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  • Exodus of Aussies, Kiwis to affect IPL

    Cricket | R. MohanIn May, IPL teams may hardly resemble those that played in the last two weeks of April. The exodus of the Australians, West Indians and New Zealanders, to do national duty in the Cari-bbean and in England, would mean that the team composition would change dramatically. Considering the impact the Australians have made in the opening phase with three of four centuries coming from them, the very nature of a team's cricket could change too.The latecomers and the reinforcements have arrived, some may even have sneaked in much to the consternation of franchises, which are questioning the norms for foreign player signings outside the auction. Frankly speaking, the flavour of the first IPL has been mostly of the imported variety despite so many success stories of local players who on occasion have outperformed themselves.Chennai Super Kings who have established themselves at the top of the table with four wins in as many outings may have to change their whole batting order as well as their approach because they are losing three key men to the exodus - Matthew Hayden, Mike Hussey and Jaocb Oram. Other teams are also similarly affected with Kolkata Knight Riders certain to feel the pinch as McCullum was providing them with so much thrust.The question is bound to come up about how open should the competition be. Should the IPL throw open its doors and raise the cap on foreign players from the existing four It can be argued that if the English Premier League format is to be followed, it should then be an open house with teams free to choose how much of their playing XI they would wish to be filled by imported stars.If market forces are allowed their freedom, which will probably happen after the first season when transfers become possible, it is on the cards that some IPL teams will aspire to be the Arsenal FC of the IPL. The London club that boasts of 13 League titles and 10 FA Cups now has far more French-speaking players than English footballers. If the existing cap of four players is raised because of pressure from teams, the composition of IPL teams could change drastically once again.It would be nice if the IPL teams were to follow the examples of the other giants of EPL, like Manchester United and Chelsea who believe in keeping their backbone English. There is a certain pride in them when an English footballer like Paul Scholes scores the goal as he did to take ManU to the final of the Champions League.When it comes to a one-club star like Scholes, who having been with United for 14 years has risen through the Old Trafford ranks, the English tend to go gaga.There is, however, no denying the pride in seeing home grown talent reach the pinnacle even in a club with an international outlook like ManU, one of the leading brands in pro sport franchises.The Delhi Daredevils, with a batting star cast that is virtually all Indian will probably argue that national is the way to go. That might, however, be a minority view. IPL cricket is bound to face the dilemma over the cap on foreign players soon as franchises try to go for the best combinations possible.The effect of having the big hitters who belt the new ball from the top order is already evident, with openers McCullum, Hayden and Gilchrist making three spectacular centuries. The other century came from the uberbat Symonds.It must have been galling for youth like Abhishek Nayar and Palani Amarnath to have to go out and play in front of huge crowds, with millions more watching on television. Many young Indians have begun to shed their stage fright and are standing up to be counted.Still, when it comes to providing momentum at the top of the innings, only the world's best, which of course includes Dhoni and Sehwag, have done it so far. The clamour will be for more ammunition from abroad. One of the founding principles of the IPL was to promote Indian talent.This is where the issue will get ticklish because franchises that have put up considerable sums will demand greater flexibility. They do pay huge amounts for foreign players to sit on the benches because only four are allowed.Curiously, Chennai dropped Muralitaharan to play Morkel against Bangalore, which was a poor tactical decision considering how Murali is a spinner for all conditions and pitches.In any case, the cap of four will certainly prove irksome and the arguments will break out. It would be interesting to see what shape the administrators give the league in the future when the debate over foreigners opens up. 
    2008-06-28 11:47:40

  • A novel plot

    Nawaid AnjumDateline: August 17, 1988. A C-130 Hercules carrying Pakistan’s military dictator, General Zia-ul-Haq, crashes. Twenty years after that mysterious crash, Pakistan-born and London-based journalist and playwright Mohammed Hanif reimagines the "conspiracies and coincidences" that sprang up on Zia’s death in his brilliant debut, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, published by Random House.A powerful story of love, betrayal, tyranny and revenge, the novel spins a dark, humorous tale out of one of the subcontinent’s most enduring mysteries which has been critically acclaimed for having shades of Sara Suleri Meatless Days, Joseph Heller Catch 22 and Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse Five. After Pakistan Air Force pilot Ali Shigri’s father, one of Zia’s colonels, commits suicide under suspicious circumstances, Shigri sets out to avenge his father’s death.While the novel is ostensibly bold in its narration ISI is referred to by a character as "Inter Bloody Services Bloody Intelligence", Hanif is far from agreeing that it will "unruffle feathers" in Pakistan. "It is a little love and adventure story with some jokes in it and I think it will be read in that spirit," says Hanif, who heads the BBC Urdu Service.As for the conspiracy theories shrouding General Zia’s death, the author says he "loves" all those theories. "I took some, added some of my own and wrote this book. And after I had finished, this 80-year-old American dude who was the US ambassador in India at the time, came up with a completely new theory. He says the Israelis did it and the state department declared him an almost-loony for bringing up the subject. I think it must be true. And I am hoping another one, an even better one will come along soon," says Hanif, who holds that while Pakistan may still be struggling with Zia’s ghost, August 17 is not a big day on anyone’s calendar.Hanif, who graduated from the Pakistan Air Force Academy, knew the setting of his novel only too well. "It’s personal in the sense that I came of age in that period. But I must say I probably learnt more about the Air Force watching Top Gun than I did being in the Air Force. So, I would say that fiction doesn’t always need to get fixated on personal. There is always other fiction to get inspiration from," he says.Having moved to London a decade back, Hanif last visited the country of his birth in April this year. "I was in Karachi when suddenly riots erupted in downtown Karachi. I felt immediately at home. The only new thing is that when robbers stop you at gunpoint in Karachi they ask for your cellphone. But then we didn’t have cellphones when I moved to London," says Hanif in a lighter vein.In the last few years, there have been some nice novels from Pakistani authors settled abroad Kamila Shamsie, Nadeem Aslam, Moni Mohsin et al. Have they helped in building Pakistan’s literary character as nations are defined by their narrations Hanif holds that Pakistanis like a good story, just like anyone else. "And probably more so because there are not enough good stories about them. There are one hundred and sixty million Pakistanis and very few writers. All the writers you mention come from very different backgrounds and write about diverse subjects. There are obviously many more who write in Urdu, Sindhi and Punjabi as well who have a wider readership. But I am not sure Pakistan has a literary character as such. TV character, may be, or pop music character, but sadly no literary character as such," he explains.As for Mohsin Hamid, whose The Reluctant Fundamentalist was shortlisted for the 2007 Booker Prize, Hanif says, "It’s a very striking book. And the only debate that I have heard about this book is that whether it’s better than Moth Smoke, which again was a very striking book. So, Mohsin is competing against himself. His books have always started conversations, debates. And there are not very many books anywhere which can accomplish that."What does Hanif think of the baggage of identities in a world that has shrunk to become a global village "I think of it as just that: baggage. Whenever my baggage is opened at customs, they usually find laundry, unread books and Indian DVDs," says Hanif, who has written plays for the stage and screen, including a critically acclaimed BBC drama and the feature film The Long Night, an urban "dystopia of drugs, sex and dislocation" produced and directed by Hasan Zaidi. Hanif holds that a bi-cultural experience is not of any great importance for a writer as people become bi-cultural for "mundane" reasons like jobs and children’s education."I have read very fine writers who died in the very house they were born in. I think Nayyar Masud, who is probably the finest post-Partition Urdu writer, was born in Lucknow and still lives there. And if you read his short stories, you’ll never mention the word bi-cultural. He can create these incredible worlds for you. And I think that’s what writers do, conjure up worlds," says Hanif. 
    2008-06-28 11:50:00

  • PM doing everything in nation's interest: Pranab

    Amritsar PTI: Rejecting the CPIM charge that Manmohan Singh was to be solely blamed for the political crisis over the Indo-US nuclear deal, External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee on Saturday said whatever the Prime Minister is doing is in ... in The Hindu: Top Stories
    2008-06-28 11:28:37

  • Running away from problem will not bring credit: Moily

    New Delhi PTI: With the PDP withdrawing support from the Jammu and Kashmir government, the Congress on Saturday sought to counsel its erstwhile ally that running away from a problem will not bring credit to any political party. "Running away ... in The Hindu: Top Stories
    2008-06-28 11:33:37

  • Arun Kumar removed as SASB CEO

    Srinagar PTI: The Jammu and Kashmir government on Saturday removed Arun Kumar as the Chief Executive Officer of the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board after an inquiry found him guilty of misconduct during a press conference last week. Kumar, who was ... in The Hindu: Top Stories
    2008-06-28 11:31:37

  • Video: AP Top Stories

    Here's the latest news for Saturday, June 28th: Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama hold 'unity' rally; Myspace.com linked to Vermont girl's disappearance; Ringleader sentenced in body parts scam; Big Brown ready to race again.
    2008-06-28 03:23:49

  • House Divided

    Olga TellisThe famous Japanese millionaire Akira Mori once said, "A boat can’t have two captains." Or as the oft-quoted Chinese proverb says, "You can’t have two tigers on the same mountain." So there’s little wonder that business families are involved in high-voltage warfare that inevitably ends in the division of their empires. Rahul Bajaj also seems to think of the inevitability of splits as he told the 57th AGM of Bajaj Auto in 2002, that only a handful of the top 50 family-run business houses remain united in the fourth generation. And, he added, all of them are doing well.So, all this business about blood being thicker than water is just a clinical observation and the splits and multi-generational splits, as business historian Gita Piramal calls them, have put paid to this blood is thicker than water chant to underline the unbreakable quality of family ties.At the moment, one of the most traumatic decisions that the richest Indian Lakshmi Mittal’s Arcelor Mitttal has to make is to take over the company in which his brother Pramod of Global Steel and Ispat Industries has a huge stake, Kremikovtsi Steel, the sick but largest steel plant in Bulgaria. Mr Lakshmi Mittal had split the Mittal Group that consisted of his father and two brothers Pramod and Vinod, though they are still on friendly terms personally. Mr Pramod had tried to compete with his elder brother by taking over sick steel mills in the erstwhile Soviet Union. It will be a bitter pill for Mr Pramod to swallow and it promises to be gory, according to reports.Family splits are stories that novels and serials like Dynasty are made of, with a lot of intrigue, rancour, court battles, competing wives, vaulting ambitions, courtiers, etc. It seems odd that Indian writers and novelists have not turned some of the high-profile splits in family businesses into steamy novels or serials. One can think of only novelist Shobhaa De doing a great job on say the Ambani empire split. But splitting has been the name of the game from the 1980s and even before when the Birla empire split. After G.D. Birla, the patriarch of the Birla empire died, his sons split the empire and K.K. Birla further split his group between his three daughters. M.P. Birla had no children and after his death his wife Priyamwada looked after the group. She left everything to her trusted lieutenant R.S. Lodha and soon the various factions of the Birla clan were at his throat for control of the Rs 5,000 crore group. The story is still unfinished.In the earlier days, they split and admitted that they did it as families did not get on. But today splits are glorified as unlocking value for the shareholders even though it is the promoters who make money hand-over-cuff while shareholders get a few crumbs. The promoters still hold the bulk of the shares either in their own names or those of shadowy associates as in the case of the Ambani brothers.Dr Piramal feels that splits are good as they re-energise a group. She wonders whether the Aditya Birla group, the Ajay Piramal group, the Ambani group or even the Rama Goenka group would have expanded as they have done had the split not occurred. When Rama and his brother G.P. Goenka split, the Rama group saw an explosion of growth through a number of acquisitions from Ceat to Dunlop. The split between cousins at the Great Eastern Shipping will also see Great Offshore which was spun out of the parent company grow out independently.Dr Piramal says the split within the Ambani group was waiting to happen. Dhirubhai had trained both his sons to be aggressive and then put them in the same box. There was bound to be an explosion. Splits happen for many reasons and it is a lot to do with parenting, she says. Sometimes a parent favours one child over the other instead of treating both equally or sometimes they train them equally for succession planning as Dhirubhai Ambani did.The Bajaj group split is very much connected with the first thesis, where the patriarch of the group and chairman of Bajaj Auto, Rahul Bajaj, was ostensibly more indulgent towards his family over the families of his younger brothers. This, at least, was the perception of his nephew Khushagra who was said to have persuaded his father Shishir to split from the family. Following the split, Mr Khushagra’s sugar unit, Bajaj Hindusthan, is thriving as it had not when it was part of the Bajaj group.Commenting on the split, Rahul said: "There is nothing wrong if one of the brothers wants to leave, four are still together."However, splits have seen the downfall of many groups, mostly in textiles and jute.They include the Mafatlals where squabbling uncles and nephews split the group, the Garwares, Khilachands, Khataus, Gujarmal Modis and Thackerseys. 
    2008-06-28 00:25:45

  • Dark Knight Director Shuns Digital Effects For the Real Thing

    <!--pageType= magazinewide slug= ff_darknightsection= entertainmentsubsection= hollywoodheadline= Gotham Thriller: Batman Does His Own Stunts in Nitty Gritty Dark KnightauthorName= Scott BrowncreditType= photocredit= Robert Maxwellcaption= Nolan drew inspiration for the mood in Dark Knight from crime dramas like Heat and The French Connection.-->The Bat-plan was simple: Base-jump off one Hong Kong skyscraper, smash through the window of another, grab the Chinese crime boss, then hitch a drag chute to a passing C-130 cargo plane for a daring aerial escape. And on to Gotham! An instant, no-fuss extradition in the best tradition of American vigilantism. Just another working day for Batman and, presumably, just another feat of digital wizardry for the visual effects team. Except for one thing: Christopher Nolan, director of The Dark Knight, wanted to do it for real.Which is a funny thing to want when you're making a lavish superhero sequel here in the heyday of the greenscreen. And certainly not an easy thing to get, 88 stories above a juddering megacity on the other side of the world. "They spent weeks in preproduction working out a way to hang the stuntman from one helicopter and have a second helicopter following him with the camera," says Wally Pfister, the movie's director of photography. Two choppers and a stuntman on a string — all to make a comic- book hero seem as credible on film as Frank Serpico or The French Connection's Popeye Doyle. All to make a comic-book movie speak the cinematic language of crime thrillers.And not a moment too soon. While today's action heroes routinely come dressed in shades of the giddy synthetic à la Spider-Man and Iron Man, movie fans have gorged on digital eye candy — and, perhaps fearing retinal diabetes, now they're cutting back Speed Racer, anyone. Still, gritty naturalism is no small leap for the spandex genre. It's a mood more identified with art noir and the prestige pic, the kind of cinema built to attract Oscars, not mass audiences. The Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan. Photo: Robert Maxwell Nolan wants to clothe that grim aesthetic in a cape and cowl — and then project it onto an enormous wraparound screen. He's the first Hollywood director to shoot key sequences of a major feature in Imax, the giant-screen film format still known mainly for whopping nature documentaries. For Nolan, reality beats the hell out of gee-whiz special effects. But keeping it real doesn't come cheap: The $180 million flick is Warner Bros.' biggest summer tent pole, and after Speed Racer's flameout, its only box-office hope.The studio should take heart. Nolan has a cogent Theory of Applied Batmatics: Insist on reality — no effects, no tricks — up to the point where insisting on reality becomes unrealistic. Then, in postproduction, make what is necessarily unreal as real as possible. "Anything you notice as technology reminds you that you're in a movie theater," Nolan explains. "Even if you're trying to portray something fantastical and otherworldly, it's always about trying to achieve invisible manipulation." Especially, he adds, with Batman, "the most real of all the superheroes, who has no superpowers."How "real" are we talking here When Nolan unveiled a six-minute Knight prologue on Imax screens last December a twisty bank heist with a jarring Joker reveal, it was clear that his cinematic vision owes more to director Sidney Lumet than golden-age DC comics. You can feel the tension of Lumet's 1975 Dog Day Afternoon and Michael Mann's 1995 drama, Heat.Nolan had an ally in Pfister, his collaborator on every film since the 2000 sleeper hit Memento. "When I was a kid, that bank heist scene in Dog Day Afternoon was real," Pfister recalls. "It was that whole time around The French Connection and Bullitt and The Seven-Ups. That's what Chris was going for. Only we were shooting in Imax, this format where you're used to seeing beautiful sunsets and helicopter shots of gazelles running across mountainsides. Instead, we've got machine-gun fire and Heath Ledger."Nolan's use of Imax is the natural fulfillment of an experiment he launched with Batman Begins in 2005. That film depicted Batman's dogged, bruising rise from angry rich kid to driven crime fighter, and it hinted at the consequences of embracing one's inner demon, even in the service of good. Begins ended with a warning: Batman has escalated the war. His presence ensures the rise of equally quixotic, equally obsessed adversaries. One of these leaves a calling card at murder scenes: a joker. Batman promises the police he'll look into it. In The Dark Knight, he does, and it looks right back at him, with the leering, paint-smeared face of the late Heath Ledger. Eight stories tall. Cruel reality mashed up with the comic-book carnivalesque — unvarnished, without the comforting buffer of f/x. In an Imax theater, your eyes can't wander off Nolan's enveloping canvas and can't easily dismiss what they're seeing as trickery. Maybe that's the most special effect of all.The man who revived the Bat-franchise and saved it from nipple-suited frippery receives visitors in the Garage, his filmmaking sanctum. It's where he shot the first Imax test footage for Knight and began what his wife and producer, Emma Thomas, calls "the biggest home movie ever made." Technically, she's right: The Garage sits across from the couple's large but unpretentious Hollywood manse, where Nolan and Thomas are raising four young children. Heath Ledger as the Joker.Photo: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures When I arrive, Nolan has just finished editing a Joker scene. Ledger is frozen in a blur on three monitors. The actor, who accidentally overdosed on prescription medications in January at age 28, haunts The Dark Knight. The full effect on the film of his shocking death has yet to be gauged, but ever since news of the tragedy hit the wires, there's been reverent yet inescapably ghoulish chatter about a posthumous Oscar.But all that is far from Nolan's mind today. Right now, it's about the work in front of him. "Ask Emma to look at the scene and make sure I didn't fuck it up," he tells his editor, Lee Smith, in a gentle English accent that suggests, to Yank ears, that Everything Is Under Control. As we step out into the toy-strewn, sun-striped courtyard separating Nolan's house from his workshop, I nearly trip over a battered effigy of the Tumbler, the tanklike Batmobile unveiled in Batman Begins. "At one point, that was remote control," Nolan sniffs. "Then it got left out in the rain." I detect a trace of disdain: A real Tumbler wouldn't fritz out after a little LA sprinkle.Because these aren't toys, after all — not in Nolan's world: For the new movie, his designers built a full-size, working motorbike called the Batpod, which zips around on two fat spheroid wheels. According to star Christian Bale, it's a cruel mistress; only one stuntman managed to stay in the saddle. "If you ride it like a bike, you won't be riding it very long," the actor says, speaking from painful experience. But spills aside, Bale definitely caught Nolan's naturalism bug: When he heard that his stunt double, Buster Reeves, was prepping for an aerial shot atop the Sears Tower, he pulled rank. "I said to Buster, 'No you're not. You get to do a lot of fantastic stunts. You're not taking that one away from me.'""So we got an Imax shot of Christian Bale as Batman standing on top of the Sears Tower," Pfister says. "Here we are with our principal actor standing on the edge of one of the tallest buildings in the world. I think a lot of people will assume that's CGI." Perhaps, but when you see the shot featured in the first trailer, your eye instinctively detects something different, something thrilling and rare: photographic reality.Settling for anything less, Nolan feared, would send the Batman franchise back into camp and mummery. That's why he transported his hero to the very real city of Hong Kong. Unfortunately, the real world has its drawbacks. "The Chinese government was a nightmare in terms of filming stuff," Pfister sighs. "They wanted to limit the amount of helicopter activity over the city."And Nolan needed helicopters. He especially wanted to minimize digital meddling in those high-altitude Imax sequences. His reasons were both aesthetic and practical: Imax film stock is enormous, roughly 10 times the size of 35-mm celluloid, and it soaks up a vast amount of visual information. Those dimensions are what make the image so rich and sharp, even spread over a screen the size of a blimp hangar. While conventional films are digitized at 2K resolution 2,000 pixels across, or 4K at most, adding visual effects to Imax footage requires digitizing each frame at up to 8K. In other words, the difficulty and expense of doing f/x rise exponentially with the size of the negative.But even superheroes and movie directors sometimes have to compromise: In the end, Chinese authorities refused to budge, and the skyscraper jump was digitized. But the C-130 preparing to snatch Batman into the sky That's real. "Sometimes you do end up replacing a filmed shot with visual effects," Nolan says. "And there's kind of a see-I-told-you-so among the effects guys. But if we had started out with that, it wouldn't have looked the same. Because we photographed something, we have a benchmark standard to hold to, even if we change things. Even the film's CG shots are rooted in some kind of photographic reality." For instance, Nolan adds a layer of actual human-generated camera-operating motions to digital effects shots — kind of like deliberately scratching the negative. He says it restores "the human element of choice: the little corrections, little imperfections. Certain uncertainties."Certain uncertainties have always pocked Nolan's relationship with the Bat-franchise. Even in 2005, after his revisionist reboot proved successful, the director wasn't sure he was up for a sequel. He was making The Prestige, an art-house thriller about rival magicians in 19th-century London which, significantly, pits technology against old-fashioned sleight of hand. He was moving on. But there was one small problem with leaving Batman behind: He knew how he wanted it all to end. He had something Godfather-ish in mind, a saga of dark doubles and transfiguration — big, dense, and novelistic. Christian Bale as Batman.Photo: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures It would involve not only Batman's archnemesis, the Joker, but also Harvey Dent Thank You For Smoking's Aaron Eckhart as a crusading Gotham City DA destined to become scarred, schizoid villain Two-Face. Nominal allies, Wayne and Dent would vie for the affections of Wayne's longtime love, assistant DA Rachel Dawes Maggie Gyllenhaal, who replaces Batman Begins' Katie Holmes. And Dent's tragic transmogrification into criminal half-man would mirror Wayne's disappearance into his Batman persona. The director wasn't interested in plumbing the murky origins of the Joker himself — the Clown Prince is more a Loki-like force of chaos. "He's like the shark in Jaws," Nolan explains. "The Joker cuts through the film, he's incredibly important, but he's not a guy with a backstory. He's a wild card."It was an ambitious tale, and Nolan needed a canvas to match, a format that could sweep fans off their feet. Imax was his best bet. Since the late 1960s, the Canadian company has specialized in large-format filmmaking and projection. Its screens are the biggest on offer, and their vertiginous 1.43:1 aspect ratio is uniquely suited to tales set on dizzying rooftops. "It's like replicating that childhood experience of moviegoing," Thomas says. "It's harder to be taken out of your own world as a grown-up. You need an even bigger screen."Of course, most people will ultimately see Knight on ordinary multiplex screens. The scenes shot in Imax — the bank heist and Hong Kong escape, all the aerial shots, a bang-up armored car chase, and the final confrontation with the Joker — will have to be adjusted to the usual 2.40:1 aspect ratio. But because they're compressed from the sumptuous Imax negative, those sequences will still retain a special visual richness.Pfister admits that even in an Imax theater, many viewers, wowed by the sheer size, might miss the finer photographic distinctions. But they'll feel them. "It's more of a visceral thing," he explains, adding that Nolan's longer, calmer cuts are designed to let viewers scan the huge Imax screen for detail — a refreshing change after years of synapse-snapping action-movie flash-cuts. "You can see something way off on the horizon," Pfister says. "You can see a little glint of light, a reflection in Batman's eye. You can't see it in a conventional theater. And you definitely can't see it on a plasma screen at home."Which is good news for studios trying to lure viewers back to the box office. Without a crane or David Copperfield, it's impossible to pirate "the Imax experience" for private viewing. It also bodes well for the Imax Corporation, which two years ago saw its stock plummet after an SEC inquiry into its accounting practices. The company has since bounced back, signing deals with theater chains AMC and Regal to expand beyond its current network of 300 theaters in 40 countries. On July 18, Warner Bros. will roll out Knight on almost 100 of those screens and on some 4,000 traditional ones. The studio has shown plenty of blockbusters on Imax screens before, but those films were shot conventionally and later digitally adapted for the format.Of course, shooting on the biggest negative in town isn't easy. The cameras, which Pfister's crew had to lug up to rooftops and onto helicopters, weighed over 60 pounds each, and their bulk made them awkward to maneuver. One crushed its mount. "On a fast tilt-down, the camera just takes you with it," Pfister says. Add to that the fact that Imax film is more than three times as expensive as 35-mm, that there's only one lab in the world able to process it, and that the cameras have to be reloaded after three minutes of shooting. "Chris said, 'It's just like when we were kids and shooting on Super 8!'" Pfister recalls. "You get a three-minute load, and then it takes five days to get your film back.'"Imax cameras are also considerably louder than traditional 35-mm cameras, making it difficult to harvest the environmental, on-set sound Nolan prefers. Movies and television shows often dub dialog after principal photography is over, since the sound recorded by the boom and body mics can prove unusable. Nolan would rather fix it while everyone's still on the set. He hates to loop. "I just think separating the voice from the face and the body is very tricky," he explains. It is, after all, blatantly unreal.To the Max Digital and 3-D may be the future of cinema, but the Imax viewing experience still packs a punch. 70-mm projection left vs. 2-D Imax projection rightPhotos: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures The ker-pow! of Imax rests on the simple rule that bigger and brighter is better. And the negative used by Imax cameras is huge: 65 mm across, or about the width of an iPod. The additional surface area allows more data to be recorded, resulting in lush, detailed, hi-def images that loom large onscreen. That hi-def effect is expensive, though: Imax film costs more than three times as much as regular film, and the cameras are gluttons with it, slurping up 6 feet of stock per second. Better still, in 2-D Imax theaters, two xenon bulbs outshine the standard single projection light. The result is a brighter image, with angelic whites that make the other colors pop. And don't forget the giant 76- by 98-foot screen — two billboards long and eight stories high. Because it runs wall to wall and floor to ceiling, the image fills viewers' peripheral vision, immersing them in the onscreen action. — Allison RoeserSo did the director get everything he needed from Ledger before his death He says yes: Ledger nailed it in principal photography. Thomas adds, "Everything you see onscreen is his performance." In other words, there'll be no clunky digital resurrection, aural or visual, no morbid echoes of Oliver Reed's posthumous performance in Gladiator. Besides, Nolan doesn't believe in bringing an actor back six months later and expecting him to re-create the nuances of a character, any more than he believes a computer can re-create the quality of human camera work on its own."Anything that's even vaguely funny you just can't reproduce. When there's a hint of irony or comedy ... Well, I don't make comedies, per se, but" — he chuckles — "at least I think my films are funny. Nobody else seems to think so, though." Photo: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures It's a problem Nolan shares with Batman's greasepainted nemesis — and perhaps a harbinger of marketing challenges to come. Naturally, no one's expected to laugh at the Joker's pranks, but will audiences even be able to look at him How will they react to these frightening final images of Ledger-the-actor His death is, in a way, the ultimate case of reality intruding on fantasy. Even before tragedy struck, Nolan was spooked by the character Ledger created. "I remember Heath calling up while I was working on the script and talking about ventriloquist's dummies, about having a voice that was high and low, and I'm on the other end going, 'Uh ... yeah.' It sounded insane, and not necessarily in the right way. But when he performed it, I was like, 'OK, I see.'"Nolan could be describing The Dark Knight itself, this rough comic-book beast he's conjured into our workaday world. "I don't know what this thing is, exactly," he says, "but I know it's what I wanted." He pauses. "Be careful what you wish for!" He laughs again — perhaps a little nervously. It's the first, tiny hint I've seen of a certain uncertainty.Contributing editor scott brown scott_brown@wired.com wrote about Transformers in issue 15.07.
    2008-06-27 15:56:18

  • Top stories

    The most-read BBC Scotland news website stories
    2008-06-27 13:34:10

  • Manekshaw will inspire future generations of Army: Gen Kapoor

    New Delhi PTI: Army chief General Deepak Kapoor on Friday condoled the death of Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw, calling him an icon whose spirit will continue to inspire future generations of the Indian Army. Gen Kapoor, who is currently on an ... in The Hindu: Top Stories
    2008-06-27 11:30:45
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