It looks like Hollywood is in a twist over $1 movie rentals from popular kiosks like that run by Redbox. The cheap rentals are “costing” Hollywood a billion dollars, at least according to some analysts.

I doubt it. Fact is, most of those purchasing the rental would never go out and buy the movie in the first place. I’m pretty sure Redbox probably winds up a net positive for studios for the time being. Claims to the contrary seem a bit foolish. You know, like they’re coming from advisers who got the predictions wrong.

The deeper question here is about media markets, and the inherent value of the service Hollywood is providing. I’m not alone in thinking that the Hollywood studio system is pumping out a lot of worthless crap these days. Apparently $1 rentals are very, very popular. That could mean one of several things: first, that DVDs (even at their currently discounted rates) are still too expensive to purchase, and second that $1 is probably too low a price (but it is a convenient marketing pitch).

The value of a DVD has diminished over the last few years for a few reasons: the most notable being the final victory of high definition over standard definition. DVD video quality isn’t quite up to snuff, and so the value of those discs has diminished. The other problem is convenience. As online systems like Netflix increase in popularity (and deliver in HD even over mediocre Internet connections), the DVD value drops even more. Even at $10 per month, the Netflix system is a value for those who watch enough movies and value the convenience of instant, last minute viewing choice.

So, what are Hollywood movies valued at by consumers? Not a lot. At least not at the moment. There are no real viable online solutions at the moment. Netflix’s library is small at the moment, and there’s a lack of competition at the moment. We won’t know for several years what the final pricing solution will be.

One thing is clear, though: Hollywood placed a huge number of bets on continued DVD sales that simply aren’t materializing. Blu-ray remains underwhelming in its adoption rates (though it is doing better now that hardware prices have come down). Hollywood greenlit some movies based on potential DVD sales, but now that money has dried up. That means smaller movie budgets in the short term. Once again, Hollywood made a sucker bet. It’s been clear the last few years that physical media for movies was going to follow physical media for music, and Hollywood didn’t adequately prepare. Who exactly is working over there these days? Don’t any of them keep up with the technology?

tags: markets, media, movies, technology
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So, I’m watching The Vampire Diaries, and…

Yes. I watch The Vampire Diaries. Wanna make something of it?

So, I’m watching the show, and the protagonist good-guy vamp Stefan has yet another opportunity to kill antagonist bad-guy vamp Damon, and … doesn’t. The first time, Stefan traps Damon in a room full of vamp-bane, and now stabs Damon with a stake … in the stomach.

Damon has killed … gosh, I’ve forgotten how many. Six? Including Stefan’s “uncle” and now one of Stefan’s oldest friends, not to mention turning bad-girl Vicki, getting her killed in the process. And then, despite the fact that Damon is a killer, Stefan lets him go.

This is idiotic. There is no good reason for letting this jerk live. The only reason the writers did it is because … they have to. Killing the bad guy now would mean no more stories. So they come up with lame excuses for the good guy not to do his job and whack the bad guy. Seriously, this is dumb.

I’ll go to my more beloved vampire franchise, Buffy, and note (spoilers ahead for those who have not seen all of Season Two–come on guys, its been a decade! Why haven’t you watched Buffy yet?) that Buffy did the same thing with Angel/Angelus. She could have stopped him and it resulted in the tragic death of someone close to the main gang. Of course, Buffy actually did have a bit of a reason for doing what she did.

Still, this dithering by the good guys pisses me off. I had similar irksome feelings toward The Dark Knight for doing the same thing. Batman has the opportunity to put the bad guy down, but nooooo, the good guy can’t kill the bad guy. Sorry, I don’t see all the torment. Sure, we hate to do the moral calculation, but it’s there: bad guy dead results in one dead body; leaving him alive results in many dead bodies. Of innocent people.

I’ve pointed out this modern foible before. We think the problem is the killing. But its not. Killing is a last-resort kind of thing, but in these fictional cases, there’s almost always no other option. The burden of being the good guy means doing what others won’t do. And that almost always means taking life. Now, the burden is knowing that some day one might be called to account for that killing. If the good guy is confident enough in his or her judgment about what is right or wrong, this is not an issue. If you’re gonna be the good guy, you’ve got to know this.

In which case, failing to kill the bad guy means either: 1) the good guy is not confident that he’s really the good guy, or 2) the good guy is a coward. Coward in the sense that he knows that killing the bad guy is the right thing to do, but is too afraid to bear the burden of judgment. Now, one can certainly argue that no one should be so confident in the idea that they are the good guy that they are able to justify killing. But the results of that position are obvious: more dead innocent people. To believe that, one must believe that it is inherently more moral for many innocent people to die at the hands of an evil person than it is for one evil person to die at the hands of an innocent person.

Honestly, the total body-count approach seems leagues more moral than that. I have very little patience for characters in novels, movies and television shows that arrogate all sorts of moral authority to themselves and then back away from the moments in which they might, just for a moment, actually begin to bear the burden of the power they claim. Being a hero accrues all sorts of fame and glory, but it also means that you’ve got a massive bit of baggage to carry. In the end, that’s why I gave The Dark Knight a pass on Batman’s dithering–because in the end, the movie recognized the burden heroes carry, even if they defined it slightly differently than I would have.

I understand: the modern hero is supposed to be sensitive and not want to kill. Fine. But they’re gonna pay for not killing, and that not killing means more killing, in the end. Not less. The irritating thing is that they never seem to learn this lesson. I’d be content if they’d learn. Instead we’re given conveniently stupid good guys getting people killed because they’re unwilling to make the difficult decisions. They aren’t heroes, they’re cowards.

tags: Books, culture, ethics, movies, television, whatever
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John Scalzi’s got an article over at AMC on the coolness (or lack thereof) of SF. He mentions two movies in particular which achieved the elusive SF goal of coolness: 2001, and The Matrix.

I can agree with his points, but I find it interesting that he picks two movies (both are classics, of course) which, on later viewings, are incredibly dated. It’s understandable that 2001 is dated, given it was released in 1968. It was very much a product of the time, an extension of the jet age into space. But its imagery was, without doubt, very cool at the time.

The Matrix, amazingly, does not stand up well even after just ten years. I think this says more about the nature of American pop culture than the movie itself, which is still amazing, but it’s difficult for me to watch the movie without becoming amused at how bloody seriously it takes itself. The heavy metal goth subculture, the first-year philosophy student “deepness” of the thing. Yes, it was damned cool at the time, but it’s not that time anymore. It will always be cool for the moment it captured, but that moment has long passed as the subcultures it glorified had their moment of fame and then became the subject of intense mockery.

I do love Scalzi’s descriptions of the SF scene, though. SF fans are often quite earnest. They really do want everyone to share in the love of the genre that they do (even if they can be elitist about the depth of there knowledge within the genre). They’re often quite unselfconsious about it as well. It strikes me as very similar to new Evangelicals (don’t get too offended here, please). They love it, they want you to love it, and they have few if any qualms about overt (and sometimes embarrassing) displays of enthusiasm. So, cool is generally out of the question. But I think cool is overrated, as well. SF may very rarely be cool, but that doesn’t matter so much to its acolytes, most of whom are not used to being members of those strata of society considered cool.

I’m not sure I could put my finger on what I, for instance, think is great about SF. I can say that I enjoy it, and that I think it’s important. Being cool, though, is not a part of it.

Scalzi asks if there are any other movies people can think of that capture that moment of coolness. I’ll say that Lord of the Rings captured a series of cool moments for fantasy fans in a way that will never, ever be repeated. All those years of reading LOTR and committing vast amounts of brain cells to it paid off. For a few years. SF, though? Movies? No. SF movies have, in general, been my least favorite media for the genre. I prefer novels and TV. And TV SF has never been cool, sorry to say.

tags: movies, science fiction, television
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Over at the Amazon website, Armchair Commentary has decided to rank the Pixar animated movies, and astonishingly hasn’t been crucified for his choices. People tend to feel strongly about these. Since I’ve seen all but one, I guess I can rank them. I don’t generally like to rank movies in terms of good and better, so I won’t. I will say that Incredibles has to be my favorite animated movie of all time, though. Monsters, Inc probably would come in second. Beyond that, there’s a layer of “okay” movies, including Toy Story and Toy Story 2 (which was better than the first, in my opinion), and Finding Nemo. Then Ratatouille trails alone a little bit further behind. The rest merit little more than a “meh” from me. Cars, A Bug’s Life and Wall-E just did absolutely nothing for me.

I will say that for Dreamworks films, the only ones that really struck me as any good were Antz (which still strikes me as not for kids), and Kung Fu Panda, which (though flawed) would probably come in second or third on my all-time-favorites list for animated movies. So I guess I can say that Pixar is still the king of animation at the moment. I’m not sure I’m happy to see that a Kung Fu Panda sequel is in the works for 2011. Along with two more Shreks. Yeesh.

Animated movies have become entirely too formulaic. That’s probably why I liked Coraline so much. It was traditional, and a bit old-fashioned in some ways, but in being so it was daring and edgy. Strange, that. Other movies have their protagonist, the underlying message, a lot of unrelated humor, and an entirely predictable ending. They’re entirely too politically correct. They’re afraid to do anything too different. Kinda like TV in that way. It’s amazing the amount of bullshit you have to filter out when watching anything from Hollywood these days. It reminds me of washing down green beans with a drink as a kid because I hated the taste. Should we really have to do that? I don’t think so. Hollywood may think it’s for our own good and all, cramming all this PC bull down our throats, but don’t they realize that we’re not buying into it?

tags: movies, whatever
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No big surprise here: Hollywood is making crap movies, and now they’re paying for it:

The average cost of producing and marketing a studio movie has risen more than 6 per cent since 2007, according to The Motion Picture Association of America, while in the past 12 months profitable revenue streams, such as DVD sales, have sharply declined. This has left the film industry facing some difficult choices. At Universal Pictures and Walt Disney, where several costly films have flopped recently, new strategies are being drawn up and senior executives have been replaced.

Hollywood has long been out of touch with the American movie-going public. During the hey-day of Bush hatred, they churned out flop after flop of anti-war crap, and to some degree that’s continuing. Who knows how much money Hollywood wasted on the junk. No one wanted to see it, but Hollywood (convinced, as it always is, that its values are more widespread than they are in reality) kept banging its head against the brick wall. Meanwhile, crowd-pleasing movies (mostly superhero flicks) did very well. We’ll never know how a serious, real, pro-American military movie would have done because that moment seems to have passed. Hollywood could have made a killing.

But they didn’t. The distance between the Hollywood elite, still hoping that someday they’ll be respected in the same way as the ruling intelligentsia in Europe, and relatively populist average Americans is growing wider. I’m not sure why that is. The massive paydays demanded by actors (as the article notes, up to 20 million and 20% of the profits) certainly doesn’t help things. With the inflated paydays are inflated egos. And the studios won’t budge on the payouts, despite the fact that without them, a whole slew of movies that lost money would be pushed over the edge into the black.

I’m not saying the actors don’t deserve what the market will pay them for their relatively rare skills. But it seems pretty obvious that they’re demanding more than the market will bear. Paychecks are status in Hollywood. And the movie-making business is too full of too many massive egos. If Hollywood would get over itself, recognize that its values are abnormal and start making movies people actually want to see, they’d be profitable again. It’s not rocket science, people.

Alas, it’ll probably never happen. Time for some innovation to take these people down a peg or two. Either that, or the entire movie industry will collapse on itself. Anyone up for another bailout?

Didn’t think so.

tags: movies
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Over at Sci-Fi Scanner, John Scalzi chats about “director’s cuts” of sci-fi movies. He asks the question, what is the definitive version? The theatrical release or the director’s cut? Honestly, I’m not sure it matters. There’s always this obsession among sci-fi fans about “definitiveness” and “canon,” especially in franchises. So, did Han shoot first in the cantina, as he did in the theatrical release of Star Wars? Or, did he not shoot first, as in the special edition?

Pointless, really. Pick whichever you like. Honestly, I can’t stand the special editions of the Star Wars movies, and not just because Lucas screwed around with some of the details and added ridiculous scenes just because he could.  (I’ll never forgive him for that horrible scene where Han is stepping over Jabba’s tail. I could do better special effects with crayons and a rubber band.) The colors were off (everything is pink!) and the sound seems … wrong, somehow.

I tend to prefer director’s cuts over theatrical releases. I don’t mind a slower pace with extra, extraneous scenes. Still, they’re often indulgent (say, Ridley Scott’s multiple takes on Blade Runner). But often they actually help the film. Scalzi is right to point out how James Cameron’s director’s cut of The Abyss actually has the movie make sense (the theatrical cut’s ending is abrupt and nonsensical). On the other hand, I don’t think any amount of tinkering could help Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. Blame the movie’s failure on studio heavy-handedness and the “happy ending” they added, but even with the new ending, I still hate the movie. (I’m probably in the minority on this one among SF fans, I know.)

As for Aliens 3, the same rule applies as Brazil. I’ve seen “okay” movies become better through director’s cuts, but I’ve never seen a bad movie become good. Star Trek the Motion Picture (doesn’t that sound old fashioned?) goes from okay to decent. Superman II goes from okay to decent. The Abyss went from great to greater.

So, if I’m going to buy one of these on DVD (heh, right, I can’t remember the last time I bought a DVD), I’d buy the special edition. More people may have seen the movie in the theater, but over the years, the non-theatrical versions will be the ones everyone sees. Eventually, those will replace the memories of the theatrical release in viewer’s minds.

[Edit: Yes, I know, you'd think someone whose blog name is a Monty Python reference would love a Terry Gilliam movie. But I don't. I haven't enjoyed any of his work outside Monty Python, save maybe for Time Bandits.]

tags: movies, science fiction
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So, I saw here that Darren Aronofsky has plans for a remake of Robocop. Am I the only one thinking that this is sort of a mistake?

Robocop is a lousy movie. It doesn’t hold up well at all, and it’s popularity at the time says more about 80s action movies than anything else. It was over-the-top violent, thinly plotted, and didn’t even try to delve very deeply into any philosophical questions about humans and machines. Looking back, it’s pretty much an attempt to piggyback on the success of Terminator.

But the real problem with the idea is that it seems so dated. I mean, the Robocop was slow. He talked like a robot. It’s very much rooted in 1970s and 1980s ideas of high tech. Heck, robots are still cool, but human-looking robots have been done to death lately (Battlestar Galactica and the recent Terminator TV show and movies come to mind). So, what can reviving Robocop add to the discussion?

For the idea to work, it would have to be rooted more firmly in biotech and nanotech advances of the last decade and a half, and at least acknowledge that SF has moved on from human-machine hybrids in the style of Robocop. And even the Terminator. What made the Terminator TV show interesting wasn’t the fact that Cameron was a robot, but that she was so human. It was all about the software, not the hardware. Where SF seems to be treading most heavily these days is in the nature of consciousness and sentience. Robocop didn’t quite do that. It was just a man inside a robot suit, essentially. But I’d rather see the opposite: the robot in the man’s mind. Rather than a robot cop, why not a suped-up human body run by a human-created, sentient AI?

Anyway, there are also cultural problems dragging Robocop forward two decades. Urban crime isn’t quite the problem it was back then. People could sympathize in some fashion with brutal cops bringing justice to the streets. Not so much now, I think. Just look at our superheroes recently: drenched in self-doubt about their methods of facing evil, they are tortured by moral grayness and forced into a kind of false moral equivalency between the violence they bring to stop crime. They are dark, brooding wimps for the most part. The only recent example to the contrary that I’ve seen is Ironman. Even Ironman drew criticism for its depiction of the hero killing brown people (even though they were clearly very bad people, and he was defending other brown people). I’ve become very impatient with all this, of course, but I can imagine a Robocop movie being too unwilling to break PC conventions, resulting in a movie that refuses to deal with evil as it actually exists, and instead focus primarily killing only those who can be killed according to those conventions: rich white businessmen.

Oh, wait, that’s exactly what ended up happening in the original Robocop. Heh. Some things haven’t changed, I guess. There’s a central conflict between Hollywood’s desire to make big, cathartic, violent movies where bad guys get what’s coming to them (that’s what people want to see) and with the politically correct conventions they’ve tied themselves to. Which is why all Hollywood action movies are so damned predictable. It’s always the rich white businessman who’s guilty. I can’t imagine Aronofsky being gutsy enough to break the convention and actually have the Robocop facing real violent American crime, which is primarily urban, ethnic and very un-PC.

How much you want to bet that he’s got Vin Diesel lined up for the role? Heh, that’d be amusing. He wouldn’t even have to act!

tags: movies, science fiction
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The new Harry Potter movie comes out in just two weeks, and I’m pretty sure I won’t bother seeing it in the theater. The movies have never captured the feel of the books (save for maybe the third movie). Nevertheless, I am a fan, and the videogame version of the sixth book in the series came out the other day. Having some extra bucks left over on my GameStop card, I decided to pick it up.

I liked the last game in the series, which let me roam all over Hogwarts. Had the game been in any other fictional universe, I probably would have been bored out of my mind. But it was Harry Potter, so I liked it. A little. Much can be said for the new game, which is not as good, in my opinion, as the last, but entertaining enough for the seven dollars I paid for it.

You’d think that the game would be able to explore parts of the book that the movie couldn’t, due to time constraints. And this did happen in earlier games in the series. But now the games are not videogames based on the book, but based on the movie. And I can already see some places where the movie jazzed up the book in ways that are … well, let’s just say they are very, very bad. Bad enough that I don’t want to see the movie now. It’s strange getting this preview of the movie’s failings in videogame form, but it’s not the first time it’s happened, and likely won’t be the last.

So the game is the book’s narrative twice removed. Butchered first by the movie, the game takes the butchering one step further. Not only do we get the crappy screenplay version of the plot, but we get it with lousy voice actors and with character models that look like a cross between robots and zombies. But I get to wander around Hogwarts again, which is really all I want.

I’m still fascinated by the crappy stories game players are forced to sit through. Even the so-called “good” videogame stories are complete crap. I think back to Mass Effect, lauded by many as having one of the best stories of 2007. Of course, anyone familiar with SF could see that massive portions of the story were lifted from the later seasons of Star Trek: Enterprise. ENTERPRISE! Of all shows to crib from, they pick the (arguably) worst of the Star Trek series, and some of the most contrived subplots. Ick. Or the stories for Halo 3, or Metal Gear Solid: Guns of the Patriots. The stories are attrocious, despite the fact that (unlike movies) they have up to 20 hours to play with in terms of storytelling, and unlike books have the power of great visuals.

Both benefits are completely squandered. It’s unfortunate that some of SF’s best storytellers couldn’t help write some decent game scripts. Or, as I’ve said before, decent film scripts. Sure, the genre is different, and has different demands, but I’d like to see someone give it a serious try. The best game stories are about as coherent and thought-provoking as Transformers 2 (my review of which was posted just the other day). That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but we should be demanding better.

The worst thing is that most gamers don’t even realize that these stories are complete crap. Let’s be honest here: Harry Potter’s sixth book is fantastic. It’s a great story, and has moments of amazing adventure and genuine emotion. And I’d love to see those things on the screen, but it just isn’t going to happen. If I enjoy the movie, it’s because I’m superimposing my love for the book onto the movie. If I love the game (or just like it), it’s because I’m doing the same. But it shouldn’t be that way, should it?

tags: Books, gaming, harry potter, movies, science fiction
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There is a huge gap between the scientific accuracy of SF novels vs. television and movies. Sometimes I can suspend disbelief long enough to let it slip (like the recent Star Trek’s reliance on “red matter” to create artificial singularities). Other times I just get irritated because the lack of accuracy (or any attempt at accuracy) is because the writers are too damned lazy to get it right.

SF Signal went around and asked a bunch of SF authors, bloggers and real scientists who they thought the worst offenders were, and who they thought got the science mostly right.

I thought their responses were pretty interesting. Star Trek gets taken to task pretty often (particularly The Next Generation), while other movies like Gattaca and 2001: A Space Odyssey get the thumbs up. I did notice that the more cerebral and less action-oriented the SF films were, the more likely they were to get things right.

Not all the comments are on the mark, though. Some complained of the over-the-top tech in some movies, like XXX, with its see-through-walls binoculars. I don’t think we’re meant to take those things seriously, so I can’t complain too much about them.

I guess my problem comes when shows desperately want you to take them seriously, but then start with the silly talk. That’s how Star Trek: The Next Generation always was for me. Very irritating. Some of the comments mention Fringe but again I have to disagree: as soon as it became obvious they were going with the alternate universe subtext, I kinda gave them a pass. Although I admit, the kooky science (not really “fringe” science, but outright sillines) did put me off to the show. But I learned to live with it, and find the show at least moderately entertaining.

Part of the appeal of SF, though, is doing things that can’t be done, or showing people what it might be like to do things that can’t be done. Things don’t need to be perfect. Sure, Star Wars’ battle scenes (even those in the original movie) were downright impossible and made no sense. But that’s not what the movie was about. It just looked damn cool. That was the point. So I’m willing to go pretty far for an adventure movie, but only so far.

tags: Books, movies, science fiction, television
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Here’s a list I stumbled on listing seven SF books that are, in that blogger’s opinion, unfilmable. The list includes some classics like The Stars My Destination (which I vaguely remember reading years ago), and A Canticle for Leibowitz, as well as some of my own favorites such as Neil Gaiman’s Sandman graphic novels and Dan Simmon’s Hyperion.

But here’s my problem with this (and all) lists like this: nearly all books are unfilmable. Not if you want to stay true to the source material and do it justice. I’ll admit that the Lord of the Rings trilogy did as best as could be done in bringing the books to the big screen. But don’t mistake best as could be done with good. The movies mangled most of the subplots, destroyed a few beloved secondary characters, and lost most of the central theme of the books. So, no, they weren’t good translations of the book to the screen. But they were good movies, which is all I really wanted.

So I guess this depends on what you mean by “filmable.” I don’t like movies made from books, in general. Books are very different beasts than screenplays, and it’s best to keep the two separate, in my opinion. Movies are inherently brief, and derive their depth from what actors bring to it. Books are about words. Movies are about images. The two very rarely overlap.

That doesn’t mean that some books aren’t inherently filmable. Some writers are good at that. Stephen King and Michael Crichton come immediately to mind as writers whose style is very cinematic. Of course, both have experience writing things for the screen, so big surprise there.

Rather than compile a list of books which are unfilmable, I think it is more productive to compile a list of books which are, more or less, filmable. Shorter, punchier books whose action would translate well to the screen. Who in their right mind would want to see Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow on the big screen? It would be a waste. On the other hand (and I’ve said this before) a book like John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War would translate fantastically to the screen. Of course, I’d prefer a six- to eight-hour made-for-TV (preferably Showtime or some other uncensored cable network) miniseries with high production values. Now that would kick ass, and allow the themes of the book to emerge.

But at two, maybe two-and-a-half hours? No. No book is truly filmable at that point. Only if you accept that the movie version is, for all intents and purposes, a completely separate work could that ever be acceptable. If the movie tries to be the book, it won’t work. It must be its own thing. And at that point, it really ceases to be a film of the book, doesn’t it?

I could probably name all the filmable SF books on the fingers of … ok, both hands. And I’m being generous.

Leave the books alone. Let them be what they are. The big screen demands its own unique stories tailor made for that medium. So, rather than telling filmmakers to destroy great works of SF by putting them on the big screen, perhaps it would be better for some visually-oriented filmmaker to team up with the hottest SF writers and create new works for the big screen. Adaptations are always exercises in compromise. I like my SF uncompromising, please.

tags: Books, media, movies, science fiction
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