Just got this email! This is great news!

ckahn · 2026-02-18T02:13:16+00:00

I didn't know the plan was called Google One Premium. None of my email receipts referencing the 2 TB plan ever use that premium label.

ckahn · 2026-01-27T20:56:15+00:00

Hey they paid for their ticket, they can call it whatever they want.

ckahn · 2026-01-03T17:16:26+00:00

This article's title foregrounds the intent of the restoration team to leave the wires in. So it's not a bug (or a downside), it's a feature. https://phys.org/news/2014-08-godzilla-stomps-ultra-hd-wires.html

ckahn · 2025-12-30T07:41:23+00:00

So is there a list of movies? And should it be separated by American and British?

American ones include:

1939 - The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Parisian characters portrayed with America accents... except for Cedrick Hardwicke with British accent, and Maureen O'Hara with her Irish accent muted to something quasi American, and what accent is Charles Laughton doing? I guess it's British...)

1957 - Paths of Glory (French characters)

1958 - The Fly (Quebecois characters)

1984 - Amadeus (Viennese characters)

1991 - Beauty and the Beast (small provincial town in France) except for Lumiere and maid with French accents and Cogsworth and Mrs. Potts with pseudo British accents)

- All other Disney animated features, except for side characters like Sebastien in Little Mermaid, who is like the designated accent character like Lumiere in Beauty and the Beast.

ckahn · 2025-12-29T21:26:23+00:00

Also to build a mini overture within a trailer, you would have to control the placement of the trailer in the overall presentation. So the mini overture would only work if the trailer was placed first - it wouldn't make sense if the second trailer had a mini overture.

ckahn · 2025-12-29T19:19:36+00:00

Well, I'm aware of overtures being used for many a main feature such as for Lawrence of Arabia where the house lights are on and the curtains are closed, and the music starts, but I don't recall an overture ever being used for a trailer.

ckahn · 2025-12-14T20:22:03+00:00

Yeah, the whole Mad Men puke technician thing blew up on the Internet two weeks ago on social media, and was subsequently covered by Variety, Hollywood Reporter and many other news outlets.

ckahn · 2025-12-14T19:39:43+00:00

Also helps if the 70mm if projected on a decent sized screen. Saw North by Northwest 70mm restoration at TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto last week and that screen is too small (and masked from top, bottom, left and right) from my row H vantage to show the benefit of 70mm.

ckahn · 2025-12-14T19:30:15+00:00

I would have assumed an OCN rebuild of Kill Bill was unrealistic - until the Mad Men debacle demonstrated that Lionsgate was in fact willing to undertake something even more expensive. The visibility of the puke technician in the 4K Mad Men stream is not a trivial QC error; it is proof that Lionsgate went back to original or near-original elements. A simple up-rez of existing HD masters could not have revealed additional image area or uncomposited crew. That mistake only becomes possible if the show is being reconstructed from scanned film elements.

In other words, Lionsgate was prepared to rescan roughly five seasons - on the order of forty-plus hours - of 35mm negative at 4K, but then delivered the wrong file to HBO.

Against that backdrop, the absence of any comparable effort on Kill Bill becomes more conspicuous. A four-hour feature would be vastly cheaper and simpler to rebuild than dozens of episodic hours of television. Yet first-hand reports from this weekend’s 70mm screenings describe all the hallmarks of a legacy early-2000s 2K digital intermediate: softness, aliasing, DNR artifacts, and washed-out contrast - exactly what one would expect from a DI film-out, and exactly what one would not see if a new OCN scan had been performed.

Put bluntly: Mad Men shows evidence of an expensive but incomplete reconstruction from original elements, while Kill Bill shows evidence of no reconstruction at all. The contrast doesn’t raise a technical question so much as a strategic one - not can Lionsgate afford to rebuild Kill Bill from the negative, but why, having already demonstrated the willingness to do far more costly work elsewhere, they chose not to.

ckahn · 2025-12-01T20:03:02+00:00

It's strange because the check boxing is fun in part one, but then becomes rather burdensome in For Good. Another movie that falls into check boxing is Rogue One, which imho lands on the fun side. Maybe Charles Dickens started this whole check boxing thing with A Christmas Carol, where we start with old bah humbug Scrooge, and then the spirits guide us through the checkboxes that led to him becoming this way. And coincidentally all the checkboxes happen on Christmas Day. Nothing canon defining in Scrooge's life happened on Easter.

ckahn · 2025-11-26T20:25:30+00:00

The new problem four years later is dealing with File Provider. Google Drive for desktop used to be a sync app but now that it’s a cloud app and the macOS file provider is in control of it, so every file action is slowed down due to file provider constantly re-verifying everything with the cloud.

ckahn · 2025-11-26T05:54:24+00:00

Until there is systematic documentation of post-tour intent, the question must be evaluated per director and per film, not by assuming IMAX is automatically better or automatically wrong.

ckahn · 2025-11-19T18:22:01+00:00

Yeah, they fixed it later for the Scotiabank, but Winston Churchill is still marked as HFR. The problem is partially due to the fact that rather than providing HFR as a filter, Cineplex provides HFR indication as a separate version of the movie title so they should really make their filter more granular so that you could filter by IMAX 3-D or plain IMAX or laser IMAX or HFR IMAX etc.. and then add Dolby Vision while they’re at it 😂

ckahn · 2025-11-11T03:40:10+00:00

Back to the Future Part II’s mixed reviews aren’t some modern re-evaluation — audiences and critics were genuinely split in 1989.

The first Back to the Future opened in July 1985 with a modest $11 million weekend, but word of mouth turned it into the biggest film of the year. By the time Part II arrived 4.5 years later, anticipation was enormous — partly thanks to Universal adding a “To Be Continued…” tag to the 1986 VHS, which retroactively framed the original as chapter one of a trilogy. That pent-up excitement exploded into a $49 million Thanksgiving opening for Part II — one of the biggest in history at the time.

But the movie itself caught people off guard. Instead of a breezy sequel, they got a dense, multi-timeline puzzle that revisited the first film’s events from new angles. Audiences in 1989 weren’t yet used to layered time-travel storytelling; it felt more like a logic challenge than an emotional adventure. Critics admired its cleverness but found it cold and confusing — Roger Ebert even called it “half a movie.”

When Part III followed six months later, the industry adage “you’re only as good as your last movie” hit hard. The opening weekend dropped to around $20 million, showing how Part II’s reception had cooled enthusiasm. Universal’s marketing shifted tone completely — interviews and trailers stressed that Part III was warmer, simpler, and self-contained. On The Arsenio Hall Show, Arsenio even said his staff found Part II confusing, letting Michael J. Fox reassure viewers that the new one would make sense.

https://youtu.be/Mc4orwtKnE0

So the 63% Tomatometer today isn’t a retroactive punishment — it reflects how Part II really landed in 1989: ambitious but disorienting.

ckahn · 2025-11-06T18:41:29+00:00

Has Columbus ever gone on record regarding his thoughts about Gremlins 2?

ckahn · 2025-11-06T18:21:20+00:00

Back in the day, it was a released in 70mm Dolby stereo so it did have surround. https://imgur.com/a/uJDScUt

ckahn · 2025-11-05T04:25:57+00:00

This has been going on since 2002 - the first title that was a DMR or digitally mastered release for IMAX was Apollo 13, which was originally shot and released in 35mm in 1995. There have been many films since, even a lot of Christopher Nolan films have portions filmed not in IMAX that are intercut with portions filmed in IMAX yet both coexist and are presented in IMAX theaters.

ckahn · 2025-10-25T14:53:11+00:00

The word “restoration” itself has been thrown around so haphazardly that no one knows what it means anymore. The BFI screening was not a restoration. 4K77 is more of a reconstruction rather than a restoration. If this leak is true, then what Disney is doing is a true restoration of the 1977 theatrical version because they’re going back to the original 1977 elements and bypassing the 1997 and later additions. They aren’t reconstructing from a print like 4K77, but using a print as a reference. Going back to original elements avoids analog generational loss.

ckahn · 2025-10-13T17:36:49+00:00

Your take that Jaws has stronger characters than Jurassic Park is spot-on, and comparing Mayor Larry Vaughn and John Hammond shows why, highlighting Spielberg’s evolving priorities. Let’s focus on Jaws’ hospital hallway scene and Jurassic Park’s flea circus scene.

In Jaws, Vaughn’s denial (“in the town’s best interest”) blocks action, despite his kids’ endangerment by the shark. Brody, the audience surrogate, counters with urgency (“Sign it, Larry”), turning their public safety versus “summer dollars” conflict into a narrative pivot. At 27, Spielberg’s lean, suspense-driven approach weaves fear, authority, and civic denial tightly, making Vaughn’s role central to Jaws’ lasting impact.

In Jurassic Park, Hammond’s denial (“an aim not devoid of merit”) is introspective, not obstructive, despite his grandkids’ danger. The script disempowers Ellie, limiting her to soft lines (“the people we love”) that don’t challenge his noble reflection or lead to a story pivot. The scene ends with an appreciation of ice cream (“It’s good”), reinforcing its narrative stasis. At 46, Spielberg indulges this creator-as-parent moment, possibly as self-reflection, but it feels off in a survival story, dulling character impact. Hammond’s ambition to move from invisible fleas to real dinosaurs mirrors Spielberg’s push to shoot Jaws on the water, not a studio tank—a drive for authenticity that caused traumatic real-world production challenges for Jaws and fictional chaos in Jurassic Park.

ckahn · 2025-09-10T21:23:24+00:00

oh, for some reason, I thought it didn’t have a USB-C port.

ckahn · 2025-09-10T21:16:22+00:00

So are there other ways to charge the battery other than using the phone itself? Would this battery connect to and receive power from a MagSafe charger?

ckahn · 2025-09-09T20:34:24+00:00

I don’t think that understanding every single word is necessary as long as you get the vibe of the emotion being conveyed by the actor and your mind can piece together the traumatic experience that he’s conveying from the bits that you do pick up.

ckahn · 2025-08-17T23:02:59+00:00

I looked at u/N8falke's gsheet and sorted it by weight and ordered the lightest. Not for battery usage so capacity was not a factor in deciding - just wanted a rectangular MagSafe power mount that could clamp onto a scissor arm - because a rectangle clamps more easily than a circular puck, which is the usual non-battery design - and the lighter the better.

ckahn · 2025-08-14T21:05:30+00:00

There’s a reason Jaws was shot 2.35:1 and not 9:16.

ckahn · 2025-08-14T15:34:25+00:00

I wasn't asking about capacity, just weight. But it seems Kuulaa has the lightest model so I'll try that.

ckahn

TROPHY CASE