Star Wars : A New Hope, Not

I'm not sure why I decided to accept a casual invitation to go along with some friends who wanted to see Star Wars Episode III, some of whom had seen it before. I don't think my attitude towards George Lucas and the prequels is too different from that of everyone else who loved the first three; we trudge to the cinema with a feeling of deep disappointment but with a sense of stalwart loyalty. Or perhaps it was because I wanted to see how someone who could do so little with so much. Like every struggling filmmaker who counts the ticking of rental on the rented HMI's and dreams of million-dollar budgets, I would like to scratch at the coattails of the man who own Industrial Light and Magic but cannot seem to afford the affront to his vanity of hiring a script writer, or even a script doctor at the very least.

On the technical side of things, I've been curious (though not enough to pay the price of the Odeon Leicester Square box office ticket to really find out) what a film shot entirely digitally looks like on a movie screen. HD looks wonderful on a computer screen because that's where it was created, to stretch things a little bit. But HD progressive ("writing" the screen twice in opposite directions) is just the latest attempt to surmount the fundamental problem of video, which is that it looks false.

This is where it gets complicated. Video, whether by means of 3CCD or HD or in post, has a guilty secret aspiration: it wants to look like film. Digital cinema from George Lucas is about the height of the technology at the moment, so it's a good assessment of what is possible and what isn't; it is patently obvious that achieving the "film look" is still in a galaxy far, far away. Film looks the way it does because it works a certain way; it has a certain advantage in its ability to compress highlights and shadows, but mainly we like the look of film because we're used to it; we also believe more in an image that looks like it was shot on film. Even most kids today still grew up with directors who will ultimately rely on film, no matter how much CGI is done; it's all transferred back to film.

I personally don't think digital cinema should look like film; but, unfortunately, it has to look other than the way it looks now, because it looks like a videogame. The fact that it's sci-fi is a double-edged light-sabre: it gives it a certain excuse to look like that; but then it doesn't help that the script and production design are simply ghastly. The future of the image is digital, that much is certain; and the transition will have its growing pains; must we unneccessarily add bad writing and directing to these pubescent difficulties? I've seen the current state of digital cinema, and seen it clearly; I wish I hadn't.

Still, there's something about watching the credits roll and not seeing "Filmed in Panavision" at the end; I like the idea of the possibilities of digital cinema. Come it will; but take this direction it must not.

Waterloo to Paris-Nord : There and Back Again

London today, in insolent defiance of the official weather forecast, is blanketed in a heat wave; people are going around naked in the park (mildly acceptable) and in the crush between Piccadilly and Leicester Square. One of these shirtless men doggedly tried to pick me up with the tenacity of an Italian; whatever happened to the stereotypical well-dressed Englishman and the British reserve?

It was probably the same temperature on the centigrade scale at the Place d'Horloge in Avignon; but oh, it was glorious last weekend. I draped myself on the stone steps facing the Palais des Papes and luxuriated in the sunshine and the breeze, idly remembering and then dismissing the vague thought that we were well past the allotted time for our rented car on the parking meter. The rest of the the weekend was a Peter Mayle idyll; we based ourselves at the Hotel les Frenes outside Avignon and made the usual rounds of Aix-en-Provence, Marseille, Les Baux (excellent unfiltered olive oil); we went to the morning market at Nimes and went sat down for a round of Perrier-menthes. (Sadly, though, gone are the days when you could race around the French countryside at top speed; they've taken to enforcing speed limits and some very unfriendly people will be waiting for you at the tollbooths.)

Waterloo Station is ironically and aptly named; it is here that the unified European rail system disintegrates into the chaos of the former British Rail, now subdivided and privatised into a system of utter confusion. They've cut the journey time down now by making some improvements on the British side, but essentially the TGV chugs along at the speed of a railway carriage from era when there were compartments on the train instead of airplane-like seats. After the descent into the tunnel and the re-emergence on the other side, time leaps forward an hour; the train leaps forward into the high-speed mode it was made for, and one leaps into the glory of continental civilisation.

Pierre Gagnaire was unavailable to feed us, as was Guy Savoy, but a table for five was available at the restaurant Alain Ducasse; it was my decision not to book our usual room at the Crillon and stay at the Plaza-Athenée instead, where the restaurant (formerly Joël Robuchon's Jamin) has now relocated. Ducasse suffered from his usual problem of a leitmotif becoming repetitious rather than resonant (it was asparagus and caviar this time); but it was an excellent meal all around. And the Plaza-Athenée is beautiful, so beautiful: its winding staircase with the unending red carpet winding upwards; the attention to detail down to the selection of pillows; the exuberant red of the canopies that unfurl every morning. If it weren't for the prohibitive price of the aller-retour (£500 for a first-class return) I'd be back there this weekend.

The Greater Parisian Co-Prosperity Sphere (as we called our reunion in Paris) has dissolved itself; the boys are off to Prague, my cousin to Milan, and my brother back home. The last time I drove on the left was when I was in South Africa, but for the moment Chelsea is charmless and the prospect of a weekend alone at Sloane seems a condemnation. Perhaps if I can make my way out of central London I shall do the Lake District this weekend. I'm sure London will be interesting again; but can these boys please put their shirts back on?

Her Majesty and the iPod

It seems almost impossible to believe that I have a broadband connection in London; or at least I think so, as the modem is a tricky one it is, and the signal myseriously comes and goes. But for the moment it seems to be here for the moment. And I've missed blogging, oddly enough. I've missed it among other things that come with broadband internet access, which had become so reliable that it was jarring to turn on the computer and have all the widgets come out blank, my mail offline, my iDisk files unreachable.

Britain seems so wired (not in the sense of having had a great deal of caffeine, although there are coffee shops every two steps; whatever happened to a the English cuppa?): every company comes with an Internet address; you can pay the congestion fee over the internet. The congestion fee is apparently a toll that motorists have to pay when they drive their cars around in Central London; I've seen this in Singapore as well, but there it all seems (like the rest of the country) ruthlessly efficient: you drive your car under a bar wired with an ray-beam (or something) and it deducts money electronically. Drivers in London have to rush to a convenience store or get online to pay the toll; if they don't, there is a £50 fine. Which is fine by the Mayor of London, who runs the whole scheme and wants more people not be able to pay in time; the website is often down. Probably not deliberately, but an inefficiency that works to his advantage.

London would be a pleasant compromise city to live in if one had the means, and these are not lean means; one must be a very, very rich person to actually live well in London. It has the best theatre, bookstores, and basically can't be beat for as the cultural capital of the Anglophone world. But the shopping is better in New York, and the food is better in Paris. You can get about seventy per cent of what you'd find on these other great cities it is wedged between (and it meanders in the middle of the Atlantic if one ignores geography); but all at twice the price. You can eat well in London; but you can't eat well for little money in London; you can in Paris. Or New York for that matter. Which leaves the bookstores, which I haven't checked out yet; but in terms of theatre, there is something ironic about the fact that the best show on in the West End is The Producers.

But the British do have style; and when they put up an Apple store here they went to town. It is located in no less than Regent Street and flies a flag above the entrance; it's more like the lobby of an Ian Schrager hotel than a computer depot. One would wouldn't be surprised to see a royal warrant above the entrance, e.g., "Purveyors of digital musical equipment to HRH The Prince of Wales". Or even the Queen; who needs an iPod more than she does? Wouldn't an audiobook be just the thing to pass the time while sitting through the Trooping of the Colours?