Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, do the musical theater workshop, I must do many errands, I must put the final touches on the Deceit video and I must eat a meal at some point. Today’s topic of discussion: What are your favorite classic art house films – especially from the Golden Age? Let’s have loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst everyone ponders why these here notes are The Beginning Of The End.
I’m thinking I need a vacation, and yet I shall not be having a vacation. I will have a couple of weeks, however, when all I have to do is concentrate on the upcoming staged reading of the new musical. But then, I start editing the Kevin Spirtas video, which will hopefully move along a bit faster than Deceit did. One good thing, the audio is mixed and locked, so that part should save quite a bit of time. Of course, come June, the musical theater workshop is over, and then I’ll just be prepping some CD and DVD releases, and overseeing our upcoming cabaret series at LACC. I will, at some point, hopefully begin a new book.
Have I mentioned that I’m writing these here notes from end to beginning, or The Beginning Of The End? Today, I must do a whole slew of things, including our “audition” assignment in the musical theater workshop (we have an extra hour of class today, so I’m also hopeful that we’ll have time to review the staging we did on Tuesday), and I have to go in at some point and put the finishing touches (all minor) on the Deceit video, so we can get going on the DVD release, which is now on the fast track. Matt and I will be recording an audio commentary, probably on Monday evening. Isn’t that exciting? Isn’t that just too too?
Well, why don’t we all click on the Unseemly Button below even though we won’t know we were supposed to do that because this paragraph should, in reality, be ending the last section, but lest we forget, this is The Beginning Of The End, notes-wise.
Last night, I watched a motion picture on DVD entitled The Passenger, a film by Michelangelo Antonioni, starring Mr. Jack Nicholson. I saw the film the day it opened in Westwood, and while I find it fascinatingly filmed, I wasn’t especially taken with it (the film was a disaster at the box-office). I haven’t seen it since, so I picked up the DVD was great anticipation to see how it’s held up. Well, as you’d expect, it’s held up very well indeed – in fact, it seems much better now than it did then, because this sort of filmmaking has virtually disappeared off the face of the earth. There was a time when the art house film was plentiful and didn’t just mean the latest Sundance or Miramax film, which, in truth, are just mini-studio films and have nothing to do with what art house cinema used to be. The Passenger is a spellbinding film – long, but never seems so, and enigmatic, but hypnotically so. Mr. Antonioni’s direction is filled with long languid takes and very bold touches and you really just can’t take your eyes from the screen. The ending ten minute shot is what cinema is all about – a combo platter of image, sound, and vision. The transfer is very nice and replicates the look of the film, which was somewhat grainy, like most 70s films. The actors are all excellent, but the film is more about Antonioni than the actors – he uses the actors as landscapes just as much as he uses the landscapes as actors. My goodness, that was a deep analysis, wasn’t it? That was so deep that I might just vomit on the ground.
Well, dear readers, it’s already Thursday and I have decided to shake things up around these here parts. I have decided to begin at the end of the notes and end at the beginning of the notes. That certainly is shaking things up, if you ask me. That is just bold notes-making, if you ask me. Yes, Virginia, today we shall have The Beginning Of The End, notes-wise. Hence, even though this is The Beginning, you are reading it at The End. How inventively inventive I am on this fine day. Speaking of this fine day, yesterday was a semi-fine day. Actually, most of yesterday was completely irritating, but I did have a really good time watching the Deceit DVD because it just looked so nice and sounded pretty okay, too. I did find about a dozen things we have to fix, but I have exact times where those things are, and what we do is to go to those scenes, fix the problem, and then relay only those specific shots right onto our digibeta master. So, I don’t think the changes will take more than an hour, and then they’ll output another DVD for me for final approval. Then, we’re done with this phase (except for Matt and I doing an audio commentary early next week). After that, the master goes to a DVD authoring fellow, who creates the DVD master – the menus, the chapter stops, etc. Also, the DVD packaging is already in the works. I’m hoping to take preorders as early as the first week in June, if all goes according to Hoyle. This is new territory for Kritzerland, so I do hope everyone will be very supportive, so that we can branch out and do more DVDs, which I’d like very much. The rest of yesterday was filled with one annoyance after another, although it does look like I made great strides in finishing the booking of our cabaret series, so that was good.