Inside [Men]

Today, Ben and I went to see Inside Man, Spike Lee's most sloppily rolled joint to date. I won't bore you with my personal opinions concerning how incredibly inconsistent and flimsy this movie was but I would like to warn the creators of The Hollywood Experiment: This is the kind of piece of trash you can expect to end up with if your miserable little plan should ever succeed.

On the walk home from the theater, we encountered a crate full of film books that someone was tossing out. Among other things, we grabbed a few Italian cinema books, the Malkiewicz cinematography book we used at Drexel, and (just for laughs) something called "Film Directing: Killer Style & Cutting Edge Technique." It's depressing to think that this a title we're meant to take seriously as opposed to outright self-parody. Ok, I think that's enough pretentious babble for one post...I was actually kind of surprised by some of my thoughts today. I must remember to keep in mind that I really have no grounds for such arrogance.

Moving along to less personal matters:

Paul L (creator of PLAY) gave us an update on how things went at the Video Games Live Tour / Game Developers Conference in San Jose, CA this past weekend. He didn't have time to sit down with T. Tallarico as I mentioned in the last post but he managed to meet and hook a number of very prominent industry people who all want to be involved in the film. I won't give you the full list he gave me but some of the highlights included the composers for Halo, God of War, Everquest 2, Myst, Prince of Persia, and Warcraft as well as the creator of the Unreal series, the producer of the Metal Gear series at Konami, and the keyboardist for the Beastie Boys for good measure.

All in all, it seems like a pretty successful weekend for networking & the future of PLAY.

As for Tennessee, we're still in the dark concerning a departure date. All the press announcements and the film's newly minted imdb page indicate that filming is supposed to start in April (even though there's actually a month of on location preproduction before principal photography is set to begin) but for all I know, that could mean this coming Saturday or April 30th. Short notice on either date wouldn't surprise me. Still, I suppose I should get my room packed up in the next couple of days.

That's pretty much all the work related news I have for now. I'm going to drop LDE an email tomorrow and see if I can't get a better idea of when we'll actually be heading out. I hope they know we need plane tickets now that we've deemed Jim's car incapable of making the cross country journey...