All that talk about the death of cinema gave me a reason to once again seek out Hitchcock’s Vertigo. It’s all David Thomson’s damn fault. In his obit (or, um, get well card) for the movies, he invoked this year’s Sight & Sound poll, the once-a-decade list to end all lists that finally (finally!) dethroned Citizen Kane and instead named Hitchcock’s flick as the top dog.¹

My reading lists and social feeds have been flooded with takes on the Sight & Sound list, but for whatever reason I have waited until now to actually go the video store and rent² Vertigo. Thomson’s ludicrously masked cynicism (“You see how positive I am being…”) pushed me over the edge.

Now that it’s fresh in my mind I thought I’d share some thoughts.

First off: it’s a crime that there isn’t a Vertigo Blu-ray available right now. Everything about this film screams big screen, from Saul Bass’s iconic opening titles to the lush San Francisco scenery. Worse, the best current DVD release is 4:3 letterboxed as opposed to 16:9 anamorphic, meaning the pixels are presently as constrained as possible. Vertigo demands a higher resolution on any sized screen.

So there I was, trying my damndest not to compare Hitchcock to Welles, a problem I never really had before the S&S list came out. All I could think for roughly the first 80 minutes of the film was “Is this really that much better than Kane?” The answer doesn’t matter because the question is, of course, flawed.

But then Vertigo becomes another film. The tale we initially settle into turns out to be a Macguffin for an altogether different type of mystery. To take an analogy a bit too far, Hitchcock not only holds his cards close to his chest, he also stacks the deck and shuffles it thrice. It’s brilliant and bold.

Modern films hinge heavily on twists, which tend to reveal themselves in the third act. That can be satisfying, but it isn’t the only way to surprise an audience. Hitchcock’s trick in Vertigo is to keep the audience focused squarely on the many twists built into the film while telling a wrenching tale of psychosis.

The reason we have become so obsessed with “Spoiler Alerts” is that so many of the films that make it to multiplexes today rely almost entirely on one or two surprises. Take them away and you are often left with nothing but a bland and straight narrative. Vertigo works on so many different levels that it is ostensibly spoiler-proof. No matter how many viewings you sit through, it will never be the same film twice.

Modern storytellers could learn a trick or two from Hitchcock’s masterwork. Hopefully, thanks to its newfound popularity, we’ll all be able to see it in an HD transfer soon.

It’s been a hot minute since someone has made the bold case for the death of cinema, by which I mean it’s an argument that’s made so often it has been rendered completely meaningless. But hey, it’s the weekend, let’s indulge anyway.

Cinema is merely a Schrödinger’s Cat for our philosphers to ponder. Their conclusions are inconsequential, but the conversation is a hoot. For your enjoyment, here are three articles on this moldy (although tasty) topic:

1. Has Hollywood Murdered The Movies? by David Denby
2. American Movies are Not Dead: They are Dying by David Thomson
3. The Movies Aren’t Dying (They’re Not Even Sick) by Richard Brody

I came to Denby’s and Thomson’s respective pieces by way of Brody’s. I recommend reading them in the order above so as to feel the full impact of Brody’s final word.

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. must have smoked the good stuff before pooping this out for the Wall Street Journal:

Video-content owners, including everyone from the TV networks and Hollywood and the NFL and Major League Baseball, aren’t the music industry or even the book industry.

OMG I know…

Video-content owners aren’t looking for a savior and ultimately won’t be satisfied with anything less than an open ecosystem accessible by any device.

Jenkins is trying to make an otherwise fair point, that Apple has a tough road ahead in the TV realm, but instead he offers up this complete and utter lie about the television industry.

The inane fragmentation we see in TV is a boon to networks; it allows them to retain the status quo. Just look at the NFL, whose games can only be streamed to a PS3 and only if users also subscribe to DirecTV. Sounds open to me.

Dear busy businesspeople who read the Wall Street Journal: don’t listen to this clown.

(via The Loop.)

This week, the candler blog is brought to you by The New York Film Academy. My thanks to them for sponsoring and supporting the site.

Who makes the movie? Is it the lead actor or cast? The screenwriter? Some say it’s ultimately the editor, while for others it’s the producer. The question has no easy answer, as these roles often overlap and it varies from film to film.

But note that for many actors of accomplishment—think Robert Redford or Ron Howard—the path upwards leads to producing. Producers are the captains of the ship, even when the ship goes down (that’s a James Cameron joke).

At the New York Film Academy, the Producing Program is among the most popular at the film school. Students with more guts than experience undertake the demanding, hands-on program at the school’s New York and Los Angeles campuses. It’s a fast-paced, intensive, hands-on program that addresses the nature of selling investors through story treatments, scripting, casting, budgeting, schedules and marketing. As everyone knows, getting a distributor is everything in producing a film, and this school treats that task with proportionate attention.

Ryan Gallagher, my pal and Backlot collaborator, got an iPhone 5 yesterday. Then he went ahead and made some gorgeous wallpapers for the thing from Criterion Collection cover art. Check ’em out here, here and here.

I think The Great Dictator is my favorite.

Me, a year ago today:

In an honest and transparent message to customers today, CEO and co-founder Reed Hastings expressed regret over his handling of the company’s recent restructuring and announced that the disc-by-mail service will soon be spun off into a separate product known as Qwikster. Netflix proper will be a streaming only company.

j/k!

What a year it has been for Netflix. All the chatter nowadays revolves around the company’s original programming and their exhumation of Arrested Development. We all seem to forget that they were in a tailspin only twelve months ago after a series of poor decisions.

In the end, common sense won over. The company never got Qwikster off the ground,¹ they implemented the price hike as they always said they would and Hastings remains at the company’s helm relatively unscathed. His colleagues, however, were picked off one by one.

Consumers have a short memory. Netflix’s streaming service is far more compelling than what the competition has to offer, and their disc-by-mail service is still a cash-cow. There is a lesson here somewhere, but I’ll be damned if I can figure it out. Hastings’s self-described “arrogance” gutted his company’s board, initiated the exodus of nearly a million customers and tarnished one of the best names in customer service. And then, piece by piece he put the company back on track.

So, go with your gut? Break some eggs to make an omelet? Be Reed Hastings?

I’m perpetually changing the way I use OmniFocus. The only thing I’ve used it consistently for since purchasing it in 2009 is as a grocery list. Otherwise, my workflow is up in the air. When I get into a groove (as I am now) though, it is the best tool to make me get off my tushy and get things done. As it turns out, I also happen to enjoy fiddling with how I use it.

Allow Me to Introduce PlainTasksOF

Enter PlainTasks, Allen Bargi’s todo plugin for Sublime Text 2 that got some attention this week from the Mac bloggerati. Similar in function to Hog Bay Software’s TaskPaper, PlainTasks allows users to navigate a plain text document as if it were a task list, making it simple to nest tasks in projects, move tasks up and down, mark them as completed and add tags to them. As in the case of TaskPaper, users get all the benefits of plain text, namely searchability, speed and platform agnosticity.

Bargi describes the plugin as “opinionated,” which is an understatement. With its legal pad yellow-styling, it feels far outside my box, but there was still something appealing about the idea of a plain text task list to add to my OmniFocus workflow, so I forked the package and got to work.

I made a new theme, tweaked the .sublime-settings, added new scopes to the Tasks syntax grammar and changed the way the package handles tags so that tasks can have more than one highlighted. I call it PlainTasksOF, and you can go grab it over on GitHub. Here’s what it looks like:

I don’t want to detail its installation here, though I’ll gladly field any questions you may have if you want to shoot me an email. Suffice it to say it looks and sorta-kinda works like OmniFocus.¹ Why? I don’t view this kind of plain text solution as a replacement for OmniFocus. It isn’t as powerful, simple or pretty. However, I’ve always had an idea on how to use these kinds of external lists, but I wanted a solution that looks similar for comfort’s sake. PlainTasksOF is a start.

Storing Repetitive Tasks

There are many sorts of tasks I don’t like keeping in OmniFocus. Some I’ll put on my calendar while others end up in Due. Filling up OmniFocus with granular tasks can get overwhelming fast, especially if they’re the sorts of things you have to do daily. The idea here is to use OmniFocus as a means of nudging me to do a longer list of repetitive tasks.

Clean the bathroom, for example, is a project made up of many granular tasks like scrub the shower, mop the floor, clean the inside of the toilet bowl, and so on. I don’t always need to do them all and I’d prefer not to set it up as a recurring series of tasks in OmniFocus. Instead, I could have one task for “Clean the bathroom” and link it to a PlainTasks list.

Let me share (what I think is) a better example. I’ve always liked the sentiment behind Curt Clifton’s “Review” task lists,² but I’ve never really tried adding them to my workflow. In short, Curt shared repetitive lists for reviewing his GTD workflow twice a day, once a week and once a month. It sounds like overkill, but the idea is to give you a basic guide to see what’s on your plate and what you’re neglecting. Here’s my modified version of Curt’s list:

* Process Email
* Review Today's Calendar
* Empty OmniFocus Inbox
* Review active projects
    Step through Active Projects due for review today
    * Any projects to put On Hold or move to someday/maybe? (Be draconian)
    * Any projects that are stuck?
        * Planning/clarity needed?
        * True next action identified?
        * Attach purpose, "success looks like", etc.
* Review Next Actions Lists

It’s basic stuff most of us do anyway, but by writing it out it makes it a bit easier to stay on track. I don’t want to see all of this in OmniFocus, but I do want a task to remind me to check what I have in store in the morning. Keeping it handy as a guide would do the trick. Here’s what the above list looks like PlainTasksOF:

I can tick off items as I complete them by hitting ⌘+d on the current task. When I’m done I can either close without saving (preserving the formatting for tomorrow) or restore an older version of the same list. I can link the file by dragging and dropping it into the note field of a repeating OmniFocus task where it can be double clicked and launched in Sublime Text 2.³

This can be used for all sorts of lists, not just repetitive tasks. I’m working on a list (and task) for films I’d like to watch and books I’d like to read. These PlainTask lists serve as a sort of cold storage for lists I don’t want to bring into OmniFocus, at least that’s the idea.

There are a few more tweaks that make this workflow a bit more viable⁴ but I’ll end this here. I’d love to hear feedback on this sort of system and hear how others use external list apps in conjunction with OmniFocus (or Things or whatever).

Vimeo just launched a new series of enhancements they’re calling Creator Services, starting with “Tip Jar”:

Vimeo Tip Jar allows your fans to show their appreciation for your videos with small cash payments to you. By giving a tip, you’re not only telling a creator how important their work is to you, you’re also giving them the resources to make more of it.

Early next year they’re introducing a pay-to-view option. Ever since Louis C.K.’s “Live at the Beacon Theater” experiment, filmmakers have been invigorated by the potential of self-distribution. The biggest hurdle, it seems, is conceiving of a hosting and payment pipeline for videos. Vimeo appears to have removed that obstacle. 2013 is looking like a big year for digital distribution.

Richard Brody:

The instantly historic video of Mitt Romney’s address to backers in Florida is important for its content, of course, but a significant dose of its affect arises from its visual style.

There are many reasons to read Brody’s New Yorker blog, The Front Row and posts like this are chief among them. I, like most people, see these videos and think of the breaking news implications. He sees cinema:

It’s the difference between theatre and cinema: politics used to be a stage, in which candidates performed with a rhetorical fervor and their conspicuous artifice was a source of ridicule. Now, it’s an open-ended movie, in which the camera threatens constantly to reveal actual character, and this drives candidates to an even more impeccable and impressive yet alienating technical perfection (as it does to many movie actors).

Distributor and wearer of many other cinematic hats Ira Deutchman learned some new info on how the Virtual Print Fee (VPF)¹ is effecting indie distribution:

It means that theaters are incentivized not to holdover films for very long. This is potentially the death knell for the types of films that require word-of-mouth to build into a hit. Now, we all know that the old fashioned word-of-mouth film has been on life support for a while now. A film like “Hoop Dreams,” which required 6 solid months of business before it started to take off could never happen today. But now will we be seeing films that could have played 5 or 6 weeks reduced to 1 or 2 in order to support the number of “turns” required by the VPF deals?

The only place to go next is to nix theatrical distribution of lower performing work altogether. I’ll bet there are a few studio heads who can’t wait to get these kinds of films out of their hair.