Will “Oppenheimer” save cinema? (Or, Going to “The Show”)

Posted on August 7, 2023 by Katherine Wikoff

Which is what we called it in my small town back in the day. We had one movie theater in town and thus one movie available to us per week. Hence, “the show.” Not “a” show, and not even “a” movie or “the” movie. The. Show.

I belong to a Facebook group called “Friends of 70 mm,” the membership of which is extremely knowledgeable about cinema history from a projection perspective. I found out about it from one of my friends, a software engineering professor who comes to be a guest speaker in my film and media studies class every year. His dad was a movie theater technician who traveled around the state (sometimes multiple states!) to repair projectors and keep them in good working order. My friend knows a lot about the technical end of cinema, and he always brings cool things to share with my students, like a 1920s hand-cranked miniature film projector he threads up with film before switching on the tiny light bulb inside and throwing the image onto the white classroom wall. He can crank one frame at a time and then speed it up to create the motion picture, which is fun.

But I digress. The “Friends of 70mm” Facebook group that my software engineering prof friend introduced me to has lots of intriguing, often highly technical discussions about movie sound, screens, theaters, projectors, reels—just really interesting and informative stuff! I come to film and media from an English and rhetoric perspective. But I teach mostly engineering students, and plus I just always like to understand things as completely as possible, because you can find “aha” moments in the most unlikely connections. This Facebook group has helped fill in some rather sizable gaps in my understanding of the technical side of filmmaking and exhibition.

In the past week I’ve seen postings and conversations in the Facebook group to the effect that many movie theaters are scrambling to find projectionists experienced with 70mm willing/able to travel to one of the handful of theaters in the U.S. (only 19, according to the Washington Post) currently showing Oppenheimer in 70mm. Both the film itself and perhaps more significantly the 70mm viewing experience have proven so successful that theaters have extended the movie’s run by 2-3 weeks—but are finding it difficult to staff the projection booths for all the additional showings because so few people are trained to operate the equipment nowadays.

Wouldn’t it be cool if this movie’s popularity, alongside the voices of a small but notable group of filmmakers committed to shooting on film (e.g., Tarantino, Gerwig, Nolan, Spielberg), helped to spur a shift toward revitalizing the larger than life, communal moviegoing experience that “cinema” used to encompass? Although I can appreciate streaming for what it offers (serendipitous discovery of new titles, for example, not to mention the convenience of viewing them on your own schedule), it is certainly not the only way to watch a movie.

And definitely not the ideal way.

(UPDATE: 8/11/23 — I just saw this Variety article from earlier this week about the various extended runs of Oppenheimer in 70m. Link: https://variety.com/2023/film/news/oppenheimer-imax-70mm-extended-tickets-1235689899/)

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Posted in Movies and film, Popular culture, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments

Crooked lamp with blinds on a sunny day

Posted on July 22, 2023 by Katherine Wikoff

My old crooked lamp from the final close-out sale at the old downtown Milwaukee Marshall Fields store (formerly Gimbels) in the 1980s. It’s showing its age, listing slightly to one side, but still capable of doing its job. Like many of us, I suppose😀

Really not much else to say beyond the title of this post, LOL. I find myself drawn to geometric images whenever they present themselves. Which may also be the reason why I so madly adore everything Art Deco!

Crooked lamp with blinds on a sunny day

P.S. You’ll note that the lamp appears to be straight up and down perpendicular in this photo. Maybe the lamp is doing just fine after all, and it’s the rest of the world that’s out of kilter!

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Wildfire sun (in the style of Mark Rothko)

Posted on July 16, 2023 by Katherine Wikoff

Yesterday’s evening sun was a strange shade of intense orange, almost something you might expect to see in a Mark Rothko painting. (Like, for example, his “Orange and Yellow” canvas, found at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum: https://buffaloakg.org/artworks/k19568-orange-and-yellow.)

I tried to take a picture, but the sun didn’t show up at all on my phone’s screen. Which was kind of unsettling at first, to be looking right at it in real life but seeing only empty gray sky above that chimney on my screen.

The sun did show up when I tapped the screen, albeit in this weirdly two-toned pinkish orange, yellow-centered orb. The outer rim (pinkish orange) is the exact shade of last night’s sun. Beautiful, but eerie.

IPhone photo of the sun, strangely orange due to wildfire. Odd yellow center is an iPhone glitch

When all is said and done, I have to say that I really like the way my iPhone image turned out, even though it’s clearly some kind of error and patently false. The more I think about it, the more it feels like a Mark Rothko sun. And if that’s what the lens “saw,” well, who’s to say what was or wasn’t there?

An image is an image is an image, right?😀

(I actually wrote this post on Sunday. Today is Tuesday. After getting zero views since hitting “publish,” despite rechecking my stats hopefully every now and then, it finally occurred to me that maybe I should check on this post’s status. Could there be a technical issue? Or did people just really not like it. Like they disliked the preview so much they couldn’t even be bothered to open it up from the reader or email and view the actual post! Sure enough, it was a “technical” issue. So to speak. I wrote the post on my phone app instead of my laptop, and for whatever reason, when I pressed “publish,” it did NOT publish. It’s reassuring to know that the main reason I got zero views, comments, or likes is that this post was still in my drafts folder! Fingers crossed that people will respond to it at least a little bit more once I actually hit “publish,” L O L)

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Posted in Art, Life, Milwaukee, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

I ASSURE YOU; WE’RE OPEN!

Posted on May 11, 2023 by Katherine Wikoff

Quite an existential feat this furniture store has managed to pull off! It is closed, as evidenced by the security gate across its entrance. It is open, as evidenced by the lit-up sign in the window. And it is timeless, as evidenced by the name above the storefront.

Actually, I shouldn’t joke about this little shop. The street in front is all torn up and undergoing a massive repaving project. I assume the store’s sales have dropped dramatically in the project’s wake.

It’s so hard for small businesses to hang on when a city does something like this. In my own inner-ring suburb of Milwaukee, a beloved, decades-old, family-run dime store closed when a similar but larger project commenced without the business’s owners even being informed that it was coming. Of course, part of me suspects that my city-suburb did this deliberately. Our local government officials are greatly enamored of bike lanes, pocket parks, rental bikes and scooters, restaurants with plenty of cafe-style seating on the sidewalks, and other rather “hipster” redevelopment—along with the myriad new apartment buildings needed to house the sizable influx of people who could patronize such amenities. That creaky old dime store with its tiny “departments” (board games, party decorations, cards, housewares, craft supplies, fabric and notions, hamsters and goldfish, and assorted seasonal needs like hibachi grills and Christmas tree tinsel) did not align well with the demographic necessary for accomplishing the city council’s vision of our town’s collective future (my personal opinion😀).

In any case, the title of today’s post was inspired by a comment my daughter made when I showed her my photo after work on the day I snapped it. (I frequently take pictures of stuff and share with my family at night. Like: Hey, do you wanna see a picture I took today of X? My family is very kind and humors me by saying, “Yes.” ❤️) My daughter laughed and said it reminded her of the movie Clerks, the (very!) low-budget 1993 indie film that proved so successful it was followed by two sequels. In that film, when the Quick Stop convenience store clerk arrives at work one morning to discover that the security screen is jammed shut, he hangs a large sign that reads “I ASSURE YOU; WE’RE OPEN!” to counteract any false impression that the store is closed.

What do you think in the case of Milwaukee’s Timeless Furniture store? Open? Closed?

Or maybe something else?

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Posted in Life, Milwaukee, Movies and film, Photography, Popular culture | Tagged , | 11 Comments

A rainy start to May

Posted on May 1, 2023 by Katherine Wikoff

Which is OK with me! The alternative for those of us who live in Wisconsin is 1-3 inches of snow, which the poor unfortunates who live about an hour north and west of Milwaukee are experiencing today. Additionally, today’s rain has a nice gentle, misty quality. It’s a gray, wet day, but there is softness in the light and even in the air.

My film studies class at Milwaukee School of Engineering is starting Sunset Boulevard this afternoon. I took the photo below when I went to our department office to print out copies of the film’s cast list, background info, and discussion questions.

I just really liked the pattern of all these little beaded droplets of rain on the glass. If it were windy, as it usually is on rainy spring days, there would’ve been streaks instead of drops. I liked the mix of large and small droplets, and I also liked the varying placement and streaming patterns of the differently sized drops.

That’s all.

I know this is a really boring post today. Sorry! But it’s about all I’ve got left in me at this point in the academic year. Any teacher out there knows what I mean. Like, I can still bring what I need to the classroom, but when it comes to generating anything interesting to say outside of class (including making small talk in social situations with people I don’t know well), I’m pretty much out of gas.

C’est la vie. At least I’m prepped for my upcoming advising appointment and for this afternoon’s class. So now, back to my grading! 😀

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Posted in Life, Milwaukee | Tagged , , , , , | 7 Comments

Abstractions: On a load of dirty dishes, ready to run

Posted on April 12, 2023 by Katherine Wikoff

Or, the mundane and the sublime, lol.

I had just finished loading the dishwasher today, placed the little Cascade detergent pod in the tray, but then right as I was about to snap the tray lid shut, raise the door, and press the start button, I noticed what a striking image I was looking at.

Bear with me while I explain. This was the first thing I noticed.

More specifically, the intricate “rivulet” patterns that had formed as cocoa dripped from a mug to the door from the pulled-out top rack when it was loaded after breakfast and then slowly drained downward when the dishwasher door was raised and shut until later in the day.

And an even closer look at those little “rivers.”

This actually reminds me a lot of the ink-drawn hills/dunes in the opening credits of The English Patient.

I shared the bigger image of the cocoa drips/rivers with my daughter, and she thought it looked like people. I agreed that it did in a weird kind of way, so I rotated the picture and cropped it to isolate the “humans.”

Cool, right?

So then just one final shot, with the detergent pod. I liked the tiny, tiny, tiny sliver of light at the upper left and the hint of color (blue and green) from the Cascade.

I don’t know; it looked cooler in my camera roll. Oh wait, maybe the problem is, it’s missing the black bars of the camera roll in my phone. You can’t see the little sliver of white in the upper left without that “frame of contrast at the top.

That’s better. I need to work with it a bit more, maybe put the whole thing inside a black frame. Which may not make it a better photograph, of course. I mean, after all, we’re looking at a dirty dishwasher door!

But still, it somehow speaks to me. I kinda like it, this squarish machine composition with its Rorschach blot!😄

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After a March snowstorm, late afternoon

Posted on March 26, 2023 by Katherine Wikoff

I just liked the overall mix of lines and light and color.😀

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A man on the street

Posted on March 21, 2023 by Katherine Wikoff

WAY far away . . .

I was walking down the hill to go into the back door entrance of my parking garage when I saw the man walking ahead of me in the distance. I liked the composition of what I suddenly saw as a photo. Pulled out my phone, took two pictures, stuck my phone back in my purse pocket.

When I got to my car inside the garage, I took a look at the pictures to decide which one to upload. To my surprise, there were four pictures, not two. I finally realized they were actually only two pictures, but for some reason I got a lighter and darker version of each one. I have no idea what happened, since I was trying to walk and take a picture in bright sunlight at the same time. Too much going on for me, lol. I couldn’t decide between the two versions, so I’m posting both here. Do you like one better than the other?

And can you see the man who is the subject of the picture? He’s way, way in the distance. Seemed a lot shorter in person. I think my iPhone must have a wider angle lens, which stretches out distance. In fact, I’m pretty certain it does, because 1) when I take pictures of buildings at a distance, the lines run at a slight diagonal instead of an up-and-down right-angled perpendicular and 2) if I take a photo of several people in a group shot, the people at either end of the line look much wider than they actually are. (PSA: So always stand in the middle when posing for any group shot!) Both of these are distortions that happen with wide-angle lenses.

In any case, I hope you can see the human in this photo that made this whole image worth capturing for me❤️

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A song about sunscreen from Baz Luhrmann and some thoughts on Leo DiCaprio

Posted on March 13, 2023 by Katherine Wikoff

This “song” came on the radio when I was driving home from work the other day.

Official music video for Baz Luhrmann’s “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)” (1997)

Baz Luhrmann, of course, is the incredibly talented director of films like William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996), Moulin Rouge! (2001), The Great Gatsby (2013), and most recently the Oscar-nominated Elvis (2022).

Luhrmann produced this song; he doesn’t voice the commencement speech himself. Ironically, the speech itself never was delivered at an actual commencement. Instead it was a newspaper column by Chicago Tribune writer Mary Schmich, setting forth the commencement speech she would deliver should she ever to have an opportunity to do so. (The speech went viral via email, the “social media” of the nineties, erroneously attributed to Kurt Vonnegut in a supposed commencement address delivered at MIT; Vonnegut said he’d have been proud for the words to have been his.)

The music playing in the background is “Everybody’s Free (To Feel Good),” by Rozalla, which appeared in Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet. Which, by the way, in case you haven’t seen it, is an interesting film, filled with surprises of all sorts (strikingly beautiful images, hip re-imaginings of the original Shakespeare, an outstanding cast) around every corner.

Leo DiCaprio has always been so good, even in his early films. I thought he was wonderful as Romeo. Check out this introduction to his character, the first time we meet him in the film.

The shot itself is beautiful, of course. The setting, the glowing golden sunlight, the slow tilt up to reveal the pensive young man. There’s something about the body language here that creates character for me without any words necessary. Although elegantly dressed, he is also disheveled, his shirt open at the neck, one collar rolled under. A cigarette held casually between two fingers. He turns his head and takes a drag, profile silhouetted against the intensely saturated orange sunlight beyond. The expression on his face when he sees his parents, gets to his feet, and turns away. How much of this was DiCaprio’s acting versus Luhrmann’s direction, framing, and editing, I don’t know.

But here is one of DiCaprio’s many death scenes from over the years, this one in The Quick and the Dead (1995). It is one of my favorites. Still breaks my heart. And he was just a kid, like 20 or 21 years old. Some actors have “it” (that natural spark, charisma, star quality, “look,” or whatever you want to call it) and some actors don’t. DiCaprio does.

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Posted in Movies and film, Popular culture | Tagged | 2 Comments

Creativity and good mental health go hand in hand

Posted on January 28, 2023 by Katherine Wikoff

Here’s an interview with Hilde Østby, author of a forthcoming book (April) titled The Key to Creativity. What really resonates for me and jibes with my own feelings and intuitive understanding of creativity is the reciprocal positive relationship between creativity and strong mental health. Almost like a feedback loop or flywheel effect: the more you engage in creative activity, the stronger your mental and physical health, and the stronger your mental and physical health, the more able you are to engage in creative activity.

The key, I suppose, is understanding and believing in this relationship to begin a creative practice even when you feel exhausted and depressed—and to keep going even when “real life” intrudes. Which, why should the activity of non-creative-practices (jobs, civic duty, household chores) be considered “real” while the very creative practices essential to sustain us are relegated to less than “real” status anyway? Is what other people want/need from us more “real” and deserving of respect than what we want/need for ourselves?

You can link to the interview here:

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/interviews/article/91330-where-does-creativity-come-from-pw-talks-with-hilde-stby.html

Posted in Art, Creativity, Life | Tagged , , | 3 Comments