cinema

In our Brooklyn Brothers Cultural Brainfood, I was suprised to see the difference between Avatar 3D’s first weekend takings of $27m and Call of Duty’s first day takings of $360m. It's not suprising to see this difference given the price difference between the two. I am assuming Avatar tickets were on sale at $10, so thats 2.7m viewers and Call of Duty were at $49.99, so that’s 7.2m purchasers.

I was somewhat entertained during parts of last night's 83rd Academy Awards show (promoted as "Oscar" this year), but far more struck by how irrelevant it has become. It used to matter much more, and fit into a broader continuum of community and engagement.

Here's a recent quick interview on NPR with Mark Coleran, the designer behind FUI (fictional user interfaces) that have appeared in many well-known movies: "What [a movie character] sees on that monitor looks nothing like what you have on your home computer. That's because it wasn't designed to surf the Internet or do your taxes."

Everyone knew that Avatar was a technically advanced, but you will probably be surprised at the amazing fusion of performance and technology. The whole special is brilliant and if you liked the movie you will enjoy this a lot.

by: David Polinchock

Catching up on my tweets this morning and came across this originally posted by the folks at ydreams (yea, I'm going through their entire twitter feed because they have so many cool ideas listed there!). So here's the deal, it's a location based movie, where your location is both the scene of what you're watching and the trigger for watching the scene. How cool is that!

by: David Polinchock

I have a degree in theater and, although I haven't performed in a lot of years, I'm still very curious about how all of these emerging & interactive technologies will impact the role and position of performances. I was a children's theater person, so a lot of the work I did was called participatory in theater language, but what it meant was that there were elements of the show where we expected the children to help move the story along. 

by: Jonathan Salem Baskin

A movie theater chain in San Antonio, Texas, caused a terrorism scare with promotional campaign for The Dark Knight that was a true bit of inspired insanity.

by: Gary Hayes

Have we reached a tipping point - with many more user hours spent with games than films are they now more culturally relevant (as in our cultures are saturated with them)? With most films having ‘game-like’ story arcs and, at the last count, nearly 80 films about games in production I am starting to think so.

by: Idris Mootee

by: David Polinchock