love it when I say “motherfuckin”. It’s so easy.

JACKSON: Heh, tell me something I don’t already know.

I mean, the movie’s signature line (”I want these motherfuckin’ snakes off this motherfuckin’ plane!!”) was added to the film after filming was completed in response to the internet hype. The movie was basically “retro fitted” to transform it from crappy b-movie to manufactured popular phenomenon.

MORE…

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Stills from Nuovi Comizi d’Amore (New Love Meetings) by Marcello Mencarini and Barbara Seghezzi.

Two Italian filmmakers, Marcello Mencarini and Barbara Seghezzi, have completed a feature-length movie shot entirely with a mobile phone. It’s an interview-centered documentary, which seems the ideal form for a mobile phone movie. Here’s what they have to say about the work:

Project’s philosophy: this project arises from one of our main belief: today who does not make a film It is because he has nothing to say. The new technologies (mltiDV and HO camcorders) give back to everybody the chance to regain their creativity to communicate trough images. We have chosen the easiest and less intrusive mean: the mobile phone. We privileged natural light and only in rare cases we illuminated with a made in china flashlight. The two of us made the entjre shooting and editing. The sound was taken by the same mobile phone without any additional microphone and later optimized in postproduction.

What a fantastic and liberating idea. I particularly love the (bolded) confrontational and manifesto-like accusation that because technology has put filmmaking in every westerner’s pocket, those of us who aren’t making movies are pretty much worthless. It’s Futurism without the fascism.

I imagine such micro-filmmakers would carry around some minimal additional equipment like extra batteries and a flashlight in order to make the production just a tiny little bit more professional without losing the spontaneous quality of the final result.

Using a mobile phone would seem at first to be a cheap novelty: why not simply bring a very small video camera? Even most digital still cameras can shoot video, and almost certainly at a better quality than a phone can. But I think the mobile phone aspect is important, since the informality of it defuses the gravity, such as it is, that people feel when they are “on camera”.

With web-based distribution (such as YouTube or Google Video, or even the iTunes Store) being the best-case scenario for most filmmakers these days, a low-resolution, highly-compressed image quality isn’t a signficant drawback to watchability, either. It’s only when the filmmaker aspires to wider distribution either via television or cinematic release that higher-quality footage becomes a concern.

The thing most amateur videographers mess up, however, is the sound: if the sound is bad — either because it is too low or drowned out by other ambient sounds, then the footage is often rendered useless. The sounds from a small mobile-phone microphone are pretty terrible. Do they make mobile phones with plug-ins for microphones that work with the video recorder, that is do any phones have jacks that can accommodate high quality mics?

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When we evaluate movies, TV shows, and other media products that are intended to be seen by a large, mass audience, we often take two positions at the same time:

• What I really think of this
• What will Someone Else think of this?
  (where Someone Else is a social demographic
  different from your own)

We see this phenomenon in culture, in business, religion, in product/user interface design, and of course in politics, where we think that there are some ideas that are good for a more educated, sophisticated, and egalitarian elite, while those same ideas can be dangerous and misleading for the unwashed masses of Someone Elses out there. MORE…

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I definitely like the new Cylons better than the old ones, although I wonder where the big lizard-head guy went.

Please forgive me as I geek out a little here, but… People are saying that Battlestar Galactica’s plot is starting to show evidence of lacking any real long-term plan or direction. That is, they fear that that the creators don’t have an “endgame” in mind for for the humans and the Cylons; indeed they may even be making it up as they go along, episode to episode, not having any ultimate fate in mind whatsoever.

Most people who have watched a TV series with a long-term story arc, particularly one in the genre of “speculative fiction” (the same-acronym-but-new-name for the despised sci-fi/fantasy genre), beleives that the best stories need to posess an integral “mystery to the universe”. And that mystery must, inevitably, be fully resolved in some climactic revelation — peace between enemies, a new frontier revealed, the birth of the savior, the defeat of the demon, the union of the lovers, the puzzle solved.

This resolution, of course, is almost never fulfilled. MORE…

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I am not much of a sports fan, but I am always impressed with the information design on many TV sports broadcasts. I love the little icon in the corner of many baseball broadcasts that quickly sums up the current game status: score, inning, who’s up, who’s on base, etc. And of course, the virtual first down line in Football games is a fabulous and elegant example of adding information to the “channel” without crowding the field (both the field of vision and the gridiron itself) with excess clutter.

Watching the Torino Winter Olympics on TV the last couple of nights, I saw another novel example of this kind of information innovation.

At the gate, these two skiers are almost a single entity…

But after passing a few turns, a clear difference has emerged.

In downhill skiiing, each competitor makes their run down the mountain alone, one at a time, and they are said to be “racing against the clock”. In reality, of course, they are racing against the other skiiers who went before and after them.

Traditionally, the sportscasters will announce “split times” as each racer descends, reporting at intervals whether the skiier is ahead or behind of the athlete currently in first place with the best time. When a skiier passes a time checkpoint, we are told that they are a quarter of a second ahead of the leader.

The image this conjures up for me is a race against a phantom: as you make your run, the leader (who may have done his or her run hours earlier) is still right there with you, ahead or behind you and separated only by split seconds.

Now NBC has actually made this visualization real, and it is an eerie and beautiful thing.

With the same kind of computer-controlled cameras used to project the line of scrimmage on a football field, this effect is created by superimposing the video from two athletes at the same time, with the camera locked to the identical angle and zoom settings sequence for each run.

This is information design. You can watch two skiiers descend in perfect unison, but then see one skiier falter slightly and immediately the synchronization of the two skiiers falls apart and the impact of what a .3 second gap really means becomes glaringly obvious.

Some may call it a gimmick, but I think it’s far more than that. I think that by adding information in such a startling and compelling way, they are actually making the sport itself clearer. Something about these images strikes me as having a psychological truth to them, that somehow they capture the exact right “mental model” of this sport. A skiier is more likely to think “I need to get four feet closer to the leader’s position” rather than “I need to make up .08 seconds to catch my rival”. Perhaps this sort of image manages to capture a little of how each of the skiiers are thinking, how they are visualizing their performance and how they really understand their competitive objectives from second to second.

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