Quotulatiousness

November 26, 2009

Damning with not-so-faint damns

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:11

A clearly impartial and unbiased advance review of James Cameron’s Avatar, due for release in December:

Budgeted at a reported $237m (£143m), Avatar is Cameron’s first dramatic feature since the record-breaking Titanic, back in 1997. The film is a science-fiction fantasy set on a verdant planet called Pandora and following the adventures of a US Marine played by Sam Worthington. Cameron shot the film on his own patented “fusion digital 3D camera system” and experts argue that the results take 3D techniques to a whole new level. [. . .]

The reviewer, however, begs to differ, describing the film as “alienating” and “weird”. Moreover, he/she argues that its pioneering visual technology is liable to induce nausea in the viewer. “The problem is with cutting in between 3D focus points and perspective,” the mystery critic writes. “The mind cannot adjust to it without a buffer — thus, Avatar is literally vomit inducing.”

Even the review’s praise comes with a sting in the tail. “There are some beautiful moments [in the film],” it concedes. “But overall it’s a horrible piece of shit.”

November 11, 2009

Reasons to avoid seeing Disney’s Christmas Carol

Filed under: Economics, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:11

Jim Carrey seems to be channelling his inner Friedrich Engels here:

Talking with the Chicago Tribune to promote A Christmas Carol a few days before the film’s release, Carrey released the following burst of political flatulence:

“I was thinking about it this morning, how this story ties into everything we’re going through,” says Carrey, who, thanks to the technology, plays Scrooge as well as the three ghosts haunting him. “Every construct we’ve built in American life is falling apart. Why? Because of personal greed and ambition. Capitalism without regulation can’t protect us against personal greed…”

Making certain that many people reading the interview will resolutely avoid seeing the film, Carrey describes the protagonist as follows:

“Scrooge is the ultimate example of self-loathing,” Carrey says, noting that, after playing the title character in Ron Howard’s “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” he was merely “going to the source” in fleshing out Scrooge. “Beware the unloved, I always say,” Carrey continues. “They’re the ones that end up being the mean guys. It comes from that deep, spiritual acid reflux within them. With Scrooge it infects his whole being.”

Whereas Dickens presented a reasonably nuanced view of the issues the story brings up, and did so with an appropriate narrative tone, Carrey makes the latest film version sound like a ham-fisted socialist diatribe, hardly a strategy for drawing middle American families in great numbers.

October 20, 2009

More “tech the tech” talk from J.J. Abrams

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:37

You felt that the “chance” meeting between the new Kirk and the old Spock was more like a run through the infinite improbability drive than a sensible plot point? Wait . . . it gets more improbable:

When Star Trek arrives on Blu-ray and DVD Nov. 17, extras like deleted scenes and commentary will answer some lingering questions. Abrams said the DVD includes a scene cut from the film that features Spock Prime (Nimoy) dropping some logic about the unlikely chance meeting.

“In the scene, Spock explains that (the encounter of Kirk and Spock Prime) is a result of the universe trying to restore balance after the time line is changed,” Abrams said. “They acknowledged the coincidence as a function of the universe to heal itself.”

Abrams said he cut that scene because he liked the mystery the chance meeting provided — and the idea that Kirk and Spock are destined to be friends. (Another DVD mini-feature, titled “The Shatner Conundrum,” will tackle the absence of William Shatner, the original Captain Kirk, from Abrams’ movie, according to io9.com.)

September 17, 2009

An alternate reading of Inglourious Basterds

Filed under: Media, WW2 — Tags: — Nicholas @ 13:08

Tyler Cowen has a very different view of Quentin Tarantino’s latest movie, Inglourious Basterds:

Tarantino made his Hong Kong movie, his martial arts movie, and his Blaxpoitation flick but I never expected him to dip into Nazi cinema. He sure loves hearing those Germans talk — boy are they eloquent — and fascist chattering takes up most of the movie. There is a veneer of a Jewish revenge plot against the Germans, but most of the movie strikes me as a re-aestheticization of various Nazi ideals, cinematic, linguistic, and otherwise. I’m not suggesting Tarantino literally favors the rule of Hitler, rather he probably got a kick out of getting away with such a swindle, right under the noses of Hollywood and with commercial success to boot. The Jewish assassin squad members hardly seem virtuous (in some ways they’re portrayed to fit Nazi stereotypes), whereas the German characters light up the screen and show extreme cleverness. (Hitler by the way is a “crummy Austrian,” not up to the more rigorous German ideal.) The sniper “movie within a movie” — which has Tarantino constructing a Nazi movie for a screening scene — is a stand-in for the broader enterprise. Throughout one wonders what are the implied references to Israel, such as when the Jewish suicide bombers strap explosives to themselves. There is homage to Riefenstahl, Pabst, Emil Jannings, Nazi “mountain movies” and other unsavory bits. I found viewing this movie a disturbing and negative experience. I’ve done a lot of work on the history of the state and the arts; if you don’t believe me, go away and research Nazi cinema and watch the film again.

Once again, it isn’t a movie I was particularly interested in seeing, and this interpretation makes me even less likely to shell out the price of admission.

September 14, 2009

Should publicly funded media be free?

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 18:59

Let’s just set aside the whole question about whether the government should be even in the media-provider business* . . . if the government paid for it (that is, if you paid for it), shouldn’t it be available to you for free?

Let’s put aside my personal frustration at having my work locked away. The real question here is, since CBC content is funded by the public, shouldn’t the public own it? Or at least have access to it? Actually, the CBC archives are just the tip of the iceberg: the overwhelming majority of stuff made for Canadians with Canadians’ money is inaccessible to Canadians.

In Canada, movies are supported by Telefilm, TV by the Canadian Television Fund, books and art by The Canada Council for the Arts, and so on. But most of this stuff isn’t distributed very well or for very long, and you can only get your hands on a fraction of it.

So I want to put forth one more contrarian position: I think that any publicly funded content should (within, say, 5 years of its creation) be released to the public domain.

Thoughts?

* No, they bloody shouldn’t be. IMO. YMMV, etc.

How to sell a film to a major studio

Filed under: Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 18:36

John Scalzi provides some helpful hints to the producers of Creation, who are complaining that they can’t get a US distributor to pick up the movie (because of all the Christian fundamentalists, y’see):

. . . leaving aside any discussion of the actual quality of the film, it may be that a quiet story about the difficult relationship between an increasingly agnostic 19th Century British scientist and his increasingly devout wife, thrown into sharp relief by the death of their beloved 10-year-old daughter, performed by mid-list stars, is not exactly the sort of film that’s going to draw in a huge winter holiday crowd, regardless of whether that scientist happens to be Darwin or not, and that these facts are rather more pertinent, from a potential distributor’s point of view.

The major US studios are no longer really tuned to distribute films like this in any event. Maybe if Charles Darwin were played by Will Smith, was a gun-toting robot sent back from the future to learn how to love, and to kill the crap out of the alien baby eaters cleverly disguised as Galapagos tortoises, and then some way were contrived for Jennifer Connelly to expose her breasts to RoboDarwin two-thirds of the way through the film, and there were explosions and lasers and stunt men flying 150 feet into the air, then we might be talking wide-release from a modern major studio. Otherwise, you know, not so much. The “oh, it’s too controversial for Americans” comment is, I suspect, a bit of face-saving rationalization from a producer flummoxed that such an obvious bit of Oscar-trollery such as this film has been to date widely ignored by the people he assumed would fall over themselves to have such a thing.

September 3, 2009

That’d better be a really, really good concert

Filed under: Humour — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:23

Colby Cosh reposts a very odd craigslist posting (well, I’m assuming that it’s not representative of typical craigslist postings . . .)

August 27, 2009

Now it’s Star Trek‘s turn

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 15:59

John Scalzi returns to the well of nerd bile (see last week’s geek-disturbing here), this time he’s aiming at Star Trek:

Me: Star Wars design is so bad that people have to come up with elaborate and contrived rationales to explain it.

Star Wars Fanboy: YOU ARE SO VERY WRONG AND I WILL SHOW YOU WHY WITH THESE ELABORATE AND CONTRIVED RATIONALES.

It’s a little much to hope for (or fear) the same result two weeks in a row, but nevertheless I promised everyone I’d point and laugh at Star Trek design, so here we go. I’ll confine myself to things in the movies. There are eleven of those, so it’s not like this will be a problem.

V’Ger
In Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a Voyager space probe gets sucked into a black hole and survives (GAAAAH), and is discovered by denizens of a machine planet who think the logical thing to do is to take a bus-size machine with the processing power of a couple of Speak and Spells and upgrade it to a spaceship the size of small moon, wrap that in an energy field the size of a solar system, and then send it merrily on its way. This is like you assisting a brain-damaged raccoon trapped on a suburban traffic island by giving him Ecuador.

August 20, 2009

It must be a slow week in movies . . .

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:14

. . . so John Scalzi decides to kick over the hornet’s nest of Star Wars geekdom:

I’ll come right out and say it: Star Wars has a badly-designed universe; so poorly-designed, in fact, that one can say that a significant goal of all those Star Wars novels is to rationalize and mitigate the bad design choices of the movies. Need examples? Here’s ten.

R2-D2
Sure, he’s cute, but the flaws in his design are obvious the first time he approaches anything but the shallowest of stairs. Also: He has jets, a periscope, a taser and oil canisters to make enforcer droids fall about in slapsticky fashion — and no voice synthesizer. Imagine that design conversation: “Yes, we can afford slapstick oil and tasers, but we’ll never get a 30-cent voice chip past accounting. That’s just madness.”

C-3PO
Can’t fully extend his arms; has a bunch of exposed wiring in his abs; walks and runs as if he has the droid equivalent of arthritis. And you say, well, he was put together by an eight-year-old. Yes, but a trip to the nearest Radio Shack would fix that. Also, I’m still waiting to hear the rationale for making a protocol droid a shrieking coward, aside from George Lucas rummaging through a box of offensive stereotypes (which he’d later return to while building Jar-Jar Binks) and picking out the “mincing gay man” module.

And the crowd goes wild.

July 28, 2009

Did James Lileks like The Watchmen?

Filed under: Books, Humour, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:23

One quote from a fascinating take-down:

. . . it’s a sign of the movie that leaving in the giant squid would have made it less ridiculous.

Haven’t seen the movie myself, although Victor said he liked it.

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