Wes Anderson’s Kingdom

On the whole, I’ve enjoyed most of director Wes Anderson’s oeuvre, and I count myself a fan. Enough so that I’m even partial to his oft-maligned Jacques Cousteau riff “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou,” one of his least-liked films. It’s far from perfect, I admit, but there’s enough of a through-line to it from “Rushmore,” his 1998 breakthrough, that I find it worthwhile. “Rushmore,” in case there’s any doubt, is a film that I found to be thoroughly wonderful and full of singular promise. It balanced a wholly novel worldview with indelible characters. There’s been very little like it from other directors since.

Over the weekend I went to see Anderson’s newest movie “Moonrise Kingdom,” which like his past works is another Joseph Cornell-like cinematic diorama, full of diminutive but delightful details and vaguely familiar but endearingly idiosyncratic characters. It tells the tale of two pre-teens who fall in love and plot to steal away to a remote part of a fictional New England island, and the comical search parties that pursue them.

Part of the wonder of a Wes Anderson film, for me, is getting to see the kind of film a designer would make given a budget, a crew and a sampling of today’s most notable celebrities. Anderson populates his movies with big name actors eager to burnish their indie cred, and he surrounds them with the accoutrements of his obsessions: obsolete technology, dubious uniforms, imaginary cartographies, naive architecture, and more. Every single piece counts, and is placed exquisitely in relation to every other. Most filmmakers compose their frames, but it might be more accurate to say that Anderson lays his out, much the way print designers once pasted up pages in lavishly illustrated encyclopedia volumes. It’s not film direction, it’s art direction.

In this, Anderson remains at the height of his powers. “Moonrise Kingdom” looks great. The eye can’t help but pore over each frame, visually twiddling with the seemingly endless details festooned fussily on every object. No one can art direct quite like Wes Anderson, and together with his regular cinematographer Robert D. Yeoman, no one can produce films quite this visually rich. The story is set in 1965 and is rendered with an appropriately halcyon color palette that’s a wonder to behold; it evokes an intoxicating, imaginary past with the verve of an Instagram photo adapted for the screen by a true auteur.

Moonrise Kingdom

Nevertheless, I found myself intermittently irritated by it. To watch “Moonrise Kingdom” is to be enthralled by the totality of Anderson’s vision, and even to be warmed by the obvious fondness that he has for his characters. But the movie is also ninety-four minutes of starvation if you’re hungry for any kind of substantial character development. The protagonists (and by the end, nearly everyone is a protagonist, undermining any real dramatic tension the plot had going for it) are little more than inventories of their scripted eccentricities. The director offers scant few arguments for why any of the characters do any of the things they do; they’re all just dress-up dolls at the beck and call of Anderson’s charmingly pre-adolescent fetishes.

Poor character development can seem like a petty complaint when Anderson also provides the visual riches that he does. His technical proficiency is clearly higher than ever, and if you can set aside the centrality of character development, you’d have no trouble arguing that “Moonrise Kingdom” is a remarkable jewel of a movie. (In fairness, the characters are not as horrifically ill-conceived as they were in Anderson’s 2007 travelogue “The Darjeeling Limited.”) This is perhaps how we should think of Anderson’s films from here on out: technical marvels engineered to show off endless quirk. That’s a legitimate credential; it’s just not the one I would have hoped for right after I saw “Rushmore.”

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Photoshop’s Blend Modes Explained

Ratings

3 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Like many inveterate users of Photoshop, I’ve never really known what the blend modes (found on the Layers palette) do. That is, I know the effects they produce, mostly through repeated usage, but I’ve never really understood the operations they perform to achieve those effects. (It doesn’t help that their names, e.g., Color Burn, Linear Dodge, Pin Light, Hard Mix, etc., are not exactly self-evident.) This blog post lists all of the blend modes and offers simplified technical explanations of each. For instance, here’s Pin Light in plain English:

“Pin Light replaces the colors [in the underlying image], depending on the blend color. If the blend color (light source) is lighter than 50% gray, pixels darker than the blend color are replaced, and pixels lighter than the blend color do not change. If the blend color is darker than 50% gray, pixels lighter than the blend color are replaced, and pixels darker than the blend color do not change.”

That’s pretty enlightening and actually very useful. Read the whole post here.

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Unit Editions: “Herb Lubalin”

Ratings

2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

Now available for pre-order from the graphic design specialty press Unit Editions, this “numbered, limited edition, deluxe monograph of the legendary Herb Lubalin, one of the foremost graphic designers of the 20th Century.” If you’re not familiar with Lubalin, you can read this brief overview here. Unit Editions’ books are impressive; I bought “TD 63-73” and it’s gorgeous. But like a lot of design books, they’re easier to admire or display conspicuously on your shelf than they are to read. Still, I just pre-ordered a copy of “Lubalin” for myself. Find out more and get your own copy here.

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An Interview with Charles Adler of Kickstarter

Folks, today I’m kicking off a series of occasional interviews with designers-turned-entrepreneurs. The first installment features Charles Adler, who co-founded Kickstarter with Perry Chen and Yancey Strickler. Kickstarter, of course, is the crowdfunding phenomenon that has upended seed economics for new products and projects — the verb “to kickstart” has become practically synonymous with the wildly successful campaigns that the company hosts. To me, one of the many fascinating aspects of Kickstarter is how they’ve leveraged design on many levels to produce increasingly disruptive, real world results.

Charles and I have become friendly over the past year, being both New Yorkers and even neighbors in Brooklyn — we frequently run into one another at Ft. Greene Park when he’s walking his ten-year old mutt Buster and I’m walking my ten-year old mutt Mister President. In this email interview, he talks about the origins of his interests in design and entrepreneurship, and how the two have meshed together in his role at Kickstarter.

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Follow Up to “Built to Not Last”

The response to my post yesterday about the durability of Apple’s products has been much more robust than I expected.

A lot of people have challenged me to name at least a few modern electronic devices that age well in the manner I’m describing. I admit: it’s very difficult to do that. Many people have cited Moore’s Law, the principle that guides every digital product’s life cycle, as being so thoroughly in opposition to designing and building products that last that it renders my argument inherently flawed. You just can’t build digital devices for the long haul, they say, because “planned obsolesence” will always do these devices in, make them irrelevant even if they do survive the ravages of time.

This is true to some extent. As I said above, I’m certainly not advising Apple on a purely business level that it would be a good idea to reverse course and make new devices user-upgradeable and repairable.

But I would say that just because these devices might no longer be wanted in their eighth, ninth, tenth years of their lives and so on, that doesn’t mean that it’s not possible to build them more ruggedly, and it certainly doesn’t mean they can’t be built so that they acquire an emotionally appealing patina as they age, increasing their desirability if only to a select few.

There’s very little keeping Apple from making an iPod or iPhone or iPad that would last for a decade or more, even if to do so would mean its software could no longer be practically updated at some point (in fact that already happens, which is totally fair, but almost invariably, the hardware begins to break down at that point too). And there’s very little keeping Apple from engineering their devices in such a way that they get better looking over time. Their margins are certainly healthy enough to impose this kind of challenge upon themselves.

It’s true, there’s not necessarily a business case to do this, but that is not the only thing Apple will be judged on in the decades to come. And that’s what I’m talking about here: how will future generations look back at Apple, and by extension its customers? Did we all live our lives by more than just the bottom line? Or were the late twentieth and early twenty-first century the decades in which we irrevocably decided that everything should be disposable (or even recyclable) after just two or three years?

It may sound like I’m picking on Apple, but I think that’s a specious criticism, too. Apple regularly claims exceptionalism in the kinds of products they build; it’s fair game then to at least raise the issue of doing things their peers clearly won’t. This is the brand they built: a company that makes truly great products, products that make a dent in the universe. To me, doing even a little bit to counter the notion that everything is disposable is right in line with that.

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Built to Not Last

Not long after its announcement last week, Kyle Wiens of iFixIt disassembled one of Apple’s new Retina MacBook Pros and wrote at Wired.com that “the display is fused to the glass, which means replacing the LCD requires buying an expensive display assembly. The RAM is now soldered to the logic board — making future memory upgrades impossible. And the battery is glued to the case.” His conclusion was that it’s “the least repairable laptop we’ve ever taken apart.”

This has sparked some debate on both the customer friendliness and environmental responsibility of this kind of manufacturing, There’s no denying that the Retina MacBook Pro is clearly not built for user-serviceable repair or upgrade. Obviously, it follows the same path that Apple has taken with its products over the past decade-plus; from the iPod to the iPhone to the MacBook Air to the iPad, Apple hardware has become less and less accessible over time.

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