What to Watch

Every year, many thousands of hours of mass market professional film and video content are produced and released and several of those thousands of those hours are eminently watchable, whatever your taste. Add to that my official count of 2.3 gazillion peta-hours of product already in watchable existence (not including cat videos) and you are confronted with a creepily uncomfortable FOMO on a skin-crawling scale.

How important is it to see Casablanca, Citizen Kane, 2001, The Partridge Family, Batman and the Lion King, when Housewives of Dallas is streaming on Bravo right now!? Depends on what's relevant to your basic grokking of what entertainment means to you. Play that out over the next say, 40 years and you reach an inescapable fact: the longer we live, the more stuff we're missing. It's piling up way too fast and at some point, everybody's gotta take a break to pay the rent! What's a concerned cine-TV-phile to do?

Chill. Produce your own content and let someone else worry about not seeing it. Pick the stuff that matters to you and screw the rest. Or go looking for what might matter to you and download that. Five hundred years from now, there will be 11.7 to the 6th power sextupla-jillion movies, series, holograms, injectibles and implantibles available for your viewing pleasure. And we’re talking the GOOD stuff… Maybe that's what the whole concept of digital immortality is about -- watching a portion of that whilst yer inanimate butt is implanted in some earth-bound cloud farm. Seems plausible. Just hope that don't mean it won't be garden-gated with monthly credit charges that relegate less fortunate souls to dealing with an inevitably endless stream of summer re-runs.

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My Corona

Image courtesy of https://alena-48.deviantart.com/

Attention umbraphiles: it's ten days and counting and there's no stopping the oncoming collision of Sun v Mr. Moon. Or the varying levels of photo worship and awe as we witness the uniquely weird-ass phenomenon of a natural day-for-night across America.

In 1973, filmmaker Francois Truffaut shot "Day for Night,” a film about a film production team and its cast that on one of its shooting days uses the technique of shooting during the day, then processing it to look like it had taken place at night. In the 1940's and 50's this technique was often used for dramatic effect, notably in westerns. Bunch of cowboys riding the range in Big Country and either a) it's time for an ambush or b) the two leads are in need of their big mano-a-mano brawl and it's going to be lots more dramatic in semi-darkness than in regular daylight. It's just too easy to process the film using a technique that cuts the exposure by 80% instead of the technical difficulty and overtime of actually shooting in the actual, like, dark.

Mark Twain used a solar eclipse as proof of his hero Hank's magical powers in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Somehow transported back to medieval times from modern day, hero Hank finds himself 1300 years shy of present, where he's branded a weirdo heretic and scheduled for burning on what turns out to be the day of a coming total solar eclipse. A brainy engineer by trade, Hank remembers his history and threatens the court with blotting out the sun if they persist in blotting him out, which they commence to do as the moon begins to roll in. That freaks out the court and gets Hank a last-minute reprieve.

Pretty crafty, Mr. Clemens. So y'all ready f'dis? Nothin' quite like blocking out the sun, getting the neighborhood so dark at midday it literally triggers the streetlights to go on. The state of Oregon is dead center for the full effect. Be in awe of the creeping shadow.

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