Now the story:

Earlier this month, my brother Gerritt and his wife Melanie hosted a party at their house. Gerritt made a playlist of party music, and I suggested we play a movie to serve as “visual noise” for people to talk about and smile at. I went on Netflix queued up the 1963 epic Jason and the Argonauts.

As we played this movie at the party, we were all amazed at how every scene seemed to sync perfectly with whatever song was playing. When the Black Eyed Peas’ “I Gotta Feeling” came on, it was truly a Pink-Floyd-meets-The-Wizard-of-Oz moment.

We imagined a video: the greatest scenes from Jason and the Argonauts condensed and synchronized to “I Gotta Feeling.” Making that video felt not only logical, but mandatory.

The following week, I attended a panel discussion about Internet video at the South-by-Southwest conference in Austin, at which I heard two film/video artists (Brett Gaylor and Elisa Kreisinger) talk about the creative energy that goes into remixing other people’s work. I felt inspired. People really enjoy creating and watching these mashups. This helped me justify investing some of my spare time in this editing project.

Back at my computer, I started clipping and ordering the best scenes from Jason and the Argonauts. I soon realized that “I Gotta Feeling” is a stupefyingly long song. To make this project as fast-paced and funny as I envisioned, I would need more monsters. This led to a month-long obsession with the brilliant work of special effects artist Ray Harryhausen. I scanned through The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), Mysterious Island (1961), One Million Years B.C. (1966) and Clash of the Titans (1981). One scene at a time, I built this video synced to the Black Eyed Peas song.

I find digital video editing to be good stress relief. I get lost in the positive feedback loop of every scene coming together, getting better with each hour spent. One reason I appreciate the precision of digital video so much (other than that I’m a control freak) is that I learned video editing in college using VHS decks, which were an exercise in frustration and creative compromise. The most basic editing tools on today’s home computers are a thousand times better than the old way.

I made this video for fun, but I think it improved my editing skills, too. I also found a renewed appreciation for the hand-built, analog creations of Ray Harryhausen. His stop-motion models still hold their magic decades later, viewed frame-by-frame on a digital screen.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

Now, time travel to present day. Beth Grant has showed up in a Skittles commercial. I love this:

I’ve written before about how much I enjoy Skittles’ TV advertising. Truth is, I don’t even eat Skittles. They were the sticky, waxy snack I gnawed on at the movies when I was 11. (I seem to remember eating an entire one-pound bag with my friend Doug while watching “Hot Shots.”) They’re the candy you move on to after you’ve devoured all the Milky Ways in your Halloween basket. They’re, above all, for children. Which makes it all the more weird that their TV commercials over the last few years (under the guidance of ad agency TBWA\Chait\Day) have been so twisted and grown-up.

Do kids get these ads? Does anybody get these ads?

If you want to read more about Beth Grant, she recently did an interview with The Onion A.V. Club.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

“I wouldn’t sell my bike for all the money in the world!,” Pee-Wee declares. “Not for a hundred billion million trillion dollars!”

Right on! Fact: This movie launched director Tim Burton’s career. Fact: This movie spawned the sugary 1980s Saturday morning classic Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, beloved by millions of children. Fact: Every time you hear the song “Tequila” by The Champs, you picture Pee-Wee dancing on the bar.

This movie also has the best bicycle chase scene ever committed to film. Beyond dispute.

Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure isn’t just incidentally about a bike. It captures something about the mind of the cyclist. Pee-Wee is obsessive. After his bike gets stolen, he drags his best friends into his basement for a three-hour presentation of all the meaningless evidence he’s collected. Then he gets offended when they leave. Convinced of his own rightness, he sets off alone on a quest, following a sort of trippy version of Route 66.

Later, while gazing at a sunrise from atop of a giant roadside dinosaur, he encourages his new friend Simone to follow her dreams. It’s a speech about being driven, about having a work ethic. Following his own advice, Pee-Wee keeps going. But it turns out Pee-Wee is tilting at windmills. Who hasn’t invested a great deal of effort in a project only to discover there is no basement at the Alamo? This is how Pee-Wee learns humility. He fails and he is better for it. What could be more American?

“Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure” reminds us of all the good things about childhood we were too young to appreciate at the time. This film lets us indulge in the dream that obsessive perseverance always pays off. It’s even delivered as a resurrection story: If your bike gets stolen, it just might come back.

In the movie, Pee-Wee eventually finds his bike. In the real world, Paul Reubens would fall from grace, his career as a children’s entertainer never to recover. Reubens is now trying to stage a Pee-Wee revival with a new theatrical show. Seems misguided, but who knows? Skinny gray suits have finally come back in style.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

The other day at work I was coding an e-mail newsletter while listening to Dr. Dre and realized: I am pulling a total Michael Bolton.

Ten years ago, Mike Judge directed a movie set at a dot-com company in the generic American suburbs. It flopped in the theater. But time has been good to “Office Space.” It’s actually gotten funnier and even more devastating as the trends this movie dryly observed have become more widespread. For people of a certain age, this movie is as much a cultural touchstone as “Star Wars” and “Back to the Future.”

Gawker uses “The Bobs” as slang for “consultants.” The Wikipedia entry on TPS report includes half a dozen pop culture references. Web sites sell red Swinglines and Initech T-shirts. The “Pieces of Flair” Facebook app has 4 million users. Call “Office Space” a cult movie if you must, but it’s one heck of a big cult.

You could lump “Office Space” in with Dilbert and the two TV iterations “The Office.” But the themes of “Office Space” are even darker. It casts the world of work as fundamentally unjust. Initech isn’t just a bad workplace, it is an evil to be vanquished.

Since the economy blew a tire last year, I doubt a week has passed at my office when somebody hasn’t made reference to “Office Space.” I am not saying this to disparage my company. But work is full of baffling stuff, and jokes help make sense of it.

It’s OK to hate your fax machine. Didn’t you get that memo?

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

Which makes me wonder, why own DVDs at all? My modest, tightly-edited DVD collection takes up one shelf of a narrow bookcase. Like my long-obsolete CD collection, seeing it sometimes fills me with buyer’s remorse. Eight discs of “Arrested Development” sit there mocking me, now that every single episode is available free online. “Pan’s Labyrinth,” “Casablanca,” and “Vertigo” are there too—and also available streaming from Netflix.

Netflix does cost money. But $10 a month seems damn cheap considering the alternatives: Video store rentals, Pay Per View, premium cable. I’m not opposed to occasionally buying shows a la carte. If I want something right away that Netflix doesn’t have for streaming (such as recent episodes of “Mad Men”), I may buy it from iTunes.

It’s the physical DVD I’m happy to live without. With so many shows online, buying a disc that only has one program on it seems like an idea from the distant past. What a model of inefficiency. What a waste of plastic!

I am using my DVD player with such decreasing frequency that I doubt I will ever upgrade to a Blu-Ray player. My next computer, especially if it’s a Mac tablet, might not even have an optical drive. TV shows and movies are all going to be on the cloud. Another point of friction in the media marketplace disappears. There’s one fewer reason to exchange money for “content.”

And Rupert Murdoch thinks I’m going to pay to read the news?

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

I wonder how many people who see this sign in Williamsburg are familiar with the movie and/or song?

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

The remake of “The Taking of Pelham 123,” I have to admit, is better than the 1974 original, which I own on DVD and have seen at least five times. But nobody said the original was a great movie. What made it notable was it’s attention to detail. Almost every reference to New York City geography in the original is absolutely accurate. It was one of those rare New York movies that respected the intelligence of trivia-obsessed New Yorkers.

I follow trains the way some people follow sports, so I was interested in whether the film was accurate in regard to the New York City subway, the setting where all of the action takes place. How did it do?

There are some strong moments, including a sharp reference to rerouting trains on the Broadway line, and a scene that weighs the merits of trains built by Kawasaki versus Bombardier. The climactic scene on the Manhattan Bridge was an amazing feat of filmmaking logistics. Good.

But there are some big problems with the movie’s geography, as well.

• A downtown Lexington Avenue train ends up on the Brighton line to Coney Island. Those tracks don’t even connect.
• The film relocates the Waldorf Hotel from 49th and Park to 33rd and Lex.
• The film relocates MTA headquarters from downtown Brooklyn to lower Manhattan.
• A police motorcade traveling from downtown Brooklyn to Grand Central Terminal crosses the Queensboro Bridge on the way there, which would be several miles out of the way.
• At one point the mayor is described as being on a 6 Train that’s five stops away from 59th Street, and his train is seen stopped at an elevated platform. All the stations within five stops of 59th Street are below ground.
• Several different train cars were used as the main car in the film, and they don’t match. Watch the doors of the 6 train during the film. In exterior shots they’re flat vertically, but in interior shots they’re curved outward slightly, as in the wider-bodied subway cars.

It’s too bad these continuity problems weren’t ironed out, as they were in the original. Still, the move is much better than I expected—too good to be ruined by transit geek trivia. It’s still 1,000 times better than “Money Train.”

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

It’s an elegant word that comes from computers. (Merriam-Webster: boot: “to start or ready for use especially by booting a program <boot a computer> often used with up.”) Practically everybody knows how to fix a computer bug by hitting a restart button. The computer clears its memory, runs its start-up routines, and after several minutes, presto!, everything is new again. It’s like un-popping your ears or cleaning your glasses.

These days, many of our economic systems could use rebooting. Think about where you work. Imagine if you could shut the place down for a period of time, rethink everything you do, and then restart with all the current problems solved, inefficiencies purged, bugs fixed. Imagine if a company undertook a careful study of itself, figured out what it did best, trained and redeployed its people to solve its hardest problems, and came roaring back to life. It’s appealing, isn’t it?

Unfortunately, nothing works that way. Outside of the world of computers, few problems can be solved by taking something apart and fitting all the same pieces back together again. Heck, even modern computers are designed to be stable enough that you shouldn’t have to reboot them. (If Vista gives you guff, rebooting doesn’t help much.)

If you wanted to reboot General Motors, you couldn’t just shut it down, wait, and then try again. You’d have to spend a lot of money and human energy correcting a system gone wrong. You’d have to invent new things. Creation is hard, and language needs to reflect that. The makers of the new Star Trek film didn’t just re-shoot an old sci-fi flick with better special effects. They respected an existing template, but used it to say something new. It was hard, it was expensive, it paid off.

Reboot just sounds lazy. I submit a better word: reinvention.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

I’m not a Trekkie, but I’ve always enjoyed Star Trek films, and I was excited about this revitalization of the franchise. The previews started rolling at 7:20, and the movie started soon after. At about 8:30, the whole screen went dark. A few minutes passed and the movie sputtered to life again, only to cut out again after a few seconds. A woman from the theater, presumably the manager, entered and apologized. She said they were working on the problem in the projector booth. She gave us an update every few minutes until finally it emerged that the projector was totally broken—no power—and we would all get free passes to a future movie. (Credit to this manager for handling this disappointing situation exactly right.)

Since we only saw about half the movie, here’s half a review of it.

I really like what director J.J. Abrams has done with “Star Trek.” Expecially the beginning—five minutes of breathless action in which a man dies and a boy is born and two gigantic spacecraft are destroyed. THIS is how to start a movie! THIS is what we’re paying to see! The movie stays strong from then on, following the life of James T. Kirk on his way to Starfleet Academy and, ultimately, as a crew member aboard the Starship Enterprise. When the Enterprise is sent to answer a mysterious distress call from Vulcan,

- End -

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.