Links: 2008-06-02

• For the life of me - Mountaineer chronicles his Everest rescue by Calgarian Andrew Brash and defends those who left him for dead
• Quotes from Yves Saint Laurent (1936 - 2008) * "I participated in the transformation of my era. I did it with clothes, which is surely less important than music, architecture, painting ... but whatever it's worth I did it." (2002) * New York Times slideshow and obituary
• "Asset-backed insecurity" - an interesting piece about sovereign-wealth funds by The Economists
• Poor People With Checks - nicely done video "Checkmate"
• ABC Blesses Blogs, Endorses Embedding
• Owning the Clouds [via Cory

In Memory: Sydney Pollack

I am saddened to hear the wonderful director, producer, actor Sydney Pollack has passed away yesterday at 73. Articles by Roger Ebert, IHT, and Washington Post.

Love this quote from G&M “The way he was” (emphasis added),

Asked why he interrupted his own filmmaking career to act for Stanley Kubrick ( Eyes Wide Shut) and Woody Allen ( Husbands and Wives), Pollack replied, “Because I wanted to see how they work. I was curious.

In this YouTube video, Sydney Pollack discusses his documentary “Sketches of Frank Gehry” with Charlie Rose.

Here in this YouTube video (at the 1:13 and 6:25 marks), you hear Sydney talking about his love of flying jet plane (actually a Citation X, the “fastest non-military jet”) in the documentary One Six Right (named after the most popular runway at the Van Nuys Airport). Yeap, he flew jets.

World's best chef

From Guardian UK - "Meet the world's best chef - His restaurant, El Bulli, in Spain, has been named best in the world - for the fourth time. So how does Ferran Adrià do it?"

Radiant City - Sunday April 6

[via CBC Docs newsletter]

THE PASSIONATE EYE SHOWCASE

(Sunday April 6 at 10pm ET/PT on CBC Newsworld)

RADIANT CITY (90 minutes)

Genie Award-winning Radiant City offers an entertaining look at life in suburbia.While Evan Moss zones out in commuter traffic, Ann toils away in her dream kitchen and the kids play sinister games amidst the fresh foundations of monster houses. Developers call it big business, but the Moss family call it home. Welcome to the neighbourhood and welcome to Radiant City - an entertaining and startling look at 21st century suburbanites and suburban sprawl.

Discuss this film online.

http://www.cbc.ca/passionateeyesunday/feature_060408.html

I first saw Gary Burns' Radiant City at Calgary international film festival. (See a trailer here and more info on filmmakers here.) It is a very interesting movie and I quite liked it. Feel free to leave your comments or thoughts on the film in the comment section. And I will share with you my thoughts about it.

By the way, Gary is a Calgarian and it has been my pleasure to run into him a few times in Calgary at movies or industry events. Gary is a really nice guy.

Warning, there may be spoilers in the comments. So please considered yourself warned. (smile)

Darfur/Darfur Calgary opening night - videos

As promised in a previous posting, I’ve finally found some time to process and post the following two video clips of the opening night.

• Maryam (a Darfurian in Calgary recently visited Darfur) speaks at DARFUR/DARFUR opening night.

• A short video clip of the Darfur/Darfur multimedia exhibit on the outdoor wall of Glenbow Museum in Calgary.

Something about Meryl

Found this group of old wonderful videos.

Jim Carrey at Meryl Streep’s AFI tribute - Wonderfully Hilarious!

Robert de Niro at Meryl Streep’s AFI tribute

Tracey Ullman at Meryl Streep’s AFI tribute

Meryl AFI Speech

Darfur/Darfur @ Glenbow - tonight to March 21 (from 7 - 11pm)

After months of work and organizing, the Darfur/Darfur multimedia project is finally in Calgary. Starting today until Friday March 21st, every evening from 7:00pm -11:00pm, one hundred fifty photographic images will be projected on the Glenbow Museum building façade facing Stephen Avenue mall with three powerful projectors. The exhibit, presented by Afrikadey and Glenbow Museum, provides an avenue of informing Calgarians about world affairs through art. Hopefully this will motivate action to alleviate the sufferings of Darfuris and other people around the globe who are victims of wars.The following is a brief summary of the schedule for the first four days (full schedule downloadable here from Afrikadey.com site),

Friday, March 14th, 7:00pm
Exhibit opening at the Glenbow Museum. Guest speakers include Exhibit co-curator, Jayme Mclennan; and photojournalist, Ryan Spencer Reed (see a Quicktime slide show of some of Ryan’s photos set to beautiful and powerful music).

Saturday, March 15, 5:00pm
Walk for Darfur organized by STAND (Students Taking Action Now for Darfur) a symbolic walk from Shaw Millenium Park in solidarity with displaced Darfuris forced to flee to refugee camps.

The walk from Mewata Armory will proceed east on 8th Ave. SW to the Glenbow Museum to view the exhibit. Come join the students.

Sunday, March 16, 1pm - 4pm
Free film series in the Glenbow Theatre - “Sand and Sorrow” (see film clips) narrated by George Clooney and “The Long Journey Home of James Nguen” directed by Rick Castiglione (Rick is a Calgarian and plans to be at the screening).

Sunday, March 16, 7:00pm
Sen. Romeo Dallaire and members of Engineers Without Borders join the audience at the exhibit.

Monday March 17, 7:00pm
Prof. Syed Soharwardy and members of the Muslim community will be present to view the exhibit. Prof. Soharwardy will speak on Muslim unity.

Bill C-10 - Tax Credits as Censorship tool

Here is an excerpt from an informative article by Prof. Cossman (Faculty of Law at UT) about the Bill C-10 mess (emphasis added),

And this is where it is useful to remember the history of censorship in this country. When you give officials the open ended power to censor, guess what they do? They censor. Broadly. And often badly. Look at the history of customs censorhip, and film censorship. And every other kind of censorship. Promoting decency becomes a way to censor stuff that is, well, just icky to the official.

And art is often, well, icky. It is subversive, unsettling, challenging. Good films often upset us. They very well might just be icky. I found Eastern Promises, David Cronenburg’s critically acclaimed, but very violent film to be, well, very violent. It was upsetting. It was icky. It could, accordingly, be censored.

Now, every one on down from the Heritage Minister is insisting that films like Eastern Promises and Juno would NEVER be censored. Well, that’s easy to say, now that those films are out in the public sphere and incredibly successful. But, its possible that they just might never see the light of day because an official decided that they were too icky.

Genie Awards & Canada’s tax credit censorship

Sarah Polley is one of Canada's finest filmmaker, so I am happy that her film Away from Her has won a few Genie Awards listed below,

Best Motion Picture

Away From Her (Daniel Iron, Simone Urdl, Jennifer Weiss)

Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role

Gordon Pinsent, Away From Her

Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role

Julie Christie, Away From Her

Achievement in Direction

Sarah Polley, Away From Her

Adapted Screenplay

Sarah Polley, Away From Her

Quoting the TorStar report (emphasis added),

Bill C-10 – the federal government's controversial proposal to cancel tax credits for films with material considered offensive – took a bashing last night at the Genie Awards.

Telecast host Sandra Oh stopped following the script to say: "I can't continue without making a personal statement. Censorship has had work done and is trying to make a comeback. I don't know about you, but to me this doesn't sound like Canada."

Producer Robert Lantos, accepting an award on behalf of Eastern Promises` absent screenwriter, added: "If the barbarians have their way, the kind of work that won this award will no longer be permissible in Canadian cinema." [K: Eastern Promises is a great film and will surely be unjustly censored if C-10 is in effect.] [...]

And Romeo Dallaire, the senator whose fight against Rwanda's genocide is told in Shake Hands With the Devil, delivered an upbeat message: "C-10 hasn't made it through the Senate yet."

But backstage, Dallaire criticized the bill. "I think it's more significant right now that we have policies to help and support the film industry financially then starting to move on policies that in my opinion are not necessarily in the Canadian perspective," he said.

Now before the Senate, Bill C-10 would allow Heritage Ministry officials to rule movies and TV shows deemed offensive or contrary to the public interest ineligible for federal tax credits. [K: And worst, the bill has retroactive power to take back approval from a film after the fact thus making film financing very uncertain, more costly and difficult.]

Consider joining the Facebook protest group against Bill C-10. And here are some other news reports,

1. Canadian official defends tax curb - Hollywood Reporter
2. No censorship threat in Bill C-10: Verner - Really?
3. An open letter to Prime Minister Harper and Minister Verner
4. The Battle over C-10
5. From the Desk of Stephen Harper - nice work Rick :)
   

Happy Leap Day!

I was wowed by what I saw from origami expert Robert Lang [hat tip: boing boing]. So I looked for some fun and unusual video to share here.

Links: 2008-02-27 Human dissection photos, Sun MySQL, Daylight savings, Phone for homeless, Canada couldn’t say No, Smoking kills Ad

1. Incredible human dissection photos on Flickr
2. MySQL is Officially a Part of Sun
3. Daylight savings time increases energy usage - interesting study
4. Permanent phone numbers and voicemail services to the homeless (GrandCentral’s Project CARE initiative)
5. Canada: The Country That Couldn’t Say ‘No’ - This may not be a bad thing if one believes in free trade.
6. Smoking kills 14,000 people everyday - very creative ad

Links: 2008-02-26 Books 2.0, eBay Rebellion, FCC Net Neutrality, Muni Bonds, Google bandwidth, ABC idiot

1. Canadians are playing key role in `Books 2.0′ - WikiTrave, print-on-demand, LibriVox project audio books
2. eBay’s Seller Rebellion
3. FCC Open Hearing: Net Neutrality
4. Bad Day? Be glad you are not selling Muni Bonds
5. Google and the Unity bandwidth consortium - Google and the under-sea cable business
6. ABC thinks you’re an idiot - Lovely pix Marc (smile)

Oscars Picks

Instead of live blogging, I will be watching the 80th Annual Academy Awards tonight with some friends. To make things fun, I will continue to try to pick the winners like last year. Here are my partial picks for some of the winners from the list of nominations.

*******

**** Best Short Film, Animated

Madame Tutli-Putli (2007): Chris Lavis, Maciek Szczerbowski (see my blogs here and here)

**** Best Motion Picture of the Year

No Country for Old Men (2007): Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, Scott Rudin

**** Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role

Daniel Day-Lewis for There Will Be Blood (2007)

**** Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role

Julie Christie for Away from Her (2006) (Note: In doing so, the Academy is also indirectly honouring Sarah Polley's great job in making Away from Her.)

**** Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role

Javier Bardem for No Country for Old Men (2007)

**** Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role

Tilda Swinton for Michael Clayton (2007)

**** Best Achievement in Directing

Ethan Coen, Joel Coen for No Country for Old Men (2007)

**** Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen

Diablo Cody for Juno (2007)

**** Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published

Ethan Coen, Joel Coen for No Country for Old Men (2007)

While I secretly hope Sarah Polley will win for Away from Her (2006) but I know the chance is bad.

**** Best Documentary, Features

No End in Sight (2007): Charles Ferguson, Audrey Marrs (World class research. I haven't seend this film but I am betting my $1 it will win. Will see.)

Chat with Laurie Maher - Soul of Madame Tutli-Putli (Oscar nominated animated short)

If eyes are window to the soul, I think filmmakers/creators/fathers of Madame Tutli Putli, Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski, will agree with me that Laurie Maher is the soul of Madame Tutli-Putli because they share the same eyes (Laurie’s).

I have previously blogged about my love of Madame Tutli-Putli. Today, I have the great pleasure to chat with Laurie to hear her sharing some of her experiences and excitement of working the Oscar-nominated Madame Tutli-Putli.

First, here is a brief bio of Laurie,

Laurie Maher has a degree in fashion design and has worked in the fashion industry in Toronto, London and Prague. Her first film role was in the comedy short How Audley, which she co-wrote and co-directed. She also starred in the feature length film, Sleep Always, which was awarded Best Feature at the 2005 New Jersey International Film Festival.

You can listen to my audio chat with Laurie Maher in mp3 format (or you can download or stream the interview here). We talked about many things like,

• how Laurie came to the role of Madame Tutli-Putli,
• how a short term much smaller scale involvement turns into a wonderful and creative 4 years project,
• the attention to details and Laurie’s personal touch in giving a soul to Madame Tutli Putli (not only with Laurie’s eyes, but her movements, mannerisms, custom designed costumes, hat),
• how Laurie worked with filmmakers Chris Lavis, Maciek Szczerebowski, and special visual effects magician Jason Walker.
• the delicate and time consuming process of creating the beautiful looking eyes of Madame Tutli-Putli (for more of Jason’s magic in adding Laurie’s eyes to the stop-motion puppet, see at Jason’s site with some really neat technical videos)
• the multiple takes to get the needed shots (sometimes as many as 25 takes) for the film,
• and many other things including Laurie’s plan for the big Oscar night tomorrow.

As I told Laurie, in my heart, they have already won the Oscar with all the beautiful and ground breaking work that have done together. Great job.

P.S. This video and article about Laurie in TorStar are not to be missed.

P.P.S. As I listened to my chat with Laurie again after the interview, I couldn’t help but noticed and realized how much dedication Laurie, Chris, Maciek, Jason and the team have put in to make this film beautiful and great. Upholding a great tradition of wonderful NFB films (special hat tip to NFB producer Marcy Page).

I am inspired by Laurie when she talked about the detailed preparation she went in to prepare for the original assignment, a short project, which turned into a 4 year collaboration and an Oscar-nominated film. I think many artists and entrepreneurs can learn a lesson here as one never knows if a “small project” may become a “Oscar-nominated” piece of work.

Good luck to the team. I hope you win and bring a golden boy home.

Laurie, thanks again for a wonderful chat today.

P.P.P.S. Here is the Madame Tutli Putli trailer,

In Love with Madame Tutli Putli

National Film Board of Canada has 12 Oscars and 70 nominations over the years. And in the last 4 years alone, there were 4 Oscar nominations and 2 wins! See my previous blog entry about the Oscars winning Ryan and The Danish Poet.

For 2008, I am in love with Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski's Madame Tutli Putli (their site has interviews, trailer, photos, and even a good part of the movie). The eyes of Madame Tutli Putli were just spectacular and beautiful thanks for the wonderful special effects work by Jason Walker (read this article for special effects) and the beautiful eyes of Laurie Maher (see a video and an article in TorStar).

If eyes are window to the soul, I think Laurie has given a beautiful soul to Madame Tutli Putli.

Wishing Chris Lavis, Maciek Szczerbowski, their team, and NFB the best of luck this Sunday at the Oscars.

Here is the official trailer. And here is the movie in two parts unofficially (part 1 and part 2).

Christine Cheung - Portrait of a young painter

Christine Cheung is a young Canadian painter that I’ve the pleasure to meet and get to know recently. Once I’ve seen a few of her abstract paintings, I know I have to try to interview and chat with her to understand more about abstract paintings because, honestly, sometimes abstract paintings can be intimidating and even down right confusing to the uninitiated. So recently, I spent six hours talking to Christine, taking pictures, filming Christine talking about her paintings, and even filming her paint.

You can take a look at some of Christine’s paintings at her blog. Or check out a slidesshow of pictures I took of Christine and her paintings.

Here is a video of Christine talking about how her earlier prints affect her later paintings.

Here is a video of Christine talking about her self-portrait.

In the following two videos, Christine talks about her thinking process when she paints, and then she shows us how she paints.

Here is a video of Christine talking about about her latest painting “Spillage (Montreal-Calgary)“

Click here to see all eleven videos of Christine (including the above videos). Take a look of the slidesshow of pictures I took of Christine and her paintings.

Christine, thank you so much for your participation in helping my understanding of abstract painting a bit more. It is incredibly generous of you to show us how you paint right in front of the camera and the talk of your techniques.

Thanks Christine.

Walks With an Architect Series - Barcelona, Brasilia, Dubai, Shanghai

The Calgary Public Library has the full 8 parts series. Here is the descriptions from Landmark Media (with my recommendations),

An invitation to discover 8 cities shown by 8 well-known architects and city planners. Each architect analyzes a city he or she knows well and sees from a personal point of view. The architect presents the main geographical axis, streets, avenues, squares etc. and the traditional quarters and contemporary creations. The historical evolution of the city, the architectural logic and the effects of a spontaneous or controlled transformation are also described.

Walks With an Architect - Barcelona - my favourite
Walks With an Architect - Brasilia - my favourite
Walks With an Architect - Dubai, Manama, Doha - nice
Walks With an Architect - London - ok
Walks With an Architect - Manhattan - no good
Walks With an Architect - Paris - no good
Walks With an Architect - Rio De Janeiro - ok
Walks With an Architect - Shanghai - nice

Groundhog Day 2008

Me and my better half have been watching Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell's Groundhog Day (the film) on Groundhog Day (Feb 2nd) every year for longer than I can remember. As always, I also discover something new this year. I found this wonderful 2005 Roger Ebert re-review of the film. I tried to find a YouTube clip of a few scenes in the movie that I love, unfortunately I couldn't find any nice ones to include.

P.S. Here are the 2008 Groundhog Day "predictions" so far according to National Post,

The results so far:

Shubnedacadie Sam (Nova Scotia): Spring

Punxsutawney Phil (Pennsylvania): Winter

Wiarton Willie (Ontario): Spring

General Beauregard Lee (Georgia): Spring

Balzac Billy (Alberta): Spring

Buckeye Chuck (Ohio): Spring

Staten Island Chuck (New York state): Spring

Malverne Mel (New York state): Spring

$1 camera stabilizer - Really Cool

Don’t believe my words. check out this amazing video, “$1 Image Stabilizer For Any Camera - Lose The Tripod“. This one is so simple and useful that I may go out and build it!

[via Cory Doctorow]

Rumpole of the Bailey

My better half and I are now addicted to “Rumpole of the Bailey” (imdb) and just love Horace Rumpole, an aging London barrister, and also adore his wife Hilda “She Who Must Be Obeyed“.

Calgary Public Library has again been a great supplier of our new exotic tastes of old classic. This wonderful 1978 to 1992 series truly “set the bar for all law dramas that followed.”