RKNet Blog... Thing

I believe that long shots in action movies are one of the biggest “fuck you”s to Hollywood. I recently rented “Death Sentence” which stars Kevin Bacon and is directed by James Wan (of “Saw” fame, not the shitty sequels.) For those unexposed to the movie, the story takes place around a white-collar family man Nick Hume (Bacon) whose son is murdered during a gang initiation then after retaliation is targeted by the gang. In the middle of the film there’s a scene where Bacon is being chased by the gang through a parking garage and it is all in one continuous shot, and even better it’s one take (no cuts, no CG blending, nada.)

I consider “cinematographer” to be under my film repertoire and whenever I can see a shot like this I can’t help but tip my hat to the director and crew behind it since it shows they really busted their balls and want it to feel real. Side by side, the sequence at the end of “Children of Men” where Clive Owen is going after Chiwetel Ejiofor and the baby, and the sequence in “Bad Boys II” where Marcus and Mike are speeding down the highway going after Haitians, “Children of Men” wins hands down. Granted the two sequences are different beasts but I’ll explain why. It’s a lot simpler to put a camera on a tripod and film two seconds of an explosion then to have a handheld shot spanning over five hundred feet with squibs (artificial gunshots) and explosions and other things that goes for five minutes and covers every possible vantage point. Reason why I give more props to the long shots is because that takes a lot of timing, coordination, and collaboration in order to pull it off right so that the end result leaves the viewer believes he just saw a .50 caliber rip through six people.

But to get into the specifics of the “Death Sentence” shot I’ll explain the effort. It starts out with Bacon entering a parking garage and moving up floor by floor to the top where his car is while the gang targeting him is pursuing him. Now on paper you might think one camera operator follows around him but you’d be wrong. Instead of having one man rock a Steadicam and go only inside the garage it is passed around like an Olympic torch. It starts with one man in the hallway then he passes it on to a man on the next level near a gap between two levels (where Bacon is climbing through), to a man sitting on a crane/platform (so the view is now outside the parking garage by a good few feet) which lowers down to the first level where the gang is. The man then passes it off to another operator who goes in closer to the gang, backs onto another elevated platform to go up two floors to where Bacon is running and after that it’s all on that guy. My explanation sucks a bit, I’ll admit, but if you watch the clip you’ll get it.

TOP FIVE LONG TAKES

1. . “Children of Men” - Theo’s pursuit of Luke and the baby. (Clip)
2. “Panic Room” - Dubbed as “The Big Shot”, a floor by floor survey of the house’s three floors as its being broken into. (Clip)
3. “Touch of Evil” - The opening shot going from the rooftop looking down on a parking lot, to past the US/Mexican border several blocks away. This was in the late ’50s. (Clip)
4. “Children of Men” - Where Theo and everyone in the car is attacked.
5. “Rope” - A Hitchcock movie, the whole thing is one continuous shot. Done in the late ’40s (Buy the fucking thing)

The whole purpose of the long shots is to show the viewer that no matter where, what and when the setting is there is a reality that lies in the film. It is more cerebral than your typical quick cut from here to here to here to here and only a second has gone by. That’s my time for now. In an unrelated note I’ve enclosed a picture that can only be described as EPIC (a term heavily being overused now but fuck it.) Picture courtesy of my coworker Timmay.

Perusing my feeds I saw a link to an article that Opera does in fact pass the Acid 3 test. I was pretty stoked to hear that, since I was pretty sure when I ran my copy of 9.26 and 9.5 through the test, neither one passed or even approached passing. (9.5 was closer at around 60-64%.)

I went to try out the Acid 3 test again to see if I’d missed something, or not checked on the latest version of the browser, and Opera out-and-out crashed on me. Which is a very rare thing, Opera’s always been pretty stable for me, but it’s never fun to have to kill all your tabs and start over.

Upon re-reading the article I realized that the version of Opera which currently passes the newest standards testing is their internal development version. Translation: I was decieved by my excitement, and for my laziness was punished by crashing Opera upon the merciless rocks of the Web 2.0 usability test. From now on I’m just going to get my Opera-related news straight from Opera Labs and bypass the PR maneuvers from the My Opera side of things, and the various fans.

I’m still patiently awaiting Kestral’s release from beta to full, because I think at that point Opera might stand a fighting chance of gaining a “real” marketshare. (i.e. Above 1%)

So I came into work this morning, only to have a co-worker mention to me that AdCenter, MSN, and Hotmail all weren’t working for him. I checked a couple things and the sites loaded up just fine for me, but when I tried to log into AdCenter I got a friendly message saying that they were down for the time being.

Curiouser and curiouser. Then my first tweet of the day appeared:

trodrigues: msn servers are down. thousands of young portuguese girls commit mass suicide.

Intrigued, I decided to start tracking instances of “MSN” through Twitter IM. Boy, was that ever a mistake! The messages - most of them not in english - began pouring in, and my IM window has been blinking like mad all morning.

Some of the highlights:

(matheusodorisi): gente, o msn naum entra de forma alguma! appocalipse now!
(s1mone): @kakah o MSN morreu! Vida longa o GTalk!!!
(pvdp): Kom msn niet op.
(jonviray): MSN down for anyone else? people here at work are getting piiiissseed……
(hdur): Supongo que MSN enfurece a los dioses de Pakistán.
(Hausdorff): MSN産経のページ，なめてんのかって位重い
(justinkeller): Adium users: is MSN giving you problems today?
(jcloop): what the fruit is wrong with MSN messenger AND Hotmail??
(agenteinforma): MSN fora do ar não só no Brasil: http://tinyurl.com/3a4qyr
(jaredavery): What a nice start to my day. Had to help mum get in to Hotmail because MSN Messager did not want to work for her.
(cl0): who cares if you can’t get on msn? chances are not many people will wanna talk to you lot anyway ;)

And tons more comments like that. Lots of suggestions to try Meebo or defect to Gtalk. None of them seem to have any concrete intel on WHY MSN/Hotmail/et al are down, or if they do I don’t know enough portuguese/spanish/insert-other-languages-here to make it out.

I would like to note, that from my end, MSN messenger (using Pidgin) worked just fine, as did visiting LiveSpaces. The home page of Hotmail loaded up but I didn’t bother trying to log in.

Anybody got any good dirt on the situation?

Just to keep things brief:
I dreamt I had a fish tank with a few kinds of viscious, snappy fish in it, and a small octopus and some other kind of shellfish or something. I accidentally screwed up the whole aquairum by collapsing one of the sides leaving only a tiny bit of water at the bottom, and nearly crushing the fish. I set everything back up and added in the appropriate salt water for this collection of pirhana like fish. (One looked like one of those clap-trap deals from Donkey Kong Jr.)
Next time I looked into the fish tank, it was full of irridescent octopi. They would look like small, but relatively normal, bluish and reddish octopi, then they would contract and glow in neon colors with cartoon faces. I watched this in fascination, as more were arrising, born out of the dead bodies of the fish that did in fact die because I had broken the tank.
That’s all I remember now. There was so much more. There has been so much more lately but I unfortunately haven’t had time to record the overall details. I have been told I need to watch Until the End of the World. …I can’t imagine why.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lassi
Yogurt drink! Also comes in “fuck you up” flavor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosewater
I have a bottle of this in my fridge.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achaemenid_dynasty
Ultimately broken by Alexander the Great and the Greeks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_II_of_Russia
She didn’t die doing it with a horse, sicko.
“Men make love more intensely at 20, but make love better, however, at 30.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coup (as in Coup d’état)
I wonder how many people have been tempted to add Bush under the list of “Currently-serving leaders who came to power via coups”?

That is all!