Along with The West Side co-creator Zachary Lieberman, this is my house in Costa Rica for the next two months. Why are we here? To get some work done. Really.
Somewhat paradoxically, by separating ourselves from the wiles of New York, we can focus on writing. Back in the city, the East Village-to-East Williamsburg commute took almost an hour each way and we weren’t writing as much, or as often, as we would’ve liked; being in the same house allows us to work more hours out of more days. Not only that, but we’re subletting our NYC apartments while we’re expats, which means the entire two-month trip, $300 round-trip airfare included, will cost us substantially less than New York rent alone for the same time period.
Add to the above factors that our house just happens to be in Playa Grande, a beautiful beach in a protected national park on the Northwest Pacific coast of Costa Rica, and a trip that at first glance seemed counterintuitive now seems like a no-brainer. It’s preposterously nice here. I haven’t yet found the words to describe the magnitude of daily niceness.
This creative retreat was predicated on a lot of ifs — it would only work if we could find tenants for our NYC apartments, if we could find cheap plane tickets, if we could find a inexpensive house available to rent for two months, and given my Spanish is more than a bit questionable — and Zack’s learned, somewhat-second language is French — if we could find our way around the country at all. Also, the most important of ifs: if the mysterious beast of creative inspiration would rear its elusive head.
All of the ifs have been squarely defeated. In an idyllic house in the middle of paradise, the project we’ve been pitching and refining for the past few months has been reinvigorated by the emergence of a Sixty-day Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Seriously, it’s really nice here.
My three year-old MacBook Pro recently started emitting a constant racket from its left fan (which sounds something like this). Most people will tell you you need a new fan for $50, but I decided to try to fix it instead, and so far (it’s been two weeks four months), the repair has worked great. As any google or youtube search for “noisy macbook pro fan” produces thousands of results, I hope this saves someone fifty of their hard-earned bucks during this, the winter of our hardships.
First you’ve got to disassemble the laptop, for which you’ll need a T6 Torx and small Phillips screwdriver; it’s best to follow these instructions. This undertaking is categorized by iFixit as “difficult” — and while I would downgrade that rating, you may want to go a different route if you’re not comfortable with the idea of your laptop looking this:
After you’ve extracted the fan from the Mac’s innards, the fan assembly comes apart quite easily (by undoing two Phillips screws), into three pieces. The inside of the fan assembly (illustrated in the brilliant photo below) is the noise culprit — it just needs to be cleaned and lubed.
Get rid of any debris using a lint-free cloth. Then, ideally you would apply some silicone lubricant to the axle (illustrated by the subtle red arrow). But all I had handy was some WD-40, so I applied a bit to the axle, reassembled the fan, and everything went back together, quietly. Use the app smcFanControl to ramp up your fans to full speed for 30 seconds or so, and when you drop them back down to normal RPMs, the lubricant should have set. The Mac once again operates as it should, silently; problem solved.
Getting rid of the laptop’s constant din was one step; now if only there were a similar way to get rid of writer’s block…
I may seldom agree with the Academy on what constitutes a “Best Picture,” but congratulations to the AMPAS for putting on an inspired, nearly flawless and tone-perfect Oscars. Reverence plays well when the global economy is imploding.
On the other hand, I went into the telecast expecting to disagree with the vast majority of their awards, and that certainly held true. I merely want to give credit where credit is due, to the showrunners, who put together an entertaining and efficient presentation. Well done. Producing the Oscars is probably a fairly thankless job, because no matter what you do everyone will say it was too long. Which I suppose is why I felt the need to post here, to explicitly not complain. Move along, there’s nothing to see here.
From my (disad)vantage point as an ex-MTVer, the new web series The District, from Newsweek of all places, is particularly hilarious. Most of the time. I think. It’s either hilarious or sad.
If you haven’t had the misfortune of seeing The Hills or The City, you might not “get” it. In my (in)defense, I was not involved in the production of reality TV content, or any video content for that matter, during my days at 1515 Broadway.
Embedded below is the second episode. While each of the three available episodes stumble conceptually at points, the parody as a whole demonstrates the ease with which MTV reality shows are thrown together, and shows the effectiveness of this kind of Life’s CliffsNotes in a celebrity-driven, attention-span-deficit society.
I’m a few days late on this, but as someone who’s been trying to get a low-budget NYC production off the ground for the past six months, this is not a pleasant specter to stare in the face:
A highly successful state program that provides tax credits to lure TV and film productions to New York has run out of cash – and now industry officials fear producers will run to other states in search of better deals.
As the first harbinger of bad news to come, the number of TV pilots scheduled for production in New York this year slumped to zero, from 19 last year.
See the NY Post article for more, and please sign the online petition to save the credits. This doesn’t only affect big corporations that (used to) have wads of cash — it also affects independent producers for whom saved pennies are invaluable. Plenty of other industries are getting bailed out by the government, but I suppose the film industry is seen as peripheral next to basic American institutions like banks (understandable, given the universal necessity of cash flow) and the auto industry (less understandable, given their historic myopia — although the government is culpable for the deregulation of both industries).
Besides, it’s in the state’s own best self-interest to reinstitute the credits:
Since the program began, the state and city combined have issued $690 million in tax credits and have collected $2.7 billion in taxes from movie and TV productions, according to a study by Ernst & Young.
The study also found that during 2007, New York’s movie and TV industry created 7,031 jobs directly – and an additional 12,481 indirectly.
[Via the Filmmaker Magazine blog]
Nominations for the 81st Academy Awards were announced yesterday, and the longstanding rumors of a possible Best Picture nomination for The Dark Knight proved to be false. Since I’ve made it a habit to write about Christopher Nolan’s films seemingly more than any other, here comes some gratuitous keyboard use:
When The Dark Knight opened here in the city, I was late (really, not early enough) and had to sit in the front row. And while front-row seats are great at a basketball game (so I’m told), not so much at an IMAX theater. When it was over, I felt like I’d only seen half of the movie: the lower half. I recently re-watched the film on Blu-ray from a less oblique angle, and seeing it on a 72-inch screen instead of a 72-foot one, I was surprised to find myself thinking often: this is sloppy. Not sloppy in the ways action movies usually are, but in all the ways they usually aren’t — The Dark Knight’s action is confusing, the fights aren’t particularly convincing or involving, screen direction is routinely ignored, and the hyper-realism is adhered to so intently that the movie doesn’t have much “what if?” alternate-universe appeal. Gotham City is simply a re-badged Chicago, and Hong Kong is just… Hong Kong.
But on a basic level I’m not into the recent comic book movie glut — of the dozens made in the past several years, only a few have been medium-good — so in many cases these deficiencies work to The Dark Knight’s advantage. Its weaknesses come in the same areas that most summer blockbusters call strengths, and its strengths come in areas seldom even paid lip service by its brethren. These areas are: the maturity of its themes thanks to the Nolans’ script (with David S. Goyer), the palpable realism (high for a comic book movie), an outstanding individual performance (Heath Ledger), and the tense score.
The Nolan brothers won’t be winning any awards for the screenplay, but that goes with the territory; writing in blockbuster movies tends to get overlooked (often deservingly so) because lots of things blow up, which begets the necessary evil of penning so many reactionary throwaway lines like “holy shit!” or “Rachel, no!!!” Half of The Dark Knight’s throwaways seem to come from the mouth of an uncredited Nicky Katt in the SWAT van chase scene (although it’s Nicky Katt, so he’s surely parodying action movie throwaway lines with his action movie throwaway lines). Nevertheless, the film takes a stab at addressing the modern themes of terrorism and asymmetric warfare, and I would argue this societal relevancy contributed to the film’s worldwide billion-dollar gross.
The movie’s realism — meaning, Nolan’s preference for filming in a real city and actually doing stunts and blowing up material things instead of greenscreening and painting in pyrotechnics — keeps the viewer grounded and engaged throughout its 2.5 hour running time. And while there is still plenty of CGI — the wire-snagged police chopper in particular looks iffy — the Theory of Hyperrealism applied throughout the film bothered me, in that Bruce Wayne drives a Lamborghini and Lucius Fox jokes about his three-button suit being “a little nineties.” If the story is taking place in a fictional Gotham City, why do we have brands and trends from our current world? Maybe the Batman comic books were always like this — I haven’t read any of them — but I found it occasionally discombobulating. Other than the bat-gadgets and Two Face’s charred countenance, in fact, the furthest departure the movie takes from our own reality is in its depiction of the Russian ballerinas Wayne takes yachting, who are too well-fed and top-heavy to be plausibly proficient at prancing around in tutus.
Hanz Zimmer and James Newton Howard’s persistent score — very rarely are there stretches of the film sans music — give every moment of the movie palatable tension, and their division of duties — Zimmer on the aggressive themes for the Joker (a perfectly grating electric cello) and Newton Howard on the softer themes of (early) Harvey Dent — works to perfection. It’s impossible to judge how much a score contributes to a film’s success (artistically and/or commercially), but in the case of The Dark Knight, it’s more than a lot.
And, of course, there is Heath Ledger’s performance; it’s impossible to even recognize him from earlier movies like 10 Things I Hate About You. I was one of the doubters when I first heard he’d be reprising Jack Nicholson’s great-in-its-own-right portrayal of the Joker, but I was enthralled by his performance. If he were still alive he’d be every bit as deserving of the Oscar; the fact that he basically killed himself in the role unfortunately guarantees the Oscar come March. A truly saddening way to win for a deserving performance, one that would’ve been a turning point in his career.
I can’t really comment on whether The Dark Knight should’ve been nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, given I rarely agree with the Academy’s choices anyway. If it were up to me, in addition to Ledger’s performance, the score would be nominated. As for best picture, best director, or best screenplay, no. But one could certainly make the case that it was one of the most interesting films of the year — and, the premature death of one of its stars notwithstanding, that’s a rare occurance indeed for a summer blockbuster.
