That is all.
Archive for the 'Commentary' Category
Every time I see some down-on-his-luck independent musician ranting about how nobody wants to pay for music anymore, and how it’s hurting their livelihood as well as the labels, and why are people such cheap bastards who won’t pay me, and blah blah blah, it makes me very angry.
Yeah, I feel your pain, guys. People don’t pay for movies anymore either, and if they did I’d have a clear-cut business plan that anyone could understand, and I’d be rolling in investment money by now and going full speed ahead on a bajillion-dollar live-action-CGI-blend-extravaganza about space pirates or something. But that’s just not the way the world works anymore.
Now, I understand the need for a coping mechanism. Blame the cheap bastards who just want to download all of your hard work that you worked so hard on for weeks and months and years. Maybe they’ve got a point when they say the big record companies shouldn’t keep making money, but you, nooooo, you’re indie! You make less money than a part-time fry cook at McDonald’s, and if people steal from you, then they’re bad, bad people! You deserve to be paid for your hard work!
No you don’t. You’re indulging in your own creative vision; nobody asked you to, and you’re not providing a service to anybody. You are creating all the pretty music in your head because you feel like it, and you are not inherently entitled to anybody’s appreciation and certainly not monetary compensation.
If you’re good, though, and people like your music, then you don’t have to tell them that you deserve to be paid for it, because they know. They’re your fans now, and they’d love to throw money at you.
So, I’m sorry to break it to you, impoverished indie musician, but if you’re not making money from your music, then you’re either not good enough or you haven’t put a god damn PayPal button on your website.
Slash rant.
Okay, you see, there are some major advances to watching videos on the web that everyone would be able to experience right now, except all of the browser makers are fighting over what type of video standard to use. It may be confusing to you, so I drew you a picture to explain it in the distinctive art style of Zacqary Adam Green at age five:
You see, Theora and H.264 are shooting guns at each other and Theora is shouting about freedom and H.264 is talking about money and Firefox is a fox and he likes Theora and Opera is a singing fat lady and she likes Theora too and Apple is an apple with leaves and a bite out of it and it likes H.264 and Google is a rainbow and it likes both of them and Dirac is hiding in his room and crying because nobody pays attention to him.
There. Now you know.
How One Simple Cut Could Have Made Avatar’s Story Excellent and Let It Win Best Picture
WARNING: The following post discusses key story points in Avatar. They are not “spoilers” per se, because everyone has already seen this movie (if not literally, then figuratively).
Avatar’s story is the one thing that has elicited a near-universal “meh” from the entire world. We’ve all heard it before: hero infiltrates enemy, learns the enemy is his friend and his friends are the enemy, helps former enemy fight former friend, and said fight is a standard progression of hero almost succeeds, then he fails, but then he miraculously succeeds. Archetypes like this aren’t a bad thing; after all, we humans have been telling this same basic story for thousands of years, keeping it fresh with minor variations (i.e. Avatar’s transhuman motifs), and it’s always interesting if not particularly groundbreaking. But with all the love and attention Avatar’s visuals got over the alleged 14 years James Cameron worked on them, the script is admittedly less polished. That’s probably one of the big reasons why Avatar didn’t win Best Picture at the Academy Awards.
There are many little things which Cameron could have done to twist the Hero’s Journey archetype — perhaps Jake Sully should have betrayed the Na’vi willingly before feeling remorse later on, for example — or simply cleaning up some of the dialogue and filling some plot holes would have sufficed. But perhaps the best thing Cameron could have done to Avatar is to make one simple removal, changing nothing else. This one removal would make Avatar’s criticisms of the War on Terror, racism, technology, and destruction of the environment immensely more powerful.
Following the scene after Hometree’s destruction, when we see slow-motion shots of Jake and Grace being wrestled out of the avatar links, Grace shouting “you murderer!” at Parker, fade to black. Roll credits.
Okay, that may be a “simple” cut, but it’s pretty major. Still, it would have made Avatar a much better film. Here’s why:
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