Netflix is now available in Cuba

At least, it's now available for the few Cuban citizens with the resources needed to watch it. Access to the Internet costs far more than the average Cuban can afford, and even those who have the money are often restricted to seeing only what information is available on the government's tightly controlled intranet. All the same, Netflix's streaming video service has been available on the island nation since yesterday, which makes it one of the first American companies to take advantage of the U.S. government's decision to relax the trade embargo first imposed on Cuba in the '60s.

Outside of whatever the government allows to air on Cuban state television, many Cubans have never been exposed to much in the way of foreign programming, which means they have decades of Doctor Who to catch up on. In a press release, Netflix spotlighted the availability of original series like House Of Cards and Orange Is The New Black, and also took care to note that The Adventures Of Puss In Boots is now available, since it knows its audience. Generally, the company's Cuban programming is similar to what it offers in other Latin American countries.

"We are delighted to finally be able to offer Netflix to the people of Cuba, connecting them with stories they will from all over the world," said Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. "Cuba has great filmmakers and a robust arts culture and one day we hope to be able to bring their work to our global audience of over 57 million members."

Because so few people in Cuba can reliably access to the Internet, Netflix's decision to expand there seems largely ceremonial at this point. Now that the embargo is lifted, however, the company is betting that it will get more subscribers "as Internet access improves and credit and debit cards become more widely available." The plan to increase trade with Cuba included provisions aimed at allowing telecommunications companies to improve the country's Internet services. If all goes according to plan, it could mean the biggest nationwide binge watch in history.

This video shows how important film colorists are to making a finished movie

We're currently in the thick of awards season, and the coming weeks are sure to be packed with discussions over which actors, directors, and screenwriters most deserve to be honored for their work. Meanwhile, those toiling in the movie industry's less sexy professions—the line producers, script supervisors, and key grips of the world—will probably have to watch their better-dressed brethren receive awards from the comfort of their own homes, or at best from a table near the bathroom way in the back of the hall.

This video sheds some light on one of those under-appreciated professions: film colorization. Post-production artists have been manipulating image color since filmmaking began, first by painting individual negatives by hand, then by treating them with chemicals, and finally by touching up digital images with computer programs. With the proliferation of digital cameras, the latter method has become increasingly popular. As the video below makes clear, a lot of raw, unedited digital footage has a washed-out look to it, but shooting it this way preserves a ton of information that can later be manipulated. This particular video is made up of before-and-after shots from indie horror flick The House On Pine Street, which was colored by Taylre Jones. It gives viewers a great idea of just how much work is done on an image between the time it's shot and when it gets projected in a theater, and makes a compelling argument for seating the technical types a little closer to the stage.

[via No Film School]

Read this: Wired ruins The Hobbit by explaining why no arrow could kill Smaug

Hot on the heels of a dense exploration of the science behind Thor's magical hammer, Wired has published an article applying real-world physics to a climatic scene from The Hobbit. If this story about elves and dwarves and goblins played out in real life, the article explains, the dragon would have killed everybody.

In both J.R.R. Tolkien's novel and, presumably, Peter Jackson's upcoming film adaptation, the dragon Smaug is shot out of the sky with a black arrow. In his article, physics professor Rhett Allain focuses on the movie version of the arrow, which viewers got a glimpse of in The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug. After estimating its length, volume, and mass, Allain performs some calculations based on a flashback from the movie in which a drawf fires a different black arrow at Smaug. Allain concludes that this arrow, at least, moved at a speed roughly equivalent to that of a nerf dart. That's probably not fast enough to help the people of Lake-town defeat Smaug. That's probably not fast enough to help anybody.

After dooming the citizens of Lake-town to death by dragon fire, Allain rubs salt in the wound by explaining why the recoil on the ballista-like contraptions used to fire the black arrows would endanger the lives of anyone who operated them. Slow arrows or not, Smaug is probably still going down in The Hobbit: The Battle Of Five Armies, but the knowledge that the victory isn't rooted in hard science is sure to dampen the triumph. After all, no one watches The Hobbit movies expecting a break from reality.

Read this: A deep look at some of the mathematical in-jokes on The Simpsons

It's no secret that many of the writers on The Simpsons are great big nerds. A lot of them went to Harvard, a school noted for the high collective IQ of its student body, and got degrees in subjects like Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, and Physics. All that brainpower resulted in one of the funniest, sharpest sitcoms in television history, at least in the early going. It also bled into the show in less obvious ways, as Simon Singn makes clear in an excerpt from his book The Simpsons And Their Mathematical Secrets, published by Bloomsbury and now available in paperback.

The excerpt takes an extremely detailed look at a throwaway joke tucked into the background of "The Wizard Of Evergreen Terrace," an episode from the show's tenth season that finds Homer following in the footsteps of Thomas Edison  and trying to become a great inventor. While trying to come up with ideas, Homer scribbles down the following on a blackboard:

The blackboard isn't prominently featured in the episode, and most viewers could be forgiven for ignoring it in favor of giggling over the ingenuity of Homer's makeup gun. According to Singn, however, it contains a college semester's worth of mathematical in-jokes. The third equation, for example, predicts that the universe will eventually implode under its own weight, a setup paid off when there's a minor implosion in Homer's basement. The fourth line involves topology, an area of geometry in which researchers study shapes by bending and stretching them into different forms. Here, Homer has transformed a doughnut into a sphere, an impossible feat in topology, by taking progressively bigger bites out of it, as is his wont.

The second line suggests that Homer has solved Fermat's last theorem, a subject Singn spends over half the excerpt discussing. It's too involved to summarize here, but it suffices to say that it's not the kind of intellectual puzzle viewers have been led to believe Homer capable of solving. The full except is up on BoingBoing, alongside another one identifying which writers on The Simpsons and Futurama were incredibly, dumbfoundingly nerdy, instead of just the ordinary kind of nerdy required to write for an animated comedy show. They're both absorbing reads, and go a long way toward proving that your sixth grade teacher may have been right about math being fun after all.

Here's an intro to an imaginary Buffy animated series

Having previously given the world a terrific look into what Doctor Who would be like as a Saturday morning cartoon, artist Stephen Bryne has moved on to Buffy The Vampire Slayer, carving out a niche as the guy who makes intros to imaginary cartoons the world deserves but never got. Bryne, clearly full to bursting with affection for the show, has packed his intro with nods to Buffy's history, from Willow's changing hair color to visits from ghostly versions of Tara and Anya to a glimpse of a world full of nothing but shrimp. As with the animator's previous work, the character designs are incredibly charming, and the wild adventures the Scooby gang never got to go on make us wistful for the actual animated Buffy series that was developed years ago but never happened.

With stuff like this under his belt, we'll be on the lookout for anything else Bryne does in the future—perhaps an animated version of Game Of Thrones, or he could go the other way and make live-action intros for Futurama or The Venture Brothers.




[via Nerdist]

Give in to paranoia with this clothing line based on Nineteen Eighty-Four

If you enjoy wearing clothes, but don't think they sufficiently protect you from the gnarled, grasping fingers of omnipotent government forces threatening to steal your secrets and charge you with thoughtcrimes, this may be for you. The Affair, a British fashion outfit that specializes in tee-shirts inspired by literature, is trying to get a clothing line inspired by George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four off the ground. Naturally, they have taken to Kickstarter, rather than accepting investment capital from within a system that works only to sublimate the human will.

The clothing itself is fairly standard. It features things like shirts, pants, and jackets that have been cunningly renamed as Party Workshirts, Party Chinos, and Outer Party Jackets. The selling point is the presence of the UnPocket, a detachable pocket made from the latest in "stealth fabrics" that securely blocks all Cell, WiFi, GPS, and RFID signals. This will allow wearers to tweet or text about how their new garments free them from the prying eyes of Big Brother, or big pharma, or big dairy, or whoever, before they tuck the cell phone into the UnPocket, where it will never be touched again.


[via boingboing]

Here's a video about the history of showing text messages on film

Sometimes, it takes Hollywood a while to find an engaging way to depict emerging technologies. For example, the '90s are littered with strained attempts to make the act of surfing the Internet—an act that involves a lot of sitting and staring and not moving—look interesting enough to compete with action blockbusters of the day. Over the last several years, many filmmakers have tried to do the same for text messages, with mixed results. For the latest video in his Every Frame A Painting series, Tony Zhou takes a look at those attempts.

Zhou—who also dedicated videos to the comedic prowess of Edgar Wright and the chaotic visual style of Michael Bay—traces the history of filmed text messages from early experiments with shoving phones into the foreground of shots, to the current trend of having text float in the air next to phones, as seen on shows like Sherlock and House Of Cards. Like his other videos, A Brief Look At Texting And The Internet In Film is well-researched and crisply edited, although it may be useless in a few years after text messaging is replaced with some kind direct brain-to-brain networking system, presenting Hollywood with a whole new problem.

Here's a learned analysis of why Michael Bay movies are bad, but pretty

No matter how many buildings, spacecrafts, and sentient robots Michael Bay explodes before our eyes, the director can't seem to get any respect. His movies are widely panned by critics, and his bombastic filmmaking style is routinely mocked by respectable, erudite writers on the internet. Nevertheless, his films continue to clean up at the box office, so someone must be enjoying them. With the latest installment in his Every Frame A Painting series, Tony Zhou looks into why.

Michael Bay - What Is Bayham? thoroughly breaks down the director's visual style, with close looks at Bay's use of off-screen space, his signature twirling camera movements, and how some of his style can be traced back to West Side Story. Featuring comparisons to the likes of Hot Fuzz, Jurassic Park, and The Lego Movie along the way, it's a detailed, well-edited examination of what makes a Michael Bay movie tick.
Bay's movies will probably continue to make gobs of money, but this video may at least help his detractors articulate their distaste with a greater degree of specificity.


Michael Bay - What is Bayhem? from Tony Zhou on Vimeo.

NBC's attempt to find new voices in comedy immediately faces legal trouble

Earlier this month, NBC announced that it would be accepting submissions for new comedy series through a website called The NBC Comedy Playground, giving thousands of aspiring filmmakers with a camera in one hand and a fistful of dreams in the other the chance to see their visions come to life on the small screen. Now they are being sued for it. Comedy Playground, a comedy workshop in Los Angeles, has filed a complaint with the U.S. Central District Court of California accusing NBCUniversal of unfair competition as well as federal and state trademark infringement. The group's complaint—which is available to read on The Wrap—alleges that the similarity between the names will leave their potential customers hopelessly confused. They claim that they've already received multiple communications from people under the mistaken impression that their comedy workshop is involved with NBC, clogging their inbox to the point where only lots of money in damages can set things right.

NBCUniversal has yet to comment on the lawsuit, presumably because they're hard at work coming up with a new name for their website that doesn't fly in the face of trademark law—something like Laughs Across America, The NBC Comedy Playground (In No Way Affiliated With Comedy Playground), or The Second City.

AMC passes on sci-fi pilot Line Of Sight

Unable to squeeze anything else between the show about zombies stalking the ravaged earth and the show about the show about zombies stalking the ravaged earth, AMC has passed on the sci-fi pilot Line Of Sight. The series, a co-production between Fox TV Studios and AMC Studios, was to star The Walking Dead's David Morrissey as “Lewis Bernt, a National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigator who survives a mysterious plane crash, bringing him on a quest to discover the accident's cause." Fox TV Studios plans to shop the show around elsewhere, so Morrissey may yet play a man "whose entire sense of self, his own life and the world as he knows it, completely unravels in a whirlwind of obsession and paranoia” on another network.

The Lego Movie

Before making The Lego Movie, directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller made 21 Jump Street, an adaptation of a police procedural about two cops who go undercover as high school students to stop teenage crime.  To follow that up with an animated family film sounds like quite a jump, but the two movies have something in common: both take what sound like cheap attempts to cash in on pieces of pop culture detritus and turn them into warm, funny, genuinely involving comedies.  The Lego Movie exists to sell Lego sets, and it succeeds.  The temptation for many filmmakers would be to stop there, but Lord and Miller have gone further to make an hour-and-a-half long toy commercial that's actually worth watching.

The appeal of The Lego Movie begins with its visuals.  The film uses computer-generated animation to bring the blocky, jointless denizens of its world to life, but there's a charming jerkiness to the way they move that more closely recalls stop-motion animation of the kind found in The Nightmare Before Christmas than, say, the smoothness of Disney's Frozen.  There isn't one part of the movie that's dull to look at, and several that reinvent the look of cinematic cliches.  At one point, a large object crashes into an ocean, something most people have seen in one form or another in action movies beyond count.  But when the object hits the water in this movie, the be-dotted surface of the sea, made entirely out of blue sheets of Lego, bursts outward in a choppy, angular wave that's playful and surprising.  Even if the rest of the movie were a bore, the visual creativity alone would make it worth seeing.

Luckily, the meat of The Lego Movie is engaging and funny.  Our hero is Emmet (Chris Pratt), a cheerful construction worker having trouble establishing his own identity.  One day after work he has a chance encounter with alternative outsider Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks) and soon finds himself in the center of a movement to stop the nefarious President Business (Will Ferrell) from destroying the world.  The plot moves very, very quickly, blasting from one standby Lego setting (the wild west, medieval fantasy world, outer space) to another with the breathless intensity of a six-year-old boy raised on Hollywood action movies making the story up as he goes.  The movie throws jokes and pratfalls at the audience almost faster than it can react to them.  Pratt, who plays the irrepressibly happy Andy on Parks and Recreation, is a great fit for the lead role.  He never seems less than delighted to be saying his lines and makes sure the energy level doesn't dip below its manic, frenzied high.

The Lego Movie also takes great advantage of the many licensing agreements The LEGO Group has made over the years.  Batman (Will Arnett) has a role as Wyldstyle's grouchy boyfriend.  Gandalf and Dumbledore compete for the title of most learned wizard in the room, and The Simpsons' Milhouse shows up as a member of the resistance high command.  Sure, they're all in Lego form, but it's rare to have so many pop cultural figures gathered in one place.  The giddy inclusivity brings to mind South Park's "Imaginationland" episodes, but The Lego Movie doesn't depend on this novelty to support itself.  It's always rushing to the next joke, the next visual, the next twist in the story.

The final twist in the story is particularly loopy, and adds a meta-textual layer too inspired to spoil here.  All this movie needed to do was sell toys.  It will do that- kids who see it are going to be asking their parents for Lego sets for Christmases uncounted to come- but Miller and Lord have worked hard to make it entertaining for the rest of us, too.

A-

Now Scrubs is getting turned into a Broadway musical

Getting turned into a musical isn't just for movies anymore. Scrubs, which ran for a combined nine seasons across NBC and ABC, is set to follow in the footsteps of Back to the Future and American Psycho and be turned into a Broadway show. Creator Bill Lawrence announced plans to turn the the medical comedy into a musical via Twitter back in 2012, but he revealed more details last week in an interview with Entertainment Weekly.

The as-yet-unnamed musical is still very early in development. It will follow the plot of the television show's pilot episode combined with that of the first season episode My Old Lady, which finds the young doctors at the center of the story unable to keep their patients from dying. An outline of the Broadway show has been sent to composers, who are writing songs that may or may not be used in the finished product.

Zach Braff, the star of the original show, will shortly make his Broadway debut in a musical version of Woody Allen's 1994 comedy Bullets Over Broadway. As far as the Scrubs musical goes, Lawrence said that he expects Braff to be "involved creatively" but intends to cast the show with seasoned Broadway performers. It remains to be seen whether the Scrubs musical will successfully make the transition from screen to stage, like the stage versions of The Producers or Hairspray, or become an embarrassingly flop all agree is best forgotten, like pretty much every other time producers try something like this.

And here's Game of Thrones' Maisie Williams stabbing a wedding cake with a sword

 

Of all the actors on HBO's Game of Thrones, Maisie Williams, who plays Arya Stark, seem to go viral the most often. Last year, after her TV family was brutally killed at history's least enjoyable wedding, Williams posted her gobsmacked reaction on Vine to the delight to fans the internet over. If this picture of her about to run a wedding cake through with a sword is any indication, she still hasn't gotten over it.

The cake itself was made by UK bakery Choccywoccydoodah, which specializes in elaborate wedding cakes. Founder Christine Taylor explained how she and her team went about creating a confectionery tribute to one of television's most upsetting moments:

"We decided to create a slaughtered cake, rather than a red cake. The daggers, swords and arrows were all created from chocolate. We also included a cracked shield of the two families in the episode; House of Stark and House of Frey to symbolize the fact they are now at war."

The fourth season of Game of Thrones premieres on April 4.

PBS documentarian Ken Burns is now available in app form

Since debuting his film The Civil War for PBS in 1990, the Ken Burns style of documentary filmmaking has become familiar to many viewers, even if they don't know that's what it's called. Burns has been panning over archival photographs, enlisting celebrities to recite famous quotes of the day, and playing tinkly piano music under historical narration for over 25 films and counting. His work is dense and absorbing, but traditional to almost a fault. Not many people would describe his many mini-series as cutting edge.

Burns is working to change that. Yesterday he launched his very own iPad app. Simply called "Ken Burns," the app breaks down his 136 hours worth of documentary footage into short clips, groups them chronologically, and lets viewers sift through the entirety of American history year by year in a way that allows them to see how different parts of Burns' films "speak to" each other. Click on the year 1933, for example, and you can select a clip about FDR's fireside chats from Burns' film Empire of the Air, check out a bit about the effect of the Depression on professional baseball from his film Baseball, and so on.

Burns is currently working on new documentaries about the Vietnam War, the Gettysburg Address, and the Roosevelt family. Clips from his new films will be added to the app as they get made. If Burns keeps producing films at the rate he's going, the app should achieve total dominion over American history in short order. The app can be downloaded for free here, although it costs $9.00 to unlock all of the content. Watch a trailer for the app below.

Glee may be kicked off the air in the UK because of a trademark lawsuit

The United Kingdom may soon have fewer earnest teenage vocalists crowding its airwaves. A United Kingdom high court has ruled that Fox's Glee, now in its fifth season, is in violation of a trademark held by British company Comic Enterprises in The Glee Club, a stand-up comedy club with four locations in the UK. Comic Enterprises is owned by Mark Tughan, who brought the lawsuit in 2011 after one too many people walked into his club, realized that Lea Michele was not going to perform, and left without even buying a drink. Judge Roger Wyand wrote the opinion:

"I have found that there is a likelihood of confusion and Twentieth Century Fox's use causes dilution and tarnishing [of Comic Enterprises' trademark] ...the damage suffered by Comic Enterprises is caused by its venues being confused with the TV show and its potential customers being put off."

Glee's future on UK television is now uncertain. The court could issue an injunction ordering Fox to pull the show from the airwaves. Comic Enterprises could demand reparations for all the income Fox may have made from customers who tuned in to Glee thinking the show had something to do with The Glee Club. Or Fox could re-brand the show in a way that doesn't interfere with any trademarks, perhaps by renaming it The Good Time Singing Hour or Glee (in no way associated with The Glee Club).

Here's what Jesse Eisenberg might be like as Lex Luthor in the Superman vs. Batman movie

Last week, Warner Brothers announced that Jesse Eisenberg will play Lex Luthor in the forthcoming Superman vs. Batman movie. The internet was promptly set ablaze, with many wondering how the actor's experience playing a real-life megalomaniacal business mogul would translate into playing a fictional one. The good people over at Screen Junkies have created a trailer for the movie that splices footage from Man of Steel together with scenes from Eisenberg flicks like Zombieland, Now You See Me, and The Social Network to give viewers an idea of how that might play out, putting the issue to rest until the film arrives in 2016.

The part of the trailer that features Eisenberg staring down Superman and declaring his intellectual superiority in a menacing monotone suggests that he may have the presence and authority needed to play the popular villain. The part where Ben Affleck suggests that he, Eisenberg, and Superman engage in a threesome seems more far-fetched, but it's hard to put anything past a movie that cast Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor.

A filmmaker has raised over $11,000 to adapt a a piece of Sherlock fan-fiction

The BBC's Sherlock wrapped up its third season a couple of weeks ago and won't return until an unspecified time in the future. One fan is determined to fill that gap: film producer Naomi Javor is currently hard at work adapting a piece of Sherlock fan-fiction into a web series, with actors and props and sets and everything. The fan-fic in question, A Finger Slip, explores how the show would be different if Sherlock Holmes and John Watson had not, as in the television program, become flat-mates who solve mysteries together, but rather met in their late teens, bonded over a long series of text messages, and fell begrudgingly in love. It is available to read here, crooking its bony finger at you like a hooded figure beckoning from the other side of a haunted lake.

Javor, who is directing the series with a cast and crew of volunteers, has set up a Kickstarter page that has already surpassed its $10,000 goal. Whether you want it or not, she hopes to release the first episode in October.

Check out these gorgeous pre-production pics of David Lynch's Dune

 

Artist and author Ron Miller worked on David Lynch's Dune (1984) as a concept artist. Last week, he wrote about his time on the film in honor of its 30th anniversary, slipping in a defense of the often derided final product for good measure. He also revealed a few pre-production pictures that proved so popular he came back a few days later to post a whole slew of them, from sketches to production paintings to models to costumes. Dune divided critics when it was first released and continues to be debated among fans today, but few doubt its visual ambition. Much of that ambition can be traced to Miller's work. Sample some of his concept art below and check out the complete gallery here.

 

Programmers create scale model of Middle Earth, invite you to stay forever

Until now, those wanting to visit J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth had to settle for flying to New Zealand, buying a horse, and riding o'er the verdant hills while Howard Shore's soundtrack blasted in their ears- or reading the books and using their imaginations. Whatever works. Luckily, a group called the Middle Earth Digital Elevation Model Project (MeDEM for short) is working to close the gap. The MeDEM team has modeled the entirety of Tolkien's fantasy world using the Outerra engine, a tool used to create detailed digital landscapes with minimal amounts of data, which in this case consists of descriptions of Middle Earth's topography taken from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings books. When inside the model, users can zoom out and view Middle Earth from on high, walk around the barren plains of Mordor up close, and anything in between.

The build of Middle Earth currently on display is incomplete- there aren't yet any buildings in place, for example- but the MeDEM team plans to add detail to the model as time goes on, including "rivers, vegetation, buildings, roads, [and] even subterranean features." Eventually, the model could allow users to explore Middle Earth from the tops of the Misty Mountains all the way down to the depths of Moria. Just don't delve too greedily or too deep- you know what the Dwarves awoke down there.

Download the (free) Outerra engine tech demo and current build of Middle Earth here, and watch a video from inside the model below.

Showtime pits William H. Macy against the Super Bowl

On this coming Sunday, the Denver Broncos and the Seattle Seahawks will face off in the Super Bowl, a reliably popular athletic contest that in its last iteration was watched by an estimated 108.4 million viewers. In the face of what is expected to be, barring a series of impossible events, another widely viewed Bowl, most networks have decided to get the Hell out of the way. HBO, for example, has opted to move new episodes of its comedies Girls and Looking to Saturday rather than get crushed underfoot of the biggest television event of the year. Showtime, on the other hand, has announced that it will air original episodes of its shows Shameless, House of Lies, and Episodes opposite the Super Bowl, proving there is still a place for brazen foolhardiness in the television business.

Showtime executive Kim Lemon explained the decision: “We’ve looked at the competitive landscape, and we have an opportunity to be one of the few scripted alternatives on Super Bowl Sunday." The network will join PBS, which will air original episodes of Sherlock and Downton Abbey this Sunday, in taking a stand for the fans who will probably just DVR the shows to watch later anyway.