WWdN: In Exile

Cloverfield

I saw Cloverfield yesterday afternoon, early enough so I could avoid a theater filled with douchebags. I understand that this was a good thing, because people I know who saw it at night with the aforementioned douchebags were so annoyed by them, and so pulled out of the movie by them, it seriously fucked with their ability to enjoy the film.

If you haven't seen it, I recommend it. I gave it 3 out of 5, but only because the first-person shaky camera stuff made me violently seasick, causing me to look away from the screen more frequently than I did with Blair Witch (a movie, by the way, that I enjoyed as much as "meh" can be enjoyed, and which doesn't deserve to be compared to Cloverfield, IMHO.) On story and effectiveness, I give it a 4.6 out of 5but the camera stuff really messed with me, and I suspect it will mess with other viewers, as well.

Assume there will be spoilers in comments, because I'm starting the comments off with my extended commentary on the film, which you should not read if you haven't seen it yet.

The Bad Astronomer (who I owned in a Techonobabbloff yesterday) has some nitpicks and a review that I agreed with pretty much all the way, too.

The Return of MST3K

I was twenty years-old the first time I saw MST3K. I was sitting on the couch with a friend of mine, looking for something to watch on a Sunday morning, when she stopped on some crappy old horror movie.

"What's this?" I said.

"You've never seen this before?"

"No," I said, "That's why I asked 'what's this.'"

"It's a show about this guy who is trapped in space with robots, and is forced to watch horrible movies. So he and the robots talk back to the screen."

It reminded me of this show I first watched on KDOC here in Los Angeles when I was a freshman in high school, called Mad Movies. I became a fan for life in a matter of minutes, and developed a list of favorites just as fast: Manos, the Hands of Fate, Rocketship XM and Lost Continent are a few that come instantly to mind.

MST3K's Joel Hodgson once said, "We don't ask ourselves, 'will anyone get this?' We tell each other, 'the right people will get this.'" I was inspired by that philosophy, and when I wrote sketch comedy or did improv (both pursuits inspired by MST3K and the British Whose Line?) I used it, and I still use it today, even when I'm not writing comedy.

So now that there's some context for how much I love MST3K, you'll understand how excited I was when I saw that most of the original crew has reunited for Cinematic Titanic, which I believe can be safely called The Return of MST3K:

Cinematic Titanic is a feature length movie riffing show and is an artist owned and operated venture created by Joel Hodgson, the creator of the Peabody award-winning Mystery Science Theatre 3000. Cinematic Titanic features the original cast and writers of MST3K, which is Hodgson (Joel Robinson), Trace Beaulieu (Crow), and J. Elvis Weinstein (Tom Servo). Filling out the ensemble is Mary Jo Pehl (Pearl Forrester) and Frank Conniff (TV’s Frank).

While this is exciting to me as a fan, it's also inspiring and validating to me as a creative person who lives on the Long Tail. Instead of waiting for a network to give them the opportunity to bring their show to viewers, they're distributing the show on DVD themselves. Between this and Riff Trax, we Misties have a lot to celebrate these days.
 

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some rock climbing to do.

MY PRECIOUS!

I just saw, via Propeller, that Peter Jackson has signed on to produce The Hobbit.

Director Peter Jackson, New Line Cinema and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc said on Tuesday they have agreed to make two movies based on the book "The Hobbit" by J.R.R. Tolkien, ending months of legal wrangling.

Jackson, the director of the smash hit "Lord of the Rings" movies, and producer Fran Walsh will executive produce both a "Hobbit" movie and a sequel, but no decision has been made about who will direct the films, Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne, co-chairmen and co-CEOs of New Line told Reuters.

The good news is, it's going to take two whole films to contain its awesomeness. The (potential) bad news is, he won't be directing. That's offset by the (potential) good news that it will make its way into theaters before 2011.

King Kong showed that Peter Jackson isn't infallible, but it's clear that he loves and respects Tolkien's work, so I'm sure I'm not the only geek who would be willing to wait until 2011 or 2012 if that's what it takes to get someone who loves it as much as we do behind the camera. I mean, we've waited for decades for this; what's a few more years to get it right?

Can media conglomerates afford to pay the writers?

As someone who hopes to be in the WGA one day, and as a current SAG member (and former member of the Board of Directors) I am in complete and total solidarity with the Writer's Guild. It's quite heartening to me, also,  to see that so many people refuse to be fooled by the lies that the six companies who control all of the media have been trying to spread.

The AMPTP has been successful (and helped by the news media they own) in spreading FUD about the things the writers are asking for. This post at United Hollywood puts some important numbers into perspective:

"But can the corporations really afford to pay you what you're asking for?"

Let's set aside for the moment the issue of what the congloms say in their press releases to us (which is basically "There's no money! Ever! And if there was, we spent it all on other projects that lost money so it's gone! Forever! We're broke! We're having to rent our yachts!") and focus on some hard numbers thoughtfully provided by Jonathan Handel on the Huffington Post yesterday.

He writes an excellent (I think) and even-handed analysis that takes into account the effect pattern bargaining will have in calculating real numbers of what we're asking for, and what it will cost the companies, individually, to pay us.

It comes, by his calculation, to $125 million per conglomerate per year -- if we got every single thing we're asking for.

That, by the way, is less than the $140 million Disney spent to fire Michael Ovitz for 15 months of work.

Also, Carson Daly is still an epic douche.

Also, also:

And finally, a meager contribution from the actor half of me:

oh my fucking god pictures from the set of watchmen

Apparently, I'm the last Watchmen geek on the planet to hear that Zack Snyder is keeping a rarely-updated blog during the film's production.

I discovered the blog on a good day, though, because today he posted some pictures from the set that gave me a serious geekgasm.

I have a lot of hope for this film, though I seriously doubt it's possible to make it into anything less than 12 hours long and truly do the book justice, because Zack Snyder managed to turn 300 into something not only watchable, but something that was a faithful adaptation of the graphic novel. When I saw these pictures this morning -- especially the ones that are almost 1:1 recreations of panels in the book -- I upgraded my condition from guarded to cautiously optimistic.

However, I am putting the studio on notice: if you pull any studiofuckery with Watchmen, you will see a rampaging horde of geek rage that will make The Phantom Menace look like a Fred Thompson campaign rally.

yet another reason why going to the movies sucks

A few years ago, we bought a spiffy home theater system, complete with the surround sound and the HDTV and the comfy chairs. I'm sure it's a coincidence that this matches up almost exactly with when we stopped going out to the movies except for extremely special events.

I know this is different for everyone, but for me, going to the movies has been only slightly less annoying than going to the DMV, thanks to outrageous ticket prices, mega-multiplexes that leave stains on their screens and never enforce the "Hey, shut the hell up" rule beyond an entirely ineffective announcement at the beginning of the film, parents who think it's entirely appropriate to bring small children into R-rated movies, and the latest joy: teenagers who leave their goddamn cellphones on and when they're not talking to each other light up the theater with hundreds of tiny screens while they send and read text messages.

Yeah, I'm really glad I have this home theater system, because going to the Arclight isn't always an option, and there's a good chance I'm going to snap one day and force feed some fucking idiot his goddamn cell phone.

Well, as if all this isn't bad enough, now you can enjoy being filmed by a studio thug while you attempt to view the film you paid out the ass to watch:

"[I]mmediately I notice an older gentleman who looked to be about 60 standing in the corner of the theater. Sporting a black suit and a black briefcase, he began to film the audience during the movie. Every 5-10 minutes he would sweep the audience with his video camera, then turn it off and just watch us, then turn the camera back on and sweep again."

Isn't that great? I know that I can't *wait* to have my privacy violated by some studio douchebag when I'm just trying to watch their fucking movie.

All furious indignation aside, can the theaters get away with this? I've never seen a notice that by entering a theater I'm giving my consent to be filmed (other than at special screenings, and certainly never at a regularly-scheduled screening.)

If theaters are going to be complicit in this sort of thing, they should:

• be forced to disclose to their customers that they will be filmed in the theater,
• post a privacy policy so audience members know what will happen with the video tapes,
• offer refunds to customers who don't wish to be filmed, or
• give audiences a choice of sitting in a surveillance theater or a non-surveillance theater.

It's annoying enough already to go out to the movies these days, and I while I understand why a studio would want to use this sort of intimidation tactic to stop people from making shitty camcorder videos of movies, I also understand why some potential customers would choose a shitty camcorder version of a film over sitting in a theater to watch it.

the simpsons movie

I took Ryan and his girlfriend to see The Simpsons movie earlier this week.

Mini review: It did not disappoint. If you've watched The Simpsons as long as I have, this may make sense:  it was like an above average episode from season seven.

Slightly longer review: While not as subversive and non-linear as the early seasons that I love so much, it was significantly better than any of the absolute garbage they've thrown at us in the last couple of seasons. The story is a bit convoluted, but they committed to the convolution so willingly and unabashedly, they actually made it work. They totally take advantage of being a movie to pull off some stuff they'd never get away with on television, which was incredibly amusing to me. I won't say anything more specific about the plot or point out any of the gags, because a big part of the fun was sitting back and enjoying the story while it unfolded. You probably don't need to see this in a theater, unless you really want to, because . . .

Drawback to seeing it in the theater: People watch The Simpsons on TV so much, they must think they're still in their living room when they are, in fact, in a theater we all paid money to get into. Memo to audiences: Shut. The. Fuck. Up. You don't need to repeat every funny line or point out every single sight gag. We saw it, too, because we are sitting in the same theater with you.

Final Rating: I give it 3 out of 5 squishees.

Geek in Review: One Big Focus Group

This week's Geek in Review is, unsurprisingly, all about Comic-Con:

My train ride to Comic-Con from Los Angeles was filled with Hollywood fucks, talking too loudly on their cell phones, bitching out their assistants, and trying to impress each other with how many scripts they had brought along to read.

Oh man, I thought, is this what Comic-Con is going to be like? A bunch of industry douchebags who think we're just a big focus group of nerds?

My fears appeared to be realized when I opened up McPaper, and read a story on page one of the Life section all about how Hollywood executives come down to Comic-Con to use the largest gathering of Nerds this side of Mos Eisley Spaceport as a giant focus group.

[...]

Once I arrived at Comic-Con, my fears were put entirely to rest. My fellow geeks were everywhere: guys with ponytails and trench coats, mostly-naked women and the men who think they have a chance to score with them, and some of the most elaborate and awesome Transformers costumes I've ever seen. After suffering through the highest concentration of Hollywood fuckery I've seen in a decade, it felt good to be back among my people, even if the Hollywood fucks just thought of us all as a giant focus group and invaded our party as a result.

This makes me wonder something: if we actually are a huge focus group, wouldn't they, you know, listen to us?

I had a lot of good times at SDCC this year, but the best time of all was sitting with other writers  who happen to be geeks, and feeling like I was almost a peer. While we talked, it also became apparent that we're a lot of very passionate people with very passionate ideas about using new technology to bring our ideas to life and our creations to the audience, without following the traditional "rules" that have made so much of entertainment media mediocre. We're part of the focus group I wrote about in the GiR, and if we can just get organized, we could turn the entertainment industry upside down.

Wil Wheaton's Geek in Review: Sci-Fi Guilty Pleasures of the 80s

This week's Geek in Review is another entry in the Guilty Pleasures series, Sci-Fi Guilty Pleasures of the 80s:

After exhaustive research (read: a week spent watching a big pile of movies so I can convince my wife that I’m “working”), I’ve realized that most films of the eighties which claim to be science fiction are equal parts awesomely awful and awesomely awesome, and none of them are purely sci-fi; they’re all some sort of hybrid.

If you’re of a certain age, and you spent any time at all browsing the science fiction/horror section of the video store on Friday nights in high school, you may recognize some of these Sci-Fi Guilty Pleasures of the 80s. They are presented in order of release, and are unranked.

I was surprised at how many good movies came out of the eighties, like Buckaroo Banzai, Brazil, Tron, Robocop, and Terminator. I could do a column on those movies, but it wouldn't be nearly as fun as commenting on movies like They Live:

Awesomely Awful Because: John Carpenter took twenty minutes of story and added in seventy minutes of filler, including a five minute-long back alley wrestling match that doesn’t involve a single folding metal chair. What could be a brilliant commentary on the excesses of the eighties tries way too hard to be funny. When you find yourself laughing at the satire instead of with the satire, something isn’t quite right.

Awesomely Awesome Because: If you set aside the filler, and just focus on the story, They Live is so prophetic, it’s kind of disturbing. It’s sort of like Ishmael for popular consumption. On a less deep note, the outrageous fights and snappy one-liners that are so annoying to sci-fi purist geeks also make this movie absurdly entertaining.

There are plenty of other guilty pleasures that came out of the eighties (I gave some of them honorable mentions at the end) so if this gets a positive response, I'll totally do another 80s version in the mysterious future.

Geek in Review: It's the End of the World As We Know It, And I Feel Fine

This week's GiR is all about apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction:

I was drawn to these stories because they were more serious than Star Wars and seemed more plausible than Star Trek. In many ways, the dystopian world they portrayed was more believable and relevant to me than the fantasy worlds I'd been exposed to. They were all scary-but-cool and felt sort of cautionary to me, which I suppose is a hallmark of all apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction, but they did it in a way that wasn't as over the top as The Day After (also a favorite of mine that scared my mother shitless, mostly because she'd lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis and knew what it meant to truly fear a nuclear armageddon.) Because I was a geeky kid who was constantly picked on, I relished any opportunity I could find to trade the boring and shitty real world I lived in for something more exciting, and these stories intelligent, compelling, and rewarding.

Once upon a time, it was strictly the provenance of geeks, but has recently come into the mainstream, thanks largely to the revival of the zombie apocalypse:

As a longtime fan of these genres, I'm happy, but not thrilled, that we're starting to see apocalyptic fiction hit the mainstream. I say "not thrilled" because when things like this hit the mainstream, the good stuff gets marginalized, while the majority tends to become guilty pleasures like The Omega Man, moderately entertaining efforts like Jericho, or full-on suckfests like the Resident Evil movie (that one shot -- you know the one -- notwithstanding, of course.)

Currently, graphic novels like Walking Dead do what the movies could never do: continue forever, examining all the situations that would realistically come up if the zombies ever did begin their insatiable feast on humanity. (Yes, I am aware of how silly it sounds to use "realistically" that close to "insatiable feast on humanity." Shut up. Zombies are cool.)

I mention World War Z in this column (which was recommended by many WWdN:iX readers when I praised Monster Nation) and I'm going to mention it here, as well: holy mother of zombie jesus, the audio version is one of the most enjoyable and truly captivating original works to come out of the zombie apocalypse, ever. It's a full cast recording of monologues from and interviews with the survivors of a huge zombie war, and it feels eerily real, like a documentary. It is six hours of awesome, and I give it five out of five rotting corpses.