rich tasty courage ([info]calamityjake) wrote,
@ 2006-07-10 10:52:00
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Links for you, and odds and ends.


  • A fascinating and in-depth look at how to design a book interior.

  • A wrong-minded column that purports to describe the problems with Wikipedia. Column summary: in the minutes after Ken Lay's death, some people wrote inaccurate/biased things in his Wikipedia entry. Over the next several hours those inaccurate/biased things were filtered out and by the afternoon of the day he died the entry was accurate. The column says that the fact that people can write things that are wrong in the posts is an enormous weakness. It doesn't mention the fact that the thousands of contributors to Wikipedia ensured that less than a day after Lay's death, his entry was up-to-the-minute accurate; that the very fault the writer finds in Wikipedia--the faceless masses with the ability to make corrections to every entry--is the reason Wikipedia is reliable. And of course the columnist neglects to mention that anyone concerned about the accuracy of an entry can easily browse every single change made to it and the citations to justify them. Just a generally bizarre column, overall, which in my opinion is a better polemic for Wikipedia than against it.

    Some examples of how misguided this column is: Mathew Ingram's perspective, Open Culture, this Boing Boing post, this Boing Boing post, this Boing Boing post, this Boing Boing post.

    It's true, though, that Wikipedia's value as a source of news information is limited. It's neat that this year's World Cup entry already lists Italy as the winner, but the presence of entries for contemporaneous people and events does make more glaring the short-lived but irritating "corrections" that are rightfully maligned in the column.

  • I saw Pirates of the Caribbean over the weekend. I enjoyed it but it wasn't particularly good. Certainly not $132,000,000 good. Depp's Captain Jack was just a tired retread of the role in the first one, in my opinion--a caricature of a caricature going through the expected motions--and aside from the truly excellent bad guy and his minions I didn't really have any interest in the other characters. The effects and action stuff were generally fun, though, and if you can manage to see it at a drive-in theater I can assure you of an entertaining evening (if you aren't unlucky enough to park next to a van stuffed to the gills with pre-teens on cellphones).


In other news, if you want to talk to me you should add me to your google talk list--calamityjake at gmail.com.

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[info]socratic
2006-07-10 03:08 pm UTC (link)
What defines something as $132,000,000 good, in your opinion? Should a movie's gross reflect its quality?

It doesn't. It reflects its appeal. You only have to pass a certain threshold of quality to get people into a theater (this is patently untrue, it's more to do with marketing than reviews these days, but please to be bearing with me) and anything beyond that is...essentially wasted from an economic perspective. If a movie has to be a 6 on a person's 1 to 10 quality scale in order for that person to go see it, then a movie that's a 6 on 1000 people's scales will do more business than a movie that's a 10 on 900 people's scales and a 5 on the remaining 100s.

Pirates of the Carribean is going to be a monster hit because it's just good enough for a lot of people to go see it, and it appeals to a broad audience. Personally I can't imagine that it wouldn't be crap, since the first one was pretty boring, and I won't...but I do admire their dedication to profiteering. It's very Meta for a pirates movie.

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[info]calamityjake
2006-07-10 03:12 pm UTC (link)
Right, I recognize that. But what I mean is, I'm surprised it had anything near that appeal. Just for example, why didn't so many people want to see Superman? Its reviews were just as good (or more accurately, just as mediocre). And its marketing was no less overwhelming or effective (seemingly--it obviously WAS less effective, but I don't get why).

I expect a movie that opens this strongly to have BOTH the general appeal to have a potential audience of enormous numbers AND the quality to get overall good reviews/word of mouth. That's why Spiderman 2 did so well, in my opinion. It wasn't a perfect movie, but it was an improvement over its very good predecessor and got generally excellent reviews; plus it benefited from a huge marketing campaign, of course.

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[info]vengeance_is_me
2006-07-10 03:16 pm UTC (link)
superman isn't an exciting superhero. that's it.

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[info]calamityjake
2006-07-10 03:18 pm UTC (link)
Fair point.

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[info]socratic
2006-07-10 03:24 pm UTC (link)
Spider-Man 2 made less money than Spider-Man 1. Considering it came out a couple years later (inflation means that box office needs to rise to stay even in absolute terms) I'd say you've just cut your own point off at the knees.

Superman had a mix of not-great buzz for the gay stuff and the woodeness of the lead (everyone knows Orlando Bloom is wooden, but teenage girls love him anyway because they are soulless abominations not fit for this planet) And Superman's marketing was schizophrenic. Look back over it and there were like four campaigns, none of them overly compelling. Pirates had one. "THIS IS A SEQUEL TO THAT MOVIE YOU LIKED." That's it, with perhaps a little "OH THAT JOHNNY DEPP!" mixed in.

I don't think quality REALLY matters anymore. This is a Jerry Bruckheimer production. Jerry Bruckheimer stands for "Crap on the edge of watchability" and he's the king of Hollywood, because he's figured out that most people just don't fucking get it or just don't fucking care or SOMETHING. I mean Bad Boys 2 was AWFUL and it made a huge amount of money. It was a horrible horrible movie. It was a big hit.

Pirates have more universal appeal than superheroes do, because they appeal to nerds and non-nerds alike in larger numbers. Likewise this film has no real competition, more star-power, and a more interesting visual milieu (The carribean as opposed to fucking Toronto or whatever.) I'm not surprised it did better.

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haha
[info]vengeance_is_me
2006-07-10 03:29 pm UTC (link)
"badboys 2" was complete garbage, but that one scene of will smith standing in the doorway, pretending to be drunk while waving a gun around in front of that teenaged boyfriend of martin lawrence's daughter, was fuckin LOLZ!

"move, bitch, get out the way!"

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Re: haha
[info]socratic
2006-07-10 03:36 pm UTC (link)
Now if only the movie had been 3 minutes long with 10 cent tickets.

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[info]calamityjake
2006-07-10 03:33 pm UTC (link)
Oops, you're right about Spiderman. That's embarrassing.

And yeah, Bad Boys 2 was REALLY awful.

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[info]vengeance_is_me
2006-07-10 03:16 pm UTC (link)
Depp's Captain Jack was just a tired retread of the role in the first one, in my opinion--a caricature of a caricature going through the expected motions-

what did you expect? he's the same guy playin the same character in the same movie series. i sort of see what you're saying, but again, what did you expect?

i saw "pirates" this weekend, too (which is a shock, since my wife and i never get to see movies), and i thought it was a 9.5. the only that could have made that movie better: tits. awesome movie all-round, though. and yea, davey jones's army (especially hammerhead guy) were off the hook with the CGI. some of the best to date. you can't fuck with the money disney has, or the team of animators.

i'm excited for the 3rd part.

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[info]calamityjake
2006-07-10 03:21 pm UTC (link)
I guess what my point is is just that it seemed like they didn't do anything new with the character (or with the other characters from the first one). Which isn't the worst thing in the world--it would be much worse if they did do something new with a character and the new thing turned out to suck (see The Matrix sequels). I wonder if I would have been more impressed if I had seen it inside, on a nice screen, with good sound. I don't think it would have changed anything, but it might have made a difference.

I'm excited for the third one, too; if it's good it would improve my opinion of this one, too, since they're basically two parts of the same movie.

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?
[info]vengeance_is_me
2006-07-10 03:23 pm UTC (link)
i'll never understand why people thought the matrix sequals were so bad. they wrapped it up nicely, i thought. again, what were people expecting? everyone was aware of the underlying story line, so what the fuck did you want? more kung fu? it's not meant to be a kung fu movie.

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Re: ?
[info]socratic
2006-07-10 03:26 pm UTC (link)
"What the fuck did you want?"

A plot with some semblance of coherence?
Some kind of dialogue that wasn't horrible horrible horrible?
Umm...acting? I swear that if you squint at the third movie's credits you can see "Lawrence Fishburn's performance brought to you by Verizon."

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Re: ?
[info]vengeance_is_me
2006-07-10 03:33 pm UTC (link)
agreed the acting wasn't up to par, but again, the story line, i felt, followed through nicely. you had a chacter that was unaware of who he was, made aware, sent through trials, and dies the death he was meant to die in the end. again, i don't see how there wasn't a story line. machines take over the world; humans fight for survival; harmony is struck in the end. game, set, match.

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Re: ?
[info]socratic
2006-07-10 03:41 pm UTC (link)
Oh the throughline was fine. It was the way it was carried out that was just...ridiculous. I mean ignoring the obvious plot holes from the first one (which I couldn't) the second two just added on, with all kinds of vague junk about there being flaws in the mechanics of the programing and bugs and earlier programs and blah blah whatever. It was just a bunch of junk that doesn't really make sense on any level. The basic story of Neo isn't the issue, it's the execution, and all those painful minutes of expository dialogue. And I didn't particularly like the action sequences either, but apparently that was just me.

Anyway I didn't like the first movie that much. They lost me when they said "The machines are using humans for energy!" because scientifically that makes zero sense. Plus the whole "Nobody can tell you what the matrix is, you have to..." is complete bullshit. "You're trapped in a computer program that's tricking your brain into thinking this is reality when in fact it's just a simulation and your body is paralyzed in a pod." Summed it up in a sentence.

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Re: ?
[info]vengeance_is_me
2006-07-10 03:51 pm UTC (link)
fair enough. and i tend to be the same when it comes to action sequences, which i can't stand in american movies ("ong bak" ruined american action cinema, in the action dept ONLY, forever).

and i'm with you - i didn't like the action sequences much either. i can't stand when nonathletic actors try to do athletic things. see: toby mcguire, ben aflick, and lawrence fishburn.

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Re: ?
[info]calamityjake
2006-07-10 03:28 pm UTC (link)
No, the action scenes were pretty sweet and I didn't want any more of that. In fact, the part where the billions of sentinels attack the underground compound was about 30 minutes too long.

But the plot went from relatively simple and clear to byzantine and absurd. The sequels were too ambitious and at moments (the porny rave, Neo reaching into Trinity's body to squeeze her heart back to life, a lot of the expository dialogue) were painful to watch. The second one was pretty decent, but it had a lot of holes that I was hoping the third one would fill in. Instead, the finale was in every way worse than the movies that came before it. I was really disappointed, but not surprised--once you establish that the main character is omnipotent, how can you make the audience worry about anything? Same problem as Superman. But at least in The Matrix there was the real world, in which Neo was just another guy. Um, until he wasn't just another guy anymore, and could stop sentinels with his mind and see with his burnt-out eye sockets.

But that's really another post.

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Re: ?
[info]spackle
2006-07-10 08:57 pm UTC (link)
part of the problem with telling a story and then telling a different one in the same universe is that the expository cherry has been popped, especially with regard to neat characters. that's probably one reason you liked the bad guys in this one. the bad guys in the last one were good, but having them again would be eh.

i'm not saying that you can't take that kind of situation and write something great, but it had better be fucking fantastic because you don't have the crutch of introducing this really cool world anymore

the matrix is a real big example of it, the whole first movie was essentially revelation after revelation. there just wasn't shitloads to revelate any more, and the strength of the writing alone wasn't enough to hit expectations. or anywhere near expectations. it's like they had this idea that they'd had for years, nurturing every aspect of it, got to execute it, and then had to expand on it for dollars.

i think an example of this kind of situation done well is the first and second (not the prequels) star wars movies. the first one was great fun because the universe was really compelling. they made the second one darker and interesting, and expanded on the universe somewhat wihtout making it feel contrived. they filled the third one with muppets. the prequels were just pretty bad to begin with and didn't get any more compelling for me. they were also filled with muppets

i've always been kind of partial to stories where the stories had all the same characters in a different universe or vice versa. hollywood is not very partial to those kinds of stories.

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[info]socratic
2006-07-10 03:27 pm UTC (link)
Do you just not fucking know who Jerry Bruckheimer is?

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[info]discreet_chaos
2006-07-10 07:06 pm UTC (link)
That's what I've been saying, up and down the web.
It's a Bruckheimer -- Style over substance.

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[info]socratic
2006-07-10 07:54 pm UTC (link)
Please substitute "Overkill" for style.

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