WATCH THIS: Redux Riding Hood

It only took over a decade to finally make this available to the public, Disney is good at shit like that, but here it finally is. The Oscar-nominated short Redux Riding Hood.



And the trailer, just for the hell of it.

4k Home Theater Cinema Test

The Sony 4k VPL-VW1000ES projector in all its glory

Engadget has published a good comparison of 4k cinema in comparison to 720p and 1080p. They did their tests with a Sony 4k projector, since there are very few monitors that can produce resolution that high.

The tests reveal what many people, myself included, have thought for some time: even with 1080p, huge resolutions are only necessary for those with huge displays. I have a 42" TV in my living room. I absolutely cannot tell the difference between 1080p and 720p unless I am sitting very close.

The only way that this resolution will EVER make sense is with a huge projector screen. I have never been one to say "Ennh! Crazy Kids! Black & white TV's are good enough!" I am not that guy. But when a technological advance is indistinguishable from the previous generation in standard use, there is no point aside from numbers.

For the home-theater aficionados among us, though, this is kick-ass. As Engadget showed, the 4k resolution is quite noticeable on a large screen, and the Sony doesn't suffer the significant drop in brightness that many home projectors did back in the transition to HD from SD in the late 1990's. If you have the money, and more important I think, the space, this is one delicious luxury. For the first time in history, a well-funded home theater can be a comparable experience to a real theater.

WATCH THIS: 38-39°C

38-39°C is a truly remarkably film. I had no idea that stuff of this experimental level was coming out of CalArts. The story is pretty abstract, to its detriment, and unless told, you would be unable to figure out that it is an artistic take on a father/son relationship. But I don't care about that. I care about the eye-popping richness of the animation. This is epic work.

$200mil Opening For "The Avengers"

I am in the middle of writing an article about the state of the movie industry. In a section discussing the growing disconnect between the all-time best performing movies and the best opening weekend movies, I made the prediction that with the trajectory as it is, we would see a $200 million opening within the next five years.

Well, I was so incredibly conservative in that estimate that it is now funny. The Avengers just took in $200 million on its opening weekend, essentially guaranteeing it a $1 billion worldwide take. Truly epic. And even if we assume that this movie bucks general trends and only earns 1/3 of its take on opening weekend, that still wouldn't put it in the top-25 all time movies. I see that as a problem.