It used to be that Americans were held responsible for watching bad movies. But it’s not even Americans anymore. You would think that a bad movie that deservedly bombs locally would just disappear. But no.

Puss in Boots seemed like a dud, but internationally it’s on track to cross 200 million and it’s tops in a bunch of markets. The character was always aimed at international audiences anyway. Which means a sequel is likely.

Real Steel, you know that dumb bastardization of one of the darker stories, into something that reminds you of Stallone’s Over the Top, did poorly at home, but overseas it’s approaching 200 million. That’s right. 200 million. Americans might have hated it, but South Koreans loved it. It scored 23 million in a country which has around twice that many people. It was almost as popular in Hong Kong. Does that mean there’s going to be a Real Steel 2? Probably not. But it means the people who made it don’t look as dumb as they should.

In Time bombed here. It’s a 100 million dollar movie internationally.

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“In con­trast, the grass stains on her jeans had nev­er felt so fa­tal. They dragged at her steps like omens or ar­cane stig­ma­ta.”

Against All Things Ending

This probably isn’t the worst line in the book, people make lists of those, but it also captures the slow degradation of the Covenant novels until they reach this level of complete ridiculousness.

The grass stains on her jeans felt fatal? Seriously. The original three books for all their emotionalism still worked somewhat as high fantasy, and the next three books, aside from the ridiculous One Tree, worked on some level despite the extended therapy sessions. But the last three books are all One Tree. They’re not about anything except the characters agonizing and the characters are running out of things to agonize about.

Donaldson has gotten to the point where “the grass stains on her jeans had nev­er felt so fa­tal” makes sense to him as something you would want to put in a book instead of an emo song. The last three Covenant novels starring Linden are just completely indefensible. Maybe they were all hard to defend, but finally Donaldson took everything wrong with The One Tree and focused on getting it even more wrong. And there’s no point to it even.

The original books were somewhat compact, but here it takes an entire chapter for Covenant and Linden to go somewhere after he’s first summoned. Every character’s expression and interaction with other characters is described even when they don’t say anything every few pages. It’s like somebody describing a play to a blind guy and it’s so repetitive and irritating that there aren’t even words for it, except maybe carious frangible sequestery.

I’ve barely gotten three chapters into Against All Things Ending and I’m already sick and tired of it.

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I guess it’s nice and all that Star Trek and Star Trek TNG have enough commercial vitality to them that Paramount is actually taking the time to continue spiffing up the old shows. I like the redone Encounter at Farpoint look, not because I’m a big fan of tinkering with old shows but because it does a better job of making the older episodes match the later episodes. This way Encounter at Farpoint looks like it could have aired in Season Seven, aside from Q’s youthful looks. But it’s also a reminder that the franchise has no life except reselling the same commodities over and over again. A new show can’t be made, so get ready for spiffing up more originals.

There’s a word for this and it’s stupid. I don’t mean the movie itself, which like Dark Knight will probably be interesting in its own way, but Nolan’s Batman. With the third and final movie it’s clear that Nolan overthought the whole Batman thing by quite a bit turning the movies into urban sociology and philosophy. There is no Batman in Nolan’s Batman movies. Not really.

Will The Dark Knight Rises even be a good movie? It’s anyone’s guess. The inaudible Bane adds on to Nolan’s inability to direct action scenes, having to take Anne Hathaway seriously as Catwoman and a whole bunch of other problems. Nolan got a boost in Dark Knight from having the Joker as a character, it’s hard to go wrong there. This time around there isn’t much in the way of a villain personality which is going to put the focus where it shouldn’t be. On Gotham.

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Give bad horror movies their due, they are the true indies. You can make them cheaply and if you get lucky they can score a fortune. The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity and now The Devil Inside. Sure marketing can be credited, but there wasn’t that much of it. It might be truer to say that there’s a public appetite for horror, bad horror movies at that, which pops up at times. And what they want isn’t another movie featuring CW starlets. That’s where movies like The Devil Inside come out of nowhere to deliver. Watch 5 minutes of SyFy, any 5 minutes and you can see how cheaply and how badly a “scares in the attic” movie can be made. And cheap and bad movies are the baseline indie.

Microsoft is either on its last legs or on the verge of seizing the future by the throat. It all depends on who you ask. It’s easy to dwell on its legion of failures. A company which could have had iTunes, Android, the iPad and the iPhone is still clumsily playing catchup and asking customers to take another look at yet another mobile product that they’re not interested in anymore. Its biggest non-legacy asset is still the XBox. But Microsoft is trying, still plowing money into one thing or another. And occasionally there are signs showing that it gets it. Windows 8 will either allow it to muscle its way into the mobile marketplace or turn into another major dud. But even if it does it still has the cash flow and the determination not to give up. Some companies are smart and graceful, Microsoft has always been the bull. It may miss its moment but it will keep on pushing forward.

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GiantFreakingRobot has a list of six reasons why he believes Voyager never really worked. His first mistake is pointing to Voyager as the beginning of the end for the franchise. Actually DS9 was the beginning of the end. It was the first TNG spinoff and its ratings plummeted badly requiring repeated reboots. Toward the end it had a fraction of its former ratings.

The reasons themselves? Janeway was more Kirk than Picard, at least a crazy unbalanced version of Kirk. She charged in a lot of the time and threw her weight around. Except for the last two reasons, the others are too stupid to comment on. The only one that matters is did Voyager really make full use of its premise. No it didn’t and the easiest way to see that is to compare it to Stargate Universe which took a similar premise and tried to live it. Or Enterprise’s third season. Neither of them were perfect but they were much more committed to the concept.

Some of Voyager’s best episodes used the premise, like The Void. But it also managed great standalone episodes that didn’t, like Blink of an Eye, which could have popped up on any of the Star Treks. Voyager doesn’t get enough credit for its good episodes, but at least unlike DS9 it wasn’t constantly being rebooted from Exploring the Wormhole to War Show to Sisko as the Chosen One Fighting the Red Devil Orbs.

Robot is close enough when he says that the problem was the characters. They were a big part of the problem. None of the post-TNG shows ever had a cast that really meshed together naturally. It was a bigger problem on Voyager, because unlike DS9 and Enterprise, not only didn’t the cast mesh, but most of the characters were either unlikable or not very interesting.

DS9 had actors who could carry the bad material. Enterprise’s actors were congenial enough that the bad stuff wasn’t as irritating. Voyager had few buffers except for the HoloDoc and Picardo’s prickly charm. Janeway, Chakotay, Paris, Kim, Tuvok, Seven and most of the cast were irritating one note characters and the actors couldn’t or wouldn’t bring anything to tone them down.

Robert Picardo and Ethan Philips seemed to be the only actors on the show trying to be sympathetic. Mulgrew went the other way. Beltran had occasional flashes of charm but mostly phoned it in. Robert Duncan McNeill decided to go as obnoxious as possible. Garret Wang couldn’t really act too well. Jeri Ryan was playing an emotionless sexbot with minimal nuance. Tim Russ has a great sense of humor, but chose to disregard a lot of what Nimoy did with Spock, and between the abrasive writing, made Tuvok as unlikable as possible.

It may not be completely fair to blame the actors for a show’s problems, the premise and the uneven writing were at fault, but the cast really did not step up to the task. Sure they mostly had one note characters, but they didn’t really try to bring any nuance to the material. They never made it come alive and they never made the show come alive.

DS9 didn’t really have great writing, but it had a supporting cast of people like Coombs, Robinson and Alaimo who would make the most of a single throwaway line. And that made up for Brooks and Visitor’s bad acting. It had Colm Meaney who could walk through the most banal material and still make you feel something. It had Rene Auberjonois who did with a similar character what Tim Russ failed to do, make him seem vulnerable despite his abrasiveness.

Imagine the actors switching places for a moment and suddenly Voyager would start looking better and DS9 would start looking worse.

Via: Wpromote

The days when advertising meant top down messaging through traditional media channels is all but dead. The decline of traditional media readership and viewership, leading to the growing extinction on networks and magazines, is removing the forum and replacing it with the user centered readership of social media.

Businesses can no longer count on using a shotgun, now they are learning to use sniper rifles and even more subtle weapons of user engagement. As we can see from some recent incidents social media management is one of the most valuable skills for any company. From large companies to small businesses, a single miscommunication or negative social media user action can do untold damage in a matter of days.

But social media marketing also gives companies the opportunity to engage with social media users at a deeper level and in more layered ways. Movies like Minority Report may feature futuristic retinal scanning ad technology, but it’s an outdated conception of how to market to people using modern measures. Social media allows marketing that doesn’t depend on flashing the right ads but on engaging the interests of social media users in their own way rather than imposing a messaging framework on them. Interactive marketing is much more powerful than dead eyed messaging and allows users and companies to engage each other and produce ideal outcomes for both parties.

There’s the bare bones of a good novel in Ian Tregillis’ Bitter Seeds, but it hasn’t been thought out well enough. From a great opening, Bitter Seeds founders on its basic premise that everything that happens in this alternate history of World War II where the Nazis have deployed technologically enhanced supermen and superwomen with special gifts and the British have turned to demonic spirits, depends on the ability of Gretchen, one of the superwomen, to predict the future and act in accordance with it.

That doesn’t seem like so much of a problem at first, but increasingly nothing can happen in the novel except following Gretchen’s agenda. That means nothing really matters and the story has nowhere to go. The British put their efforts into soliciting demons and paying a blood price to blockade the English Channel, but none of that really goes anywhere. The Nazis zip around Europe and besiege England, but don’t seem to get around to pushing into the USSR.

Rather than the battle between technology and mysticism that the novel’s blurb advertises, it’s more of a pointless stalemate with none of the characters really accomplishing anything. Tregillis proves the paradox that knowing the future leaves you helpless but that doesn’t make for much of a story. It’s not Tregillis’ writing that fails here, or his ability to tell a compelling story, it’s the plotting that locks him into a novel that goes nowhere. By the end the war has ended, with little intervention from any of the characters, and nothing really seems to matter.

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The best way to read The Best of Gene Wolfe is to open the book, read the first story, The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories, and then close the book and put it away. Not only doesn’t it get any better from here, it gets much worse.

The cover blurbs on the book boast that Wolfe is Melville, Dostoevsky and Dickens all rolled into one. Truth be told he’s a second-rate Theodore Sturgeon and Avram Davidson rolled into one, and The Best of Gene Wolfe is his idea of what his best stories are. Which with authors is rarely a good thing.

I’m not a Wolfe hater. The man has written some great stories and most of them are in here, so are stories that should never have seen the light of day. If you’ve read the usual Best of the Year and Hugo and Nebula collections, then you’ve probably seen the good ones. You may have also seen some of the terrible ones like The Dream Detective, an upscale Catholic version of a Jack Chick tract.

The Fifth Head of Cerberus is in here, so is The Tree is My Hat and Seven American Nights. Unfortunately so is Forlesen, an endless story about how awful working for a corporation is, along with numerous stories that just aren’t stories. Take The Death of the Island Doctor, which Wolfe in his afterword mentions that he is pleased it is nothing like a story. But maybe it should have been.

The Best of Gene Wolfe is filled with stories that aren’t really stories, but probably should have been stories. Or the space taken up by them should have been filled by stories. Some like From the Desk of Gilmer C. Merton, On the Train or The God and His Man are wankery, there’s no better word for it.

For every adequate story like Westwind, or And When They Appear, there’s a Game in the Pope’s Head or The Parkroads. And the rare good ones like Straw, are more than offset by all the rest. The average quality of the collection is not good, but anyone who’s a fan of Wolfe will eat it up. Those who aren’t, might want to consider just buying a couple of old Hugo and Nebula collections for a better overall quality mix.

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So The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo performed poorly. Big surprise. Bestsellers don’t often translate into big box office. Once people paid 20 something or 7 something dollars for the book, they’re much less likely to go see the movie. The DaVinci Code was an exception, but it was practically a cult in its time.

I never read the books. I don’t care about them. The synopsis reads like the writer was writing up a glamorized version of himself in a more exciting version of his real job along with a bisexual girl. Throw in David Fincher, the most overrated director of all time and you have a perfect score.

Fincher is the other thing that should go away. Despite being a music video director, he was also a good director, even if his visuals relied too much on gimmicks. Seven and Fight Club were sold entries. And then came a string of random movies shot in that same filtered tone and looking like music videos. But they were forgivable too. What’s wrong is that everyone keeps treating anything he releases as a major event, no matter how mediocre it is.

Panic Room. Zodiac. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button deserved some attention, but The Social Network was the most grossly overhyped piece of crap that had no reason for existing in years. Then we come to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a bunch of overhyped books leading to an overhyped movie by an overhyped director that not many people actually wanted to see.

Who could have seen that coming?

Thanks for the post from Barney Crosby

Being at home with my parents has been a lesson in patience, I tell you what. They’re the nicest people in the world but they’re so darn impatient when it comes to things…but they refuse to learn anything technological to help them navigate their daily lives! They don’t get that if they had wireless internet Hartford they could move around the house with the computer instead of sitting at a desk and they certainly can’t see the value in a cellphone. I don’t understand why they don’t want more than 6 channels at a time but they are bound and determined to get through life without having to learn anything new. I guess they both figure that since they’re older they don’t need to learn anything to help them get by but in my opinion it would be really helpful for everyone if they’d just get on the stick and figure out what’s going on. They’re going to live at least 10 more years so they need to become a little more tech savvy!

The official word is that Tom Cruise has saved Christmas for Hollywood. That’s even sorta true, but only because MI4 was the only movie launched that didn’t hopelessly underperform the way a bunch of other movies did. But MI4 isn’t much of a hit, its opening box office was at or below MI3 levels. And MI3 was already below earlier installments and MI4 made a chunk of its money from IMAX and its inflated ticket prices.

If MI4 ends up making more money than MI3 it will only be because there’s no serious competition and that makes it the default choice for people who want to sell out some money and sit in front of a flickering screen without having to talk too much for 90 minutes. But it won’t be because MI4 is a good movie or because Cruise has regained his appeal.

Paramount’s scheduling bet for MI4 paid off when the other studios tanked. If there’s no recovery then MI4 will probably make more money than MI3, which opened in May. Does that testify to a resurrection of Cruise’s appeal? He probably kept his appeal overseas, but Americans didn’t go to see MI4 for Cruise, they went for the same reason that they went to see the earlier MI movies or the Transformer movies. Because a lot of stuff explodes on screen.

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