It’s not the first we’re likely to run into this subject, but it’s the second ComicCon where Twilight has been a major issue with an inevitable backlash and a reaction that is split into two camps. Typical of the second camp is the reaction at a CBR librarian forum which treats the whole thing as male sexism. And while that’s no doubt an ingredient, it ignores the reality that fandom backlashes are not exactly something new. Is the Star Wars vs Star Wars thing sexist? You could make that argument since Star Trek did attract more female fans. But it really has nothing to do with gender.

There is no such thing as an uncritical acceptance of someone else’s fan base. If fandom is anything, it’s people going “Why do they like that. They must be idiots” and like it or not, a lot is built on just that. Marvel vs DC, Star Trek vs Babylon 5, Browncoats vs 101. This sort of thing goes on endlessly. No one can expect a large fandom to show up and be immune from that. It just isn’t going to happen. Fans always have opinions. Even when they don’t know anything about the subject, and expecting Twilight and its fan base to be immune from reasoned and unreasoned criticism is like expecting the same thing for Black Panther.

Just because fans are a niche group, or because especially because fandom is a niche group, the hothouse atmosphere gets thicker. Gender may play a role, but does anyone seriously believe that if Twilighters were generally male, that the response would be any more welcoming? Somehow I don’t think so. It would probably be even more openly hostile. The ethos is just too different, which invites its own backlash vs if it was the same, the backlash would be based around plagiarism. And that’s fandom too, an argument no one can win.

Take a blog, reduce each post to only 150 characters and leave only the comments, which can only be 150 characters in size, and which will cross appear on the commenter’s blog as well. There you’ve pretty much got Twitter, the perfect tool for the Attention Deficit Disorder internet, for people who want to promote themselves without having anything real to say, and who want the illusion of interaction without the personal commitment or the depth. Taking together the people centered appeal of Facebook and the promotional appeal of Digg, Twitter discards all the content, leaving only the links and the virtual soundbites. Naturally Facebook is worried and so is Digg. Half the point of Facebook were the brief updates that let people keep track of each other’s pointless minutia. Twitter does that with much less effort or content. 99 percent of the reason for Digg’s existence was as a way of filtering the internet to find interesting content and for other people to make snarky remarks about it (the other 1 percent were Ron Paul, Alex Jones, Obama, Marijuana legalization, Blogspam spam). Twitter does all that without all the infrastructure. Twitter is the minimalist digital revolution of personal trivia eating its own children. Sure it’s completely pointless and non-productive, but so was Facebook and Digg. Twitter is just more honest about it.

It’s blogging without the blog, facebooking without the facebook and digging without the digg. Is Twitter the future? Probably not, mainly because the future changes and gets shinier, more Web 2.0ey and more pointless every 5 months. I don’t know what slimmed down shiny beast will slither down the Silicon Valley pipeline next waiting to be born, but I’m sure it’s already available as an iPhone app.

Follow me on Twitter, no wait. Please don’t.

Following in the footsteps of the terrible idea known as Spider Man the Musical from Julie Taymor, an event that absolutely no one is waiting for, George Lucas’ boundless greed is set to turn Star Wars into a Musical. Now to be fair Broadway is already overrun with Hollywood crap. Disney has turned Broadway into a new revenue source with adaptations of cartoons, Shrek is camping out there too, and Hollywood stars have been infesting the London stage, and to a lesser extent Broadway. All of that however makes some kind of sense, Star Wars the Musical does not.

George Lucas has signed off on Star Wars: A Musical Journey, a two-hour live musical event featuring a Stormtrooper kick line and singing Wookiees John Williams’ Oscar-winning score. The production will blast off April 10 in the U.K. and then embark on a European tour, complete with an exhibition of rare Star Wars collectibles, including never-before-seen models, props, costumes and production artwork. No word when it will visit America. Now if we could only get a musical version of the Star Wars Holiday Special…

Adapting cartoons for Broadway made sense since it could bring in the kiddies. A Star Wars musical spectacular in the UK doesn’t. France maybe, or Germany where they might view as some sort of surrealistic comment on the tragic nature of man. But George Lucas thinks that people will actually go and see singing Stormtroopers and Wookies, for some reason other than to laugh at them. It’s like an SNL skit or Simpsons opening actually coming to life.

I’m sure that George Lucas will wind up making money out of this. I’m also sure that it will be one of those nail in the coffin deals for the franchise. If the prequels and the Clone Wars wasn’t bad enough, or The Force Unleashed, Lucas is now just going whole hog to trash whatever’s left of Star Wars for a quick buck. I don’t know what the man is thinking. He’s only 64, which means he could have a possible life expectancy of decades more. Has he thought about what he’s going to do 5 years from now, when he won’t even be able to move a Star Wars cereal if it was made out of pure uncut cocaine? Oh right, that’s when Indiana Jones and the City of Merchandising Toys debuts.

From the beginning of its inception Google Street View inspired controversy, though not as much controversy as you might have expected considering the ongoing protests about the rising number of surveillance cameras in major cities. Most of those protests naturally focused on privacy. From the early days when Google Maps’s satellite view feature was catching naked sunbathers, it was obvious enough that this was going to be a problem. And the controversies began early for Google Street View with shots of people, rather than houses, in stages of undress. It took Google Street View heading to the UK to really rile people up, the Brits once upon a time placed telephones in the closet because they considered them too much of an imposition. England has changed, but not enough for people to embrace Street View. The official worry is concern that criminals may use Google Street View to scope out their targets, a plausible but not particularly serious worry. The real issue is the collapse of conventional privacy barriers. Google isn’t solely responsible for that, not when you can walk into an electronics store and see a line of tiny surveillance cameras, and a camera concealed inside an alarm clock. But Google has been part of the end of privacy, something that Googlers might be a lot more jejune about, than British villagers.

It’s funny how the media will jump on some social trend, give it a salacious name, particularly if it involves teenagers and some kind of behavior that’s likely to upset parents, and then go into overdrive reporting on it, in order to boost their circulations and drive traffic by those same worried parents and the occasional pervert (Bill O’Reilly). Rationally speaking, technology creates the conditions for its own implementation. Overlap that with teenagers doing the stuff that teenagers always do, and the results are going to be obvious. And overlap that on a judicial system where prosecutors can’t be bothered to seriously prosecute ordinary crimes, but jump on the idea of dragging out their entire arsenal of legal tools to prosecute a dubious case that can set a precedent and get them into the newspapers, and the next stage of results is also inevitable. Technology creates its own challenges and counter-challenges. Given technological empowerment, the sex lives of teenagers will go digital. Given the fear of technology and human sexuality, society will react with typical nervousness and the press and the justice system will prey on that skittishness for their own purposes. Mission accomplished.

You kind of have to feel sorry for anyone working over at Io9 and desperately trying to generate stories that will drive traffic and get them paid and non-fired, but aside from digging up porny bits of B Movies, and promoting William Gibson’s latest pointless essay, and of course reporting the movie and TV news that got reported a day ago, there’s not much there. So they have to make stuff up.

Case in point.

2008: The Year Science Fiction Became Science Culture

Ah 2008, that was the year.

This year, the top twenty movies in the US grossed 3.7 billion dollars. Science fiction movies accounted for 2.5 billion of that. In 2008, scifi rocketed out of the basement to become scicult.

I don’t have the numbers off the top of my head, but Science Fiction movies have been blockbusters for a long time. 2008 doesn’t break the mold or change anything.

Movies are really just a small piece of the pop culture pie currently being wolfed down by science fiction. You’ve got space opera and apocalypse in video games like Mass Effect, Fallout 3, and Spore, which are just a few of the scifi titles that obsessed audiences this year.

Yeah, an even bigger chunk of video games have always been Science Fiction. SF is about the most common type of video game there is. It’s either that or fantasy. So again, nothing new here.

comic book readers went nuts over alien invaders called Skrulls in last summer’s giant crossover extravaganza Secret Invasion.

Because DC and Marvel comic books have never been Science Fiction before. That’s just something that happened now. In 2008!

When science fiction has become so much a part of our everyday pop culture, does it make sense to call it scifi anymore?

Yes, because it’s still Science Fiction. It’s fiction about science. That’s the definition.

Certainly that seems to be the underlying message of some of 2008’s most popular new TV shows, such as The Mentalist and Fringe - as well as old favorites like House, Bones and CSI. All of these are fiction shows about science.

This is stupid even for Io9. And an old argument. Science Fiction is speculative, shows that deal with present day science, even a dumbed down version, are not Science Fiction.

What’s going on here? Acclaimed scifi author William Gibson has already explained it in interviews about his latest novels, all of which read like literary science fiction but take place in the present day. He believes that the present has become so saturated by high tech and advanced science that we are effectively living in a science fictional era.

Yes and to anyone from the 19th century, so were people in the 1950’s. This is a matter of perception and perspective. To someone from the 22nd century, we’d be technological barbarians.

Gibson is asserting that what once seemed futuristic is now part of the present.

That’s the definition of technological progress. It’s not an assertion, it’s how things work. We actually did go to the moon decades ago. We were futuristic then too. More so because we can’t go to the moon today, but we can blog a whole lot about how the future is now.

But it would be more accurate to say that we now accept scientific speculation as part of everyday life. We haven’t lost the idea of a future that’s way freakier than today. It’s just that now everybody thinks about the freaky future, not just scifi fans.

Has anyone at Io9 even heard of the world’s fair? Speculating about the future has been mainstream throughout the 20th century. Reading fictional books set in fictional universes, somewhat less so.

The phenomenal success of a show like House is testimony to this cultural shift. Every episode focuses on a medical mystery which House and his team can only solve using speculative thinking. Nobody would call House scifi, and yet it offers audiences the same pleasures as Star Trek: A chance to imagine how science might solve human problems, and where those solutions will take us.

Yes but it isn’t Science Fiction. It’s a medical drama dealing with present day medical science. House is just a detective show set in the world of medicine. There’s the annoying detective, and a cast of supporting characters and weekly mysteries to solve. Just because something involves science, doesn’t mean it is Science Fiction.

Scifi could become more like realism, where we explore the problems of ordinary people like House’s patients. Perhaps there will be no room for romantic monsters and heroic mutant outcasts in science culture, just as there is little room for those kinds of creatures in your typical episode of CSI.

What was that? Oh nothing, I was banging my head against the wall. House and CSI are not Science Fiction. They are fictional TV shows. They do involve Science. But they are not speculative projections of significant Scientific advances. They are mystery shows with a science backdrop.

If Science Fiction turns into that, it will be a dead genre.

Indeed, this draining away of experimental thought in scifi might explain the rise in fantasy stories right now.

This drain doesn’t actually exist. Io9, like a lot of elitist media commentary, just prefers what they consider realism, over good Science Fiction.

There’s no avoiding the fact that a holiday movie is doomed to be heartwarming in the same way that pianos falling from roofs are doomed to impact the pavement with a giant crash and splintered keys flying everywhere. But smarter holiday movies have learned from Dickens how to walk the fine line between human darkness and heartwarming, the balancing act out of which enduring pathos is formed, cheesy as it may be.

It’s a Wonderful Life probably would not have the cultural scope it does today if not for a rights issue that enabled it to be broadcast over and over again, but it negotiated that balancing act almost perfectly. And once a cultural landmark is planted, it’s revisionism time all over again. Wendell Jameson in the New York Times interviews just about everybody who had nothing to do with the movie, including his elementary school teacher and a distract attorney from upstate New York. But nothing he comes up with is all that interesting or original.

Of course It’s a Wonderful Life is a basically downbeat story, grounded in enough realism about human life, that it makes the treacle, when it comes, go down all the smoother. And then there’s the conflict between the movie as envisioned by Frank Capra, and a complicated production process involving multiple scripts and writers. But the success of It’s A Wonderful Life the movie after its crashing failure on release provides a kind of real life testament to the sort of turnaround that the movie’s plot embodies.

Between Twilight and True Blood, vampires seem to be around, and plenty of news stories are analyzing what the whole thing means culturally. A reasonable answer disappointing to the media studies crowd may be that it means nothing at all. We burned through a bunch of zombie movies and now we’re getting some vampires. Not that long ago it was slashers chasing after virginal teenage girls. Monsters, like most trends come and go, based on how they’re used and abused. A movie or a book can jumpstart a trend, and with Hollywood’s copycatting skills, the trend quickly becomes legion. These days it’s the lack of cultural originality that’s responsible for cultural trends more than anything else. Naturally the people who overanalyze things to death can’t wait to sink their teeth, yes pun intended, into what the whole vampire trend means. What it really means is that people are sick of zombies, zombie movies and things involving zombies. And vampires are like zombies with brains who can actually do more than lurch toward you with slack jaws. Of course with Left 4 Dead a hit, I wouldn’t count the zombie out yet either. Analyze that.

The whole trajectory of modern celebrity has melded with reality tv, the drama just as manufactured and the whole wave motion geared toward entertaining a bored populace that can hardly bother to sit around for fiction. So Mike Judge was right in Idiocracy but he was wrong. The future of entertaining isn’t two ass cheeks farting, except to the young adult male audience, it’s a celebrity going up and down over and over again, spawning endless tabloid stories circulating around them like a pulsar. That sweet spot in which a public figure is set to continue spawning and respawning the same stories over and over again. Britney Spears is the perfect example of how this works, hitting bottom and then making a comeback, only to hit bottom again. This isn’t an original idea, but overlaying the kind of instant tabloid coverage that the internet provides, it’s not Reality TV anymore, it’s social reality and social celebrity, for an age in which MySpace and Facebook have more do do with fame than actually starring in a movie anyone watches or a song anyone listens to.

1. Harry Knowles Aint It Cool News review of Blade II. If you haven’t ever read it consider yourself very lucky and don’t go looking for it. Unless you’re tired of living.

2. Any movie made by Uwe Boll. This also extends to anyone making fun of movies by Uwe Boll. Broad side of a barn. Target.

3. Taking LSD at a Thomas Kinkade exhibition. Visions of hell would be a vast improvement.

4. Waking up to Ward Churchill on WBAI. Second worst way to wake up never, not involving a penguin.

5. Anime fans talking about anything involving Anime.

6. Battlestar Galactica montages set to mournful music. Why can’t the Cylons just kill them all already.

7. Riker shaving his beard in a tub

8. Any TV show involving a fat slob married to a former model

9. Brits complaining about the US TV reworking of The Office. Did we complain about Coupling? Shut up. Besides you’ll find there are people on Planet Earth who expect more from a TV show than 13 episodes in 2 years. They’re called Americans. They make most of the TV you watch. The preceding is the reason for it.

10. Lexx. Enough said.

If you’ve got anything to add to the list, sing out with it or remain forever in shut the hell up land.

This essay from Mel Valentine over at efilmcritic isn’t unique, it’s not too dissimilar from reactions such as Moriarty’s over at AICN, though that seemed to be more embargo related, and a lot of online reviewers who are also Star Wars fans who are bidding goodbye to Star Wars over the Star Wars Christmas Special or Clone Wars.

Personally I think Clone Wars is a crossroads mainly because it’s impossible for anyone over the age of 6 to get anything out of the movie or keep on denying that the backlash to The Phantom Menace was dead on, that George Lucas has completely lost it and that Star Wars exists mainly for the sake of merchandising. Clone Wars now has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 18 percent, which is seriously ugly. And while George Lucas will make money on it, the idea of a 15 million dollar opening for a Star Wars project is a joke, and one that Lucas helped to create by shortchanging the quality over and over again.

In a way Star Trek has done better than Star Wars or X-Files because Gene Roddenberry is dead and he quickly lost control over the franchise. Had the same Gene Roddenberry responsible for Star Trek TNG Season 1 and ST TMP kept on running Star Trek, I think the results might have been just as awful. Much as fans don’t like to recognize it, creation is a collaborative effort, and when a show or movie’s creator gains too much stature, it all goes to hell in a handbasket.

A lot of New York City’s self-promotion seems to suffer from exquisitely bad timing, case in point New York, I Love You to be released just around the time that New York hipsters are fleeing the city for Austin and New York yuppies are heading to San Francisco, the state is suffering from a budget crisis, the Governor is blind and a cokehead and the Mayor is set to leave making way for a political hack to seize City Hall and trash what’s left of the city. Like I said, bad timing.

New York, I Love You is still very much a product of New York’s days on top in the late 90’s or even around 2003 or 2004 and it looks very much Manhattan centered, because of course all the rest of us poor cousins know that Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island don’t matter (Alright State Island doesn’t matter, who can really argue with that) and has that vibe of actors slumming and the “ordinary types” in New York as seen from the vantage point of the upper east side.

I’m not going to be too cynical about New York, I Love you, at least more so than usual, but movies do a lousy job of capturing New York. Certainly any movie made after the 70’s and 80’s. It’s easy enough to capture landmarks and cliches, show a few shots of the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building and a guy with a Brooklyn accent and a mustache selling hot dogs while asking you about your marriage. When done right it can be cute, when done wrong it’s a Nora Ephron movie, but it isn’t New York. The kind of general sentiments I can see in the New York, I Love You trailer don’t capture the New York experience, they capture the facade of it, a cartoon that’s basically flattering but doesn’t address any kind of meaningful reality, just like the sketchers on the sidewalk outside Central Park throwing out a few geometric shapes in 60 seconds for eight bucks don’t capture the reality of a person.

New York City basically does one kind of museum well, the cultural museum. The Brooklyn Museum, Guggenheim, the Frick, the Met, some paintings, some rocks and bones and a sculpture or too. Ancient or modern, it doesn’t really matter. The art’s the thing.

That hasn’t stopped various museum ventures, from the Museum of the American Indian and the Sports Museum of America at Bowling Green in the man with the hat and the tan island, are particular examples of pointless ventures that no one visits. After all who goes to New York to see sports memorabilia or Indian exhibits. Museums are geared mostly to the tourist trade with a sideline of people genuinely interested in the subject. The former aren’t visiting the city expecting to see Indian and Sports museums, the paying odds are that they’ve got better sports and Native American artifact and culture museums back in the Midwest. And New York isn’t about to produce a museum impressive enough for people genuinely interested in sports or Native American culture.

Which makes the Rock and Rock Hall of Fame museum annex in New York City twice as pointless. Something like that is obviously meant to cash in on the tourist trade, just like Madame Tussaud’s, but it takes a pretty bored or aimless tourist to wander in to something as off the mark as that. I’m sure Madame Tussaud gets its traffic, but at least it has a certain wacky uniqueness that blends into New York. The Rock and Hall of Fame annex may try to focus on Springsteen for the Bridge and Tunnel crowd, but they’ve got the Stone Pony already and they aren’t coming into the city for that. The thing is that New York’s rock and roll legacy is too much a part of a whole other era, one that doesn’t fit nearly into the museum’s agenda, it’s a New York music legacy that flows out of Jazz and after it into its aftermath.

If you probably remember Charlie Chan, it’s as a fat lisping white guy who went around delivering fortune cookie wisdom and solving crimes with wisdom and kindness and generally being an all around Chinese stereotype palatable for white people at the time.

The real Charlie Chan though was based on a guy named Ah Ping Chang and the best way to imagine Ah Ping Chang is to imagine a Chinese combination of Clint Eastwood and Indiana Jones. Am I exaggerating? No. Ah Ping Chang originally worked as a cowboy, when he joined the Honolulu Police Force they wanted him to carry a gun, but he turned them down. Instead he went right on carrying his bullwhip from his Cowboy days. And he cleaned up Honolulu with that whip.

Imagine Clint Eastwood as a Chinese guy in a cowboy hat with a bullwhip bursting down doors and making mass arrests, and you have some idea of what the real Charlie Chan would have looked like on the big screen. Ah Ping Chang armed with only a bullwhip broke up organized crime rings across Hawaii. In one day he arrested over 40 people, armed with only a bullwhip! And then smoked one of his trademark cigars.

Did I mention that he was married three times, liked to drink and while he spoke bad English, it was probably more along the lines of, “Put down gun or I whip your &$%^$ %@%$!” than Charlie Chan’s “Sunshine beams through man like wisdom through dark room” crap. Obviously America was not ready for the real Charlie Chan, Ah Ping Chang who was just too badass for those times.

New York musicals and shows for New Yorkers are more about the shows you hate that linger on cheesily only for tourists to snack on, whether it’s Cats, which refused to go away for horrible amounts of time, or Les Miserables, which finally went away only to come back, or Rent, which opened to reflect some kind of reality but wound up being as hackneyed and irritating as any of the above mentioned shows.

A lot of the problem is not in Rent itself, which was never brilliant, but was briefly relevant in a pop culture sort of way, but its transformation into a product, every much so as Grease, meant to cater to some sort of entitled nostalgia divorced from real life in New York. Luckily for the Rentheads, The Wackness will be coming out to reflect that same kind of entitled hipster reality, detached from anything human or genuine, because once life becomes pop reality, it’s hard to make it go away.

I can’t really hate Rent itself, Jonathan Larson’s naive take on the city may have been a little too full of stylized and unreal stereotypes, but that’s a failing of youth. Unfortunately he’s dead and like a malignant ghost, was outlived by the creation he made, turned monster. Contrary to its defenders, Rent doesn’t have any kind of raw reality to it, it’s as unreal as any stylized depiction of a time and a place is going to be, but its charm vanished as it stopped being a show and became a product.

For everyone who’s groaned at the people who get in line to see a movie for a week ahead of its release, wearing full costumes and embarrassing us all, there’s The Line. Loosely aimed at somewhere between Star Trek and Star Wars with a fictional SciFi series called FutureSpace, it stars some solid talent and while it takes a while to get off the ground, the journey turns out to be fun. Don’t go into this expecting another Dr. Horrible’s Sing A Long blog, The Line is an affordable production taking place against the wall of a New York City movie theater, but the comic talent more than makes up for it.

As I said The Line picks up from episode to episode, really kicking into gear with Episode III with The Spoiler, all too real and believable. The series isn’t done yet but there are plenty of nice touches and character introductions, from the telepathic triplets to the spoiler to the master to the assistant manager who manages to steal the show. You sort of can’t help but get the sense that this is a bit of a giant waste of talent, but it’s still another demonstration that web series can hold their own without a fanatical following or musical numbers or a Darth Vader costume or fake reality TV.

Between a breakup, a custody visit, a mysterious moondagger, the five minute rule, the trivia contest, the shocking revelation about the ending of the Futurespace movie, the screener DVD and the big gulp, the protagonists of The Line’s episodes carry on the absurdity of fanboy life while making it seem almost fun, despite the social isolation and misery of the characters. With one episode left I guess we’ll find out if The Line still has a big finish left in it, as in the back of the line, the tension builds with 30 minutes left to the movie’s opening.

Particularly in the wake of 9/11 questions about public photography continue to arise. On the one hand we live in more of a surveillance society than ever with pervasive closed circuit cameras all over the place and now even the so-called see through cameras at airports. On the other hand individual photography is more restricted than ever, even as cheap digital cameras and cameras in cell phones and the rise of sites like Flickr and Photobucket, not to mention YouTube for videos, makes it the norm for people to walk around everywhere casually snapping shots as they go.

Either way both are symptoms of the ubiquitous loss of privacy that is a very real issue but they also raise the question of who is empowered to violate that privacy, only the authorities over a given area or everyone. It’s a troubling issue that goes right back to the universal glass bowl envisioned by Isaac Asimov’s The Dead Past, one of the earliest and clearest SF visions of a Surveilance society.

I’m not much for photography myself but I understand the documentary impulse and I can see both sides to the Thomas Hawk MOMA story that’s all over Boing Boing and everywhere else, but it’s also a collection of multiple narratives. Was Hawk kicked out for simply photographing in the atrium or was he kicked out on suspicion of shooting down a young girl’s blouse, as some supposed eyewitnesses have alleged. Was he kicked out because Blint lacked the grounding in photography to distinguish one kind of camera from another, and then there’s the McDonalds theory.

I’m all for civil liberties myself, but I have to ask whether photographers should have an unlimited right to shoot anywhere. The photos Hawk showed don’t violate anyone’s privacy, but at the same time taking photos of crowds from above is rife with potential for such violations. Is there a difference between photographing objects and turning people into subjects? I think that there is.

Viewed from the perspective of the present day, Jerry Maguire over a decade later seems eerily prescient of Tom Cruise’s career. As the story of a star agent whose ill timed personal crisis turns him into an industry disgrace, loses him his hot blond wife whom he replaces with a younger child friendly model and forces him to try and make a go of it with his own company, Jerry Maguire seems oddly like the role that Tom Cruise would find himself playing out in real life, divorcing Nicole Kidman, marrying a teen soap actress half his age, wrecking his time at Paramount and trying to run his own studio at UA after a public meltdown. Of course instead of standing up for principle, Cruise was instead standing up for Scientology and his midlife crisis, and there is no Cuba Gooding Jr available to redeem him with a last minute game injury, since Cuba Gooding Jr blew his own post-Jerry Maguire career too even more effectively than Cameron Crowe did. If filmed today, Jerry Maguire would be the perfect comeback vehicle for Tom Cruise the way that Iron Man was for Robert Downey Jr because it puts a positive spin on his life errors. But the over the top intensity that pushed Cruise from actor to punch line is all too present in Jerry Maguire.

With the demand for broadband soaring and movies doing blockbuster business, particularly Time Warner’s own The Dark Knight, things should be rosy for Time Warner, an old fashioned media mega corporation gone digital, but Time Warner is still suffering from the consequences of a bad merger. The AOL Time Warner merger, one of the worst examples of old line companies trying to jump on board the internet without really understanding what they’re doing, continues dragging Time Warner down. AOL as always a bad fit and the merger combined two companies, one with a huge amount of valuable properties and a booming cable business, and one that gave away CD’s with 60 free hours of internet. It’s hard to know what Levin was thinking or if he was even thinking at all. Had AOL been able to reinvent itself with the rise of broadband, things might not be so bad, for the joined company, but between the decline of the magazine business and AOL’s increasing descent into a company with no product or reason for existing, Time Warner is in trouble and ripe for someone like Carl Icahn to come along and tear it to pieces.

We all know communication speeds things up. The rumor that once took eight weeks to properly spread in person then went up to 8 days by email and then 8 hours by IM now spreads via texting and Twitter in eight minutes. Like watching a TV show on fast forwad, the internet speeds things up and makes them illegible and pointless. In other words the internet beats things to death. Particularly jokes, and that’s because of the way a joke works.

Usually in comedy you have a group of people who develop and tell the joke. They’re Phase 1. Then on to Phase 2 when the joke is passed around and slowly shows up in different mediums. Somewhere around Phase 3 the joke becomes a catchphrase, at which point it becomes annoying and doofuses begin repeating it and doing imitations of whatever famous comedian last did it. Then it officially dies, that’s Phase 4.

The internet though does everything faster, which means Phase 1 can take something like a week. Phase 2 can be done just as fast. Then the joke is unleashed on the general population which begins doing it until everyone is sick of it. This can take a matter of days. But since the internet is so large and people are so stupid, once some internet meme hits the big time, you can expect people to keep discovering it or doing it long past its expiration date. The truly sad thing is that months from now there will be idiots who will still be Rickrolling people. Maybe years from now. Maybe centuries. Maybe when mankind makes first contact with aliens, the wise and supremely intelligent galactic civilization will tune in to earth’s message of peace and love, only to discover halfway through that they’ve been Rickrolled.