Afterschool: In theaters Oct. 2.
Robert is a young American student at an elite East Coast preparatory school who accidentally captures the death of two classmates on camera. Their lives become memorialized as part of an audio-visual document intended to speed up the campus-wide healing process. But instead, the video creates an atmosphere of paranoia and unease among students and teachers.


Visual Acoustics: In theaters Oct. 9.
Narrated by Dustin Hoffman, VISUAL ACOUSTICS celebrates the life and career of Julius Shulman, the worlds greatest architectural photographer, whose images brought modern architecture to the American mainstream. Shulman, who passed away this year, captured the work of nearly every major modern and progressive architect since the 1930s including Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra, John Lautner, and Frank Gehry. His images epitomized the singular beauty of Southern Californias modernist movement and brought its iconic structures to the attention of the general public. This unique film is both a testament to the evolution of modern architecture and a joyful portrait of the magnetic, whip-smart gentleman who chronicled it with his unforgettable images.


La Nana: In theaters Oct. 16.
After 23 years working as housemaid in an upper class Santiago, Chile household, Raquel (Catalina Saavedra) is as much a part of the Valdez family as the wife, husband, and kids she lives with and looks after.

I'm interested to see what everyone thinks about all the self proclaimed HD Floating around out there. The title HD is basically worthless now. Consumer electronics as well as user based video sites have seemingly blurred, no pun intended, the distinction between what is actually High-Definition and what only pretends to be.

Years ago the standards for HD were set by the ATSC. They were 1280x720 and 1920x1080, 720p and 1080p respectively(this also includes 1080i). Everything that was to be considered HD had to be at least 1280x720 Simple enough, right? Not exactly. A few years a friend of mine purchased a TV that was purported to be HD 720p yet its resolution was only 1024x768, which is actually XGA.
See Graph below.


When we researched this we found that it was common for 42 inch 720p plasma televisions to be this resolution. Which really surprised me because I was aware of the ATSC standard. And yes, I'm aware that the image quality difference between 1280 and 1024 at that screen size is negligible, but it's the principle, 1024 fails to meet the standard.
This marked the beginning of an interesting trend. Since, I imagine, the average person is not aware of the vertical resolution specs, the horizontal pixel count is touted more often. Which leads manufacturers to cut corners, for some odd reason, by lowering the pixel count. It doesn't sense to me that lowering the pixel count a little bit would decrease production cost in any way. Or take for instance the Hitachi Ultravision, it boast a 1080 resolution but its actually resolution is closer to 720. It measures in at 1280x1080. Which means it's 720 with extra horizontal resolution. I imagine this was done simply to put that 1080 tag on the case. Little do prospective buyers know that it's actually 640 pixels short of 1080p.
But this is all water under the bridge now, because 1080p is quickly becoming the standard. My gripe is all the pseudo HD floating around the net. Especially YouTube and Vimeo, as well as many others. It's seems customary on these sites to have a button that turns the HD quality video on. However this button is a lie. Anyone who is familiar with HD content knows that when you watch a video on YouTube or Vimeo it's decidedly not HD. Why? Because every video site transcodes and compresses video, so even if you upload 1280x720 what you watch on the site will not be HD. To be clear, I'm not complaining about the video quality on these sites. For streaming video it's excellent. What I'm more concerned about is the mislabeling of HD content, because it could lead to lower standards for picture quality. If the public consciousness becomes conditioned to think that HD video is equal to what we watch on YouTube or stream on Netflix then the incentive to up the ante for HD pq on broadcasts and Bluray could possibly drop. that's it that's my gripe, now on to health care!

...At least in this test shot for the mythic Kevin Smith penned Tim Burton directedSuperman Returns. This looks so crazy that I'd actually be interested in watching it. It would be cool to see a totally bizarre take on such a famous property. Though, it wouldn't have received much love, I'm sure.

What's with the long hair, or, for that matter, the stoner look? And that plastic suit looks ridiculous, but still, I like it. Oh, what might've been. I guess we'll never know. Check out some of Burton's conceptual sketches.


And who else thinks Cage could play Burton in a Burton biopic?