During the airing of tonight's 24: Live Another Day, Fox aired an extended trailer for their upcoming Batman prequel, Gotham. It features Ben McKenzie as Detective James Gordon, Jada Pinkett Smith as a new character called Fish Mooney, and all the original characters in the comic before they turn into their future selves.
The long sludge of New York City’s mayoral primary season is almost over. On Tuesday the five contenders in the Democratic race—including front-runner Bill de Blasio, his current biggest challenger, Bill Thompson, and former front-runner Christine Quinn—duked it out on live television, with Quinn and peripheral candidates Anthony Weiner and John Liu aiming to loosen de Blasio’s grip on recent poll numbers in the hopes of forcing a runoff election. It wasn’t pretty.
Last in this week's series of gloomy New York panoramas, this image is a still from Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow, a movie remarkable (only) for its painstaking special effects. The spire of Empire State Building, now festooned with communications antennae, was originally designed with a docking port for dirigibles, a fantastic conceit only realized in Sky Captain's alternate New York.
Not everybody's so impressed by high dynamic range photography. The relatively novel technique, which produced the gloomy Gotham cityscape we published yesterday, can also be used simply to pump up an image with color. Cheesy. Nikola Tamindzic's first nightlife pictures for Gawker made heavy use of filters in Photoshop, the standard photo manipulation software. But the photographer has gradually weaned himself off Photoshop and eschews HDR programs such as Photomatix. Here's a panorama of downtown New York (from Nikola's Home of the Vain portfolio site) using traditional means.
High dynamic range imaging, a technique which amplifies the tonal range in a photograph, is particularly effective in capturing cityscapes. This panorama, New York City at Night, by Paulo Barcellos, gives the midtown skyscrapers an ambience that looks borrowed from the computer generated imagery of the Batman movies. Click the image to enlarge.
Work parties: A chance for the company to reward its employees while giving those employees the opportunity to interact outside the usual confines of the office. It's a time to bond, to kick back, relax, and celebrate who you are as an organization, but more importantly, who you are as individuals. And if you're an individual who works for Jason Binn (last seen on a giant yacht in the Hamptons) and Gotham mag, well, you're going to Six Flags with everyone you try to ignore on the elevator! Whether you like it or not. Full soul-crushing e-mail after the jump.
A flustered emailer writes:
A report from the office of Gotham magazine, the Manhattan outpost of Jason Binn's rich-people-friendly Niche Media empire:
Copyranter Mark Duffy, arguably the angriest living boy in New York, happened across insufferable adman Donny Deutsch's new column in Jason Binn's equally insufferable Gotham magazine. Deutsch, Binn, Gotham: They're all things we do our best to avoid, and so we owe great thanks to 'Ranter Duffy, who took a good luck at Deutsch's first effort — it's called, theoretically cleverly, "Deutsch Mark" — and crunched the numbers that remind us why we engage in that avoidance:
Mazel tov to the indefatigable Jason Binn, whose usually content-free Gotham magazine has apparently scored the local-news scoop of the year: an exclusive interview with Rudy Giuliani.
• Jessica Simpson's assistant CaCee may have been pushing rumors about Simpson cheating on husband Nick Lachey, and now Nicole Kidman's sister Antonia may have slipped to the press about Kidman's rumored engagement to singer Keith Urban. You just can't trust a bitch these days. [Scoop (2nd item)]
• Why we're glad we don't work at Page Six: Paris Hilton personally calls the column to clarify that her ex-fiancé Paris Latsis merely enjoyed a single tequila shot with the heiress and her current beau, Stavros Niarchos. The thought of hearing that abnormally deep voice on the phone gives us chills. [Page Six]
• Gotham magazine cover girl Natasha Richardson hates publisher Jason Binn's penchant for forced photo-ops at his parties. You and the rest of the world, darling. [Lowdown]
• The strap on model Naomi Campbell's dress breaks but is quickly repaired, much to the disappointment of those hoping for a nip slip — including Andre Leon Talley, according to Rush & Molloy. Somehow, we don't think the Vogue queen was too interested. [R&M (3rd item)]
• To clarify rumors from yore, jittery actress Brittany Murphy dumped her manager, not the other way around, nor does she do smack and fuck the help. [Page Six]
