This has basically been an insane week for movie, tech and media news. I know the candler blog has been quiet of late, but it’s not because I’ve stopped paying attention to things. It feels like every time I sit down to compose a piece something else massive happens that diverts my attention. That and, uh, I just haven’t been setting aside enough time to write.

Anyway, I’d like to play catch up and give you a short update on my goings on at SXSW this year.

This year marks my fourth fest, but my first as a local. As such, I saw way fewer films than I used to. This used to happen back when I lived in New York too: I wouldn’t take off of work for Tribeca and NYFF, so I’d go to as many screenings as I could in the evenings. Now that I live here I had to balance work and SXSW, or at least try. I still saw a nice helping of films though.

By far my favorite new (to these shores) non-headliner film was Good Vibrations, directed by Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn. It’s a biopic of Terri Hooley, the man who brought Belfast’s punk scene to the rest of the world. Narratively it’s a straghtforward affair, but it nails the feeling of discovering a new and exciting art form. The scene where Terri, played by Richard Dormer, hears local punkers for the first time nearly brought me to tears. It perfectly summed up what it’s like to cross over from ignorance to understanding, from being lost to finding purpose. And the trick is in Dormer’s eyes. It’s truly a performance to behold.

I forewent the opening night The Incredible Burt Wonderstone¹ and instead went next door to check out Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color. I still haven’t seen his first feature, Primer, but the Stateside Theater was loaded with fans of the 2004 film. His latest has garnered a lot of support in the indie community, but I found it to be a trial just to get through. Basically Carruth removes anything resembling exposition from the film, a choice that confuses me more than it excites me.

Plus I wasn’t a fan of the way the film looked. Upstream is shot almost entirely with handheld, shallow depth-of-field telephoto lenses, so scenes drift in and out of focus by design. It feels like just another another layer of confusion standing between me and the story. (There’s a reason I’m not mentioning plot here. If anything it’s secondary. Look it up elsewhere.) Strip away the layers of complexity Carruth has baked into the film and I’m not sure what’s left, but the film’s champions would tell me that’s the point, so I guess it’s a matter of taste.

Real quick:

• Spring Breakers is insane, but I liked it. Hidden beneath the sex and drugs and guns and shock there seems to be a message about capitalism, consumerism and America, or something. If you think this film is only about a raucous, violent spring break spree, then you’re going to hate it.
• Joseph Gordon Levitt’s Don Jon is about what you’d expect from an actor’s directorial debut, which is to say it’s not very good but the leads get to speak with funny accents.

I think that’s enough to share about a few films for now. I’ve got a few more expanded thoughts planned for the future.

Michael M. Grynbaum for the New York Times City Room Blog:

“I sat through an hour of trailers, and every one was stupider than the other,” Mr. Bloomberg complained[…]

An hour! He then went on to complain about the state of dumbed down news media.

At least his media empire is doing its part.

Visual Idiot strikes again:

MailappApp lets you quickly and hipsterly create another mail app, because that’s totally what everyone wants.

I can’t tell you the joy this brings to my heart.

From the blog of a new short film marketplace called Elevision:

We believe there would be a cultural renaissance if “short filmmaker” were a viable career. If there were a place for the best filmmakers to sell their work, and for viewers to discover them, we would experience a surge of visionary storytelling.

With the hope of unlocking this vast and hidden potential, we proudly introduce Elevision — a carefully-curated collection of amazing short films that you can preview and buy.

Films are $2 a pop. It’s an interesting idea, but I’m not sure why a filmmaker would want to be on Elevision and sell their film for so little. Still, it’s neat to think there is a shelf life for short films, which usually just disappear or go on YouTube to die.

Letters of Note:

In March of 1980, a school librarian by the name of Jo Ellen Misakian wrote to Francis Ford Coppola and, on behalf of the students at Lone Star School in Fresno, California, asked him to consider adapting their favourite novel, S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, for the big screen. Also included with her letter were a copy of the book, and a petition signed by 110 of the kids. Amazingly, three months later they received an unexpected and cautiously optimistic reply from producer Fred Roos, who soon advised Coppola to read the book. He did exactly that, and two years later, production on the movie began.

So cool.

Addy Dugdale for Fast Company:

A small indie British film will be the first to be released solely through a gaming console. Pulp, a crime caper about the comic book industry, will be available exclusively to users of Xbox 360 from today–and, says Microsoft, using its gaming system as an exclusive film distribution pipe will not be a one-off.

Everyone’s doing it.

Wes Fenlon over at The Wirecutter:

If you’re ready for a major storage expansion, these are some serious options.

You know, the options Wes discusses here are pretty expensive, but in perspective, it’s pretty damn nuts that you can get 10 terabytes of storage that writes at 700 MB/s for $1100.

Not that long ago a setup like that not only would have cost an insane amount, but the computer and fibre card for it would have cost a bundle as well. Today you could (probably) edit uncompressed media on an iMac. That’s wild.

As you may recall, back in 2007, Palm needed to innovate and fast. Whatever faithful consumers they had left were eyeing Apple’s revolutionary iPhone; without a major new product, Palm would fall into obscurity. (Spoiler: they did.) The company had a trick up its sleeve, though. Palm had the Foleo.

On the cusp of the netbook craze, Palm figured the future of mobile was not only in your pocket, but in your briefcase as well. The Foleo was a sort of laptop screen and keyboard for your Treo (or whatever). Link your smartphone and Foleo and you could clack out emails, browse the Web and update spreadsheets from the comfort of a 10” screen and full-ish sized keyboard.

Reaction was swift and near-universally negative. At $500, the Foleo was already in spitting distance of a laptop. Worse, it couldn’t actually do anything without a paired Palm device. Famously, Peter Rojas, Ryan Block, and Joshua Topolsky, then the editors of Engadget, published an open letter to Palm articulating the problems with the device and the company as they perceived them. Two weeks later Palm killed the Foleo without ever releasing it.

There are a million reasons why the Foleo was a terrible idea (and a million more why Palm failed), but the one that sticks out in my mind is the fact that it was just a brick until paired with a mobile device. Consumers don’t like paying for a gizmo that can’t do much of anything without another device. Consumer electronics seem to be moving away from paired ecosystems. Even Apple has decoupled iPhone/iPad setup from syncing with a desktop machine. Buy one device at a time, use as needed.

So it is with Glass, Google’s wearable computer. On its own, the visor-like device sports a WiFi chip, which puts it head and shoulders above the Foleo. However, most users of Glass will pair it with a mobile device, which will give it a persistent connection without ever requiring one to enter a WiFi password.¹ Glass, likely, will be either useless or unendingly frustrating without a paired device.

There are more than a few reasons I see Glass failing, but this one in particular, the emphasis on Glass as a secondary device, not a primary one, is ultimately the reason I see it not catching on.

Google is asking a lot of consumers with Glass. I keep hearing chatter across the Web that it is some kind of cool, futuristic device, but I don’t see it that way. I see it as a plaything for the ultra-wealthy, the sort of thing that only makes sense for Google executives.

Consider, for example, the Glass Explorer program. The buzzy social media campaign invites people in the US to apply to be among the first to own Glass.

We’re looking for bold, creative individuals who want to join us and be a part of shaping the future of Glass.

If your fifty word, five photo and fifteen-second video application gets selected, you will get the opportunity to drop $1500 on Glass before anyone else. To boot, the only way to actually retrieve Glass will be to attend a “special pick-up experience” in New York City, Los Angeles or San Francisco. Again, this is for the privilege of buying a device that warrants the presence of yet another device in your pocket. All of this sends a clear message, at least to me: if you don’t have a whole lot of disposable income, Glass isn’t for you.

I think Glass is a joke, Google’s Spruce Goose du jour. Augmented reality is a technology that perennially mystifies and impresses, but its value remains little more than a parlor trick, an admittedly cool one. Sure, if you’re jumping out of an airplane, it’d be nice to have a head-mounted camera with a data connection (in your pocket, remember), but is that really an every-day device?

Google, as ever, makes products for Googlers. That’s the driving force behind the way Gmail is organized, that’s why Buzz rolled out to the world with a hilarious number of privacy holes and that’s why the company thinks a Willy Wonka-esque contest feasible only for residents of the company’s backyards is a good idea.

Google has loads of cash and is probably burning through it to bring Glass to market. They can afford for it to fail because if not, who cares? They dominate the online advertising business; Glass is an attempt to get more computers in more places so they can serve up ever more ads (or at least collect more data).

The Foleo was the wrong device because it solved a problem no one had and in a rather cumbersome, expensive manner. The trick in this game is to solve problems no one knows they have. Does Glass do that? Not for me, and I’d venture not for enough people on a daily basis.

It’s probably unfair for me to judge a product I’ve never seen in person so harshly, but I’d like to air this grievance now. If I’m wrong and we all wear some form of computer visor in the future, I’ll look back on this and have a laugh. But, come on, no one needs a Foleo for their face.

Amazon has some great albums on sale for the ridiculous price of $2 today.¹ You really should get Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’ The Heist if nothing else.

On a related note, I just whipped my music library into shape and signed up for iTunes Match. Amazon’s MP3 downloader makes adding new tracks to iTunes dead simple, and with Match turned on my iPhone populates with the new tracks almost instantly.

It’s not as convenient as buying from iTunes, which auto-downloads new tracks to all my devices, but considering Amazon has albums at a $10 discount today, it’s worth the elbow grease.

Related: Andy Baio’s aforelinked “Indiepocalypse” piece from January was the reason I bought The Heist recently. “Jimmy Iovine” is a great track, but I think “Wing$” might be my favorite.

Greg Bensinger reporting for The Wall Street Journal:

At an investor conference Monday, Chief Executive Reed Hastings said the show would be a “one-off” and “non-repeatable” event for the Los Gatos, Calif., company.

It hasn’t even “aired” yet.

Some questions come to mind: How the hell does Netflix measure success? Or does it just not care? Would another network have killed the prospect of another season before releasing a single episode?

The bigger question, I think, is whether or not Netflix actually has the power to negotiate keeping a show as ambitious and sprawling as Arrested Development in production. Some of the biggest players are movie stars now; do they really want to keep on making a direct-to-video sitcom?¹

I’m getting the feeling 2013’s original content rollout from Netflix is less “the future” and more, in the words of Hastings, a “one-off.”