Criticism is doubt informed by curiosity and a deep knowledge of a discipline related to your work. Whether the criticism you receive is constructive or not, it comes from knowledge. Informed insights like “I’m not sure someone would ever pay that much” or “you may not want to outsource that given the high-touch required” may cause you to question your approach.

By contrast, cynicism is a form of doubt resulting from ignorance and antiquated ways. Industry experts will often express doubt based on an ingrained muscle memory of past experiences that handicaps their vision for the future. Cynical statements like, “People will never read a book on a computer” or “Why would anyone want to put their rolodex online?” are famous doubts expressed by experts with handicapped vision.

This wasn’t written for filmmakers or really those critical of the arts, but I think these definitions apply in this realm. I’m not sure if “doubt” is the best word to use for what film critics apply to work, but I think anyone with “curiosity and a deep knowledge” of cinema can offer opinions worth listening to.

Cynics will always write off work that is difficult to penetrate. Belsky offers great advice on how to weather tough criticism and ignore useless crap. Too bad it often feels like the cynics are the ones greenlighting movies.

John August on film time:

In movies, unless something seems wildly impossible — driving from LA to New York in an hour — audiences are extremely forgiving about time, particularly if overall story logic seems to be consistent. In many of my favorite movies, I couldn’t tell you how many hours or days or months have elapsed in story time.

When movies work, you don’t care.

He brings up the point of temporal space in reference to a recently reprinted article from the September 2002 issue of Scientific American. In an aside to Antonio R. Damasio’s “Remembering When,” the author discusses the use of time in Hitchcock’s Rope. Damasio tries to explain how 25 minutes of the film are missing as Hitchcock said on record that story takes place over 105 minutes but the film only runs for 80.

I’m with August, naturally, who is coming at this from a filmmaking perspective instead of a neurological one. Damasio’s piece isn’t without some great arguments though:

The emotional content of the material may also extend time. When we are uncomfortable or worried, we often experience time more slowly because we focus on negative images associated with our anxiety. Studies in my laboratory show that the brain generates images at faster rates when we are experiencing positive emotions (perhaps this is why time flies when we’re having fun) and reduces the rate of image making during negative emotions. On a recent flight with heavy turbulence, for instance, I experienced the passage of time as achingly slow because my attention was directed to the discomfort of the experience. Perhaps the unpleasantness of the situation in Rope similarly conspires to stretch time.

Now that blows my mind a little.

SA’s new special issue in which this article appears, A Matter of Time, looks well worth the few bucks they’re asking for it.

Last week I wrote about Apple’s updated iBooks software and textbook initiative. One thing these updates don’t address is how textbooks are actually used in academia. Abused might be a better word.

The KAIST Institute of Information Technology Convergence released this video of their prototype ebook gestural interface on January 8, but it just came to my attention today. Take a look:

Research is messy. Whether it’s a student or professional researcher doing the work, paper books remain an indispensable tool because they can be flipped through, dog-eared, doodled on, fanned out and treated in an altogether rotten manner. Macrumors provides a great breakdown of the gestures KAIST adds that are not currently available on the iPad:

• Page Flipping, by spreading pages and then flipping through
• Page Flipping with finger bookmarking
• Multiple page turning using multiple fingers
• Faster swipes turning multiple page
• Longer presses, then swiping can turn multiple pages
• Writing the page number

Some of these seem tedious (writing the page number?) but the one I’m most interested in is the “page flipping with finger bookmarking.” This is something I do in paper books all the time; I love flipping ahead to see about how many pages are left in a chapter.

Ebook reading apps on the iPad like iBooks and Kindle offer a great many advantages over their print equivalents, (device syncing, text-wide search, non-destructive highlighting and annotating, etc.) but actually moving through books in them is still clunky and slow. I hope this makes it into ebook software soon. These gestures are the missing piece in bringing textbooks and longer academic works to the iPad.

I came across the work of Robert Lyons today on Vimeo. He posts (and links to) a lot of experimental and animation work in addition to his own films. Here’s how he describes the above piece, “The Filmmaker”:

A combination of 2-D cut-out animation, 3-D clay animation, and a little bit of pixilation, I made this film in 1979 shooting with a 16mm Canon Scoopic camera. This is currently the oldest animated film of mine that I have posted, and was created when I was in college at SUNY, New Paltz, when I was 20 years old. This was my earliest attempt at doing clay animation. The music “Communication Breakdown” by Led Zeppelin was added recently, as the original film was silent. It was chosen because it related to the theme of the film and was of the time period from which the film was made.

I really enjoy this little film, though I think he should have left it silent. Zeppelin just doesn’t work here for me. Perhaps I’m being influenced by the fact that it’s so much cleaner and crisper than the picture. In any event, it’s easy enough to hit mute. I wonder what other goodies Robert will be uploading.

Recently, British Prime Minister David Cameron urged the British Film Institute (BFI) to use its funding to support more work that appeals to mainstream audiences. Comedian Stewart Lee took umbrage with that idea:

But maybe David is party to a formula for popularity, despite the fact that no art of any real value, including all Hollywood films of the past 30 years, has ever been made by pursuing one. Good artists do what they believe in and don’t merely court public approval. In these respects they are the opposite of politicians. Zing!

In the UK, the BFI doles out some £20 million ($31 million) to independent productions, some of which is public money, including earnings from the National Lottery. Per the Guardian Article linked above, the UK film industry does about £4.2 billion a year, riding a wave of £1 billion from foreign investments in the wake of successes like The King’s Speech. Cameron is asking for more hits to bolster the industry.

Lee brings up some interesting points about the creative process. The best thing for the British film industry to do is to find its own voice and not live in the shadow of Hollywood (or, ya know, the rest of Europe). When you unleash your most creative people on the cinema, the rest of the world will perk up and listen. As Lee points out, there is no formula for finding the next Danny Boyle or David Yates; you just have to support your artists and hope their voices will resonate.

For my money, the last thing the BFI should do is promote more films like The King’s Speech. What we’ll end up with is a lot of My Week With Marilyns washing ashore, which is to say uninspired anglo-fetishism for the sake of turning a buck (or a quid). I wouldn’t object to more, Attack the Blocks though; not at all.

In response to the piece by Paul Graham I linked earlier:

For Hollywood to be killed, the Internet needs to focus on a metric other than eyeballs. It’s not about mass, it’s about good. That’s absolutely anti-YouTube and anti-Farmville and any other content which we expect to be rapid, mass and disposable. Disposable content isn’t bad, it’s just not everything. And as long as that’s *all* that the Valley is putting out, we won’t kill Hollywood.

Yes and no.

Hollywood’s biggest assests are neither necessarily “good” nor the opposite of “disposable.” They’re engaging. For ninety minutes or more.

But I won’t argue against better content on YouTube. Lacy is damn right about that.

How do you kill the movie and TV industries? Or more precisely (since at this level, technological progress is probably predetermined) what is going to kill them? Mostly not what they like to believe is killing them, filesharing. What’s going to kill movies and TV is what’s already killing them: better ways to entertain people. So the best way to approach this problem is to ask yourself: what are people going to do for fun in 20 years instead of what they do now?

“Y Combinator” provides funding for tech startups. Two things:

1. If you have ideas in response to the above, I suggest you apply for their next round of funding.
2. This kind of talk should reinforce the idea that the MPAA, especially under Chris Dodd, is shooting themselves in the foot. Technology is the future and “film” is the past; when the two collide, I’ll put my money on the future every time.

(via Daring Firaball.)

To the degree I thought about my role, I saw myself as a journalist (reporting on movies people might not otherwise know about) and as someone contributing to something I’d call, after Jonas [Mekas’s] magazine, “film culture.” On succeeding Sarris as lead critic in 1988 I continued what I saw as a Voice tradition — emphasizing work I felt significant, regardless of its commercial clout or mass appeal.

If you’ve ever had a passing interest in film criticism, this article is for you. Hoberman’s insight, as well as A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis’s, on the form is always a fun read.

In a post titled The next SOPA, Marco Arment suggests that the MPAA’s clout in Washington is a campaign finance problem. He paints a bleak picture of how we will always lose a battle against them, unless…

The MPAA studios hate us. They hate us with region locks and unskippable screens and encryption and criminalization of fair use. They see us as stupid eyeballs with wallets, and they are entitled to a constant stream of our money. They despise us, and they certainly don’t respect us.

Yet when we watch their movies, we support them.

Even if we don’t watch their movies in a theater or buy their plastic discs of hostility, we’re still supporting them. If we watch their movies on Netflix or other flat-rate streaming or rental services, the service effectively pays them on our behalf next time they negotiate the rights or buy another disc. And if we pirate their movies, we’re contributing to the statistics that help them convince Congress that these destructive laws are necessary.

Marco suggests a boycott of Hollywood movies, at least those made and/or released by the six major studios that comprise the MPAA. No more buying tickets, discs, streaming subscriptions or downloads (legal or otherwise). This is the nuclear option, our Doomsday Machine. Pull the trigger and Hollywood is done.

I don’t advocate this tactic. This is in part because I don’t want to harm the filmmakers whose films move cinema forward from within the system, but I also have a vested interest in the movie business succeeding. There actually are a lot of jobs at stake in this industry, mine included.

Which wraps back around to why Chris Dodd and the MPAA should listen closely to what Marco is saying, because I’ll bet you he’s not the first person to think up an all out Hollywood boycott. The studios should be more afraid of losing their core audiences than they are of piracy.

As more online outlets pop up and enterprising filmmakers get savvier, the studio system may see more attention (and dollars) being spent elsewhere. Then they’d be in much worse of a pickle than piracy could ever provide.

Dodd and friends: it’s time for damage control. When the people start considering putting down your product and looking elsewhere, you’ve done something horribly wrong. Don’t pursue “the next SOPA.” Instead, make amends and find a way to be great again. This may be your last chance.

Matthew Butterick, the typographer and writer behind Typography for Lawyers, took issue with the use of the Verdana typeface in Brad Bird’s Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, so he wrote the director a letter.

Inapt typography is not uncommon in movies. But big-budget studio films employ scores of people specifically to worry about the details that ensure the on-screen experience will be seamless. Therefore, it’s incongruous to put all that care (and money!) into the frame and then overlay it with an inapt font, which in its own small way, breaks the illusion. It’s not Mission: Impossible — IKEA Protocol, is it.

I had a similar reaction when the text showed up on screen, but I forgot all about it once I nearly lost my lunch during the Burj Khalifa scenes. This whole letter is gold.

UPDATE 01/25/12: Brad Bird Responds to Typographer

(via Shawn Blanc.)