If in the mood for a campy Thai drag queen spy movie with heavy buddhist morals – it’d be hard to go past ‘The Adventures of Iron Pussy’ which just screened at the Melb_Inter_Film Fest. Nevertheless, we have other important things to deal with this week.
Movies to Change Climate To
Under the influence of sites like say – www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net, www.energybulletin.net, www.endofsuburbia.com & say www.peakoilaction.org.. and say given the war in Iraq and with the TV flickering on about the current record high and rising price of oil – I was kinda curious about how the makers of the profoundly moving ‘Independence Day’ tackled Global Warming and other matters of Climate Change. Rest assured ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ is a gripping, stunt-packed romance thriller!
Not to take anything away from the money shots – New York hit by tidal waves and later freezing over, Los Angeles wiped by tornadoes, including a nice Hollywood sign rip-up – this is an emotional rollercoaster, it’ll sweep you off your feet, it’ll keep you on the edge of your seat, and yet somehow, miraculously against all odds, and despite the deaths of millions of people because of irreversible climate change, two teenagers will manage to find true love, and a scientist dad will fight off evil nature to rescue his son. Five teary stars.
Edit Your Mpegs
www.alfanet.it/squared5
Many online movies are encoded as mpegs – heavy compression that greatly reduces the file size of a movie. It is also uses for videos put on VCDs. This makes them great for sending around the internet, but unfortunately the way the audio and video are compressed together as one file ( called muxing ), means that it is difficult to edit these files with the audio and video in synch. There are quite a few small home-made applications available to extract the audio and video in various ways and then re-stitch them together, but the recent publishing of ‘Mpeg Streamclip’ is a very welcome and free! addition to the tool-kits of would-be collage-ists.
MPEG Streamclip converts MPEG files into muxed, demuxed, QuickTime or DV files with more than professional quality, so you can easily import them into your video editing app of choice. A cool function of this software is that you can select a portion of the file you want to export as an editable movie – not just the entire file – which is handy if you want to sample a small section of a feature length film for example. Just set your in and out points and bingo. Works like a treat – though is for mac OS X only. On the PC – I’d be reckoning the much recommended www.virtualdub.org might solve mpeg editind issues for you.
Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp
Aye Carumba~! If anybody has ever spent any time collecting footage of monkeys performing human tasks – the odd beer commercial here, the rollerskating chimp on a kids show there – they can appreciate the rare glimpse lancelink.jpgthese animals give us of ourselves, a reminder of our own animal clumsiness – and they can also appreciate how hard these clips are to find. If you have a friend like that, have the smelling salts ready when you introduce them to the wonderful world of Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp – an entire goddamn sitcom series made by the creators of ‘Get Smart’ where each of the 24 episodes is peppered with all the shots and cheesy sets you’d expect in a spy sitcom – except that every character is a chimp dressed up and moving it’s mouth in a talking like manner. Google this hilarity, and when you’re done – try the ace documentary interview with the directors by Jeff Krulik, I Created Lancelot Link, available free to watch here: www.planetkrulik.com/link.htm