Disorderly Content

I'm a half hour from heading to a friend's house for Christmas dinner, and here I sit, listening to the commentary track on Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. A musical commentary, which is every bit as cool as the one in the program itself, if perhaps a little too self-referential. Or is that a bad thing? I'm so not sure...

This is so cool! By using a tilt-shift lens, a photographer in Sydney is able to make movies that look like they're tiny little models, rather than real people in real situations. Watch:

Beached from Keith Loutit on Vimeo, spotted on Boing Boing.

A scary thought, and an even scarier sight. But it's twoo, thanks to podcaster Trucker Tom, who captured a few moments of day one of our Tips From The Top Floor photo seminar in Fort Collins this past weekend. That's me nodding like a bobble head gone horribly wrong. Do I really look that silly? And will I do anything to change it, now that I know? Yes. And probably not.

I'm in Cedar Rapids at the moment, trapped in a really boring hotel and waiting for American Airlines to deliver the suitcase they managed to mislay for the past twenty-four hours or so. So you can imagine that I'm in an easily amused state, by which I do not mean Iowa. Not that I'd have to be so easily amused to find this funny. Someone named Sarah Phelps has recreated classic video games using classic non-video game components. It's cool beyond belief, even if you aren't trapped in a frozen tundra with nothing to amuse you. Go ahead, see for yourself.

A few weeks ago I started to read a screed against Professor Lawrence Lessig's arguments for sampling and mixing as Fair Use. Professor Lessig believes making music and videos from protected content ought to be legal at least some of the time, that it's a great creative enterprise that should be encouraged. The screeder (screedist?) not only didn't buy the argument; he thought LL was smoking dope.

Me, I couldn't agree more with Professor Lessig. Not just because of the fun and satisfaction I've had making my own music videos, but every time I see something like this: a battle between Neo and Robocop that's hard to tell from the real thing. If an amateur production like this doesn't take anything away from the original sources, why shouldn't it be encouraged?

The day we feared would never come... well, it still hasn't come. But at least now we know when it's supposed to come. What date, you ask? Why, July 25th. This year. On that day we may all forget about work and everything else and bask in our good fortune.

Huh?, I hear you exclaim. Oh, alright; I'll explain. For it is on that date that Warner Brothers is finally going to get off their large corporate posteriors and release the first DVD volume of Animaniacs. Which is a wonderful thing. Truly. Thanks, TV Squad, for brightening my day immesurably.

Much as I like DVDs, I hate those Fascist warnings and menus the content providers force us to wade through before we can get to the actual content. But not nearly as much as I hate region coding. Why shouldn't I be able to buy British or Australian programs, or Chinese if that's what floats my boat? But nooooo, say the people with the power. You'll watch what we let you watch. And only when we let you watch it. And we follow, sheeplike, where they lead us.

Mostly, anyway. I've been pleased with the ability of apps like VideoLAN Client to bypass region coding on some discs, so I can see the Farscape extras the Brits get. But even VLC isn't perfect; I had to actually change my DVD drive's region to watch the even smuttier but still just as dull Region 2 version of Eyes Wide Shut. I kept thinking how pleasant life would be with a hacked DVD player. But that sheeplike thing kept me from acting on that thought.

Until recently, when my Sony 5-disc DVD carousel player started acting up. First it was a series of ripples in the picture when I powered it on, but which cleared up in a few minutes. Then it was more than a few minutes. Until finally it was all the time, and getting worse. Time to get a new player, I thought. And as long as I'm getting a new player, why not get a region free one?

But of course that would be wrong. The powers that control the content say it's wrong, don't they? And they wouldn't lie to us, just to protect their phony baloney jobs. They wouldn't, would they?

One of the podcasts I've been listening to is called Cinecast, which consists of two guys talking about movies. They recently trashed Terry Gilliam's Brothers Grimm, going so far as to say that most of Mr. Gilliam's directorial efforts have been disasters. As big a Python fan as I am, I was never a big fan of his animations; mostly I'd just wait for the funny live action stuff to come back on.

None of which is the point of this post, which is really about an early effort of two other Python alums, Michael Palin and Terry Jones. in the late 70s Palin and Jones collaborated on Ripping Yarns, a series of 1920s era boy's own adventure stories that I remember discovering and loving during my time in the UK. Now they're out on DVD and well worth a viewing. They do a surprisingly good job of creating an early 20th century sense of heroism amid a world of possibility, while at the same time pointing out the absurdity of the whole thing.

Sadly, there are only nine Ripping Yarns. According to Mr. Palin, the BBC weren't entirely comfortable with the concept. Sitcoms they got; standalone comedy stories in an anthology format made them nervous. Pity, that.

I was in Tower Records today, looking through the DVDs for anything new that I just can't resist. Which mostly involves the displays at the ends of the aisles, where the new releases go. At the far right they have their topical display, when there's a topic that's... well... topical. Today it was St. Patrick's Day, so all the discs were Irish in some way or another. The Quiet Man. The Matchmaker. Waking Ned Devine. The Secret of Roan Inish. Ronin. Some PBS special about the music or culture or something...

Wait a second. Ronin? De Niro and Jean Reno doing car chases in the south of France? Everybody after everybody else about a MacGuffinesque briefcase that doesn't really matter in the first place? All kinds of talk about noble Japanese warrior traditions, although none such actually appear in the film?

Oh, wait. Yeah, now that I think of it, Jonathan Pryce and Natascha McElhone were doing Irish accents. They were supposed to be IRA, weren't they? Not much of a connection to St. Pat's Day, thinks I.

And the Japanese warrior thing? Must be some kind of metaphor. Deep.

No, not crazy. Shortsighted; definitely that. Because as much as it hurts that Fox killed Family Guy too soon, that's nothing compared to the way they screwed Wonderfalls. Heck, even Firefly got more of a chance.

If you missed Wonderfalls in its brief run, you're not alone. Fox ran three whole episodes before they changed time slots. Then they ran one more before canceling it. At the time of the cancellation I still wasn't quite sure whether I liked the show or not. But now that I've seen all thirteen produced eps on DVD, I can see where the producers were going. And boy, was it a journey worth taking!

A lot of television programs are shaky in their early episodes, both in terms of their storytelling and their audience appeal. One of the challenges of turning friends and colleagues onto Farscape, to which I am a devoted fanboy, is that things don't really settle down until you're half a dozen episodes in. Heck, I wasn't sure I loved Firefly until I got to the last episode on the DVDs. To be sure, there are shows that just don't work, where you know in the first few episodes things aren't going to gel. But for anything with a story arc, where the characters and their adventures need time to develop, the networks need to provide enough time to be sure.

The good news is that Wonderfalls works as a miniseries. The producers gave us a reasonably self-contained first season, with a satisfying conclusion to the arc developed over the thirteen episodes. And the commentaries by producers and selected cast members are a hoot. Especially that last ep, where they all sing along to the show's quirky theme song. Good stuff.

From the Vancouver Film School comes Help!, a CG retelling of the fable about Androcles and the lion, this time transported to the time of cavemen and dinosaurs. Yes, I know cavemen didn't really overlap in time with dinosaurs. Stop being so literal!

Anyway, it makes me wish we'd had anything like this level of technology when I was studying computer science. When I think of the stuff we were doing with Tektronix storage tube displays and APL, all I can do is cringe...

You gotta love people. A report on Ananova talks about a Baptist couple in the UK who bought a DVD of Doris Day in Pajama Game but got Italian porn instead. But the best part of the story is that the retired couple had to watch the entire movie before they expressed their shock. You'd think that if the over-18 warning didn't tell them something was wrong, all the topless women speaking Italian might have told them they weren't getting Doris Day.

Their explanation? "My wife and I were very shocked, but we watched it until the end because we couldn't believe what we were seeing."

Yep. That's always been my reaction to smut too.

I'm a vidder. That's someone who makes fan music videos. Mine are based on Farscape; I take a song and string together clips from the show to match the lyrics or the pacing or something. It's a hobby, something I do because it's fun to create them and fun to share them with other fans. And on occasion to introduce somebody to the show, the music or, on rare occasions, both at the same time.

I mention this because a pall has been cast over this activity. Because Farscape Fantasy, the largest and best collection of Scaper videos, received a Cease & Desist letter. It seems representatives of Enya do not appreciate her music being used in fan videos and shared on the web.

An argument can be made that fan vids are good for the musicians whose work we borrow, that we introduce their work to people who might not otherwise discover them. I know that my own videos have helped sell a few CDs. But that's beside the point; we are using copyright protected work without permission. And if the copyright holder tells us to stop, that's what we have to do.

The damage to the hobby has been contained so far. Farscape Fantasy will remove anything that uses Enya's music. The rest of us will hope that other artists will be more forgiving, if not more appreciative of our enthusiasm for their work and our willingness to share it with others. And maybe things will go back to normal.

No, I'm not referring to A Series of Unfortunate Events, although I am using the title of the first book in that series for this entry. No, the bad beginning to which I refer belongs to Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Because, having exhausted every episode of Joss Whedon's three shows (I have season five of Angel on order for the commentaries and other extras), I did a foolish thing. I was in Tower Records and saw a cheap copy of the original Buffy movie on sale. It was relatively cheap and, being the completist soul that I am, I purchased it. I knew it was inferior to the series. But I figured that anything that started life in Joss's pen had to have some redeeming features.

Let me say without qualification that I was wrong. This has to be among the very lamest, dullest and least inspired stories I've ever seen. Every single aspect that made the television version of Buffy (and Angel and Firefly) so eminently watchable is missing from the film. The acting is dull, the dialogue is uninspired, the visuals are uncompelling, the music is forgettable. It's all a train wreck.

It reminds me of a joke once told by actor Alan Thicke, who, before becoming a success as the father on Growing Pains, was touted as Johnny Carson's worst nightmare as host of a new talk show called Thicke of the Night. "What's the difference between Thicke of the Night and the Titanic?", he asked. Answer: "The Titanic had entertainment."

Exactly.

I've been slowly working my way through my stack of unwatched DVDs. Latest viewing has been the Star Wars set. I saw the revamped Star Wars (or Episode IV or A New Hope) when it showed up in theaters. And I was unimpressed enough with George Lucas's hacking that I skipped the revisions of Empire and Jedi. So catching them on DVD gave me a chance to see the new effects and listen to the commentaries at the same time.

The best commentary by far is on Empire. And the reason is obvious: it's the only one that isn't dominated by Lucas, and by what I have to believe is revisionist history of the making of the films. Irvin Kershner's comments are more humble, more honest and a lot more insightful about his directorial efforts on the film. He admits to making some things up as he went along, as well as his uncertainty about how the live footage and the effects would look when it all came together. He makes filmmaking seem exciting and dangerous (in the career sense), which is the way it ought to be.

Lucas, on the other hand, seems incapable of doubt or the ability to make a mistake. Okay: one mistake; he does acknowledge that introducing Boba Fett only to kill him off quickly and unceremoniously in Jedi was foolish, especially since he knew (so he says) that he would be so central to the first trilogy. But no other mistakes: all six films came fully formed from his brain before the first film ever saw a camera. And the obvious, if trivial, mistakes aren't mistakes either. Lucas has his explanation for Han Solo's "Kessel run" line (treating parsec as a measure of time rather than distance). And I grant that the explanation is reasonable. But I'm still willing to bet that the line was a mistake and that he's just trying to come up with something to save his own aura of infallability.

In any event, it's nice to have the movies on DVD. They look very good, although the additions are both unnecessary and stylistic distractions. (The extra CGI creatures at the beginning of Jedi are too sharp, making it obvious they were added to filmed scenes.) And there's some nice stuff in the commentaries, along with Lucas's howlers. Like talking about all the work to find the best possible actors. Gee, then how do you explain Jake Lloyd?

I just finished watching the last of the extras on my season 7 DVDs of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Buffy isn't a show I watched when it was first on; I got into it only when a friend lent me the first couple of seasons on DVD. And perhaps that was better than trying to watch an episode a week, with all the months of waiting for new episodes both at the end of seasons and whenever The WB decided to screw with the schedule. I think Buffy (and Angel and Firefly, if it'd been allowed more time) work better on DVD, when you can gorge on hours at a time, take however long you need to recover from all the angst and then jump back in for more.

Anyway, now that I'm out of Buffy and have seen all of Angel (I'll watch the season 5 DVDs just for the extras), I can't believe the entertainment biz isn't clamoring for Joss Whedon's next project. This guys is an amazing talent, one who goes beyond the "same old same old" that fills our airwaves. He should be kept busy until he drops dead from exhaustion.

I'm unsurprised to discover that a lot of my fellow Farscape fans are also Joss fans. Because as different as his work is from Farscape, they share a sensibility, a willingness to push the envelope and to tell big dramatic stories. Now if only more Joss fans would discover the world of Moya...

What's that old saying: those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it? I'd read about the latest attempt to create temporary DVDs, which turn into pumpkins at the stroke of midnight. Well, not literally. Actually, it's supposed to take a couple of days. And they turn red rather than pumpkin-colored. But they're real. And they're on Amazon.

I was surprised to see the first Flexplay DVD among Amazon's offerings. I can't believe that these people didn't learn the lesson of DivX (the limited-use DVD, not the video codec): that consumers don't really want DVDs that turn into coasters. If I don't want to own a disc, I'll rent it, and for half the price of this thing. And I'll feel better about life for not filling landfills with stacks of useless discs.

Of course, it's all academic. The first and, I believe, only disc in Flexplay format holds no interest for me. Not big on Christmas movies at my house. Not even for "an inspiring, contemporary story of hope, forgiveness, love and redemption". And certainly not while contributing to a global trash problem.

It's a pity; Flexplay's a good name. But not to worry. I'm betting that in a couple of years someone'll resurrect it to name something less lame than this.

My DVD buying has outpaced my DVD viewing by quite a bit lately. I was keeping up pretty well until the new television season started. And between the few new shows worth watching and the rest of Angel season four, the unwatched stack was growing a little too fast. But I finally finished with Angel. In fact I'm done with all of Joss's output, having caught Angel season five and Buffy season seven on broadcast television. With commercials! Well, actually, with ReplayTV's fast skip feature. But they're still there even if I don't have to see them, right?

Anyway, now I can work my way through some old favorites I've picked up over the past couple of months:

• The President's Analyst, a 60s Cold War comedy with James Coburn as a paranoid shrink who really does have everybody after him
• The Assassination Bureau, Jack London's unfinished tale of WWI-era political intrigue, turned into a wild comedy caper film with Oliver Reed and Diana Rigg
• Ed Wood, finally on DVD and with commentaries and other goodies
• My Name Is Modesty, a low budget film about Peter O'Donnell's wonderful comic strip creation, Modesty Blaise. Which will, I pray, remove any memory of the appalling Monica Vitti/Terence Stamp adaptation from the 60s

Oh, and Shrek 2. Which, while not the tour de force of the original, is still a whole lot of fun.

Looks like we dodged a bullet this time. Boing Boing reports that Orrin Hatch cancelled plans to present the INDUCE Act to the Judiciary Committee. This is the bill that would make manufacturers liable for illegal activity on the part of those who purchase their products. Like Apple for any music on your iPod for which you can't produce a receipt. Just think: if this thing had been the Law Of The Land back in the days of the Betamax decision, we wouldn't have VCRs and the movie industry wouldn't be making half its revenue on home video.