Thu, December 7, 2006

Nothing says "procrastinating on the Survivor column" like adding comments to random blog posts across the net.

In this case, it's the giddily entertaining What code DOESN'T do in real life (that it does in the movies) – a fun debunk of ridiculous computer-related falsehoods in the movies.

Here's me, discussing one commenter's peeve – that annoying ability of any computer to digitally enhance any image such that the resolution of any tiny area becomes infinite:

That one is beautiful! And in almost every case it's another example of computer people eschewing the mouse. The shoulder-beasting cop says, "Zoom in on this area" and mashes his greasy fingers all over the nice screen, then you hear the computer tech go clackety-clik-clak on the keyboard, which produces a rectangular selection, which he then moves over the area in question (again, using the keyboard) before zooming in. The hell?

Of course, my all time favorite in this area was in "Enemy of the State" (which is actually a movie I enjoyed very much). They're reviewing grainy security-cam footage of Will Smith holding a shopping bag from a lingerie store. The footage is only from one angle, the opposite side of the bag from the part they want to see. So the computer tech is instructed, "Rotate that 75 degrees around the vertical" (priceless!) and - clackety-clak - he does! The computer somehow magically interpolates every crease and wrinkle on the opposite side of the bag from the side the camera captured. Man, would that ever be useful.

The all-time greatest, of course, is Swordfish, which is mentioned by another commenter on the page. Hugh Jackman is hired to create a worm/virus, so he sits at this giant, multi-monitored station and works on this series of giant, interlocking 3D blobs that he's trying to somehow fit together by typing textual commands into the computer. Utterly, utterly weird. I know filmmakers are tasked with the difficult job of making something abstract like computer code look real, but it's like they didn't even try. Fortunately, they had Halle Berry's tits to distract us.

And no discussion of fake movie image enhancement would be complete without mention of Murder at 1600, in which dramatic-political-thriller mainstay Dennis Miller plays a cop who asks a computer tech to blow up an image that has been scanned from a 35mm negative. (Miller has discovered that little-known secret that the prints you get from Target actually crop the frame a bit, leaving out some information that is available on the negative.) Half of a murder suspect is right on the edge of the negative's frame, so Miller wants a closer look. The computer tech clickety-cliks, and the image becomes larger but for some reason, the sprocket holes above and below stay the same. It's as if they're just a window for enclosing the photographic image on the celluloid – no matter how closely you peer into that image, there they are faithfully surrounding it!

Ah, this has been fun, and truly... an address that changes all the rules.