H/T to KA-CHING! for the image.
December 24, 2013
“I want an Official Red Ryder carbine action 200-shot Range Model air rifle”
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December 19, 2013
Reason.tv – 3 Reasons Anchorman 2 is The Most Important Movie of The Year
I didn’t see the original Anchorman, and I may or may not watch the current version, but I do find Nick Gillespie’s arguments to be compelling:
As Anchorman 2, the long-awaited sequel to 2004’s Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, hits theaters, it’s worth pointing out Will Ferrell’s fake newscaster is not just wildly entertaining but hugely instructive in our media-soaked age.
Here are three reasons why Anchorman 2 is already the most important movie of the year.
1. It Foregrounds Media Cliches and Pat Formulas.
When Ron Burgundy and team create ridiculous, over-the-top news features such as “Rip the Lid Off It!,” it’s impossible to ever take a special report or interruption for breaking news uncritically ever again.
2. It (de)humanizes the Production of “News.”
By calling attention to the actual production process of “news” and the often-considerable limitations of the people who make media, the Anchorman franchise underscores that news is invented, not discovered.
3. It Eviscerates the Media’a Hero Complex
Far more than critically acclaimed critiques such as Network, Anchorman brilliantly lampoons the self-importance and deranged egos of media stars.
For these reasons and more — and especially at a time when even venerable media outlets such as 60 Minutes is effectively firing correspondents for inaccurate reports and blatantly sucking up to power — Anchorman 2 and its prequel should be required viewing for everyone who takes media literacy seriously.
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December 14, 2013
Kurt Loder reviews the second installment of The Hobbit
Despite the tone of many reviews, I’m still looking forward to seeing The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug soon. Here’s Kurt Loder in Reason with his views on the movie:
Part Two: In which we rejoin Bilbo and Gandalf on their way to Erebor in company with the questing dwarves Thorin, Balin, Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, Dopey, Sneezy, Grumpy — you remember. Once again they’re menaced by fearsome orcs and snarling wargs as they gamely transit glorious New Zealand. Some familiar faces pass through: the mind-reading Lady Galadriel (Cate Blanchett), the mushroom-addled wizard Radagast the Brown (Sylvester McCoy). Orlando Bloom’s fiercely blond Legolas is dragged back from the Lord of the Rings series (no word from Tolkien about this), and even the fiery Eye of Sauron gets a quick peek in.
Okay, okay. The Desolation of Smaug is actually a lot livelier than the first Hobbit installment, An Unexpected Journey. For one thing, there’s nothing in it as fun-smothering as the endless hobbit-hole chow-down that opened the previous film. There’s a lot more action this time, and at several points director Peter Jackson exceeds even his own very high standard in designing and executing it.
The story is so simple that we wonder once more why it should take nearly three friggin hours to tell it. Bilbo (amiable Martin Freeman) is slogging along with the 13 dwarves en route to the ancestral homeland from which they were long ago expelled by the dragon Smaug. Their leader, Prince Thorin (Richard Armitage), has recruited him to join in re-entering the stony innards of the Lonely Mountain, where Smaug still sleeps, and, once there, to find and secure a glowy artifact called the Arkenstone, which is…I don’t know, really important. Gandalf (Ian McKellen, crinkly as ever) is intermittently absent, but Bilbo is still secretly in possession of the One Ring he snookered away from Gollum in the last film. Maybe that’ll help.
Entering the dark, broody forest of Mirkwood (where “the very air is heavy with illusion,” Gandalf mutters), the party is attacked by a very real army of giant spiders — a scary scene that allows Jackson to flex his low-budget-horror muscles. Before long the hardy band is imprisoned by a tribe of unfriendly elves. But then they manage a spectacular escape — the movie’s most thrilling sequence – in which Bilbo and company, each squeezed into an empty wine barrel, plunge down a churning waterway as warrior orcs pursue them, leaping from bank to bank, and an intervening band of friendlier elves wades in to fend them off. Blood gushes, limbs fly, and the action builds in endlessly inventive ways. Only when this sequence finally concludes do we note that it’s gone on too damn long.
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December 13, 2013
Desolating The Hobbit
Ethan Gilsdorf reviews the second film in The Hobbit trilogy:
If you are resigned to the idea of Jackson and co-screenwriters Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Guillermo del Toro cribbing from other source materials in the Tolkien legendarium to expand the world of The Hobbit, then Smaug might sit right with you. But if you insist on even moderate fealty to Tolkien’s book, then Smaug might feel overlong, bloated, and unfaithful.
[…]
Once again, Jackson’s art team has done a mesmerizing job visualizing the various stops on this Middle-earth tour. The Elvenking’s Hall, an intricately carved wood and rock dungeon, is magnificent. Mirkwood and its tangle of paths, tree-trunks, toadstools and spiderwebs feels like a mushroom trip gone bad. The Tombs of the High Fells and the crumbed fortress of Dol Guldur would be any D&Der’s wet dream. Set on piers and walkways over the water, Lake-town resembles a Renaissance-inspired Venice made of wood. The secret mountain stairway to the back door of Smaug’s lair, which the Company must ascend, proves to be a masterpiece of design. All are jaw-plummeting environments where I wanted to linger longer. In fact, I’d wished PJ had told his editor Jabez Olssen to let each shot linger a little longer, and asked cinematographer Andrew Lesnie to please hold his shots steady and in place — sans some swooping camera move — for more than five seconds.
[…]
Let me set my biases free. As a fan of Tolkien and a fan of Jackson’s first trilogy, it’s difficult to distance myself from my desire for movie that I’d hoped The Hobbit would deliver. This Hobbit Peter Jackson is less impressive than the Peter Jackson I came to know, respect and love in Lord of the Rings. This is an undisciplined director on display, showing no restraint. To me, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is too too loud, too fast, too much focused on action and distracting plot threads. I prefer the relative simplicity of Tolkien’s first Hobbit to the over-inflated, overblown, over-the-top epic Jackson aims his bow at here. Even if you accept the liberties Jackson and Company take with the script, to my mind, the movie as a movie experience, independent of the book, is not well served by all this extra material.
The question remains, how much of this can audiences withstand? How hard can Jackson pound on their armor before their defenses of patience give way? My suspicion is that chink in their dragon scales, if there is one, will be revealed when the final film in the trilogy, The Hobbit: There and Back Again, hits us with its Black Arrow next December.
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December 7, 2013
November 24, 2013
QotD: Failure is always an option
The idea that “failure is not an option” is a fantasy version of how non-engineers should motivate engineers. That sentiment was invented by a screenwriter, riffing on an after-the-fact observation about Apollo 13; no one said it at the time. (If you ever say it, wash your mouth out with soap. If anyone ever says it to you, run.) Even NASA’s vaunted moonshot, so often referred to as the best of government innovation, tested with dozens of unmanned missions first, several of which failed outright.
Failure is always an option. Engineers work as hard as they do because they understand the risk of failure. And for anything it might have meant in its screenplay version, here that sentiment means the opposite; the unnamed executives were saying “Addressing the possibility of failure is not an option.”
Clay Shirky, “Healthcare.gov and the Gulf Between Planning and Reality”, Shirky.com, 2013-11-19
November 10, 2013
Alison Bechdel on the revived popularity of the “Bechdel Test”
You’d think, with all the social advances in equality for women over the last few decades that our media would more directly reflect that equality … but you’d be wrong. Quite some time ago, Alison Bechdel outlined a quick test you could use to determine whether a book or movie treated women as real people or just as foils for males:
The Bechdel test is used to identify gender bias in fiction. A work passes the test if it features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. Commentators have noted that a great proportion of contemporary works fail to pass this threshold of representing women. The test was originally conceived for evaluating films, but has since been applied to other media.
Pretty low hurdle, yet a vast number of books and movies fail to meet even this minimal standard. Recently a Swedish theatre chain decided to use the Bechdel Test to evaluate the movies they were showing (with Bechdel’s blessing), which has revived interest in the test itself. Bechdel talks about this on her blog:
I said sure, that sounds awesome, go for it.
So they did, and the Guardian ran an article about it on Wednesday. Which prompted a flurry of emails from radio programs who wanted to talk to me. I spoke to Marco Werman at PRI’s The World, and got to join in his conversation with Ellen Tejle, the director of the participating cinema in Stockholm. I also did a background interview with the NPR program Here and Now.
Yesterday I got a lot of other requests from other media outlets but I’m ignoring them. I feel bad about this. There seems to be something fundamentally wrong about not seizing every possible chance for publicity — if not for myself, then at least for the brave Swedish cinema consortium, not to mention the cause of women everywhere.
But inevitably in these interviews I say simplistic things, or find myself defending absurd accusations — like that the formal application of the Test by a movie theater is somehow censorious.
I have always felt ambivalent about how the Test got attached to my name and went viral. (This ancient comic strip I did in 1985 received a second life on the internet when film students started talking about it in the 2000′s.) But in recent years I’ve been trying to embrace the phenomenon. After all, the Test is about something I have dedicated my career to: the representation of women who are subjects and not objects. And I’m glad mainstream culture is starting to catch up to where lesbian-feminism was 30 years ago. But I just can’t seem to rise to the occasion of talking about this fundamental principle over and over again, as if it’s somehow new, or open to debate. Fortunately, a younger generation of women is taking up the tiresome chore. Anita Sarkeesian, in her Feminist Frequencies videos, is a most eloquent spokesperson.
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November 9, 2013
Virginia Postrel on the persistence of glamour
At the Daily Beast, Virginia Postrel argues that far from being dead, glamour is still a powerful force in our lives:
In a world that prizes transparency, honesty, and full disclosure, the very idea seems out of place. Glamour is an illusion that conceals flaws and distractions. It requires mystery and distance, lest too much information breaks the spell. How can its magic possibly survive in a world of tweeting slobs?
But glamour does in fact endure. It is far more persistent, pervasive, and powerful than we realize. We just have trouble recognizing it, because it has so many different incarnations, many of which have nothing to do with Hollywood or fashion.
Glamour isn’t just a style of dress or a synonym for celebrity. Like humor, it’s a form of communication that triggers a distinctive emotional response: a sensation of projection and longing. What we find glamorous, like what we find funny, depends on who we are.
One person who yearns to feel special finds glamour in the image of U.S. Marines as “the few, the proud,” while another dreams of getting into the city’s hottest club and yet another imagines matriculating at Harvard. For some people, a glamorous vacation means visiting a cosmopolitan capital with lots to do and see. For others, it means a tranquil beach or mountain cabin. The first group yearns for excitement, the second for rest. All of these things are glamorous — but to different people.
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November 7, 2013
Astounding historical ignorance … or is he just trolling?
You’d have to go a long way to match the degree of ignorance that the Washington Post‘s Richard Cohen admits to in this article:
I sometimes think I have spent years unlearning what I learned earlier in my life. For instance, it was not George A. Custer who was attacked at the Little Bighorn. It was Custer — in a bad career move — who attacked the Indians. Much more important, slavery was not a benign institution in which mostly benevolent whites owned innocent and grateful blacks. Slavery was a lifetime’s condemnation to an often violent hell in which people were deprived of life, liberty and, too often, their own children. Happiness could not be pursued after that.
Steve McQueen’s stunning movie 12 Years a Slave is one of those unlearning experiences. I had to wonder why I could not recall another time when I was so shockingly confronted by the sheer barbarity of American slavery. Instead, beginning with school, I got a gauzy version. I learned that slavery was wrong, yes, that it was evil, no doubt, but really, that many blacks were sort of content. Slave owners were mostly nice people — fellow Americans, after all — and the sadistic Simon Legree was the concoction of that demented propagandist, Harriet Beecher Stowe. Her Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a lie and she never — and this I remember clearly being told — had ventured south to see slavery for herself. I felt some relief at that because it meant that Tom had not been flogged to death.
No modern American — working in the media — could possibly be so ignorant, so he must be trolling. H/T to Julian Sanchez for the link.
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October 19, 2013
October 1, 2013
Coming features – The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
The Hobbit:The Desolation of Smaug opens nationwide across the UK on 13th December 2013
The second in a trilogy of films adapting the enduringly popular masterpiece The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug continues the adventures of the title character Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) as he journeys with the Wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen) and thirteen Dwarves, led by Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) on an epic quest to reclaim the lost Dwarf Kingdom of Erebor.
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is a production of New Line Cinema and MGM, with New Line managing production. Warner Bros Pictures is handling worldwide theatrical distribution, with select international territories as well as all international television distribution being handled by MGM.
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September 19, 2013
Latest online piracy study shows the problem is Hollywood
Techdirt‘s Mike Masnick shows that the data in the most recent study of online piracy (funded by NBC Universal) clearly shows that the real reason for piracy is Hollywood’s unwillingness or inability to learn:
While we already discussed the MPAA’s questionable new study trying to pin the blame for infringement on Google, MPAA member NBC Universal has released its “Digital Piracy Universe” study as well. This study was done by NetNames, the company formerly known as Envisional, which basically released a very similar study two and a half years ago. Matt Schruers, over at CCIA, does a nice job explaining some of the more questionable aspects of the methodology. However, we’d like to focus on something a bit more basic: the study’s own numbers don’t seem to support what NBC Universal seems to think it does. More specifically, as we noted with the last study, the results actually suggest piracy is Hollywood’s own damn fault. This isn’t just our interpretation either. The guy who wrote both studies, David Price, basically said the same thing right before SOPA died (he argued that the bills were a bad idea).
Once again, it’s not difficult to see why the problem is Hollywood’s with one simple chart:
Basically, in the US, where Netflix has come up with a model that many people find to be reasonably priced and convenient enough, the rate of things like BitTorrent usage falls in comparison.
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September 10, 2013
Julian Assange thinks Cumberbatch sounds nothing like him
Wired‘s Angela Watercutter on the amusing report that Julian Assange seems to be the only person who thinks Benedict Cumberbatch’s accent is wrong:
Going into the making of The Fifth Estate, Benedict Cumberbatch had a tough task ahead: Resembling Julian Assange – a complex figure with a well-known public persona. And while Cumberbatch’s final performance in the film does the WikiLeaks founder justice, there’s one person who took issue with his accent: Assange himself.
In a video interview with Marc Fennell that was posted just a few days before the film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, the WikiLeaks founder said that the Australian accent Cumberbatch – a Brit – uses in the film was “grating.” Only, in the video he sounds eerily similar to the man whose performance he’s saying sounds nothing like him – an irony not lost on Fifth Estate director Bill Condon.
“It is crazy, isn’t it? I heard it before I saw it, and they sounded identical, and I thought that was really funny,” Condon said in an interview with WIRED. “Who actually can hear their own voice, I guess, right? That proves that. Benedict hasn’t seen it yet, but we just talked about it over lunch and he’s dying to.”
In the video (above) Assange, who once called Condon’s film the “anti-WikiLeaks” movie, also calls out the director for instructing Cumberbatch to portray him as a “sociopathic megalomaniac.” (Assange doesn’t cite his source, but he may be referencing comments Cumberbatch recently made in Vogue, stating that when it came to the stage direction in an early version of the script, the actor and director “collided paths because Bill did seem to be setting him up as this antisocial megalomaniac.”) But Condon said that characterization doesn’t come through in the film.
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August 22, 2013
Sixties TV – it was different if you were under 12
James Lileks looks at a few Gerry Anderson productions:
Gerry Anderson! You’re going to get everything you need for crackerjack adolescent-satisfying sci-fi: spaceships, shuttlecrafts, computers, control rooms, crisp commanding officers, futuristic gadgets, and a big score. And none of it will work half as well as you hoped. The spaceships will look great, though. The computers will blink and there will be switches, but nothing makes Star Trek Sounds. The control rooms are clean but everyone is talking in a British accent for some reason, like they have their own NASA that’s just as big. The gadgets are okay. The score has a trademark echoey quality you found in soundtracks, particularly British ones, from the late 60s to the early 70s. It should be good! Why isn’t it great?
I’ve pondered that mystery for a long time. Sometimes you have a revelation — hey, the founding concept of “Space: 1999 was really stupid” — or you carp about the details, wondering why the UFO interceptors went hunting with one (1) missile that required a direct hit to be effective, instead of just blowing the hell out of the area. Then you realize it’s not great because it’s all the work of someone who made horribly grinning square-headed puppets, that’s why, and never stopping thinking he was making entertainment for 8 years olds.
[…]
The title theme is here, complete with oddly romantic piano interlude. It’s every Barry Grey piece that ever left me cold, right there. In general I just don’t feel Barry Grey’s music — except for the opening of the “Space 1999” theme before it goes full whacka-chicka, and of course that other theme. Here’s a guy who wrote miles and miles of scores for things like “Supercar,” for heaven’s sake, and he turns around and knocks off the tightest, sharpest theme of the 70s.
Still, Laurie Johnson was better.
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July 17, 2013
Trailer for The Fifth Estate
A dramatic thriller based on real events, THE FIFTH ESTATE reveals the quest to expose the deceptions and corruptions of power that turned an Internet upstart into the 21st century’s most fiercely debated organization.
Triggering our age of high-stakes secrecy, explosive news leaks and the trafficking of classified information, WikiLeaks forever changed the game. Now, in a dramatic thriller based on real events, THE FIFTH ESTATE reveals the quest to expose the deceptions and corruptions of power that turned an Internet upstart into the 21st century’s most fiercely debated organization. The story begins as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and his colleague Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Daniel Brühl) team up to become underground watchdogs of the privileged and powerful. On a shoestring, they create a platform that allows whistleblowers to anonymously leak covert data, shining a light on the dark recesses of government secrets and corporate crimes. Soon, they are breaking more hard news than the world’s most legendary media organizations combined. But when Assange and Berg gain access to the biggest trove of confidential intelligence documents in U.S. history, they battle each other and a defining question of our time: what are the costs of keeping secrets in a free society — and what are the costs of exposing them?”
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