Pfff, you are just a puppet of the Hollywood cum Media cum Military industrial triumvirate! You don't even know who you are anymore, man! You're a total Manchurian. You just don't know it! GET OUT OF HERE DENZEL!!!#!@$@#$
If a presentation is GPL due to GPL fonts, does this provide a barrier to use by the DoD or DoJ or any government agency that would like to use the cheap OSS solution but wouldn't risk compromising classified material with potential copyright? On one hand you could say "we'll that's win win!" but couldn't that stop agencies from implementing any OSS solution because they could get sued to see all the material they make/view/keep with it?
Back on their Infotainmentdisc: the last two tracks were all 123 samples used in making the album. Of course this was 1996 so there wasn't ProTools, GarageBand, or Reflex out there in the common market. Still, it was open-hooded music.
I'm happy Trent did this. Too bad the disc is pretty underwhelming.
This situation is like France circa 1950, where the French film was being driven by "Integrity" that was code for staid costume dramas and literary adaptations. These were the few sorts of films that French mainstream French audiences would watch and so the industry indulged them (even as movies became increasingly unprofitable with the rise of TV and the auto). This created a horrible feedback loop of "Pander to the mainstream", lower margin of profit, "pander more", etc.
Of course, out of this only the hardcore community of cine clubs and journals remained faithful (kind of like modern fiction publishing where 20% of the audience buys 80% of the work). And helped lead to the French New Wave. Challenging, rewarding cinema.
I guess we're in a similar situation now and, as you said, it might finally take the continual failure of blockbusters to satisfy for some really neat stuff to make inroads on the national consciousness. Nobody Knows is one. I'd also like to throw out 15, Downfall, or Oldboy. Rewarding without being a bunch of Swedes shot at low angle black and white, talking (which I like but I can understand the lack of mainstream appeal).
I dunno. I think the "from the TV show" cameo is wearing thin. Lou Ferrigno in The Hulk, Stan Lee in everything (although he was smarter than I and avoided The Punisher). Then you have the TV shows (Starsky and Hutch) doing the same thing.
I'm now just looking for a smart update of the material without any hipster/Gen X *wink wink/nudge nudge* masquerading as content.
I guess we are having a conflict on what the scope of originality I'm having issue with. I'm below the cultural/racial level. Heck, I'm even below the deconstructionist level.
If someone injects a level of originality into it, I'll accept it as an artistic achievement. Now the quality can be up for dispute. Elvis was sometimes no better than a cover band and that this was hidden is a real shame. But that is a bit different since the mash-up is musical deconstructionism that wears its influences right out on its sleeve. It's as if Elvis took old Blind Willie McTell records and sang Screaming Jay Hawkins over it (instead of releasing covers as an implied original creation and not paying the originators dick).
This interpolation is the artistic domain in the mash-up and much of hip-hop. And there is some fantastic work done with this.
"Planet Rock" kills because Bambaataa found the heart of Kraftwerk's "Trans-europe Express" and then plays with it creating something wholly new out those elements. Listening to the instrumental and there's significant enough differences to make it interesting. Of course this track is almost 30 years old and doing this was meat and potatos in hip-hop for that duration.
And because this is so common, I have trouble saying the Grey Album is such a breakthrough (other than its controversy and it gaining international praise via P2P).
I'd rather tip a glass to stuff that adds a new element. Like RZA and ODB's "Curse of the Black Widow" and how it is strikingly ribald in comparison to the tightlaced Portishead original ("Mourning Air" if I remember correctly).
I guess my issue was that re-producing The Black Album was something of a hip-hop production fad at the time.
The motivation was part tepid reception to the beats on The Black Album but also to MF Doom rebuilding Nas' Nastrodomus (making Nastradoomus. Clever, eh?) and 9th Wonder redoing Nas' God's Son (God's Stepson). As Doom was big in the underground and the publicity of the Jay-Z/Nas feud, there was interest in the community to provide the counterpart to this Nas work.
Of course both of those were original productions under the accapellas and most of the Black Album versions followed that. Kno's The White Albulum or Kevin Brown's The Brown Album are some noteable examples (the later which I think is the best out there. Very jazzy).
My personal taste was that this gimmick (Big Name + Big Name + Broader Issue) overshadowed some other stellar efforts. Not that it isn't good but no one cares that there might be something better.
I guess it's basic 15-second mainstream digestible keystone of mash-up'dom.
Of course this is old as hip-hop itself. Dancehall exists on the idea of a riddim becoming popular itself and multiple deejays rap/sing over it. Now hip-hop, R&B and Reggeton artists get in on it. An example from '04: Pitbull "Culo", Mr Vegas "Pull Up", Nina Sky "Move Ya Body" and many others all used the Coolie Dance Riddim.
The pop culture clash of using a very recognizable outer-genre instrumental (the "mash-up") got big in clubs two years ago (making this Wire award a bit like John Wayne's Oscar). A popular one was Whitney Houston ("I want to dance with somebody") over Kraftwerk ("Numbers") forming ala Voltron to Girls on Top's "I Want to Dance with some Numbers". Nigh unreleasable due to copyright considerations but interesting none the less.
Of course now MTV is in the Official Mash-up business by creating things that aren't Mash-ups at all (that Jay-Z and Linkin Park thing is, due to original parts by both artists, a collaboration).
I still think Chopped and Screwed is going to hit the mainstream consciousness soon as T.I.'s disc just got the treatment and it sold amazingly. And kids are chop n' screwing all sorts of tracks now. Many on laptops and then distributed into the public conscious via P2P (so Wired could give it an award and be a bit ahead the bellcurve). Of course this is a decade old style too.
Damn! But Woman of the Dunes is from a book (I should know. I have it on my bookshelf). Well there goes any hope of this thread getting into a peer-reviewed journal!
And that isn't including those adapted from plays... ok... I did mention King Lear. That is a play. But considering how much Shakespeare is read, having him as a "novel" author isn't much of a stretch (he says trying to cover his ass).
From just those on Roger Ebert's Great Movies List (and not already given by other posters):
2001: A Space Odyessy The Shining (up for debate due to Kubrick's choices with the material) Apocolypse Now! (from Heart of Darkness) The Big Sleep Goldfinger, Dr. No Goodfellas (from Wiseguys) The Grapes of Wrath (debateable due to its ending) In Cold Blood Jaws The Maltese Falcon One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest Ran (from King Lear) Rififi The Right Stuff Schindler's List The Silence of the Lambs The Wizard of Oz
Ebert has 221 movies on this list. Given the above (plus the others mentioned previously: The Godfather, etc) this means about 10% of his list is adapted from a novel. And that isn't including those adapted from plays (Amadeus).
The way I found out about TechTV was back when it was still ZDTV and this was from a 55 year old phone company tech. The guy was soon to be retired and just got a home-built PC from a coworker. In fiddling around with it he was told about ZDTV and soon became addicted to Screen Savers.
Now I've never really been to big into TechTV (I watch a little X-Play but when Morgan showed up... ugh) but the fact that it could reach a novice end user (one at an age where you "aren't supposed to be learning new things") impressed me. It keep him interested, made him excited about computers and technology, and informed him without either talking down nor over his head (something a lot of tech folks seem incapable of doing).
TV can be a strong informational medium: it can keep pretty current, it is pretty passive (unlike reading a book or trade mag), and provide multimedia interaction. That the one channel that was about exposing everybody to the latest ish has been replaced with juvenille porn is a shame. I'd almost prefer there to be a hardcore sex basic cable station. Then these other channels would have no reason to outscandalize each other for that 15-28 year old male demo. We might get something approaching substance.
The article mentions licensing in both the gaming and movie industries but what I also think about is the licensing as a foundation for a product: either as adaptation to a screenplay or a game itself.
Now, how often do video games get turned into movies. A couple dozen? And how many have been good? Paul W. S. Anderson has done more to damage the flow from games to movies than anyone else. Usually its the movies based upon non-existent games that come off better (the only one I can think of is Avalon for now).
The reverse then: how many movies are turned into games? Hell, you run out of fingers every week for the crap game squirted out to hock a movie. For ever Spiderman 2 you have a Cat in the Hat, Shrek 2, E.T..
The day that a crap movie comes out only to boost the sales of video game will this argument become interesting. And, no, Chronicles of Riddick doesn't count.:p
Because we all know it doesn't matter if you use your iPod... it's about being seen with your iPod. This just makes your designer item that much more vital and cutting edge. A real way to stop the presses down at the oxygen bar.
Because of the population density in Japan is significantly higher in the US there is less room for stuff... and for stuff that you use with more room.
So you wouldn't have a huge market for 52" projection screen televisions and full living room furniture sets because no Japanese household would find that to be an efficient use of (their limited amount of) space. So they prefer technological solutions: small, miniturized things that can be easily packed away into the corner. This also goes towards the Japanese interior design aesthetic which is for clean minimalism (where rooms are indistinguishible/modular and everything is cleverly hidden in wall/floor storage to be broken out at need).
How much stuff does an American suburban household have that a condo/apartment dweller wouldn't need? A lawnmower, weedtrimmer. And then the luxury items: BBQs, pool tables, swimming pools, decks, boats, RVs, ATVs. Even in dense American suburbs these are common. Your McMansion. There is space and an inclination to be out in it.
For this reason the Japanese are very interested in high tech and Americans less so. Koreans, Taiwanese and Europeans somewhere in the middle.
That was the Foxboro classic between the Oakland Raiders and New England Patriots with the imfamous "tuck":
New England was moving down the field in a snow storm, under 2 minutes left in the game, down by 3. When the ball is snapped, Oakland comes with a cornerback blitz. Charles Woodson comes screaming in and totally blindsides Patriot QB Tom Brady. Brady drops the ball in an apparent force fumble, which Oakland recovers.
If this was how events occured, Oakland could've sat on the ball, run out the clock and won the game.
Turns out the referee decided to have a look at the fumble again in replay. This is where things get interesting.
What the referee saw was that Brady makes this little forward and back arm motion before Charlie lays wood to him. Most people would say this is akin to laying your lips to your ass before getting hit by a train. What the referee saw was NFL Rule 3, Section 21, Article 2. The "tuck rule".
Basically because Brady was moving his arm forward, he was "attempting a forward pass". The tuck rule also states that you can then return the ball to your side ("tucking" the ball back in). If the quarterback is hit while in the process of "tucking", 3.21.2 says the play should be ruled an incomplete pass.
What did this mean? It meant that Brady hadn't fumbled, so Oakland hadn't recovered. New England's drive was still alive. The reversal of fortune was also a Guillotine to the Raiders. Their defense slinked back to the line as Brady maneuvered in for Adam Vinateri to kick the game-tying field goal.
Waiting for the drop, New England marched down the field in overtime, kicking the decisive field goal over the stunned Oakland defense.
New England went on to upset the Rams in the Super Bowl. Oakland traded away their coach Jon Gruden... who went to Tampa Bay... and promptly beat Oakland next year in the Super Bowl. Both the Raiders and the Rams never really recovered from what the Patriots did to them in 2002.
New England goes on to become the premier NFL team. Their coach, Bill Belichick, once disgraced as a mumbling baffoon for his tenure with the Cleveland Browns, is recast as a defensive and player managing genius. New England goes on to win another Super Bowl two years later (an impressive feat in the parity dominated NFL) and win 25 (26?) straight games (ending this year with a loss to the Steelers). Tom Brady becomes the definition of clutch. The Patriots are held in awe for their selfless work ethic and lack of egotistical superstars. And they have a good shot at the Super Bowl this year.
Basically the game that Legend of the Rangers went up against was the one that defined the current state of the NFL. It was controversial, subjective and an instant classic. Personally? The only thing Brady was tucking was his tail between his legs. But as a Browns fan (who's had to watch all of this from the bottom of the NFL pile) I might be a little jealous:p
That would be nice. Its just that Tolkien had a five decade long worldwide movement before they made LotR (and after an ass animated version). And Kill Bill started off as one movie they split into two: mostly because Harvey Weinstein saw it as a favor to his favorite son, Q. And even then the budget on Kill Bill was pretty low (considering its special effects, sans the animated part, were the sort the Shaw Bros. would produce on a shoe string back in the 70's).
Tarantino and Tolkien are names that they could bank on. They knew a certain baseline would fill seats for so many weekends. I really don't see a studio risking so much on a book authored by a man who's last two adapted features sank at the box office. None of the talk I see here says a Watchmen movie will be anything more than a Band of Brothers (with a nice synchronicity with the story and the plot). I'd love that but that's even further out in the land of improbability.
just like in theory Communism works. Movies have been doing the juxtaposed images and narrative structure for a while. Rules of Attraction and Timecode are both recent examples of crossing split-screen narrative that reintersect with each other (and you can get some pretty off the wall stuff such as Last Year at Marienbad). Leitmotivs have existed in movies forever and so has repeated symbolism. But because cinema velocity is artist-determined, not audience-determined (i.e. the director controls the pacing. In literature the reader can stop, reread and thus control the pace of the story) often such levels of interpretation are usually missed unless one is willing to invest the time rewatching a movie critically.
This will always be the problem between much literature and film, even for short written works. This is why movies are either of short stories or of novels that are completely gutted of everything but the highlight reel. Rarely are people going to sit through three movies that aren't epic drama. You might get a fan to sit down for the 312 minute Swedish TV version of Fanny and Alexander but no way is it going to survive a theatrical release.
So... if a studio can be convinced to release a 5 hour movie and if a select group carefully translated the symbols to film equivilents (playing into part of the bane and boon of movies being the temporal element) and if a budget can be collected to accurately reproduce everything from Vietnam to Mars to Veidt's Antarctic base to the annihilation of NYC... theoretically this could be the greatest movie ever made.
Of course, that's said by every Producer/Director/Studio Head before every movie they release...
And I guess you can also say by the way his friends namechecked/. to him and he then reflected that back on us, slashdot is itself a brand and an identity.
Several fans discuss that issue in Trekkies 2. It would be humorous to dissect sports fanatics vs. Star Trek fans--but almost too easy. I'll wager that the average IQ of the guy wearing cheese on his head and screaming obscenities at a referee and the average Star Trek fan leave no comparison. It would be like shooting fish in a barrel.
Frontline covered this in an episode called The Persuaders. It is about how brands are able to engender such loyalty and how marketeers work to get enough people to self-associate with an inert product.
What was interesting was how some of the original studies of fans (of wrestling and others. I guess you can include sports and Trek in there) were compared to the study of cults and how the social patterns were eerily identical. As if there's some sort of primal need to merge with an icon.
It suddenly made sense why people said "Trek/sports is a religion".
Just use the iPod support plugin in Winamp. Not only does it let you sync and listen to your iPod in Winamp, it allows you to "Copy Selection to Hard Drive". There are still some kinks in it. It has a habit of creating literal album names for directories (which is a problem for DJ Shadow's "Endtroducing...". Windows doesn't like them ellipses).
Of course worse comes to worst I navigate into the iPod in Windows Explorer, CTRL+C all the directories and CTRL+V it onto my Harddrive. No big deal.
This was a popular research result (so much that Crichton borrowed it in Sphere). The problem: much of the evidence was ancedotal. The teams were asked their opinions. The men were blunt about their situation, the women put up a unified front. When later tests were done on performance it turned out that the men, though overt in their bickering, worked just as well as women.
There is a parallel in Rosalind Wiseman's Queen Bees and Wannabes (the basis of much of Tina Fey's Mean Girls): most of the research into [junior]+ high school bullying dealt with boys. Because the boys were open about it, more willing to make an issue of it. The girls, both victims and victimizers, concealed their activities, often in passive-aggressive ways (causing many sociologists to assume it wasn't there). Girls would bond into groups that, when asked, would uniformly reply with "best friends forever" to researchers. Observation noted that this was not the case. There were obvious social heirarchies (even among "friends") where the lower girls were humiliated, and nettled endlessly.
Of course this all just showed that the sexes approaches to group dynamics were different, not better. Both have members who demonstrate all the sort of behaviors you don't want in a closed space (depression, group disruptive behavior, passive-aggressiveness, etc).
Slashdot Mirror
Angela Landsbury will eat your HEART!!!
Pfff, you are just a puppet of the Hollywood cum Media cum Military industrial triumvirate! You don't even know who you are anymore, man! You're a total Manchurian. You just don't know it! GET OUT OF HERE DENZEL!!!#!@$@#$
If a presentation is GPL due to GPL fonts, does this provide a barrier to use by the DoD or DoJ or any government agency that would like to use the cheap OSS solution but wouldn't risk compromising classified material with potential copyright? On one hand you could say "we'll that's win win!" but couldn't that stop agencies from implementing any OSS solution because they could get sued to see all the material they make/view/keep with it?
Back on their Infotainment disc: the last two tracks were all 123 samples used in making the album. Of course this was 1996 so there wasn't ProTools, GarageBand, or Reflex out there in the common market. Still, it was open-hooded music.
I'm happy Trent did this. Too bad the disc is pretty underwhelming.
This situation is like France circa 1950, where the French film was being driven by "Integrity" that was code for staid costume dramas and literary adaptations. These were the few sorts of films that French mainstream French audiences would watch and so the industry indulged them (even as movies became increasingly unprofitable with the rise of TV and the auto). This created a horrible feedback loop of "Pander to the mainstream", lower margin of profit, "pander more", etc.
Of course, out of this only the hardcore community of cine clubs and journals remained faithful (kind of like modern fiction publishing where 20% of the audience buys 80% of the work). And helped lead to the French New Wave. Challenging, rewarding cinema.
I guess we're in a similar situation now and, as you said, it might finally take the continual failure of blockbusters to satisfy for some really neat stuff to make inroads on the national consciousness. Nobody Knows is one. I'd also like to throw out 15, Downfall, or Oldboy. Rewarding without being a bunch of Swedes shot at low angle black and white, talking (which I like but I can understand the lack of mainstream appeal).
I dunno. I think the "from the TV show" cameo is wearing thin. Lou Ferrigno in The Hulk, Stan Lee in everything (although he was smarter than I and avoided The Punisher). Then you have the TV shows (Starsky and Hutch) doing the same thing.
I'm now just looking for a smart update of the material without any hipster/Gen X *wink wink/nudge nudge* masquerading as content.
I guess we are having a conflict on what the scope of originality I'm having issue with. I'm below the cultural/racial level. Heck, I'm even below the deconstructionist level.
If someone injects a level of originality into it, I'll accept it as an artistic achievement. Now the quality can be up for dispute. Elvis was sometimes no better than a cover band and that this was hidden is a real shame. But that is a bit different since the mash-up is musical deconstructionism that wears its influences right out on its sleeve. It's as if Elvis took old Blind Willie McTell records and sang Screaming Jay Hawkins over it (instead of releasing covers as an implied original creation and not paying the originators dick).
This interpolation is the artistic domain in the mash-up and much of hip-hop. And there is some fantastic work done with this.
"Planet Rock" kills because Bambaataa found the heart of Kraftwerk's "Trans-europe Express" and then plays with it creating something wholly new out those elements. Listening to the instrumental and there's significant enough differences to make it interesting. Of course this track is almost 30 years old and doing this was meat and potatos in hip-hop for that duration.
And because this is so common, I have trouble saying the Grey Album is such a breakthrough (other than its controversy and it gaining international praise via P2P).
I'd rather tip a glass to stuff that adds a new element. Like RZA and ODB's "Curse of the Black Widow" and how it is strikingly ribald in comparison to the tightlaced Portishead original ("Mourning Air" if I remember correctly).
I guess my issue was that re-producing The Black Album was something of a hip-hop production fad at the time.
The motivation was part tepid reception to the beats on The Black Album but also to MF Doom rebuilding Nas' Nastrodomus (making Nastradoomus. Clever, eh?) and 9th Wonder redoing Nas' God's Son (God's Stepson). As Doom was big in the underground and the publicity of the Jay-Z/Nas feud, there was interest in the community to provide the counterpart to this Nas work.
Of course both of those were original productions under the accapellas and most of the Black Album versions followed that. Kno's The White Albulum or Kevin Brown's The Brown Album are some noteable examples (the later which I think is the best out there. Very jazzy).
My personal taste was that this gimmick (Big Name + Big Name + Broader Issue) overshadowed some other stellar efforts. Not that it isn't good but no one cares that there might be something better.
I guess it's basic 15-second mainstream digestible keystone of mash-up'dom.
Of course this is old as hip-hop itself. Dancehall exists on the idea of a riddim becoming popular itself and multiple deejays rap/sing over it. Now hip-hop, R&B and Reggeton artists get in on it. An example from '04: Pitbull "Culo", Mr Vegas "Pull Up", Nina Sky "Move Ya Body" and many others all used the Coolie Dance Riddim.
The pop culture clash of using a very recognizable outer-genre instrumental (the "mash-up") got big in clubs two years ago (making this Wire award a bit like John Wayne's Oscar). A popular one was Whitney Houston ("I want to dance with somebody") over Kraftwerk ("Numbers") forming ala Voltron to Girls on Top's "I Want to Dance with some Numbers". Nigh unreleasable due to copyright considerations but interesting none the less.
Of course now MTV is in the Official Mash-up business by creating things that aren't Mash-ups at all (that Jay-Z and Linkin Park thing is, due to original parts by both artists, a collaboration).
I still think Chopped and Screwed is going to hit the mainstream consciousness soon as T.I.'s disc just got the treatment and it sold amazingly. And kids are chop n' screwing all sorts of tracks now. Many on laptops and then distributed into the public conscious via P2P (so Wired could give it an award and be a bit ahead the bellcurve). Of course this is a decade old style too.
Do you guys in NY... have the same cognitive dissonance when watching your towns subbing for other parts of the world?
A buddy of mine from Toronto would come out of movies saying "Damn, I didn't realize I lived in New York this entire time and no one told me!"
Damn! But Woman of the Dunes is from a book (I should know. I have it on my bookshelf). Well there goes any hope of this thread getting into a peer-reviewed journal!
*throws hands in air*
And that isn't including those adapted from plays ... ok... I did mention King Lear. That is a play. But considering how much Shakespeare is read, having him as a "novel" author isn't much of a stretch (he says trying to cover his ass).
From just those on Roger Ebert's Great Movies List (and not already given by other posters):
2001: A Space Odyessy
The Shining (up for debate due to Kubrick's choices with the material)
Apocolypse Now! (from Heart of Darkness)
The Big Sleep
Goldfinger, Dr. No
Goodfellas (from Wiseguys)
The Grapes of Wrath (debateable due to its ending)
In Cold Blood
Jaws
The Maltese Falcon
One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest
Ran (from King Lear)
Rififi
The Right Stuff
Schindler's List
The Silence of the Lambs
The Wizard of Oz
Ebert has 221 movies on this list. Given the above (plus the others mentioned previously: The Godfather, etc) this means about 10% of his list is adapted from a novel. And that isn't including those adapted from plays (Amadeus).
That what angered him the most about dying was not reading tomorrow's newspaper.
I'd have to agree. Living forever would give you that possibility of a new day.
The way I found out about TechTV was back when it was still ZDTV and this was from a 55 year old phone company tech. The guy was soon to be retired and just got a home-built PC from a coworker. In fiddling around with it he was told about ZDTV and soon became addicted to Screen Savers.
Now I've never really been to big into TechTV (I watch a little X-Play but when Morgan showed up... ugh) but the fact that it could reach a novice end user (one at an age where you "aren't supposed to be learning new things") impressed me. It keep him interested, made him excited about computers and technology, and informed him without either talking down nor over his head (something a lot of tech folks seem incapable of doing).
TV can be a strong informational medium: it can keep pretty current, it is pretty passive (unlike reading a book or trade mag), and provide multimedia interaction. That the one channel that was about exposing everybody to the latest ish has been replaced with juvenille porn is a shame. I'd almost prefer there to be a hardcore sex basic cable station. Then these other channels would have no reason to outscandalize each other for that 15-28 year old male demo. We might get something approaching substance.
Yeah: frogs, wings, bumps, asses a hoppin'.
The article mentions licensing in both the gaming and movie industries but what I also think about is the licensing as a foundation for a product: either as adaptation to a screenplay or a game itself.
:p
Now, how often do video games get turned into movies. A couple dozen? And how many have been good? Paul W. S. Anderson has done more to damage the flow from games to movies than anyone else. Usually its the movies based upon non-existent games that come off better (the only one I can think of is Avalon for now).
The reverse then: how many movies are turned into games? Hell, you run out of fingers every week for the crap game squirted out to hock a movie. For ever Spiderman 2 you have a Cat in the Hat, Shrek 2, E.T..
The day that a crap movie comes out only to boost the sales of video game will this argument become interesting. And, no, Chronicles of Riddick doesn't count.
Because we all know it doesn't matter if you use your iPod... it's about being seen with your iPod. This just makes your designer item that much more vital and cutting edge. A real way to stop the presses down at the oxygen bar.
Because of the population density in Japan is significantly higher in the US there is less room for stuff... and for stuff that you use with more room.
So you wouldn't have a huge market for 52" projection screen televisions and full living room furniture sets because no Japanese household would find that to be an efficient use of (their limited amount of) space. So they prefer technological solutions: small, miniturized things that can be easily packed away into the corner. This also goes towards the Japanese interior design aesthetic which is for clean minimalism (where rooms are indistinguishible/modular and everything is cleverly hidden in wall/floor storage to be broken out at need).
How much stuff does an American suburban household have that a condo/apartment dweller wouldn't need? A lawnmower, weedtrimmer. And then the luxury items: BBQs, pool tables, swimming pools, decks, boats, RVs, ATVs. Even in dense American suburbs these are common. Your McMansion. There is space and an inclination to be out in it.
For this reason the Japanese are very interested in high tech and Americans less so. Koreans, Taiwanese and Europeans somewhere in the middle.
That was the Foxboro classic between the Oakland Raiders and New England Patriots with the imfamous "tuck":
:p
New England was moving down the field in a snow storm, under 2 minutes left in the game, down by 3. When the ball is snapped, Oakland comes with a cornerback blitz. Charles Woodson comes screaming in and totally blindsides Patriot QB Tom Brady. Brady drops the ball in an apparent force fumble, which Oakland recovers.
If this was how events occured, Oakland could've sat on the ball, run out the clock and won the game.
Turns out the referee decided to have a look at the fumble again in replay. This is where things get interesting.
What the referee saw was that Brady makes this little forward and back arm motion before Charlie lays wood to him. Most people would say this is akin to laying your lips to your ass before getting hit by a train. What the referee saw was NFL Rule 3, Section 21, Article 2. The "tuck rule".
Basically because Brady was moving his arm forward, he was "attempting a forward pass". The tuck rule also states that you can then return the ball to your side ("tucking" the ball back in). If the quarterback is hit while in the process of "tucking", 3.21.2 says the play should be ruled an incomplete pass.
What did this mean? It meant that Brady hadn't fumbled, so Oakland hadn't recovered. New England's drive was still alive. The reversal of fortune was also a Guillotine to the Raiders. Their defense slinked back to the line as Brady maneuvered in for Adam Vinateri to kick the game-tying field goal.
Waiting for the drop, New England marched down the field in overtime, kicking the decisive field goal over the stunned Oakland defense.
New England went on to upset the Rams in the Super Bowl. Oakland traded away their coach Jon Gruden... who went to Tampa Bay... and promptly beat Oakland next year in the Super Bowl. Both the Raiders and the Rams never really recovered from what the Patriots did to them in 2002.
New England goes on to become the premier NFL team. Their coach, Bill Belichick, once disgraced as a mumbling baffoon for his tenure with the Cleveland Browns, is recast as a defensive and player managing genius. New England goes on to win another Super Bowl two years later (an impressive feat in the parity dominated NFL) and win 25 (26?) straight games (ending this year with a loss to the Steelers). Tom Brady becomes the definition of clutch. The Patriots are held in awe for their selfless work ethic and lack of egotistical superstars. And they have a good shot at the Super Bowl this year.
Basically the game that Legend of the Rangers went up against was the one that defined the current state of the NFL. It was controversial, subjective and an instant classic. Personally? The only thing Brady was tucking was his tail between his legs. But as a Browns fan (who's had to watch all of this from the bottom of the NFL pile) I might be a little jealous
That would be nice. Its just that Tolkien had a five decade long worldwide movement before they made LotR (and after an ass animated version). And Kill Bill started off as one movie they split into two: mostly because Harvey Weinstein saw it as a favor to his favorite son, Q. And even then the budget on Kill Bill was pretty low (considering its special effects, sans the animated part, were the sort the Shaw Bros. would produce on a shoe string back in the 70's).
Tarantino and Tolkien are names that they could bank on. They knew a certain baseline would fill seats for so many weekends. I really don't see a studio risking so much on a book authored by a man who's last two adapted features sank at the box office. None of the talk I see here says a Watchmen movie will be anything more than a Band of Brothers (with a nice synchronicity with the story and the plot). I'd love that but that's even further out in the land of improbability.
just like in theory Communism works. Movies have been doing the juxtaposed images and narrative structure for a while. Rules of Attraction and Timecode are both recent examples of crossing split-screen narrative that reintersect with each other (and you can get some pretty off the wall stuff such as Last Year at Marienbad). Leitmotivs have existed in movies forever and so has repeated symbolism. But because cinema velocity is artist-determined, not audience-determined (i.e. the director controls the pacing. In literature the reader can stop, reread and thus control the pace of the story) often such levels of interpretation are usually missed unless one is willing to invest the time rewatching a movie critically.
This will always be the problem between much literature and film, even for short written works. This is why movies are either of short stories or of novels that are completely gutted of everything but the highlight reel. Rarely are people going to sit through three movies that aren't epic drama. You might get a fan to sit down for the 312 minute Swedish TV version of Fanny and Alexander but no way is it going to survive a theatrical release.
So... if a studio can be convinced to release a 5 hour movie and if a select group carefully translated the symbols to film equivilents (playing into part of the bane and boon of movies being the temporal element) and if a budget can be collected to accurately reproduce everything from Vietnam to Mars to Veidt's Antarctic base to the annihilation of NYC... theoretically this could be the greatest movie ever made.
Of course, that's said by every Producer/Director/Studio Head before every movie they release...
Yeah, this is probably going to suck.
And I guess you can also say by the way his friends namechecked /. to him and he then reflected that back on us, slashdot is itself a brand and an identity.
Several fans discuss that issue in Trekkies 2. It would be humorous to dissect sports fanatics vs. Star Trek fans--but almost too easy. I'll wager that the average IQ of the guy wearing cheese on his head and screaming obscenities at a referee and the average Star Trek fan leave no comparison. It would be like shooting fish in a barrel.
Frontline covered this in an episode called The Persuaders. It is about how brands are able to engender such loyalty and how marketeers work to get enough people to self-associate with an inert product.
What was interesting was how some of the original studies of fans (of wrestling and others. I guess you can include sports and Trek in there) were compared to the study of cults and how the social patterns were eerily identical. As if there's some sort of primal need to merge with an icon.
It suddenly made sense why people said "Trek/sports is a religion".
Just use the iPod support plugin in Winamp. Not only does it let you sync and listen to your iPod in Winamp, it allows you to "Copy Selection to Hard Drive". There are still some kinks in it. It has a habit of creating literal album names for directories (which is a problem for DJ Shadow's "Endtroducing...". Windows doesn't like them ellipses).
Of course worse comes to worst I navigate into the iPod in Windows Explorer, CTRL+C all the directories and CTRL+V it onto my Harddrive. No big deal.
This was a popular research result (so much that Crichton borrowed it in Sphere). The problem: much of the evidence was ancedotal. The teams were asked their opinions. The men were blunt about their situation, the women put up a unified front. When later tests were done on performance it turned out that the men, though overt in their bickering, worked just as well as women.
There is a parallel in Rosalind Wiseman's Queen Bees and Wannabes (the basis of much of Tina Fey's Mean Girls): most of the research into [junior]+ high school bullying dealt with boys. Because the boys were open about it, more willing to make an issue of it. The girls, both victims and victimizers, concealed their activities, often in passive-aggressive ways (causing many sociologists to assume it wasn't there). Girls would bond into groups that, when asked, would uniformly reply with "best friends forever" to researchers. Observation noted that this was not the case. There were obvious social heirarchies (even among "friends") where the lower girls were humiliated, and nettled endlessly.
Of course this all just showed that the sexes approaches to group dynamics were different, not better. Both have members who demonstrate all the sort of behaviors you don't want in a closed space (depression, group disruptive behavior, passive-aggressiveness, etc).