This is the process for buying a new Apple product:
Me (speaking): I would like to purchase a new [insert Apple product name here]
Well-meaning Machead (response): You can’t. You need to wait [insert X amount of time] for [insert Y announcement, price change, or feature addition].
Me (response): Oh. [sadness; feelings of technical inadequacy]
Repeat x3 per purchase, per attempt.
I’d call the first 10 issues of the Buffy comic pretty much great, and the Wolves at the Gate and Time of your Life arcs genuinely brilliant (for reasons having relatively little to do with the Buffy-Satsu fling). For a while, this was my favourite title in comics. In the past ten or twelve issues, however, the wheels have fallen off this thing. Why? Let’s waste some time with this:
1. One-offs. After Time of your Life, the series descended into an “arc” made up of five one-off issues. That’s five too many. None of them ever felt like a complete story, and in spite of bringing in some Buffy and non-Buffy heavy-hitters as vanity writers, this was wasted issue-space.
2. Jane Espenson. Pains me to say it, given how many of the television series’ better episodes she wrote, but Espenson can’t write comics. Her one-off Harmony issue, followed by her five-part Retreat arc, demonstrate poor comic storytelling almost across the board. Key plot details occur off-panel, ideas in Retreat seem listless and un-fleshed, and Espenson’s execution-dependent dialogue suffers by having no actors to execute it. The only character who works in the whole thing is Oz - perhaps because Seth Green’s original performance was as stoic as a comic panel anyway.
3. Dollhouse. Whedon has admitted that shepherding his lame-duck series through its 2 tumultuous seasons took him away from executive-producing the comic for the last while, and it shows. Now that DH has been euthanized, things may get back on track.
A fish with feet? Babies in the snow? Suckbargo and religion-bashing and GIANT BEER? It can only be Suck It: Four, where all of 2009 (and some of 2010, sorry we were late) are post-capped.
Last week was fairly tiring, between attending my own funeral 3 times daily and catching a 72-hour cold at the tail end of it. Plus, my firewire port broke, my swimming pool is closed for six months, and I couldn’t find my lightsabre.
But hey, I quit my job.
The whithertos and the whyfores of that will wait for a later discussion, but for the time being I am excited, and making healthy lists of the must-happen-by-whens of moving out of one’s egg carton. And a few things have come together alarmingly quickly on a short script I have called ACCORDION, which means I might tackle it before spring officially starts.
Sometime tomorrow Avatar passes Titanic to become the #1 grossing film of all time (unadjusted). I mark the occasion only because (as someone who’s been handicapping this dog track for a while now) I can honestly say this record broke at least 5 years earlier than my best estimates held… and by no means did I ever consider that the record would be overtaken by the same runner.
Avatar won’t beat Titanic’s record for consecutive #1-grossing weekends (15!), nor, I think, will any film ever do so. We no longer have the market-space for that sort of domination, nor the spending power (15 consecutive $30-millionish weekends, per Titanic, would no longer be enough to dominate a field for any length of time, nor would 15 consecutive weekends at Avatar’s high mark of $70 million be sustainable in any way, shape, or form).
Given the number of my guesses proven wrong by this film, I’d be unwise to advance another theory here, but I am curious to see whether Avatar, and all its technical jewels, have truly saved theatrical distribution as we know it - or if this is the last gasp of a great, dying age.
I took another look at the film on Blu-ray today and was surprised to find myself enjoying it rather immensely. Taken in the context of the style of the later films, it’s a bit easier to see what Mike Newell was doing with this one - lots of emphasis on schoolboy life and hormones; loose and dirty staging and blocking; and some of the most natural performances out of the young cast in the whole series. As for those abbreviated story points, they don’t miss as badly as I’d thought, as long as you can satisfactorily ignore the sheer quantity of material left out in the adaptation of the book. This is a shame, but hardly crippling. I don’t know why I’ve been so pissed off for the last five years.
Minority Report isn’t a very good movie, but it has great doses of futurism - particularly the treatment of ad space in the future. I was at a class on trends in technology earlier this week and observed with bemusement as the instructor outlined how we did indeed build Skynet - just not for defence. Web 3.0 is sentient; our baby is in about Week 8. A few things become clear:
1. Social media isn’t a fad.
2. Geolocation isn’t a fad.
3. These two non-fads are going to intersect.
4. Social media will stay free, because the social media stream is monetized by ads.
5. Ads will know who you are, what you like, who you like, what you buy, what you look for on the internet, and where you go during your day.
The result isn’t just targeted advertising; it’s point-of-presence targeted advertising via every media stream you access whenever and wherever you access it.
Also,
6. It’s a good thing Amazon doesn’t sell nuclear weapons.
The roll to total world domination continues, as Avatar takes some Golden Globes, some more records, and the increasing ire of some among the filmgoing community. We continue to handicap the…
Updates for the new version:
1. Standardized design template across as much content as possible
2. Consistent navigation through all affected sections of the site
3. Easier angles of attack for tederick films and tederick reviews
4. Yes, more flexible social media installations than ever before. Welcome to 2010.
In the dream I had last night, Demetre has gone ahead with his second major film project - which, as expected, is Fincherian slash Cameronian in its scope and scale. It concerns an epic snowball fight between two Lord of the Rings-sized armies in a mountain region akin to those you’d find in Switzerland or Germany. The snowballs are the size of refrigerators and are being launched into the air via cunning mechanical devices and engines of war. Some refrigerator-sized-snowballs conceal hidden sub-thermonuclear devices which explode on contact with enemy soldiers and equipment. Demetre being Demetre, he has of course realized the entirety of this epic battle movie in stereoscopic 3-D. In the third act, his artistic slash experimental leanings begin to come out and he starts to shift the stereoscopic field of view to reveal the filmmaking cheats behind the otherwise pristine cinematic vision. So, if a stereoscopic image is made of two superimposed images at slightly off-plum axes of direction, he will slide the left image thirty more degrees to the left to reveal that the snowy wilderness is just a massive cyclorama, or that behind the engines of war are sleepy teamsters. In one memorable shot, the stereoscope cranes all the way around the cyclorama to reveal Demetre, watching the action intently from behind his array of television monitors. And you were there (Daniel), and you were there (Chris), and you were there (Demetre). I, having somehow missed the entirety of this production from concept to screen, feel left out and unloved, and yet cannot deny that the son of a bitch really has something there with the fridge-sized snowball fight.
