Category: Movies and Television

An observation: Until now I’d been on the 2-at-a-time plan for my Netflix subscription. I’d found that returning movies to Netflix was snappy; they’d email me confirmation of receiving a movie from me the day after I placed it in my mailbox (and I get my mail at about 5pm on weekdays). However getting movies from Netflix usually took much longer – after confirmation of my return, it would be another full day before I got the outbound notice email, and then it took another two days typically for the movie to actually get here.

I just upgraded to the 3-at-a-time plan however and just noticed that I am now getting movies much faster – they reach me the day after I get the outbound notice. It’s only a few dollars more a month but it’s a tremendously faster service. OK, I’m paying more, they are happier, I understand. But my puzzlement about this is that wouldn’t this actually serve to increase my cost to them as a customer? Why make any change at all to my movie priority? I didn’t upgrade for speed, I upgraded because we as a family needed more than just 2 discs at a time (we basically have three people in the house who watch TV).

Watch, now that I’ve pointed this out my movies will take twice as long to arrive 😛

I do highly recommend Netflix as an easy way to stay abreast of both anime and regular movies. They offer a free trial (affiliate link) and the basic, one disc at a time/two rentals a month service is only $5 a month (though I’m paying $17 for three, with unlimited returns and rentals).

This movie is based on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, and premieres tomorrow. I haven’t read the original series, but it’s come under significant criticism from religious groups like the Catholic League who argue that the film “sells atheism to kids” (There’s a a good summary of the controversy, with refs, at Wikipedia). Not having read the books, I can’t comment on the fracas, but I am in general skeptical (the ridiculous brouhaha about The DaVinci Code comes immediately to mind). What interests me more however is the movie, and from the looks of it, it’s in every sense the heir to Lord of the Rings with respect to epic scale and visual feast. The first five minutes of the film are online at Yahoo and are a must-see. A pair of positive reviews at AICN – by liberal Harry, and by conservative Massawyrm, who addressed the controversy, also are worth reading. Standing alone, this film is incomplete; in a sense it’s like Fellowship of the Ring which is really act 1 of a 6-hour movie. But that’s the price we pay for a truly epic scale.

Intriguingly, it seems that Prince Caspian, the sequel movie to The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe is also in the works. It’s interesting to see this new film genre of child-friendly epic fantasy is evolving, and is populated not just with classic literature (two of the Inklings!) but also with more modern works like Pullman’s and of course Harry Potter – and how they come at the questions of faith and freedom from opposite directions, yet all converge.

C, c, c, c
T, t, t, t
H, h, h, h
U, u, u, u
L, l, l, l
H, h, h, h
U, u, u, u

CTHULHU!!!

We can dance like Cthulhu
We can answer to his call
Watch him kick Lady Liberty’s head
down the road like a soccer ball

Say, we can dance like Cthulhu
Live it up while the livin’s good
Cause once he awakens, the world starts shakin’
and there goes the neighborhood

Say, we can dance, we can dance
Great Old Ones are in control
We can dance, we can dance
Hear them callin’ the call
We can dance, we can dance
Terror makes you go in a trance
We can dance, we can dance
Everybody’s shitting their p-a-a-nts

The Cthulhu Dance
The Cthulhu Dance
The Cthulhu Dance
YEAH!

It’s the CTHULHU DANCE!!!

lyrics by Mr. Nice Gaius, a frequent commenter at Ain’t It Cool News (with the best Galactica-fan screen name ever).

Jammer weighs in on the writer’s strike.

If Internet media is the future of television revenue — and it will be at least in small part — then the studios owe it to the writers to compensate them fairly.
[…]
And when there’s original content produced for network’s web sites — like with the Battlestar Galactica webisodes last year and again this year, then the creators definitely should be paid for the hours they worked.

I was stunned to learn that the creative staff of “BSG” was originally not going to be paid for creating those webisodes. I guess I had simply assumed as a given the studio would want to pay their creative staff for original web content. One (although not me) could argue that a writer has been compensated for an episode that has already been broadcast on TV and doesn’t need to be paid again for its posting online. But not paid at all for new work?

The writers are certainly making their case using their craft, and leveraging the new media that ironically has been the source of their complaints:

I’m glad to see that people who were originally skeptics/apathetic are beginning to come around; Shamus asks though what benefit to the writers such a shift in public opinion confers. I think that the answer is simple; by watching better television. I don’t have cable TV and I refuse to watch any “reality” show, even American Idol, on principle. Also, I do not engage in any online viewing of streamed content, because I know the writers don’t get a dime. This is why I won’t be patronizing Amazon.com’s “Unbox” service (even though I’d net a generous affiliate fee if I hawked it) and will also stay away from Hulu.com when it goes live. I also am holding out on DVD purchases of several box sets of shows I truly enjoy (including Galactica and Samurai Jack) until such time as the writers’ reasonable demand for increased royalties are met. These actions amount to barely anything at all in isolation, but if enough people become knowledgeable about the basic economics of the industry, I think that they will take similar steps. Reward good behavior.

China, the Middle Kingdom, gets the Middle Earth treatment. I remember Crouching Tiger, HIdden Dragon was disappointing in that it seemed to lack that epic quality in terms of plot; it was built on imagery alone. This seems to have a lot more substance, and pairing Jet Li with Jackie Chan gives it immediate gravitas. I am looking forward to this.