I made this with my good friend Jon Stuyvesant at Milk Products Media. Gilbert is an absolute riot; nothing was off limits. Watch to your heart’s content.

{% vimeo 22696138 %}

Last week, Apple previewed the forthcoming edition of Final Cut Pro, dubbed Final Cut Pro X. I’ve written [here](http://www.candlerblog.com/2010/11/12/a -wish-list-for-the-2011-final-cut-studio/) [before](http://www.candlerblog.com/2010/11/17/final-aperture-pro-an-idea-for- whats-to-come/) about what I would like to see in the next iteration of the app and I thought I’d take a moment to share my thoughts on this latest demo.

##The Price

A lot has been made of Apple’s pricing of FCP X, but I can’t quite see what the big deal is. Where once Final Cut Pro was only accessible through the purchase of Final Cut Studio, which most recently sold for $999, Final Cut Pro X will be available on the App Store for $299. Final Cut Studio included DVD Studio Pro, Compressor, Motion, Color, Soundtrack Pro and a host of other odds and ends. Dipping FCP X down to $299 for a stand-alone app sounds about right; it’s not a deal by any means. Being offered on the App Store may come as a surprise to anyone who’s ever spent a half day installing it, though I’ll bet the download alone will take some time.

##The Toy

I’ve been hearing that FCP X is a replacement for Final Cut Express, the $199 stand-alone, stripped down version of Final Cut Pro that Apple has been selling since 2003. This is total misinformation and I’m not sure why people are jumping to this conclusion. Perhaps the seemingly (but not actually, remember?) reduced price is fueling this perception. &nbsp_place_holder;Hopefully Apple will discontinue that product for precisely this reason. There should only be one Final Cut.

This melds with another point of confusion for Final Cut editors fearful of change in their workflow: whether or not this is a souped up version of iMovie. From the demo, it’s clear that Apple has taken cues from iMovie as it has evolved over the years. This has been expected, as the designer of the ill-received iMovie ‘08 came from the Final Cut team. However, the only thing it legitimately shares with the current iMovie appears to be media organization, something that has always been a sore point for Final Cut Pro and precisely the direction the software needs to move in the tapeless era. I expect that we will see Apple testing the waters more and more in iMovie for features that will one day end up in Final Cut. If that sounds crazy, just look at how iPhoto and Aperture have coexisted over the years.

##The Power

64-bit. GPU acceleration. Cocoa.

These are features that are long overdue in Apple’s pro video apps. Though there have been many advances since Final Cut 1 debuted in 1999, the current model you could buy in a store today shares not only an interface with the original but much of the same DNA as it is written in Carbon, OS X’s now outmoded API. I’m no programmer, but I know enough to know that Cocoa, Carbon’s successor, enables apps to access OS X’s most modern and most powerful technologies, namely access to the 64-bit processor (which ups RAM access way past the 32-bit 4 GB constraint) and access to any available cores on on your graphics card. Finally, FCP gets to use features in the system that heretofore had been reserved for designers and gamers.&nbsp_place_holder;

Apple’s approach to harnessing all of this power appears, at least from the demo, to be somewhat ingenious. For years, Final Cut has featured realtime playback of certain commonly used effects (color correction, text overlays, etc.) and hat worked out…okay. “RT Playback” would scale to your system, allowing only the effects your processor could handle to play without stopping to render. With FCP X, not only rendering but transcoding are, supposedly, a thing of the past. For certain tapeless formats (at least for DSLR HD footage) there will no longer be a time-consuming Log and Transfer transcoding process. Instead, you will simply bring in your footage and Final Cut will start churning through transcodes in the background. Effected shots will be rendered in the background while the editor is none the wiser.

##The Gear

Of course, all of this is built to scale with Apple’s systems, so a low-end MacBook Pro will run differently than a fully configured Mac Pro. The good news is you can finally have good reason to up your graphics card. iMacs in particular could become beastly edit bays, offering quad-core processing with graphics cards carting 1 GB RAM; and that’s only what’s available today.

Hopefully soon, Apple will unleash a new crop of iMacs with the usual round of spec bumps and, crucially, the recently unveiled Thunderbolt port. Since Thunderbolt is based around PCI technology, one could conceivably have a full resolution input/output setup with nothing more than an iMac and a breakout box. Once storage devices start shipping later this year with the port, editing high-resolution video will be completely unencumbered on the iMac and even on the MacBook Pro. AJA, Blackmagic Design and MXO have already announced interface devices utilizing Thunderbolt, while G-Technology and LaCie are advertising storage solutions as well.

##The Curve

The fear whenever an industry standard app gets rebuilt from the ground up is that the learning curve will be too sharp for some people to keep up. Apple has done what few companies in its positing would dare to attempt. Final Cut is on par with Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop in terms of market saturation; so many people rely on these apps that to radically change them could alienate users on a grand scale and, at worst, cripple the industries that rely on them. For this reason, those two examples have remained fairly stagnant for decades. Final Cut might avoid that fate or it might send editors flocking to another platform; time will tell.

The editors who don’t adapt will ultimately be swallowed up by those who will. I still use Final Cut Pro 6 without too much trouble (though I often wish I has a ProRes Proxy workflow), but think of the difference. On my old MacBook Pro, it takes about forty minutes to import an hour of Canon 5D footage. A colleague with FCP X would already be editing while I was out loafing (or writing a blog post, or watching Battlestar). The difficulty of the learning curve is no reason to avoid change. Plus, there’s always Avid and Premiere Pro (and other stuff I don’t care to mention).

##Modern Times

Final Cut and Avid were written around videotape workflows. Not only are fewer crews shooting tape today, but even film can now be laid off to digital files and stored on massive hard drives. The age of tape is one of precision and tangibility, with media that could be labeled, handed off, shelved, retrieved, and so on. But it is coming to an end.

We are entering the age of tapeless editing, one which asks us to be more stringent about backups, more exacting about our organization and more considerate about our space limitations. It is unclear how robust Apple’s file management is in FCP X, though they did show off some cool tricks involving keywords and smart folders. The Las Vegas demo focused heavily, in fact only, on tapeless workflows, which should be a sign of great things to come. Tape has become a hindrance that manages to slow down workflows even when it is extricated from the process. If FCP X can drag the champions of tape into the next era of post-production, then it’s worth not only every penny, but every headache that is sure to come on everyone’s first project.&nbsp_place_holder;

I, for one, can’t wait.

A physicist who identifies himself these days as a “cyber-control scientist,” my dad (whose bio you can read here) loves to dig into the feasibility of pop culture narratives.

…

It’s true that time is reversible, but entropy is not. They created a disorder and they have to bring back the order in an alternative universe. I can conceive of that. But you can’t violate the second law of thermodynamics.

This is, perhaps, the best film blog post of 2011. Definitely worth a read whether you like the film or not.

Peep World isn’t a bad film; it’s just weak. Still, I found myself laughing enough throughout to recommend it.

My review is up at Heeb Magazine.

Blu-ray is a [pain in the ass](http://www.subtraction.com/2011/01/10/blu- ray-blues), even for consumers. The major movie publishers finally got what they wanted in a home-movie medium: enough dynamic “multimedia” capabilities that they can boast “interactive” extras to sell more expensive “special editions”…

Still, I’d like to see a new version of DVD Studio Pro (or Blu-ray Studio, or Digital Studio) in the next Final Cut Studio update. I agree with everything Marco is saying except he leaves out the phenomenal picture quality of Blu- ray. In the hands of indies, who knows how great 1080p discs could have been all these years.

Conan O’Brien’s career has been well-documented both in the press and in New York Times writer Bill Carter’s extensive (and fascinating) book, The War for Late Night. Filmmaker Rodman Flender set out to flesh out his tale by documenting the performer’s summer long live comedy tour while he was barred from being on television. Save for a few salient moments, Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop serves more as a peek at the show he performed and less of a character study of one of the most fascinating late night stars in television. The unprecedented access is squandered, showing us little more than the Conan we already knew from TV.

The buzzword surrounding the film is “Mean Conan”, the unguarded version of Conan that punches his writers, threatens to fire his assistant and can’t help but waste his energy and voice for the opportunity to entertain adoring fans. The trouble is that there’s no clear narrative to the documentary at all. You basically come along for a ride on the tour bus through some forty-odd performances. To be fair, it’s a pretty fun ride. I couldn’t stop laughing the entire film.

My main problem is that the film doesn’t do much more than show us Conan on the road. There is mention made of how he came to lose his gig at NBC, but it skips over some of the more poignant points about his career turns over the years (the entire backstory is told through a repurposed Taiwanese animation). Very little is made of his career as a writer, or even of his time helming NBC’s 12:35 block (though even money says this was a rights issue for that footage). Those who know nothing of Conan’s professional travails will be lost from the get-go, which is why it plays more like a circle-jerk for fans than as a true narrative.

That’s not to say there aren’t some great scenes. In one instance, after a show in New York City, Conan’s producer Jeff Ross tells him not to greet the enormous group of fans behind a barricade outside his green room. “You don’t get it, Jeff. I can’t just go home and read a fucking Kindle after a show. I have to go out there.” It’s funny but it’s also a great insight on him as a performer and a character.

Conan puts himself out there, warts and all, in this film. I only wish a braver filmmaker had been behind the camera, or at the editing bay, to help bring out a more human picture of him. I was expecting something along the lines of Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, which works both as a portrait and as a comedy road film. Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop may have many great moments, but the piece as a whole never comes together.

All that being said, it’s funny as hell and definitely worth a look, especially if you’re a Conan fan. If you’re not, I think the Joan Rivers doc is out on DVD.

Greta Gerwig’s performance in Alison Bagnall’s The Dish and the Spoon proves she is not just one of the best actresses of our time, but of any time. She has the straightforward wit of Katherine Hepburn, the unflinching comedic backbone of Lucille Ball, the mysterious grace of Meryl Streep…I could go on. She is not the only phenomenal aspect of the film, but it’s worth being said and said again: Gerwig is great and must finally be shared with the entire moviegoing world.

In Dish, she plays Rose, a woman on the lam after her husband admits to cheating on her. It’s clear Rose has been closely guarded her whole life, rarely having to fend for herself as she does on her week-long wander through a Delaware beach town in winter. While trying to find drunken solace in lighthouse, she happens up a wayward British boy, played by Olly Alexander, whom she fears is ill. After lugging his sleeping body into her car, he refuses her offer to take him to the hospital and the two become fast, if awkward, friends.

What ensues are a series of beautiful moments which inform each characters' back story and emotional makeup. Bagnall masterfully makes use of her actors in Dish. In the film’s culmination, a colonial dance that ends in a violent confrontation, the director holds back, utilizing the space of the dance studio to build up to a moment of realization. It is a time bomb that only we are privy to, and when it goes off, it is beautiful, painful.

I can’t recommend The Dish and the Spoon highly enough. Gerwig, who had a lead role in Noah Baumbach’s 2010 Greenberg is about to reach her widest audience alongside Russell Brand in the upcoming Arthur. Hopefully, that will lead people back to The Dish and the Spoon so they can see what she is capable of when let loose on an interesting character.

Behind the Music” meets “Intervention” in Keirda Bahruth’s phenomenal documentary Bob and the Monster. It tells the story of Bob Forrest, onetime frontman for L.A. post-punk mainstay Thelonious Monster, whose experiences as a drug addict have led him to become an addiction counselor. Bahruth masterfully uses archival footage, home movies, photographs, staged sequences and animation to tell the epic tale that is Forrest’s life.

The story is one you’ve heard a million times. A rock star from humble beginnings falls into a pile of csh and blows it on heroin and other drugs, eventually bottoming out and either dying or living a meager existence. What sets Forrest’s tale apart is how he has come to recognize why he was doing drugs and why the addiction landscape has changed so much in the past few decades. He explains it best by admitting he once thought Charles Bukowski would have been nothing without alcohol, but the truth is that he would still have been Charles Bukowski.

Forrest’s life story, outside of his dealings in addiction, is fascinating enough. I don’t want to give too much of it away, but his childhood experience was mostly ideal, until it wasn’t, and that’s about when he fell into drugs. This point comes out organically and after we have already come to understand who he is as a person.

The film briefly goes into the issues of clinical addiction, the concept that drugs will help you kick drugs. Forrest quips that if someone comes to him on a prescription addiction drug, he tells them to go back on heroin for a month because it’s easier to get them to kick it. Unconventional, sure, but Forrest rails against the addiction treatment industry. At the film’s conclusion, he opens his own clinic where he can use the new methods he has studied. Dr. Drew Pinsky, a recurring character in the film, serves as a consultant to the practice.

Bahruth spent over 6 years making Bob and the Monster and her passion shines through in every frame. It is a lovely character study, but it is also a rock- doc. It is touching, funny and full of some great music. If it ever comes to your town, it is absolutely worth a look or two.

After Summit Entertainment complained that a TechCrunch article on Source Code was too snarky, a publicity liaison for Moviefone conveyed the message of the studio’s displeasure to the article’s author. She then proceeded to post the email request online and ball out Moviefone and AOL for dictating editorial to TechCrunch at a studio’s behest. Then [Moviefone responded](http://blog.moviefone.com/2011/03/15 /moviefones-response-to-the-techcrunch-post/) with a post that didn’t help their case all that much. It’s a very sticky situation, and many parties screwed up here. Let’s take a look at who screwed up what.

##Summit Entertainment

Summit should never have asked for an article to be changed. However, I work with publicists all the time and this is par for the course. They put critics and writers on the spot all the time. They are not journalists. From the perspective of a publicity company, the press is simply a marketing outlet, a place to get their client’s name in print to help sell tickets. It’s taking it too far to say they have no ethics, but they are certainly not bound to any ethical code as journalists are (or are supposed to be). So while I find their action here reprehensible, there is no real recourse. Should Summit have requested the article to be changed? Nope. Can I fault them for trying? Nope. Their’s is a dirty business and it’s up to us to keep our business clean.

##Unnamed Moviefone Liaison

If there is a patient zero or smoking gun in this mess, this person is it. Parsing out the e-mail he or she sent, the language is actually extremely careful. They’re not telling the writer to change the piece, they’re politely asking if they would consider changing it. This is what Moviefone is using as its defense of this person’s actions. TechCrunch is claiming that AOL is dictating editorial to them through Moviefone, but since this person wasn’t working in an editorial capacity everything is kosher, right?

Wrong. No one at any outlet should be looking out for a studio’s best interests. It was out of line to suggest that TechCrunch take any action on the post whatsoever. There are a few ways to respond to Summit in this situation. You could flat out say “no way”; you could lie and just not convey the message; or you could direct them to TechCrunch’s equivalent liaison. Had that happened, we’d never have heard of this.

##TechCrunch Writer Alexia Tsotsis

In Alexia Tsotsis’s post, AOL Asks Us If We Can Tone It Down, she splits hairs by linking Moviefone and AOL so directly. She has every right to be pissed by that e-mail, but citing the unwritten arrangement that if AOL ever steps on TechCrunch’s editorial toes they would publish any such correspondence doesn’t make a lot of sense. Moviefone does not act as an overlord of TechCrunch, and in fact they are closer to being on the same level in AOL’s family. This could have been dealt with internally. Someone screwed up (see above), but that didn’t necessarily have to result in the loss of credibility of an entire film site. The post’s headline is patently false and Alexia knows it. TechCrunch loves to fear-monger if it results in clicks, but this should have been an exception. AOL didn’t ask them to change anything.

##Moviefone’s Official Response by Patricia Chui

[Pure, unadulterated horse-shit](http://blog.moviefone.com/2011/03/15 /moviefones-response-to-the-techcrunch-post/). Here’s the steamiest bit (boldface hers):

The reality of our situation is that, as a movies site, we work with movie studios every day, and it is in our best interests to stay on good terms with them. Staying on good terms with studios means that we will relay information if asked. It does not mean that we would ever force a writer or an editor to edit their work for the sake of a studio – or anyone else.

I believe Patricia’s conviction in that last sentence, and as she points out earlier in the piece, technically, no one was telling Alexia to change her copy. But that’s splitting hairs. I’m more concerned with the bit about the reality of Moviefone’s situation, about staying on good terms with studios. No embargoes were breached, no arrangements upended. I can’t imagine how not conveying this message would have injured the site’s relationship with Summit. Moreover, her case is basically that keeping a relationship with Summit is more important than journalistic integrity. It’s a dopey statement to make at best. If it were a smaller film site perhaps no one would be surprised, but given the size of Moviefone’s audience, it sounds weird to think they would need to bend over backwards to keep a single studio in their Rolodex.

##Conclusion

This all really comes down to the balance of journalism versus publicity, or as Alexia Tsotsis would put it, Silicon Valley versus Hollywood. What Moviefone forgot in this situation is that there is a balance of power between the press and the movie studios. They may have the access to screenings and movie stars, but we have the audience they want. We don’t have to bend to them for anything because we don’t have to stay on good terms with the movie studios any more than they have to stay on good terms with us. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship.

It’s funny that this went down not 24 hours after I attended a panel at SXSW called “The Blogger Centipede: How Content is Eroding Credibility”. The room was full of elite film journalists (including current and now former Moviefone writers) all discussing plagiarism and credibility in the blog age. Towards the end of the session, the conversation moved to some of these issues, specifically dealing with publicists who are using you for good clips. It took almost no time for a situation to present itself which illustrates, at least, how not to go about working as a film journalist.

At last year’s SXSW, one of the films that stuck with me was Aaron Katz’s Cold Weather, a mumblecore whodunnit that took the “genre”, if you can call it that, to a new level. This year, the film that elevates the form is without a doubt Evan Glodell’s Bellflower, a post-apocalyptic (or is it?) love story (or is it?). It’s the story of two guys, Woodrow (Glodell) and Aiden (Tyler Dawson), who like to mod cars and are working on a flame thrower, just in case a Mad Max-esque apocalypse comes.

When Woodrow falls for Millie (Jessie Wiseman) in a cricket eating contest, the two set up a date which leads to a road trip on a whim from California (home of the street which gives the film its name) to Texas. It is the genesis of something beautiful, something pure: inexplicable love. The first half of the film is all about how a relationship can begin; how simple and stupid love can be.

The second half of the film is all about how a relationship can devolve into a steaming mess, and how wrenching love lost can be on the soul. That’s reading between the lines of the experience of the film, which is a jaunty, at times heart-pounding, trip. All of the main characters experience some kind of physical debilitation, all because of our femme fatale’s unfaithfulness. It is a pleasure to behold the dark and disturbing places Glodell takes the characters once they try to exist in a loveless world.

Formally, Bellflower is a gritty, lo-fi endeavor. There is use of plastic- looking lenses, tilt-shifts lenses, a sheen of unmoving glass against the frame and bits of dirt and hair sitting statically between you and the film on screen. None of the effects are throwback looks, but aberrations of modern digital filmmaking. The dirt, for example, would be more organic if it were shot on film, moving and jumping around the frame. There is also an inconsistency to the lo-fi-ness. Sometimes it is a clearly applied effect, sometimes it really looks like it was shot poorly. The highlights are constantly blown out in the film. This too is a problem that is digital- specific.

These image choices bothered me at first, until the film changes directions and rears its post-love, post-apocalypse head. The style becomes more motivated with time, and now has me reevaluating the first half of the film, back when things were still all well and good.

In mainstream films, genre cinema has become refined into a science. There was a time, like back when Mad Max (which is constantly referenced throughout the film) was released that you could make a genre film and still say something, still offer more than what’s on the surface. Glodell has taken one of the most popular forms of American indie cinema (mumblecore) and flipped it into an action film that says something about our emotions, about how we experience the highs and lows of the simple things in life. Everything here is implausible, including two hipsters’ obsession with fire and cars, yet it works perfectly.

Glodell is great as the tortured Woodrow, but for me, the real treat to watch was Tyler Dawson’s Aiden. To be fair, Aiden is more of a badass and less of a softie than Woodrow, thus the more fun character to play. Still, Dawson takes the character to unexpected places. He is a not just a best friend, he is the best friend, the one we all wish we had in our court. I think he has chops to enjoy a healthy career in movies, and I can’t wait to see what other roles he takes on.

There is a debate (at least amongst myself and a friend I saw the film with) about which aspects of the film are real and which are fantasy. Perhaps none of it is fantasy, and perhaps none of it is real. It’s difficult to tell, but not as a fault to the film. Bellflower is a movie that, if nothing else, will surprise audiences. It will inspire endless conversation on the ride home. For a small indie film about twenty-somethings falling in and out of love, that’s a hell of a feat.