After a four-hour miniseries, 73 episodes, a TV movie and numerous Internet “webisodes,” “Battlestar Galactica” has finally reached its journey’s end. Now the arguments can begin.
If you haven’t yet seen the series finale, consider yourself warned. There are spoilers ahead.
The two-hour conclusion of “Battlestar Galactica,” which aired Friday, gave its major characters closure, but it left some major plot points unanswered. Or, to be more exact, it answered them ambiguously.
Were the apparitions that appeared to Baltar and Caprica Six really angels? Was everything that happened in the series really the will of God, or some deity-like facsimile? What was Starbuck anyway? Was she an angel or a demon? And who or what resurrected her after her apparent death in season 3?
The only thing certain is that the ending has people talking. Fans who have followed “Galactica” since the 2003 miniseries seem split. Some think they were cheated. Some think producer/writer Ronald D. Moore delivered an emotionally satisfying conclusion. Some think Moore was just “making it up” as he went and didn’t know how to end the series. And others are just confused.
Put me in the camp that is pleased with how Moore ended the series. All of the major characters reached the end of their personal story arcs and were better for the journey, even if some of those endings were bittersweet. As for the unanswered questions, science fiction is still fiction. In science, it is nice to have answers, but in fiction it is usually more fun to be left with questions.
I don’t really care what Starbuck was or how she returned from the dead. What is important is that her character finally found a purpose — along with inner peace. And when she simply vanished without a trace, her mission at last complete, that floored me as much as anything on television has in a long, long time. It was as close to perfect as television gets.
Did Moore and his writing staff make things up as they went? Sure. You can’t expect a TV series to come out looking like a novel. I suspect a lot of sci-fi fans have taken away the wrong lesson from “Babylon 5,” J. Michael Straczynski’s epic “novel for television,” which spanned five seasons. Straczynski started out with a definite beginning, middle and end in mind. But he still had to make major changes as the series progressed, some of which improved on his original plan.
Even when it comes to novels of the regular paper variety, it is rare for an author’s outline to survive the first draft. The difference is when you read a novel, you’re getting a finished product, but when you watch a TV series — even a so-called novel for television — you’re getting a work in progress, one episode at a time. You have to expect the writers to change their minds, try new ideas and abandon ones that aren’t working. They wouldn’t be doing their jobs if they just stuck to their original plan. Few writers are clever enough to get it right the first time.
In any case, it could be worse. At least “Battlestar Galactica” didn’t end like “The X-Files.” It would take a PowerPoint presentation, complete with flow charts, to explain the ins and outs of that show’s conspiracy-laden mythology.
“Battlestar Galactica” leaves its fans with lots of great moments and lots more to debate. That puts it in some pretty special company. Other classic SF series that had controversial endings include the British series “The Prisoner” and the animated Japanese series “Neon Genesis Evangelion,” both of which still set off heated arguments years and, in the case of “The Prisoner,” decades after they left the air. Both also remain extremely popular. AMC is producing a miniseries remake of “The Prisoner,” while in Japan, new feature-film retellings of “Evangelion” are still landing in theaters.
So, thanks, “Battlestar Galactica,” both for the memories and for the arguments to come.
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Sci-Fi Channel finally does away with the ‘Sci-Fi’
What is in a name? Quite possibly more than even Shakespeare ever dreamt.
The Sci-Fi Channel, which has gone by just “Sci Fi” for most of the decade, announced Monday that it will have a new name as of July 7.
Say goodbye to Sci Fi, and say hello to SyFy — different spelling, same pronunciation. And unlike the generic term “sci-fi,” which was coined by the late Forrest J Ackerman, SyFy has the advantage of being something the network can trademark, said Bonnie Hammer, former Sci-Fi Channel president and current head of parent company NBC Universal Cable Entertainment.
Unfortunately, SyFy has the disadvantage of being lame, if not downright insulting to sci-fi fans. Yet it took marketing geniuses years to come up with it — if they actually did. The name originally belonged to a Web site called SyFy Portal, which sold the SyFy name and reopened as Airlock Alpha.
Sci Fi executives have been looking for a new name and a new image for a long time. In fact, they seem embarrassed by the idea of being associated with science fiction.
TV Week cites television historian Tim Brooks, who helped launch the Sci-Fi Channel when he worked at USA Network, Sci Fi’s sister channel.
“The name Sci Fi has been associated with geeks and dysfunctional, antisocial boys in their basements with video games and stuff like that, as opposed to the general public and the female audience in particular,” Brooks said.
So, in case you were wondering what Sci Fi’s executives think of their core audience — the geeks and “dysfunctional” fanboys who have watched the channel religiously since it started up in 1992 — now you know.
Current Sci Fi President Dave Howe was a little more diplomatic.
“If you ask people their default perceptions of Sci Fi, they list space, aliens and the future,” he said in a New York Times story. “That didn’t capture the full landscape of fantasy entertainment: the paranormal, the supernatural, action and adventure, superheroes.”
Well, we certainly can’t have a TV channel devoted to space, aliens and the future, now can we? In fact, during her tenure as president, Hammer pretty much let everyone know of her contempt for real science fiction. She canceled “Farscape,” a popular series set in space and loaded with extraterrestrials, and packed the schedule with “reality” and paranormal programs like “Crossing Over with John Edward.”
From the beginning, Sci Fi aired a lot of horror and fantasy programming, and most sci-fi fans accepted that. In the publishing world, science fiction, fantasy and horror have always been linked. But then Sci Fi aired “Braveheart,” a movie that isn’t sci-fi, fantasy or horror. It’s just bad history. After that, nothing was off limits. Not even professional wrestling.
With the new name, SyFy, Hammer finally has what she always wanted: something that sounds like sci-fi and looks a little like sci-fi, but isn’t sci-fi.
Sure, SyFy will still air science fiction, with “Caprica” — a prequel series to “Battlestar Galactica” — and a new “Stargate” series yet to come. But I would expect more wrestling and action movies if I were you. Toss in some “C.S.I.” reruns, and SyFy would probably look a lot like Spike TV.
Along with the new name, the channel is also getting a new slogan, “Imagine Greater,” and you have to wonder how long it took the marketing guys to come up with that.
What does it even mean? Greater than what? Maybe they mean “Imagine More” or “Imagine Better.” Is there a language on Earth in which “Imagine Greater” even makes sense? Maybe it sounds better in the original Klingon, or would if SyFy didn’t hate aliens.
Hey, SyFy executive folks, how about trying to “Imagine Grammar” instead?
The Sci-Fi Channel, which has gone by just “Sci Fi” for most of the decade, announced Monday that it will have a new name as of July 7.
Say goodbye to Sci Fi, and say hello to SyFy — different spelling, same pronunciation. And unlike the generic term “sci-fi,” which was coined by the late Forrest J Ackerman, SyFy has the advantage of being something the network can trademark, said Bonnie Hammer, former Sci-Fi Channel president and current head of parent company NBC Universal Cable Entertainment.
Unfortunately, SyFy has the disadvantage of being lame, if not downright insulting to sci-fi fans. Yet it took marketing geniuses years to come up with it — if they actually did. The name originally belonged to a Web site called SyFy Portal, which sold the SyFy name and reopened as Airlock Alpha.
Sci Fi executives have been looking for a new name and a new image for a long time. In fact, they seem embarrassed by the idea of being associated with science fiction.
TV Week cites television historian Tim Brooks, who helped launch the Sci-Fi Channel when he worked at USA Network, Sci Fi’s sister channel.
“The name Sci Fi has been associated with geeks and dysfunctional, antisocial boys in their basements with video games and stuff like that, as opposed to the general public and the female audience in particular,” Brooks said.
So, in case you were wondering what Sci Fi’s executives think of their core audience — the geeks and “dysfunctional” fanboys who have watched the channel religiously since it started up in 1992 — now you know.
Current Sci Fi President Dave Howe was a little more diplomatic.
“If you ask people their default perceptions of Sci Fi, they list space, aliens and the future,” he said in a New York Times story. “That didn’t capture the full landscape of fantasy entertainment: the paranormal, the supernatural, action and adventure, superheroes.”
Well, we certainly can’t have a TV channel devoted to space, aliens and the future, now can we? In fact, during her tenure as president, Hammer pretty much let everyone know of her contempt for real science fiction. She canceled “Farscape,” a popular series set in space and loaded with extraterrestrials, and packed the schedule with “reality” and paranormal programs like “Crossing Over with John Edward.”
From the beginning, Sci Fi aired a lot of horror and fantasy programming, and most sci-fi fans accepted that. In the publishing world, science fiction, fantasy and horror have always been linked. But then Sci Fi aired “Braveheart,” a movie that isn’t sci-fi, fantasy or horror. It’s just bad history. After that, nothing was off limits. Not even professional wrestling.
With the new name, SyFy, Hammer finally has what she always wanted: something that sounds like sci-fi and looks a little like sci-fi, but isn’t sci-fi.
Sure, SyFy will still air science fiction, with “Caprica” — a prequel series to “Battlestar Galactica” — and a new “Stargate” series yet to come. But I would expect more wrestling and action movies if I were you. Toss in some “C.S.I.” reruns, and SyFy would probably look a lot like Spike TV.
Along with the new name, the channel is also getting a new slogan, “Imagine Greater,” and you have to wonder how long it took the marketing guys to come up with that.
What does it even mean? Greater than what? Maybe they mean “Imagine More” or “Imagine Better.” Is there a language on Earth in which “Imagine Greater” even makes sense? Maybe it sounds better in the original Klingon, or would if SyFy didn’t hate aliens.
Hey, SyFy executive folks, how about trying to “Imagine Grammar” instead?
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Children’s brains may evolve for Information Age
If TV doesn’t rot your child’s brain, the Internet will, according to the latest scary speculation.
Susan Greenfield, an Oxford University neuroscientist, says exposure to social networking Web sites like Facebook and Twitter, along with video games and fast-paced TV shows, may be rewiring children’s brains.
I can think of two reasonable responses to this claim: “So what?” and “So what?”
At one level, this is exactly the sort of thumb-sucking response that has always greeted new media. Since the 1930s, do-gooders have blamed jazz, comic books, rock ’n’ roll, television, and now video games and the Internet, for everything wrong with “the children” — even when there isn’t anything wrong with children.
Like Paul Lynde in the Broadway musical “Bye Bye Birdie,” they ask, “Why can’t they be like we were, perfect in every way? What’s the matter with kids today?”
Juvenile crime across the board is down compared to 10 years ago. Fewer teens are having sex, and the ones who do are more likely to use protection. Fewer teens are getting abortions.
OK. I give. What exactly is the matter with kids today? If online social networking is bad for them, it hasn’t shown up in the statistics yet.
But let’s assume MySpace and Facebook really are rewiring children’s brains. In fact, I would be surprised if that were not the case. The real question is “Why is this a problem?”
This isn’t the first time the environment has rewired our brains. Before our ancestors developed written languages, they had excellent memories. But writing has taken away our ability to remember epics like “The Iliad.” Still, that seems a good trade-off.
Adults often complain that change happens too quickly and that the world is becoming too fast-paced. If children’s brains are adapting to the pace of modern society, that seems like a net plus. A brain that is better at filtering information from many different sources in a short span of time is a brain that is better suited to the Information Age.
How fast-paced is the world today? One useful measure is the length of the average movie shot. An average shot in a major motion picture today is 2 or 3 seconds long. By comparison, film critic Roger Ebert notes, the average shot in “Citizen Kane” (1941) is 11.4 seconds. By today’s standards, “Pulp Fiction” is a slow movie, which isn’t surprising given that Quentin Tarantino is, in many respects, an old-fashioned filmmaker. The average shot in “Pulp Fiction” is 7.9 seconds.
There is a question of cause and effect here. Are movies contributing to children’s shorter attention spans by rewiring their brains? Maybe, but I doubt that’s the whole answer. I suspect, instead, that movies are mainly catering to the shorter attention spans that have resulted from the quickening pace of life in general, with movies being a small part of that.
Phil Edholm, chief technology officer at Nortel, created a minor stir last year when he suggested that Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, at least in its mild form, may be an evolutionary adaptation for multitasking in the digital era. Parents of ADHD children where not amused. But maybe there is some truth to his speculation.
Scientists at Northwestern University have discovered that a genetic variation associated with ADHD seems to help people in nomadic cultures survive. The variation also seems to encourage novelty-seeking behavior. The researchers speculate that some ADHD-associated traits may have been beneficial in our prehistoric past.
If modern society is taking on attributes that make it more like our hunter-gatherer past — for example, greater mobility and a faster pace than agricultural societies — then genetic traits that were advantageous in the past could reassert themselves.
If so, that’s not cause for alarm. That might be just evolution.
Susan Greenfield, an Oxford University neuroscientist, says exposure to social networking Web sites like Facebook and Twitter, along with video games and fast-paced TV shows, may be rewiring children’s brains.
I can think of two reasonable responses to this claim: “So what?” and “So what?”
At one level, this is exactly the sort of thumb-sucking response that has always greeted new media. Since the 1930s, do-gooders have blamed jazz, comic books, rock ’n’ roll, television, and now video games and the Internet, for everything wrong with “the children” — even when there isn’t anything wrong with children.
Like Paul Lynde in the Broadway musical “Bye Bye Birdie,” they ask, “Why can’t they be like we were, perfect in every way? What’s the matter with kids today?”
Juvenile crime across the board is down compared to 10 years ago. Fewer teens are having sex, and the ones who do are more likely to use protection. Fewer teens are getting abortions.
OK. I give. What exactly is the matter with kids today? If online social networking is bad for them, it hasn’t shown up in the statistics yet.
But let’s assume MySpace and Facebook really are rewiring children’s brains. In fact, I would be surprised if that were not the case. The real question is “Why is this a problem?”
This isn’t the first time the environment has rewired our brains. Before our ancestors developed written languages, they had excellent memories. But writing has taken away our ability to remember epics like “The Iliad.” Still, that seems a good trade-off.
Adults often complain that change happens too quickly and that the world is becoming too fast-paced. If children’s brains are adapting to the pace of modern society, that seems like a net plus. A brain that is better at filtering information from many different sources in a short span of time is a brain that is better suited to the Information Age.
How fast-paced is the world today? One useful measure is the length of the average movie shot. An average shot in a major motion picture today is 2 or 3 seconds long. By comparison, film critic Roger Ebert notes, the average shot in “Citizen Kane” (1941) is 11.4 seconds. By today’s standards, “Pulp Fiction” is a slow movie, which isn’t surprising given that Quentin Tarantino is, in many respects, an old-fashioned filmmaker. The average shot in “Pulp Fiction” is 7.9 seconds.
There is a question of cause and effect here. Are movies contributing to children’s shorter attention spans by rewiring their brains? Maybe, but I doubt that’s the whole answer. I suspect, instead, that movies are mainly catering to the shorter attention spans that have resulted from the quickening pace of life in general, with movies being a small part of that.
Phil Edholm, chief technology officer at Nortel, created a minor stir last year when he suggested that Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, at least in its mild form, may be an evolutionary adaptation for multitasking in the digital era. Parents of ADHD children where not amused. But maybe there is some truth to his speculation.
Scientists at Northwestern University have discovered that a genetic variation associated with ADHD seems to help people in nomadic cultures survive. The variation also seems to encourage novelty-seeking behavior. The researchers speculate that some ADHD-associated traits may have been beneficial in our prehistoric past.
If modern society is taking on attributes that make it more like our hunter-gatherer past — for example, greater mobility and a faster pace than agricultural societies — then genetic traits that were advantageous in the past could reassert themselves.
If so, that’s not cause for alarm. That might be just evolution.
Thursday, March 05, 2009
Book publishers risk repeating the music industry’s mistakes
At the risk of slipping into “grumpy old man” mode, life used to be so much simpler.
You bought a book, and it was yours to do with as you pleased. You could read it silently to yourself. You could read it aloud to someone else. You could dog-ear the corners, underline passages and make notes in the margin. And when you were finished, you could sell the book or give it away.
If someone wanted to borrow it, your only problem was getting it back in good condition. I’m still upset about the book I lent out that ended up covered in vegan mayonnaise.
Nowadays, you can purchase and download digital books, which seems like a great idea — until you learn that publishers want to control how you use them.
You young people and your Kindles! You don’t know what it used to be like. When I was your age, books had pages! Now get off my lawn!
Sorry. That was Old Man Grumpy talking.
Actually, I really do think electronic books are a great idea. Who wouldn’t like to keep hundreds of books stored on one convenient, easy-to-read digital device? For me, that is the main attraction of electronic readers like Amazon.com’s Kindle. You start to worry when you have so many books that they threaten to bury you beneath an avalanche.
Unfortunately, owning a book downloaded from Amazon isn’t the same as owning a book. You can’t resell it, and you can’t let someone borrow it without also letting them borrow your Kindle. And I wouldn’t take the chance of a friend accidentally dropping my $360 reader into a jar of Vegenaise(cq).
Making matters worse, some publishers seem bent on limiting Kindle’s features.
Amazon’s new Kindle 2 includes a text-to-speech feature that allows it to read aloud any book loaded onto it. That feature, however, scared publishers and the Authors Guild, which claimed text-to-speech would threaten sales of audio books.
Not everyone was concerned. Bestselling author and recent Newberry Medal recipient Neil Gaiman blogged that when you buy a book, “you’re also buying the right to read it aloud, have it read to you by anyone, read it to your children on long car trips, record yourself reading it and send that to your girlfriend etc.”
Kindle’s text-to-speech isn’t a threat to audio books, he concluded, because audio books are, in effect, performance art. A Kindle reading a book to you in a robotic voice isn’t the same as the vocal performance you get with a true audio book.
But rather than fight a protracted copyright battle, Amazon gave in, offering rights holders the option of disabling text-to-speech on selected books.
The publishing industry is repeating the music industry’s mistakes. Music companies lost money while they tried to fight and then restrict music downloads. Only in the past year have the major recording labels learned their lesson: When customers buy digital media, they don’t want restrictions.
Ironically, Amazon helped pioneer music downloads free of the Digital Rights Management software that limits what you can do with a song after you’ve purchased it. After Amazon started selling DRM-free songs, industry leader iTunes followed. Now downloads are the music industry’s one area of sales growth.
By caving to the demands of publishers and the guild, Amazon may be hurting itself. Kindle books already come with use restrictions you don’t find with other electronic books. The Internet is full of DRM-free books you can download — many in the public domain and free of charge. Author and blogger Cory Doctorow gives away entire novels online, which he says helps drive sales of his physical books.
Doctorow’s sales benefit, no doubt, from the fact that a lot of people still like to own real books. But as devices like the Kindle improve, and reading an electronic book becomes more like reading a real one, that may not remain the case.
Book publishers should concentrate on finding business models that don’t risk alienating their customers. Otherwise, they could end up playing catch-up just like the music industry.
You bought a book, and it was yours to do with as you pleased. You could read it silently to yourself. You could read it aloud to someone else. You could dog-ear the corners, underline passages and make notes in the margin. And when you were finished, you could sell the book or give it away.
If someone wanted to borrow it, your only problem was getting it back in good condition. I’m still upset about the book I lent out that ended up covered in vegan mayonnaise.
Nowadays, you can purchase and download digital books, which seems like a great idea — until you learn that publishers want to control how you use them.
You young people and your Kindles! You don’t know what it used to be like. When I was your age, books had pages! Now get off my lawn!
Sorry. That was Old Man Grumpy talking.
Actually, I really do think electronic books are a great idea. Who wouldn’t like to keep hundreds of books stored on one convenient, easy-to-read digital device? For me, that is the main attraction of electronic readers like Amazon.com’s Kindle. You start to worry when you have so many books that they threaten to bury you beneath an avalanche.
Unfortunately, owning a book downloaded from Amazon isn’t the same as owning a book. You can’t resell it, and you can’t let someone borrow it without also letting them borrow your Kindle. And I wouldn’t take the chance of a friend accidentally dropping my $360 reader into a jar of Vegenaise(cq).
Making matters worse, some publishers seem bent on limiting Kindle’s features.
Amazon’s new Kindle 2 includes a text-to-speech feature that allows it to read aloud any book loaded onto it. That feature, however, scared publishers and the Authors Guild, which claimed text-to-speech would threaten sales of audio books.
Not everyone was concerned. Bestselling author and recent Newberry Medal recipient Neil Gaiman blogged that when you buy a book, “you’re also buying the right to read it aloud, have it read to you by anyone, read it to your children on long car trips, record yourself reading it and send that to your girlfriend etc.”
Kindle’s text-to-speech isn’t a threat to audio books, he concluded, because audio books are, in effect, performance art. A Kindle reading a book to you in a robotic voice isn’t the same as the vocal performance you get with a true audio book.
But rather than fight a protracted copyright battle, Amazon gave in, offering rights holders the option of disabling text-to-speech on selected books.
The publishing industry is repeating the music industry’s mistakes. Music companies lost money while they tried to fight and then restrict music downloads. Only in the past year have the major recording labels learned their lesson: When customers buy digital media, they don’t want restrictions.
Ironically, Amazon helped pioneer music downloads free of the Digital Rights Management software that limits what you can do with a song after you’ve purchased it. After Amazon started selling DRM-free songs, industry leader iTunes followed. Now downloads are the music industry’s one area of sales growth.
By caving to the demands of publishers and the guild, Amazon may be hurting itself. Kindle books already come with use restrictions you don’t find with other electronic books. The Internet is full of DRM-free books you can download — many in the public domain and free of charge. Author and blogger Cory Doctorow gives away entire novels online, which he says helps drive sales of his physical books.
Doctorow’s sales benefit, no doubt, from the fact that a lot of people still like to own real books. But as devices like the Kindle improve, and reading an electronic book becomes more like reading a real one, that may not remain the case.
Book publishers should concentrate on finding business models that don’t risk alienating their customers. Otherwise, they could end up playing catch-up just like the music industry.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Oscar winners are only certainty in an uncertain biz
If you’re the sort of person who expects the unexpected, then Sunday’s Oscar telecast was probably almost as disappointing for you as it was for Mickey Rourke.
This year’s Academy Awards ceremony was completely devoid of surprises, unless you count the surprising lack of surprises. No out-of-nowhere winners like Marisa Tomei or Roberto Benigni. No one-armed push-ups. No streaker running past a delightfully unperturbed David Niven.
Usually the Oscars offer up one or two unexpected moments, if only to make you forget how predictable the rest of Hollywood’s annual celebration of itself really is. This year, however, not even that. The 2009 edition was so paint-by-numbers that kindergartners could have written the jokes. As it was, Bruce Vilanch wrote the jokes — as usual. And that’s basically the same thing.
“Slumdog Millionaire” took home the top prizes of Best Picture and Best Director. Sean Penn robbed Rourke just like he robbed Bill Murray in 2004. Kate Winslet finally snagged the Best Actress prize she should have won years ago. Heath Ledger received a posthumous Best Supporting Actor honor.
And so on.
It was all from the standard playbook. Oscar voters love to reward middlebrow, little-seen art films. They love to pat Penn on the back when he’s the least-deserving nominee. They love to make up for past mistakes. And they love to give awards to actors who play psychopaths (for example, Anthony Hopkins). There are exceptions to the first rule, like “Titanic,” a middlebrow film everyone saw, and “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.” But even “The Return of the King” falls under the making-up-for-past-mistakes rule. It won after the first two movies in the trilogy lost.
The Academy Awards are so predictable that filmmakers sometimes make movies with Oscar gold in mind, which is often a winning strategy, at least so long as it isn’t too obvious. “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and “Changeling” were two films this year that went too far and came up empty as a result, except for a few technical awards for “Benjamin Button.” Nobody wants to see a movie beg.
Still, I was happy to see Ledger and Winslet win, even if, now that she has her Oscar, Winslet says she isn’t doing any more nude scenes. Gee, thanks, Kate. Leave the nude scenes to actresses so thin that when they turn sideways all you can see are their implants. Meh.
Maybe I’m being too hard on Hollywood. You can’t really blame the Oscars for being predictable. They’re about the only thing in Hollywood that is. Compared to figuring out how to make a profitable movie, figuring out how to make an Oscar-winning one is easy.
Consider the top grossing movie of 2009 so far, “Paul Blart: Mall Cop.” Granted, it’s only February, but who would have predicted that a lowbrow “comedy” about a security guard would top the box office in its opening weekend, let alone be the top grossing movie two months into the year? No one, that’s who.
If you’ve ever wondered why the major studios make the movies they do, it’s because no one in Hollywood actually knows what they are doing. And I don’t mean that as an insult. I mean moviemaking is the riskiest, least predictable business on Earth. Most movies are lucky to make back their production and promotional costs after factoring in overseas grosses and DVD sales. If you’re a studio executive, you just hope that a couple of your movies hit big enough to make up the difference and keep you in your job.
It isn’t that Hollywood isn’t trying to appeal to moviegoers. It’s that moviegoers are the most fickle market there is.
Arthur De Vany, professor emeritus of economics at the University of California, Irvine, and author of “Hollywood Economics: How Extreme Uncertainty Shapes the Film Industry,” went looking for some pattern of success in Hollywood and found none. Nothing can predict whether a movie will be a hit or a flop. Sequels are slightly less risky, which probably explains why Hollywood makes so many of them. But even most sequels are more likely to lose money at the domestic box office than break even.
So, I can’t begrudge Hollywood its one night of predictability. Ironically, it’s the only night when the movies stick to the script.
This year’s Academy Awards ceremony was completely devoid of surprises, unless you count the surprising lack of surprises. No out-of-nowhere winners like Marisa Tomei or Roberto Benigni. No one-armed push-ups. No streaker running past a delightfully unperturbed David Niven.
Usually the Oscars offer up one or two unexpected moments, if only to make you forget how predictable the rest of Hollywood’s annual celebration of itself really is. This year, however, not even that. The 2009 edition was so paint-by-numbers that kindergartners could have written the jokes. As it was, Bruce Vilanch wrote the jokes — as usual. And that’s basically the same thing.
“Slumdog Millionaire” took home the top prizes of Best Picture and Best Director. Sean Penn robbed Rourke just like he robbed Bill Murray in 2004. Kate Winslet finally snagged the Best Actress prize she should have won years ago. Heath Ledger received a posthumous Best Supporting Actor honor.
And so on.
It was all from the standard playbook. Oscar voters love to reward middlebrow, little-seen art films. They love to pat Penn on the back when he’s the least-deserving nominee. They love to make up for past mistakes. And they love to give awards to actors who play psychopaths (for example, Anthony Hopkins). There are exceptions to the first rule, like “Titanic,” a middlebrow film everyone saw, and “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.” But even “The Return of the King” falls under the making-up-for-past-mistakes rule. It won after the first two movies in the trilogy lost.
The Academy Awards are so predictable that filmmakers sometimes make movies with Oscar gold in mind, which is often a winning strategy, at least so long as it isn’t too obvious. “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and “Changeling” were two films this year that went too far and came up empty as a result, except for a few technical awards for “Benjamin Button.” Nobody wants to see a movie beg.
Still, I was happy to see Ledger and Winslet win, even if, now that she has her Oscar, Winslet says she isn’t doing any more nude scenes. Gee, thanks, Kate. Leave the nude scenes to actresses so thin that when they turn sideways all you can see are their implants. Meh.
Maybe I’m being too hard on Hollywood. You can’t really blame the Oscars for being predictable. They’re about the only thing in Hollywood that is. Compared to figuring out how to make a profitable movie, figuring out how to make an Oscar-winning one is easy.
Consider the top grossing movie of 2009 so far, “Paul Blart: Mall Cop.” Granted, it’s only February, but who would have predicted that a lowbrow “comedy” about a security guard would top the box office in its opening weekend, let alone be the top grossing movie two months into the year? No one, that’s who.
If you’ve ever wondered why the major studios make the movies they do, it’s because no one in Hollywood actually knows what they are doing. And I don’t mean that as an insult. I mean moviemaking is the riskiest, least predictable business on Earth. Most movies are lucky to make back their production and promotional costs after factoring in overseas grosses and DVD sales. If you’re a studio executive, you just hope that a couple of your movies hit big enough to make up the difference and keep you in your job.
It isn’t that Hollywood isn’t trying to appeal to moviegoers. It’s that moviegoers are the most fickle market there is.
Arthur De Vany, professor emeritus of economics at the University of California, Irvine, and author of “Hollywood Economics: How Extreme Uncertainty Shapes the Film Industry,” went looking for some pattern of success in Hollywood and found none. Nothing can predict whether a movie will be a hit or a flop. Sequels are slightly less risky, which probably explains why Hollywood makes so many of them. But even most sequels are more likely to lose money at the domestic box office than break even.
So, I can’t begrudge Hollywood its one night of predictability. Ironically, it’s the only night when the movies stick to the script.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
‘Youngblood’ is a bad movie just waiting to happen
I’m not sure that’s entirely true. For example, I think Uwe Boll, director of “House of the Dead,” “Alone in the Dark” and “BloodRayne,” among other crimes against humanity, may indeed set out to make bad movies.
Then there is Brett Ratner, a director who can take an otherwise successful film franchise and turn it into fertilizer. Hannibal Lecter and the X-Men are his two most notable victims.
“Red Dragon” is a pale parody of its predecessors, “Silence of the Lambs” and “Hannibal.” Meanwhile, “X-Men: The Last Stand” is a bloated, incoherent mess that disposes of major characters as if they were dirty diapers.
Having sullied the X-Men, Ratner is obviously the perfect choice to take on another superhero franchise — one that is already so awful even he can’t ruin it.
He now has his chance. Hollywood trade publications reported last week that Ratner will direct a film based on Rob Liefeld’s “Youngblood” comic.
During the height of the comic-book boom of the early 1990s, several popular Marvel Comics artists decided to leave and start their own company, Image Comics. Liefeld, who had drawn “X-Force” for Marvel, was one of those artists, and “Youngblood” was his flagship series for Image.
Somehow, Liefeld became a minor celebrity even outside the world of superhero comics. Director Spike Lee featured him in a Levi’s ad.
What superhero comics have to do with blue jeans I’ll never know, but even more incredible is how popular Liefeld became as an artist.
I learned a lot from reading Liefeld’s comics back in the ’90s. I learned, for example, that severe scoliosis and a lack of feet are no obstacles to being a superhero.
“Youngblood” is representative of everything that went wrong with comic books in the ’90s. So, what would a faithful movie adaptation of it look like?
Ratner could follow the lead of Zach Snyder, director of “300” and next month’s “Watchmen.” Snyder’s films try to stick as closely as possible to the look of the original graphic novels. If Ratner did that with “Youngblood,” most of his special-effects budget would have to go toward making his cast look like a bunch of deformed mutants.
It’s impossible to overstate just how bad an artist Liefeld is. He apparently can’t draw feet, so he usually draws characters so that their feet cut off at the ankles. When he does bother to draw feet, they end in points, like a ballerina standing en pointe.
All of his females have impossibly contorted spines, which Liefeld seems to think makes them look sexy. His male characters are so over-muscled they can’t put their arms down. And everyone, male and female, has an impossibly small head.
If you think Peter Jackson had problems trying to make Hobbits look smaller than humans, imagine the amount of CGI you’d need to make a normal human being look like any of Liefeld’s superheroes.
On the other hand, Ratner could save a bundle of money on sets. A truly faithful adaptation of “Youngblood” wouldn’t need them.
You see, Liefeld apparently decided one day that his comics didn’t really need backgrounds. Maybe he thought drawing backgrounds was too much work. Maybe he thought no one would notice. In either case, his comics started to depict a lot of anatomically impossible people standing in the middle of otherwise blank panels.
Somehow, however, I doubt Ratner will try to adhere to the visual style of Liefeld’s artwork. So, while I don’t expect “Youngblood” the movie to be any good, there is a fair chance it won’t be as bad as its source material. Of course, a “Youngblood” movie directed by Ed Wood would likely be an improvement on the source material, too.
To get a “Youngblood” movie that’s actually just as bad as the comic books, you would need a director who actually sets out to make bad movies. Fortunately, I think Uwe Boll is otherwise engaged.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Jane Austen plus zombies equals box-office gold
I’m not a bitter man, but I really, really hate Seth Grahame-Smith.
Who is this fellow with the hyphenated last name, you ask? And why do I sometimes find myself wishing he’s come down with a permanent case of African sleeping sickness?
Grahame-Smith is the man who has come up with the most brilliant, most lucrative and yet laziest idea I’ve heard of in ages.
He has re-written Jane Austen’s classic novel “Pride and Prejudice” — and added zombies.
“Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” is scheduled for publication in May, but Hollywood studios are already bidding for the movie rights. Grahame-Smith is about to be quite financially secure. And for what? Adding zombies to a classic novel.
In fact, according to one newspaper account, Grahame-Smith admits that 85 percent of his novel is from Austen’s original text. He had to do only 15 percent of the work. Yet, because Austen is dead — and not a zombie — and because her book is in the public domain, he gets to keep all of his Hollywood riches to himself. Well, except for what he has to fork over to the government.
There is only one word for this. “Brilliant.” Or “lazy.” But mainly it’s brilliant, because the laziness is part of why it’s so brilliant.
What’s killing me is that I didn’t come up with it. Brilliant and lazy is what I do. For example, this column. It required no more research than reading an article in Variety and searching Google for “Seth Grahame-Smith” so I could know exactly where to direct my righteous fury. For the record, Grahame-Smith is a film and TV writer/producer in Los Angeles. He also writes for The Huffington Post, a liberal political blog. His Internet Movie Database page is, well, lacking. But I assume that will change soon enough.
Now I’m even angrier with myself. I’ve written for high-traffic blogs, so where is my book deal?
More to the point, however, why didn’t I come up with “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”? Why are movie studios not calling my agent, besides the fact I don’t have an agent? These are the questions I’ll take to my grave.
I mean, it didn’t even have to be “Pride and Prejudice.” It could have been almost anything. “Sense and Sensibility and Zombies”? Sounds like a winner to me. “Oliver Twist and Zombies”? A zombie infestation could only improve any Charles Dickens novel. “Vanity Fair and Zombies”? Genius!
Granted, I haven’t read the book yet. For all I know, Grahame-Smith’s 15-percent contribution could be the most brilliant, witty, sparkling prose since Oscar Wilde died of wallpaper poisoning in a Paris hotel room. But it could be utter rubbish and still net him a movie deal worth in the high six figures.
“Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” is, as they say in Hollywood, a “high concept” piece. High concept projects are anything you can sell to a movie executive with a sentence like “It’s something you’ve heard of meets something else you’ve heard of.”
“Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” is “Pride and Prejudice” meets zombies. How much more high concept can you get? The idea sells itself. It’s a bonus that Hollywood can’t get enough of either zombie movies or Jane Austen adaptations. Here you get both. Put Keira Knightley in a period costume and stick Rob Zombie behind the camera, and you’re guaranteed a $100 million opening weekend. Probably. I’d know I’d pay to see Mr. Darcy eat Elizabeth Bennet’s brain. (I hope that’s actually in the book.)
Well, never again. Listen up, Hollywood. I have my own high-concept movie. It’s called “Kung-Fu Biker Zombies vs. the Vampire Strippers from Hell.” It’s “Easy Rider” meets “Dawn of the Dead” meets “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” meets “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” meets “Showgirls.” I think Quentin Tarantino would be perfect to direct, and I spent the entire weekend fleshing out the story.
Call my agent. As soon as I get one.
Who is this fellow with the hyphenated last name, you ask? And why do I sometimes find myself wishing he’s come down with a permanent case of African sleeping sickness?
Grahame-Smith is the man who has come up with the most brilliant, most lucrative and yet laziest idea I’ve heard of in ages.
He has re-written Jane Austen’s classic novel “Pride and Prejudice” — and added zombies.
“Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” is scheduled for publication in May, but Hollywood studios are already bidding for the movie rights. Grahame-Smith is about to be quite financially secure. And for what? Adding zombies to a classic novel.
In fact, according to one newspaper account, Grahame-Smith admits that 85 percent of his novel is from Austen’s original text. He had to do only 15 percent of the work. Yet, because Austen is dead — and not a zombie — and because her book is in the public domain, he gets to keep all of his Hollywood riches to himself. Well, except for what he has to fork over to the government.
There is only one word for this. “Brilliant.” Or “lazy.” But mainly it’s brilliant, because the laziness is part of why it’s so brilliant.
What’s killing me is that I didn’t come up with it. Brilliant and lazy is what I do. For example, this column. It required no more research than reading an article in Variety and searching Google for “Seth Grahame-Smith” so I could know exactly where to direct my righteous fury. For the record, Grahame-Smith is a film and TV writer/producer in Los Angeles. He also writes for The Huffington Post, a liberal political blog. His Internet Movie Database page is, well, lacking. But I assume that will change soon enough.
Now I’m even angrier with myself. I’ve written for high-traffic blogs, so where is my book deal?
More to the point, however, why didn’t I come up with “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”? Why are movie studios not calling my agent, besides the fact I don’t have an agent? These are the questions I’ll take to my grave.
I mean, it didn’t even have to be “Pride and Prejudice.” It could have been almost anything. “Sense and Sensibility and Zombies”? Sounds like a winner to me. “Oliver Twist and Zombies”? A zombie infestation could only improve any Charles Dickens novel. “Vanity Fair and Zombies”? Genius!
Granted, I haven’t read the book yet. For all I know, Grahame-Smith’s 15-percent contribution could be the most brilliant, witty, sparkling prose since Oscar Wilde died of wallpaper poisoning in a Paris hotel room. But it could be utter rubbish and still net him a movie deal worth in the high six figures.
“Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” is, as they say in Hollywood, a “high concept” piece. High concept projects are anything you can sell to a movie executive with a sentence like “It’s something you’ve heard of meets something else you’ve heard of.”
“Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” is “Pride and Prejudice” meets zombies. How much more high concept can you get? The idea sells itself. It’s a bonus that Hollywood can’t get enough of either zombie movies or Jane Austen adaptations. Here you get both. Put Keira Knightley in a period costume and stick Rob Zombie behind the camera, and you’re guaranteed a $100 million opening weekend. Probably. I’d know I’d pay to see Mr. Darcy eat Elizabeth Bennet’s brain. (I hope that’s actually in the book.)
Well, never again. Listen up, Hollywood. I have my own high-concept movie. It’s called “Kung-Fu Biker Zombies vs. the Vampire Strippers from Hell.” It’s “Easy Rider” meets “Dawn of the Dead” meets “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” meets “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” meets “Showgirls.” I think Quentin Tarantino would be perfect to direct, and I spent the entire weekend fleshing out the story.
Call my agent. As soon as I get one.
Thursday, February 05, 2009
Super Bowl film ads are winners and losers — but mostly losers
Sunday’s Super Bowl is the first I can recall where the game definitely outshined the commercials.
Advertisers paid record rates, but the only one that seemed to get its money’s worth was Denny’s, which generated plenty of water-cooler buzz with its offer of free food, which is second only to free T-shirts as a way to lure customers.
But who were the biggest losers? Offhand, I’d say they were the Hollywood studios trying to build hype for this year’s slate of would-be summer blockbusters.
Jack Black and Michael Cera star in “The Year One,” a historical comedy that features the two as lazy hunter-gatherers who get banished from their tribe. Left to fend for themselves, they encounter a host of biblical characters. Yes, it’s a comedy of biblical proportions — if, of course, you haven’t already had enough of Black’s poor-man impersonation of John Belushi and Cera’s impression of a depressed turtle.
The late Dudley Moore already tried this joke in the 1980 stinker “Wholly Moses!” Nothing short of a burning bush giving “The Year One” a three-star review could get me into the multiplex for this.
The latest ad for director J.J. Abrams’ “Star Trek” reboot offers plenty of explosions but still looks like “Star Trek” crossed with “Beverly Hills 90201.” That is not a good thing. Of course, “Trek” fans will pack theaters opening weekend, if only so they can complain about how the movie trashed Gene Roddenberry’s vision. But does anyone else care? And is the world ready for a James T. Kirk who is not William Shatner?
It will take more than a commercial that makes “Star Trek” look like every other action/adventure movie on the market for this Enterprise to live long and prosper.
Next up, the sequels and prequels. Tom Hanks returns for “Angels & Demons,” the prequel to “The Da Vinci Code,” while Vin Diesel takes the “Fast and the Furious” franchise for another spin in “Fast & Furious.” Neither film seems to have much appeal beyond fans of the original films, and Diesel’s star power has dimmed after a string of duds. At whom are these Super Bowl ads aimed, anyway?
And that brings us to the Super Bowl’s power couple: “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” and “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.” Both are based on Hasbro toys. Both were incredibly popular in the 1980s. And both inspired multiple lines of comic books and cartoons.
Those of you who made the first live-action “Transformers” movie a hit in 2007 know who you are, and if you actually liked the first movie, this one will give you more of the same. That means not enough giant robots fighting each other and way too much Shia LaBeouf.
“G.I. Joe” looks absurd and completely over the top, which is exactly what I expect from “The Mummy” director Stephen Sommers. Die-hard “G.I. Joe” fans are nervous, but the cartoon was pretty silly, too. Remember the episode in which Cobra Commander used a huge laser to carve his face into the moon? Besides, the movie features Christopher Eccleston (“Doctor Who”) as Destro and Sienna Miller inside the Baroness’ fetching leather cat suit, which is more than any of these other films have.
But did the ads for “Transformers” and “G.I. Joe” really move Super Bowl viewers who weren’t already fans? I doubt it. Still, Super Bowl exposure probably did help two contenders.
The sleeper hit of the bunch may be “Race to Witch Mountain,” Disney’s return to a live-action film series that was popular when I was young. If Disney was trying to reach Generation X dads who now have children of their own, a Super Bowl commercial was the way to go.
The same goes for “Land of the Lost,” a big-screen remake of a popular 1970s Saturday-morning adventure series. Except, in this case, what was a clever and sometimes spooky TV show is now just another alleged Will Ferrell comedy, only with dinosaurs. When will Ferrell’s movie career go extinct?
Probably not before this travesty makes a bundle and tarnishes my childhood memories.
Advertisers paid record rates, but the only one that seemed to get its money’s worth was Denny’s, which generated plenty of water-cooler buzz with its offer of free food, which is second only to free T-shirts as a way to lure customers.
But who were the biggest losers? Offhand, I’d say they were the Hollywood studios trying to build hype for this year’s slate of would-be summer blockbusters.
Jack Black and Michael Cera star in “The Year One,” a historical comedy that features the two as lazy hunter-gatherers who get banished from their tribe. Left to fend for themselves, they encounter a host of biblical characters. Yes, it’s a comedy of biblical proportions — if, of course, you haven’t already had enough of Black’s poor-man impersonation of John Belushi and Cera’s impression of a depressed turtle.
The late Dudley Moore already tried this joke in the 1980 stinker “Wholly Moses!” Nothing short of a burning bush giving “The Year One” a three-star review could get me into the multiplex for this.
The latest ad for director J.J. Abrams’ “Star Trek” reboot offers plenty of explosions but still looks like “Star Trek” crossed with “Beverly Hills 90201.” That is not a good thing. Of course, “Trek” fans will pack theaters opening weekend, if only so they can complain about how the movie trashed Gene Roddenberry’s vision. But does anyone else care? And is the world ready for a James T. Kirk who is not William Shatner?
It will take more than a commercial that makes “Star Trek” look like every other action/adventure movie on the market for this Enterprise to live long and prosper.
Next up, the sequels and prequels. Tom Hanks returns for “Angels & Demons,” the prequel to “The Da Vinci Code,” while Vin Diesel takes the “Fast and the Furious” franchise for another spin in “Fast & Furious.” Neither film seems to have much appeal beyond fans of the original films, and Diesel’s star power has dimmed after a string of duds. At whom are these Super Bowl ads aimed, anyway?
And that brings us to the Super Bowl’s power couple: “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” and “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.” Both are based on Hasbro toys. Both were incredibly popular in the 1980s. And both inspired multiple lines of comic books and cartoons.
Those of you who made the first live-action “Transformers” movie a hit in 2007 know who you are, and if you actually liked the first movie, this one will give you more of the same. That means not enough giant robots fighting each other and way too much Shia LaBeouf.
“G.I. Joe” looks absurd and completely over the top, which is exactly what I expect from “The Mummy” director Stephen Sommers. Die-hard “G.I. Joe” fans are nervous, but the cartoon was pretty silly, too. Remember the episode in which Cobra Commander used a huge laser to carve his face into the moon? Besides, the movie features Christopher Eccleston (“Doctor Who”) as Destro and Sienna Miller inside the Baroness’ fetching leather cat suit, which is more than any of these other films have.
But did the ads for “Transformers” and “G.I. Joe” really move Super Bowl viewers who weren’t already fans? I doubt it. Still, Super Bowl exposure probably did help two contenders.
The sleeper hit of the bunch may be “Race to Witch Mountain,” Disney’s return to a live-action film series that was popular when I was young. If Disney was trying to reach Generation X dads who now have children of their own, a Super Bowl commercial was the way to go.
The same goes for “Land of the Lost,” a big-screen remake of a popular 1970s Saturday-morning adventure series. Except, in this case, what was a clever and sometimes spooky TV show is now just another alleged Will Ferrell comedy, only with dinosaurs. When will Ferrell’s movie career go extinct?
Probably not before this travesty makes a bundle and tarnishes my childhood memories.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Congress gives analog TV yet another reprieve
The never-ending saga for America’s transition to digital television just got a little more never-ending.
The U.S. Senate voted Monday for a four-month delay that would encourage but not require over-the-air TV stations to continue broadcasting both analog and digital signals until June 12. House Republicans blocked the measure Wednesday, but Democrats plan to bring it up again and have the votes to pass it. After June 12, all stations would finally turn off their analog signals.
President Barack Obama made the delay a top priority upon taking office, arguing that the original Feb. 17 deadline would leave millions of Americans unable to receive over-the-air TV broadcasts.
Despite a year of public service announcements and a government program to subsidize people buying analog-to-digital converter boxes for their old TV sets, it seems a lot of people still haven’t gotten the message. And some who did get it are out of luck.
The converter boxes range in price from $40 to $80, and the Commerce Department has run out of money for the coupon program intended to help people pay for them. The program’s funding limit is $1.34 billion, but the number of people on the waiting list for the $40 coupons has reached 2.6 million. Dangle “free” money around, and the world will beat a path to your door.
This, however, is just the latest screw-up in the long and convoluted transition to digital television. Congress and the Federal Communications Commission have been bungling the process for 20 years. Concessions to broadcasters delayed DTV implementation, which resulted in there being little incentive, until recently, for consumers to buy DTV-ready TV sets or converter boxes.
Those concessions are on top of the fact that the government gave additional broadcast spectrum to the stations free of charge.
One rule of economics is that people care more about something when they have to pay for it. But according to one estimate, TV broadcasters received up to $100 billion worth of prime broadcast real estate for nothing. That certainly didn’t give TV stations an incentive to quickly implement DTV and offer high-quality digital programming that would entice viewers to buy digital televisions. Instead, most stations just sat on that spectrum for years.
Now that broadcasters are finally ready to go all-digital, this latest delay has some of them asking for even more concessions. PBS chief executive Paula Kerger said Monday that continuing to broadcast in analog until June 12 would cost PBS affiliates $22 million, and she wants the federal government — meaning taxpayers — to pick up the tab.
Like most things the government does, there was a better way.
Congress and the FCC could have abandoned the fiction that the broadcast spectrum is and must remain a public resource, which broadcasters merely use so long as they promote “the public interest,” which is whatever politicians say it is. Broadcast spectrum is valuable property. Congress could have auctioned it off, forcing broadcasters to pay market prices. That would have ensured the spectrum would have gone to broadcasters who were prepared to exploit it as soon as possible and to its fullest.
Then, Congress could have allowed broadcasters to auction off their old analog spectrum to recoup some of their costs. As it is, as soon as broadcasters shut off their analog signals, that spectrum will go to wireless services and local public safety agencies. But there is no reason why TV stations couldn’t have sold those frequencies to wireless companies or back to the government. That would have been a fair concession to broadcasters.
Of course, this mess means nothing to the vast majority of TV viewers. More than 80 percent get their TV via cable or satellite. This expensive, drawn-out process is about the 20 percent of viewers who still rely on rabbit ears. And that number would be smaller if Congress and the FCC hadn’t spent most of the past 40 years restricting pay-TV’s growth and stifling competition — yet another gift to over-the-air broadcasters.
The U.S. Senate voted Monday for a four-month delay that would encourage but not require over-the-air TV stations to continue broadcasting both analog and digital signals until June 12. House Republicans blocked the measure Wednesday, but Democrats plan to bring it up again and have the votes to pass it. After June 12, all stations would finally turn off their analog signals.
President Barack Obama made the delay a top priority upon taking office, arguing that the original Feb. 17 deadline would leave millions of Americans unable to receive over-the-air TV broadcasts.
Despite a year of public service announcements and a government program to subsidize people buying analog-to-digital converter boxes for their old TV sets, it seems a lot of people still haven’t gotten the message. And some who did get it are out of luck.
The converter boxes range in price from $40 to $80, and the Commerce Department has run out of money for the coupon program intended to help people pay for them. The program’s funding limit is $1.34 billion, but the number of people on the waiting list for the $40 coupons has reached 2.6 million. Dangle “free” money around, and the world will beat a path to your door.
This, however, is just the latest screw-up in the long and convoluted transition to digital television. Congress and the Federal Communications Commission have been bungling the process for 20 years. Concessions to broadcasters delayed DTV implementation, which resulted in there being little incentive, until recently, for consumers to buy DTV-ready TV sets or converter boxes.
Those concessions are on top of the fact that the government gave additional broadcast spectrum to the stations free of charge.
One rule of economics is that people care more about something when they have to pay for it. But according to one estimate, TV broadcasters received up to $100 billion worth of prime broadcast real estate for nothing. That certainly didn’t give TV stations an incentive to quickly implement DTV and offer high-quality digital programming that would entice viewers to buy digital televisions. Instead, most stations just sat on that spectrum for years.
Now that broadcasters are finally ready to go all-digital, this latest delay has some of them asking for even more concessions. PBS chief executive Paula Kerger said Monday that continuing to broadcast in analog until June 12 would cost PBS affiliates $22 million, and she wants the federal government — meaning taxpayers — to pick up the tab.
Like most things the government does, there was a better way.
Congress and the FCC could have abandoned the fiction that the broadcast spectrum is and must remain a public resource, which broadcasters merely use so long as they promote “the public interest,” which is whatever politicians say it is. Broadcast spectrum is valuable property. Congress could have auctioned it off, forcing broadcasters to pay market prices. That would have ensured the spectrum would have gone to broadcasters who were prepared to exploit it as soon as possible and to its fullest.
Then, Congress could have allowed broadcasters to auction off their old analog spectrum to recoup some of their costs. As it is, as soon as broadcasters shut off their analog signals, that spectrum will go to wireless services and local public safety agencies. But there is no reason why TV stations couldn’t have sold those frequencies to wireless companies or back to the government. That would have been a fair concession to broadcasters.
Of course, this mess means nothing to the vast majority of TV viewers. More than 80 percent get their TV via cable or satellite. This expensive, drawn-out process is about the 20 percent of viewers who still rely on rabbit ears. And that number would be smaller if Congress and the FCC hadn’t spent most of the past 40 years restricting pay-TV’s growth and stifling competition — yet another gift to over-the-air broadcasters.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Obama is not America’s first celebrity president
There already was a fine line between being a politician and being a celebrity, but President Barack Obama has just erased it.
If the millions of people who turned the National Mall into a giant mosh pit during Tuesday’s inaugural ceremonies weren’t evidence enough, you only have to look to the thousands more who filled stadiums last year to hear candidate Obama speak. It’s difficult to tell the difference between a politician and a rock star when you have people fainting in the audience.
You may chalk that up to “hope” or “change you can believe in,” but more likely it’s simply the culmination of the obvious: Presidential elections have, for a long time, been mostly high-stakes popularity contests. Instead of getting a recording contract, you get to be the most powerful man in the world.
William Henry Harrison won the election of 1840 with the help of a song, “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.” The song’s title doubled as his campaign slogan. Even back then, branding was everything, although it helped that the Democrats that year were too busy beating up each other to worry about Harrison and the Whig Party.
Franklin Pierce won the election of 1852 in a landslide, aided in part by a campaign biography written by his old pal and college roommate Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose novel “The Scarlet Letter” has tortured high school students for decades. Say what you will about Pierce’s presidency, his political propaganda had the best pedigree ever. The closest President Obama could come to topping that was writing two autobiographies of his own.
Even if he isn’t the first celebrity president, President Obama has played the part better than any of his predecessors — although I have heard that President James Buchanan could really tell a joke. He even has suggested CNN medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta as the nation’s surgeon general. What’s next? “America’s Most Wanted” host John Walsh as FBI director?
One thing is certain. The new president is well on his way to being the most commercialized public figure since Elvis Presley. You can’t watch television without being bombarded by advertisements for Obama commemorative plates and laser-dyed Obama coins. That’s in addition to the ubiquitous T-shirts, posters and tote bags. Can velvet paintings of the commander in chief be far behind?
But it gets stranger. The New York Times found Obama hot sauce, Obama soap and even Obama toilet paper, which is just decorative because the ink on the paper is toxic. What would Surgeon General Gupta have to say about that? Nothing good, I bet.
Then it gets downright insane. If a T-shirt isn’t enough of a statement, you can always wear the Obama thong, although hopefully not in public. And then, the Times reported, there is the Obama sex toy, which, given recent federal court decisions, is illegal under Alabama law, unless used for a legitimate medical purpose, whatever that means.
The world hasn’t seen such a marketing blitz since George Lucas unleashed the first batch of “Star Wars” lunchboxes and bed sheets.
At this rate, how long will it be before presidential elections are determined by text messaging, just like “American Idol” winners are? Some people have already proposed allowing Americans to vote for president via the Internet, which isn’t much different.
Other countries have the same idea. According to The Hollywood Reporter, “Jeopardy!” host Alex Trebek will soon be back in his native Canada to host a reality show called “Canada’s Next Prime Minister.” Will the winner become a serious contender? Who knows? But the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. has already licensed the show’s format to the BBC, so Great Britain won’t be far behind.
When voters start following candidates from campaign stop to campaign stop — like fans following the Grateful Dead — we’ll know the age of celebrity presidents has truly arrived.
If the millions of people who turned the National Mall into a giant mosh pit during Tuesday’s inaugural ceremonies weren’t evidence enough, you only have to look to the thousands more who filled stadiums last year to hear candidate Obama speak. It’s difficult to tell the difference between a politician and a rock star when you have people fainting in the audience.
You may chalk that up to “hope” or “change you can believe in,” but more likely it’s simply the culmination of the obvious: Presidential elections have, for a long time, been mostly high-stakes popularity contests. Instead of getting a recording contract, you get to be the most powerful man in the world.
William Henry Harrison won the election of 1840 with the help of a song, “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.” The song’s title doubled as his campaign slogan. Even back then, branding was everything, although it helped that the Democrats that year were too busy beating up each other to worry about Harrison and the Whig Party.
Franklin Pierce won the election of 1852 in a landslide, aided in part by a campaign biography written by his old pal and college roommate Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose novel “The Scarlet Letter” has tortured high school students for decades. Say what you will about Pierce’s presidency, his political propaganda had the best pedigree ever. The closest President Obama could come to topping that was writing two autobiographies of his own.
Even if he isn’t the first celebrity president, President Obama has played the part better than any of his predecessors — although I have heard that President James Buchanan could really tell a joke. He even has suggested CNN medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta as the nation’s surgeon general. What’s next? “America’s Most Wanted” host John Walsh as FBI director?
One thing is certain. The new president is well on his way to being the most commercialized public figure since Elvis Presley. You can’t watch television without being bombarded by advertisements for Obama commemorative plates and laser-dyed Obama coins. That’s in addition to the ubiquitous T-shirts, posters and tote bags. Can velvet paintings of the commander in chief be far behind?
But it gets stranger. The New York Times found Obama hot sauce, Obama soap and even Obama toilet paper, which is just decorative because the ink on the paper is toxic. What would Surgeon General Gupta have to say about that? Nothing good, I bet.
Then it gets downright insane. If a T-shirt isn’t enough of a statement, you can always wear the Obama thong, although hopefully not in public. And then, the Times reported, there is the Obama sex toy, which, given recent federal court decisions, is illegal under Alabama law, unless used for a legitimate medical purpose, whatever that means.
The world hasn’t seen such a marketing blitz since George Lucas unleashed the first batch of “Star Wars” lunchboxes and bed sheets.
At this rate, how long will it be before presidential elections are determined by text messaging, just like “American Idol” winners are? Some people have already proposed allowing Americans to vote for president via the Internet, which isn’t much different.
Other countries have the same idea. According to The Hollywood Reporter, “Jeopardy!” host Alex Trebek will soon be back in his native Canada to host a reality show called “Canada’s Next Prime Minister.” Will the winner become a serious contender? Who knows? But the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. has already licensed the show’s format to the BBC, so Great Britain won’t be far behind.
When voters start following candidates from campaign stop to campaign stop — like fans following the Grateful Dead — we’ll know the age of celebrity presidents has truly arrived.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Poe gains respect in time for his 200th birthday
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| Edgar Allan Poe |
He died Oct. 7, 1849, four days after being discovered delirious and “in great distress” on the streets of Baltimore. Poe never regained his senses, so he never said how he came to be wandering the streets alone. He was 40 years old, and his cause of death remains mostly speculation. Newspaper reports at the time attributed it, more or less, to alcoholism. Thus began the legend of Poe — the tortured, self-destructive, unfairly maligned and often misunderstood artist.
Poe himself, however, began 200 years ago Monday.
He was born Jan. 19, 1809, in Boston. His parents died when he was young, and John and Frances Allan of Richmond, Va., took him in. The couple never adopted him, but they did give him his middle name, and because of his time growing up in Virginia, Poe always thought of himself as a Southern gentleman. The Southern literary establishment reciprocated by claiming Poe as one of its own.
While some critics debate just how Southern Poe was, there seems little question that the bleak, gothic style of Poe’s poems and stories fits well with the Southern mindset after the Civil War. The crumbling castles and corrupt bloodlines of Poe are a non-regional counterpart to the wrecked plantations and ruined families of the South. Obvious comparisons between Poe and William
Faulkner are the stuff of which college and high school term papers are made.
But it was much later before the rest of America’s literary establishment — the critics and the college professors — would give Poe his due.
Poe did himself no favors. He disliked most of the powerful and influential literary figures of his day, except Nathaniel Hawthorne. He practically dared later critics to take sides against him.
Sure, the French have always loved Poe, but they also think Jerry Lewis is a comic genius. So, what do they know?
Stephen King counts Poe as an influence. So did H.P. Lovecraft, the early 20th century pulp writer who admired Poe above all other American writers.
King won a National Book Award in 2003, which dismayed self-appointed keepers of the American literary canon like Yale professor Harold Bloom. Meanwhile, the Library of America recently published a collection of Lovecraft’s stories, admitting Lovecraft into that canon that Bloom so loves to defend.
In the 1960s, director Roger Corman made a series of films loosely based on Poe’s stories and starring Vincent Price. Some critics now rank Corman and Price’s Poe adaptations — considered cheap, drive-in fare at the time — among the finest horror films ever produced.
Poe’s own reputation has undergone a similar rehabilitation, and perhaps it’s because his critics have finally caught up to him. They now have a healthy appreciation for a finely crafted weird tale filled with horror and despair.
But Poe has never needed the appreciation of the literary gatekeepers to capture his readers’ imaginations. And even some people who have never read his poems can quote the first lines of his most famous work, “The Raven.”
“Once upon a midnight dreary…”
So, on Monday, the 200th anniversary of Poe’s birth, a 60-year-old ritual will continue. A person concealed beneath a heavy coat and hat will visit Poe’s grave in Baltimore and leave three roses and a half-empty bottle of cognac. It’s a ritual begun by one of Poe’s admirers and carried on still, supposedly as a family tradition.
Few people have ever tried to discover the mysterious mourner’s identity. Knowing would spoil the mystery, and mystery has been part of Poe’s legend since the day he was laid to rest.
Thursday, January 08, 2009
Critical favorites undergo changes for ’09
The new year means change, and television is no exception. Three critically acclaimed TV shows are either winding down, with an eye toward spin-offs, or undergoing radical makeovers.
First is “Scrubs,” which returned this week for its eighth and possibly final season. The hospital-based comedy had been a staple on NBC but is now on ABC. I guess NBC has used up its good karma for picking up the final season of “Taxi” in 1982 after ABC canceled it.
“Scrubs” has had a good run, and this slightly abbreviated season of 18 episodes should give it a satisfying conclusion. I know other critics love the American version of “The Office” more, but I’ll nominate “Scrubs” as the funniest half hour on television since Fox canceled “Arrested Development.”
Still, even after this year, “Scrubs” could continue.
The show’s star, Zack Braff, is definitely leaving. Creator and executive producer Bill Lawrence is probably moving on, too. But there is persistent talk in Hollywood of either a spin-off or continuing of the series with a new cast.
I think it’s best to let “Scrubs” end now. Eight seasons is a lot for a TV show — especially a good one, because the good die young.
Besides, the last time a medical show mixing comedy and drama spawned a spin-off, we got “After M*A*S*H.” And I don’t think anybody wants another “After M*A*S*H.”
Meanwhile, I’m awaiting the return of “Battlestar Galactica” on Jan. 16 on the Sci-Fi Channel.
The mid-season cliffhanger was the most shocking — and depressing — of the series’ run, which has always been full of dramatic and daring plot twists.
The show’s producers have promised more of the same for the series’ final 10 episodes, which will close out arguably the best science fiction series ever aired on American television. Who would have expected so much from “Galactica” given the show’s pedigree? The current version of “Galactica,” which won a Peabody Award in 2005, is in an entirely different universe than its cheesy 1970s counterpart.
To get viewers ready, Sci-Fi is posting 10 mini-episodes on its Web site, Scifi.com. Also, the first half of the current season, season 4, was released Tuesday on DVD.
What’s next after “Battlestar Galactica”? Sci-Fi has set a 2010 premier for “Caprica,” a prequel series set decades before the events of “Galactica.” Prequels are usually a bad idea (for example, the “Star Wars” prequels), but the early footage from “Caprica” looks promising.
The biggest news of the past week, however, came from Britain, where the BBC announced the 11th actor to take on the lead role of “Doctor Who,” the longest-running sci-fi franchise in television.
Twenty-six-year-old Matt Smith will become to the youngest actor to play the role of the 900-year-old Time Lord, replacing David Tennant, who has become one of the series’ most popular Doctors, probably second only to Tom Baker, who held the mantle from 1974 to 1981. In Britain, picking a new Doctor is more important than picking a new James Bond.
Smith has a short but impressive resume, but his hiring has raised about the same amount of controversy as Auburn University’s latest pick for head football coach. Fortunately, I have confidence in incoming “Doctor Who” producer Steven Moffat, writer of most of the best “Doctor Who” stories since the series’ return in 2005.
Like soccer, “Doctor Who” is something the entire English-speaking world obsesses over — except the United States. The show was a cult phenomenon here during its original run (1963-1989). But the revived series has gained a larger following after airing on Sci-Fi and BBC America. And if any sci-fi series can challenge “Galactica” for best ever, it’s not “Star Trek.” It’s “Doctor Who.”
Tennant will remain the Doctor for a few specials throughout 2009, but in 2010 the team of Smith and Moffat will take the long-lived program into its sixth decade.
First is “Scrubs,” which returned this week for its eighth and possibly final season. The hospital-based comedy had been a staple on NBC but is now on ABC. I guess NBC has used up its good karma for picking up the final season of “Taxi” in 1982 after ABC canceled it.
“Scrubs” has had a good run, and this slightly abbreviated season of 18 episodes should give it a satisfying conclusion. I know other critics love the American version of “The Office” more, but I’ll nominate “Scrubs” as the funniest half hour on television since Fox canceled “Arrested Development.”
Still, even after this year, “Scrubs” could continue.
The show’s star, Zack Braff, is definitely leaving. Creator and executive producer Bill Lawrence is probably moving on, too. But there is persistent talk in Hollywood of either a spin-off or continuing of the series with a new cast.
I think it’s best to let “Scrubs” end now. Eight seasons is a lot for a TV show — especially a good one, because the good die young.
Besides, the last time a medical show mixing comedy and drama spawned a spin-off, we got “After M*A*S*H.” And I don’t think anybody wants another “After M*A*S*H.”
Meanwhile, I’m awaiting the return of “Battlestar Galactica” on Jan. 16 on the Sci-Fi Channel.
The mid-season cliffhanger was the most shocking — and depressing — of the series’ run, which has always been full of dramatic and daring plot twists.
The show’s producers have promised more of the same for the series’ final 10 episodes, which will close out arguably the best science fiction series ever aired on American television. Who would have expected so much from “Galactica” given the show’s pedigree? The current version of “Galactica,” which won a Peabody Award in 2005, is in an entirely different universe than its cheesy 1970s counterpart.
To get viewers ready, Sci-Fi is posting 10 mini-episodes on its Web site, Scifi.com. Also, the first half of the current season, season 4, was released Tuesday on DVD.
What’s next after “Battlestar Galactica”? Sci-Fi has set a 2010 premier for “Caprica,” a prequel series set decades before the events of “Galactica.” Prequels are usually a bad idea (for example, the “Star Wars” prequels), but the early footage from “Caprica” looks promising.
The biggest news of the past week, however, came from Britain, where the BBC announced the 11th actor to take on the lead role of “Doctor Who,” the longest-running sci-fi franchise in television.
Twenty-six-year-old Matt Smith will become to the youngest actor to play the role of the 900-year-old Time Lord, replacing David Tennant, who has become one of the series’ most popular Doctors, probably second only to Tom Baker, who held the mantle from 1974 to 1981. In Britain, picking a new Doctor is more important than picking a new James Bond.
Smith has a short but impressive resume, but his hiring has raised about the same amount of controversy as Auburn University’s latest pick for head football coach. Fortunately, I have confidence in incoming “Doctor Who” producer Steven Moffat, writer of most of the best “Doctor Who” stories since the series’ return in 2005.
Like soccer, “Doctor Who” is something the entire English-speaking world obsesses over — except the United States. The show was a cult phenomenon here during its original run (1963-1989). But the revived series has gained a larger following after airing on Sci-Fi and BBC America. And if any sci-fi series can challenge “Galactica” for best ever, it’s not “Star Trek.” It’s “Doctor Who.”
Tennant will remain the Doctor for a few specials throughout 2009, but in 2010 the team of Smith and Moffat will take the long-lived program into its sixth decade.
Thursday, January 01, 2009
This New Year’s, resolve to fight pessimism
It’s the start of a new year, a time when most of us are hopeful about what the future will bring.
Unfortunately, that hope tends to fade quickly, and not only in tough times. Even though America is the “land of opportunity,” most Americans — in fact, most people everywhere — are pessimistic about the long run.
That is the bad news. The good news is our pessimism is unfounded.
Bryan Caplan, a professor of economics at George Mason University in Virginia, calls this “pessimistic bias.” It is one of four biases he cites in his 2007 book, “The Myth of the Rational Voter,” as leading to bad public policy.
Caplan shows that people are generally too pessimistic about long-term economic trends. In short, they believe things are bad when they’re actually good, and they believe things are worse when they’re merely bad. This is despite overwhelming evidence that, in the long run, economic conditions are improving overall.
Long-run improvement wasn’t always the case. Throughout most of history, living conditions barely improved at all.
In his recent book “A Farewell to Alms,” Gregory Clark, chairman of the economics department at the University of California, Davis, writes that for most of the last 100,000 years, living conditions stayed the same — awful. Even with improvements in technology, the arts and science, people ate poorly and died young. Short-term improvements in living standards led to larger populations that then overwhelmed available resources, causing living standards to drop. Over the long run, life for the vast majority of people remained nasty, brutish and short.
But in 1800, all of that changed. The Industrial Revolution made long-run improvements in living standards possible, at least in countries that had an industrial revolution. In the 21st century, we’re reaping the benefits of more than 200 years of economic growth.
Still, the pessimistic bias remains, with many people and interest groups predicting the End of the World is just around the corner. Professional pessimists still cite books written in the early 1970s that predicted a worldwide economic collapse by the 1990s. Even the current recession isn’t that bad.
With the U.S. and most of the rest of the industrialized world in a recession, some measure of short-term pessimism is understandable. But as a whole, we’re almost always more pessimistic than we should be, whatever the economic conditions.
Yet, while the bias toward economic pessimism is important — especially if, as Caplan argues, it leads to voters voting irrationally — it’s not our only pessimistic bias.
Various studies have found that people overestimate their cancer risk, think divorce rates are increasing when the opposite is true and greatly overestimate the threat of terrorist attacks following 9/11. Pessimistic bias is everywhere.
French researchers have found that people are most pessimistic when they think they have no control over a situation. Thus, many have a pessimistic bias against airplane travel, even though flying is far safer than being behind the wheel of a car.
Caplan’s George Mason colleague Tyler Cowen devotes a chapter of his 1998 book, “In Praise of Commercial Culture,” to cultural pessimism, the belief that art, music and culture as a whole are always getting worse.
“The later we stand in history, the more likely that our favorite cultural products will lie in the relatively distant past,” he writes. “The passage of time implies that the entirety of the past contains an increasing amount of culture relative to any single point in time, such as the present. Cultural pessimism therefore appears increasingly persuasive over time.”
Persuasive? Yes. But not justified, as Cowen shows.
So, this New Year’s Day, resolve to hang on to that optimism you’re feeling. Even when everything around you seems to be falling apart, chances are at least some of that pessimism that taunts you is just in your head.
Unfortunately, that hope tends to fade quickly, and not only in tough times. Even though America is the “land of opportunity,” most Americans — in fact, most people everywhere — are pessimistic about the long run.
That is the bad news. The good news is our pessimism is unfounded.
Bryan Caplan, a professor of economics at George Mason University in Virginia, calls this “pessimistic bias.” It is one of four biases he cites in his 2007 book, “The Myth of the Rational Voter,” as leading to bad public policy.
Caplan shows that people are generally too pessimistic about long-term economic trends. In short, they believe things are bad when they’re actually good, and they believe things are worse when they’re merely bad. This is despite overwhelming evidence that, in the long run, economic conditions are improving overall.
Long-run improvement wasn’t always the case. Throughout most of history, living conditions barely improved at all.
In his recent book “A Farewell to Alms,” Gregory Clark, chairman of the economics department at the University of California, Davis, writes that for most of the last 100,000 years, living conditions stayed the same — awful. Even with improvements in technology, the arts and science, people ate poorly and died young. Short-term improvements in living standards led to larger populations that then overwhelmed available resources, causing living standards to drop. Over the long run, life for the vast majority of people remained nasty, brutish and short.
But in 1800, all of that changed. The Industrial Revolution made long-run improvements in living standards possible, at least in countries that had an industrial revolution. In the 21st century, we’re reaping the benefits of more than 200 years of economic growth.
Still, the pessimistic bias remains, with many people and interest groups predicting the End of the World is just around the corner. Professional pessimists still cite books written in the early 1970s that predicted a worldwide economic collapse by the 1990s. Even the current recession isn’t that bad.
With the U.S. and most of the rest of the industrialized world in a recession, some measure of short-term pessimism is understandable. But as a whole, we’re almost always more pessimistic than we should be, whatever the economic conditions.
Yet, while the bias toward economic pessimism is important — especially if, as Caplan argues, it leads to voters voting irrationally — it’s not our only pessimistic bias.
Various studies have found that people overestimate their cancer risk, think divorce rates are increasing when the opposite is true and greatly overestimate the threat of terrorist attacks following 9/11. Pessimistic bias is everywhere.
French researchers have found that people are most pessimistic when they think they have no control over a situation. Thus, many have a pessimistic bias against airplane travel, even though flying is far safer than being behind the wheel of a car.
Caplan’s George Mason colleague Tyler Cowen devotes a chapter of his 1998 book, “In Praise of Commercial Culture,” to cultural pessimism, the belief that art, music and culture as a whole are always getting worse.
“The later we stand in history, the more likely that our favorite cultural products will lie in the relatively distant past,” he writes. “The passage of time implies that the entirety of the past contains an increasing amount of culture relative to any single point in time, such as the present. Cultural pessimism therefore appears increasingly persuasive over time.”
Persuasive? Yes. But not justified, as Cowen shows.
So, this New Year’s Day, resolve to hang on to that optimism you’re feeling. Even when everything around you seems to be falling apart, chances are at least some of that pessimism that taunts you is just in your head.
Thursday, December 25, 2008
End of piracy lawsuits an early gift to music lovers
For many Americans, it was an early Christmas present.
Friday, the Recording Industry Association of America announced it is ending its five-year campaign of suing people who share music via the Internet.
The RIAA declared victory, but to anyone reading between the lines, the triumphant bluster seemed a lot more like an admission of defeat. Although the RIAA claimed its lawsuits were necessary to save the music industry, no data indicates the suits had any impact on people’s behavior.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the RIAA initiated legal proceedings against 35,000 people — ranging from college students to grandmothers — during its war on music piracy. That number, however, was a just small fraction of the 19 percent of Internet users estimated to have shared music via peer-to-peer networks. So, unsurprisingly, fear of being sued wasn’t much of a deterrent. You might as well worry about being struck by lightning. From 2003 to 2007, that 19 percent figure remained virtually constant, and the number of songs downloaded actually increased.
Most of the RIAA’s targets settled out of court, and, ultimately, the RIAA spent more on legal fees than it recovered from shaking down defendants.
Yet, the RIAA’s president, Cary Sherman, claims the suits were a success. In an interview with CNET.com, he points to the spectacular growth of authorized downloads from for-profit sites like iTunes. But all that proves is that a lot of consumers are willing to pay for digital music — if, of course, the big music companies are willing to offer it.
During most of the past decade, the music industry hurt itself by not selling music downloads. Instead, the RIAA sued Web sites like Napster to prevent people from sharing songs. Then, when peer-to-peer software made it possible for computer users to share music with each other directly, without needing centralized hubs like Napster, the RIAA went after individuals.
When that didn’t work, the music companies finally, grudgingly, started entering into agreements to sell music downloads online, first through iTunes and, later, through sites like Amazon.com and MySpace. But by then, many of that pesky 19 percent were already used to not paying for music. And the music industry had only itself to blame.
Still, selling music downloads has become big business, even as sales of compact discs continue to fall. Who wants a bunch of CDs littering the house when you can store thousands of songs on a computer or iPod?
According to NPD Group, paid music downloads rose 29 percent in the third quarter of 2008 compared to the same period in 2007, with iTunes and Amazon gaining 2.8 million music buyers, or about 15 percent of Internet users, CNET reported. Two major music labels, Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group, reported strong gains in digital sales, with Warner posting a 27 percent increase in the third quarter. Universal reported that its digital sales more than made up for the continued decline in CD sales.
Not coincidentally, as the music industry finally began offering legal downloads, the number of people illegally downloading music finally started to creep lower in 2008, falling to 14 percent, according to NPD.
Does that look like the result of the RIAA’s lawsuits, or the result of the RIAA’s members finally getting around to offering a legal alternative? Consumers aren’t greedy, and they want their favorite music artists to make money, even if that also means giving money to the music labels that wanted to sue them.
Nevertheless, the RIAA says it still plans to send warning letters to Internet service providers when it discovers computer users who are major copyright violators. The RIAA wants ISPs to limit or block Internet access for repeat offenders. But I have to wonder, is an ISP more likely to heed the RIAA or its own paying customers?
Somehow, I doubt the RIAA’s new strategy will be any more successful than its old one. And with legal downloads becoming easier to get, I also doubt it will matter much either way.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Childhood holds memories of the best Christmas gift ever
I suspect most people can recall one special Christmas — the Christmas when they received a present so cool, so amazing that it could only be the Best. Christmas. Present. Ever.
For Ralphie Parker, the hero of “A Christmas Story,” it was a Red Ryder carbine-action 200-shot Range Model air rifle BB gun with a compass in the stock and a thing that tells time. I’m still not sure about the “thing.” A clock? A sundial?
For me, it was the Christmas of 1982, when I received my Atari 2600 game console. OK, yeah, what I’d really wanted was a state-of-the-art ColecoVision game system. But it was more expensive than the Atari, and money was tight. Besides, it wasn’t as if any of my friends had a ColecoVision, anyway.
They all had 2600s, too. Except for the ones who had Mattel’s Intelevision system or Magnavox’s Odyssey2.
Actually, I don’t know anyone who owned an Odyssey2. But I do remember the floor model that mostly gathered dust at the local Otasco store.
Before the Christmas of the Atari, my best present ever had been a Mego brand Batmobile with Batman and Robin action figures. That must have been about 1975. Obviously, in just seven years, my requirements for a satisfactory Christmas present had gotten a lot more stringent.
Christmas ’77 would have been a great Christmas if the first batch of “Star Wars” toys had arrived on time. George Lucas was smart enough to keep all of the licensing rights to his movies, but not smart enough to get the toys into stories in time for the holidays. But maybe some children actually had fun playing with their Early Bird Gift Certificates, which were basically IOUs for action figures.
Some children this year will get MP3 players that have more processing power than my first game system did. It’s easy to forget, especially when the economy is in the dumps, but we’re a lot wealthier as a nation now than we were just 30 years ago.
In the early ’80s, William Shatner appeared in ads extolling the Commodore Vic-20 — “the wonder computer of the 1980s” — which cost “under $300.” The wristwatch I’m wearing now is smarter than a Vic-20, and for about $300 I can buy a decent desktop PC.
Each new Christmas brings rising expectations. I was once happy to get this thing called a “turntable” on which I placed a large, wax disk called a “record album.” When spun on the turntable, the album would play music, along with assorted hisses, pops and crackles.
Today, I’d insist that Santa Claus bring me an iPod that could hold thousands of songs. And, no, a Zune would not be a reasonable substitute.
But even with rising expectations, you reach a point when nostalgia trumps all else. I’ve received better, more advanced Christmas gifts since that Atari 2600, but none that can top it as my best gift ever. After a certain age, Christmas loses something, and not just because children stop believing in Santa. I suspect it’s when puberty hits, and suddenly you have more important things on your mind — like girls or boys or whatever — than what’s under the tree.
That’s when Christmas goes into a time capsule, waiting to be opened only when you have children of your own. And the memories in that capsule can’t be surpassed.
Lexus is running a TV advertisement in which a young child talks excitedly about how his new Big Wheel is the greatest Christmas present ever — at least until the ad shifts to the same child, now an adult, staring starry-eyed at a new Lexus in his driveway.
No one has ever given me a car for Christmas, so I’m not exactly certain how I would react. But, somehow, I think it wouldn’t top a Big Wheel. Or an Atari.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Uncle Forry inspired Hollywood with his love of sci-fi, horror
The world’s greatest fan has died.
But Forrest J Ackerman was more than just a fan. With his boundless enthusiasm for horror and science fiction, he inspired a generation of Hollywood filmmakers.
Ackerman, 92, died Dec. 4 of heart failure at his home in Los Angeles. His death elicited tributes from the many who knew him and the many more who only knew of him.
How different might the world have been without the man everyone called Uncle Forry?
“Many of the technicians, special effects masters and filmmakers that work in the realms that Forry loved … do so in no small part based on the childhood passion that Forry gave them,” wrote Harry Knowles at his Web site, Ain’t It Cool News.
Knowles is often guilty of overstatement — just read some of his movie reviews — but not this time. For many young, would-be storytellers, Uncle Forry was the center of the universe.
Imagine a world without “Star Wars” or “Jaws.” George Lucas and Steven Spielberg are two of the many directors, writers and producers who were captivated by Ackerman’s magazine, Famous Monsters of Filmland. Imagine a world without “The Martian Chronicles” and “Fahrenheit 451.” Ray Bradbury credits Ackerman with helping him get his start as a writer.
“Forry changed my life,” Bradbury said in 2000, when both he and Ackerman visited Florence. “He paid attention when no one else cared.”
As Bradbury later told The Associated Press, Ackerman paid Bradbury’s way to New York for an authors meeting that launched Bradbury’s career.
“I hadn’t published yet, and I met a lot of these people who encouraged me and helped me get my career started, and that was all because of Forry Ackerman,” Bradbury said.
It started in the 1920s, when Ackerman, then 9 years old, discovered Amazing Stories. That magazine, which inaugurated the Golden Age of science fiction, gave the young Ackerman his lifelong love of the genre. He would keep that first issue his entire life, and it would become the cornerstone of his private museum of SF and horror memorabilia.
But at that point, Forry was still just a fan. In his teens, he and several other teenage SF fans — including future DC Comics editors Julius Schwartz and Mort Weisinger — founded the first science fiction fanzine, The Time Traveller(two Ls). It was a start, but Forry’s big breakthrough came in February 1958. That was when Warren Publishing unveiled the first issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, with Ackerman as its editor.
Aimed at adolescents and young teenagers, Famous Monsters featured stories about the greatest horror, fantasy and sci-fi filmmakers of the day. It capitalized on the newfound popularity of classic monster movies from the 1930s and ’40s, which were beginning to air on TV stations throughout America.
Note that I’m now using the term “sci-fi” instead of “science fiction” or “SF.” That’s because Uncle Forry coined it. Without Ackerman, the Sci-Fi Channel would have to call itself something else.
Famous Monsters let its readers in on the inner workings of sci-fi and horror movies. Some of those readers got the idea that they could make movies, too.
Ackerman left Famous Monsters in the late 1970s, and the magazine’s original incarnation ceased publication a few years later. But Ackerman still found ways to inspire the next generation of fans.
Every weekend, Ackerman opened his home to visitors, who traveled from just about everywhere to see the artifacts he had spent decades assembling. When I met Uncle Forry eight years ago, he had a few mementos with him: the cape Bela Lugosi wore in the stage production of “Dracula,” the ring Boris Karloff wore in “The Mummy” and face paint that had belonged to Lon Chaney Sr. And each item had a story.
Uncle Forry’s gift for storytelling is what set him apart. He seemed to know everything and everyone, and he counted people like Bradbury, Karloff and Vincent Price among his closest friends.
Sure, he edited a magazine and several books. And he had small roles in numerous films made by the people he helped lure into moviemaking. But he remained, first and foremost, a fan. And his infectious love of sci-fi helped change the world.
Thursday, December 04, 2008
The Rickroll is dead; long live the Rickroll
I hereby declare the end of the Rickroll.
The Internet prank, which involves a seemingly cool Web link that goes instead to a video of ’80s pop star Rick Astley singing “Never Gonna Give You Up,” is passé now that the ultimate Rickroll has been pulled.
During NBC’s annual broadcast of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade last week, Astley got the last laugh. He appeared unexpectedly on the Cartoon Network float and lip-synced his most infamous hit single.
In an instant, Astley had Rickrolled more people than any online prankster could ever dream of. No one can top that, so it’s time to stop trying.
The Rickroll is over. Now we need a replacement.
Fortunately, the 1980s is a treasure trove of ghastly songs that soared to the top of the pop charts. I blame cocaine abuse.
“The Girl Is Mine.” Before they tangled over the rights to the Beatles catalog, Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney recorded two duets. The first, and worst, was 1982’s “The Girl Is Mine” from Jackson’s “Thriller.” As the first single off the most popular album of all time, “The Girl Is Mine” was everywhere. Now that the drugs have worn off, however, we can recognize what an unbearably hokey song it is.
“Ebony and Ivory.” Earlier that year, McCartney teamed up with Stevie Wonder for another duet, “Ebony and Ivory.” The song reached No. 1 on both the U.S. and British pop charts, proving that bad taste doesn’t respect geographic boundaries. As trite as it is awful, “Ebony and Ivory” uses the black and ivory keys of a piano as a metaphor for racial harmony. And in case you don’t get the message, McCartney and Wonder’s harmonizing is also a metaphor for racial harmony. Listening to the song today is like having a piano dropped on your head.
Let this be a lesson to everyone: If McCartney wants to record a duet with you, just say no.
“Ice Ice Baby.” This song was Vanilla Ice’s contribution to bad music, giving the world insightful lyrics like “Will it ever stop? Yo, I don't know/Turn off the lights, and I'll glow.” Vanilla Ice, aka Robert Matthew Van Winkle, almost won a Grammy for this atrocity. However, he lost to ...
“U Can’t Touch This.” Yes, there was a time when people thought MC Hammer was cool. He was so cool, in fact, that you couldn’t touch him — presumably because you’d get frostbite if you did. So, he penned the song “U Can’t Touch This.”
Most recently, the man otherwise known as Stanley Kirk Burrell was getting in touch with his spiritual side as the host of a show on the Trinity Broadcasting Network. But whether or not his soul is immortal, his song is — like a vampire sucking the life out of anyone it encounters.
“Who Can It Be Now?” I will admit a nostalgic fondness for Men at Work’s other hit, “Down Under,” a reggae-tinged anthem to the manly virtues and poor dietary habits of Australians. But “Who Can It Be Now?” hasn’t aged well. Neither has …
“Somebody’s Watching Me.” This is the only hit by Rockwell, son of Motown Records founder Berry Gordy. Both “Who Can It Be Now?” and “Somebody’s Watching Me” deal with paranoia and have lyrics such as “Is it the man come to take me away?/Why do they follow me?” and “When I’m in the shower/I’m afraid to wash my hair/’Cause I might open my eyes/And find someone standing there.”
Why were these songs so popular in the ’80s? Again, I fault cocaine, which is said to cause paranoid delusions. These were songs cokeheads could relate to.
But probably the best potential successor to “Never Gonna Give You Up” is …
“Girl You Know It’s True.” Milli Vanilli won a Grammy for Best New Artist after releasing this earnestly lame single in 1989. But the duo had to give back their award because someone else actually recorded the vocals. The truth, however, is this song is bad no matter who sings it.
The ’80s gave us so much terrible music that I could go on for hours. But it takes a truly heartfelt, unironic and irredeemably shallow song to replace “Never Gonna Give You Up.” It set the standard.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Auburn and Alabama fans are driven by tribal instinct
If you think we’ve come a long way from our primitive ancestors, look around at your neighbors this weekend, and you’ll likely see we haven’t evolved all that much.
In fact, you may only have to look in a mirror.
A significant proportion of Alabamians will be decked out in tribal colors — either orange and blue for Auburn University, or crimson and white for The University of Alabama. But the odd thing is that most people wearing those colors in anticipation of the annual Auburn/Alabama football game didn’t attend either university.
It doesn’t end there. Some members of each tribe turn entire rooms of their homes into shrines filled with football memorabilia. They dress the family dogs in team sweaters. They walk down the wedding aisle to the tune of their school’s fight song. They name their children after dead coaches.
Making fun of such excess is easy. Actually, I encourage it. But that extreme behavior is, in a way, only natural. In fact, it has roots in 200,000 years of human pre-history.
Our earliest human ancestors lived in the African savanna and survived by hunting and gathering. The rule of the day was eat or be eaten. In such an unforgiving environment, cooperation within a tribe was a necessity.
Every living being, humans included, is a complex machine with one biological purpose — to spread its genetic material. “Be fruitful and multiply” isn’t just a Biblical commandment. It is encoded in our DNA.
Members of hunter-gatherer societies best fulfilled their genetic imperative by cooperating with the people they saw every day, mostly close relations. That’s how tribal bonds formed, and it’s why, even today, people have an enormous capacity for social cooperation. Evolutionary biologists call it “reciprocal altruism,” but everyone else calls it “you scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.” (In fact, our chimpanzee cousins practice this literally when they groom each other.) Our brains are wired for it because it’s a powerful survival mechanism, and thus favored by natural selection.
But there is a downside to our mental wiring. While it encourages cooperation within a tribe, it often leads to conflict with other tribes, especially if those other tribes are competing for the same resources. We are “us,” and they are “them.”
Down through the centuries, that tribal instinct had led to racism, ethnic hatred, religious conflict and, on a larger scale, wars between nations fighting to control land, resources and wealth.
Fortunately, human societies evolve far more quickly than human biology does. So, we’ve come up with ways to close the distance between us and them. The most successful is trade. Frederic Bastiat, a 19th century French economist, said, “When goods don’t cross borders, armies will.” Today, large-scale trade between nations is the norm, not the exception. The more trade there is between any two given countries, the less likely those countries will end up at war with one another. As a result, the number of wars going on at any particular time has dropped steadily since the end of the Cold War.
Within nations, individuals are also interconnected by trade. We all do business with each other, and most of our old tribal divisions have broken down or substantially weakened. But we still have that tribal instinct, which now expresses itself, usually, in more peaceful ways — like identifying with collegiate and professional sports teams. We have rituals, like tailgating, that we share with fellow tribesmen, and we compete with other tribes by participating in office betting pools.
We’re driven to join tribes, which is why people who never attended Auburn or Alabama still choose sides. And all tribes seek to grow, which is why natives often pressure newcomers from out of state to pick a team.
You can join a tribe even if you don’t care about sports. For better or worse, tribes form around everything from TV shows (Trekkies) to rock bands (Deadheads) to political candidates (Obamaniacs).
So, when you’re putting on your war paint for the big game Saturday, remember that you’re part of a tradition that dates to the Stone Age. And if your team loses, just tell yourself that football is still better than hunting zebras.
In fact, you may only have to look in a mirror.
A significant proportion of Alabamians will be decked out in tribal colors — either orange and blue for Auburn University, or crimson and white for The University of Alabama. But the odd thing is that most people wearing those colors in anticipation of the annual Auburn/Alabama football game didn’t attend either university.
It doesn’t end there. Some members of each tribe turn entire rooms of their homes into shrines filled with football memorabilia. They dress the family dogs in team sweaters. They walk down the wedding aisle to the tune of their school’s fight song. They name their children after dead coaches.
Making fun of such excess is easy. Actually, I encourage it. But that extreme behavior is, in a way, only natural. In fact, it has roots in 200,000 years of human pre-history.
Our earliest human ancestors lived in the African savanna and survived by hunting and gathering. The rule of the day was eat or be eaten. In such an unforgiving environment, cooperation within a tribe was a necessity.
Every living being, humans included, is a complex machine with one biological purpose — to spread its genetic material. “Be fruitful and multiply” isn’t just a Biblical commandment. It is encoded in our DNA.
Members of hunter-gatherer societies best fulfilled their genetic imperative by cooperating with the people they saw every day, mostly close relations. That’s how tribal bonds formed, and it’s why, even today, people have an enormous capacity for social cooperation. Evolutionary biologists call it “reciprocal altruism,” but everyone else calls it “you scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.” (In fact, our chimpanzee cousins practice this literally when they groom each other.) Our brains are wired for it because it’s a powerful survival mechanism, and thus favored by natural selection.
But there is a downside to our mental wiring. While it encourages cooperation within a tribe, it often leads to conflict with other tribes, especially if those other tribes are competing for the same resources. We are “us,” and they are “them.”
Down through the centuries, that tribal instinct had led to racism, ethnic hatred, religious conflict and, on a larger scale, wars between nations fighting to control land, resources and wealth.
Fortunately, human societies evolve far more quickly than human biology does. So, we’ve come up with ways to close the distance between us and them. The most successful is trade. Frederic Bastiat, a 19th century French economist, said, “When goods don’t cross borders, armies will.” Today, large-scale trade between nations is the norm, not the exception. The more trade there is between any two given countries, the less likely those countries will end up at war with one another. As a result, the number of wars going on at any particular time has dropped steadily since the end of the Cold War.
Within nations, individuals are also interconnected by trade. We all do business with each other, and most of our old tribal divisions have broken down or substantially weakened. But we still have that tribal instinct, which now expresses itself, usually, in more peaceful ways — like identifying with collegiate and professional sports teams. We have rituals, like tailgating, that we share with fellow tribesmen, and we compete with other tribes by participating in office betting pools.
We’re driven to join tribes, which is why people who never attended Auburn or Alabama still choose sides. And all tribes seek to grow, which is why natives often pressure newcomers from out of state to pick a team.
You can join a tribe even if you don’t care about sports. For better or worse, tribes form around everything from TV shows (Trekkies) to rock bands (Deadheads) to political candidates (Obamaniacs).
So, when you’re putting on your war paint for the big game Saturday, remember that you’re part of a tradition that dates to the Stone Age. And if your team loses, just tell yourself that football is still better than hunting zebras.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
New ‘Star Trek’ prequel promises everything you don’t want to know
Growing up in the 1970s and watching reruns of “Star Trek,” I always wondered what Capt. Kirk was like when he was young.
Wait. No I didn’t. Actually, the thought never crossed my mind. But now that it has, I’m reasonably sure I don’t want to know what James T. Kirk was like before he became captain of the USS Enterprise.
But the idea of going back in time to explore the early years of beloved characters is just too tempting for Hollywood. So, on May 8, 2009, we’ll get to see Kirk, Spock, McCoy and the rest of the Enterprise crew as they were before they began their famous five-year mission.
The trailer for director J.J. Abrams’ new “Star Trek” debuted last weekend in front of “Quantum of Solace,” and it confirmed my worst suspicions. It’s no wonder some longtime “Star Trek” fans have already dubbed this latest installment in the franchise “Dawson’s Trek.” I, however, prefer to think of it as “Young Phasers.”
The preview opens with a vintage 20th century sports car speeding across a desert, and just before the car flies off a cliff, its young driver jumps out. That’s when a 23rd century police officer walks up and asks the boy his name. “My name is James Tiberius Kirk,” the mop-headed little punk says.
Yes, before he became the greatest captain in Starfleet history, Kirk was an annoying brat with authority issues. Does that remind you of any other famous sci-fi character you know?
The trailer then jumps forward, where we get to see a brooding, twentysomething Kirk (Chris Pine) riding a motorcycle and watching the Enterprise’s construction at a Starfleet shipyard. (My inner science geek insists that I now note how silly it is to build a ship like the Enterprise on Earth rather than in orbit.) Meanwhile, voiceover narration describes Kirk’s troubled youth and unfulfilled destiny, and I half expect Samuel L. Jackson to appear and tell me Kirk is the chosen one who will bring balance to the Force.
Sorry. I was thinking about that other sci-fi character again. You know — the one who used to be cool. The one who was the baddest bad guy ever to appear on a movie screen. Until, that is, we saw him as a whiny 8-year-old and then, later, as an even whinier young adult.
Darth Vader killed incompetent subordinates on a whim and struck fear into an entire galaxy. Anakin Skywalker, on the other hand, complained a lot and missed his mommy. Are we really supposed to buy that Anakin could eventually become Vader?
When you venture into an iconic character’s past you’re treading on sacred ground. We knew before the “Star Wars” prequels that Anakin had a tragic fall from grace, but seeing it only cheapened it. So, do we really want to take the risk of watching Kirk grow up? We know he was the only Starfleet cadet ever to beat the no-win scenario of the Kobayashi Maru test. (He cheated, and then received a commendation for original thinking.) Do we really want to see the gory details?
The fact that Pine looks like he just stepped out of an Abercrombie & Fitch advertisement doesn’t help. No one ever confused William Shatner with an underwear model.
Face it. No matter how cool you are as an adult, you still don’t want your parents showing your friends old photographs and home movies of you. Unfortunately, Abrams’ “Star Trek” reboot looks an awful lot like Kirk’s home movies. How is he supposed to score with alien women and the occasional android if everyone sees what he was like as a petulant youth?
Hannibal Lecter was a scarier villain before “Hannibal Rising” delved into his childhood and revealed the trauma that turned him into Hannibal the Cannibal. Darth Vader was more menacing before we learned he was an idiot whose only qualification for being a Jedi was a high midi-chlorian count. (They probably have antibiotics for that.) And, trust me, Capt. Kirk is cooler without our knowing about all of his youthful screw-ups.
Wait. No I didn’t. Actually, the thought never crossed my mind. But now that it has, I’m reasonably sure I don’t want to know what James T. Kirk was like before he became captain of the USS Enterprise.
But the idea of going back in time to explore the early years of beloved characters is just too tempting for Hollywood. So, on May 8, 2009, we’ll get to see Kirk, Spock, McCoy and the rest of the Enterprise crew as they were before they began their famous five-year mission.
The trailer for director J.J. Abrams’ new “Star Trek” debuted last weekend in front of “Quantum of Solace,” and it confirmed my worst suspicions. It’s no wonder some longtime “Star Trek” fans have already dubbed this latest installment in the franchise “Dawson’s Trek.” I, however, prefer to think of it as “Young Phasers.”
The preview opens with a vintage 20th century sports car speeding across a desert, and just before the car flies off a cliff, its young driver jumps out. That’s when a 23rd century police officer walks up and asks the boy his name. “My name is James Tiberius Kirk,” the mop-headed little punk says.
Yes, before he became the greatest captain in Starfleet history, Kirk was an annoying brat with authority issues. Does that remind you of any other famous sci-fi character you know?
The trailer then jumps forward, where we get to see a brooding, twentysomething Kirk (Chris Pine) riding a motorcycle and watching the Enterprise’s construction at a Starfleet shipyard. (My inner science geek insists that I now note how silly it is to build a ship like the Enterprise on Earth rather than in orbit.) Meanwhile, voiceover narration describes Kirk’s troubled youth and unfulfilled destiny, and I half expect Samuel L. Jackson to appear and tell me Kirk is the chosen one who will bring balance to the Force.
Sorry. I was thinking about that other sci-fi character again. You know — the one who used to be cool. The one who was the baddest bad guy ever to appear on a movie screen. Until, that is, we saw him as a whiny 8-year-old and then, later, as an even whinier young adult.
Darth Vader killed incompetent subordinates on a whim and struck fear into an entire galaxy. Anakin Skywalker, on the other hand, complained a lot and missed his mommy. Are we really supposed to buy that Anakin could eventually become Vader?
When you venture into an iconic character’s past you’re treading on sacred ground. We knew before the “Star Wars” prequels that Anakin had a tragic fall from grace, but seeing it only cheapened it. So, do we really want to take the risk of watching Kirk grow up? We know he was the only Starfleet cadet ever to beat the no-win scenario of the Kobayashi Maru test. (He cheated, and then received a commendation for original thinking.) Do we really want to see the gory details?
The fact that Pine looks like he just stepped out of an Abercrombie & Fitch advertisement doesn’t help. No one ever confused William Shatner with an underwear model.
Face it. No matter how cool you are as an adult, you still don’t want your parents showing your friends old photographs and home movies of you. Unfortunately, Abrams’ “Star Trek” reboot looks an awful lot like Kirk’s home movies. How is he supposed to score with alien women and the occasional android if everyone sees what he was like as a petulant youth?
Hannibal Lecter was a scarier villain before “Hannibal Rising” delved into his childhood and revealed the trauma that turned him into Hannibal the Cannibal. Darth Vader was more menacing before we learned he was an idiot whose only qualification for being a Jedi was a high midi-chlorian count. (They probably have antibiotics for that.) And, trust me, Capt. Kirk is cooler without our knowing about all of his youthful screw-ups.
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Is ‘Star Trek’ actors’ feud real or a fraud?
Just when you thought it was safe to go to a “Star Trek” convention, Kirk and Sulu are fighting again.
Tales of how William Shatner is hated by most of his former “Star Trek” co-stars — with the exception of Leonard Nimoy — are legendary. But during the past few years, it seemed most of the old feuds subsided. That is, until the latest round of sparring broke out between Shatner and George Takei.
The latest flare-up began when Shatner complained on his Web site that Takei hadn’t invited him to his wedding. Takei then said he had invited Shatner. Takei issued the following statement: “It is unfortunate that Bill was unable to join us for our wedding as he indeed was invited to attend. It is our hope that at this point he joins us in voting NO on Proposition 8, which seeks to eliminate the fundamental right for same-sex couples to marry in California.”
The situation deteriorated from there. Shatner said something about Takei having a “psychosis,” and Takei responded by basically calling Shatner an egomaniac.
The back-and-forth continued. Takei sounded off on “Entertainment Tonight,” then Shatner retaliated with a video on YouTube.
It’s times like this that I’m reminded of a scene in “Fight Club”:
Narrator: If you could fight any celebrity, who would you fight?
Tyler Durden: Alive or dead?
Narrator: Doesn’t matter. Who’d be tough?
Tyler Durden: Hemingway. You?
Narrator: Shatner. I’d fight William Shatner.
Maybe Takei is like the unnamed narrator of “Fight Club.” He just really, really wants to fight William Shatner. At the rate it’s going, the Shatner/Takei feud will soon reach the epic heights of Bette Davis vs. Joan Crawford.
Or will it?
I don’t have any evidence to back it up, but I have a suspicion that the war of words between Shatner and Takei is an elaborate put-on, just like the feuds in professional wrestling. In fact, it reminds me a lot of the greatest faux feud of them all: Andy Kaufman vs. Jerry “The King” Lawler.
In the early 1980s, Kaufman started wrestling women as part of his comedy act, proclaiming himself the “World Intergender Champion.” Lawler, a popular wrestler in Memphis, became incensed, believing that Kaufman was making a mockery of wrestling by beating up women. So, he challenged Kaufman to a match, which lasted all of a few seconds, as Lawler quickly dispatched Kaufman with a pile driver. When Kaufman got out of the hospital, he threatened to sue Lawler.
From there, the feud continued on television. Both Kaufman and Lawler appeared on “Late Night with David Letterman,” where Lawler slapped Kaufman and Kaufman, after a profanity-laced tirade, threatened to sue, well, just about everyone.
That led back to the ring, where Kaufman schemed with wrestling manager Jimmy Hart to trick Lawler. The plan worked, and instead of Lawler pile-driving Kaufman again, Lawler fell to his own signature move, delivered by other rival wrestlers.
But as Lawler now admits, the whole thing was, in wrestling jargon, a work, a scripted stunt engineered by the two of them. And it worked so well that some people still believe that maybe, just maybe it was real.
So, is that what Shatner and Takei are up to?
Think about it. The feud serves both Shatner’s and Takei’s interests. Takei can use it as a platform to speak out for gay marriage. Meanwhile, Shatner can use it to do what he does best, which is play up his exaggerated public persona, something he has been doing successfully since he portrayed himself in the 1998 comedy “Free Enterprise” and in the first batch of Priceline commercials. It’s a win-win.
But maybe I’m guilty of wishful thinking. Having to take sides in a battle of “Star Trek” icons is like a child having to pick sides in a divorce.
Probably the only way we’ll ever know for sure is if Shatner tries to pile-drive Takei or Takei hits Shatner with a steel chair.
Tales of how William Shatner is hated by most of his former “Star Trek” co-stars — with the exception of Leonard Nimoy — are legendary. But during the past few years, it seemed most of the old feuds subsided. That is, until the latest round of sparring broke out between Shatner and George Takei.
The latest flare-up began when Shatner complained on his Web site that Takei hadn’t invited him to his wedding. Takei then said he had invited Shatner. Takei issued the following statement: “It is unfortunate that Bill was unable to join us for our wedding as he indeed was invited to attend. It is our hope that at this point he joins us in voting NO on Proposition 8, which seeks to eliminate the fundamental right for same-sex couples to marry in California.”
The situation deteriorated from there. Shatner said something about Takei having a “psychosis,” and Takei responded by basically calling Shatner an egomaniac.
The back-and-forth continued. Takei sounded off on “Entertainment Tonight,” then Shatner retaliated with a video on YouTube.
It’s times like this that I’m reminded of a scene in “Fight Club”:
Narrator: If you could fight any celebrity, who would you fight?
Tyler Durden: Alive or dead?
Narrator: Doesn’t matter. Who’d be tough?
Tyler Durden: Hemingway. You?
Narrator: Shatner. I’d fight William Shatner.
Maybe Takei is like the unnamed narrator of “Fight Club.” He just really, really wants to fight William Shatner. At the rate it’s going, the Shatner/Takei feud will soon reach the epic heights of Bette Davis vs. Joan Crawford.
Or will it?
I don’t have any evidence to back it up, but I have a suspicion that the war of words between Shatner and Takei is an elaborate put-on, just like the feuds in professional wrestling. In fact, it reminds me a lot of the greatest faux feud of them all: Andy Kaufman vs. Jerry “The King” Lawler.
In the early 1980s, Kaufman started wrestling women as part of his comedy act, proclaiming himself the “World Intergender Champion.” Lawler, a popular wrestler in Memphis, became incensed, believing that Kaufman was making a mockery of wrestling by beating up women. So, he challenged Kaufman to a match, which lasted all of a few seconds, as Lawler quickly dispatched Kaufman with a pile driver. When Kaufman got out of the hospital, he threatened to sue Lawler.
From there, the feud continued on television. Both Kaufman and Lawler appeared on “Late Night with David Letterman,” where Lawler slapped Kaufman and Kaufman, after a profanity-laced tirade, threatened to sue, well, just about everyone.
That led back to the ring, where Kaufman schemed with wrestling manager Jimmy Hart to trick Lawler. The plan worked, and instead of Lawler pile-driving Kaufman again, Lawler fell to his own signature move, delivered by other rival wrestlers.
But as Lawler now admits, the whole thing was, in wrestling jargon, a work, a scripted stunt engineered by the two of them. And it worked so well that some people still believe that maybe, just maybe it was real.
So, is that what Shatner and Takei are up to?
Think about it. The feud serves both Shatner’s and Takei’s interests. Takei can use it as a platform to speak out for gay marriage. Meanwhile, Shatner can use it to do what he does best, which is play up his exaggerated public persona, something he has been doing successfully since he portrayed himself in the 1998 comedy “Free Enterprise” and in the first batch of Priceline commercials. It’s a win-win.
But maybe I’m guilty of wishful thinking. Having to take sides in a battle of “Star Trek” icons is like a child having to pick sides in a divorce.
Probably the only way we’ll ever know for sure is if Shatner tries to pile-drive Takei or Takei hits Shatner with a steel chair.
Thursday, November 06, 2008
Orson Welles remains a study in fact vs. fiction
Tim Burton’s 1994 film “Ed Wood” features a scene in which one of the greatest directors who ever lived meets one of the worst.
Frustrated with the progress of his latest project, “Plan 9 From Outer Space,” Edward D. Wood Jr. (Johnny Depp) storms into a Hollywood bar only to meet his hero, Orson Welles (Vincent D’Onofrio). After complaining about his own struggles with financial backers, Welles gives Wood the confidence to return to the set and finish shooting “Plan 9,” making Welles, ironically, responsible for a movie frequently cited as the worst ever made, usually by people who have not seen “Doomsday Machine” (1972).
Of course, like many events depicted in “Ed Wood,” the meeting between Wood and Welles never happened. Oh, yes, Edward D. Wood Jr. was a real director who made some really bad movies, but one must never let truth stand in the way of art. And the meeting between Wood and Welles works beautifully because Wood and Welles had so much in common, except that Welles was a genius and Wood was, to put it charitably, not.
Several years ago, I met Forrest J. Ackerman, the original editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. Ackerman was also once a literary agent, representing such renowned authors as Ray Bradbury. He also represented Wood. “I was his illiterary agent,” Ackerman quipped.
Wood struggled to get money to make his schlocky sci-fi and horror movies, and after “Plan 9,” he faded into a more obscure obscurity than he had occupied before, directing sleazy sex films and hitting his friends up for work until his death in 1978 at age 54.
Welles’ problem, however, wasn’t a lack of talent. He had loads of it. Director, screenwriter, producer, actor — Welles did it all. At age 23, he conquered radio. During an Oct. 30, 1938, broadcast of H.G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds,” he fooled (inadvertently) more than a million listeners into believing the Earth was really being invaded by Martians.
He then moved to Hollywood and seemed primed to conquer it, too. But “Citizen Kane,” the film that would eventually establish Welles as a great filmmaker, was a disappointment at the box office. Afterward, Hollywood studios were reluctant to give Welles the total creative control he enjoyed with “Kane.” RKO, which had released “Citizen Kane,” re-edited and re-shot portions of Welles’ next film, “The Magnificent Ambersons,” and Universal took over Welles’ 1958 thriller “Touch of Evil,” which was finally re-released in a form close to Welles’ vision 10 years ago.
Welles turned to financing his films independently. He spent years trying to complete his adaptation of “Don Quixote” without success, just one of many projects he left unfinished, usually because of a lack of money. Only one of those films, “The Other Side of the Wind,” seems likely to ever be released. Director Peter Bogdanovich has been working on editing Welles’ footage into a finished product.
As an actor, Welles often took jobs just to finance his movies. Most famously, he became a TV pitchman. He would “sell no wine before its time.” His legendary voice lent authority to everything from frozen peas to a dubious documentary about Nostradamus. He even had a part — his last, as it turned out — in the animated feature “Transformers: The Movie.” As he put it, “I play a big toy who attacks a bunch of smaller toys.”
But still, Welles carried on, directing films that include an inspired adaptation of Franz Kafka’s “The Trial” and his not-quite-a-documentary “F for Fake,” which was his last completed movie.
Long overlooked, “F for Fake” is one of Welles’ finest films. It’s a meditation on art and fakery, taking as its subjects art forger Elmyr de Hory and Clifford Irving, who wrote a hoax biography of Howard Hughes and a real biography of de Hory. But more than that, “F for Fake” is a magic trick. Welles was an amateur magician and knew all the tricks, especially the fine art of misdirection.
You never let truth stand in the way of art.
Frustrated with the progress of his latest project, “Plan 9 From Outer Space,” Edward D. Wood Jr. (Johnny Depp) storms into a Hollywood bar only to meet his hero, Orson Welles (Vincent D’Onofrio). After complaining about his own struggles with financial backers, Welles gives Wood the confidence to return to the set and finish shooting “Plan 9,” making Welles, ironically, responsible for a movie frequently cited as the worst ever made, usually by people who have not seen “Doomsday Machine” (1972).
Of course, like many events depicted in “Ed Wood,” the meeting between Wood and Welles never happened. Oh, yes, Edward D. Wood Jr. was a real director who made some really bad movies, but one must never let truth stand in the way of art. And the meeting between Wood and Welles works beautifully because Wood and Welles had so much in common, except that Welles was a genius and Wood was, to put it charitably, not.
Several years ago, I met Forrest J. Ackerman, the original editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. Ackerman was also once a literary agent, representing such renowned authors as Ray Bradbury. He also represented Wood. “I was his illiterary agent,” Ackerman quipped.
Wood struggled to get money to make his schlocky sci-fi and horror movies, and after “Plan 9,” he faded into a more obscure obscurity than he had occupied before, directing sleazy sex films and hitting his friends up for work until his death in 1978 at age 54.
Welles’ problem, however, wasn’t a lack of talent. He had loads of it. Director, screenwriter, producer, actor — Welles did it all. At age 23, he conquered radio. During an Oct. 30, 1938, broadcast of H.G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds,” he fooled (inadvertently) more than a million listeners into believing the Earth was really being invaded by Martians.
He then moved to Hollywood and seemed primed to conquer it, too. But “Citizen Kane,” the film that would eventually establish Welles as a great filmmaker, was a disappointment at the box office. Afterward, Hollywood studios were reluctant to give Welles the total creative control he enjoyed with “Kane.” RKO, which had released “Citizen Kane,” re-edited and re-shot portions of Welles’ next film, “The Magnificent Ambersons,” and Universal took over Welles’ 1958 thriller “Touch of Evil,” which was finally re-released in a form close to Welles’ vision 10 years ago.
Welles turned to financing his films independently. He spent years trying to complete his adaptation of “Don Quixote” without success, just one of many projects he left unfinished, usually because of a lack of money. Only one of those films, “The Other Side of the Wind,” seems likely to ever be released. Director Peter Bogdanovich has been working on editing Welles’ footage into a finished product.
As an actor, Welles often took jobs just to finance his movies. Most famously, he became a TV pitchman. He would “sell no wine before its time.” His legendary voice lent authority to everything from frozen peas to a dubious documentary about Nostradamus. He even had a part — his last, as it turned out — in the animated feature “Transformers: The Movie.” As he put it, “I play a big toy who attacks a bunch of smaller toys.”
But still, Welles carried on, directing films that include an inspired adaptation of Franz Kafka’s “The Trial” and his not-quite-a-documentary “F for Fake,” which was his last completed movie.
Long overlooked, “F for Fake” is one of Welles’ finest films. It’s a meditation on art and fakery, taking as its subjects art forger Elmyr de Hory and Clifford Irving, who wrote a hoax biography of Howard Hughes and a real biography of de Hory. But more than that, “F for Fake” is a magic trick. Welles was an amateur magician and knew all the tricks, especially the fine art of misdirection.
You never let truth stand in the way of art.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Palin, economy can’t scare people from Halloween
If on Halloween night you should find yourself surrounded by Sarah Palins, don’t be alarmed. It’s not an attack of the clones.
The Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential candidate may or may not be a maverick, but she definitely is one of the hottest Halloween costumes this year. And you can take “hottest” in any sense you like.
Ricky’s Halloween Costume Superstore in New York City has come up with a “Miss Alaska” costume that is little more than a sash that says “Miss Alaska” on one side and “Miss Vice President” on the other. It does, however, include a facsimile pair of Palin’s stylish Kazuo Kawasaki eyeglasses. It’s up to the wearer to supply a star-spangled bikini like the one the model wears on the Ricky’s Web site. But what do you expect for only $22.99? It’s a costume priced for a sagging economy.
Somehow, I suspect most Palin impersonators this Halloween will stick with the standard-issue latex mask. At least I hope so, unless they happen to have a Miss Alaska figure.
As if Halloween night weren’t scary enough, the streets are sure to be crawling with people dressed as — shudder — politicians. And because this is a presidential election year, there will be plenty of Barack Obamas and John McCains to go along with such evergreens as Presidents Nixon, Reagan and Clinton.
The proprietors of online retailer Annie’s Costumes claim that since 1980, the presidential candidate to sell the most Halloween masks at Annie’s has gone on to win the election. So, in case you’re wondering, Obama has a slight lead.
That leaves Joe Biden. Is anyone dressing up as the Democratic VP nominee? Anyone? Hello?
Even with the economy slumping toward a seemingly inevitable recession, Americans seem eager to spend money on celebrating Halloween. Of course, maybe that shouldn’t be a surprise. The Golden Age of horror movies — Bela Lugosi’s “Dracula” and Boris Karloff’s “Frankenstein,” among many others —occurred during the Great Depression. Economic hardship and the macabre seem to go together.
Nearly two-thirds of Americans plan to celebrate Halloween this year, according to the National Retail Federation, which expects $5.8 billion in Halloween-related sales, up from $5.7 billion last year.
Popular non-political costumes include the Joker (as played by Heath Ledger in “The Dark Knight”) and Iron Man. But unfortunately the Iron Man costume you can buy off the rack isn’t as cool as the one in the movie.
And if you want something really scary, the most popular movie-related costumes for groups, according to Fandango.com, are the women of “Sex and the City.” Who hasn’t run in terror from Sarah Jessica Parker’s hats?
Everyone from Wal-Mart to Papa John’s is trying to cash in on Halloween, reported The New York Times.
“Halloween is a huge day for Papa John’s,” a spokesman for the pizza chain told The Times, “and having it fall on a Friday is a double benefit because we know there will be a lot of big parties.”
Of course, if your costume is a Sarah Palin bikini, you should probably steer clear of pizza until after Halloween.
Cable television always skews heavily toward horror programming during October, but this year offers more than usual. The Sci-Fi Channel, for example, has replaced its traditional “13 Days of Halloween” with “31 Days of Halloween” and has seen its year-on-year ratings rise as a result, The Times reported.
“With the financial turmoil, people want to escape and think about something else,” said Sci-Fi President Dave Howe.
“Something else” apparently means pleasant things like zombies, ghosts and masked serial killers. Just keep the slashers away from my 401(k).
The Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential candidate may or may not be a maverick, but she definitely is one of the hottest Halloween costumes this year. And you can take “hottest” in any sense you like.
Ricky’s Halloween Costume Superstore in New York City has come up with a “Miss Alaska” costume that is little more than a sash that says “Miss Alaska” on one side and “Miss Vice President” on the other. It does, however, include a facsimile pair of Palin’s stylish Kazuo Kawasaki eyeglasses. It’s up to the wearer to supply a star-spangled bikini like the one the model wears on the Ricky’s Web site. But what do you expect for only $22.99? It’s a costume priced for a sagging economy.
Somehow, I suspect most Palin impersonators this Halloween will stick with the standard-issue latex mask. At least I hope so, unless they happen to have a Miss Alaska figure.
As if Halloween night weren’t scary enough, the streets are sure to be crawling with people dressed as — shudder — politicians. And because this is a presidential election year, there will be plenty of Barack Obamas and John McCains to go along with such evergreens as Presidents Nixon, Reagan and Clinton.
The proprietors of online retailer Annie’s Costumes claim that since 1980, the presidential candidate to sell the most Halloween masks at Annie’s has gone on to win the election. So, in case you’re wondering, Obama has a slight lead.
That leaves Joe Biden. Is anyone dressing up as the Democratic VP nominee? Anyone? Hello?
Even with the economy slumping toward a seemingly inevitable recession, Americans seem eager to spend money on celebrating Halloween. Of course, maybe that shouldn’t be a surprise. The Golden Age of horror movies — Bela Lugosi’s “Dracula” and Boris Karloff’s “Frankenstein,” among many others —occurred during the Great Depression. Economic hardship and the macabre seem to go together.
Nearly two-thirds of Americans plan to celebrate Halloween this year, according to the National Retail Federation, which expects $5.8 billion in Halloween-related sales, up from $5.7 billion last year.
Popular non-political costumes include the Joker (as played by Heath Ledger in “The Dark Knight”) and Iron Man. But unfortunately the Iron Man costume you can buy off the rack isn’t as cool as the one in the movie.
And if you want something really scary, the most popular movie-related costumes for groups, according to Fandango.com, are the women of “Sex and the City.” Who hasn’t run in terror from Sarah Jessica Parker’s hats?
Everyone from Wal-Mart to Papa John’s is trying to cash in on Halloween, reported The New York Times.
“Halloween is a huge day for Papa John’s,” a spokesman for the pizza chain told The Times, “and having it fall on a Friday is a double benefit because we know there will be a lot of big parties.”
Of course, if your costume is a Sarah Palin bikini, you should probably steer clear of pizza until after Halloween.
Cable television always skews heavily toward horror programming during October, but this year offers more than usual. The Sci-Fi Channel, for example, has replaced its traditional “13 Days of Halloween” with “31 Days of Halloween” and has seen its year-on-year ratings rise as a result, The Times reported.
“With the financial turmoil, people want to escape and think about something else,” said Sci-Fi President Dave Howe.
“Something else” apparently means pleasant things like zombies, ghosts and masked serial killers. Just keep the slashers away from my 401(k).
Thursday, October 23, 2008
‘Cinematic Titanic’ invites you to go down with the ship
I love bad movies — the really bad ones that are so bad they’re good. But some are so mind-numbingly awful I can’t imagine watching them alone.
Thankfully, I don’t have to. I can board the “Cinematic Titanic” and go down with the ship, along with the creator and original cast members of “Mystery Science Theater 3000.”
What made “Mystery Science Theater 3000” so great was that no matter how terrible the movie, those three wisecracking shadows on the screen could make it not just bearable, but enjoyable. Along with Tom Servo, Crow T. Robot and Joel Robinson (later replaced by Mike Nelson), I not only survived “Manos: The Hands of Fate” and “Red Zone Cuba,” I lived to watch them again and again.
When MST3K ended after 11 seasons, it seemed like all hope was lost. I was again left to watch the worst of the worst alone.
Eventually, Michael J. Nelson, along with fellow MST3K alums Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy, would return with RiffTrax, a Web site that lets you download audio commentaries to play along with DVDs of recent movies. It’s an experiment in giving an old-style MST3K riffing to recent theatrical releases.
But Hollywood doesn’t make bad movies like it used to. “Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace” isn’t just bad, it’s sad. Watching it is like counting every penny wasted to produce it. A truly bad movie needs more than stilted dialog and dumb characters. It needs wobbly sets dressed in dime-store Halloween cobwebs or last year’s Christmas tinsel. It needs condiments standing in for blood and entrails. In short, it needs character. Also, with RiffTrax you don’t get to see shadows talking back to the movie.
While RiffTrax is a noble effort, leave it to the rest of the MST3K cast and writing staff to get as close to the old MST3K format as possible. The result is “Cinematic Titanic.”
“Cinematic Titanic” features MST3K creator Joel Hodgson (Joel Robinson’s civilian identity), Trace Beaulieu (the original Crow T. Robot), Frank Conniff, Mary Jo Pehl and J. Elvis “Josh” Weinstein, who was the voice and puppeteer of Tom Servo when MST3K aired on Minnesota’s KTMA.
So far, the “Cinematic Titanic” crew has released four DVDs, and the response has been so positive that the plan is to release a new DVD just about every month, with each movie thoroughly eviscerated for your enjoyment. All “Cinematic Titanic” releases are available exclusively at www.cinematictitanic.com, which also offers digital downloads via EZTakes.com.
And what a worthy batch of cinematic abortions it has been so far:
“The Oozing Skull”: The timely tale of a dictator who loves his people so much he wants his brain transplanted into a young, healthy body. He can’t just die and let any old strongman oppress his people, you know. Unfortunately his HMO doesn’t cover brain transplants, so the dictator must call on a mad scientist.
“Doomsday Machine”: It’s the end of the world, and the only survivors aren’t exactly the strongest swimmers in the gene pool. For starters, they’re on a spaceship to Venus, which isn’t exactly the most hospitable planet for refugees. Mike Farrell (“M*A*S*H”) and Casey Kasem appear in bit roles. (They needed the money, I’m sure.)
“The Wasp Woman”: A non-classic from Roger Corman, the king of B movies. This movie is why we now test cosmetics out on rabbits. A Wasp Rabbit isn’t nearly as big a deal.
“Legacy of Blood”: A dysfunctional family must survive a week in a creepy mansion in order to claim an inheritance. One of them doesn’t want to share. Stop me if you’ve heard this plot before.
Each film is a big, fat target for the put-downs the CT crew hurls at it. And best of all, we get to see the gang’s silhouettes on screen. For MST3K fans, it’s just like old times. And for everyone else, there’s no better way to watch lousy horror and sci-fi movies.
Trust me, you don’t want to watch these movies alone.
Thankfully, I don’t have to. I can board the “Cinematic Titanic” and go down with the ship, along with the creator and original cast members of “Mystery Science Theater 3000.”
What made “Mystery Science Theater 3000” so great was that no matter how terrible the movie, those three wisecracking shadows on the screen could make it not just bearable, but enjoyable. Along with Tom Servo, Crow T. Robot and Joel Robinson (later replaced by Mike Nelson), I not only survived “Manos: The Hands of Fate” and “Red Zone Cuba,” I lived to watch them again and again.
When MST3K ended after 11 seasons, it seemed like all hope was lost. I was again left to watch the worst of the worst alone.
Eventually, Michael J. Nelson, along with fellow MST3K alums Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy, would return with RiffTrax, a Web site that lets you download audio commentaries to play along with DVDs of recent movies. It’s an experiment in giving an old-style MST3K riffing to recent theatrical releases.
But Hollywood doesn’t make bad movies like it used to. “Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace” isn’t just bad, it’s sad. Watching it is like counting every penny wasted to produce it. A truly bad movie needs more than stilted dialog and dumb characters. It needs wobbly sets dressed in dime-store Halloween cobwebs or last year’s Christmas tinsel. It needs condiments standing in for blood and entrails. In short, it needs character. Also, with RiffTrax you don’t get to see shadows talking back to the movie.
While RiffTrax is a noble effort, leave it to the rest of the MST3K cast and writing staff to get as close to the old MST3K format as possible. The result is “Cinematic Titanic.”
“Cinematic Titanic” features MST3K creator Joel Hodgson (Joel Robinson’s civilian identity), Trace Beaulieu (the original Crow T. Robot), Frank Conniff, Mary Jo Pehl and J. Elvis “Josh” Weinstein, who was the voice and puppeteer of Tom Servo when MST3K aired on Minnesota’s KTMA.
So far, the “Cinematic Titanic” crew has released four DVDs, and the response has been so positive that the plan is to release a new DVD just about every month, with each movie thoroughly eviscerated for your enjoyment. All “Cinematic Titanic” releases are available exclusively at www.cinematictitanic.com, which also offers digital downloads via EZTakes.com.
And what a worthy batch of cinematic abortions it has been so far:
“The Oozing Skull”: The timely tale of a dictator who loves his people so much he wants his brain transplanted into a young, healthy body. He can’t just die and let any old strongman oppress his people, you know. Unfortunately his HMO doesn’t cover brain transplants, so the dictator must call on a mad scientist.
“Doomsday Machine”: It’s the end of the world, and the only survivors aren’t exactly the strongest swimmers in the gene pool. For starters, they’re on a spaceship to Venus, which isn’t exactly the most hospitable planet for refugees. Mike Farrell (“M*A*S*H”) and Casey Kasem appear in bit roles. (They needed the money, I’m sure.)
“The Wasp Woman”: A non-classic from Roger Corman, the king of B movies. This movie is why we now test cosmetics out on rabbits. A Wasp Rabbit isn’t nearly as big a deal.
“Legacy of Blood”: A dysfunctional family must survive a week in a creepy mansion in order to claim an inheritance. One of them doesn’t want to share. Stop me if you’ve heard this plot before.
Each film is a big, fat target for the put-downs the CT crew hurls at it. And best of all, we get to see the gang’s silhouettes on screen. For MST3K fans, it’s just like old times. And for everyone else, there’s no better way to watch lousy horror and sci-fi movies.
Trust me, you don’t want to watch these movies alone.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Infamous clone of ‘The Exorcist’ is due new respect
“The Exorcist” inspired its fair share of low-budget imitators, and probably the most famous — or infamous, depending on your point of view — is 1974’s “Beyond the Door.”
Warner Bros., which released “The Exorcist,” sued the makers of “Beyond the Door” for copyright infringement but lost, clearing the way for other Italian “Exorcist” clones like “The Antichrist” (1974), which added sex and exploitation to the mix. Released on DVD in 2002, “The Antichrist” is now, sadly, out of print.
Meanwhile, “Beyond the Door” became a hit, grossing about $15 million in the U.S. That may not sound like a lot of money now, but it was a respectable sum in the early ’70s for an independently produced, Italian horror movie.
A staple at mom-and-pop video stores during the heyday of VHS rentals, “Beyond the Door” is only now available on DVD, along with two commentary tracks, interviews and trailers. Best of all, the newly remastered film looks better than it did when it originally played to theater audiences across America.
At last, we can assess this blatant — but non-infringing — attempt to cash in on the success of “The Exorcist” on its own merits.
First, to be fair to “Beyond the Door,” it’s more than just an “Exorcist” clone. It’s also a rip-off of Roman Polanski’s 1968 shocker “Rosemary’s Baby.” If Linda Blair were not only possessed by the devil but also expecting his little bundle of joy, it would look a lot like “Beyond the Door.”
Jessica and Robert Barrett are a happily married couple in San Francisco. Robert (Gabriele Lavia of Dario Argento’s “Deep Red”) is a music producer, while Jessica (Juliet Mills, most recently seen in the TV soap opera “Passions”) is a housewife. They already have two children: a pre-teen daughter who never goes anywhere without a copy of Erich Segal’s “Love Story” tucked under her arm and a young son with a pea soup fetish.
Children didn’t have juice boxes in the ’70s, so I guess it was normal back then for a boy to slurp pea soup through a straw — and to have a Warholesque poster of a soup can hanging above his bed.
No, wait, there’s nothing normal about that at all. But the conspicuous, not to mention absurd, emphasis on pea soup does blatantly conjure images of a key scene in “The Exorcist.”
The Barretts already are stuck with a daughter who swears like a sailor and a son who is just plain weird. So, the last thing they need is another child, especially one who is the spawn of Satan. But if the devil wants a baby, he’s not going to let a little thing like birth control get in the way. So, Jessica unexpectedly finds herself pregnant. And worse still, the fetus is growing at an unnatural rate. Satan, it seems, is in a hurry. Plus, the movie is only an hour and 40 minutes long.
To make matters worse, Jessica’s ex-boyfriend Dimitri (Richard Johnson of Lucio Fulci’s “Zombie”) is lurking in the shadows, occasionally emerging to intone, “The child must be born!” He is not exactly a disinterested party. Having let Jessica escape from his satanic cult years earlier, he’s now once again doing Satan’s bidding.
As the devil’s baby grows inside her, Jessica goes from wanting to abort it to threatening to kill anyone who tries to take it from her. She levitates above the bed, turns her head 360 degrees and occasionally speaks in a demonic voice. Pretty much, it’s all the same stuff we saw in “The Exorcist,” only with ridiculous dialog and those two annoying children.
But you can’t dismiss “Beyond the Door” that easily. Mills delivers a chilling and, at times, grotesque performance, and director Ovidio G. Assonitis is no slouch behind the camera. While he filmed the interior scenes in Italy, Assonitis shot most of the exteriors in San Francisco, and he makes good use of that gorgeous backdrop.
Even if Assonitis set out to do nothing more than hop on the “Exorcist” bandwagon, he did so ably. It’s no surprise “Beyond the Door” was such a success when it was first released. And now it’s a welcome addition to any horror aficionado’s DVD collection.
Warner Bros., which released “The Exorcist,” sued the makers of “Beyond the Door” for copyright infringement but lost, clearing the way for other Italian “Exorcist” clones like “The Antichrist” (1974), which added sex and exploitation to the mix. Released on DVD in 2002, “The Antichrist” is now, sadly, out of print.
Meanwhile, “Beyond the Door” became a hit, grossing about $15 million in the U.S. That may not sound like a lot of money now, but it was a respectable sum in the early ’70s for an independently produced, Italian horror movie.
A staple at mom-and-pop video stores during the heyday of VHS rentals, “Beyond the Door” is only now available on DVD, along with two commentary tracks, interviews and trailers. Best of all, the newly remastered film looks better than it did when it originally played to theater audiences across America.
At last, we can assess this blatant — but non-infringing — attempt to cash in on the success of “The Exorcist” on its own merits.
First, to be fair to “Beyond the Door,” it’s more than just an “Exorcist” clone. It’s also a rip-off of Roman Polanski’s 1968 shocker “Rosemary’s Baby.” If Linda Blair were not only possessed by the devil but also expecting his little bundle of joy, it would look a lot like “Beyond the Door.”
Jessica and Robert Barrett are a happily married couple in San Francisco. Robert (Gabriele Lavia of Dario Argento’s “Deep Red”) is a music producer, while Jessica (Juliet Mills, most recently seen in the TV soap opera “Passions”) is a housewife. They already have two children: a pre-teen daughter who never goes anywhere without a copy of Erich Segal’s “Love Story” tucked under her arm and a young son with a pea soup fetish.
Children didn’t have juice boxes in the ’70s, so I guess it was normal back then for a boy to slurp pea soup through a straw — and to have a Warholesque poster of a soup can hanging above his bed.
No, wait, there’s nothing normal about that at all. But the conspicuous, not to mention absurd, emphasis on pea soup does blatantly conjure images of a key scene in “The Exorcist.”
The Barretts already are stuck with a daughter who swears like a sailor and a son who is just plain weird. So, the last thing they need is another child, especially one who is the spawn of Satan. But if the devil wants a baby, he’s not going to let a little thing like birth control get in the way. So, Jessica unexpectedly finds herself pregnant. And worse still, the fetus is growing at an unnatural rate. Satan, it seems, is in a hurry. Plus, the movie is only an hour and 40 minutes long.
To make matters worse, Jessica’s ex-boyfriend Dimitri (Richard Johnson of Lucio Fulci’s “Zombie”) is lurking in the shadows, occasionally emerging to intone, “The child must be born!” He is not exactly a disinterested party. Having let Jessica escape from his satanic cult years earlier, he’s now once again doing Satan’s bidding.
As the devil’s baby grows inside her, Jessica goes from wanting to abort it to threatening to kill anyone who tries to take it from her. She levitates above the bed, turns her head 360 degrees and occasionally speaks in a demonic voice. Pretty much, it’s all the same stuff we saw in “The Exorcist,” only with ridiculous dialog and those two annoying children.
But you can’t dismiss “Beyond the Door” that easily. Mills delivers a chilling and, at times, grotesque performance, and director Ovidio G. Assonitis is no slouch behind the camera. While he filmed the interior scenes in Italy, Assonitis shot most of the exteriors in San Francisco, and he makes good use of that gorgeous backdrop.
Even if Assonitis set out to do nothing more than hop on the “Exorcist” bandwagon, he did so ably. It’s no surprise “Beyond the Door” was such a success when it was first released. And now it’s a welcome addition to any horror aficionado’s DVD collection.
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