Last night, a crowd in Austin surprisingly found themselves at the U.S. premiere of the new Star Trekmovie after being duped with promise of a new print of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (and a mere ten minutes of the upcoming film). Of course, this being Aint It Coolterritory, there were movie blog people in attendance, and of course these guys have given the reboot glowing reviews. But their praises can’t simply be explained away by the fact that the audience is part of the Trekkie choir, because certainly those fans don’t love every Star Trek movie. Otherwise there wouldn’t be such thing as the “Star Trek movie curse” on the odd-numbered installments.
Maybe they were just positive in their reviews because that’s what these kinds of guys do in situations like this. Think of it this way: if diehard Superman II,Raiders of the Lost Arkor The Empire Strikes Backfans were lured in with the promise of new prints of those films, hosted by Richard Donner or George Lucas or Harrison Ford, and the respective hosts surprised the audience with pre-release screenings of Superman Returns, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skullor The Phantom Menace, they would have been disappointed and some would possibly have written negative reviews. But if those fans were the type of movie bloggers who post reviews in between uploading photos of themselves with celebrities on Facebook, then there might be something more to it than simple fan-based bias.
I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with these kinds of bloggers, of course. I actually appreciate that they love movies as much as they do. And certainly anybody who criticizes their positivity is only jealous that they didn’t get to see the movie yet. So consider that when reading the following responses: …Read more
Behold the latest episode of The Dr. Steel Show, about an evil doctor bent on taking over the world. Sound familiar? Apparently it’s been ripped off by the new Joss Whedon project, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, which Karina commented on yesterday. And as early as Adam’s praise last week when Whedon’s series launched, SpoutBlog has been receiving comments from followers (known as the Army of Toy Soldiers) of the allegedly real-life Dr. Steel. Every other online acknowledgment of Whedon’s project also seems to be getting hit with similar allegations that Dr. Horrible is a copycat.
Personally, I can’t figure out the deal with Dr. Steel or his faithful subjects. It’s one of the many viral things on the web that confuse me and make me glad that I actually spend much of my non-blogging time away from a computer. Funny enough, in the past I’ve had the same issue with Browncoats (followers of Whedon’s series Firefly), who seem to be forever monitoring the internet for reasons to defend their beloved franchise. So far, I’ve only watched a few clips of Dr. Steel-related stuff and only some musical clips from Dr. Horrible. Just to be fair, I think I’ll avoid both, though I have to admit that I’m far more interested in a singing Doogie Howser.
Anyway, I await the flames from fans on both sides. I won’t mind the attacks if someone at least clues me into the stuff so I don’t have to spend my evening playing catch up.
Sarah Jessica Parker is talking about her latest perfume. She’s also, indirectly, talking about her appeal, her brand, what she does for a living, the reason why an audience in the low triple digits (mostly female, mostly younger than the actress by a decade) has rushed to the Times Center on a Friday evening exactly four weeks before the premiere of the Sex and the City movie, to see her interviewed on stage by journalist William J. Carter. I was invited to the event as a member of the press; I accepted the invitation in the spirit of making an honest effort to learn something about why adult women find Parker and the Sex and the City phenomena appealing.
The two women sitting next to me, who breathlessly climbed over my legs a few minutes after the program began, left behind their own fragrance trail: hair products, manicures, menthol cigarettes and pink drinks. A surface-only snap-judgment says these women were a representative sample of those in attendance: young(ish), upper-middle-class, not particularly cosmopolitan but enthusiastic about both cosmopolitans and Cosmopolitan.
Talk is brewing on Nikki Finke and Jeff Wells‘ sites of promoting a movie theater boycott over Thanksgiving weekend as a show of solidarity with the striking writers. The concept, says a commenter calling him/herself “writer/producer”, is simple: “All you have to do is stay home and spend more time with your families…Thanksgiving is one of the biggest weekends of the yeah and lowering the box office take that weekend will really hit the studios hard. Hard core fans could even picket their local movie theaters if they wanted to…”
For his part, Wells says he’ll support a boycott if it happens–”Hitting the producers and studio chiefs where it hurts is pure Frank Capra, but I love it”–but maybe he should take minute to think it over. Another Finke commenter says advocating such an organized show of solidarity would be illegal: “Secondary Boycotts are illegal Big-Time! While it might help a lot to boycott the theaters over the thanksgiving weekend it is very illegal to advocate that, especially on Nikki’s board which would surely be closed down when the first Studio Mogul secretly objected.”
A couple of hundred potential ticket buyers picketing on CityWalk would certainly cause a media-friendly ruckus, but I seriously doubt such a boycott could happen on large enough a scale to make any real difference. The fact is, there are five major studio films opening that weekend, many of them family-friendly films with aggressive ad campaigns. It seems hugely unlikely that anyone outside of New York or LA with plans to take the whole family to see Enchanted or This Christmas is going to care enough about a labor issue (especially one that they perceive impacts rich people) to stay home.
In Variety, Scott Kirsner looks at a new technology at YouTube called Video ID, which Kirsner describes as a “lost-and-found desk for unauthorized video content…through which media companies can “claim” videos that have been uploaded to YouTube without permission.”In a brief entry inspired by the LA Times‘ coverage of Video ID, Chuck Tryon comments that there are potentially “some real problems here in that many of the videos that would be subject to removal would fall into Fair Use categories,” and Kirsner does address this in his story. Noting that the YouTube faithful tend to “get steamed when the site takes down videos that make incidental use of copyright material, especially parodies or commentaries,” Kirsner reports that YouTube is reticent to explain exactly how Video ID works, because they don’t want videomakers who are using copyrighted content (whether within the bounds of Fair Use or not) to be able to easily skirt the system.
It’s entirely possible that Video ID could prove to be entirely blind to fair use; there’s also the issue of conflicts between copyright holders, as well as a lot of possible damage to YouTube’s organically aggregated fan communities. More thoughts after the jump.
Blogger, Convergence Culture author and MIT professor Henry Jenkins just gave a talk on Web 2.0 and fan communities at a marketing conference called the Forrester Consumer Forum, and our friend Chris Thilk from Movie Marketing Madness blogged it. There’s a lot of great stuff, including a Four Eyed Monsters a shout-out; check out Chris’ complete notes here. My favorite line? “Any network that can be used to share cat pictures can be used to bring down a government.”
A few weeks ago I was invited to participate in a collaborative effort, spearheaded by the folks at Cinema Fusion and Movie Patron, to produce a Top 100 films list on behalf of the online film community. I was sent a list of 500 nominees, and was asked to narrow it down to my personal Top 100, ranked in order.
I didn’t end up getting that far. Poring over the nominees list, I just became completely overwhelmed. It was easy enough to narrow the 500 down to 100 (frankly, there were quite a few films on the Top 500 that felt like placeholders–Pirates of the Caribbean? Grease? Seriously?), but I didn’t want to just submit a list of My Top 100 Most Favorite Bestests with Barry Lyndon at the top and the remaining 99 in random order. I decided I needed to come up with an organizing philosophy that would allow me to rank the films on a non-arbitrary scale, based on artistic, entertainment, and socio-historical value. But while I was agonizing over theoretical point values, everyone else was ranking their movies, and yesterday the final Top 100 list debuted on Cinema Fusion.
Considering that this venture was at least in part a reaction to AFI’s recently re-released Top 100 list, I think it’s useful to compare the two. Sean at Film Junk notes that he’s “a little disappointed that [the online] list wasn’t very radical or ‘progressive’.” This is a bit of an understatement; this new list is in fact so similar to the AFI list that if you compare just the two Top 20s side by side, seven films appear on both lists, with one film actually winning the same exact ranking from both groups. It begs the question: how did this self-styled “alternative list” come to so closely resemble the institutional verdict? Is this just an instance of consensus necessarily producing mediocrity, and if so, would there have been any way to get around that? Below the jump, you’ll find both Top 20s, and my analysis.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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Last night, a crowd in Austin surprisingly found themselves at the U.S. premiere of the new 
