Monday, March 08, 2010

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The national celebration of crea tive filmmaking, illusion and escape — better known as the Oscars — takes place tonight. But before the official awards ceremony kicks off, American taxpayers were treated to a best-acting performance by Vikram Pandit, Citigroup’s chief executive, who testified last week on Capitol Hill that short sellers were to blame for the near-collapse of the nation’s biggest bank back in 2008.

Eighteen months after the implosion of the global financial system, Pandit is still promoting the fiction that Citi’s problems were all market-induced. In his words: “This was not a fundamental situation. It was not about the capital we had, not about the funding we had at that time.” Really?

Message to beleaguered US taxpayers — “You now own 27 percent of this lousy bank because a bunch of Wall Street hotshots ran the stock down from $54 to $3, just because they could.” In Pandit’s mind, bad management, lousy risk controls, the sub-prime crisis and over-expansion apparently had nothing to do with Citi’s near-demise.

Luckily there is one cool head in Washington whose stock is rising by the day — Elizabeth Warren, chairwoman of the Congressional Oversight Panel, or TARP czar. Warren is one of the few regulators in Washington who not only understands the truth, but speaks it as well.

None too happy to hear Pandit’s “blame the shorts” excuse again, Warren fired back. “Is Citi special?” she tauntingly asked Pandit. If not, why was it the only major bank to need two huge bailouts and another $300 billion in government guarantees to stay afloat in the fall of 2008?

Christopher Whalen, one of the best banking analysts around, was equally unimpressed. “This bank has got the highest loss rate of any of the big four,” he noted. “The shorts were just responding — the emperor had no clothes.” It got to the point where the two were almost calling Pandit delusional.

Sadly, the Citi chief appeared to be just that. Almost two years into the banking crisis, it’s a pity that the short sellers are still getting hit with a disproportionate amount of the blame for the system’s collapse.

terrykeenan@email.com

Image Credit: Kevork Djansezian/Getty ImagesLast night, some of the biggest names in independent filmmaking gathered in downtown L.A. to celebrate everything that makes Hollywood break out in hives: feisty, gritty, against-the-grain movies that don’t always have the benefit of shimmering star power to lure butts into multiplex seats. That said, there were plenty of celebs on hand at the 25th Annual Film Independent Spirit Awards, including Ben Stiller, who joked winningly about the strangeness of being named Honorary Chair of the event since the last time he made an indie was the mid-90s. Then he invited some porn stars on stage with him, which was sorta weird and distracting. But whatevs, that’s the independent spirit, I guess. That and liberal, un-bleeped swearing. You won’t hear any of that this Sunday night on ABC, beyotches!

I watched the event (which was hosted by Eddie Izzard) on IFC from the comfort of my living room last night, forcing my eyeballs to stay open till the wee hour of … 1 a.m. (It’s been a long week, friends. I’m usually a tad hardier.) As my colleague Dave Karger posted earlier this weekend on his Oscar Watch blog, the night belonged to Precious, which went five-for-five. The always adorable Gabby Sidibe charmed the room with her acceptance speech for Best Female Lead (yay!) and gets my vote for best speech. At an event that can get kinda long-winded (no orchestra to play winners off the stage here!), Sidibe was succinct and sweet. “It’s got wings, yay!” she said, admiring her trophy. Jeff Bridges also deserves a shout-out for brilliantly channeling The Dude. Holding up his statuette while thanking his wife, he exclaimed, “This is really going to tie the room together, baby!” Just wait till you get your accoutrement from the Academy tomorrow night, Jeff.

For what must have been the 8 millionth time this season, Bridges performed “Fallin’ & Flyin’” from Crazy Heart, but the real performance moment was Anvil’s “Metal on Metal.” If you’ve seen Anvil!: The Story of Anvil (and if you haven’t, get thee to Netflix and put it at the top of your queue), then you know just how much these Canadian heavy-metalers long to play live. And boy did lead singer Steve “Lips” Kudlow look overjoyed to be there. Only bummer here was that, from my couch-potato vantage point, the audience seemed oddly sedate. Oh well, at least Lips and bandmate Robb Reiner got to accompany Anvil! director Sacha Gervasi when he accepted Best Documentary from presenters Maria Bello and Lenny Kravitz who, by the way, easily win the Hottest Presenters Award in my book.

The most touching moment of the night belonged not to the numerous teary-eyed, grateful winners. No, it came when Roger Ebert got a standing ovation. (The beloved critic and his wife Chaz’s Truer Than Fiction Award went to documentary filmmakers Bill Ross and Turner Ross for 45365.) To see all those people cheer Ebert, who can no longer speak due to his fight with cancer, moved me to tears.

That’s my take on the night. What did you think? (If you missed it last night, don’t fret. IFC is rerunning the show all weekend.)

Image Credit: Kevork Djansezian/Getty ImagesLast night, some of the biggest names in independent filmmaking gathered in downtown L.A. to celebrate everything that makes Hollywood break out in hives: feisty, gritty, against-the-grain movies that don’t always have the benefit of shimmering star power to lure butts into multiplex seats. That said, there were plenty of celebs on hand at the 25th Annual Film Independent Spirit Awards, including Ben Stiller, who joked winningly about the strangeness of being named Honorary Chair of the event since the last time he made an indie was the mid-90s. Then he invited some porn stars on stage with him, which was sorta weird and distracting. But whatevs, that’s the independent spirit, I guess. That and liberal, un-bleeped swearing. You won’t hear any of that this Sunday night on ABC, beyotches!

I watched the event (which was hosted by Eddie Izzard) on IFC from the comfort of my living room last night, forcing my eyeballs to stay open till the wee hour of … 1 a.m. (It’s been a long week, friends. I’m usually a tad hardier.) As my colleague Dave Karger posted earlier this weekend on his Oscar Watch blog, the night belonged to Precious, which went five-for-five. The always adorable Gabby Sidibe charmed the room with her acceptance speech for Best Female Lead (yay!) and gets my vote for best speech. At an event that can get kinda long-winded (no orchestra to play winners off the stage here!), Sidibe was succinct and sweet. “It’s got wings, yay!” she said, admiring her trophy. Jeff Bridges also deserves a shout-out for brilliantly channeling The Dude. Holding up his statuette while thanking his wife, he exclaimed, “This is really going to tie the room together, baby!” Just wait till you get your accoutrement from the Academy tomorrow night, Jeff.

For what must have been the 8 millionth time this season, Bridges performed “Fallin’ & Flyin’” from Crazy Heart, but the real performance moment was Anvil’s “Metal on Metal.” If you’ve seen Anvil!: The Story of Anvil (and if you haven’t, get thee to Netflix and put it at the top of your queue), then you know just how much these Canadian heavy-metalers long to play live. And boy did lead singer Steve “Lips” Kudlow look overjoyed to be there. Only bummer here was that, from my couch-potato vantage point, the audience seemed oddly sedate. Oh well, at least Lips and bandmate Robb Reiner got to accompany Anvil! director Sacha Gervasi when he accepted Best Documentary from presenters Maria Bello and Lenny Kravitz who, by the way, easily win the Hottest Presenters Award in my book.

The most touching moment of the night belonged not to the numerous teary-eyed, grateful winners. No, it came when Roger Ebert got a standing ovation. (The beloved critic and his wife Chaz’s Truer Than Fiction Award went to documentary filmmakers Bill Ross and Turner Ross for 45365.) To see all those people cheer Ebert, who can no longer speak due to his fight with cancer, moved me to tears.

That’s my take on the night. What did you think? (If you missed it last night, don’t fret. IFC is rerunning the show all weekend.)

No matter which film gets the Oscar for best visual effects at the Academy Awards this weekend, it’s a guaranteed win for Autodesk and Nvidia. The San Francisco Bay Area companies provided technology for all three of the category’s nominees: “Avatar,” “District 9″ and “Star Trek.”

As movies rely more on digital effects, Hollywood is looking north to Silicon Valley to enhance scenery, bring characters to life and even render whole worlds from scratch.

“Avatar,” one of the highest-grossing film of all time, was also the most technologically demanding. Creating the effects required 35,000 computer-processing cores and gobbled up as much storage as the three “Lord of the Rings” movies combined. The goal: make it look so real viewers wouldn’t think about the technology involved.

“Traditional filmmaking started in Hollywood, but digital filmmaking started in the Bay Area,” said Richard Kerris, chief technology officer of San Francisco’s Lucasfilm, the production company behind the “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” movies. “It kind of makes a whole lot of sense for people, when you look at the hotbed of companies going on here.”

Autodesk’s software allowed “Avatar” filmmakers to see how actors would appear in digital environments right away. It was as if the computer displayed a live video game of each scene, giving directors the ability to make corrections immediately.

“We provide technology that allows people to essentially create real-world experiences digitally, which are accurate and as photo-realistic as possible, and in some cases, more than photo-realistic,” said Maurice Patel, an executive at the San Rafael, Calif.-based company, the world’s biggest maker of engineering-design programs.

Weta Digital, the New Zealand visual-effects company that worked on “Avatar,” ran all of its computer processors simultaneously to create lifelike scenes in 3-D. Nvidia’s graphics processors helped cut down on the time it took Weta to make the sequences.

“The scenes that were created for that movie were far more complex than anything Weta Digital had ever done before,” Danny Shapiro, a director of marketing at Nvidia, said in an interview. “They just did not have the time to have that level of complexity and quality to make the release deadline.”

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company developed a new computing engine, called PantaRay, that allowed Weta to create complex scenes quicker, while using less memory and fewer processors.

“It’s all about creating tools that allow studios to innovate,” Shapiro said.

NetApp, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., helps filmmakers store and manage the terabytes of data generated. When “Avatar” filmmakers needed to focus on a certain element of the scene, it threatened to create an information bottleneck. That meant a scene could require hours or days to process.

Without NetApp’s technology, “Avatar” would have taken years longer to produce and been much more expensive, said Patrick Rogers, a vice president at the company. The film wasn’t cheap as it was: It cost about $237 million to make, according to the Internet Movie Database.

“The outcome would be, either the movie would take four years to render, would double the cost of the movie, or you wouldn’t have had the lifelike images,” Rogers said.

Chips from Santa Clara’s Intel and Sunnyvale-based Advanced Micro Devices, meanwhile, help handle much of the underlying work. Their processors run the servers used in filmmakers’ so-called render farms.

When Lucasfilm opened its new campus in San Francisco’s Presidio in 2005, it included an AMD-based render farm that can operate 24 hours a day.

Shares of Autodesk and NetApp have more than doubled in value over the past year, while Nvidia’s stock is up 97 percent.

Effects technology isn’t relegated to big-budget epics, science-fiction films and animated features. Independent films are increasingly relying on computer graphics.

“If you take some of the Sundance films today, they’ll have more frames digitally treated than visual-effects award-winners 10 years ago,” Patel said.