My buddy Keith Ellis tipped me off to a LA podcast that had an interview with Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally. It was really nice to hear both of them talk about the business and their backgrounds in a genial, long form. There's some sweet history and analysis of the Chicago entertainment scene.
This April and May, I will have the good fortune to tour once again with the Handsome Little Devils, the Denver-based, nouveau vaudevillian troupe, in their hit show Squirm Burpee. I spent the better part of November 2011 with them in New York and New Hampshire in this "vaudevillian melodrama". I've praised these folks before, more from afar, and was hoping one day to work with them. And luckily enough, I get to!
I play the lovably evil Baron Vegan Von Hamburger, one of four characters in this non-stop thrill-ride of juggling, swing dancing, and steampunk wet-dream!
It was a welcome return to actually recite lines again, something I haven't done for about 3-4 years. I've been mostly sticking to the physical stuff with Cirque du Soleil and Le Reve. Now, as the show's malcontented narrator, I have quite the mouthful of soliloquies to growl and sneer through. It's a lot of fun!
This April we'll be touring multiple cities in New Mexico, and then immediately following, we trek over to Cleveland, OH for a week of the International Children's Festival at the Playhouse Square.
If anybody is in either of these areas, please look me up and bring the family to the show!
The next challenge is mapping out summer plans! Stay tuned!
Just taught my first Comedic Pratfalls class. It was a one-on-one with Le Rêve wardrobe assistant, Rudy Uresti. I was pretty nervous that I wasn't going to fill two hours worth of useable, interesting content. But it turned out pretty good. I think I'm putting together a solid curriculum for a bigger class. I've always thought I SHOULD eventually try my hand at teaching, I just needed an extra boost to get the ball rolling, and I think this class was it.
In the Vegas area and want to learn how to fall down correctly, safely, and funnily? Give me a jiggle!
Like an excited schoolgirl, I rushed to my computer to watch the trailer for Sacha Baron Cohen's upcoming comedy, The Dictator.
I've been a huge fan of his since Ali G, but I've admittedly been skeptical of both Borat and Bruno before they came out. When they announced Borat, I was actually disappointed. It was not my favorite character on Ali G, and I was hoping for an Ali G or Bruno movie--I thought they were stronger characters. Of course, when I saw it, I thought it was a masterpiece. Then when they announced Bruno, I was a little disappointed again. I thought SBC was going to just follow the same formula, I thought it was a bit of a cop-out. But then Bruno blew me (ahem) away! I also really enjoyed SBC's supporting performances in Talladega Nights and Sweeney Todd.
So when I heard he was making a new movie called The Dictator, for the first time I was thrilled. Maybe this was going to be another schmuck-the-real-people flick, but now he's a huge leader of a nonsense-named country, or something like that. I was going to forgive the potential that it would again follow the same formula, since it worked so well last time. He's gotta outdo himself with this one, right?
Well, when I fired up the trailer on YouTube, I was pretty excited until I saw all the famous people supporting in his cast--Ben Kingsley, John C. Reilly, Megan Fox. And his jokes were the same pointedly offensive jabs at modern culture, but the only thing that was missing was the look of genuine horror/confusion/anger on the real non-actors he played against in the past.
I'll have to go back and check the other movies, but I suspect if the Borat or Bruno gags were taken into a pure narrative filmmaking scenario, they wouldn't be very funny. The "straight man", in the comic sense, in the other two films was absolutely integral. And while both movies had very funny narrative elements sprinkled in, and some of the candid moments were probably a little less candid than they let on, the places where I laughed and cringed the most were when people genuinely reacted--not acted reacted. In fact, the narrative sections of those movie just supported the anticipation of the real-people scenes.
I'll give it a chance--I've been wrong about SBC before, maybe I will be surprised again. But the trailer doesn't seem to do a potentially great movie justice. It looks like Adam Sandler in a schlocky remake of Coming to America. Am I alone here?
And, I mean, come on... Am I crazy for thinking this looks like a funnier movie:
Had to take the boy in for his scheduled vaccines. Robin and I have done a lot of research and discussion about putting together a vaccination schedule. Being itinerant for the first year of his life, then being on and off health insurance, we've unfortunately had to bounce from pediatrician to pediatrician.
Today, we saw a new doctor for the first time to get his fourth DTAP and his Chicken Pox vaccines. I brought in the spreadsheet that we made up for his schedule and showed it to her. I also showed her some of the past height, weight, and head size data I had in my iPhone. She seemed put off by it all.
First, she said she couldn't find all of his records paperwork, but she almost brushed off my iPhone with disdain. Sorry, lady, technology trumps your absent tree-killing papers! And then she had the gall to tell me, "I don't believe in this schedule," referring to our spreadsheet. The boy is almost two, he's been getting shots all along the way, he's healthy as a horse--now is not the time to judge our process. I didn't need her opinion about our method, I needed her recommendations, and we'll make the final decisions about our child's future, thanks.
And she also could have spared us the line about how she's seen children die of mumps, chicken pox, and HepB. I'm not a small-time bumpkin that just stepped off a boat. Of course I didn't go to medical school for X amount of years, but I do live in the 21st century, where a much better educated decision can be made than just blindly going along with whatever snotty person with a PHD has to say.
The little guy cried a bit at the shots but then recovered like a champ. I think I'll recover from the doctor visit by taking my child's healthcare elsewhere.
On Tuesday, Apple previewed Final Cut Pro X, the newest version of the company's professional non-linear video editing software. The announcement came at the Final Cut Pro User Group Network Supermeet, being held in Las Vegas during the 2011 National Association of Broadcasters Show.
In addition to a complete UI overhaul, Final Cut Pro X boasts a newly designed floating point linear color system, up-to-4K-resolution-independent playback, a magnetic timeline for keeping audio and video in sync, Compound Clips for easy video nesting, non-destructive color balancing, automatic audio cleanup, and Smart Collections for organizing clips.Apple says Final Cut Pro X has been rewritten from the ground up, with support for 64-bit, a user-interface redesign, and a whole host of new features. The software takes advantage of core Mac OS X features like Cocoa, Core Animation, Open CL, and Grand Central Dispatch to speed up and fine-tune performance.
The new software has additionally borrowed a trick or two from Apple's consumer-level video editing software, iMovie: It now supports full background rendering—“the render dialogue is gone!” said Apple video architect Peter Steinauer—and an inline precision editor. It also sports the same automatic face detection (single or group) as iMovie or and the ability to identify shots (medium, wide, or close-up).
Steinaeur spoke briefly about the new features before Apple’s chief architect for video applications, Randy Ubillos, came on-stage for a full walkthrough of the software.
Final Cut Pro X will be available this June from the Mac App Store for $299.
The EHCI Research Group has produced a demonstration video of 3D without glasses on an iPad 2 and iPhone 4 that will make your jaw drop to the floor! The possibility of glasses–free 3D hitting iOS devices has just become a reality.
Head-Coupled Perspective (HCP) on mobile devices allows to create a glasses-free monocular 3D display. It is based on a efficient head-tracker that uses the front-facing camera of the device. We use an off-axis projection in order to adapt the perspective of the 3D scene according to the head's position of the user. Such spatially-aware mobile display enables to improve the possibilities of interaction.
The videos are after the break, you have to see them to believe how good they are. When you have, let us know what you think in the comments! [EHCI via macstories]
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