Ginger Lincoln and the Antics of Evil

Sometimes I wonder how the QA guys at work manage to stop themselves going nuts. Testing bugs all day calls for a pretty special kind of individual - QA is possibly the most frustrating job in the entire world.

Well, now I know. They make movies like this. (To be fair, since we're building a movie-making tool, making movies is a fundamental part of the job description.) But does it stop them going nuts? Watch it and see for yourself.


I had to use VLC to play the movie, as WMP wouldn't give me any sound. But, technical issues aside, this is great fun. Abe Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth, and Colonel Sanders fight the forces of Evil and try to discover who's stealing Christmas. It's got three Stooges style slapstick (which you don't often see in machinima) with more than a touch of Tarantino (which you do), snappy dialogue, and a wonderful "unmasking of the masked villain" scene - all it really needed was to end on a song and dance number.

I wish I hadn't suggested that, not with the new music pack going into QA this week...

Mmmm, looks tasty

Normally, when you think of pictures of food, you think of pictures in cookery books or tacky restaurant menus designed to make you hungry. Photographer Carl Warner has a different approach - he makes landscapes out of food.

Absolutely everything in this picture is food. The sea, for example, is smoked salmon...

There's more like this on his Web site. (Click Fotographics, second from left, then Foodscapes, second from left, and be amazed.)

Spawn of the Devil

"I know Outlook's evil," writes Emma. "But what, exactly, will it do?"

It grows black tentacles and strangles your teddy bears while you sleep. It emits noxious odours which infest your clothing and cause your friends to sit on the other side of the pub from you. In its spare time, it takes over small European countries and establishes megalomaniacal dictatorships and secret police with mirrored sunglasses that function equally well at the dead of a moonless night. It listens to Black Sabbath albums backwards and develops paranoid tendencies which it expresses through the gratuitous mutilation of endangered mammals. It translates every fourth word of all your critical documents into Ancient Church Slavonic, and turns all your photographs into reproductions of LP cover art by Andy Warhol. It sends out anti-Semitic hate mail under your name to the Elders of Zion, and it pours treacle into your favourite slippers.

Truly, there is no abomination or foulness of which Outlook is not capable.

Who is Jon Richfield?

I like reading New Scientist. It helps me convince myself that I have at least some grasp of modern technology and modern scientific thinking. OK, so I skip past all the physics and cosmology articles, and focus on the social sciences (or “wet science” as it was called back when I did my degree). But my favourite bit is The Last Word, the bit at the back where people ask bizarre questions, and I always jump straight to there.

One name pops up again and again: Jon Richfield, of Somerset West, South Africa. Doesn’t matter what the question is, there’s a good chance he’ll have a bash at an answer. For the last seven years, I’ve had a mental image of Richfield as a retired scientist of some form, who has nothing to do but gaze out at the veldt, dreaming of his glory days. Then along comes New Sci each week, and suddenly, his life has purpose. There’s a question that nobody seems to know an answer to. So, by careful ferreting out, diligent research, and lateral and logical thinking, he comes up with a plausible answer. While the rest of us spend maybe a few seconds thinking, hmm, that’s a good question, Richfield devotes fifty hours to the problem. Which makes him, IMHO, a real scientist.

I’ve always wished that New Sci would do an interview with him. The breadth of his knowledge is staggering, and I’ve often wondered what he’s really like.

It turns out my mental image isn’t so far from the truth. A quick Googling tells us that he’s a retired computer scientist, living in a retirement complex, spending his days on "anything to do with ideas, especially living things, and with reading and writing".

A true polymath for the 21^st century, I salute you!

The plan is that the plan will go ahead as planned

Why does post-production and distribution always take so long, even in this digital age?

Over New Year, Phil and I recorded the first two episodes of our upcoming podcast, Making Better Movies. (It was originally going to be a cookery show, entitled Making Better Brownies, but the test shows didn't go down too well with the audiences, who kindly pointed out that (a) we knew nothing about making brownies and should stick to making funny foreign food, and (b) there's only so much you can say about brownies before you bore the pants off everyone. So we decided to talk about movies instead.)


The plan was to edit it in early January, and start releasing them fortnightly. However, what with one thing and another, the editing session planned for this weekend didn't happen. We're hoping to get something done this week, then you can hear us babble on about our favourite movie topics, and take part in the Alfred Hitchcock and Robert Rodriguez drinking games. Well, that's the plan, anyway.

For the time being, if you want to listen to my dulcet tones (albeit under the influence of red wine, brandy and Red Bull, and the aftermath of England beating France at rugby), you'll have to pop over to The Overcast and listen to Episode #25, recorded at last year's Machinima Festival. There should be another, more sobererer Overcast, where we talk seriously about Moviestorm, out soon once Overman has a chance to edit it.

Anyway, to answer my earlier question, it's because post is where the real work usually gets done. Pre-prod is just kicking ideas around, recording is fun, but turning all that into something half-decent - that's the tricky bit.

Here's a more difficult question. Why is everyone I do podcasts with called Phil? It's confusing.

The more wings, the better!

The Lost Squadron (1932)

I’ll lay my cards right on the table. I’m a sucker for anything with biplanes in. Or airships. Or any other form of vintage air travel. So a movie about a bunch of Air Force buddies who become Hollywood stunt pilots after the First World War is right up my street. Sadly, it's not available on DVD or even VHS, as far as I can see. I watched it on a tape recorded off TCM some years back, so finding a copy may not be trivial.

Four guys (three pilots and their mechanic) come back to America to find they have nothing waiting for them – one’s lost his business to a crooked partner, one’s lost his job, one’s lost his girlfriend to another man. So they decide to stick together and use their skills. Cue a fairly predictable plot about an unscrupulous movie producer who not only is sending his pilots up in dodgy planes, but is also the man who married our hero’s girlfriend. She’s an actress, and guess what, she now has to work with her ex. And her husband doesn’t even like her – she’s just a trophy wife. Suffice it to say, it’s about what you’d expect for this type of film. Strangely, although many reviewers refer to the movie as a comedy, it isn’t. It’s more like a Dick Barton thriller.

The opening sequence is really unusual. It sets the scene with an air battle. However, when all you can see is a helmeted head with goggles in a cockpit surrounded by rigging and machine guns, you have no idea who’s who, or even which side they’re on. If the movie were in colour, you could probably work it out; after all Flyboys and The Blue Max don’t seem to suffer from that problem. But in black and white they all look the same. So they superimpose a roundel or a cross in the corner of the screen so you know who’s on which side, which makes it look rather like a computer game. The aerial battle also looks very static. As is brought out so effectively in The Aviator, unless you have some background, you can’t tell that the planes are moving. Hughes had the luxury of delaying shooting until he had the right cloud conditions, even though waiting around for cloud in California was costing him a fortune: RKO obviously didn’t have that option, and the planes are shot against a dull grey background. Worth a look, though, just out of curiosity.

However, the rest of the flying sequences are wonderful. There’s a great range of different aircraft on show, which is enough to pique my curiosity. Some of the stunt flying is really quite hairy, particularly a sequence where they are strafing a village. And the great thing is that because the movie was made in 1932, they’re all real, genuine planes. No replicas, no models, and no CG.

(Quick aside, speaking of CG biplanes – have a look at Faith, Hope and Charity, by Wingmen Productions, which is a dramatized documentary on the air battle over Malta in 1940, where three Gloster Gladiators saw off wave after wave of the Italian air force. What makes this a special film is that it’s machinima. The entire thing is shot using a commercial flight sim game, and the quality of the models and the flying sequences is right up with the kind of stuff you’ll see on Discovery. Most machinima gets painful to watch after 20 minutes: this keeps you hooked for an hour and leaves you wanting more. It’s a free download, and if you like it you can make them a donation or buy the DVD.)

Anyway, back to The Lost Squadron. There are a few well-known names from the 1930s in the cast and crew, including Mary Astor (as actress Follette Marsh), David O. Selznick (producer), Max Steiner (music) and Herman Mankiewicz (dialogue). However, this isn’t their best work. The only really memorable performance is from Erich von Stroheim, perfectly typecast as the tyrannical producer. The character was clearly based on Stroheim himself – in fact, in the first draft of the script, the character was actually called "von Stroheim". The name was later changed to "von Furst" at Stroheim’s request. While I’d always thought of von Stroheim as a director, it turns out that while he only shot 12 films in 14 years, almost all silent, he acted in over 50 films in a career that lasted over 45 years, right up to his death.

While The Lost Squadron isn’t in any way comparable to Hell’s Angels, which is superior in just about every way imaginable, or Wings, which was the first movie ever to win an Oscar for Best Picture, it's an interesting look at an era of Hollywood where health and safety was a non-existent concept. It’s a fairly workmanlike run-of-the-mill story, with no particular flaws, but no nothing that makes it a must-see film for anyone except film buffs or biplane freaks. Which, I guess, is me, on both counts.

Here's what others have said about it:

• Time Out
• New York Times
• MSN
  

And did I mention it’s got really cool contemporary footage of World War One biplanes in? Oh, OK.

What to do with a movie library?

One of my great joys, while growing up, was visiting my aunt and uncle in the holidays. Ted was a serious film buff (among other things), and the room where I used to stay was packed from floor to ceiling with books and magazines about movies, which I used to read voraciously. In fact, it would be fair to say that Ted's collection of movie books was largely responsible for me doing what I do today.

From as early as I can remember, I used to plough through magazines like Famous Monsters of Filmland, and I knew my way through the canon of German Expressionist films before I'd seen any of them. I could tell you all about the making of Gone With The Wind or Wizard of Oz, I knew what the concept art for Fantasia and King Kong looked like, and names like von Stroheim, Eisenstein, Griffith, Pickford, Chaney, Fellini and Bergman tripped off my tongue with the fluency of a seasoned student of film. I used to read the screenplays and shooting scripts of all my favourite RKO horror films, and knew by heart the production notes of the masterworks of Welles, Hitchcock and de Mille.

This library was an absolute treasure trove of information. It was far larger and more expansive than anything my local library could offer me, and the best I was likely to see outside a film school. (In fact, I didn't seen anything to rival it until I visited the American Film Institute last year and saw what was on their shelves.)

Ted died just before Christmas, and left me his library, but sadly, I find myself wondering what to do with it. Aside from the practical issue of where to put a thousand or more books, I begin to wonder how many of those books I would ever look at now. The Web offers so much information that this enormous stack of books is no longer a collection of information you can't get anywhere else. And, what's more, the Web's easier to use. DVD extras also provide so much background material, in a more friendly form, that I'm less inclined to read a book about the making of a film than I used to be.

There's a side of me that would love to own such a library, but on the other hand, it doesn't seem nearly as useful or as interesting as it did ten or twenty years ago. Maybe it's one of those side-effects of progress, and books are, regrettably, becoming as obsolete as vinyl LPs, reel-to-reel tapes or slides.