Kevin Kelly, a contributor to Joystiq, i09 and countless other weblogs, will be weighing in on the intersection between film and video games every Thursday here on SpoutBlog. This is his introductory column; please welcome Kevin, ask him personal questions, shower him with flattery and/or rip apart his argument in the comments.
If you’d been holding onto a game controller or sitting deep in a multiplex somewhere a few weeks ago, you might have felt the shuddering groan of millions of video game and movie fans everywhere when the press release dropped the news: Brett Ratner is going to start making movies based on Activision’s cadre of video games. Maybe the Uwe Boll career path of making extremely bad movie adaptations of video games still appeals to him. It’s not clear what project will be first up, but given the fact that Ratner’s films have somehow made millions of dollars, it’ll probably be something fairly popular. Don’t rule out Brett Ratner Presents: Brett Ratner’s Guitar Hero: The Movie just yet.
Someone appears to be exploiting 9/11–but is it the marketers of Cloverfield, or Fox News? For Chris Thilk, the key takeaway from this video is that “Fox News is a half-rate news organization that’s willing to reference 9/11 at the drop of the hat, even if it’s for a story about why Taco Bell should never run another ad because someone bought a taco on that day.”
The Consumerist describes the ad-supported PDF model that Kevin Kelly is using to release his new book, True Films 3.0: 200 Documentaries You Must See Before You Die
I’m a bit of a doc junkie, so I was pretty pleased to see that Kevin Kelly (co-founding editor of Wired) has put together reviews of 100 of his favorite documentary films. Better yet, the 56-page book is published in PDF format, so you can download it for $3 (at the Boing Boing Digital Emporium).
On his website, Kevin nicely sums up what I love about docs:
“The very best of these non-fiction films are as entertaining as the best of Hollywood blockbusters. In contrast to the fiction that most movies are, true films offer authentic plot twists, real characters, and truth stranger than fiction. They aim to both entertain and to inform–a powerful combo.”
I think this book will be a great tool to change the minds of people who aren’t quite sold on the idea of enjoying documentaries. And for those who have long loved docs, apparently there’s already been a film club launched around the 100 films reviewed in the book. I’m not sure who organized it, or where, but it sounds like a good idea for Spout doc fans.
I’ll be back with more after I have a chance to look at the book.
Someone appears to be exploiting 9/11–but is it the marketers of Cloverfield, or Fox News? For Chris Thilk, the key takeaway from this video is that “Fox News is a half-rate news organization that’s willing to reference 9/11 at the drop of the hat, even if it’s for a story about why Taco Bell should never run another ad because someone bought a taco on that day.”
