Category: Movies and Television

  • Does the Ring turn Sauron invisible?

    One Ring to Rule Them All
    The Ring
    On Facebook, one of my friends posed an innocent question:

    How come the ring doesn’t make Sauron invisible?

    Indeed! Out of the mists of Facebook, a truly awesome discussion ensued. I found this reply the most intriguing and erudite:

    The Ring doesn’t actually make someone invisible in the sense we understand the term. It shifts its bearer into the world of the Unseen (which is why it can’t hide Frodo from the Nazgul on Weathertop–they already dwell in the World of the Unseen). As a former Maia, Sauron simultaneously dwells in Middle-earth and the realm of the Unseen–so the Ring would not make him invisible.

    Surely we haibane can contribute to this critical topic. What say you all? Agree or disagree with the theory above?

  • Spider Man 4 dies so that Warcraft may live

    I don’t really care about the news that the Spider Man franchise under Sam Raimi’s hand is over, except for the much more important fact that it frees Raimi to work on the Warcraft movie instead. As Harry says at AICN,

    I feel confident in saying that the next film we’ll see from Raimi is going to be WARCRAFT… which after AVATAR, the concept of world building that particular universe could be astonishing – especially in 3D – especially after what Cameron just unleashed upon the globe. World creating Science Fiction & Fantasy… done by visionary filmmakers … well, it is a premium. We got THE HOBBIT coming, looks like an AVATAR 2… but the word I hear is that today – the phone lines were burning between a certain legendary locale and Raimi’s folks about firing up the furnaces to forge the weapons of war.

    Some time in the next few months, I expect progress. I’ve heard that Robert Rodat (SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, THE PATRIOT) has put together one helluva script.

    A movie technology arms race between Jackson, Cameron and Raimi with the Hobbit, Avatar and Warcraft franchises is going to be one fun hell of a ride.

    Just look at this again – click on it, zoom in, and really look at it – and imagine it on the big screen, alive:

    WarCraftArtSmall.jpg

  • Does Pixar have a gender problem?

    This argument by blogger Caitlin says yes. But I find it unconvincing, because frankly if you zoom out to animated storytelling as a whole, you realize that there’s acually a shortage of normal male characters, not female. Disney is the perfect counterexample – apart from Aladdin, there isn’t a single boy character that is worthy of role model or morality model status. You just have a succession of generic princes and eye candy. Beauty and the Beast was just the inversion of Aladdin, with Belle playing Aladdin’s role and the Beast equivalent to Jasmine (in terms of plot relevance and narrative focus).

    In fact Pixar explicitly set out to rectify that imbalance and I think that there’s a diversity on the types of male characters that we’ve seen in their films. Caitlin’s list is very helpful in summarizing them, and I think it’s clear that the male characters in these stories are all of different types. But more to the point, Pixar movies aren’t just about individuals, but their relationships, in a way that Disney movies never were. Toy Story and Monsters, Inc were about male friendship, Bug’s Life about a man and his role in society, Finding Nemo about a father and son, UP about youth and ageing, The Incredibles simultaneously about a man and his family, and a man and his wife (and I think Caitlin gives Helen really short-shrift here). Cars is really a paean to a lifestyle, and the NASCAR life is just a metaphor for our fast-paced existence whereas life in Radiator Springs represents that essence that gets left behind; in that context it was reasonable for McQueen to be male and Sally to be female because these are symbolic roles. I hated Ratatouille. As for WALL-E, it was a simple love story, beauty and the beast (or geek, rather) all over again and again the gender roles were absolutely appropriate here.

    I’ll also note that the one glaring omission on the Pixar male relationship lineup was a story about brothers, but Disney’s Brother Bear nailed that so perfectly that I don’t think we ever need to see another movie on that topic again.

    The bottom line is that there’s a body of work here that does indeed have a gender focus, but that’s valuable. It doesnt take away from the enjoyment of these movies by little girls – of which I have two. As a male myself I feel that in general, female relationships are always the focus far more than make ones – usually its female characters who are better defined and have the more interesting issues and relatonships.

    My advice to Caitlin is that if you want to go looking for strong female characters, then look at anime, particularly Miyazaki. I cant really think of a memorable male anime character at all. Well, maybe a few – Spike from Cowboy Bebop, the brothers from Fullmetal Alchemist, and Light from Death Note. But these are exceptions to teh rule – mahou shoujo rules. Haibane, Dreamers, Sugar, anyone? Again, I have two girls of my own 🙂

  • Netflix coming to Wii

    This was expected, and welcome news indeed: Netflix streaming is coming to the Wii in March.

    Screw the Roku or popbox, man, between my DVD player and Wii I’ve got 95% of my bases covered now. And the Wii’s lack of HD support isn’t a big deal – for streaming, standard-def is actually better anyway, and most TV is still standard def anyway.

    I think the console makers need to realize that they could basically swallow the market share of devices like Roku, Boxee, popbox, etc whole just by adding software support for video formats, a USB port, and WiFi to their next generation consoles.

    I just logged into my netflix acct and reserved my Netflix Wii disc which unlocks the streaming. Ships automatically to my address! one click.

  • a solution to the Leno vs Conan problem

    as regards to the arcane conflict over at NBC about where to stick Leno and how to stiff Conan, ably summarized by the latter in his own words here (hey Conan, apology accepted, btw), I offer a humble solution in all earnestness that should preserve egos, reputations, and ratings alike. May it be so.

    (disclosure – I dont really watch late-night TV. Warcraft, anime, etc…)

  • Boxee and Popbox gunning for Roku

    I’ve prevously mentioned the Roku digital player as a game changer for home entertainment, but haven’t actually bought one yet. It looks now like there’s some serious competition to Roku, which is of course a good thing. The first is Boxee, which has a software-only variant you download to yor PC and also actual hardware slated for release this year. Like Roku, the Boxee box has simple connections for your TV, has built-in wifi, and USB for external drives. Boxee also has an SD card slot and intriguingly, a full QWERTY keyboard on the back of the remote. It isn’t clear if Boxee supports Netflix or the Amazon video store, but unfortunately Boxee was forced to yank Hulu support recently. Boxee is expected to cost about $200, which about twice what Roku costs.

    The other challenger to Roku is popbox, which is an evolution of the Popcorn Hour box which Nick has been using (and promising to blog about for ages! *nudge* *nudge*). The popbox looks to be a simpler deice than Popcorn Hour’s flagship model the C-200, and promises support for pretty much every file format out there (including MKV, which doesn’t seem to be supported by Roku). Popbox will support netflix, and also crunchy roll which pretty much screams “otaku buy me!” – and its price is more comparable to Roku at $129 (available in March). The only downside is that it doesn’t come with wifi included, you have to shell out a little for that.

    So, whats a prospective consumer like me to do? The ideal device for me would be to support every possible format (like popbox), built-in wifi (like boxee and roku), and be priced no higher than $150. And of course netflix support is the key. Its worth noting that both popbox and boxee also will have app development platforms so presumably someone could add support for other services. I also imagine that Roku isn’t going to sit back withouut any competitive response; if Roku could add MKV support then I’d probably still favor it over these other more featured, but more complicated and expensive, options. That has to be a simple firmware or software update, I imagine.

    Regardless, it’s great to see how this market is coming along. With the death of disc imminent, it’s where the future is. You can easily imagine someone taking a BD player and adding a Roku to it and making a complete convergence device. In fact, what if Nintendo were to do that with Wii v2.0 – have it be a BD player like the PS3 and also support all these features in software? Given all the hype about mobile device convergence (camera+phone+PDA+apps) it makes sense that we would see a trend towards convergence in our living rooms. Theres no reason I should have to have a separate device for DVDs, games, and digital entertainment. The PS3 is closest to this now, in fact – but its expense still sets it apart. A fully converged device as I describe above, my hypothetical Wii 2.0, shoudl be priced no higher than $300 to really make inroads.

    Related: article on Popbox at Electronista

  • the shrinking world of anime

    An interesting discussion at Pete’s and Steven’s has me thinking that the trend for anime is one whihch basically dooms DVDs to extinction (and why are we even talking about VHS anymore?). The problem is not just limited to titles that aren’t available in North America, but even titles which may technically be available but utterly impractical to obtain. Case in point – my beloved, $5-from-Walmart copy of Totoro has gone missing (unwillingly, unlike last time). I decided I’d buy a new copy – preferably one with all the extras – and guess what? It’s out of print. The only way to get my Totoro fix for my kids is to download a torrent (and watch on our TV via our USB-enabled DVD player). I fully expect to buy a Roku or equivalent device this year to tap into my Netflix on-demand account, which will also open the door to torrent convenience (though the demise of Mininova is a roadblock – I’ll have to start actually participating at bakabt or some other community now). Even titles which are available at Best Buy, like the complete Kino’s Journey, are absurdly expensive and the sad reality is that the pricing of anime makes most of it out of reach for anyone who has mouths to feed and bills to pay. Without torrents, the few purchases I can afford to make – Haibane, Sugar, etc – would never have happened.

    Ultimately, anime is a hobby and not a necessity. But if we are limiting anime to only those who can afford to play by the industry’s rules, then anime will die. It’s really just the torrenters keeping it alive right now. That sounds paradoxical but it’s fundamental reality about the new era of digital content. Give it away, build an audience, and then hope some of them will buy for posterity. Assuming you’re making decent quality anime in the first place…

    Incidentally, this story about Boxee being forced to give up on Hulu is pretty emblematic of the thorny issues of control being fought out in the marketplace. The anime industry is just a bit player in all of this.

  • Willow goes to Azeroth

    Unfortunately I got stuck on the Earth for rather longer than I intended. I came for a week and was stranded for fifteen years. — Ford Prefect

    These words of warning apply equally well to Azeroth as Earth, as does the Guide entry which read in full, “Mostly Harmless”. That mostly bit is key, as G Willow Wilson is discovering.

    The thing that gets me is this: there is nothing original about this game. Somebody mixed a little steampunk into Tolkien’s Middle Earth, changed a few names (high elves are night elves; hobbits are gnomes; trolls are troggs–the L’s replaced with a letter a mere 4 spaces away on the keyboard) and went to town. From a storytelling angle, everything about WoW is a rehash of something older and better.

    But the sheer richness of the digital environment is so impressive that you don’t even begin to care. The other day (day? night? In my delirium I can’t remember) I was running along a frozen river in my little gnomish avatar when I heard the sound of bells. Around the bend came a blue-skinned elf. We stood there for a long moment, looking at each other, and then ran on, each bent on her own errand.

    It was almost poetic.

    Indeed, as was the occasions when I (or rather, my lvl 50 warrior toon) literally rode up on a white horse to save her little gnome mage from something or other. The sheer artisanship of the game makes even mundane encounters, epic in a way.

    Meanwhile, on my flight back to Chicago from Abu Dhabi, I became acquainted with the TV show “How I Met Your Mother”. It’s amazing how WoW crops up in pop culture nowadays:

  • The Avatar of politics

    James Cameron’s AVATAR is the kind of film that moves the industry forward – and not necessarily just the movie industry. The movie’s 3D technology makes Gollum look like Max Headroom. The scope of Cameron’s ambition in terms of redefining the baseline for movie-making technology is utterly breathtaking; this is the kind of stuff that George Lucas or Steven Spielberg should have been doing with their sacred franchise cash cows’ spoils. This film was something Cameron wanted to make decades ago but was restrained by technology; the story goes that he saw Peter Jackson’s LOTR trilogy and realized, “the time is now”. And Jackson will surely step up his game in response – but this isn’t just a game of techno-wizardry, it’s an arms race from which every moviegoer will benefit from in terms of how movies are made, filmed, and most importantly, viewed.

    So of course, some people are mad because the film hates America. WTF?!?!

    GOOD GRIEF FOLKS. These are MOVIES. This one is set on an alien planet, with 10 foot tall blue natives and (regrettably the only non-original aspect of the film) a generalized Earth Military which could have been ripped straight from Starship Troopers or the Alien trilogy. If there’s a message here, it’s Pocahontas, not The West Wing.

    Not every army on film is a metaphor for the US military. In fact, as is the case with Heinlein, sometimes it’s a metaphor for something else. And AVATAR is above all, a love story, and about an individual who questions the dogma he’s lived by and embraces his own conscience and beliefs. What’s more conservative than that?

    What we need is a entertainment-industry equivalent of Sigmund Freud, to make the arch-observation “sometimes a movie is just a movie.”

    And what a movie it will be!


    Official Avatar Movie

  • socialists and zombies

    strange musing I had about an allegorical film where zombies attack a town in the usual fashion, and are killed doff by shotguns by the usual rouugh types, but for some reason everyone in the film never uses the word “zombies”, instead they call them “socialists” – and instead of brains, the zombies go looking for wallets. The shotgun-wielders all have cool names like Galt and Laffer and they name their shotguns things like Chicago School and Trickle Down.

    In a flashback, we can see the origin of the zombies – a virus caught by ordinary folk who are sitting around in a poost-apocalyptic landscape (quite different from the clean rural chic of the heroes’ home towns), unemployed and ill, gathered around the iconic television on fire from the original Terminator movie.

    At the end, the small band of heroes is surrounded by the zombies (er, socialists) in an old farm, and all looks lost when all of a sudden the calvalry, dressed in crisp trenchcoats, white gloves and black boots, comes swarming in from out of town and smashes the zombies into pulp with truncheons. Then they usher the grateful citizenry towards their nearby semi-trailer for a hot shower. Credits.