Tag: movie

Will you go back to a movie theater for more ‘Sopranos’? This filmmaker is betting on it

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Kristian Fraga ‘s new film is nearly three hours long and mostly involves people sitting in chairs talking. But the director is convinced it’s a film that will get audiences back in theaters, where it is being shown starting on May 19.   There’s another hook too. The three-part documentary, being distributed by CineLife Entertainment, is about The Sopranos , so it’s essential viewing for fans of the seminal HBO show.   Fraga admits that to those who have no interest in Tony Soprano and his turn-of-the-century mobster malaise, Sopranos Sessions “will be like watching paint dry.” But his hope is that the film will also tap film and TV lovers interested in the craft of visual storytelling and the creative process of someone such as series creator David Chase, and that its intimate, pared-down nature will be a draw for theatergoers who have been pent up at home during COVID-19.   “I don’t have vistas or camels or spaceships,” Fraga says. “But the immediacy of the big screen and the experience of being in a theater where there are no distractions—you kind of get into the zone of the conversation.”   [Photo: CineLife Entertainment] There are many conversations. Read More …

Don’t get too excited about Apple Music’s ‘spatial’ and ‘lossless’ music

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I’ve often gushed about my admiration for Apple’s commitment to music. The company employs a lot of musicians or ex-musicians, and even more music lovers. It’s not trivial: It says something about the company’s culture and the way it approaches creativity and collaboration. Apple has obviously made many important music-related announcements in its time, but this week’s announcement about Apple Music offering “lossless” and “spatial” audio probably won’t end up rocking the world. Spatial audio Apple has been working with Dolby to begin making some of the Apple Music catalog available in Dolby’s proprietary Atmos format. Those recordings are meant to sound something like the experience of watching a movie with surround-sound technology, where sounds might come from behind you, above you, or anywhere else within a spherical audio surface around you. And sounds can move around in that space, so a guitar solo might seem to slowly circle above your head (which is cool, because guitar solos are boring). Apple says it’s going to start off with a few thousand Atmos songs in June, including some from Ariana Grande, Kacey Musgraves, and others, and then add more tracks over time. When the spatial support launches next month, Apple devices will be set to play available songs by default, rather than the regular binaural mix. I’ve no doubt the Atmos mixes themselves will be true to the spatial concept. Read More …

HBO Max is Discovery’s ’90 Day Fiancé.’ Does this marriage make sense?

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The announcement of the megamerger between Discovery Communications and WarnerMedia on Monday underscored several things: that AT&T, which spent $85 billion just three years ago to acquire TimeWarner in an attempt to seamlessly marry entertainment and mobile communications had arrived at the conclusion that that effort was anything but seamless, and was now spinning off its entertainment assets. (Offloading some of AT&T’s $160 billion debt was also a motivating factor.) Consolidation in Hollywood is the way forward. (Unless regulators block tie-ups like this.) And the future, more than ever before, is all about streaming Read More …

Meet the mystery woman who mastered IBM’s 5,400-character Chinese typewriter

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I had seen this woman before. Many times now. I was certain of it. But who was she? In a film from 1947, she’s operating an electric Chinese typewriter, the first of its kind, manufactured by IBM. Semi-circled by journalists, and a nervous-looking middle-aged Chinese man—Kao Chung-chin, the engineer who invented the machine—she radiates a smile as she pulls a sheet of paper from the device. Kao is biting his lip, his eyes darting back and forth intently between the crowd and the typist. As soon as I saw that film, I began to riffle through my files. I’m a professor of Chinese history at Stanford University, and I was years into a book project on the history of modern Chinese information technology—and the Chinese typewriter specifically. By that point, I had amassed a large and still-growing body of source materials, including archival documents, historic photographs, and even antique machines. My office was becoming something of a private museum. As I thought, I’d encountered the typist previously in my research, in glossy IBM brochures and on the cover of Chinese magazines. Who was she? Why did she appear so frequently, so prominently, in the history of IBM’s effort to electrify the Chinese language? Read More …

Meet the mystery woman who mastered IBM’s 5,400-character Chinese typewriter

Posted onAuthoradmin

I had seen this woman before. Many times now. I was certain of it. But who was she? In a film from 1947, she’s operating an electric Chinese typewriter, the first of its kind, manufactured by IBM. Semi-circled by journalists, and a nervous-looking middle-aged Chinese man—Kao Chung-chin, the engineer who invented the machine—she radiates a smile as she pulls a sheet of paper from the device. Kao is biting his lip, his eyes darting back and forth intently between the crowd and the typist. As soon as I saw that film, I began to riffle through my files. I’m a professor of Chinese history at Stanford University, and I was years into a book project on the history of modern Chinese information technology—and the Chinese typewriter specifically. By that point, I had amassed a large and still-growing body of source materials, including archival documents, historic photographs, and even antique machines. My office was becoming something of a private museum. As I thought, I’d encountered the typist previously in my research, in glossy IBM brochures and on the cover of Chinese magazines. Who was she? Why did she appear so frequently, so prominently, in the history of IBM’s effort to electrify the Chinese language? The IBM Chinese typewriter was a formidable machine—not something just anyone could handle with the aplomb of the young typist in the film. On the keyboard affixed to the hulking, gunmetal gray chassis, 36 keys were divided into four banks: 0 through 5; 0 through 9; 0 through 9; and 0 through 9. With just these 36 keys, the machine was capable of producing up to 5,400 Chinese characters in all, wielding a language that was infinitely more difficult to mechanize than English or other Western writing systems Read More …