It is occasionally desirable to be able to non-verbally convey jaded boredom, such as that one might feel in one of those utterly useless, Dilbert-style staff meetings. What is needed in these cases is a way of saying, short of sleeping or notepad-doodling, “I’m here because I’m required to be, but I am well aware that nothing of great importance is being discussed.” For those craving such a skill, check out this site, devoted to the fine art of pen-spinning. (Thanks to Sean, himself a noted pen-spinner, for this one.)
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There are times when one must eschew poetic descriptors, and go instead straight for the onomatopoeia. That said:
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I believe this to be the worst teaser for a film that I have ever seen. It’s for the new Bond film, Die Another Day, and it does absolutely nothing to make me look forward to the movie. And I’m a longtime James Bond fan. It doesn’t help that the thing is presented in a window that is roughly the size of a large postage stamp, but a Bond trailer should look like a BOND trailer, not just a generic espionage-thriller.
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In his review of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, Roger Ebert noted that he found many of the film’s visual effects to be hazy and ill-defined, as he was seeing a film print taken from a digital master. Now he has seen the film in an actual digital projection, and he writes this article about the difference.
Many Star Wars fans were surprised by Ebert’s lukewarm review of the new film, given his until-now unflagging support of the franchise — he is the by far the most prominent film critic to give The Phantom Menace a positive review, for example. But to experienced readers of Ebert, his opinions now don’t come as much of a surprise. Ebert has been fairly skeptical of digital cinema for several years now; he has written numerous articles detailing his belief that film is still preferable because the image is more organic. (The argument is reminiscent of the audiophiles who steadfastedly maintain that a pristine vinyl LP sounds better than a compact disc.) He has also been giving films that are not quite up to par passing marks for inventive visuals; it was on this basis that he gave probably the only positive review that Speed 2: Cruise Control received. It was on the basis of visuals that he recommended The Phantom Menace, saying: “As for the bad rap about the characters–hey, I’ve seen space operas that put their emphasis on human personalities and relationships. They’re called Star Trek movies. Give me transparent underwater cities and vast hollow senatorial spheres any day.” If he was truly disappointed by the look of Attack of the Clones, how could he give it any other review than the one he did?
(And he panned Spiderman for the EXACT same reason.)
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Donn Esmonde, a regular columnist for The Buffalo New, wrote this article on today’s vote by the Seneca Nation of Indians on whether to pursue casinos in downtown Buffalo and Niagara Falls. His article is a bit alarmist, but that’s fine by me. I’d love to see the city figure out a plan for economic development that doesn’t include gambling venues.
(UPDATE: The vote by the Seneca Nation approved the gambling pact with the State of New York, by approximately one hundred votes. Casinos, here we come….)
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Newsweek has an interesting article online about the future of high-rise skyscrapers.
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And thus did the Bash Brothers pass into baseball memory, there to dwell forever with the likes of the Gashouse Gang and “Tinker to Evers to Chance”. Jose Canseco has retired. I always rather liked Canseco, with his “Yeah, I’m a big-time sports star and I’m just going to have fun with it”. You have to like any ballplayer who, while playing outfield, goes to run down a deep fly ball at the warning track and has the ball bounce off his head and over the fence for a home run.
Canseco is one of those borderline players who will appear on many Hall of Fame ballots before he’s eventually admitted, if at all. I suspect he’ll eventually get in, but it may take him years into his “Veterans Committee” eligibility. Anyway, best of luck to him.
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I supported the recording industry’s legal fights against Napster and other such services, not so much for the good of the record companies but for the artists. No one will claim that the artists have been fairly treated by the record companies; in fact, their track record in that regard is two steps removed from indentured servitude. But I failed to see the logic, argued heatedly by Napster proponents, that since record companies so often treated the artists unfairly viz. the compensation they paid the artists for their efforts, it was therefore an improvement to switch to a system whereby there was no compensation whatsoever for the artists, whose work was distributed without their consent. I called this the “Robin Hood argument”, and I never bought it; instead, I suspected ulterior motives on the part of the pro-Napsterites — and my suspicions were in part born out by the tone many of them took in their argumentation. They usually ended up sounding like nothing so much as pale imitators of the Veruca Salt character from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory: “Daddy, I want my free music now!!!”
But now, just a year and a half later, the recording industry has shot itself in the foot with their clumsy attempts at copy-protecting CDs. They are terrified of piracy, which is made absurdly easy by the prevalence of CD-R drives. The problem, though, is that their copy-protection schemes frequently render CDs unplayable in some players, and in any event are easily circumvented. The whole enterprise is glaringly disrespectful of the idea of fair use, and is in all likelihood ridiculously futile anyway. The record companies need desperately to get on the bandwagon of new technology, or they will soon be extinct.
A good article on the quandaries facing the recording industry appears in the current issue of Time, and also appears online here. (ASIDE: for some unintentional hilarity, check out the article’s accompanying photograph of Morpheus founder Steve Griffin. His picture is taken sitting down, and behind him is a wall-hanging hung in such a way that the picture makes it appear as if Griffin is wearing some kind of gonzo Ancient Egyptian headdress.) A sidebar article features a guy who created a site to let music consumers pay artists directly for the music they download, eliminating the record company as middle man entirely. That article is here.
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(WARNING: RANT AHEAD!)
George Lucas has been blamed for a lot of things. The most common charge against him, mainly by film critics, is that he paved the way for Hollywood’s ever-increasing obsession with huge blockbusters at the expense of quality films. The road leading to Armageddon, Godzilla, and The Scorpion King begins, they say, with Star Wars. This may be partly true, but to blame Lucas for that seems harsh. After all, Lucas had absolutely no idea how Star Wars would be received when it opened, and in any event the first real huge blockbuster came two years earlier, with Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. Additionally, one need only watch AMC for a week to see that the idea that cinema used to produce films the caliber of Casablanca on a regular basis is false. There have always been bad movies; we merely remember the hits and forget the misses. So George Lucas isn’t totally to blame for the blockbuster mentality of Hollywood these days. But there is one thing that I will blame on George Lucas: the evolution of the lunatic fanboy. Witness this AICN review of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones.
I have not yet seen the movie. I will be seeing it on opening day, three days from now. Thus, I do not challenge this person’s view of the film, and even if after seeing it I disagree entirely, I still won’t challenge it. Opinions are tricky things, not usually governed by reason (although reason can and should be brought to bear). A cut of meat one man wouldn’t use to make shoe leather is another man’s beef brisket, and we all would do well to remember that. This reviewer was decidedly unimpressed with Attack of the Clones. Fair enough.
But not fair enough is the vitriol with which he attacks the film and, both implicity and explicitly, George Lucas. It is no secret that many (if not most) filmgoers were disappointed with The Phantom Menace (I am one of the few who liked it; we are sufficiently low in number that we have petitioned EPA Administrator Christie Whitman for “Endangered Species” status). But the sheer hatred that film seems to engender is utterly mystifying to me. Consider the third paragraph of the review in question, and try while reading it to not hear in your innermost ear, as I did, the voice of William Shatner intoning “Get a life….it’s just a movie….”. I find it somewhat disturbing that some people would form such angry hatred for a Star Wars movie, and I would be bothered enough by this review if that paragraph stopped just after the first sentence. But then the reviewer goes on to intone the single most repugnant phrase I’ve ever heard from any sector of fandom:
“George Lucas raped my childhood.”
I barely know where to start. First, I am baffled by the idea of one’s childhood as something that can be harmed retroactively, as if we didn’t learn until we were thirty that Christopher Reeve was buoyed by wires in Superman. When I learned that Errol Flynn, star of many films that I watched and loved when I was a kid, was a drunk and a rascal to such a degree that he basically drank himself to death, did learning that somehow harm the experiences I had enjoyed years before? If a heretofore unknown JRR Tolkien manuscript, detailing the Fourth Age of Middle Earth, comes to light and turns out to be a complete dud, has Tolkien somehow done injury to my original experience of reading The Lord of the Rings? The reviewer says, “Something died in me — and George Lucas killed it. Bastard.” No, he didn’t. He did nothing except fail to live up to one person’s expectations, and to call Lucas a “bastard” on that basis makes me wonder what we would say if George Lucas eventually was revealed to be the Zodiac Killer. (And of course, encountering such name-calling just three paragraphs into a lengthy review doesn’t bode well for what one would hope to be a piece of rational criticism.)
But in any event, the truly disgusting thing about the whole thing is the idea that one’s childhood could be “raped” by something so trivial as a movie. Sorry, folks. If you don’t like this Star Wars movie, the last one, or any of them, fine. But let’s reserve the overwrought hyperbole for people who really have a right to use it — the children of Northern Ireland, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, or Bosnia, for example. Or how about all those children who lost one or both parents on 11 September 2001. Their childhoods were raped. Anyone who wishes to claim that their childhood was raped by a Star Wars movie should be aware: they are still in their childhood, and really should grow up.