For the record, 2009 can suck it. While I don't think this past year could be listed as the worst year, it's certainly not ever going to be listed in the same zip code as some of the best. I've lost friends and family this year. People I know have also had their share of loss and setbacks. When I think about it this past year has been more about things happening around me rather than things happening to me. Considering 2009 felt like it was full of death and sadness, maybe it's not exactly a bad thing. Still, there was an undeniable sense of being idle for way too long. It wasn't until very near the end that things actually started to pick up a little bit for me. I feel like I'm standing in the eye of the tornado. For me it's very calm, but around me there is a whirling mass of destruction.
Ten years ago I was leaving this place and heading off to start a new adventure in a brand new state. I was young and eager to try something different. College had only finished the year before and it was time to leave for a new world beyond what I had known while I was in school. I often wonder what my life would have been like had I not taken that leap. A huge portion of my life would be drastically different. I don't regret doing it, but it's natural to think about the road not taken. That was then and this is now and to be honest it's really hard to tell the difference between my then self and now self. Back then I felt as though I was starting over and here I am feeling that same way. I've circled back around to where it feels like I'm starting over again. Maybe it's a good thing for me, but it's also more than a little frustrating because I have a tendency to pre-worry (a term coined by a friend of mine) about things long before I need to. So in addition to feeling like I'm living through the Pink Floyd lyrics "Ten years have got behind you. No one told you when to run. You missed the starting gun", I'm worried that if I'm not careful I'll be right back here in another ten years.
Now all of 2009 wasn't bad. There were actually a lot of good things. Several family members have started new aspects of their lives, be it retiring from a job after years of service or leaving the military to try and sort out what it's like to be a civilian again. And my best friend lost her job after more than a dozen years at the same company only to find an even better job a few months later. Some relationships ended while others started and some even made the leap to that next step. I took the safe route of staying single, although I'm starting to wonder how much of that is by choice and how much is just a bad habit of not trying.
As usual there seemed to be a lot of celebrity deaths. Several of which were surprising at the time. Others may have not been shocking, but were still sad. This year we lost a dirty dancing roadhouse bouncer, one of Charlie's Angels, a prisoner, a man who told us the rest of the story, the king of pop, Khan himself, and the one who said that's the way it is. And to add to all that we lost another Karl with a K when we live in a world where it seems like there are simply too few. It seems like a lot and it probably is, but it's probably not all that different from years before as far as numbers are concerned.
The thing that's strange to me is that we're about to enter 2010, the year we make contact, and yet it feels like we're still arguing over the same old issues for the sake of arguing. Social and scientific issues are still being debated to the point that nothing gets done and the conspiracy theorist in me wonders if that's not exactly how someone wants it. In some ways I wonder if we're not going backwards in some aspects. People are fighting battles that were "won" more than 30 years ago. And some people are fighting battles that should have ended 30 years ago. Having had my fair share of arguments and all out fights about things, I've learned that sometimes it's no good to win the battle if you lose the war. It seems it many cases there are those who would simply rather fight because they see any kind of compromise as a lose-lose situation. Or at the very least they had to give up something. There was a social experiment where a person is given $100 and are told to share a portion of the money with a second person. They can offer any amount, but if the other person refuses they both get nothing. Depending on your logic you may say that the most likely acceptance would be a 50-50 split of the money. Others might think that the second person should be happy with any portion of money because no matter what percentage they get it will still be 100% more than they had. More often than not the people making the laws are willing to walk away with nothing if they can't keep all $100. There's a reason why the acronym for mutually assured destruction is MAD.
Overall 2009 felt like a year that you just had to survive. Anything beyond that was just a bonus. I'd like to be hopeful for 2010, even if it's only because the year itself sounds much better than any of the 00s, which no one found a good name for in ten years. Do I think things will be drastically different than the last year? Maybe not, but I'm still looking forward to what it has to offer.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Words Fail Me
I need a word that describes the feeling you get when you watch a movie or TV show with someone you consider to funny that's so painfully unfunny you seriously question the reason why you ever laughed at anything they've ever done.
Monday, December 14, 2009
On Time
I'm starting to think that I'm operating outside of time. I seriously no longer have any concept of time. Days of the week mean next to nothing to me, which tends to be a problem when I try to go somewhere only to realize that it's actually Saturday and everyone else is out and about too. For over two years I had nothing that even came close to resembling a schedule. I woke up when I was no longer tired and there were several times where I found myself awake for 24-48 hours in a stretch. The whole thing has left my internal clock flashing 12:00 over and over again. And to make things even more confusing I've started a job where my schedule feels like the opposite of everyone else. I'm going into the office hours before the sun will rise. It's before the rooster would think about waking up. Add to that working those same hours on weekends means that Friday is my Monday. So I typically have no idea when I am.
It seems that a lot of people are just killing time. The problem with that is they're killing time while looking forward to nothing. Sure they may be waiting for the weekend, but how different are the weekends from the weekdays? When you're waiting for a movie to start or sitting in a doctor's waiting room you're looking for ways to kill time because something is about to happen, you just have excess time on your hands. If you're killing time every day then maybe it's a sign that you need something to do. What's the point of always watching the clock while you're at work just so you can go home and watch the clock until it's time to go to bed so you can do it all over again?
Which makes me wonder if time isn't running in a line at all. What if it's all sort of circling back on itself over and over again? I mean if we can remember the past then how come we can't remember the future? If you believe in the idea that all time is always happening then it would stand to reason that events that haven't happened in our perception should be remembered as well as those that have already happened. Is that what Deja vu is? Just a brief glimpse into something that's already happened and we're remembering it somehow? If time is always happening then it would be nice if we could get some insight to things up the road so we can make some changes. Kind of like holding your finger on a page while reading one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books. You choose to go right. You were eaten by a bear. With that knowledge you flip back and decide to go left instead.
I guess the trick to time is not thinking of it as something that you need to kill in order to get to the next thing. They say time flies when you're having fun and that's because you're not thinking about how much time is going by, but instead of thinking about the fun itself. So the moment you start seeing time as something that has to be counted you've already partially defeated the purpose.
Often I've wondered how people spend their time. When I was younger I thought for sure I'd be given some kind of knowledge of what to do with myself when I was older. Apparently I never got that memo. So I'm always asking people what they do with their time. Turns out my time spent isn't all that much different from most people. Even when someone has kids there's just a lot of almost empty calories as far as time spent is concerned. Watching television. Surfing the internet. Playing games. Reading books. Chores. Other various hobbies. I'm not saying any of those things are necessarily bad, but all can be treated as things done just to get through a few hours before something else happens.
We've created all these gadgets to save time. All these processes to be more efficient. We've done all this and yet we're still always busy and it feels like there's less time than before. So is there really less time or are we just terrible in how we spend it? It makes me wonder what we'd do with ourselves if we didn't have to do certain things. If we didn't have to eat what would we do with the time we'd save by not having to gather food or money to buy food? No matter how advanced we think we are, there are always going to be the basics of survival that take up a majority of our time. We'd like to believe that we're above the lion, who spends its days looking to eat. We're not that far ahead of them when instead of hiding in the grass waiting for a slow gazelle we're stalking through some office waiting for our paycheck so we can buy a steak.
Maybe some day we will evolve beyond what we are now and we'll look back at all of this with different eyes. It makes me think of the closing lyrics for an old song.
"Now it's been ten thousand years, man has cried a billion tears for what he never knew. Now man's reign is through, but through eternal night, the twinkling of starlight. So very far away. Maybe it's only yesterday"
It seems that a lot of people are just killing time. The problem with that is they're killing time while looking forward to nothing. Sure they may be waiting for the weekend, but how different are the weekends from the weekdays? When you're waiting for a movie to start or sitting in a doctor's waiting room you're looking for ways to kill time because something is about to happen, you just have excess time on your hands. If you're killing time every day then maybe it's a sign that you need something to do. What's the point of always watching the clock while you're at work just so you can go home and watch the clock until it's time to go to bed so you can do it all over again?
Which makes me wonder if time isn't running in a line at all. What if it's all sort of circling back on itself over and over again? I mean if we can remember the past then how come we can't remember the future? If you believe in the idea that all time is always happening then it would stand to reason that events that haven't happened in our perception should be remembered as well as those that have already happened. Is that what Deja vu is? Just a brief glimpse into something that's already happened and we're remembering it somehow? If time is always happening then it would be nice if we could get some insight to things up the road so we can make some changes. Kind of like holding your finger on a page while reading one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books. You choose to go right. You were eaten by a bear. With that knowledge you flip back and decide to go left instead.
I guess the trick to time is not thinking of it as something that you need to kill in order to get to the next thing. They say time flies when you're having fun and that's because you're not thinking about how much time is going by, but instead of thinking about the fun itself. So the moment you start seeing time as something that has to be counted you've already partially defeated the purpose.
Often I've wondered how people spend their time. When I was younger I thought for sure I'd be given some kind of knowledge of what to do with myself when I was older. Apparently I never got that memo. So I'm always asking people what they do with their time. Turns out my time spent isn't all that much different from most people. Even when someone has kids there's just a lot of almost empty calories as far as time spent is concerned. Watching television. Surfing the internet. Playing games. Reading books. Chores. Other various hobbies. I'm not saying any of those things are necessarily bad, but all can be treated as things done just to get through a few hours before something else happens.
We've created all these gadgets to save time. All these processes to be more efficient. We've done all this and yet we're still always busy and it feels like there's less time than before. So is there really less time or are we just terrible in how we spend it? It makes me wonder what we'd do with ourselves if we didn't have to do certain things. If we didn't have to eat what would we do with the time we'd save by not having to gather food or money to buy food? No matter how advanced we think we are, there are always going to be the basics of survival that take up a majority of our time. We'd like to believe that we're above the lion, who spends its days looking to eat. We're not that far ahead of them when instead of hiding in the grass waiting for a slow gazelle we're stalking through some office waiting for our paycheck so we can buy a steak.
Maybe some day we will evolve beyond what we are now and we'll look back at all of this with different eyes. It makes me think of the closing lyrics for an old song.
"Now it's been ten thousand years, man has cried a billion tears for what he never knew. Now man's reign is through, but through eternal night, the twinkling of starlight. So very far away. Maybe it's only yesterday"
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
On The Apocalypse
Well I suppose it has to happen at some point. The end of the world as we know it. No not the end of the world because in most cases Earth will continue to be here long after we're gone. It bothers me when people say the end of the world because short of our planet being totally vaporized into space dust, it's going to keep spinning around the Sun whether it can support life or not. There is the the chance in about 12 billion years that humans are still on the planet when the Sun finally runs out of hydrogen to fuse and then goes through helium fusion and becomes a Red Giant, where it expands out to the orbit of Mars. Even then it would take awhile before Earth felt some lasting effects. Long story short it would take so many billions of years for that to happen that man as we know it will have become something quite different than what we are now.
Anyway pick your ending. Zombie invasion, hit by an asteroid (or meteor), global climate meltdown, or good old fashion nuclear winter. According to most science fiction there are really two ways things can go in the future. Either there will be an apocalypse and the world will be turned into burnt out shell where people fight to survive and it's questioned if mankind will burn out as well. The other option is that civilization turns into some kind of utopia. The caveat with option two is that often times you have to go through option one to get to the society of bliss.
In most of the disaster movies there are only about twenty minutes worth of signs that something is wrong. And the only ones to notice it are the quirky scientist guys that are amazingly smart, but somehow aren't reputable enough for anyone to take their work seriously until the core of the Earth has stopped spinning or The White House is covered in an ice storm that won't end for two years. The more likely scenario is that the events that are leading to the end of the world (as we know it) have already been set in motion. It's not going to be everything fine one day and the next we're in a panic because the sky is raining fire. Even when the dead rise from their graves there's always going to be a couple days of reports that corpses are running amok. So try to watch the news at least once a week to get a heads up on those sort of things.
The part that interests me is how people will react in the face of such an event. Some will be in denial that anything could be happening. The scope of the event will be just too large for their brains to handle. And it's hard to blame them because of the constant barrage of things we're told we should be afraid of. While I don't believe H1N1 is going to be a pandemic that will wipe out humanity, I do wonder if people think H3N3 could be. Beware of Captain Trips. Then you have the other group of people. These are the ones who see what's happening and just deal with it. Maybe they stock up on canned food and shotguns (which is probably a good idea anyway). Maybe they're just quick enough to avoid the initial wave of undead and get setup on a nice fortified island of safety. These people will do whatever is necessary to survive.
The really depressing part about surviving the apocalypse is that's all you're doing. You're just surviving. In most of the stories about the end of the world the people in it are just trying to make it to tomorrow. There aren't a lot of spare moments spent on hopes and dreams. Maybe that's how things were a few thousand years ago. Less time was spent on worrying about your feelings or if your company will sell another dozen widgets and more time was spent on finding a clean water source or where your next meal will come from. I'm not saying that things were better back then, but it was a much simpler definition of wants versus needs.
Maybe all the survivors are doing is surviving because they know how far things have been set backwards. If you think about it, this is the most advanced our society has ever been, to our knowledge anyway. That means we have so much farther to fall should some catastrophic event happen. If something were to kill all electronic devices in 1879 the biggest hit would be the first commercial power station in San Francisco. At least as far as regular people could tell. For the most part it wouldn't be a lasting setback to the future of man. You kill power today and the effects are instantaneous. Our reliance on electronics makes us even more susceptible to drastic reversals in progress as a society. Imagine what life would be like if an EMP hit most of America. Even if we were capable of replacing the electronics that were destroyed, the time that we're down could lead to chaos. If it happened in the summer you'd lose people in the south. If it happened in the winter you'd lose people in the north. A week without lights, or phones, or the blessed Internet and society as we know it could start to crumble around the edges. The longer we spend in the dark, the more feral we become.
And that's just an electromagnetic pulse. Imagine if at the start of the industrial revolution there was a cataclysmic event that set everything back 200 years. Would things progress the same way that they were going in the first place? I know life finds a way to survive, but how does it find its way to progress beyond just survival? What happens to a society that is forced to go backwards and start over? Do we learn from the mistakes we made? Maybe there will be those who look at technology as the root of the problem and prefer we go back to a more nomadic existence. Maybe we rebuild and in time we get back to where we are now. New York City is built on the remains of the old city. So it is possible.
There are so many things that could finish us off that if you thought about it for too long you might go a little crazy. People like to think we have the means to change the world, but really we just have the means to change things enough that we can't live on the planet anymore. So we can create our own apocalypse either with weapons of mass destruction or through the inadvertent creation of some super virus. Personally I think the Large Hadron Collider has some potential to warp all matter as we know it. The Earth itself could have some global problem be it climate changes or killer trees. And if that's not enough you have other outside forces (think meteor, not aliens). I guess it just comes down to enjoying what you have while you have it because we could be already on our way to the end of things and just not know it yet.
Anyway pick your ending. Zombie invasion, hit by an asteroid (or meteor), global climate meltdown, or good old fashion nuclear winter. According to most science fiction there are really two ways things can go in the future. Either there will be an apocalypse and the world will be turned into burnt out shell where people fight to survive and it's questioned if mankind will burn out as well. The other option is that civilization turns into some kind of utopia. The caveat with option two is that often times you have to go through option one to get to the society of bliss.
In most of the disaster movies there are only about twenty minutes worth of signs that something is wrong. And the only ones to notice it are the quirky scientist guys that are amazingly smart, but somehow aren't reputable enough for anyone to take their work seriously until the core of the Earth has stopped spinning or The White House is covered in an ice storm that won't end for two years. The more likely scenario is that the events that are leading to the end of the world (as we know it) have already been set in motion. It's not going to be everything fine one day and the next we're in a panic because the sky is raining fire. Even when the dead rise from their graves there's always going to be a couple days of reports that corpses are running amok. So try to watch the news at least once a week to get a heads up on those sort of things.
The part that interests me is how people will react in the face of such an event. Some will be in denial that anything could be happening. The scope of the event will be just too large for their brains to handle. And it's hard to blame them because of the constant barrage of things we're told we should be afraid of. While I don't believe H1N1 is going to be a pandemic that will wipe out humanity, I do wonder if people think H3N3 could be. Beware of Captain Trips. Then you have the other group of people. These are the ones who see what's happening and just deal with it. Maybe they stock up on canned food and shotguns (which is probably a good idea anyway). Maybe they're just quick enough to avoid the initial wave of undead and get setup on a nice fortified island of safety. These people will do whatever is necessary to survive.
The really depressing part about surviving the apocalypse is that's all you're doing. You're just surviving. In most of the stories about the end of the world the people in it are just trying to make it to tomorrow. There aren't a lot of spare moments spent on hopes and dreams. Maybe that's how things were a few thousand years ago. Less time was spent on worrying about your feelings or if your company will sell another dozen widgets and more time was spent on finding a clean water source or where your next meal will come from. I'm not saying that things were better back then, but it was a much simpler definition of wants versus needs.
Maybe all the survivors are doing is surviving because they know how far things have been set backwards. If you think about it, this is the most advanced our society has ever been, to our knowledge anyway. That means we have so much farther to fall should some catastrophic event happen. If something were to kill all electronic devices in 1879 the biggest hit would be the first commercial power station in San Francisco. At least as far as regular people could tell. For the most part it wouldn't be a lasting setback to the future of man. You kill power today and the effects are instantaneous. Our reliance on electronics makes us even more susceptible to drastic reversals in progress as a society. Imagine what life would be like if an EMP hit most of America. Even if we were capable of replacing the electronics that were destroyed, the time that we're down could lead to chaos. If it happened in the summer you'd lose people in the south. If it happened in the winter you'd lose people in the north. A week without lights, or phones, or the blessed Internet and society as we know it could start to crumble around the edges. The longer we spend in the dark, the more feral we become.
And that's just an electromagnetic pulse. Imagine if at the start of the industrial revolution there was a cataclysmic event that set everything back 200 years. Would things progress the same way that they were going in the first place? I know life finds a way to survive, but how does it find its way to progress beyond just survival? What happens to a society that is forced to go backwards and start over? Do we learn from the mistakes we made? Maybe there will be those who look at technology as the root of the problem and prefer we go back to a more nomadic existence. Maybe we rebuild and in time we get back to where we are now. New York City is built on the remains of the old city. So it is possible.
There are so many things that could finish us off that if you thought about it for too long you might go a little crazy. People like to think we have the means to change the world, but really we just have the means to change things enough that we can't live on the planet anymore. So we can create our own apocalypse either with weapons of mass destruction or through the inadvertent creation of some super virus. Personally I think the Large Hadron Collider has some potential to warp all matter as we know it. The Earth itself could have some global problem be it climate changes or killer trees. And if that's not enough you have other outside forces (think meteor, not aliens). I guess it just comes down to enjoying what you have while you have it because we could be already on our way to the end of things and just not know it yet.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
On Cookie Cutter Neighborhoods
I noticed something awhile back. In the previous state I lived in I was near a Target, a Starbucks, a Safeway, and an AMC Theater. Now in my current state I'm near a Target, a Starbucks, a Safeway, and an AMC Theater. Before it brought me comfort to know there were familiar stores around me where I could get whatever I wanted. Now I'm starting to ask myself if there is a difference between the towns we live in outside of their names.
If I were to go into nearly any Safeway they all look fairly the same, which I suppose is the point. My first real job was as a bag boy at a grocery store called SuperValu. It wasn't a great store, but in my home town it was the only store. I had many fond memories of that place. I'm sure most of which are painted by nostalgia more than anything else. And for a long after I had moved away that store remained the same. Then somewhere along the way it go converted into a Safeway. The old store that I loved was gone. It had been replaced by a generic grocery chain. Standing inside of it I couldn't tell that I was in my old home town or in my current one. It made me a little sad to think that part of my history's character had been wiped away for the sake of conformity.
It's not just the grocery store either. In town there are all sorts of new box stores. Lowe's, Home Depot, Wal-Mart, Barnes & Noble, Gamestop to name a few. I don't have a problem with any of those stores, well maybe Wal-Mart, but that's a discussion for another time. Growing up I remember wishing we had more stuff like other larger cities. Then when I moved away I lived in a pretty large city and realized that all the choices really didn't make things any better. It was just more nothing. I don't live in my old home town anymore so I'm sure my opinion doesn't really matter all that much to people who just want to be able to pick up an HD TV at a reasonable price without traveling 360 miles to the next town or ordering it online. Still when I go to visit I can see how the town is desperately trying to be like everywhere else. So is that where things are going? Are towns and cities going to become so similar that you can no longer tell the difference between where you are? The mall in Seattle has the same exact stores as the mall in Miami.
I think it's part of the reason why I like going to certain places that have things that are unique. San Francisco has Fisherman's Wharf and Chinatown. Seattle has Pike's Market. Chicago has Millennium Park. Boston has well the maze like streets of Boston. Sure those places also have Targets and Starbucks, but they also haven't become some generic box store community that's lost all sense of what makes the town unique.
Look around your town. What do you see? Can you tell the difference between your block and the next? Or the next twenty? At this rate you'll drive across the country and it will be like you never left home.
If I were to go into nearly any Safeway they all look fairly the same, which I suppose is the point. My first real job was as a bag boy at a grocery store called SuperValu. It wasn't a great store, but in my home town it was the only store. I had many fond memories of that place. I'm sure most of which are painted by nostalgia more than anything else. And for a long after I had moved away that store remained the same. Then somewhere along the way it go converted into a Safeway. The old store that I loved was gone. It had been replaced by a generic grocery chain. Standing inside of it I couldn't tell that I was in my old home town or in my current one. It made me a little sad to think that part of my history's character had been wiped away for the sake of conformity.
It's not just the grocery store either. In town there are all sorts of new box stores. Lowe's, Home Depot, Wal-Mart, Barnes & Noble, Gamestop to name a few. I don't have a problem with any of those stores, well maybe Wal-Mart, but that's a discussion for another time. Growing up I remember wishing we had more stuff like other larger cities. Then when I moved away I lived in a pretty large city and realized that all the choices really didn't make things any better. It was just more nothing. I don't live in my old home town anymore so I'm sure my opinion doesn't really matter all that much to people who just want to be able to pick up an HD TV at a reasonable price without traveling 360 miles to the next town or ordering it online. Still when I go to visit I can see how the town is desperately trying to be like everywhere else. So is that where things are going? Are towns and cities going to become so similar that you can no longer tell the difference between where you are? The mall in Seattle has the same exact stores as the mall in Miami.
I think it's part of the reason why I like going to certain places that have things that are unique. San Francisco has Fisherman's Wharf and Chinatown. Seattle has Pike's Market. Chicago has Millennium Park. Boston has well the maze like streets of Boston. Sure those places also have Targets and Starbucks, but they also haven't become some generic box store community that's lost all sense of what makes the town unique.
Look around your town. What do you see? Can you tell the difference between your block and the next? Or the next twenty? At this rate you'll drive across the country and it will be like you never left home.
Words Fail Me
I need a word for when you notice a misspelling and feel compelled to look down at your keyboard to try and figure out exactly how it happened.
On Air Travel
Whoever said "Getting there is half the fun" needs to be dragged into the street and shot. Commercial air travel started in the 1930s and I have to say things aren't much easier than they were back then. Today's travel, both air and by land, is just no fun. I'm one of the easiest travelers out there too. I'm just me. I don't have any kids. I don't have any special dietary needs. I travel light and I don't care if my entire body is put through a chemical bath to determine if I've somehow packed explosives up my ass. Even for me, traveling in today's world is a pain in the ass. That's two sentences in a row that end with the word ass, which is starting a trend we need to stop right now.
Let's start with the beginning. It used to be you could arrive roughly an hour before your flight was scheduled to take off and be good to go. Now the recommendation is to arrive at LEAST an hour before, usually it's safer to be two hours ahead. There is that lovely 45 minute rule where if you haven't checked in 45 minutes before your flight is scheduled to depart, you might not get on board. Let's not worry about the fact that a flight schedule to leave at 10:25 never EVER gets off the ground until 10:50, but more on that later. I usually take the Super Shuttle because in order to avoid the insane air fares I have to fly at weird times. So a flight leaving at 11:37 on an odd numbered Wednesday is not out of the question. I'm not the kind of person who will hit up a friend for a ride to the airport mid-morning on a weekday. I'm a lot of things, but not that guy. So for a flight leaving at 11:37 my shuttle will pick me up at 8:35, allowing them time to pick up the 3-4 other people along the way. I've been flying a long time and I've never once been the last pickup. I've never experienced getting on the shuttle and being taken directly to the airport. No, instead I get to experience the worse tour of whatever city I'm in. If you'll look to your left you'll see Avenue B. And to your right is a Super Wal-Mart.
Arriving at the airport means one of two things will happen as it regards to time. Either you're drastically early in which case you sit at your gate so long that you've learned the first name of your gate agent as well as the names of her four cats or you've got ten minutes to get through the hundred person check-in line, the security chute, and the twenty acre jog to your gate. Thankfully I've never missed a flight, except that one time when there was some confusion over what day midnight meant. So I'd rather be bored than stranded.
It used to be (yes I've gotten old enough that I've started referring to things like that) that your bags, yes plural, would be put on the plane at no extra cost. It was part of the ticket price. Along with drinks and possibly a meal. Now everything costs extra and ticket prices aren't any lower. Want to check a bag? $25. Want some M&Ms? $4. Pretty soon they'll put a credit card swipe on the bathroom door. $2 for Number 1. $4 for Number 2. The part I don't understand is that initially the added cost was attributed to the rising gas prices. Fuel was reaching record high prices so in order to cover the cost airlines needed to make extra money somewhere. Well fuel prices are back down to what they were a few years ago, but I'm still paying for my bag. However, I've seen people take their two bags through security and to the gate where eventually the attendant announces if you have more than one bag they'll check it at the gate with no extra charge. So they're essentially rewarding people tenacious enough to have held onto their bags and refused to pay the extra cash.
There are a few types of people you'll always seem to run into while traveling. Usually you'll see them at security because they're right in front of you. You can get:
The Angry Guy - This guy must have a pine cone wedged in his ass because everything is a personal affront to him. The family in front of him who has the nerve to need a few extra minutes to take a child out of the stroller before putting it in the X-ray machine makes him groan. The old woman who is on oxygen and shuffling along in a walker pisses him off. This is the guy who's so mad at everyone else he doesn't realize that everyone is required to take off their shoes. They don't care if there isn't any metal in them. That's not what they're looking for.
The Jewelry Encrusted Lady - This woman is unaware of how to dress for air travel. I appreciate that people want to look good when they're out in public. If you want to wear as many necklaces as Mr. T while going to the mall, good for you. I'll be sure to mock you in private later. But if you're about to pass through something called a METAL detector then having your entire jewelry collection on isn't the brightest move. The best part is these women also have a tendency to talk about the pieces of jewelry as they're removing them. This was given to me by...yeah don't care lady. See where The Angry Guy gets his start?
The Clueless One - Everyone is standing at the gate ready to board. The attendant hasn't started calling rows yet. There could be a line formed for the eventual race to your seats, if you happen to be flying on an airline that doesn't assign seats. This person comes bumbling from out of nowhere, oblivious to the fifty people standing in a line, or a queue if you're from out of country. They walk straight up to the attendant and try to hand their boarding pass over. "We're only boarding rows 15-23. Please if you're not seated in these rows move aside so that other people who have learned to count can proceed to their seats" Why is there such a rush to get to your seat? Is anyone in a hurry to get into a cramped seat and breath in recycled fart air?
Oh and one more: Men who call their wives mother. It's not so much a class of person, but I really just find that to be creepy.
I know the airlines can be fined by either the city or the FAA for not leaving on time so it's in the airline's best interest to actually depart when they say. The problem is departing means only having to pull away from the gate. It doesn't mean they have to be in the air. I've been in planes that taxi for no less than thirty minutes. They've driven long enough that they could be back at my house and could have picked me up on the way. I could have avoided all the hassle I just mentioned.
When I fly I always try to get an exit row. Not because I'm a hero or anything, but because the exit rows normally have just a little bit more leg room. They could easily remove an entire row of seats and give everyone on the plane an extra two inches and still manage to operate in the negative like they do now. I always find it comforting when sitting in the exit row when the attendant comes by and asks for a verbal confirmation that you're willing to perform the safety duties in the event of an emergency. If by duties you mean I'm willing to open the door and get the hell out of a plane carrying 64,000 gallons of soon to be exploding jet fuel, then yeah I'm willing. Can I get a couple of those little bottles of Jack Daniels while we're negotiating what's all required?
I'm usually a pretty quiet traveler. It's just part of my general disdain for people I don't know. If I don't know you, then chances are I don't want to know you. Still I could be wearing headphones, leaning against the window, and reading my book, but if I make even the slightest bit of eye contact with someone I've suddenly become their new bestest travel buddy. They want to know where I'm traveling to. Do I live there? Who you going to see? I swear a CIA interrogator has fewer questions.
If you've ever flown on little planes or come into Denver from the west you know that landing is the most exciting part of the actual flight. Due to some tricks of air pressure surrounding the Rocky Mountains the plane will inevitably drop about a thousand feet in a matter of seconds. Then it will happen again. After about the second time the co-pilot (whatever happened to the navigator? I always liked him best) will come on and say something in a rather chipper voice "This is Lt Colonel Gantry and we're experiencing a slight bit of turbulence so I'm going to ask you to put on your seat belt in case we run into any more" Thanks for the warning as I'm wearing the rest of my Jack and Coke. My seat belt didn't protect me from a drink in the face. And flying in on a little plane is the worst. Not only can you feel every bump, but I swear those pilots are cowboys. They must be the guys no one trusts to fly the 747, but can't fire because he's the only one willing to fly the puddle jumper back and forth from LA to Vegas. These are the guys you know are in the cockpit having a blast as they drop out of the sky like an anvil, giving everyone the fantastic sensation of zero G for 2.6 seconds.
So you've landed and there's another twenty minute taxi back to the airport. Sometimes I wonder if they've landed in the same zip code as the terminal. No matter where you're sitting there will always be someone who takes twice as long as humanly possible to get up from their seat, get their bag from the overhead bin, retrieve their coat, and start putting one foot in front of the other to get off the plane. I've sat in the first row and still managed to get stuck behind someone who was desperately trying to unwedge their bag. They're shocked that it's stuck even though when they were getting on then spent a good five minutes beating it into place like they were tenderizing a steak.
I've been traveling with the same suitcase since I graduated from high school. It's bag my dad gave me as a graduation present and it's worked for me all this time. Besides being an actual suitcase and not one of those lame half a bag/half a purse things, it's very easy to spot due to the wear and tear it's taken over the years. I've noticed that unless your bag is on fire, it will look like at least five other bags on the carousel. There will always be that person who goes up to your bag (often as you're reaching for it) and checks the tag because they can't quite remember if their bag was navy blue or emerald green. I've actually had it happen once where someone pulled my bag from the carousel and I had to convince them that I was in fact the owner. Want me to open it up and show you my underwear because I'll do it. I have no shame.
No matter what time you exit the terminal, if you're looking for a shuttle, it just left. The next one should be along in about fifteen minutes. I've never walked out of the airport only to find the shuttle just pulling up, as though it were a friend with fantastic timing. If you are lucky enough to have a friend pick you up from the airport, get in quick before airport security starts wondering if you bear a striking resemblance to that Interpol terrorist everyone is talking about. And thank you for flying with us. We hope to see you again.
Let's start with the beginning. It used to be you could arrive roughly an hour before your flight was scheduled to take off and be good to go. Now the recommendation is to arrive at LEAST an hour before, usually it's safer to be two hours ahead. There is that lovely 45 minute rule where if you haven't checked in 45 minutes before your flight is scheduled to depart, you might not get on board. Let's not worry about the fact that a flight schedule to leave at 10:25 never EVER gets off the ground until 10:50, but more on that later. I usually take the Super Shuttle because in order to avoid the insane air fares I have to fly at weird times. So a flight leaving at 11:37 on an odd numbered Wednesday is not out of the question. I'm not the kind of person who will hit up a friend for a ride to the airport mid-morning on a weekday. I'm a lot of things, but not that guy. So for a flight leaving at 11:37 my shuttle will pick me up at 8:35, allowing them time to pick up the 3-4 other people along the way. I've been flying a long time and I've never once been the last pickup. I've never experienced getting on the shuttle and being taken directly to the airport. No, instead I get to experience the worse tour of whatever city I'm in. If you'll look to your left you'll see Avenue B. And to your right is a Super Wal-Mart.
Arriving at the airport means one of two things will happen as it regards to time. Either you're drastically early in which case you sit at your gate so long that you've learned the first name of your gate agent as well as the names of her four cats or you've got ten minutes to get through the hundred person check-in line, the security chute, and the twenty acre jog to your gate. Thankfully I've never missed a flight, except that one time when there was some confusion over what day midnight meant. So I'd rather be bored than stranded.
It used to be (yes I've gotten old enough that I've started referring to things like that) that your bags, yes plural, would be put on the plane at no extra cost. It was part of the ticket price. Along with drinks and possibly a meal. Now everything costs extra and ticket prices aren't any lower. Want to check a bag? $25. Want some M&Ms? $4. Pretty soon they'll put a credit card swipe on the bathroom door. $2 for Number 1. $4 for Number 2. The part I don't understand is that initially the added cost was attributed to the rising gas prices. Fuel was reaching record high prices so in order to cover the cost airlines needed to make extra money somewhere. Well fuel prices are back down to what they were a few years ago, but I'm still paying for my bag. However, I've seen people take their two bags through security and to the gate where eventually the attendant announces if you have more than one bag they'll check it at the gate with no extra charge. So they're essentially rewarding people tenacious enough to have held onto their bags and refused to pay the extra cash.
There are a few types of people you'll always seem to run into while traveling. Usually you'll see them at security because they're right in front of you. You can get:
The Angry Guy - This guy must have a pine cone wedged in his ass because everything is a personal affront to him. The family in front of him who has the nerve to need a few extra minutes to take a child out of the stroller before putting it in the X-ray machine makes him groan. The old woman who is on oxygen and shuffling along in a walker pisses him off. This is the guy who's so mad at everyone else he doesn't realize that everyone is required to take off their shoes. They don't care if there isn't any metal in them. That's not what they're looking for.
The Jewelry Encrusted Lady - This woman is unaware of how to dress for air travel. I appreciate that people want to look good when they're out in public. If you want to wear as many necklaces as Mr. T while going to the mall, good for you. I'll be sure to mock you in private later. But if you're about to pass through something called a METAL detector then having your entire jewelry collection on isn't the brightest move. The best part is these women also have a tendency to talk about the pieces of jewelry as they're removing them. This was given to me by...yeah don't care lady. See where The Angry Guy gets his start?
The Clueless One - Everyone is standing at the gate ready to board. The attendant hasn't started calling rows yet. There could be a line formed for the eventual race to your seats, if you happen to be flying on an airline that doesn't assign seats. This person comes bumbling from out of nowhere, oblivious to the fifty people standing in a line, or a queue if you're from out of country. They walk straight up to the attendant and try to hand their boarding pass over. "We're only boarding rows 15-23. Please if you're not seated in these rows move aside so that other people who have learned to count can proceed to their seats" Why is there such a rush to get to your seat? Is anyone in a hurry to get into a cramped seat and breath in recycled fart air?
Oh and one more: Men who call their wives mother. It's not so much a class of person, but I really just find that to be creepy.
I know the airlines can be fined by either the city or the FAA for not leaving on time so it's in the airline's best interest to actually depart when they say. The problem is departing means only having to pull away from the gate. It doesn't mean they have to be in the air. I've been in planes that taxi for no less than thirty minutes. They've driven long enough that they could be back at my house and could have picked me up on the way. I could have avoided all the hassle I just mentioned.
When I fly I always try to get an exit row. Not because I'm a hero or anything, but because the exit rows normally have just a little bit more leg room. They could easily remove an entire row of seats and give everyone on the plane an extra two inches and still manage to operate in the negative like they do now. I always find it comforting when sitting in the exit row when the attendant comes by and asks for a verbal confirmation that you're willing to perform the safety duties in the event of an emergency. If by duties you mean I'm willing to open the door and get the hell out of a plane carrying 64,000 gallons of soon to be exploding jet fuel, then yeah I'm willing. Can I get a couple of those little bottles of Jack Daniels while we're negotiating what's all required?
I'm usually a pretty quiet traveler. It's just part of my general disdain for people I don't know. If I don't know you, then chances are I don't want to know you. Still I could be wearing headphones, leaning against the window, and reading my book, but if I make even the slightest bit of eye contact with someone I've suddenly become their new bestest travel buddy. They want to know where I'm traveling to. Do I live there? Who you going to see? I swear a CIA interrogator has fewer questions.
If you've ever flown on little planes or come into Denver from the west you know that landing is the most exciting part of the actual flight. Due to some tricks of air pressure surrounding the Rocky Mountains the plane will inevitably drop about a thousand feet in a matter of seconds. Then it will happen again. After about the second time the co-pilot (whatever happened to the navigator? I always liked him best) will come on and say something in a rather chipper voice "This is Lt Colonel Gantry and we're experiencing a slight bit of turbulence so I'm going to ask you to put on your seat belt in case we run into any more" Thanks for the warning as I'm wearing the rest of my Jack and Coke. My seat belt didn't protect me from a drink in the face. And flying in on a little plane is the worst. Not only can you feel every bump, but I swear those pilots are cowboys. They must be the guys no one trusts to fly the 747, but can't fire because he's the only one willing to fly the puddle jumper back and forth from LA to Vegas. These are the guys you know are in the cockpit having a blast as they drop out of the sky like an anvil, giving everyone the fantastic sensation of zero G for 2.6 seconds.
So you've landed and there's another twenty minute taxi back to the airport. Sometimes I wonder if they've landed in the same zip code as the terminal. No matter where you're sitting there will always be someone who takes twice as long as humanly possible to get up from their seat, get their bag from the overhead bin, retrieve their coat, and start putting one foot in front of the other to get off the plane. I've sat in the first row and still managed to get stuck behind someone who was desperately trying to unwedge their bag. They're shocked that it's stuck even though when they were getting on then spent a good five minutes beating it into place like they were tenderizing a steak.
I've been traveling with the same suitcase since I graduated from high school. It's bag my dad gave me as a graduation present and it's worked for me all this time. Besides being an actual suitcase and not one of those lame half a bag/half a purse things, it's very easy to spot due to the wear and tear it's taken over the years. I've noticed that unless your bag is on fire, it will look like at least five other bags on the carousel. There will always be that person who goes up to your bag (often as you're reaching for it) and checks the tag because they can't quite remember if their bag was navy blue or emerald green. I've actually had it happen once where someone pulled my bag from the carousel and I had to convince them that I was in fact the owner. Want me to open it up and show you my underwear because I'll do it. I have no shame.
No matter what time you exit the terminal, if you're looking for a shuttle, it just left. The next one should be along in about fifteen minutes. I've never walked out of the airport only to find the shuttle just pulling up, as though it were a friend with fantastic timing. If you are lucky enough to have a friend pick you up from the airport, get in quick before airport security starts wondering if you bear a striking resemblance to that Interpol terrorist everyone is talking about. And thank you for flying with us. We hope to see you again.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Words Fail Me
I need a word that describes the taste you get when you're thinking about lemonade, but instead take a drink of milk.
Monday, November 9, 2009
Words Fail Me
I need a word for when you're listening to the radio and all the stations except one have commercials. So you listen to that one station regardless of the music until it too goes to commercial. When you switch to another station you find that one of your favorite songs is just ending and they're about to go into a commercial break.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Words Fail Me
I need a word for when you've just finished doing the laundry, go to take it out of the dryer and immediately drop something on the floor.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
On Wasted Opportunities
It's become almost expected that a video game based on a movie is going to be horrible. Still people rush out to buy G.I. Joe: The Video Game because they want to be able to play as their favorite character from the movie. Well not that movie because it was like watching puppies get murdered for an hour and a half. It's been said that in certain situations just before you die there is this level of calm that passes over you. You're ready to die. At 22 minutes into that movie I felt that and it scared me a little because I didn't want to be ready to die. This movie and everything associated with it (even the collector cups) is a perfect example of a wasted opportunity.
Before I talk about the movie itself, video games based on movies are a strange thing these days. It's become this weird circle of loathing. It's expected that the game will be bad, often times the game is bad, people buy the game anyway, and then complain about video games based on movies being bad. I wonder if the developers accept this and that allows for the quality to stay in the toilet. It's very much like the example I used in Stolen Opportunities. There must be some level of success because there's no end to bad video game/movie tie-ins.
G.I. Joe has been around (at least in its most recognizable form) since the early 80s. It allowed boys to play with dolls by calling them action figures and making them smaller than Barbie. He came with tiny accessories and weapons. Each one had a different job or specialty. Wait, how is this not a doll? Anyway. For years there had been talk of a live action movie showing how Joe would protect America's freedom from the faceless bad guys known as Cobra. The problem of course was that war isn't exactly kid friendly, especially when America has been in an armed conflict every decade since WWII.
Finally after it was shown that various "kid" properties like X-Men, Spider-Man, and Transformers could be insanely successful, they started working on the live action movie everyone (and by everyone I mean those who owned the toys and could name every character to this day) was expecting. Fast forwarding past all the signs and portents that indicated something about this movie wasn't quite right, the film is released. Shockingly the thing was a disaster and millions of fanboys, who had been waiting their entire lives for a real movie, wept.
The really sad part isn't just that the movie was bad. It's that if they had taken it a little more seriously and thought about establishing something that could last, the movie might have been ok. There are no illusions about a movie called G.I. Joe being remembered like Citizen Kane, but it could have been something remembered fondly and possibly opened the door to a new generation of fans. Instead they made it into some half-ass cartoony spectacle that even children don't want to watch. So now G.I. Joe will go quietly back into the realm of nostalgia.
It's not just franchises that waste their chances. Individual actors do it too. Not being an actor I have no idea what it must be like to be struggling to stay in the spotlight before your 15 minutes is up. Look at some of the Academy Award winners who have just squandered their potential by making terrible movies. Tommy Lee Jones won in 1994 and by the next year he was playing Two-Face in Batman Forever. After that he went on to play various roles in several forgettable movies. In 1996 Cuba Gooding Jr won and since then he's starred in movies like Chill Factor, Rat Race, and Snow Dogs.
Now I get that having the statue doesn't mean you get to just pick and choose, but I have to imagine it has some pull. When Meryl Streep won her award for Sophie's Choice, there's no doubt she was offered ridiculous roles for female buddy movies or the chance to star with a talking donkey. The difference was that she didn't take them. Instead of wasting that limited amount of time she continued to make quality movies. Well until she made She-Devil, but that was a one-time mistake in judgement.
There are several young actors out there who showed promise at possibly being very good, but instead they wander off to do something else. Ashton Kutcher is one I think of. He was good on his television show. He made a couple movies that showed he could act. Instead of going with this he went with the safe play, made some movies where the plot and characters were interchangeable with each other and is now selling cameras. Maybe this is actually genius, for right now. He's probably making a ton of movie just lounging around for minimal work. The question is, as an actor what is he going to do in 5 or 10 years? The shelf life for young actors is always so short, so it seems like a mistake to be wasting it on showing us practical jokes.
I get that in the entertainment business it's probably better to take the money and run than try to make a serious living at it. It's possible that most people get into it not really caring if they make a quality product. They just want the movie associated with it so they can be famous for a little while. That just makes us, the audience, that much more quick to dismiss someone when they come along. Eventually our attention span will be calculated in nanoseconds.
Before I talk about the movie itself, video games based on movies are a strange thing these days. It's become this weird circle of loathing. It's expected that the game will be bad, often times the game is bad, people buy the game anyway, and then complain about video games based on movies being bad. I wonder if the developers accept this and that allows for the quality to stay in the toilet. It's very much like the example I used in Stolen Opportunities. There must be some level of success because there's no end to bad video game/movie tie-ins.
G.I. Joe has been around (at least in its most recognizable form) since the early 80s. It allowed boys to play with dolls by calling them action figures and making them smaller than Barbie. He came with tiny accessories and weapons. Each one had a different job or specialty. Wait, how is this not a doll? Anyway. For years there had been talk of a live action movie showing how Joe would protect America's freedom from the faceless bad guys known as Cobra. The problem of course was that war isn't exactly kid friendly, especially when America has been in an armed conflict every decade since WWII.
Finally after it was shown that various "kid" properties like X-Men, Spider-Man, and Transformers could be insanely successful, they started working on the live action movie everyone (and by everyone I mean those who owned the toys and could name every character to this day) was expecting. Fast forwarding past all the signs and portents that indicated something about this movie wasn't quite right, the film is released. Shockingly the thing was a disaster and millions of fanboys, who had been waiting their entire lives for a real movie, wept.
The really sad part isn't just that the movie was bad. It's that if they had taken it a little more seriously and thought about establishing something that could last, the movie might have been ok. There are no illusions about a movie called G.I. Joe being remembered like Citizen Kane, but it could have been something remembered fondly and possibly opened the door to a new generation of fans. Instead they made it into some half-ass cartoony spectacle that even children don't want to watch. So now G.I. Joe will go quietly back into the realm of nostalgia.
It's not just franchises that waste their chances. Individual actors do it too. Not being an actor I have no idea what it must be like to be struggling to stay in the spotlight before your 15 minutes is up. Look at some of the Academy Award winners who have just squandered their potential by making terrible movies. Tommy Lee Jones won in 1994 and by the next year he was playing Two-Face in Batman Forever. After that he went on to play various roles in several forgettable movies. In 1996 Cuba Gooding Jr won and since then he's starred in movies like Chill Factor, Rat Race, and Snow Dogs.
Now I get that having the statue doesn't mean you get to just pick and choose, but I have to imagine it has some pull. When Meryl Streep won her award for Sophie's Choice, there's no doubt she was offered ridiculous roles for female buddy movies or the chance to star with a talking donkey. The difference was that she didn't take them. Instead of wasting that limited amount of time she continued to make quality movies. Well until she made She-Devil, but that was a one-time mistake in judgement.
There are several young actors out there who showed promise at possibly being very good, but instead they wander off to do something else. Ashton Kutcher is one I think of. He was good on his television show. He made a couple movies that showed he could act. Instead of going with this he went with the safe play, made some movies where the plot and characters were interchangeable with each other and is now selling cameras. Maybe this is actually genius, for right now. He's probably making a ton of movie just lounging around for minimal work. The question is, as an actor what is he going to do in 5 or 10 years? The shelf life for young actors is always so short, so it seems like a mistake to be wasting it on showing us practical jokes.
I get that in the entertainment business it's probably better to take the money and run than try to make a serious living at it. It's possible that most people get into it not really caring if they make a quality product. They just want the movie associated with it so they can be famous for a little while. That just makes us, the audience, that much more quick to dismiss someone when they come along. Eventually our attention span will be calculated in nanoseconds.
Monday, October 19, 2009
On Stolen Opportunities
In college I had a business teacher who owned a used car dealership. He told us that too often car salesmen go for the quick sale at the expense of the customer. This wasn't something he wanted at his dealership because once the sale was made that person would never come back. Instead he would treat the customer fair and rather than just buying one car, they would come back over the years buying several. I don't know if those days are gone. Loyalty like that may be some nostalgic idea that no longer works in today's world.
Looking at the movie industry it's apparent that most times there isn't any concern with longevity, but rather just the immediate profit. If the first movie is successful then a sequel is drafted with one of two possible motives: A) Continue the story in a logical and progressive way that builds on what was already established while managing to bring something new to the screen. Or B) Profit off the success of the first movie and possibly create a hook for additional sequels. Now both can be true, but very few tend to pull that off. There's a certain robots from outer space movie from this past summer that comes to mind. The first movie was entertaining, as much as one could expect from something based on a toy line from the 80s. The second movie, however, felt like a street crime. You're not even sure what's happening at first, but next thing you know your money is gone and you're going to spend hours trying to recover from the incident. In the movie's defense, it's made a lot of money. It's made much more money than a movie of that quality should. Rotten Tomatoes has it listed at 19% and yet it managed to make over $400 million. How is it that only 1 out of 5 people liked the movie, but it was one of the highest grossing movies of 2009?
The point isn't to bash this movie in particular. Rather it's about what this movie and movies like it represent. If you were to ask the critics if this movie was a success they would say no. It failed on several levels and will ultimately forgotten among the other mindless action pictures. Now if you asked the studio or director if it was a success, they would say of course. It more than made back the cost to make it. Enough so that they're already working on another movie. This movie has entered into a slightly strange netherworld of success. On one hand it's considered to be a terrible movie in terms of storytelling. On the other it's a financial success. So which is it really?
Let's try an example. You're working for a software company and just completed a large project. The whole thing has taken a lot of time, effort, and money to finish. The software ships and millions of units are sold, but 80% of the people who buy it can't stand what it does for them. They can't return the software once it's been opened so they're left with feeling unsatisfied. Is your software successful? Maybe in the immediate present it is because you've got the money in hand. The problem is the next time you go to release something whether or not if anyone is going to bother. Your last outing felt like being gang raped by rabid monkeys so why would anyone shell out money again?
I recently read an article that talked about the disaster that was Batman & Robin. It went on to say that despite being a terrible movie, it was one of the most important comic book movies ever made. It was so bad that it actually caused lasting change throughout the entire genre. There is a demotivational poster called Mistakes that says "It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others." That is what Batman & Robin has become. It's a cautionary tale to other filmmakers. The movie was both a critical and financial flop. What would have happened if it had made a ton of money? People may have hated it, but someone was paying to see it. Would the lesson still have been learned?
I think the sequel can be more important than the original depending on the motive behind it. In movies it can establish a franchise. In music it can show that a band's success wasn't just a one time thing. It's when the second one is done solely to capitalize on the success of the first that things start to fall apart. I could make up some numbers about the number of fans lost after the second movie, but it's hard to know. People can be strangely forgiving about their entertainment.
Looking at the movie industry it's apparent that most times there isn't any concern with longevity, but rather just the immediate profit. If the first movie is successful then a sequel is drafted with one of two possible motives: A) Continue the story in a logical and progressive way that builds on what was already established while managing to bring something new to the screen. Or B) Profit off the success of the first movie and possibly create a hook for additional sequels. Now both can be true, but very few tend to pull that off. There's a certain robots from outer space movie from this past summer that comes to mind. The first movie was entertaining, as much as one could expect from something based on a toy line from the 80s. The second movie, however, felt like a street crime. You're not even sure what's happening at first, but next thing you know your money is gone and you're going to spend hours trying to recover from the incident. In the movie's defense, it's made a lot of money. It's made much more money than a movie of that quality should. Rotten Tomatoes has it listed at 19% and yet it managed to make over $400 million. How is it that only 1 out of 5 people liked the movie, but it was one of the highest grossing movies of 2009?
The point isn't to bash this movie in particular. Rather it's about what this movie and movies like it represent. If you were to ask the critics if this movie was a success they would say no. It failed on several levels and will ultimately forgotten among the other mindless action pictures. Now if you asked the studio or director if it was a success, they would say of course. It more than made back the cost to make it. Enough so that they're already working on another movie. This movie has entered into a slightly strange netherworld of success. On one hand it's considered to be a terrible movie in terms of storytelling. On the other it's a financial success. So which is it really?
Let's try an example. You're working for a software company and just completed a large project. The whole thing has taken a lot of time, effort, and money to finish. The software ships and millions of units are sold, but 80% of the people who buy it can't stand what it does for them. They can't return the software once it's been opened so they're left with feeling unsatisfied. Is your software successful? Maybe in the immediate present it is because you've got the money in hand. The problem is the next time you go to release something whether or not if anyone is going to bother. Your last outing felt like being gang raped by rabid monkeys so why would anyone shell out money again?
I recently read an article that talked about the disaster that was Batman & Robin. It went on to say that despite being a terrible movie, it was one of the most important comic book movies ever made. It was so bad that it actually caused lasting change throughout the entire genre. There is a demotivational poster called Mistakes that says "It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others." That is what Batman & Robin has become. It's a cautionary tale to other filmmakers. The movie was both a critical and financial flop. What would have happened if it had made a ton of money? People may have hated it, but someone was paying to see it. Would the lesson still have been learned?
I think the sequel can be more important than the original depending on the motive behind it. In movies it can establish a franchise. In music it can show that a band's success wasn't just a one time thing. It's when the second one is done solely to capitalize on the success of the first that things start to fall apart. I could make up some numbers about the number of fans lost after the second movie, but it's hard to know. People can be strangely forgiving about their entertainment.
Sunday, October 11, 2009
On Drag Me To Hell
I originally wrote this review for a friend back when the movie first came out. Apparently I'm one of five people who went to see this movie in the theater. With it being released on DVD hopefully people will find it among the rubble that is new releases.
I should start off this review with the fact that I'm a pretty big fan of Sam Raimi. Anyone who allows Gene Hackman to shoot and kill Leonardo DiCaprio is a genius in my book. Given that, I haven't been all that happy with his Spider-Man movies. Raimi does better when he's given more freedom and that just don't seem to be the case with his Marvel movies. So it was nice to hear he was coming back to horror, even if it's only in between Spider-Man sequels.
You really have to go into this movie knowing it's going to be classic Raimi. If you are expecting a straight up horror movie or something grounded in reality, then you'll probably be thrown off for about twenty minutes or so until you can get into the right frame of mind. It's a little disarming when you get your first sight gag because you may be unsure just how serious the movie is supposed to be. The movie does have a few issues where it's not quite sure what it wants to be. Still if you can't find humor in the idea of a highly agitated demon-filled goat at a seance, then this movie might not be for you.
For the most part the black humor worked for me. There were only a few exceptions where either the joke was telegraphed too far in advance or it felt setup. Having spent a considerable amount of time around anvils as a kid, I've never seen an anvil suspended higher than eye level. So it was hard for me to buy into the fact that the main character would have one just hanging around for no apparent reason other than to be a prop.
Speaking of the characters, Alison Lohman's character felt pretty real to me. Not overly good or bad, but more like a regular person. She was somewhat self-centered and made some bad choices that led to her getting cursed in the first place. What she did wasn't even that bad, although you can really judge a person by how they treat people they don't have to be nice to. On the other hand the gypsy wasn't some frail old lady who needed some help though. She was a vindictive witch, who apparently curses anyone for even the slightest wrong doing. Her reaction to theft or being denied something is extreme. It was the equivalent of burning down someone's house because of name calling.
I actually liked Justin Long's character. He was put in the very grounded role, which I'm guessing was supposed to be the skeptic. Still it was nice having the supporting character not spend the entire movie questioning everything or do the routine act of disbelief. Well there was disbelief, but there was also a sense of trust and respect. He even says at one point in the movie, if she believes it then it doesn't matter what he believes.
Overall this movie isn't going to change the genre. It was a welcome change from the seemingly endless parade of horror remakes where brutality is mistaken for originality. This had gross out moments and geniune scares that were in just the right amount. I think if Raimi had shifted more in either the comedy or horror direction this movie might have come off as too silly for its own good. It's the balance of the two aspects that really makes it work.
I should start off this review with the fact that I'm a pretty big fan of Sam Raimi. Anyone who allows Gene Hackman to shoot and kill Leonardo DiCaprio is a genius in my book. Given that, I haven't been all that happy with his Spider-Man movies. Raimi does better when he's given more freedom and that just don't seem to be the case with his Marvel movies. So it was nice to hear he was coming back to horror, even if it's only in between Spider-Man sequels.
You really have to go into this movie knowing it's going to be classic Raimi. If you are expecting a straight up horror movie or something grounded in reality, then you'll probably be thrown off for about twenty minutes or so until you can get into the right frame of mind. It's a little disarming when you get your first sight gag because you may be unsure just how serious the movie is supposed to be. The movie does have a few issues where it's not quite sure what it wants to be. Still if you can't find humor in the idea of a highly agitated demon-filled goat at a seance, then this movie might not be for you.
For the most part the black humor worked for me. There were only a few exceptions where either the joke was telegraphed too far in advance or it felt setup. Having spent a considerable amount of time around anvils as a kid, I've never seen an anvil suspended higher than eye level. So it was hard for me to buy into the fact that the main character would have one just hanging around for no apparent reason other than to be a prop.
Speaking of the characters, Alison Lohman's character felt pretty real to me. Not overly good or bad, but more like a regular person. She was somewhat self-centered and made some bad choices that led to her getting cursed in the first place. What she did wasn't even that bad, although you can really judge a person by how they treat people they don't have to be nice to. On the other hand the gypsy wasn't some frail old lady who needed some help though. She was a vindictive witch, who apparently curses anyone for even the slightest wrong doing. Her reaction to theft or being denied something is extreme. It was the equivalent of burning down someone's house because of name calling.
I actually liked Justin Long's character. He was put in the very grounded role, which I'm guessing was supposed to be the skeptic. Still it was nice having the supporting character not spend the entire movie questioning everything or do the routine act of disbelief. Well there was disbelief, but there was also a sense of trust and respect. He even says at one point in the movie, if she believes it then it doesn't matter what he believes.
Overall this movie isn't going to change the genre. It was a welcome change from the seemingly endless parade of horror remakes where brutality is mistaken for originality. This had gross out moments and geniune scares that were in just the right amount. I think if Raimi had shifted more in either the comedy or horror direction this movie might have come off as too silly for its own good. It's the balance of the two aspects that really makes it work.
Saturday, October 10, 2009
On Corn Dogs
Ok technically this isn't specifically about corn dogs, but what corn dogs used to mean. When I was a kid one of my favorite things were corn dogs. I didn't get to have them that often so when I did it always felt special. Something about a hot dog encased in cornbread was sheer genius. Add a handy stick that protects the fingers and my little child brain almost couldn't handle it. Thinking back about the times when I had corn dogs, I don't even know how they tasted. I only know that I loved them.
Somewhere along the way corn dogs stopped being awesome to me. I can't pinpoint a specific instance when I stopped loving them, but it happened and part of me is sad that they're just another thing that I don't seem to appreciate like I used to. It's been a couple years since I had one and the last one I had tasted like disappointment. The cornbread was hard in spots and gooey in others. The hot dog...well it tasted as good as a hot dog can taste when surrounded by a funky bread-like substance. Is it possible that corn dogs tasted different when I was a kid? Did they change or did I? They say that you're essentially a new person every seven years. At least on a cellular level anyway. So do the things we loved when we were young stand a chance at being loved by us as we get older if we're almost a completely different person the next time we try them?
Sometimes I think nostalgia must be a form of delusion. Are the memories we have actually what happened? So much of what we experience is slanted towards our own perception of the event. Things that happened could be distorted due to emotions or simply misremembering details. I suppose that could call into question what is actually reality if reality is just the collective perception of events based on the memory of them. That's a whole other bag of frogs though.
Find something that you used to love as a kid. Or even less extreme, find something you used to love ten years ago and haven't experienced since. Is it as important to you now as it was then? Try watching an old movie or television show that you haven't seen in years. How long does that warm feeling of remembering last before you start to look at it with present day eyes?
I'm not saying it's impossible to love something from your past. I just wonder how certain things move through time with us. Obviously you won't love everything in the same way as when you were eight, but what causes some people to continue loving something long after others have outgrown it?
Something like Star Wars or Star Trek is a good example. Both have influenced people long after they originally came out. Still to this day there are people who love either as much now as when they first were released. What if you had watched Star Wars once or twice and loved it, then didn't see it again for 25 years. How would it hold up compared to your memory of it? They say absence makes the heart grow fonder. It can also make it grow forgetful. Maybe it's that gap in between that causes the idea of it to be better than reality.
For me there is almost a fear of reliving certain things from my past. I'm convinced that the memory of it is going to screw up my expectations of what it will be like today. Is it better to let some things just stay a pleasant memory?
Somewhere along the way corn dogs stopped being awesome to me. I can't pinpoint a specific instance when I stopped loving them, but it happened and part of me is sad that they're just another thing that I don't seem to appreciate like I used to. It's been a couple years since I had one and the last one I had tasted like disappointment. The cornbread was hard in spots and gooey in others. The hot dog...well it tasted as good as a hot dog can taste when surrounded by a funky bread-like substance. Is it possible that corn dogs tasted different when I was a kid? Did they change or did I? They say that you're essentially a new person every seven years. At least on a cellular level anyway. So do the things we loved when we were young stand a chance at being loved by us as we get older if we're almost a completely different person the next time we try them?
Sometimes I think nostalgia must be a form of delusion. Are the memories we have actually what happened? So much of what we experience is slanted towards our own perception of the event. Things that happened could be distorted due to emotions or simply misremembering details. I suppose that could call into question what is actually reality if reality is just the collective perception of events based on the memory of them. That's a whole other bag of frogs though.
Find something that you used to love as a kid. Or even less extreme, find something you used to love ten years ago and haven't experienced since. Is it as important to you now as it was then? Try watching an old movie or television show that you haven't seen in years. How long does that warm feeling of remembering last before you start to look at it with present day eyes?
I'm not saying it's impossible to love something from your past. I just wonder how certain things move through time with us. Obviously you won't love everything in the same way as when you were eight, but what causes some people to continue loving something long after others have outgrown it?
Something like Star Wars or Star Trek is a good example. Both have influenced people long after they originally came out. Still to this day there are people who love either as much now as when they first were released. What if you had watched Star Wars once or twice and loved it, then didn't see it again for 25 years. How would it hold up compared to your memory of it? They say absence makes the heart grow fonder. It can also make it grow forgetful. Maybe it's that gap in between that causes the idea of it to be better than reality.
For me there is almost a fear of reliving certain things from my past. I'm convinced that the memory of it is going to screw up my expectations of what it will be like today. Is it better to let some things just stay a pleasant memory?
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Word Fail Me
I need a word that describes that feeling when you look at a flame or red hot oven burner and can't help but want to touch it even though every time you've done so in the past has resulted in horrible burns.
On Oil
A long time ago I saw this movie with William H Macy called The Water Engine. Based on David Mamet's 1977 play, it's the story of an inventor who has created a carburetor that runs on water. When he tries to patent the engine things start to go wrong. Even though it was set in the 1930s, there was still this push to make sure that oil was the primary fuel source. Eventually the inventor is killed and the engine itself is lost thanks to the oil companies. It was an interesting story about how a naive inventor thought he could just create something that would change the world. He didn't realize that some people don't want the world to change.
The next time I saw something about the water engine was in the short-lived X-Files spin off, The Lone Gunmen. They were searching for the mythical water-powered car. And the end of the episode the person they thought was helping them was working to make sure the water engine never was given to the public. Her motives for doing this weren't as monetarily based as the oil companies in the movie. Instead she was keeping the water engine a secret because imagine a world where cars run on water. It seems like a great idea in theory. Our primary source of fuel is based on something from a few hundred million years ago and when we run out, there isn't any more. With about 70% of the Earth covered in water it would seem like an almost endless source of fuel. So what would our oceans, lakes, and rivers be like if we were trying to feed our cars and machinery? It's predicted by 2020 there will be over a billion motor vehicles on the planet. Imagine if they all ran on a cheap fuel that ran clean? There could be double that in half the time. Maybe an engine that runs on water isn't such a great thing after all.
In 1999 Honda released its first hybrid car called the Insight. Its fuel efficiency was rated as high as 70 mpg on the highway. Ten years later and the highest numbers come from the Prius and Civic. The Prius at 48 mpg actually gets better mileage in the city than the Civic's 45 mpg highway. Most other hybrid cars can barely top out at 40 mpg. It's 2009. How is it that we're supposed to be excited that a hybrid can barely get 40 mpg? The automobile has been around for 140 years and the absolute best we can look forward to is 48 mpg. Something about that just seems wrong. Shouldn't the numbers be higher already?
I'm not an oil baron (if they even still have those anymore) so I can't really understand what it's like to have everything I own based on the profit of oil. Still oil production in America is over a 150 years old. There is potentially a lot of oil left to squeeze out of the Earth. Those who are making billions today will most likely continue to make billions tomorrow. The part I can't figure out though is why it seems like both the automotive manufacturers and oil companies (I guess energy companies might be more accurate) are dragging their feet when it comes to new technology. Given the resources of someone like Exxon, shouldn't they be leading the charge when it comes to new technology? And not just in oil refinement, but modern energy. Imagine if Shell Oil created some new kind of fuel cell that reduced our need for oil? Notice I didn't say ended our need. Reduced. Anyone who thinks that oil usage is going to go away anytime soon is deluding themselves. And maybe that's where the feet dragging comes from. Oil companies fearing that if they revolutionize fuel efficiency they'll essentially be killing their profits. I suppose it's the safe play to just keep doing what worked for the last century rather than innovate. Problem with that is eventually the need for oil will go away, either because we just don't have enough or because some other fuel comes along. When that happens those who cling to the old ideas are going to get crushed in the switch.
It's interesting that Mamet wrote his play not too long after the Emergency Highway Conservation Act was passed. This is what gave us the speed limit of 55 mph. The speed limit acting as a band-aid to the oil crisis of 1973 where OPEC essentially decided to stop sending us oil. Combined with the stock market crash there was a sort of panic that things were crumbling. In an attempt to make sure the oil on hand could last as long as possible gas rationing was implemented. Even with this there were lines and stations without fuel. This was in the early 70s. If people were panicking then what's it going to be like tomorrow? There's less oil now than 30 years ago.
There's this thing called Hubbert peak theory that predicted United States oil production would peak between 1965 and 1970. After that it would be harder to produce petroleum and there would always be less of it. There was criticism of this theory because it tended to be too simplistic and thanks to the strict gas rationing Hubbert's original numbers were off. The general idea holds true, even if the date isn't exact. The guy wrote his original paper back in 1956. Even then he understood what was coming. As predicted we reached our peak and ever since have been on the decline.
Fifty years ago it was predicted that oil production would begin to fall. Thanks to his handy little bell curve graph it looked like the very end of oil wouldn't be for another 200 years. Apparently that is reason enough to not move very fast on coming up with some alternatives. If you're an oil executive you know that with 200 years to spare even your great great grandchildren can be rich off oil.
The problem is just because there's a drop of oil left in the ground, doesn't mean it's going to be easy to get to. If everyone else is running off the same information then they have to know before too long it'll be worth fighting over. We're fighting over oil interests now and according to the charts we still have a couple centuries before things go completely dry. What's it going to be like when we're on the downward slide of that bell curve and the peak is a distant memory to anyone still alive? I guess we can look forward to the Texaco Army in a stand off with the British Petroleum Militia.
The next time I saw something about the water engine was in the short-lived X-Files spin off, The Lone Gunmen. They were searching for the mythical water-powered car. And the end of the episode the person they thought was helping them was working to make sure the water engine never was given to the public. Her motives for doing this weren't as monetarily based as the oil companies in the movie. Instead she was keeping the water engine a secret because imagine a world where cars run on water. It seems like a great idea in theory. Our primary source of fuel is based on something from a few hundred million years ago and when we run out, there isn't any more. With about 70% of the Earth covered in water it would seem like an almost endless source of fuel. So what would our oceans, lakes, and rivers be like if we were trying to feed our cars and machinery? It's predicted by 2020 there will be over a billion motor vehicles on the planet. Imagine if they all ran on a cheap fuel that ran clean? There could be double that in half the time. Maybe an engine that runs on water isn't such a great thing after all.
In 1999 Honda released its first hybrid car called the Insight. Its fuel efficiency was rated as high as 70 mpg on the highway. Ten years later and the highest numbers come from the Prius and Civic. The Prius at 48 mpg actually gets better mileage in the city than the Civic's 45 mpg highway. Most other hybrid cars can barely top out at 40 mpg. It's 2009. How is it that we're supposed to be excited that a hybrid can barely get 40 mpg? The automobile has been around for 140 years and the absolute best we can look forward to is 48 mpg. Something about that just seems wrong. Shouldn't the numbers be higher already?
I'm not an oil baron (if they even still have those anymore) so I can't really understand what it's like to have everything I own based on the profit of oil. Still oil production in America is over a 150 years old. There is potentially a lot of oil left to squeeze out of the Earth. Those who are making billions today will most likely continue to make billions tomorrow. The part I can't figure out though is why it seems like both the automotive manufacturers and oil companies (I guess energy companies might be more accurate) are dragging their feet when it comes to new technology. Given the resources of someone like Exxon, shouldn't they be leading the charge when it comes to new technology? And not just in oil refinement, but modern energy. Imagine if Shell Oil created some new kind of fuel cell that reduced our need for oil? Notice I didn't say ended our need. Reduced. Anyone who thinks that oil usage is going to go away anytime soon is deluding themselves. And maybe that's where the feet dragging comes from. Oil companies fearing that if they revolutionize fuel efficiency they'll essentially be killing their profits. I suppose it's the safe play to just keep doing what worked for the last century rather than innovate. Problem with that is eventually the need for oil will go away, either because we just don't have enough or because some other fuel comes along. When that happens those who cling to the old ideas are going to get crushed in the switch.
It's interesting that Mamet wrote his play not too long after the Emergency Highway Conservation Act was passed. This is what gave us the speed limit of 55 mph. The speed limit acting as a band-aid to the oil crisis of 1973 where OPEC essentially decided to stop sending us oil. Combined with the stock market crash there was a sort of panic that things were crumbling. In an attempt to make sure the oil on hand could last as long as possible gas rationing was implemented. Even with this there were lines and stations without fuel. This was in the early 70s. If people were panicking then what's it going to be like tomorrow? There's less oil now than 30 years ago.
There's this thing called Hubbert peak theory that predicted United States oil production would peak between 1965 and 1970. After that it would be harder to produce petroleum and there would always be less of it. There was criticism of this theory because it tended to be too simplistic and thanks to the strict gas rationing Hubbert's original numbers were off. The general idea holds true, even if the date isn't exact. The guy wrote his original paper back in 1956. Even then he understood what was coming. As predicted we reached our peak and ever since have been on the decline.
Fifty years ago it was predicted that oil production would begin to fall. Thanks to his handy little bell curve graph it looked like the very end of oil wouldn't be for another 200 years. Apparently that is reason enough to not move very fast on coming up with some alternatives. If you're an oil executive you know that with 200 years to spare even your great great grandchildren can be rich off oil.
The problem is just because there's a drop of oil left in the ground, doesn't mean it's going to be easy to get to. If everyone else is running off the same information then they have to know before too long it'll be worth fighting over. We're fighting over oil interests now and according to the charts we still have a couple centuries before things go completely dry. What's it going to be like when we're on the downward slide of that bell curve and the peak is a distant memory to anyone still alive? I guess we can look forward to the Texaco Army in a stand off with the British Petroleum Militia.
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
On Believing the Hype
We've all seen it. There is a movie that you're not quite sure about or maybe one that you're convinced is a train wreck. Then the second weekend commercials come out. They try to convince you to come in and see it by showing you all the highlights. This is when they usually hit you with the one or two word rave "reviews". Rolling Stone says it's "hilarious". Chicago Sun Times finds it to be "thought provoking". Random blog person found it to be "charming". And as usual, Clive Barker says it's the scariest movie he's seen in the last five minutes.
I'm not saying these are outright lies, but they're taking a review and truncating it to a single word. Even if the review is only two words long, it's still a 50% cut in content. I know for a 30 second TV spot you can't really do much more than flash a single word every five seconds and tickle the movie-goer's G-spot and hope it's enough to draw them to the theater. This tactic just allows for a lot of abuse and manipulation. Just to prove my point I'm going to hype some movies using excerpts from real reviews. One of these is actually from a positive review of a movie. Let's see what happens.
Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever
TV Guide calls it "Genuine"
"You'll be pleased" says The Boston Globe
"Perfect" - LA Times
Master of Disguise
"Phenomenal" - View London
Battlefield Earth
Variety says it's "Inspired" and "Destined for greatness"
Good Luck Chuck
"Hilarious" - Empire Magazine
Catwoman
The Bangor Daily News says it's "Genuinely clever"
Speed 2: Cruise Control
The Washington Post finds it to be "Entertaining" with "Hair-raising excitement"
All but one of those movies got single digit reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, meaning less than 10% of the people who saw the movie found it to be anywhere close to entertaining.
The poor bastards who have to market terrible movies have a tough time. It's their job to make you believe that 100 million dollar suckathon (not the good kind) is worth your money. In most cases just trust your instincts. If it looks bad then skip it and read a damn book for a change. If you can't decide just let me know and I'll tell you if you're an idiot for thinking about seeing shit.
I'm not saying these are outright lies, but they're taking a review and truncating it to a single word. Even if the review is only two words long, it's still a 50% cut in content. I know for a 30 second TV spot you can't really do much more than flash a single word every five seconds and tickle the movie-goer's G-spot and hope it's enough to draw them to the theater. This tactic just allows for a lot of abuse and manipulation. Just to prove my point I'm going to hype some movies using excerpts from real reviews. One of these is actually from a positive review of a movie. Let's see what happens.
Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever
TV Guide calls it "Genuine"
"You'll be pleased" says The Boston Globe
"Perfect" - LA Times
Master of Disguise
"Phenomenal" - View London
Battlefield Earth
Variety says it's "Inspired" and "Destined for greatness"
Good Luck Chuck
"Hilarious" - Empire Magazine
Catwoman
The Bangor Daily News says it's "Genuinely clever"
Speed 2: Cruise Control
The Washington Post finds it to be "Entertaining" with "Hair-raising excitement"
All but one of those movies got single digit reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, meaning less than 10% of the people who saw the movie found it to be anywhere close to entertaining.
The poor bastards who have to market terrible movies have a tough time. It's their job to make you believe that 100 million dollar suckathon (not the good kind) is worth your money. In most cases just trust your instincts. If it looks bad then skip it and read a damn book for a change. If you can't decide just let me know and I'll tell you if you're an idiot for thinking about seeing shit.
Monday, October 5, 2009
Words Fail Me
I need a name for that flavor you get when you've brushed your teeth and idiotically take a swig of grapefruit juice immediately afterward.
On Cash Cows and Dead Horses
I understand in the various forms of entertainment the true goal is to make money. Quality sometimes takes a backseat to the sheer quantity. Actually sometimes I don't even think quality is in the same car. Just look at Transformers 2. Bigger explosions. Megan Fox gets more screen time to look all hot and slutty. Oh and there are about five times as many robots bouncing around on screen. Those things don't make up for the fact that there's almost no coherent story. All that matters is that there was more! Despite the fact that the movie was generally considered to be an ocular rape, they've already started working on the third movie. I can't really blame them though. It's made over 400 million dollars. Obviously someone was watching it. So there will be a Transformers 3 and depending on how that does, probably another one. They are going to ride that franchise as long as they can squeeze out another nickle. Which means it'll be ridden straight into the ground at full speed. Think Batman & Robin.
I get the desire to make money and that things move quickly out of the collective consciousness so one has to always be a step or two ahead. What I don't get is there seems to be no foresight as to what's going to happen when the hot property of today becomes so over saturated it's nearly radioactive.
Let's start with something simple like zombies. Now I like zombies as much as the next person and believe that it touches on some of our basic fear of people. Zombies aren't a new idea. You could say it started with Frankenstein. While the monster isn't exactly a zombie like we think of today, the general concept was there. Even the original story I Am Legend built on what we know about zombies. George Romero said that Richard Matheson's story was a major influence to his own Night of the Living Dead. His movie came out in 1968 and pretty much set the standard for zombies. Shoot them in the head! The 70s and 80s saw plenty of zombie movies, but things tapered off and by the 90s it was just another obscure sub genre.
During the 90s our horror was driven by monsters and unstoppable serial killers. Then came 9/11 and we had something new to be afraid of. People who looked like normal people, but were actually out to hurt us. You couldn't tell who was just a normal person and who was secretly plotting your death. Suddenly the zombie genre was back. It fed on our fear of other people. Next thing you know there was an endless parade of zombie movies coming out. And it didn't stop there either. It was spreading. Even Stephen King took a crack at zombies with his book Cell. Zombies were showing up in Pride and Prejudice, in comic books, in survival guides, and even in a forensics guide of the living dead. Ironically zombies are everywhere.
Since I'm on the subject of horror, I can't ignore the Saw franchise. What started out as a mildly clever twist to horror has essentially become just another tired series in the torture porn genre. I saw a preview for Saw VI that said "If it's Halloween. It must be Saw." That's their promotion, that every year, regardless of quality, we're going to get another entry of traps and torture. The first movie was a different brand of horror compared to the other movies coming out at the time. The second movie built on that to some degree. After that it just became this convoluted mess of industrial strength devices designed to tear people apart while we watched. Go to Rotten Tomatoes and check out how the ratings plunged into almost single digits. It's nearly a 10% drop between movies and the first one was only ranked at 46%. It doesn't stop them from churning out another one. So by the time we get around to Saw X it'll just be 97 minutes of people getting their faces ripped off by bear traps.
This one might not be as apparent to the non-geeks out there, but Wolverine needs to go sit down with some juice and crackers and take a break. The guy is everywhere in comics. He is on several super teams and he appears in no less than three titles a month. He got to be in three X-Men movies and his own stand-alone movie. Plus he's got another one on the way, this time with more origins! I don't get it either. He's not that interesting of a character. His big claim to fame is his ability to heal from just about any injury. So I'm supposed to be impressed with the fact that if you shoot him in the face he'll just heal from it? You want to impress me, don't get shot in the face. The ability to heal from a gunshot just means he's not smart enough to avoid the damage in the first place. So really this super popular character is just a short, hairy man with unbreakable bones and some knives in his hands. You take away the knives and unbreakable bones and I've just described porn legend Ron Jeremy, who is also nicknamed after a small furry animal.
Oh and movies based on comic books. Not every comic book ever published needs to be optioned for a movie. Studios have realized there is a lot of potential to make serious money by turning comics into movies. Doesn't matter if they're any good, but they'll be sure to tap that well until it's bone dry. They're working on Spider-Man 4 now, but the original plan was to ramp up 4, 5, & 6. Now I like Spider-Man. Unlike the previously mentioned hedgehog, he has the ability to avoid bullets. Even still there is just too much of a good thing. Preplanning three movies, which will take at least six years to realize, seems like overkill. I guess the idea is that there should be a rush to make these comic movies before audiences grow tired of the genre, but they don't realize in doing so they're only speeding the process along.
There is a Lego Star Wars movie. This is a movie based on a video game based on a toy based on another movie. We've gone full circle. The only way to grind that further into the ground would be to make a Lego Star Wars: The Movie: The Video Game. The very idea of it creates this sharp spike of pain behind my left eye.
Let's talk about Twilight real quick. Oh you didn't think I could talk about dead horses without bringing up this series. Vampires are another one of my favorite sub genres. Sure we had Buffy and Blade and various books in the late 90s, but that's nothing compared to the blitz we're seeing now. Thanks to some cheesy writing about sparkly, brooding teen baseball players we're overrun with a bunch of emo vampires. Some of which are vampire in name alone. You take away the blood sucking part and what you've really got is a bunch of lazy teenagers. By the way, they don't sparkle! They burst into flame when exposed to direct sunlight. Kind of the whole point of a vampire is that they've given up the ability to walk in daylight so they can be young and live forever. Being your own nightlight is not a drawback. Now there vampires in everything. Go to your local Barnes & Noble and see how long it takes you to find the Twilight...I mean teen section. Majority of the books on display have some reference to a vampire.
The thing is a lot of these trends are being pushed because the audience for them is fickle. The Twilight books are marketed towards teenage girls. Movies based on comics are geared towards young boys and middle aged men who don't know the touch of a woman. Teenage girls grow up. Young boys turn into young idiots who can't sit still for more than five minutes unless there is a naked woman present. The point is interests change quickly so a lot of this stuff is being crammed down our throats before we have time to digest the last trend. It's like a kid eating candy until they're sick. The entire time they're eating candy it's fantastic. Then suddenly it's not. They don't sense that feeling when one more candy is going to cause them to throw up. The last one tasted good so the next one should be just as good. The problem is that people won't remember how good the candy tasted, only that in the end they got sick from it. They keep beating this horse and eventually people will hate the things they loved.
I get the desire to make money and that things move quickly out of the collective consciousness so one has to always be a step or two ahead. What I don't get is there seems to be no foresight as to what's going to happen when the hot property of today becomes so over saturated it's nearly radioactive.
Let's start with something simple like zombies. Now I like zombies as much as the next person and believe that it touches on some of our basic fear of people. Zombies aren't a new idea. You could say it started with Frankenstein. While the monster isn't exactly a zombie like we think of today, the general concept was there. Even the original story I Am Legend built on what we know about zombies. George Romero said that Richard Matheson's story was a major influence to his own Night of the Living Dead. His movie came out in 1968 and pretty much set the standard for zombies. Shoot them in the head! The 70s and 80s saw plenty of zombie movies, but things tapered off and by the 90s it was just another obscure sub genre.
During the 90s our horror was driven by monsters and unstoppable serial killers. Then came 9/11 and we had something new to be afraid of. People who looked like normal people, but were actually out to hurt us. You couldn't tell who was just a normal person and who was secretly plotting your death. Suddenly the zombie genre was back. It fed on our fear of other people. Next thing you know there was an endless parade of zombie movies coming out. And it didn't stop there either. It was spreading. Even Stephen King took a crack at zombies with his book Cell. Zombies were showing up in Pride and Prejudice, in comic books, in survival guides, and even in a forensics guide of the living dead. Ironically zombies are everywhere.
Since I'm on the subject of horror, I can't ignore the Saw franchise. What started out as a mildly clever twist to horror has essentially become just another tired series in the torture porn genre. I saw a preview for Saw VI that said "If it's Halloween. It must be Saw." That's their promotion, that every year, regardless of quality, we're going to get another entry of traps and torture. The first movie was a different brand of horror compared to the other movies coming out at the time. The second movie built on that to some degree. After that it just became this convoluted mess of industrial strength devices designed to tear people apart while we watched. Go to Rotten Tomatoes and check out how the ratings plunged into almost single digits. It's nearly a 10% drop between movies and the first one was only ranked at 46%. It doesn't stop them from churning out another one. So by the time we get around to Saw X it'll just be 97 minutes of people getting their faces ripped off by bear traps.
This one might not be as apparent to the non-geeks out there, but Wolverine needs to go sit down with some juice and crackers and take a break. The guy is everywhere in comics. He is on several super teams and he appears in no less than three titles a month. He got to be in three X-Men movies and his own stand-alone movie. Plus he's got another one on the way, this time with more origins! I don't get it either. He's not that interesting of a character. His big claim to fame is his ability to heal from just about any injury. So I'm supposed to be impressed with the fact that if you shoot him in the face he'll just heal from it? You want to impress me, don't get shot in the face. The ability to heal from a gunshot just means he's not smart enough to avoid the damage in the first place. So really this super popular character is just a short, hairy man with unbreakable bones and some knives in his hands. You take away the knives and unbreakable bones and I've just described porn legend Ron Jeremy, who is also nicknamed after a small furry animal.
Oh and movies based on comic books. Not every comic book ever published needs to be optioned for a movie. Studios have realized there is a lot of potential to make serious money by turning comics into movies. Doesn't matter if they're any good, but they'll be sure to tap that well until it's bone dry. They're working on Spider-Man 4 now, but the original plan was to ramp up 4, 5, & 6. Now I like Spider-Man. Unlike the previously mentioned hedgehog, he has the ability to avoid bullets. Even still there is just too much of a good thing. Preplanning three movies, which will take at least six years to realize, seems like overkill. I guess the idea is that there should be a rush to make these comic movies before audiences grow tired of the genre, but they don't realize in doing so they're only speeding the process along.
There is a Lego Star Wars movie. This is a movie based on a video game based on a toy based on another movie. We've gone full circle. The only way to grind that further into the ground would be to make a Lego Star Wars: The Movie: The Video Game. The very idea of it creates this sharp spike of pain behind my left eye.
Let's talk about Twilight real quick. Oh you didn't think I could talk about dead horses without bringing up this series. Vampires are another one of my favorite sub genres. Sure we had Buffy and Blade and various books in the late 90s, but that's nothing compared to the blitz we're seeing now. Thanks to some cheesy writing about sparkly, brooding teen baseball players we're overrun with a bunch of emo vampires. Some of which are vampire in name alone. You take away the blood sucking part and what you've really got is a bunch of lazy teenagers. By the way, they don't sparkle! They burst into flame when exposed to direct sunlight. Kind of the whole point of a vampire is that they've given up the ability to walk in daylight so they can be young and live forever. Being your own nightlight is not a drawback. Now there vampires in everything. Go to your local Barnes & Noble and see how long it takes you to find the Twilight...I mean teen section. Majority of the books on display have some reference to a vampire.
The thing is a lot of these trends are being pushed because the audience for them is fickle. The Twilight books are marketed towards teenage girls. Movies based on comics are geared towards young boys and middle aged men who don't know the touch of a woman. Teenage girls grow up. Young boys turn into young idiots who can't sit still for more than five minutes unless there is a naked woman present. The point is interests change quickly so a lot of this stuff is being crammed down our throats before we have time to digest the last trend. It's like a kid eating candy until they're sick. The entire time they're eating candy it's fantastic. Then suddenly it's not. They don't sense that feeling when one more candy is going to cause them to throw up. The last one tasted good so the next one should be just as good. The problem is that people won't remember how good the candy tasted, only that in the end they got sick from it. They keep beating this horse and eventually people will hate the things they loved.
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Words Fail Me
I need a word that describes when you're on your way to an interview and the first song playing on the radio as you get in the car is Highway to Hell followed by a song that has the chorus of "I'm never gonna work another day in my life"
On the TV Formula
Television is one of my closest friends. I wish I could say the friendship has been smooth sailing from the start, but there have been a lot of times where TV has really let me down. Still when I'm lonely it's always there to shower me with technicolor love. That said there are some things I wish TV would just stop doing over and over. Sure sometimes these tricks are effective. Most of the time they're tired and predictable. I know most of television's strength comes from a well used formula. Most of the time that formula is comforting and safe. Then there are the times when it becomes just another cliche. Much like that one episode of Three's Company where there is a misunderstanding. These are some of the things that TV needs to stop overusing.
The main character of the show is suddenly visited by an old friend. They could have saved their life at some point or been a mentor. Even though the show has been on for five seasons and they've never mentioned this friend before, this visitor is (or at least was) very important to the main character. During the first act the main character and friend talk about old times, just to establish that this guest star was influential. Maybe it's was an old war buddy who saved your life by dragging you through the jungle to avoid Vietcong or maybe it's a teacher who taught you everything and you see yourself to be a younger version of them. Right at the beginning of the second act there is something that causes a bit of doubt by everyone else that maybe this friend isn't 100% good. This could be something like they had an affair with a recently murdered Chinese official or their company isn't doing everything by the book. Whatever the situation the main character doesn't want to believe that their dear friend/mentor/old flame/life saver person could do something so wrong. Inevitably the old friend did in fact do whatever they're suspected of. They have their reasons that they try to convey to the main character. There are some tears and sentimental music playing in the background as the main character struggles with the sense of betrayal or thought that everything they thought was good in the world was an illusion. Then the visiting character is never heard from again.
If the visiting character was so important how about a little bit of establishment prior to the single episode where they show up, say hi, murder the witness, and then explain their actions to the main character. Instead of telling us that this visitor is so important, why not show us. And not just with old photoshop pictures of the main character looking slightly younger and happy with the friend. I've known a lot of people in my life. Some more important than others. If someone reappeared from my past for a 43 minute period to reveal that they did something amoral it wouldn't make much of an impact on my life. Now if one of my closest friends, who I see on a regular basis, suddenly told me that they are Russian spy that would be a bit more shocking. Mostly because I don't think I know anyone with that kind of dedication to a lie (other than myself). It's gotten to the point now when I see a somewhat well-known TV actor appear as a blast from the past I'm just waiting to see what the disappointment is going to be, not if it's coming.
Let's say you're a mathematical genius or have firmly established over the course of four seasons and a two hour season premiere that you're good at whatever you do. Why is it when you come up with some "crazy" theory about something everyone around you suddenly doubts the words coming out of your mouth? Never mind the fact that just last week you were able to diagnose the skin discoloration as a rare form of some Amazonian disease just by noticing the patient had a fever. This week you say something that isn't painfully obvious to everyone else and it's as if you're in the pilot episode all over again. I know it's supposed to make for good drama and everything, but these are supposed to be real characters. How can seemingly smart FBI agents or medical doctors instantly revert back to being so dumb? Now sometimes the super genius star of the show couldn't be more wrong about something and that's where the supporting cast (or ensemble cast for those with inferiority complexes) steps in to help guide things to the right conclusion. I'm really tired of things like "you're just overreacting", "there is no proof to your theory", and "I think you may be in the throes of a psychological break". Can we get a little benefit of the doubt in these situations? Half the episode is spent discussing how the main character has flipped the script, then it's realized that maybe they were onto something, only to use the final ten minutes as a way to catch everyone else up to what was initially proposed. Let's find a new way to create tension that isn't predictable.
This next one is a little more tricky. Having watched a lot of non-serial television I've started recognizing faces. The guy on an episode of West Wing also shows up on CSI. It's not like Susan Sarandon or anything. It's just another television character actor. They just happen to have a pretty good agent who's getting their face out there. So what happens now is when I see these various faces pieces of the plot are being telegraphed ahead of time. When the guy who played the viscous murderer on Numbers is now on an episode of Castle as a quiet unassuming victim it's easy to know something is up. You know the character is going to have more than one scene, even though the detectives are pursuing other leads.
Speaking of leads, most murder investigations take weeks or longer. Same thing with medical diagnostics and evidence gathering. The process is most likely mind-numbingly boring to watch. So of course with only an hour to use certain things have to be sped up a bit. We're show two to three possible leads. The first one usually goes nowhere even though all the preliminary evidence points directly to Option A. This causes the team to rethink their case and move onto the second lead. There is a little deviation at this point. Either the second lead is nothing and it moves onto the third (or fourth or fifth) option or it swings back around to Option A again, but with a twist. The wife wasn't the victim, she was the murderer! More evidence gathering or witty banter between characters and the options are narrowed down to the correct one. Case solved. No one wants to watch a show where after all the theories are tried or computer simulations run there's no definitive answer to the problem. There's a reason why homicide detectives and doctors have backlogs. Not everything get solved right away. So let's not make it too easy every time.
The last one usually tries to be the most subtle of them all. The quirky main character has some personal situation going on. Meanwhile there's a new weekly case. Everything has been tried and it seems like there's no solution. Then while talking about the personal situation something is said that triggers a thought that leads to the solution. The writer is talking to his daughter about boy troubles, the little girl in the wheelchair thinks her dog is actually a bear, or the computer simulation that's been running on the supercomputer for the last three days spits out the exact answer. That's when you realize the whole point of the personal situation was just to tie up the episode's problem. I want to see something where the thing said in this week's episode has no bearing on the immediate problem, but is actually legitimate character building for the sake of making the character more real.
Sometimes they throw a twist at you, but for the most part television doesn't try too hard to be complex. It's very much like fast food. It's quick and easy and not exactly quality food, but it gets the job done. Still I keep watching and enjoying it. I just wish they would change it up a little bit.
The main character of the show is suddenly visited by an old friend. They could have saved their life at some point or been a mentor. Even though the show has been on for five seasons and they've never mentioned this friend before, this visitor is (or at least was) very important to the main character. During the first act the main character and friend talk about old times, just to establish that this guest star was influential. Maybe it's was an old war buddy who saved your life by dragging you through the jungle to avoid Vietcong or maybe it's a teacher who taught you everything and you see yourself to be a younger version of them. Right at the beginning of the second act there is something that causes a bit of doubt by everyone else that maybe this friend isn't 100% good. This could be something like they had an affair with a recently murdered Chinese official or their company isn't doing everything by the book. Whatever the situation the main character doesn't want to believe that their dear friend/mentor/old flame/life saver person could do something so wrong. Inevitably the old friend did in fact do whatever they're suspected of. They have their reasons that they try to convey to the main character. There are some tears and sentimental music playing in the background as the main character struggles with the sense of betrayal or thought that everything they thought was good in the world was an illusion. Then the visiting character is never heard from again.
If the visiting character was so important how about a little bit of establishment prior to the single episode where they show up, say hi, murder the witness, and then explain their actions to the main character. Instead of telling us that this visitor is so important, why not show us. And not just with old photoshop pictures of the main character looking slightly younger and happy with the friend. I've known a lot of people in my life. Some more important than others. If someone reappeared from my past for a 43 minute period to reveal that they did something amoral it wouldn't make much of an impact on my life. Now if one of my closest friends, who I see on a regular basis, suddenly told me that they are Russian spy that would be a bit more shocking. Mostly because I don't think I know anyone with that kind of dedication to a lie (other than myself). It's gotten to the point now when I see a somewhat well-known TV actor appear as a blast from the past I'm just waiting to see what the disappointment is going to be, not if it's coming.
Let's say you're a mathematical genius or have firmly established over the course of four seasons and a two hour season premiere that you're good at whatever you do. Why is it when you come up with some "crazy" theory about something everyone around you suddenly doubts the words coming out of your mouth? Never mind the fact that just last week you were able to diagnose the skin discoloration as a rare form of some Amazonian disease just by noticing the patient had a fever. This week you say something that isn't painfully obvious to everyone else and it's as if you're in the pilot episode all over again. I know it's supposed to make for good drama and everything, but these are supposed to be real characters. How can seemingly smart FBI agents or medical doctors instantly revert back to being so dumb? Now sometimes the super genius star of the show couldn't be more wrong about something and that's where the supporting cast (or ensemble cast for those with inferiority complexes) steps in to help guide things to the right conclusion. I'm really tired of things like "you're just overreacting", "there is no proof to your theory", and "I think you may be in the throes of a psychological break". Can we get a little benefit of the doubt in these situations? Half the episode is spent discussing how the main character has flipped the script, then it's realized that maybe they were onto something, only to use the final ten minutes as a way to catch everyone else up to what was initially proposed. Let's find a new way to create tension that isn't predictable.
This next one is a little more tricky. Having watched a lot of non-serial television I've started recognizing faces. The guy on an episode of West Wing also shows up on CSI. It's not like Susan Sarandon or anything. It's just another television character actor. They just happen to have a pretty good agent who's getting their face out there. So what happens now is when I see these various faces pieces of the plot are being telegraphed ahead of time. When the guy who played the viscous murderer on Numbers is now on an episode of Castle as a quiet unassuming victim it's easy to know something is up. You know the character is going to have more than one scene, even though the detectives are pursuing other leads.
Speaking of leads, most murder investigations take weeks or longer. Same thing with medical diagnostics and evidence gathering. The process is most likely mind-numbingly boring to watch. So of course with only an hour to use certain things have to be sped up a bit. We're show two to three possible leads. The first one usually goes nowhere even though all the preliminary evidence points directly to Option A. This causes the team to rethink their case and move onto the second lead. There is a little deviation at this point. Either the second lead is nothing and it moves onto the third (or fourth or fifth) option or it swings back around to Option A again, but with a twist. The wife wasn't the victim, she was the murderer! More evidence gathering or witty banter between characters and the options are narrowed down to the correct one. Case solved. No one wants to watch a show where after all the theories are tried or computer simulations run there's no definitive answer to the problem. There's a reason why homicide detectives and doctors have backlogs. Not everything get solved right away. So let's not make it too easy every time.
The last one usually tries to be the most subtle of them all. The quirky main character has some personal situation going on. Meanwhile there's a new weekly case. Everything has been tried and it seems like there's no solution. Then while talking about the personal situation something is said that triggers a thought that leads to the solution. The writer is talking to his daughter about boy troubles, the little girl in the wheelchair thinks her dog is actually a bear, or the computer simulation that's been running on the supercomputer for the last three days spits out the exact answer. That's when you realize the whole point of the personal situation was just to tie up the episode's problem. I want to see something where the thing said in this week's episode has no bearing on the immediate problem, but is actually legitimate character building for the sake of making the character more real.
Sometimes they throw a twist at you, but for the most part television doesn't try too hard to be complex. It's very much like fast food. It's quick and easy and not exactly quality food, but it gets the job done. Still I keep watching and enjoying it. I just wish they would change it up a little bit.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Words Fail Me
I need a word that describes what you were thinking when you decide to make mac & cheese and try to substitute the mac with spaghetti.
On Comic Worlds
I love comics and believe there is a lot of potential for stories to be told in them. All too often though in the mainstream titles there is a limitation to what can be done. You can't have too many lasting changes otherwise you might alienate certain readers. Part of it is that you don't want to upset the fan boys, who are the ones paying cover price for comics and not just buying them in trades. I can understand not wanting to disregard your core audience, but in attempting to placate them means the ability to have progression is lost. Well at least seriously hindered. Add to that there is always that desire to draw in new readers. Many of the characters are iconic. There is a standard for each title that has to be maintained so that your typical person off the street won't be overwhelmed. Spider-Man is always the misunderstood hero. Batman is always fighting crime because of a sense of loss from his murdered parents. The X-Men are a band of renegade heroes that society doesn't understand and even hates.
There have even been several resets within comics to make sure things don't get too far ahead of themselves. Spider-Man got married over 20 years ago. He revealed his identity to the world. He had left his job at The Daily Bugle and became a teacher. Thanks to "magic" all that's been erased. He's back to living with the seemingly ageless and perpetually sick Aunt May. No one knows his identity and his marriage never existed. Not divorced. Just gone. It was felt that readers wouldn't be able to identify with a married Spider-Man. The guy dresses in blue and red spandex. Anyone who could identify with him is in need of serious help. Plus most serious comic readers aren't teenagers anymore. They're middle aged men. Some of whom have wives of their own. The mutant population was in the millions. They lived on islands and even had an entire district in New York City that was like Chinatown, but with mutants. It got to be that mutants weren't really special anymore. So again with "magic" all the mutants were gone (except of course for all the main characters and popular ones that brings in money). Mutants are again this weird little subset of species with their backs against the wall. The biggest resets are death itself. It's been joked about that no one stays dead in the comic world. The only real exceptions seem to be Uncle Ben and Thomas & Martha Wayne. They only stay dead to drive the main character to keep doing what they're doing. Hal Jordan dies saving the universe. He is replaced as Green Lantern by Kyle Rayner. Ten years later Hal Jordan is returned to life and restored as the primary Green Lantern. Nearly every character has been "killed" only to come back. Some take longer than others. Captain America's World War II sidekick, Bucky Barnes, was dead for nearly 40 years before coming back. Jason Todd, the second Robin, stayed dead for half that time. How someone cheats or beats death varies in its believability and quality, but the end result is the same: return things back to how they were.
It makes me wonder what these various comic worlds would look like if there was actual progression within them. Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four has always been called one of the smartest men in the world. In several comics he’s making quick comments about some random invention that’s for lack of a better word, fantastic. (Side note: The Thing has been essentially trapped in his rocky form for the better part of 40 years. Reed should have been able to come up with a cure by now. Ben being stuck as The Thing supposedly makes for a more interesting character, but it’s been 40 years. I think it’s safe to say that well has been tapped dry. In a world of make believe it comes off as unbelievable.) Their costumes aren’t even costumes. They’re unstable molecules which conform to the wearer’s body and don’t get destroyed when Human Torch bursts into flames. It also makes it easier for the artist so they don't have to draw fabric, but that’s really beside the point. He’s created super computers to help with his experiments. He has a flying car that can fly across the US in a short amount of time. Imagine if a good-natured scientist, who is already insanely rich was coming up with these breakthroughs every day. Would we still be using computers or driving in cars that burned gasoline or flying like cattle in a plane that takes hours to get you two states over? Hank Pym named subatomic particles after himself. These Pym Particles allow for size-alteration. Think of the medical advances that could be done by shrinking something. Cancer cells could be reduced to nothing. Imagine the applications of making something giant sized. Food grown at regular size could be expanded in size as needed. World hunger would be a memory. Tony Stark invented a suit of armor that essentially allows the wearer to fly, have super strength, and even go into space. The world of prosthetics would be drastically different. Stark even provided Misty Knight with a cybernetic hand to replace the one she lost. There are normally offhand comments about its expense, but with any technology the first is always the most expensive. So Cancer is gone. World hunger is gone. Reliance on fossil fuels is gone. If you’re hurt, you can be rebuilt to a point where you’re actually better than before. With those types of inventions why is the world still basically the same? Sure it’s possible that various governments or evil organizations could stop the spread of these advances. People sure do like their status quo (kind of the whole point of what I’m writing). Still at some point there would have to be some sign of advancement with just the sheer number of inventions being done.
Speaking of evil organizations, you’d think they too would have progressed beyond just a bunch of henchmen grouped together listening to a leader rant about how he’s going to take over the world. Think about what happens if you ever took over the world. Can you imagine the amount of administration that would go into something like that? It’s not like these things just take care of themselves and unless you want to be the ruler of a dead planet there is a lot of general upkeep to deal with. In a recent reboot of G.I. Joe Cobra Commander was revealed to be someone who thought of himself as a patriot. He was using terrorist actions to take back his country from what he thought was a corrupt government. In his mind he was essentially leading a revolution in the same way the colonists broke from the English. This felt more believable than just some former used car salesman who managed to convince everyone that he was going to rule the world. Of course eventually the comic turned back into the typical story of how Cobra comes up with some insane and outlandish plan and the Joes foil it again. It could have been an interesting twist on who was really the bad guy.
While we’re on the subject of bad guys, there are several instances where you’re forced to suspend disbelief. Considering these are worlds where people can teleport through force of will or manipulate the weather with a thought, it’s saying a lot that something is hard to believe. Lex Luthor was a criminal mastermind responsible for numerous deaths. He was sent to prison on more than one occasion for various crimes. Despite this he was somehow elected President. Granted given his past he was still not the worst President ever elected, but come on. How does that happen? Anyway he eventually wanders off the reservation in attempt to kill Superman and is removed from office. Once again he’s known as a criminal, an ex-President criminal at that. Still given time he’s cleared of all charges and attempts to return to being what most people know him as, just another businessman. As of right now he’s in full bad guy mode, but I’m sure given enough time he’ll somehow be restored back to evil billionaire bent on destroying Superman. He's one of the most well known people in Metropolis and it's expected that people will just forget all the horrible things he's done in the past. I'm a relative nobody and I still have a gym hounding me for membership dues from ten years ago. They never forget.
Another example of disbelief is one of Batman’s most known villains, (although the same can really be said about most villains) The Joker. He’s been around from the very beginning and is the complete antithesis of Batman, which I suppose is what makes him so popular not just among readers, but with writers as well. He’s killed countless people in countless ways, including the previously mentioned Robin (although since Jason Todd eventually got better from being dead, I guess it would only be considered attempted murder). Every time he’s caught by Batman and sent to Arkham Asylum, where given enough issues in between, he escapes to do it all over again. There comes a point where rationality has to supersede morality. Batman has a major no-killing rule even though he’s a vigilante and has no problem breaking bones, removing teeth, and causing serious psychological trauma to criminals. So of course the worst Joker ever has to worry about is getting beat up and tossed into a padded cell. This man will continue to spread pain and death as long as he’s alive so why is he allowed to live? No wonder Gotham City is always depicted as a festering cesspool. The criminals know that sure they may get hurt once and awhile, but just wait a bit and you’ll be able to keep doing what you’ve been doing. There is a Punisher series under the MAX label, which has taken Frank Castle out of the regular Marvel Universe and kept him in a seemingly self-contained world. It actually frees him up to do what he’s supposed to. He doesn’t go around beating up thugs, leaving them tied up for the cops to pick up. Instead he ends the threat by ending them. Now his character is very much on the extreme side of things, but I have to believe there could be a more reasonable middle ground. Cops are issued weapons and are expected to kill if needed. That doesn’t mean they’re killing every single criminal they come across. If you have a mass murderer who has killed before and is in the process of killing again, you don’t wring your hands about how crossing some invisible line is going to make you as bad as them. It’s such a lame argument and really just used as an excuse to make sure that the popular characters never are eliminated.
So with all that said, I’d love to see what these various comic worlds would look like if a writer actually attempted to expand on what things would really be like. What would the world be like with amazing technology that advances society into tomorrow? The world would have real consequences because death is a permanent state, not some place where you rest for a bit so you can become popular again. The villains have true motivations beyond just they’re evil, it’s what they do. They should be people, not sharks. The world should keep spinning and things shouldn’t always be the same.
There have even been several resets within comics to make sure things don't get too far ahead of themselves. Spider-Man got married over 20 years ago. He revealed his identity to the world. He had left his job at The Daily Bugle and became a teacher. Thanks to "magic" all that's been erased. He's back to living with the seemingly ageless and perpetually sick Aunt May. No one knows his identity and his marriage never existed. Not divorced. Just gone. It was felt that readers wouldn't be able to identify with a married Spider-Man. The guy dresses in blue and red spandex. Anyone who could identify with him is in need of serious help. Plus most serious comic readers aren't teenagers anymore. They're middle aged men. Some of whom have wives of their own. The mutant population was in the millions. They lived on islands and even had an entire district in New York City that was like Chinatown, but with mutants. It got to be that mutants weren't really special anymore. So again with "magic" all the mutants were gone (except of course for all the main characters and popular ones that brings in money). Mutants are again this weird little subset of species with their backs against the wall. The biggest resets are death itself. It's been joked about that no one stays dead in the comic world. The only real exceptions seem to be Uncle Ben and Thomas & Martha Wayne. They only stay dead to drive the main character to keep doing what they're doing. Hal Jordan dies saving the universe. He is replaced as Green Lantern by Kyle Rayner. Ten years later Hal Jordan is returned to life and restored as the primary Green Lantern. Nearly every character has been "killed" only to come back. Some take longer than others. Captain America's World War II sidekick, Bucky Barnes, was dead for nearly 40 years before coming back. Jason Todd, the second Robin, stayed dead for half that time. How someone cheats or beats death varies in its believability and quality, but the end result is the same: return things back to how they were.
It makes me wonder what these various comic worlds would look like if there was actual progression within them. Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four has always been called one of the smartest men in the world. In several comics he’s making quick comments about some random invention that’s for lack of a better word, fantastic. (Side note: The Thing has been essentially trapped in his rocky form for the better part of 40 years. Reed should have been able to come up with a cure by now. Ben being stuck as The Thing supposedly makes for a more interesting character, but it’s been 40 years. I think it’s safe to say that well has been tapped dry. In a world of make believe it comes off as unbelievable.) Their costumes aren’t even costumes. They’re unstable molecules which conform to the wearer’s body and don’t get destroyed when Human Torch bursts into flames. It also makes it easier for the artist so they don't have to draw fabric, but that’s really beside the point. He’s created super computers to help with his experiments. He has a flying car that can fly across the US in a short amount of time. Imagine if a good-natured scientist, who is already insanely rich was coming up with these breakthroughs every day. Would we still be using computers or driving in cars that burned gasoline or flying like cattle in a plane that takes hours to get you two states over? Hank Pym named subatomic particles after himself. These Pym Particles allow for size-alteration. Think of the medical advances that could be done by shrinking something. Cancer cells could be reduced to nothing. Imagine the applications of making something giant sized. Food grown at regular size could be expanded in size as needed. World hunger would be a memory. Tony Stark invented a suit of armor that essentially allows the wearer to fly, have super strength, and even go into space. The world of prosthetics would be drastically different. Stark even provided Misty Knight with a cybernetic hand to replace the one she lost. There are normally offhand comments about its expense, but with any technology the first is always the most expensive. So Cancer is gone. World hunger is gone. Reliance on fossil fuels is gone. If you’re hurt, you can be rebuilt to a point where you’re actually better than before. With those types of inventions why is the world still basically the same? Sure it’s possible that various governments or evil organizations could stop the spread of these advances. People sure do like their status quo (kind of the whole point of what I’m writing). Still at some point there would have to be some sign of advancement with just the sheer number of inventions being done.
Speaking of evil organizations, you’d think they too would have progressed beyond just a bunch of henchmen grouped together listening to a leader rant about how he’s going to take over the world. Think about what happens if you ever took over the world. Can you imagine the amount of administration that would go into something like that? It’s not like these things just take care of themselves and unless you want to be the ruler of a dead planet there is a lot of general upkeep to deal with. In a recent reboot of G.I. Joe Cobra Commander was revealed to be someone who thought of himself as a patriot. He was using terrorist actions to take back his country from what he thought was a corrupt government. In his mind he was essentially leading a revolution in the same way the colonists broke from the English. This felt more believable than just some former used car salesman who managed to convince everyone that he was going to rule the world. Of course eventually the comic turned back into the typical story of how Cobra comes up with some insane and outlandish plan and the Joes foil it again. It could have been an interesting twist on who was really the bad guy.
While we’re on the subject of bad guys, there are several instances where you’re forced to suspend disbelief. Considering these are worlds where people can teleport through force of will or manipulate the weather with a thought, it’s saying a lot that something is hard to believe. Lex Luthor was a criminal mastermind responsible for numerous deaths. He was sent to prison on more than one occasion for various crimes. Despite this he was somehow elected President. Granted given his past he was still not the worst President ever elected, but come on. How does that happen? Anyway he eventually wanders off the reservation in attempt to kill Superman and is removed from office. Once again he’s known as a criminal, an ex-President criminal at that. Still given time he’s cleared of all charges and attempts to return to being what most people know him as, just another businessman. As of right now he’s in full bad guy mode, but I’m sure given enough time he’ll somehow be restored back to evil billionaire bent on destroying Superman. He's one of the most well known people in Metropolis and it's expected that people will just forget all the horrible things he's done in the past. I'm a relative nobody and I still have a gym hounding me for membership dues from ten years ago. They never forget.
Another example of disbelief is one of Batman’s most known villains, (although the same can really be said about most villains) The Joker. He’s been around from the very beginning and is the complete antithesis of Batman, which I suppose is what makes him so popular not just among readers, but with writers as well. He’s killed countless people in countless ways, including the previously mentioned Robin (although since Jason Todd eventually got better from being dead, I guess it would only be considered attempted murder). Every time he’s caught by Batman and sent to Arkham Asylum, where given enough issues in between, he escapes to do it all over again. There comes a point where rationality has to supersede morality. Batman has a major no-killing rule even though he’s a vigilante and has no problem breaking bones, removing teeth, and causing serious psychological trauma to criminals. So of course the worst Joker ever has to worry about is getting beat up and tossed into a padded cell. This man will continue to spread pain and death as long as he’s alive so why is he allowed to live? No wonder Gotham City is always depicted as a festering cesspool. The criminals know that sure they may get hurt once and awhile, but just wait a bit and you’ll be able to keep doing what you’ve been doing. There is a Punisher series under the MAX label, which has taken Frank Castle out of the regular Marvel Universe and kept him in a seemingly self-contained world. It actually frees him up to do what he’s supposed to. He doesn’t go around beating up thugs, leaving them tied up for the cops to pick up. Instead he ends the threat by ending them. Now his character is very much on the extreme side of things, but I have to believe there could be a more reasonable middle ground. Cops are issued weapons and are expected to kill if needed. That doesn’t mean they’re killing every single criminal they come across. If you have a mass murderer who has killed before and is in the process of killing again, you don’t wring your hands about how crossing some invisible line is going to make you as bad as them. It’s such a lame argument and really just used as an excuse to make sure that the popular characters never are eliminated.
So with all that said, I’d love to see what these various comic worlds would look like if a writer actually attempted to expand on what things would really be like. What would the world be like with amazing technology that advances society into tomorrow? The world would have real consequences because death is a permanent state, not some place where you rest for a bit so you can become popular again. The villains have true motivations beyond just they’re evil, it’s what they do. They should be people, not sharks. The world should keep spinning and things shouldn’t always be the same.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Words Fail Me
I need a word for that overwhelming fear that no matter how careful you are, somehow if your hand gets too close to the garbage disposal you're going to be pulling back a stump.
On Modern Fears
It's really hard for me to stay current with modern fears because I seem to have this backlog of scary things that I just haven't gotten around to. I can't really worry about swine flu right now when I haven't finished being scared about Anthrax, SARS, bird flu, and global warming. Those are in addition to my ever present fears about cancer, getting old or sick in America, the general failing of our education system, and my penis falling off. So for now swine flu, or whatever they're trying to call it, is just going to have to wait until I can sort through the others. They were thrown in my face first.
Originally when it first broke to all the various media outlets the number of cases was in the triple digits. Be afraid because it's spreading so fast! Then about three days later it was corrected when the CDC said it was more likely less than twenty. Twenty people are sick out of 6.5 billion and I'm supposed to be afraid of this why? I'm not saying I disbelieve the seriousness of swine flu, but it's a cold. Sure it's not fun to get sick and there's a chance you could die from it, but is the chance really any greater? Since April there have been 4013 deaths from swine flu, which may seem like a lot. When you compare it to the number of people who had verified cases of the virus it's a small fraction. Annually there are 440,000 smoking related deaths and about 1.2 million people die in car crashes. The number of people who have died from swine flu so far comes out to less than 1% of the people who will die from smoking. In comparison to auto accidents it's so small it's not really even a number anymore. The CDC has even said that while the virus was serious, cases worldwide are typically mild. Hospitalization and death has been from people with other underlying conditions.
Problem is even knowing this I can't help but feel a slight twinge of fear. The other day I was out and someone had the sniffles. I felt uncomfortable around them and every time they'd snort I'd shudder. My mind was picturing the little viruses jumping from their snot and raping my immune system. I can see why the zombie genre is so popular. It's just our fear of other people. You're still you and technically they're still people, but they're mindless and herd together into this seemingly unstoppable wave of humanity. If you're not careful, you'll become one of them. One of the infected. That's how people are starting to look at each other. Going onto Amazon.com and buying masks and gloves so they can stay "clean" for a little while longer. I got news for you people. Even if they find a vaccine for swine flu that they can get out to everyone who wants it, there will be another virus tomorrow. They haven't cured the common cold because it's constantly evolving. And we're making them stronger. We can't keep dodging the bullet on the real super virus. Eventually something will come along that we should be afraid of, but we'll all be so numb to the every day crap that we won't even see it coming.
A couple years ago there was a movie called Civic Duty. It's really just a modern take on Rear Window. A regular guy has lost his job and spends way too much time looking at his neighbor, who he is convinced is a terrorist. Much like Rear Window you're not entirely sure what's going on until the end. Is he just another person who has been caught up in the blitz of fear? Even if he's telling the truth, who's going to believe him? It was a great example of how we're afraid of our neighbors. What's going on behind those closed doors?
So what's the point of all this fear? Are we supposed to be distracted by all the things that could get us so we don't see what's going on elsewhere? Sometimes I feel like an audience member watching a magic show. You're forced to focus on something small and don't realize the real threat. That's not to say these issues aren't important, but think of it this way. You wake up in the morning, your paint's peeling, your curtains are gone, and your water is boiling, which problem do you deal with first? None of them. The building is on fire. They've got us worrying about our curtains. You want something to really be scared of. Any society is about three missed meals away from anarchy. If we ever lost our ability to provide food for everyone you'd see just how terrifying other people can be.
If you weren't afraid before, you just haven't been paying attention...to the right things
Originally when it first broke to all the various media outlets the number of cases was in the triple digits. Be afraid because it's spreading so fast! Then about three days later it was corrected when the CDC said it was more likely less than twenty. Twenty people are sick out of 6.5 billion and I'm supposed to be afraid of this why? I'm not saying I disbelieve the seriousness of swine flu, but it's a cold. Sure it's not fun to get sick and there's a chance you could die from it, but is the chance really any greater? Since April there have been 4013 deaths from swine flu, which may seem like a lot. When you compare it to the number of people who had verified cases of the virus it's a small fraction. Annually there are 440,000 smoking related deaths and about 1.2 million people die in car crashes. The number of people who have died from swine flu so far comes out to less than 1% of the people who will die from smoking. In comparison to auto accidents it's so small it's not really even a number anymore. The CDC has even said that while the virus was serious, cases worldwide are typically mild. Hospitalization and death has been from people with other underlying conditions.
Problem is even knowing this I can't help but feel a slight twinge of fear. The other day I was out and someone had the sniffles. I felt uncomfortable around them and every time they'd snort I'd shudder. My mind was picturing the little viruses jumping from their snot and raping my immune system. I can see why the zombie genre is so popular. It's just our fear of other people. You're still you and technically they're still people, but they're mindless and herd together into this seemingly unstoppable wave of humanity. If you're not careful, you'll become one of them. One of the infected. That's how people are starting to look at each other. Going onto Amazon.com and buying masks and gloves so they can stay "clean" for a little while longer. I got news for you people. Even if they find a vaccine for swine flu that they can get out to everyone who wants it, there will be another virus tomorrow. They haven't cured the common cold because it's constantly evolving. And we're making them stronger. We can't keep dodging the bullet on the real super virus. Eventually something will come along that we should be afraid of, but we'll all be so numb to the every day crap that we won't even see it coming.
A couple years ago there was a movie called Civic Duty. It's really just a modern take on Rear Window. A regular guy has lost his job and spends way too much time looking at his neighbor, who he is convinced is a terrorist. Much like Rear Window you're not entirely sure what's going on until the end. Is he just another person who has been caught up in the blitz of fear? Even if he's telling the truth, who's going to believe him? It was a great example of how we're afraid of our neighbors. What's going on behind those closed doors?
So what's the point of all this fear? Are we supposed to be distracted by all the things that could get us so we don't see what's going on elsewhere? Sometimes I feel like an audience member watching a magic show. You're forced to focus on something small and don't realize the real threat. That's not to say these issues aren't important, but think of it this way. You wake up in the morning, your paint's peeling, your curtains are gone, and your water is boiling, which problem do you deal with first? None of them. The building is on fire. They've got us worrying about our curtains. You want something to really be scared of. Any society is about three missed meals away from anarchy. If we ever lost our ability to provide food for everyone you'd see just how terrifying other people can be.
If you weren't afraid before, you just haven't been paying attention...to the right things
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Words Fail Me
I need a word that describes when you're so hungry that you know whatever you eat will be fantastic and that actually makes it hard to decide because you don't want to ruin that feeling on just anything.
On FM Radio
This is my theory: At any given point in time on some radio station Foo Fighters is playing. If I had access to every radio station I'm sure I could prove this. It's a perfect example of why I can't stand FM radio. Just about everything that's played there feels like it's been packaged for some focus group. Nothing too loud. Nothing too long. Nothing too new. Yes there are "new" songs being released all the time. The latest from Green Day. The latest from Linkin Park. The latest by some band who couldn't think of a name and instead just started randomly throwing words together. I'm not saying those songs are bad. Those songs are just safe and are really just variations on whatever they released before. It makes me wonder who they're playing for. In today's age you can have an iPod with 10,000 of your favorite songs. There's XM radio that has over 70 different music channels. If you're near a computer there are dozens of streaming radio stations playing songs from bands you've probably never heard of. At least not if you've been listening to FM radio. So what's the target audience when it comes to FM radio? People with a lack of options?
Radio should be where you hear music not muzak. Whenever I get in my car, which has a bitchin tape deck and is the main reason I'm forced to listen to FM radio in the first place, I feel like I'm riding in an elevator about seven years in the future. The music playing today is going to end up being played softly in a grocery store where people hear it, smile softly as they remember the first time they heard it, and then pick out the fabric softener than really fits into their lifestyle. And who's deciding what gets to be on the radio anyway? Is it the listener? Is there some number I should be calling to say that I really haven't heard enough Nickelback today and I'd appreciate it if we could have a four song super set from them? Someone has to be deciding what's popular and what's not. I heard the Rob Zombie song from The Punisher soundtrack just once (it sucked) and never heard it again. Obviously someone somewhere is keeping track of these things. Who decides what's a hit song?
The term One-hit Wonder is used a lot in FM radio. There are some bands out there who managed to only come up with a single song that didn't sound like drywall screws in a blender. While others actually had several songs and even albums that are well known, outside of the mainstream. Warren Zevon was a respected musician outside of his Werewolves of London song. Jimi Hendrix only appeared on the Billboard Top 40 once. Using the Top 40 as the standard then he's just another One-hit Wonder. If you've ever been to Seattle's Experience Music Project then you know that's not true. So how many bands have been labeled as One-hit wonders and actually weren't? On the flip side how many bands have you heard where you think to yourself that you only liked the one song so how is it that they're still being played?
There is a radio station here that does this thing called 90 Minutes of the 90s. Because after only ten years it's really time we revisit all the great music from that decade. Really it's just an excuse to fill the air with more recycled music. The 90s lasted ten years. Why is it whenever I tune to that station on those horrible days when I'm driving between 12:00 and 1:30 that I only hear Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Nirvana, Stone Temple Pilots, The Offspring, and that one song by Seven Mary Three? With an entire decade's worth of music I shouldn't be hearing the same twelve songs on a loop. It's like a TV station playing episodes of Seinfeld and Friends in prime time and saying it's the best of the 90s. Sure those shows were great in their time, but with ten years worth of stuff, it's pretty limited to say it's the only thing. Then of course you've got radio stations out there who are playing the equivalent of The Jeffersons.
So it comes back to who is FM radio really for these days? Is there anyone out there that's listening happily to the fast food-ish music that's being broadcast?
If you weren't tired of listening, you just haven't been paying attention.
Radio should be where you hear music not muzak. Whenever I get in my car, which has a bitchin tape deck and is the main reason I'm forced to listen to FM radio in the first place, I feel like I'm riding in an elevator about seven years in the future. The music playing today is going to end up being played softly in a grocery store where people hear it, smile softly as they remember the first time they heard it, and then pick out the fabric softener than really fits into their lifestyle. And who's deciding what gets to be on the radio anyway? Is it the listener? Is there some number I should be calling to say that I really haven't heard enough Nickelback today and I'd appreciate it if we could have a four song super set from them? Someone has to be deciding what's popular and what's not. I heard the Rob Zombie song from The Punisher soundtrack just once (it sucked) and never heard it again. Obviously someone somewhere is keeping track of these things. Who decides what's a hit song?
The term One-hit Wonder is used a lot in FM radio. There are some bands out there who managed to only come up with a single song that didn't sound like drywall screws in a blender. While others actually had several songs and even albums that are well known, outside of the mainstream. Warren Zevon was a respected musician outside of his Werewolves of London song. Jimi Hendrix only appeared on the Billboard Top 40 once. Using the Top 40 as the standard then he's just another One-hit Wonder. If you've ever been to Seattle's Experience Music Project then you know that's not true. So how many bands have been labeled as One-hit wonders and actually weren't? On the flip side how many bands have you heard where you think to yourself that you only liked the one song so how is it that they're still being played?
There is a radio station here that does this thing called 90 Minutes of the 90s. Because after only ten years it's really time we revisit all the great music from that decade. Really it's just an excuse to fill the air with more recycled music. The 90s lasted ten years. Why is it whenever I tune to that station on those horrible days when I'm driving between 12:00 and 1:30 that I only hear Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Nirvana, Stone Temple Pilots, The Offspring, and that one song by Seven Mary Three? With an entire decade's worth of music I shouldn't be hearing the same twelve songs on a loop. It's like a TV station playing episodes of Seinfeld and Friends in prime time and saying it's the best of the 90s. Sure those shows were great in their time, but with ten years worth of stuff, it's pretty limited to say it's the only thing. Then of course you've got radio stations out there who are playing the equivalent of The Jeffersons.
So it comes back to who is FM radio really for these days? Is there anyone out there that's listening happily to the fast food-ish music that's being broadcast?
If you weren't tired of listening, you just haven't been paying attention.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Words Fail Me
I need a word to describe that sensation you get when you're reversing in a car and shift into drive, but for a moment you're still traveling backwards and aren't quite sure if the car is going to get on board with moving in a forward direction.
On Reimagining a Remake
Let's just start off with that I think most remakes are unnecessary. Just watch the original. It's a step down from a sequel, which is really done to progress the story further. It's a step up from a prequel (one of the stupidest terms we have to deal with), that is just a way to bore us to death with how we got to the first movie, which is now technically the second movie even though it was the original. There are enough books, plays, comic books, TV shows, toy brands, video games, social networks, and funny catch phrases out there that we shouldn't be seeing a swarm of remakes every year.
Don't get me wrong. Actually I don't care if you get me wrong. Sometimes a remake works and adds something new to an existing idea. This has happened once in the entire history of film. It was when Alfred Hitchcock remade his own movie The Man Who Knew Too Much.
That's not entirely true. There have been plenty of remakes that stood on their own and did a good job of modernizing the concept for current audiences. The horror genre is probably the one hit most by this. Just about every major horror movie I grew up with has been remade or is slated to be reimagined (another one of the stupidest terms we deal with). Some are able to update the general idea or even expand on it while most others confuse gore and CGI for a plot. Then there is the rare exception that does less than nothing. An example of this would be the remake of Psycho. What the hell was that? I felt like I was watching a film school experiment in shot-for-shot masturbation. Eventually we'll get to a point where people are watching the third or fourth remake of something. I can't wait for them to remake The Fly again.
I've come to the realization that the more you like a movie the more you should avoid its eventual remake. I love Red Dawn and there is no way in hell I'm going to watch the remake. Unless you can promise me that Jennifer Grey is somehow going to get gunned down there is nothing you can offer me I can't see in the original. I was pretty much indifferent to the original Halloween and didn't see it as the horror standard that it's been made out to be. So I was able to walk into the remake with no expectations.
Why is it generally accepted that a movie can be remade or reimagined? It's not done elsewhere. Sure there are cover songs and even cover bands, but it would be insane for some band to attempt to release a remake of Led Zeppelin II. It's ok for someone to remake The Birds, but lunacy for someone to rewrite Stephen King's The Stand. Why is one accepted and the other isn't? Another horrifying thought, what if we're not that far off from it? I know how to work a computer, I think I'm going to take a stab at rewriting Dune, but you know, make it more modern so more troglodytes can appreciate it. At some point aren't what we watching just plagiarism?
There are so many remakes that Wikipedia had to dedicate TWO pages to them all. Think about that.
If you weren't annoyed before, you just haven't been paying attention
Don't get me wrong. Actually I don't care if you get me wrong. Sometimes a remake works and adds something new to an existing idea. This has happened once in the entire history of film. It was when Alfred Hitchcock remade his own movie The Man Who Knew Too Much.
That's not entirely true. There have been plenty of remakes that stood on their own and did a good job of modernizing the concept for current audiences. The horror genre is probably the one hit most by this. Just about every major horror movie I grew up with has been remade or is slated to be reimagined (another one of the stupidest terms we deal with). Some are able to update the general idea or even expand on it while most others confuse gore and CGI for a plot. Then there is the rare exception that does less than nothing. An example of this would be the remake of Psycho. What the hell was that? I felt like I was watching a film school experiment in shot-for-shot masturbation. Eventually we'll get to a point where people are watching the third or fourth remake of something. I can't wait for them to remake The Fly again.
I've come to the realization that the more you like a movie the more you should avoid its eventual remake. I love Red Dawn and there is no way in hell I'm going to watch the remake. Unless you can promise me that Jennifer Grey is somehow going to get gunned down there is nothing you can offer me I can't see in the original. I was pretty much indifferent to the original Halloween and didn't see it as the horror standard that it's been made out to be. So I was able to walk into the remake with no expectations.
Why is it generally accepted that a movie can be remade or reimagined? It's not done elsewhere. Sure there are cover songs and even cover bands, but it would be insane for some band to attempt to release a remake of Led Zeppelin II. It's ok for someone to remake The Birds, but lunacy for someone to rewrite Stephen King's The Stand. Why is one accepted and the other isn't? Another horrifying thought, what if we're not that far off from it? I know how to work a computer, I think I'm going to take a stab at rewriting Dune, but you know, make it more modern so more troglodytes can appreciate it. At some point aren't what we watching just plagiarism?
There are so many remakes that Wikipedia had to dedicate TWO pages to them all. Think about that.
If you weren't annoyed before, you just haven't been paying attention
On Identity Theft
First off you don't want my identity. I don't even want my identity. Never mind the fact that I owe so much in student loans that I'm seriously considering faking my own death to get out of them. I'm on the Your Children Will Be Paying These Off Plan. I'm also kind of a boring person so the second you charge the jet ski rental in the Bahamas the bank is going to be alerted. I've already gotten calls the previous two times my card number was stolen. They were just short of "There's no way in hell you did something that awesome." If you want to spend $5834.12 in tacos and comics then you might consider my identity.
My problem with credit cards these days is that no one seems to ask for identification or even a signature. I've heard varying amounts that the purchase has to be over before they bother to check. $25 all the way up to $50. Nearly 10 million people were hit by some form of identity theft last year. Why would businesses make it easier to allow people to use a stolen credit card? If you use a credit card on a regular basis think about your weekly purchases. How many times did someone even glance up at you when you swiped it through? Now think about how fast you could max out your card just with little purchases. I'd say it wouldn't take more than a few days. If you're thinking like a thief you may start off slow, hoping you don't get noticed and then just running for the finish as you figure someone has to be looking at their statement soon. If you're not thinking at all, you might just go crazy and buy everything on the left side of the menu at Morton's Steakhouse.
So why are more and more businesses going the route of next to no security when it comes to credit cards? Is it a matter of convenience for the customer? Is our world so fast paced that a person can't be bothered to show an ID or sign a receipt saying you approve the charge? That would have been like handing someone a blank check and just assuming they'd fill out the correct amount for you. Maybe it's just assumed that the bank or credit card company has a system to deal with it. Some banks are better than others, but no matter how good you're going to be looking at 5-7 days before a replacement card comes in and possibly several weeks before they fully refund the charges. Is that a worthwhile trade off for the 7.3 seconds you save by not having to sign your credit card receipt?
If you weren't scared before, you just haven't been paying attention.
My problem with credit cards these days is that no one seems to ask for identification or even a signature. I've heard varying amounts that the purchase has to be over before they bother to check. $25 all the way up to $50. Nearly 10 million people were hit by some form of identity theft last year. Why would businesses make it easier to allow people to use a stolen credit card? If you use a credit card on a regular basis think about your weekly purchases. How many times did someone even glance up at you when you swiped it through? Now think about how fast you could max out your card just with little purchases. I'd say it wouldn't take more than a few days. If you're thinking like a thief you may start off slow, hoping you don't get noticed and then just running for the finish as you figure someone has to be looking at their statement soon. If you're not thinking at all, you might just go crazy and buy everything on the left side of the menu at Morton's Steakhouse.
So why are more and more businesses going the route of next to no security when it comes to credit cards? Is it a matter of convenience for the customer? Is our world so fast paced that a person can't be bothered to show an ID or sign a receipt saying you approve the charge? That would have been like handing someone a blank check and just assuming they'd fill out the correct amount for you. Maybe it's just assumed that the bank or credit card company has a system to deal with it. Some banks are better than others, but no matter how good you're going to be looking at 5-7 days before a replacement card comes in and possibly several weeks before they fully refund the charges. Is that a worthwhile trade off for the 7.3 seconds you save by not having to sign your credit card receipt?
If you weren't scared before, you just haven't been paying attention.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)