Just for the Hell of It -- Episode Eighteen

                               Photo of the Week

                  "Molefay on a combo roller on top of a jeep"
                                  Courtesy of Shittyrigs

(Note:  Today's offering is a real grab-bag (or potpourri, if you prefer twenty-five cent words) of disparate items that didn't really fit anywhere else -- which, after all, is the raison d'etra of these JFTHOI posts.)* 

Sometimes you just gotta do what you've gotta do to get a shot, so you have to admire the pluck, determination, and inventiveness of the crew that came up with this lighting rig, complete with branch-a-lorus throwing a nice plant-like shadow on the background, providing a lovely simulation of light filtering through that palm tree.  

Half the fun of this business is making it work with what you've got -- that's what gets the monkey-brain inside all of us really cranking -- so if you haven't stopped by Shitty Rigs lately, you're missing out.  

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                                 Quote of the Week

"I'm looking forward to looking back on this"

Jersey Bob,  Digital Imaging Technician **

I have no particular reason for posting that quote, but Bob was a consistent source of snappy one-liners during the run of my now dead-and-gone-forever show -- and like that job, he will be missed.  

By me, anyway.

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Here's a very short story I heard the other day that's enough to make any industry veteran cringe.

“Years ago my brother was building sets on a Harrison Ford movie and lost his pager. While Harrison was filming a scene, a pager went off inside a wall. They had to stop filming and cut a hole in that wall to get it out to resume filming.” 

Given that Harrison Ford started out building sets, I can only imagine how this went over…

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I do love the eloquent, thoughtful prose of Mick LaSalle, film critic for the San Francisco Chronicle.  Here's a nice example from his recent review of “Jupiter Ascending.”

“Almost every movie about the future is really about the present. In “Star Trek,” the universe of competing powers — the Federation versus the Romulans and Klingons — was really just a blown-out version of the Cold War, with NATO pitted against China and the Soviet Union.  Nearly 50 years later, Andy and Lana Wachowski make entertainment out of a host of modern anxieties in “Jupiter Ascending,” envisioning a future universe in which a handful of elites control technology and can live indefinitely. Meanwhile, the great masses of people live short, manipulated lives of meaninglessness and doom.”

The future?  "Great masses of people living short manipulated lives of meaninglessness and doom" sounds a lot like our world today -- but maybe that's just here in Hollywood.

And last but not least, a video treat from the good people at HBO, called Talking Funny, a roundtable discussion on the subject of comedy with Louis CK, Jerry Seinfeld, Ricky Gervais, and Chris Rock -- four guys who know a little something about the subject. It's not short -- something over half an hour, as I recall -- but definitely worth your time.  

Especially if (like me), you're not working these days.

Check it out…

* That'll be fifty cents, please.

** To learn more about what a Digital Imaging Technician does, click this.