Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar’s I Want You To Want Me is an interactive art installation that mines data from dating sites. It was was installed at the New York’s MoMA on February 14, 2008, Valentine’s Day. (via BB:G)

The aborted John Carter Of Mars animation project that could have changed the history of animation back in the 1930s…

Directors’ Cameos in Films

Not very thorough a list, but includes some interesting videos.

After years of reading all the praise about The Wire on the internet, I finally caught a bit of an episode on TV yesterday (portuguese cable subscribers can watch the first season on MOV, weekdays at 21:00). Just as I accidentally zapped into it, I watched a it turns out classic scene in which two detectives investigate a crime scene while constantly muttering to themselves variations on the word 'fuck'. And the whole thing had such a class that in my mind it instantly downgraded every other depiction of policemen at work in film or television. I browsed the listings and watched the full episode when it repeated later last night, and I found The Wire nothing short of brilliant. Interestingly enough, turns out the series was created by David Simon, also responsible for Homicide: Life on the Street, perhaps my favourite TV show ever.

The thing about The Wire is that it feels Real, and to enumerate cop films that felt as realistic as The Wire, I say perhaps Serpico (by Sidney Lumet, one of the most underrated working American directors who owes nothing to Academia favourites such as Scorsese), or the 1950s classic Detective Story by William Wyler (which for its age is incredibly realistic in the portrail of a working precint). The Wire is no 'television' at all, it's more cinema than most films. And so are other TV series nowadays.

One of the things that really irks me about Film Studies and many critics is the constant labelling of different calibers of moving image as 'good', 'ungood' or as Evil Incarnate. I don't like many things on TV and I don't like the lowest-common-denominator culture that oozes from the networks, but I always felt a nasty pinch in my spine whenever someone gives me a variation of the 'on Cinema as Art and TV as Shite' speech. A big canvas in a dark room, a TV screen, a phone screen, or a webpage embed are all just different ways in which to see moving images, each with a different context. Just that. Different calibers have implications on what kind of images work in each, and some things do crossover between screen calibers and contexts better than others (i.e. Cinerama westerns relied too much in extreme long shots and watching them is only tolerable in a big projection). For the film/videomakers that just means an awareness of the destination displays. Artistic quality is something else altogether.

Most TV used to be bad because you only had big networks that were part of a monoculture and therefore little diversity. Today there's lots and lots of cable channels, all competing against each other and against the Internet besides movie theatres, books, etc. An explosion in diversity allows for TV series that are true works of art, and should no longer be regarded as the stupid serialized C-movies they never were. It's true there are things like CSI: Horatio Caine One-Liners or 24: Far-Fetched Conundrums Only Solved By Torture, but then you also have the movies of Brett Ratner or Rob Cohen. Bad TV is as bad as cinema can be. Good TV - can be just as good. ¶