You disagree but yet you must admit that he did it because he honestly thought that it was the best for the country. Think how rarely we can say that about our elected officials today.
It removed the consequences from bad governance. You can commit any crime you want and you'll get pardoned. That's bad for business. We didn't go after the Nixon criminals and they came right back in the Dubya administration. We didn't go after the Dubya criminals and they'll come back in the next Republican administration.
While there's boatloads of free legal porn out there, some people still feel the need to pay for it. I assume that the same goes for the illegal stuff, you can get freebies if you look hard enough and some of the people producing it are amateurs but others are expecting to get paid. Certainly the FBI mail order stings we've heard about in the papers involved people sending payment in some fashion or another to obtain their illegal porn with kids or whatever. How did they do it then? How do they do it online? Because if it has anything to do with credit cards then I'd have to ask how those payments get processed. Does the credit card company not know what's involved until law enforcement tells them it's for illegal stuff? Do customers use money orders instead?
What I'm getting at is if the credit card companies had any plausible deniability before, they're giving it all away. The post office bears no responsibility if they deliver a package that happens to have drugs in it. The phone company is not a co-conspirator if their service was used by two people planning a crime. Common carrier and all that.
When the credit card companies stopped processing wikileak payments, it was pointed out that they are processing donations for the KKK. While I don't like the idea of the KKK getting donations, where does the line get drawn as to who can and can't be denied service for personal beliefs? Could China put the muscle on the banks and get them to cut off transfers to Falun Gong groups overseas? Law enforcement does this for noted criminals and criminal organizations and this is perfectly acceptable because actual crimes have been committed. But shit, do we allow Iran to ask for Salman Rushdie's accounts to be frozen because he's a heretic? That's a crime over there.
They rarely tell you anything you need to know, aren't answering burning questions, and are locked into predestination because you already know how the damn thing ends up. It's permissible to include flashbacks within a larger story that will provide some elaboration of how things came to pass. Probably the best example of that sort of thing was the whole Angelus backstory in Angel. Darla was a throwaway character from season 1 and none of that backstory was established beyond a sketchy paragraph in the story bible. The whole elaborate story of Angel, Darla, Spike and Dru was made up as the show went on but felt not only proper but completely intentional, as if it was known from the start. That takes some doing. But it would have been tedious if it was a whole prequel season.
If they want to resurrect the franchise, declare the first two movies to be canon, everything else is not canon, start from the Dark Horse comics that were meant as a direct sequel to Aliens and go from there. Aliens overrunning the Earth? You can't get much more apocalyptic than that.
And if you're wanting to bring AVP back, forget the previous two movies and reboot with a script adapted from the original AVP comic. It was great. Why not use it?
I am one of the people that does not even watch TV. With stuff like Hulu and even Netflix, there is no need. You can watch all of your shows online.
In other words, you still watch television.
This isn't really a distinction without a difference. He's watching a show but he's not watching a network. Remember that the purpose of a commercial television station is to sell a product (your eyeballs) to customers (the advertisers.) Commercials are how the networks collect their chips. The bits that go in between are how they keep the eyeballs watching. What's that again? Oh, right -- television shows. That's why the execs don't really care about art or quality and they'll air idiot reality shows as soon as anything else. Whatever keeps the proles watching.
The net is breaking this business model. The networks are scrambling to catch up. Times past, size meant everything. You had three networks in the US. Murdoch required shitloads of cash to belly up as number four. Things like the WB were also-rans. You needed money to pay for the distribution channel and that's called a barrier to entry. You want to make a television show in this country, you had to sell it to the networks or try and live off of syndication to stations outside of the network primetime. Tough going.
Now Apple and Netflix are positioned to be the gatekeepers and there's no limit to the amount of programming out there. You only had so many hours of primetime a week on each channel. Now it's infinite. And now studios can sell their shows direct. The networks are becoming middlemen.
Yes, people are watching shows but they're not watching TV. This is hugh!!11 etc.
I can accept a pure fantasy explanation like an dimensional portal in the back of a wardrobe or "a wizard did it" or "the dead have come back to life, we don't know why but you'd better run!" Trying to understand something like Tron is... it's like trying to explain zombies with a virus. No, there's all sorts of reasons why zombies can't work scientifically. If you leave in the realm of "we have no idea why it's happening" then I'm fine. Their being flatly impossible is part of the reason why they're so scary. You start trying to explain and I'll start poking holes.
Alice falling down the rabbit hole into Wonderland, I'm fine with it. You tell me a guy gets digitized into a 1980's computer that's gotten a mind of its own? It just doesn't work! Now someone might say "What about the Matrix?" Well what about it? It's like two hundred years from now and hyper-intelligent AI's have taken over so the technology's damn well gonna look like magic to us. I can completely buy the Matrix and the battery bit was just the studios intervening and dumbing it down for the masses. But I'd have problems with the Matrix if the war went down in 1980. Do I have problems with the Terminator timeline? Obviously we're not going to be building anything like skynet in time for Judgement Day, whenever it happens according to whichever continuity you prefer. But at least when Cameron made the first one, it was far enough in the future for advanced AI to seem plausible. It's not like his Skynet was already built and operating in the early 80's.
I could maybe, MAYBE buy the premise of Tron if the guy "sucked into the machine" was a hacker who'd been on a week-long coding binge mixing coffee and hallucinogenics and suffered a nervous breakdown and all of the running around in glowing costumes part was his fevered imagination at work.
And yeah, you're all going to say I'm comic book guying this a whole bunch. *stands up, wheezes from effort* "Whatever."
I saw the folding city in Inception and thought "Holy fuck, that is cool". I guess I must have been the only one then?
There will always be room for movies focused around spectacles and eye candy because of visceral thrill... Perhaps the article writer has lost his ability to suspend his disbelief, but I was loving every second of the sfx (actors floating) and vfx (folding buildings) of Inception.
I also would have been so much more impressed if the first time I saw that WAS IN THE FUCKING THEATER. I don't even watch television and I've seen that shot a thousand times while in the gym. I have my audiobook in and yep, folding city, tagline Inception. So I don't even know what the movie's about and have had what looks to be an impressive SFX shot completely ruined for me. Great move, assholes.
My rule of thumb: movie trailers in the theater should be mini-movies that tease the audience while revealing as little as possible. TV spots should be limited to clips taken from that teaser. Under no circumstances should ANYTHING later than the first act be revealed and this goes ESPECIALLY for the big SFX money shots. Don't spoil it! I didn't have any TV around the time of the first LOTR so I don't know if they actually showed the Balrog on-screen. I hadn't read the book at the time so I only knew from people on the net saying that there was a creature in the mine called a Balrog and it was great. So when that flame and shadow Balrog came on I about lost my shit. That didn't look like an effect, that looked like they found a Balrog and had him come in as a day player! Would have been ruined for me if I saw his entrance a thousand times in the trailers.
Overexposure to anything will cause people to become less impressed. The very first cinemas didn't even try to show movies with stories, it was just everyday stuff filmed in motion. People freaked out at the sight of a locomotive coming at the camera. Who could blame them? Their whole frame of reference was still trying to come to terms with moving pictures projected against a giant screen. The illusion was entirely too convincing.
Just think back to things that impressed you as a kid. I can think of many movies I loved then that don't hold up today. Some things don't hold up as much because you had a fonder memory as a child that cannot be replicated as an adult and some things you just had to experience at the time to see them as revolutionary. I get this a lot with movies that are considered classics. Something like Easy Rider I consider to be a very dull movie, unfocused to the point of being pointless. Fans say that you have to see that movie in the context of the time to fully appreciate it, to see how it broke from what had been done before.
Good storytelling has been the only constant for quality across the years. Tell a good story with good characters and you'll keep people interested. Most SFX movies continue to bore me to tears because they suck but a character like Gollum keeps blowing me away. I've yet to see another CGI character with that kind of presence and it was truly as much of an acting job as a piece of technical artistry.
I think another part of all this is that practical effects involve a degree of effort that makes the viewer shake his head in wonder, breaking the suspension of disbelief in the story itself to consider how hard it was to pull off in real life and thus commanding even more respect. I see CGI spiderman flipping about and I say "Meh, nice render." I see Jackie Chan doing something stupid and insanely dangerous and I think "Wait a minute, he could get hurt here! This is real!" And then you watch the credits and see just how badly he got hurt. You look at the Blues Brothers movie and consider all the cop cars they wrecked, consider that they didn't just CGI in a car for the Illinois Nazi drop but actually rented a helicopter to drop a real car over the city... Some people might not think about it in those terms but that's the way it strikes me. The sheer freakin' effort is worthy of respect.
1. Fix the leveling problem 2. Come up with a decent goddamn story for a change. Hire writers if you have to!
Oblivion was one of the most amazing, gorgeous, astounding games I'd ever seen. I'm still blown away by it. But for chrissakes,the leveling was awful and the writing was shit. Can't we have a game that delivers on all counts?
They can already pull off the same kind of visual storytelling you get in the movies, plus they're interactive. What could a movie possibly bring to the mix? It's not like we're talking about greatly changing media and showing a different side of the story like with Hitchhiker's Guide where the books, game, movie, and tv show all had a slightly different twist on the material. Bring a book to the screen, I can see that. A game? Not so much.
Given some of the 'hacks' that have been reported here over the last year, I think hack now means 'use a computer in a way that the writer does not completely understand.'
I almost got reported for hacking at college. The professor had put the class notes up on his website but made a typo in the html. I was able to ftp into the site and see what the file name should be and pointed out the problem to him. His face turned purple and he started shouting about how hacking would not be tolerated in his class.
Now some of you might say "Oh, man, you should have darked him to turn you in. Wouldn't the look on his face be funny after that!" That's assuming anyone higher up would recognize he was ignorant. More likely, they would accept his claim at face value and proceed directly to deciding my punishment.
The thing I don't get is when publishers come out with an AAA game that's built to have a storyline and then don't bother to include a story. Just watching the playthrough of Black Ops was completely off-putting. There's no sense of character, no sense of story. When you are deliberately trying to build a game that is like a movie with a storyline and a plot, why do you not bother to provide decent writing? You can blame the movies for that same sin. Why go to all that effort and so utterly fail on making it good? The argument of "it's a big dumb fun movie, it's not supposed to be good" is an argument that flabbergasts me.
I like that mobile is helping to bring back old-school play mechanics like the Atari games. Just like not every movie needs to be ponderous Oscar material, not every game needs to be overdeveloped and overly complex. You can just have something simple and fun you can pick up and play for a minute or a half hour.
As I seem to recall there was some controversy because there was little control over the use of likenesses and the technology was very cheap. The line I remember was talking about a reimagining of an old Erroll Flynn pirate movie but this version featured him "vigorously and enthusiastically taking a cabin boy from behind." I think this story ran in Asimov's.
There was another story that really presaged the Youtube phenomenon. The premise is that everyone had personal video drones and could run a personal television show in their private lives. The observer was rather disgusted with the phenomenon, finding it crass and intrusive. He observes a young waitress trying to turn her life into a sassy sitcom with the customers. She lipped off to the wrong guy and he smashed her expensive little drone into pieces. The transformation from confident and brash and trying too hard to a young girl in too much makeup shaken and crying was pretty bleak. This was her only dream of getting out of nowhere and becoming someone, becoming important. Pretty much the tinseltown dream as imagined in the 21st century.
It's interesting to see those sorts of stories becoming real life. Not so happy about the cyberpunk stuff being made real.
The entire world has been the kind of complete statist that China is now. We all did it. All our ancestors tried it, practically every Western nation was once an absolute monarchy. The reality is- we changed it because it doesn't work. China hasn't learned that yet, but if history is anything to go by - they will. The real question is - will China fall (like most of those monarchies) in bloody revolution ? Or will they have the sense (like a few of them) to recognize the inevitability of the fall of statism- and implement reforms themselves before it comes to that ? The current Chines politburo's approach and statements (especially the rather telling ones on this peace prize) suggest that we shouldn't bet on it...
I'm making my own prediction. Not sure if I'll be right on this one but I think it's got an even shot of it.
I think that the corruption within the current Chinese economy will cause the whole thing to collapse. It's pretty much the same problem the US and USSR suffered from but coming from different angles. Right now the people are supporting the government because prosperity seems to be at hand. Well, what happens when the economic engine shuts off? America's facing the death of the American dream. Will we embrace serfhood happily or will we rebel? Uncertain. The Russians like having a powerful autocrat in charge and have a cultural familiarity with being fucked over by one type of autocrat or another. The Chinese are, as pointed out, a really big mix of ethnic groups with rival priorities. The Three Gorges Dam is a prestige project that the party says has to get done but there was a lot of corner-cutting to make it happen. I don't think it's going to hold up under the next big quake they have.
My bet is that the collapse of Three Gorges will either precipitate a crisis of government or occur during a crisis and push things over the edge. What comes next will, as the Chinese say, be interesting times.
But like I said, this is just a personal theory. The Chinese may remain subservient without that sort of intervention. After the worst of the Yeltsin years and now Putin we've never seen any sort of revolutionary reform movement over there. We're looking at the end of the American Dream in this country with capitalism no longer plausibly seen as a force for social good for the poor and nobody cares. So maybe all that will happen in China is one group of autocrat assholes supplants another group of autocrat assholes and things continue as before.
One of the big "it's not as logical as you'd think" headslappers of the space age is that the cost of launch dwarfs the cost of hardware. The space shuttle made a whole lot of sense with the idea of repairing satellites in space until you realized that with launch costs what they were, it was cheaper to sent up a new sat than fix an old one. The Hubble remains a very special case and I'm sure some people could make a case that it would have been cheaper to build and launch a series of Hubbles with incremental improvements on the usual $100 million a launch expendable vehicles than service it with $500 million a launch shuttles.
Aaaanyway, the only useful mission that fits this flight profile is as a crew transfer vehicle. If it's just a spy sat, why bring it back? Back in the early days the spy sats actually took film and the cannisters were dropped down from orbit. Specially-equipped C-130's had to catch the cannisters before they went in the drink. A flyback cannister could make sense but the sats started beaming back their data yonks ago. The only thing I can think of is if they're trying to test out hardware and need to put the old eyeball on it directly to see how it's fared in space. But we've been doing a pretty good job designing sats without that kind of inspection for a long time. Color me stumped.
(I consider the modern Republican party to be nothing more than a scam that seeks power for the explicit purpose of perverting the United States into some combination of theocracy and corporate plutocracy. I hold the Democrats in marginally less contempt; At least they generally offer the people a reacharound while they're screwing us)
The Democratic Party exists to occupy the space that would otherwise be taken by a real opposition party. They're like the placebo thermostat building maintenance installs in the office so the workers can think that they're adjusting the temperature and quit complaining.
I think this type of criticism is entirely unfounded. In order to get this leaked information out into the world, you need press coverage. Julian Assange has done America and the world a HUGE favor by exposing the crooks and liars in our government. This government is hurting America and the world. We can't even begin to start turning things around unless their secret dealings are made public in the widest possible manner.
I really have to agree with this. You need to get media attention to make a splash. The wingers who did the whole ground zero mosque thing had their material out for months with no media interest. It took the GOP deciding to push that narrative to suddenly put them on the front page.
If wikileaks did not make itself a big deal, the story would have languished. How many stories out there were you thinking "Oh my god, why is this not HUGH!!!1 and driving the media cycle?" Just didn't spark the right level of interest, didn't get the right people pushing it.
I would think that political prosecutions would be pretty huge news, the idea that the Bush DOJ set out deliberately to prosecute Dems over Reps for political advantage. Never generated much interest.
Now the question remains whether the media will stick with with the bullshit side of the story or actually talk about the content of the leaks like Obama pressing to prevent foreign prosecution of Bush admin players for war crimes.
No interest in leaving a house to your kids, eh? While I agree that rights should terminate somewhere within the first hundred years after the work is produced, all your solution will do is create a market for bumping off newly popular writers.
If it will prevent more Twilight novels, I'm all for it.
This is just a fundamental concept of basic property rights -- you OWN yourself, therefore you should be able to do whatever the hell you want with yourself. Same with the money in your wallet. It's YOURS, not mine (not even secondhand via taxes).
I can respect a basic property rights argument but will usually run into disagreement with big and small L libertarians when it comes to impact. "Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins." A property rights argument might begin with "I can dump oil on my land because it's my property." But the runoff doesn't stop at your property line. It's shared by your neighbors.
So someone has property and it turns out to be a vital habitat for the yellow-bellied snail-darter. The EPA says it can't be developed. The owner will be fuming about that but does his right to that property entitle him to cause ecological damage that will be experienced by all? If I want to build a big bonfire on my property even though we're in month six of a serious drought, isn't it my right? If embers fall on my neighbor's property, it's his problem, right?
Even on earmarks - some politicians fight for their share and then vote against the entire bill. No discrepancy there. The money will get taken if the bill passes, they are just making sure that, if they lose, they get some of the benefit as well. That's what your dad is doing. While he loses, he may as well cash in on what he can.
That's like sitting in a crashed airplane in the Andes saying "Look, I'm against cannibalizing the dead but in case we do vote for it, I call dibs on the thigh." If you're against it on principle then it is hypocritical to take part in the results.
That's the same old-fashioned hypocrisy that sees the religion channels on cable fighting ala carte programming. Now in principle they should be for it. The pious could pay for cable and only get the channels they want, blocking the sin and filth channels. Win-win, right? No. Because however many people opt-in for the religion channels, many more would opt-out. The religion channels would lose money. So they instead lobby to make sure that bundling remains the practice for all cable companies. Sure, this is pragmatic but it's also hypocritical.
Man I would love to see the reaction on Fox if Obama did something like that. Just how fast can they switch from "Obama invading your rights" to "Obama making you vulnerable to terrorists" without causing cognitive dissonance in their audience. Actually, I'm not sure their audience is capable of cognitive dissonance.
It takes a certain amount of self-awareness to even have cognitive dissonance. You have tea partiers carrying signs saying "Government, hands off my Medicare!" and there's not a trace of irony there. My dad says the government shouldn't be in the health care business while collecting disability and VA benefits. The same people who say the government shouldn't have a hand in enforcing desegregation in the schools on account of state's rights applaud the DEA stepping in and violating local medical marijuana laws.
I can understand why a successful politician says one thing and does another -- it makes him money. He can pound the podium about wasteful spending Monday and then demand his earmarks on Tuesday. I suppose I can understand segregation/pot thing -- said person hates blacks and hates drug users and doesn't really care if there's a logical inconsistency in the arguments he borrows to justify his prejudices. But it does make you want to scratch your head when you look at someone selling out their own position for no reason, no pragmatic benefit.
I would love it if we had a president who said something like this:
"Yeah, about the TSA. We're ending it. Same with Homeland Security. Folks, the simple truth of the matter is there's no possible way to secure ourselves against all risk. I think we can all agree that the Soviet Union operated as a police state none of us would want to live in and even with all that security, they still had serial killers. China routinely uses the death penalty for drug smugglers and yet they still have a drug problem.
"The trappings of the police state represented by the TSA does not deter terrorists, it represents the illusion that government is doing something. It also is making a great deal of money for people who provide goods and services for the paranoia industry.
"The fact of the matter is that we will get hit again. We don't know by who, we don't know where, we don't know when, but it'll happen. You know what, though? We're strong. We can take whatever they dish out. They could fly ten more planes into ten more buildings, they could set off a nuclear device in downtown New York. No, we won't like it. But we'll crawl out from under the rubble and rebuild. Living as we have before, uncowed, unbowed, not conceding a goddamn thing to terrorists, that's middle finger resolutely extended right back at them. It says 'If that's all you've got, we've got nothing to worry about.'
"What we're no longer going to do is live our lives looking over our shoulder, jumping at shadows, giving up the way we live our lives because someone has rattled us, because we've lost our nerve, because we've been beaten.
"Oh, and while we're on the topic, Middle Eastern nuts wouldn't have so much money to finance terror attacks if we weren't giving it to them for the goddamn oil. They wouldn't even have a reason to attack us if we weren't involved in their politics in the first place. Our post-oil energy policy is also our anti-terror policy."
Why not have an increased fine for people who have an accident while on the phone? We don't ban alcohol but give extra bonus penalties to drunk drivers. Should be treated the same. I can handle going to a bar and not getting into a car until I'm detoxed. Those that can't get nailed by the cops.
One thing CGI and modern technology has allowed for are the impossible camera moves. Yes, it's impressive to zoom in on a flying aircraft and right through the glass into the interior. It's impressive to follow a bomb dropping from the plane until it goes down the stack of a battleship or fly down Orthanc into the flaming pits below it. But these impossible shots draw attention to their artificiality by being so impossible. I'll give Lord of the Rings a pass on some of the more extreme camera stuff because the CGI was so impressively integrated but I did wonder how the whole thing would have looked if it was filmed in a more deliberately like an old Hollywood sword and sandals epic, acting like a real camera was involved and just happening to sprinkle in all the CGI monsters.
Michael Bay/Borne Trilogy/Lucaswank modern cinema becomes an exercise in bad storytelling. It's impossible to follow the action, impossible to realize what you're even seeing, and the overwhelming amount of CGI bling ruins the impact of each individual shot. I really have to agree with the Red Letter Media critique of the Star Wars prequels. (the 90 minute long reviews with the serial killer). He points out how the Lucas team was impressed with how much crap they managed to shove into a scene but lost sight of trying to tell an actual story.
The early silent films played out a lot like cartoon shorts, trying to use pictures to tell a simple story. That sort of thing was picked up by the cartoons in the age of the talkies and through the decades we keep finding people who have relearned the old lesson. You look at the Pixar shorts or some of the stuff making it onto Youtube from animation students and you see people who might be using really high technology but they're making sure they tell a coherent story with characters you identify with and care about.
Your level of stylization within that framework can vary and I've seen some very good films with frantic camerawork but there's no way to use style to make up for a weak story and weak film-making. That seems to be Hollywood's biggest mistake right now.
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You disagree but yet you must admit that he did it because he honestly thought that it was the best for the country. Think how rarely we can say that about our elected officials today.
It removed the consequences from bad governance. You can commit any crime you want and you'll get pardoned. That's bad for business. We didn't go after the Nixon criminals and they came right back in the Dubya administration. We didn't go after the Dubya criminals and they'll come back in the next Republican administration.
While there's boatloads of free legal porn out there, some people still feel the need to pay for it. I assume that the same goes for the illegal stuff, you can get freebies if you look hard enough and some of the people producing it are amateurs but others are expecting to get paid. Certainly the FBI mail order stings we've heard about in the papers involved people sending payment in some fashion or another to obtain their illegal porn with kids or whatever. How did they do it then? How do they do it online? Because if it has anything to do with credit cards then I'd have to ask how those payments get processed. Does the credit card company not know what's involved until law enforcement tells them it's for illegal stuff? Do customers use money orders instead?
What I'm getting at is if the credit card companies had any plausible deniability before, they're giving it all away. The post office bears no responsibility if they deliver a package that happens to have drugs in it. The phone company is not a co-conspirator if their service was used by two people planning a crime. Common carrier and all that.
When the credit card companies stopped processing wikileak payments, it was pointed out that they are processing donations for the KKK. While I don't like the idea of the KKK getting donations, where does the line get drawn as to who can and can't be denied service for personal beliefs? Could China put the muscle on the banks and get them to cut off transfers to Falun Gong groups overseas? Law enforcement does this for noted criminals and criminal organizations and this is perfectly acceptable because actual crimes have been committed. But shit, do we allow Iran to ask for Salman Rushdie's accounts to be frozen because he's a heretic? That's a crime over there.
They rarely tell you anything you need to know, aren't answering burning questions, and are locked into predestination because you already know how the damn thing ends up. It's permissible to include flashbacks within a larger story that will provide some elaboration of how things came to pass. Probably the best example of that sort of thing was the whole Angelus backstory in Angel. Darla was a throwaway character from season 1 and none of that backstory was established beyond a sketchy paragraph in the story bible. The whole elaborate story of Angel, Darla, Spike and Dru was made up as the show went on but felt not only proper but completely intentional, as if it was known from the start. That takes some doing. But it would have been tedious if it was a whole prequel season.
If they want to resurrect the franchise, declare the first two movies to be canon, everything else is not canon, start from the Dark Horse comics that were meant as a direct sequel to Aliens and go from there. Aliens overrunning the Earth? You can't get much more apocalyptic than that.
And if you're wanting to bring AVP back, forget the previous two movies and reboot with a script adapted from the original AVP comic. It was great. Why not use it?
I am one of the people that does not even watch TV. With stuff like Hulu and even Netflix, there is no need. You can watch all of your shows online.
In other words, you still watch television.
This isn't really a distinction without a difference. He's watching a show but he's not watching a network. Remember that the purpose of a commercial television station is to sell a product (your eyeballs) to customers (the advertisers.) Commercials are how the networks collect their chips. The bits that go in between are how they keep the eyeballs watching. What's that again? Oh, right -- television shows. That's why the execs don't really care about art or quality and they'll air idiot reality shows as soon as anything else. Whatever keeps the proles watching.
The net is breaking this business model. The networks are scrambling to catch up. Times past, size meant everything. You had three networks in the US. Murdoch required shitloads of cash to belly up as number four. Things like the WB were also-rans. You needed money to pay for the distribution channel and that's called a barrier to entry. You want to make a television show in this country, you had to sell it to the networks or try and live off of syndication to stations outside of the network primetime. Tough going.
Now Apple and Netflix are positioned to be the gatekeepers and there's no limit to the amount of programming out there. You only had so many hours of primetime a week on each channel. Now it's infinite. And now studios can sell their shows direct. The networks are becoming middlemen.
Yes, people are watching shows but they're not watching TV. This is hugh!!11 etc.
I can accept a pure fantasy explanation like an dimensional portal in the back of a wardrobe or "a wizard did it" or "the dead have come back to life, we don't know why but you'd better run!" Trying to understand something like Tron is... it's like trying to explain zombies with a virus. No, there's all sorts of reasons why zombies can't work scientifically. If you leave in the realm of "we have no idea why it's happening" then I'm fine. Their being flatly impossible is part of the reason why they're so scary. You start trying to explain and I'll start poking holes.
Alice falling down the rabbit hole into Wonderland, I'm fine with it. You tell me a guy gets digitized into a 1980's computer that's gotten a mind of its own? It just doesn't work! Now someone might say "What about the Matrix?" Well what about it? It's like two hundred years from now and hyper-intelligent AI's have taken over so the technology's damn well gonna look like magic to us. I can completely buy the Matrix and the battery bit was just the studios intervening and dumbing it down for the masses. But I'd have problems with the Matrix if the war went down in 1980. Do I have problems with the Terminator timeline? Obviously we're not going to be building anything like skynet in time for Judgement Day, whenever it happens according to whichever continuity you prefer. But at least when Cameron made the first one, it was far enough in the future for advanced AI to seem plausible. It's not like his Skynet was already built and operating in the early 80's.
I could maybe, MAYBE buy the premise of Tron if the guy "sucked into the machine" was a hacker who'd been on a week-long coding binge mixing coffee and hallucinogenics and suffered a nervous breakdown and all of the running around in glowing costumes part was his fevered imagination at work.
And yeah, you're all going to say I'm comic book guying this a whole bunch. *stands up, wheezes from effort* "Whatever."
I saw the folding city in Inception and thought "Holy fuck, that is cool". I guess I must have been the only one then?
There will always be room for movies focused around spectacles and eye candy because of visceral thrill... Perhaps the article writer has lost his ability to suspend his disbelief, but I was loving every second of the sfx (actors floating) and vfx (folding buildings) of Inception.
I also would have been so much more impressed if the first time I saw that WAS IN THE FUCKING THEATER. I don't even watch television and I've seen that shot a thousand times while in the gym. I have my audiobook in and yep, folding city, tagline Inception. So I don't even know what the movie's about and have had what looks to be an impressive SFX shot completely ruined for me. Great move, assholes.
My rule of thumb: movie trailers in the theater should be mini-movies that tease the audience while revealing as little as possible. TV spots should be limited to clips taken from that teaser. Under no circumstances should ANYTHING later than the first act be revealed and this goes ESPECIALLY for the big SFX money shots. Don't spoil it! I didn't have any TV around the time of the first LOTR so I don't know if they actually showed the Balrog on-screen. I hadn't read the book at the time so I only knew from people on the net saying that there was a creature in the mine called a Balrog and it was great. So when that flame and shadow Balrog came on I about lost my shit. That didn't look like an effect, that looked like they found a Balrog and had him come in as a day player! Would have been ruined for me if I saw his entrance a thousand times in the trailers.
Overexposure to anything will cause people to become less impressed. The very first cinemas didn't even try to show movies with stories, it was just everyday stuff filmed in motion. People freaked out at the sight of a locomotive coming at the camera. Who could blame them? Their whole frame of reference was still trying to come to terms with moving pictures projected against a giant screen. The illusion was entirely too convincing.
Just think back to things that impressed you as a kid. I can think of many movies I loved then that don't hold up today. Some things don't hold up as much because you had a fonder memory as a child that cannot be replicated as an adult and some things you just had to experience at the time to see them as revolutionary. I get this a lot with movies that are considered classics. Something like Easy Rider I consider to be a very dull movie, unfocused to the point of being pointless. Fans say that you have to see that movie in the context of the time to fully appreciate it, to see how it broke from what had been done before.
Good storytelling has been the only constant for quality across the years. Tell a good story with good characters and you'll keep people interested. Most SFX movies continue to bore me to tears because they suck but a character like Gollum keeps blowing me away. I've yet to see another CGI character with that kind of presence and it was truly as much of an acting job as a piece of technical artistry.
I think another part of all this is that practical effects involve a degree of effort that makes the viewer shake his head in wonder, breaking the suspension of disbelief in the story itself to consider how hard it was to pull off in real life and thus commanding even more respect. I see CGI spiderman flipping about and I say "Meh, nice render." I see Jackie Chan doing something stupid and insanely dangerous and I think "Wait a minute, he could get hurt here! This is real!" And then you watch the credits and see just how badly he got hurt. You look at the Blues Brothers movie and consider all the cop cars they wrecked, consider that they didn't just CGI in a car for the Illinois Nazi drop but actually rented a helicopter to drop a real car over the city... Some people might not think about it in those terms but that's the way it strikes me. The sheer freakin' effort is worthy of respect.
1. Fix the leveling problem
2. Come up with a decent goddamn story for a change. Hire writers if you have to!
Oblivion was one of the most amazing, gorgeous, astounding games I'd ever seen. I'm still blown away by it. But for chrissakes,the leveling was awful and the writing was shit. Can't we have a game that delivers on all counts?
They can already pull off the same kind of visual storytelling you get in the movies, plus they're interactive. What could a movie possibly bring to the mix? It's not like we're talking about greatly changing media and showing a different side of the story like with Hitchhiker's Guide where the books, game, movie, and tv show all had a slightly different twist on the material. Bring a book to the screen, I can see that. A game? Not so much.
Given some of the 'hacks' that have been reported here over the last year, I think hack now means 'use a computer in a way that the writer does not completely understand.'
I almost got reported for hacking at college. The professor had put the class notes up on his website but made a typo in the html. I was able to ftp into the site and see what the file name should be and pointed out the problem to him. His face turned purple and he started shouting about how hacking would not be tolerated in his class.
Now some of you might say "Oh, man, you should have darked him to turn you in. Wouldn't the look on his face be funny after that!" That's assuming anyone higher up would recognize he was ignorant. More likely, they would accept his claim at face value and proceed directly to deciding my punishment.
The thing I don't get is when publishers come out with an AAA game that's built to have a storyline and then don't bother to include a story. Just watching the playthrough of Black Ops was completely off-putting. There's no sense of character, no sense of story. When you are deliberately trying to build a game that is like a movie with a storyline and a plot, why do you not bother to provide decent writing? You can blame the movies for that same sin. Why go to all that effort and so utterly fail on making it good? The argument of "it's a big dumb fun movie, it's not supposed to be good" is an argument that flabbergasts me.
I like that mobile is helping to bring back old-school play mechanics like the Atari games. Just like not every movie needs to be ponderous Oscar material, not every game needs to be overdeveloped and overly complex. You can just have something simple and fun you can pick up and play for a minute or a half hour.
As I seem to recall there was some controversy because there was little control over the use of likenesses and the technology was very cheap. The line I remember was talking about a reimagining of an old Erroll Flynn pirate movie but this version featured him "vigorously and enthusiastically taking a cabin boy from behind." I think this story ran in Asimov's.
There was another story that really presaged the Youtube phenomenon. The premise is that everyone had personal video drones and could run a personal television show in their private lives. The observer was rather disgusted with the phenomenon, finding it crass and intrusive. He observes a young waitress trying to turn her life into a sassy sitcom with the customers. She lipped off to the wrong guy and he smashed her expensive little drone into pieces. The transformation from confident and brash and trying too hard to a young girl in too much makeup shaken and crying was pretty bleak. This was her only dream of getting out of nowhere and becoming someone, becoming important. Pretty much the tinseltown dream as imagined in the 21st century.
It's interesting to see those sorts of stories becoming real life. Not so happy about the cyberpunk stuff being made real.
The entire world has been the kind of complete statist that China is now. We all did it. All our ancestors tried it, practically every Western nation was once an absolute monarchy. The reality is- we changed it because it doesn't work. China hasn't learned that yet, but if history is anything to go by - they will.
The real question is - will China fall (like most of those monarchies) in bloody revolution ? Or will they have the sense (like a few of them) to recognize the inevitability of the fall of statism- and implement reforms themselves before it comes to that ? The current Chines politburo's approach and statements (especially the rather telling ones on this peace prize) suggest that we shouldn't bet on it...
I'm making my own prediction. Not sure if I'll be right on this one but I think it's got an even shot of it.
I think that the corruption within the current Chinese economy will cause the whole thing to collapse. It's pretty much the same problem the US and USSR suffered from but coming from different angles. Right now the people are supporting the government because prosperity seems to be at hand. Well, what happens when the economic engine shuts off? America's facing the death of the American dream. Will we embrace serfhood happily or will we rebel? Uncertain. The Russians like having a powerful autocrat in charge and have a cultural familiarity with being fucked over by one type of autocrat or another. The Chinese are, as pointed out, a really big mix of ethnic groups with rival priorities. The Three Gorges Dam is a prestige project that the party says has to get done but there was a lot of corner-cutting to make it happen. I don't think it's going to hold up under the next big quake they have.
My bet is that the collapse of Three Gorges will either precipitate a crisis of government or occur during a crisis and push things over the edge. What comes next will, as the Chinese say, be interesting times.
But like I said, this is just a personal theory. The Chinese may remain subservient without that sort of intervention. After the worst of the Yeltsin years and now Putin we've never seen any sort of revolutionary reform movement over there. We're looking at the end of the American Dream in this country with capitalism no longer plausibly seen as a force for social good for the poor and nobody cares. So maybe all that will happen in China is one group of autocrat assholes supplants another group of autocrat assholes and things continue as before.
One of the big "it's not as logical as you'd think" headslappers of the space age is that the cost of launch dwarfs the cost of hardware. The space shuttle made a whole lot of sense with the idea of repairing satellites in space until you realized that with launch costs what they were, it was cheaper to sent up a new sat than fix an old one. The Hubble remains a very special case and I'm sure some people could make a case that it would have been cheaper to build and launch a series of Hubbles with incremental improvements on the usual $100 million a launch expendable vehicles than service it with $500 million a launch shuttles.
Aaaanyway, the only useful mission that fits this flight profile is as a crew transfer vehicle. If it's just a spy sat, why bring it back? Back in the early days the spy sats actually took film and the cannisters were dropped down from orbit. Specially-equipped C-130's had to catch the cannisters before they went in the drink. A flyback cannister could make sense but the sats started beaming back their data yonks ago. The only thing I can think of is if they're trying to test out hardware and need to put the old eyeball on it directly to see how it's fared in space. But we've been doing a pretty good job designing sats without that kind of inspection for a long time. Color me stumped.
(I consider the modern Republican party to be nothing more than a scam that seeks power for the explicit purpose of perverting the United States into some combination of theocracy and corporate plutocracy. I hold the Democrats in marginally less contempt; At least they generally offer the people a reacharound while they're screwing us)
The Democratic Party exists to occupy the space that would otherwise be taken by a real opposition party. They're like the placebo thermostat building maintenance installs in the office so the workers can think that they're adjusting the temperature and quit complaining.
I think this type of criticism is entirely unfounded. In order to get this leaked information out into the world, you need press coverage. Julian Assange has done America and the world a HUGE favor by exposing the crooks and liars in our government. This government is hurting America and the world. We can't even begin to start turning things around unless their secret dealings are made public in the widest possible manner.
I really have to agree with this. You need to get media attention to make a splash. The wingers who did the whole ground zero mosque thing had their material out for months with no media interest. It took the GOP deciding to push that narrative to suddenly put them on the front page.
If wikileaks did not make itself a big deal, the story would have languished. How many stories out there were you thinking "Oh my god, why is this not HUGH!!!1 and driving the media cycle?" Just didn't spark the right level of interest, didn't get the right people pushing it.
I would think that political prosecutions would be pretty huge news, the idea that the Bush DOJ set out deliberately to prosecute Dems over Reps for political advantage. Never generated much interest.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Siegelman
Now the question remains whether the media will stick with with the bullshit side of the story or actually talk about the content of the leaks like Obama pressing to prevent foreign prosecution of Bush admin players for war crimes.
Anyone can comment on facts, but conjecture is more fun.
I'll give it a shot. "NASA announces the discovery of alien life, passably human, currently tweeting from Alaska. You betcha."
No interest in leaving a house to your kids, eh? While I agree that rights should terminate somewhere within the first hundred years after the work is produced, all your solution will do is create a market for bumping off newly popular writers.
If it will prevent more Twilight novels, I'm all for it.
This is just a fundamental concept of basic property rights -- you OWN yourself, therefore you should be able to do whatever the hell you want with yourself. Same with the money in your wallet. It's YOURS, not mine (not even secondhand via taxes).
I can respect a basic property rights argument but will usually run into disagreement with big and small L libertarians when it comes to impact. "Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins." A property rights argument might begin with "I can dump oil on my land because it's my property." But the runoff doesn't stop at your property line. It's shared by your neighbors.
So someone has property and it turns out to be a vital habitat for the yellow-bellied snail-darter. The EPA says it can't be developed. The owner will be fuming about that but does his right to that property entitle him to cause ecological damage that will be experienced by all? If I want to build a big bonfire on my property even though we're in month six of a serious drought, isn't it my right? If embers fall on my neighbor's property, it's his problem, right?
Even on earmarks - some politicians fight for their share and then vote against the entire bill. No discrepancy there. The money will get taken if the bill passes, they are just making sure that, if they lose, they get some of the benefit as well. That's what your dad is doing. While he loses, he may as well cash in on what he can.
That's like sitting in a crashed airplane in the Andes saying "Look, I'm against cannibalizing the dead but in case we do vote for it, I call dibs on the thigh." If you're against it on principle then it is hypocritical to take part in the results.
That's the same old-fashioned hypocrisy that sees the religion channels on cable fighting ala carte programming. Now in principle they should be for it. The pious could pay for cable and only get the channels they want, blocking the sin and filth channels. Win-win, right? No. Because however many people opt-in for the religion channels, many more would opt-out. The religion channels would lose money. So they instead lobby to make sure that bundling remains the practice for all cable companies. Sure, this is pragmatic but it's also hypocritical.
Man I would love to see the reaction on Fox if Obama did something like that. Just how fast can they switch from "Obama invading your rights" to "Obama making you vulnerable to terrorists" without causing cognitive dissonance in their audience. Actually, I'm not sure their audience is capable of cognitive dissonance.
It takes a certain amount of self-awareness to even have cognitive dissonance. You have tea partiers carrying signs saying "Government, hands off my Medicare!" and there's not a trace of irony there. My dad says the government shouldn't be in the health care business while collecting disability and VA benefits. The same people who say the government shouldn't have a hand in enforcing desegregation in the schools on account of state's rights applaud the DEA stepping in and violating local medical marijuana laws.
I can understand why a successful politician says one thing and does another -- it makes him money. He can pound the podium about wasteful spending Monday and then demand his earmarks on Tuesday. I suppose I can understand segregation/pot thing -- said person hates blacks and hates drug users and doesn't really care if there's a logical inconsistency in the arguments he borrows to justify his prejudices. But it does make you want to scratch your head when you look at someone selling out their own position for no reason, no pragmatic benefit.
I would love it if we had a president who said something like this:
"Yeah, about the TSA. We're ending it. Same with Homeland Security. Folks, the simple truth of the matter is there's no possible way to secure ourselves against all risk. I think we can all agree that the Soviet Union operated as a police state none of us would want to live in and even with all that security, they still had serial killers. China routinely uses the death penalty for drug smugglers and yet they still have a drug problem.
"The trappings of the police state represented by the TSA does not deter terrorists, it represents the illusion that government is doing something. It also is making a great deal of money for people who provide goods and services for the paranoia industry.
"The fact of the matter is that we will get hit again. We don't know by who, we don't know where, we don't know when, but it'll happen. You know what, though? We're strong. We can take whatever they dish out. They could fly ten more planes into ten more buildings, they could set off a nuclear device in downtown New York. No, we won't like it. But we'll crawl out from under the rubble and rebuild. Living as we have before, uncowed, unbowed, not conceding a goddamn thing to terrorists, that's middle finger resolutely extended right back at them. It says 'If that's all you've got, we've got nothing to worry about.'
"What we're no longer going to do is live our lives looking over our shoulder, jumping at shadows, giving up the way we live our lives because someone has rattled us, because we've lost our nerve, because we've been beaten.
"Oh, and while we're on the topic, Middle Eastern nuts wouldn't have so much money to finance terror attacks if we weren't giving it to them for the goddamn oil. They wouldn't even have a reason to attack us if we weren't involved in their politics in the first place. Our post-oil energy policy is also our anti-terror policy."
It clearly says "D-E-L-L" right on the box. Only way to get more explicit than that is Surgeon General's Warnings.
Why not have an increased fine for people who have an accident while on the phone? We don't ban alcohol but give extra bonus penalties to drunk drivers. Should be treated the same. I can handle going to a bar and not getting into a car until I'm detoxed. Those that can't get nailed by the cops.
One thing CGI and modern technology has allowed for are the impossible camera moves. Yes, it's impressive to zoom in on a flying aircraft and right through the glass into the interior. It's impressive to follow a bomb dropping from the plane until it goes down the stack of a battleship or fly down Orthanc into the flaming pits below it. But these impossible shots draw attention to their artificiality by being so impossible. I'll give Lord of the Rings a pass on some of the more extreme camera stuff because the CGI was so impressively integrated but I did wonder how the whole thing would have looked if it was filmed in a more deliberately like an old Hollywood sword and sandals epic, acting like a real camera was involved and just happening to sprinkle in all the CGI monsters.
Michael Bay/Borne Trilogy/Lucaswank modern cinema becomes an exercise in bad storytelling. It's impossible to follow the action, impossible to realize what you're even seeing, and the overwhelming amount of CGI bling ruins the impact of each individual shot. I really have to agree with the Red Letter Media critique of the Star Wars prequels. (the 90 minute long reviews with the serial killer). He points out how the Lucas team was impressed with how much crap they managed to shove into a scene but lost sight of trying to tell an actual story.
The early silent films played out a lot like cartoon shorts, trying to use pictures to tell a simple story. That sort of thing was picked up by the cartoons in the age of the talkies and through the decades we keep finding people who have relearned the old lesson. You look at the Pixar shorts or some of the stuff making it onto Youtube from animation students and you see people who might be using really high technology but they're making sure they tell a coherent story with characters you identify with and care about.
Your level of stylization within that framework can vary and I've seen some very good films with frantic camerawork but there's no way to use style to make up for a weak story and weak film-making. That seems to be Hollywood's biggest mistake right now.