Recently

Wonderland. Starring Val Kilmer (who was fantastic in last year’s uh… fantastic The Salton Sea), Josh Lucas, Dylan McDermott, plus lots of their respective facial hair (they didn’t have razors in 1981?). Eric Bogosian, who we all remember from Under Siege 2: Dark Territory is there, too (with a weird accent). The movie is about John Holmes and his involvement in the “Wonderland Murders”, which went down in the early 80’s. I can’t wait to see it, despite the fact that P.T. Anderson beat James Cox to the punch six years ago with the Holmes-inspired Boogie Nights (one of my all-time favorite films). Basically, the part where Marky Mark, John C. Riley, and Thomas Jane (who will be The Punisher next year) try to rip-off Fred Molina (who will be Dr. Octopus next year), but expanded. And more historically accurate, I assume.

And yes, Wonderland, about John Holmes, one of the most famous and well-endowed porn stars, is directed by a guy whose last name is Cox. I think that’s funny.

Since I haven’t posted much here recently (I’ll work on that), I figure I might as well make the last post something useful.

Some friends of mine are in a band called From Monument To Masses, and they’re heading out on their first cross-country tour, which kicked off last night here in San Francisco, and ends late August in Texas, hitting a good amount of major cities along the way (LA, Portland, Seattle, Chicago, Providence, DC, to name a few). Check either the FMTM shows page or the Dim Mak site for exact dates, venues, etc.

Their new album was released in June and is called The Impossible Leap In One Hundred Simple Steps. It’s available directly from the band and through assorted retailers.

Ron Perlman as Hellboy. Now that’s fuckin’ badass.

MTV News has an article about the making of Shynola’s badass video for Queens of the Stone Age’s “Go With The Flow”. Unfortunately, there isn’t a whole lot of technical information in the piece (about all I took out of it is “they filmed the band and then they used a computer”), but they did drop one interesting piece of info: the visual style for the video was inspired by comic book artist Frank Miller, specifically his series Sin City.

These days I find myself becoming less and less interested in comics, but the Sin City series (not to mention Miller’s ground breaking Legends of the Dark Knight), plus Mike Mignola’s Hellboy (soon-to-be a major motion picture), will always be on my bookshelf. Do check them out, if the opportunity arises.

At NAB (which I’m told you don’t pronounce as “nab”), Apple announced Final Cut Pro 4. From what I’ve read, it seems that FCP has evolved from a stand-alone application to a suite of apps. New additions include Compressor (Apple’s answer to discreet’s cleaner?); a scoring program called Soundtrack (which means little to me as I’m not an audio guy); and LiveType, a titling app. And with LiveType comes LiveFonts, an Apple original format for animated fonts, which sounds interesting, although the examples on the site look a bit cheesy. The previously separate Cinema Tools (formerly FilmLogic) is also included. All that for the current $999 price tag. It is scheduled to ship in June.

Apple also previewed DVD Studio Pro 2. Besides having its price cut in half to $499, DVDSP2 appears to have a new interface. There aren’t many screenshots on the site, but it looks like the previous version’s somewhat frustrating flowchart model is gone. Also new are templates and something called “Context Sensitive Drop Palettes”. It should be available in August.