Behold. “Steamboat Willie” was the first Mickey Mouse cartoon. [First distributed in theaters, not first produced —Ed.] It premiered November 18, 1928, at the Colony Theater in New York City. It was also the first cartoon to have synchronized sound. If you watch the whole thing, which I had never done until last year, you’ll [...]
Inevitably, I will post at least one of the seemingly numerous videos available of Ira Glass telling people how to tell stories. But until then, I’ll stick with the video below. It’s a clip from a Woody Allen film. If you haven’t seen his Hannah and Her Sisters, I’m spoiling things a bit by putting [...]
In The Odd Couple, Oscar Madison admits to his ex-wife in California that he’s weeks late paying his alimony. He gets off the phone, sits down with his poker buddies, and announces: “I’m $800 behind in alimony. Let’s raise the stakes.” Eight-hundred dollars. We wonder how much that would be today. The Bureau of Labor [...]
Although the flooding is near completion–the last city to be inundated is going under this fall–the consequences of China’s Three Gorges Dam will shudder through generations. But that’s a big story, and big stories are hard to tell well. One way is to find a character, a family, a community, and to show how the [...]
Bollywood production with big Bollywood star comes to the Bay Area, and they wouldn’t let me take any photos. That’s the view toward their San Jose set yesterday. The city hall rotunda in San Jose was “Golden Gate, Inc.,” hence the sign outside. It is apparently also called “Golden Gate Engineering,” if the signs [...]
I recently saw a scene from a film called The Adventures of Prince Achmed (Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed), accompanied by original score, on an arts channel a couple of weeks ago. Here’s a short clip of what I saw, with a new score by the Khoury Trio. Achmed has escaped to China with the [...]
As is customary when wasting any significant amount of time on YouTube, I stumbled across a cute enough little animation about an ambitious, yearning kiwi. And then another version of the same cartoon, this time with the Gary Jules/Michael Andrew song “Mad World” dubbed on top. It all seemed suitably angst-ridden. Kiwi and other videos, [...]
An older and very accomplished journalist once wrote to me that the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he went, is “a jealous god.” And sometimes, I think, so am I. Let’s say “demigod.” That accursed Wes Anderson. He is so good, our sensibilities are so complimentary, I would love to make the movies [...]
The following was intended to be blogged, but at the time I had no blog. The related pictures have been viewed more than any of my other, better pictures. But SFist.com linked to it, so what can you do? September 21, 2005 I was walking to my train stop at Duboce Park this morning when [...]
It is sometimes immature and sometimes inappropriate but mostly pretty funny. “Ha Ha Ha America” is an intentionally mistranslated short documentary that is gaining popularity due to its brevity, its humor, and its availability on the internets. The narration is, I think, not translated at all, but simply affected so as to read like a [...]
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