Boyle in the Lobby
It took a few hours, but I finally uploaded yesterday morning's interview with Slumdog Millionaire director Danny Boyle. Or rather the computer did it while I slept. It'll probably take a while to load. I'll have to remember next time to break the video down into five- or ten-minute segments. I haven't timed the Boyle chat but it's something like 25 or 30 minutes.
I still can't figure what code to use so a visual screen will show up on the column that you just click on to activate, like all the other video-running sites do.
Boyle said a couple of times during our discussion that he believes in "extreme" and "vivacious" cinema. Slumdog Millionaire is certainly that. It's also very much a rags-to-riches Dickensian fable in which all manner of ugliness, cruelty and avarice are heaped upon the young hero, and things are set right only within the last half-hour.
This means, naturally, that Slumdog, though beautifully filmed and sharply written by Simon Beaufoy (having adapted an Indian book called Q and A), is not exactly surging with alpha vibes during its first two-thirds. But it's certainly propelled by Boyle's remarkable filmmaking fever, and it does start to pay off like a slot machine starting around the 100-minute mark. And then it concludes with a dance sequence in a Mumbai train station that just blows you away.
It's a epic-sized, live-wire story of an Indian youth named Jamal (the grown-up version is played by Dev Patel) whose streak of correct answers on a Hindi version of Who Wants to be A Millionaire? creates suspicion that he's somehow cheating. The powers-that-be interrogate him, and his life story -- which, in a sense, is also the story of India's social evolution over the past 15 to 20 years -- is told to them and to us.
Slumdog looks like Best Picture material to me because of its freshness (all the more interesting by its reliance on a story-telling strategy made famous by Charles Dickens), the themes of justice and redemption and satisfied love, the almost luridly colorful vistas, and the relentless and impassioned character of Jamal, who is every kid who ever had to run and hustle and struggle to survive.
Posted by Jeffrey Wells on September 11, 2008 at 9:31 AM
comment #1
Jason
says ...
FYI to would-be downloaders, it's a 360 megabyte file. I hope Jeff's hosting company doesn't meter his bandwidth.
Posted by Jason
at September 11, 2008 10:50 AM
comment #2
frankbooth
says ...
"It took a few hours, but I finally uploaded yesterday morning's interview with Slumdog Millionaire director Danny Boyle."
Is this why the site disappeared a few minutes ago when I tried to access it? It was a blank screen.
Unnerving. Thought maybe "they" got you.
Posted by frankbooth
at September 11, 2008 10:54 AM
comment #3
YRG
says ...
If you want to embed it in the blog, you can use the embed tag:
<EMBED SRC="filename.???"></EMBED>
You can also use blip.tv to host and compress it so that it doesn't take up all of your bandwidth. Haven't watched it yet, but thanks for putting it up.
Posted by YRG
at September 11, 2008 11:02 AM
comment #4
lazespud
says ...
Jeff --
I have a lot of experience with this... I'd concur a bit with Yves. If you use blipTV or youtube, you pass along the bandwidth to them and then you possibly pull in new viewers. If you can do it with your software, embed "hollywood-elsewhere.com" in a corner of the image so that people who discover the video on those site will know to go to your site.
Youtube has some arbitrary time limits; but you can get longer time limits if you jump through their hoops to be a "producer".
If you ARE intent on hosting them straight on your site, with a clickable image, then you really need to convert them to flash videos and use a "wrapper" that allows them to be played. The benefit of hosting on your site with your own videos is you can control the quality. Either way, your files are just much too large for ordinary folk to be able to play... they've got to be reduced (I have a 20mbs FIOS line and I still choked a bit on the download). This is easily accomplished with Adobe Premiere, but I'm not sure what you're using. Feel free to click on my url and see examples of me doing it on my site. If you want help doing it (or just some pointers), you can contact me through my site.
Posted by lazespud
at September 11, 2008 12:03 PM
comment #5
lazespud
says ...
Just found out that your comments no longer post our URLs... so if you did want to check out my examples, go to http://www.richardhuffman.com
Posted by lazespud
at September 11, 2008 12:04 PM
comment #6
janee
says ...
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Posted by janee
at May 18, 2011 2:26 AM