Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Best Films of 2010
2. Blue Valentine (dir. Derek Cianfrance)
4. The King's Speech (dir. Tom Hooper)
5. Inception (dir. Christopher Nolan)
6. The Fighter (dir. David O. Russell)
7. 127 Hours (dir. Danny Boyle)
8. Exit Through the Gift Shop (a Bansky Film)
9. Carlos (dir. Olivier Assayas)
10. Inside Job (dir. Charles Ferguson)
11. Restrepo (dir. Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington)
12. The Kids Are All Right (dir. Lisa Cholodenko)
13. Rabbit Hole (dir. John Cameron Mitchell)
14. Daddy Longlegs (dir. Safdie Bros)
15. Never Let Me Go (dir. Mark Romanek)
16. Black Swan (dir. Darren Aronofsky)
Need to See:
Winter's Bone
The Ghost Writer
Mother
I Am Love
Another Year
Toy Story 3
Greenberg
Boxing Gym
Animal Kingdom
Last Train Home
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
Trash Humpers
The Illusionist
The American
Tiny Furniture
The Town
Mother and Child
Biutiful
Night Catches Us
You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger
The Two Escobars
The Killer Inside Me
The Way Back
Hereafter
Phone Wars
The New York Times
Verizon Deal May Expose iPhone Flaws
By JOE NOCERA
With this week’s announcement that Verizon Wireless is going to begin selling the iPhone — something its customers have been panting for ever since AT&T got that first, exclusive iPhone contract four years ago — it’s time for me to face the music. Nobody really cares that the iPhone is flawed. After this column, I’m going to stop caring too. I swear it.
Its design is undeniably elegant; both the iPhone and its sister device, the iPad, stand at the pinnacle of modern industrial design. The iPhone offers some 300,000 apps that delight its users. Photographs look gorgeous on an iPhone. “It is the first and best implementation of a highly mobile computer,” said Roger L. Kay, the president of Endpoint Technologies Associates, a market intelligence firm.
Yet for all that it offers, the iPhone has always been plagued by serious drawbacks. The “phone” part of the iPhone has never worked very well, dropping calls with annoying regularity. Even when the phone works, the sound quality is often substandard. You would think in an age when fewer people are using landlines this would matter. Apparently not.
Meanwhile, the iPhone’s lack of a raised keyboard makes it next to impossible to do serious e-mailing. And users have to worry constantly about battery life; if they’re not judicious, the iPhone’s battery can be drained by noon.
At the Verizon Wireless-iPhone extravaganza on Tuesday — in which the two companies announced that the iPhone 4 would run on Verizon Wireless’s 3G network — Apple’s chief operating officer, Timothy D. Cook, was asked why Apple wasn’t going with the carrier’s faster, newer 4G LTE network. Mr. Cook replied that doing so required “design compromises” that Apple was unwilling to make.
They never make design compromises at Apple. They make consumer compromises. Yet consumers have always been willing to overlook those compromises so they can claim they own some of the coolest products on the planet.
“People so love their devices from Apple that they are willing to put up with the stupidities,” said Larry Keeley, president of the innovation and design firm Doblin. “For many users,” he added, “especially the ones Apple loves the most, the fact that the battery gets balky is how you convince yourself to get a new one.”
My oldest son, Amato, who is on my Verizon Wireless plan, told me recently that even though he was perfectly happy with his Android phone, if given the chance to switch to an iPhone, he would probably do it. “I can’t even say why,” he said. “I don’t even know if there is any real rationale behind that desire.”
Is Steve Jobs a business genius or what?
•
On the other hand, the fact that my son owns an Android phone — and finds it to be a fine smartphone, thank you very much — suggests that the Apple chief executive’s fetish for form over function has its downside. Not everybody, it turns out, is indifferent to whether their smartphones can actually make phone calls. For proof, all you have to do is look at the recent performance of Verizon Wireless, which has been, by far, the country’s most profitable wireless carrier, despite not having the iPhone in its arsenal.
Verizon Wireless could have snagged the original iPhone contract four years ago, but it passed. It did so not because of the iPhone’s flaws, which were then unknown, but because Apple was insisting on terms that it could not accept. These included a guaranteed subsidy for the phone (cellphone carriers use subsidies as important marketing tools), no say in the software design and loss of control of the customer to Apple.
A Verizon Wireless spokesman told me back then that with the iPhone deal, AT&T had handed over “the ability to insure customer service” to Apple, which, he added, “is something we would never have agreed to.” AT&T, which was struggling, felt it had no choice but to agree to Apple’s onerous terms.
The Apple-AT&T marriage has been a public relations disaster — for AT&T. Its network was quickly overwhelmed, in part because it was subpar, and in part because iPhone owners — with a mobile computer at their fingertips — used astonishing amounts of data: 15 times more than the average smartphone user, and “50 percent more than AT&T itself had projected,” according to Fred Vogelstein, who wrote about the problems for Wired magazine.
Mr. Vogelstein went on to note in his article that the troubles that ensued — the dropped phone calls, the frequent network crashes and so on — were not entirely AT&T’s fault. His Apple sources, he wrote, confirmed to him that “the software running the iPhone’s main radio, known as baseband, was full of bugs and contributed to the much-decried dropped calls.” But since Apple walks on water, and AT&T doesn’t, it was easy for Apple to place all the blame on its wireless carrier. Which it gleefully did.
And what was Verizon Wireless doing? Taking full advantage of AT&T’s problems to trumpet the reliability of its own network. Network reliability, in fact, became its core selling point: it may not have had the world’s sexiest phone, but at least the phones it sold worked. As it turns out, there are millions of people who care about having phones that work — they’re just not the cool people. Like CBS, which gets ratings with programming for Middle America, Verizon Wireless kept adding subscribers by catering to the unhip.
What also helped Verizon Wireless, though, was the introduction of Android phones beginning in the fall of 2008. Android is not a single phone, but rather an operating system developed by Google that allowed cellphone manufacturers to approximate the look and feel of an iPhone. Cellphone makers like Samsung and Motorola flocked to it. And so did Verizon Wireless, which abandoned its marketing support for loser phones like the Palm Pre, and put all its muscle behind the Android phones.
“Verizon Wireless has done an incredibly good job with the Android phones,” said Craig Moffett, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. “But the best you can say is that they are almost iPhones.” True enough, but while they may not be as sleek as the iPhone, or have as many nifty apps, they make phone calls more reliably. Oh, and if you are having problems with the battery, you can take it out and replace it. Imagine!
Here’s the shocker, though. According to Gartner, in the second quarter of 2009, Android sales constituted 1.8 percent of all smartphones sold, compared with Apple’s 13 percent. By the second quarter of 2010 — just a year later — Android was actually outselling Apple, 17.2 percent to 14.2 percent. This must have been a shock to the system at Apple — it was being outdone by an uncool competitor.
As much as anything, the success of Android is what finally pushed Apple into the arms of Verizon Wireless, which got much better terms than AT&T. When I asked a spokeswoman for Verizon Wireless who was going to control the customer, she told me that iPhone users who were having problems would take their phone to the nearest Verizon Wireless store, not the Apple genius bar. Verizon Wireless does not appear to have promised the guaranteed subsidy, the way AT&T did. In truth, Apple needed Verizon Wireless more than Verizon Wireless needed Apple. The deal the two companies cut reflects that fact.
The deal is being described as the long-awaited marriage of coolness and reliability. And maybe it will work out that way. At the press conference on Tuesday, Mr. Cook called it a “tremendous opportunity” — as it surely is given Verizon Wireless’s 93 million subscribers. Charles Wolf, who follows Apple for Needham & Company, estimates that Apple could sell as many as 32 million iPhones in the next two years through the Verizon Wireless channel.
But there are also plenty of potential pitfalls. Verizon Wireless insists that its network is up to the task of handling all that data its iPhone customers will be clamoring for. But clever developers keep coming up with new ways to use even more data than anyone ever dreamed of.
Mr. Moffett described to me, for instance, an app he saw at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which allowed parents to turn their iPhone into a baby monitor at night. That might not sound like much, but it would require the iPhone to stream video while the baby was sleeping. It would be a huge data hog. “Eventually, that kind of thing clogs up the network and starts to compromise the user experience,” he said.
Another possibility is that the Verizon Wireless network will hold up fine but that the iPhone will keep dropping calls because of its own inherent compromises. This time, though, it will be much harder to blame all the problems on its wireless carrier, the way it could with the hapless AT&T. At the very least, the iPhone will have to compete with all the Android phones, which offer a sturdier, if less dazzling, experience. And Verizon Wireless is unlikely to abandon its marketing support for Android the way it did with Palm. Those phones have become too important to its bottom line.
Mainly, though, the Verizon Wireless subscriber is simply used to a different kind of experience. If they all migrate immediately to the iPhone, then truly I will raise the white flag. If they hang back, then it will signal that there are still some people who prefer something that works over something that dazzles.
As for the AT&T subscribers, I hear that many of them are planning to stay where they are, hoping that enough other subscribers move to Verizon Wireless to relieve some of the pressure on the network and reduce their own misery.
A person can always dream.
Sunday, July 4, 2010
A Brighter Summer Day
Thursday, June 3, 2010
I'm not afraid of you. You don't know what I have done.
Amazing visual and aural experience. Beautiful filmmaking.
How could I not know of Silver Mt. Zion? They've been making music for about a decade now. Not many excuses. Wish I could have experienced their music long ago, but I also think that nothing could beat the introduction this film provided.
Sunday, January 17, 2010
New Market
Declaration of Indies: Just Sell It Yourself!
LAST November inside a conference room at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, a film consultant named Peter Broderick was doing his best to foment a revolution. Mr. Broderick, who helps filmmakers find their way into the marketplace, was spreading the word on an Internet-era approach to releasing movies that he believes empowers filmmakers without impoverishing them economically or emotionally. Mr. Broderick divides distribution into the Old World and New, infusing his PowerPoint presentation with insurgent rhetoric. He has written a “declaration of independence” for filmmakers that — as he did that afternoon — he reads while wearing a tricorn hat.
In the Old World of distribution, filmmakers hand over all the rights to their work, ceding control to companies that might soon lose interest in their new purchase for various reasons, including a weak opening weekend. (“After the first show,” Mr. Broderick said, repeating an Old World maxim, “we know.”) In the New World, filmmakers maintain full control over their work from beginning to end: they hold on to their rights and, as important, find people who are interested in their projects and can become patrons, even mentors. The Old World has ticket buyers. The New World has ticket buyers who are also Facebook friends. The Old World has commercials, newspapers ads and the mass audience. The New World has social media, YouTube, iTunes and niche audiences. “Newspaper ads,” Mr. Broderick said, “are mostly a waste of money.”
The 200 filmmakers inside the conference room laughed, soaking up Mr. Broderick’s pitch as if their careers depended upon it, which perhaps they do. Independent filmmaking has never been for the faint of heart. But the consensus is that the past few years have been especially brutal. Sales have slowed, deal prices have dropped, and most of the major studios have retreated from the independent scene, closing or scaling back divisions like Warner Independent Pictures and Paramount Vantage, which released the kinds of movies that win critical hearts and awards. And good films are going unsold. Given the changes and downsizing, these might seem like worrisome times for movie lovers as well. After all, if these companies disappear, how do we find the next great American independent filmmaker, the new Jim Jarmusch, Wes Anderson 2.0?
For consultants like Mr. Broderick and filmmakers like Jon Reiss (the documentary “Bomb It”) the answer lies in self-distribution, in filmmakers doing it themselves or, more accurately, doing it themselves with a little or a lot of help from other people, including consultants like Mr. Broderick and Richard Abramowitz. Last year Mr. Abramowitz, a film-industry veteran who runs an outfit in Armonk, N.Y., called Abramorama with one full-time employee (him), helped shepherd Sacha Gervasi’s documentary “Anvil! The Story of Anvil,” about a 1970s metal band and its rebirth, into a success, with almost $700,000 at the North American box office. Consultants guide filmmakers on every angle of distribution. They can simply offer advice, but can also develop a marketing strategy, book theaters and collect the money.
If the D.I.Y. drumbeat has grown louder in recent years, it’s not only because the major studios have backed away from the independent sector. That’s a factor, but there are other issues involved, among them that the economic barriers to filmmaking have never been lower. Martin Scorsese once said that John Cassavetes’s first feature, “Shadows,” shot in the late 1950s with a 16-millimeter camera, proved to filmmakers that there were “no more excuses,” adding, “If he could do it, so could we!” Still, even in the glory years of the new American cinema movement, from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, when the major studios appeared more open to original voices, Cassavetes had to self-distribute his 1974 masterpiece “A Woman Under the Influence,” which he did successfully, pulling in $6 million domestically.
Inexpensive digital cameras and editing software have lowered the barrier for filmmakers even further. Yet even as the means of production have entered into more hands, companies — large and small — continue to dominate distribution. Hollywood’s historical hold on resources and the terms of the conversation have made it difficult for an authentic alternative system to take root in America. The festival circuit has emerged as a de facto distribution stream for many filmmakers, yet the ad hoc world of festivals is not a substitute for real distribution. And then there’s the simple fact that there are independent filmmakers who do not fit inside the Hollywood (and Hollywood-style) distribution model and do not want to. For some stubborn independents D.I.Y. distribution has at times been either the best or only option.
In 1992, the year before Disney bought Miramax Films, thereby initiating the indie gold rush, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky became a model for true independence when they distributed their own documentary “Brother’s Keeper” (1992) to substantial critical and commercial success. In the years since, those entering self-distribution have included emerging talent like Andrew Bujalski (who initially sold DVDs of his 2005 film “Mutual Appreciation” online) and established filmmakers like David Lynch (who released his 2006 movie “Inland Empire” in theaters himself). As self-distributed movies have found levels of critical or commercial success or even both, others have followed, including “The Talent Given Us,” “Note by Note: The Making of Steinway L1037,” “Ballast,” “Helvetica” and “Good Dick.”
Some self-distributed titles find their audiences with help from consultants, while others make their way into the marketplace with the help of consultants and companies that take a fee, rather than a percentage of the profits and all the distribution rights. Innovative strategies abound. Mr. Broderick is an advocate of what he calls hybrid distribution, which, as he has put it, “combines direct sales by filmmakers with distribution by third parties.” Thus filmmakers hold on to their sales rights and sell the DVD retail rights to one buyer and the video-on-demand rights to another and so on — rather than handing them all over to one distributor, as has been traditional. This allows filmmakers to reach audiences directly while controlling their own work and destinies, at least in theory.
The new D.I.Y. world is open-source in vibe and often execution. Participants refer to one another in conversation and on their Web sites and blogs, pushing other people’s ideas and projects. (On his Web site, peterbroderick.com, Mr. Broderick even posts discount codes for other people’s books.) But these new-era distribution participants are not engaging in blog-rolling. By sharing information and building on one another’s ideas, they are in effect creating a virtual infrastructure. This infrastructure doesn’t compete with Hollywood; this isn’t about vying with products released by multinational corporations. It is instead about the creation and sustenance of a viable, artist-based alternative — one that, at this stage, looks markedly different from what has often been passed off as independent cinema over the past 20 years.
Although D.I.Y. has become shorthand for this new movement, a more complex idea of the filmmaker-audience dynamic is emerging (Mr. Reiss calls it “a sea change”), partly as a response to the shifts in the industry, though also in reaction to the changes in the audience or more specifically audiences. Although some viewers still enjoy the ritual of going out to see movies, others don’t want to experience their entertainment in a theater, preferring to immerse themselves in a media-saturated world across a variety of platforms. “My son,” Mr. Reiss said, speaking by phone from Los Angeles, “consumes media on his computer and his iPod, and he will occasionally go out to a movie theater.” He tries to encourage his son, who’s 13, to go to the movies, but finds it tough. “He would rather interact with media on his computer than anywhere else.”
One of the buzzy ideas in D.I.Y. is transmedia, a word borrowed from academia, in which stories — think of the “Star Wars” and “Matrix” franchises — unfold across different platforms. “Star Wars” helped expand the very idea of a movie, because it involved a constellation of movie-related products, from videogames to action figures, all of which become part of the understanding and experience of the original, originating work. This isn’t just about slapping a movie logo on a lunchbox or a screensaver: it’s about creating an entertainment gestalt. As the theorist Henry Jenkins writes, “Reading across the media sustains a depth of experience that motivates more consumption.” In other words, you can sell one ticket to a moviegoer or enlist fans into media feedback loops that they in turn help create and sustain.
It might seem counterintuitive that D.I.Y. independents are borrowing a page from the George Lucas playbook. But only if you forget that Mr. Lucas is the most successful independent filmmaker in history. 20th Century Fox distributed the first “Star Wars,” yet Mr. Lucas kept the sequel and merchandising rights. “If I make money,” he said when the movie was released, “it will be from the toys.” The new generation of D.I.Y. filmmakers might not be pushing toys on their Web sites (though I’d like to see an Andrew Bujalski action figure), but they do peddle DVDs, posters, CDs, books and — much as Spike Lee did before them — are getting hip to selling themselves alongside their art.
The downside to this new D.I.Y. world is that filmmakers, who already tend to expend tremendous time and effort raising money, might end up spending more hours hawking their wares than creating new work. “I struggle with this all the time,” Mr. Reiss said. But artists who want to reach an audience are rarely if ever really free of the marketplace, and filmmakers working in the commercial arena tend to be even less so. For Mr. Reiss and other do-it-yourselfers, the most important thing is to reach their audiences, any which way, niche by niche, pixel by pixel, in theaters or online. “This is the other voice of film,” Mr. Reiss said with urgency, “and if this dies, all we’re left with is the monopoly.”
Sunday, January 10, 2010
China Awakes
Hong Kong
C. H. Tung, the first Chinese-appointed chief executive of Hong Kong after the handover in 1997, offered me a three-sentence summary the other day of China’s modern economic history: “China was asleep during the Industrial Revolution. She was just waking during the Information Technology Revolution. She intends to participate fully in the Green Revolution.”
I’ll say. Being in China right now I am more convinced than ever that when historians look back at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, they will say that the most important thing to happen was not the Great Recession, but China’s Green Leap Forward. The Beijing leadership clearly understands that the E.T. — Energy Technology — revolution is both a necessity and an opportunity, and they do not intend to miss it.
We, by contrast, intend to fix Afghanistan. Have a nice day.
O.K., that was a cheap shot. But here’s one that isn’t: Andy Grove, co-founder of Intel, liked to say that companies come to “strategic inflection points,” where the fundamentals of a business change and they either make the hard decision to invest in a down cycle and take a more promising trajectory or do nothing and wither. The same is true for countries.
The U.S. is at just such a strategic inflection point. We are either going to put in place a price on carbon and the right regulatory incentives to ensure that America is China’s main competitor/partner in the E.T. revolution, or we are going to gradually cede this industry to Beijing and the good jobs and energy security that would go with it.
Is President Obama going to finish health care and then put aside the pending energy legislation — and carbon pricing — that Congress has already passed in order to get through the midterms without Republicans screaming “new taxes?” Or is he going to seize this moment before the midterms — possibly his last window to put together a majority in the Senate, including some Republicans, for a price on carbon — and put in place a real U.S. engine for clean energy innovation and energy security?
I’ve been stunned to learn about the sheer volume of wind, solar, mass transit, nuclear and more efficient coal-burning projects that have sprouted in China in just the last year.
Here’s e-mail from Bill Gross, who runs eSolar, a promising California solar-thermal start-up: On Saturday, in Beijing, said Gross, he announced “the biggest solar-thermal deal ever. It’s a 2 gigawatt, $5 billion deal to build plants in China using our California-based technology. China is being even more aggressive than the U.S. We applied for a [U.S. Department of Energy] loan for a 92 megawatt project in New Mexico, and in less time than it took them to do stage 1 of the application review, China signs, approves, and is ready to begin construction this year on a 20 times bigger project!”
Yes, climate change is a concern for Beijing, but more immediately China’s leaders know that their country is in the midst of the biggest migration of people from the countryside to urban centers in the history of mankind. This is creating a surge in energy demand, which China is determined to meet with cleaner, homegrown sources so that its future economy will be less vulnerable to supply shocks and so it doesn’t pollute itself to death.
In the last year alone, so many new solar panel makers emerged in China that the price of solar power has fallen from roughly 59 cents a kilowatt hour to 16 cents, according to The Times’s bureau chief here, Keith Bradsher. Meanwhile, China last week tested the fastest bullet train in the world — 217 miles per hour — from Wuhan to Guangzhou. As Bradsher noted, China “has nearly finished the construction of a high-speed rail route from Beijing to Shanghai at a cost of $23.5 billion. Trains will cover the 700-mile route in just five hours, compared with 12 hours today. By comparison, Amtrak trains require at least 18 hours to travel a similar distance from New York to Chicago.”
China is also engaged in the world’s most rapid expansion of nuclear power. It is expected to build some 50 new nuclear reactors by 2020; the rest of the world combined might build 15.
“By the end of this decade, China will be dominating global production of the whole range of power equipment,” said Andrew Brandler, the C.E.O. of the CLP Group, Hong Kong’s largest power utility.
In the process, China is going to make clean power technologies cheaper for itself and everyone else. But even Chinese experts will tell you that it will all happen faster and more effectively if China and America work together — with the U.S. specializing in energy research and innovation, at which China is still weak, as well as in venture investing and servicing of new clean technologies, and with China specializing in mass production.
This is a strategic inflection point. It is clear that if we, America, care about our energy security, economic strength and environmental quality we need to put in place a long-term carbon price that stimulates and rewards clean power innovation. We can’t afford to be asleep with an invigorated China wide awake.