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Psychotic Reactions
-- John Shea
21 May, 2003
Howdy folks. Let me take a quick moment to mention this column and the guy stabbing at keyboard to create it. I've been running this site five years now. It started as a quick joke among friends, something I tossed up on the company intranet for personal amusement. But my single-minded need for perfection led me to tinker with it, expand it and then for reasons I'll never truly understand, move it on to the internet proper. Still, it was a personal joke and I expected nothing of it. Not until someone contacted me wanting to sell ads on the damn thing. The thought of getting money for the ravings of my largely unbalanced group of friends was intoxicating. That began a relentless expansion of the site until we get to what you see today. Sure that's the severely glossed over version but I also don't want to bore you before I really get started on this column.
I've written countless news stories and reviews for the site, done some interviews and edited the work of dozens of writers. We've had several columns on the site, none more enduring or diverse than the Untitled Deadpool Column, but I've never attempted it myself. And yet I always wanted to. When I read magazine or the more literate of websites, my favorite parts are always the columns, the strange combination of editorial/reporting/review that somehow blends together into something you can give some thought and discussion to. I wanted to do that myself but constantly dragged my feet and never quite got around to it. Well this week I said enough, shit or get off the pot.
Psychotic Reactions (prize goes to the first person who can successfully identify the inspiration for the name) will be my attempt to write a regular column. The hope is that it will be daily but for the moment I'll be happy to get a couple out a week. Writing takes discipline and that has never been a strong suit. I have a more scatter shot approach to life so taming that will probably take some time. My subject matter for the column? Entertainment in general. Yeah, I know that's really broad but that's what I want. Mostly I'll talk about the movies and some television but I'm keeping the option open to ramble about music or what not. I'm sure some format will eventually emerge but for the moment we'll assume my scatter shot style will hold sway.
Anyway, enough with the intro. You're here for the goods, not for me talking about me, a topic found interesting by an audience of none. Even I'm already busily surfing other sites by now.
This movie will self-destruct...
Disney announced recently that they would begin selling DVDs that self-destruct Mission: Impossible style 48 hours after being opened. Now, the logical response to that is to wonder why we would want to buy something that is actually designed to break. The answer is that the entertainment industry these days is paranoid about copyright infringement (Let's put an end to the term pirating shall we? This has nothing to do with boarding a ship to kill the crew for their goods.) that they have forgotten the cardinal rule of business. Make the customer happy. Customers want a quality product at an affordable price. The movie and music businesses though have long since forgotten that and have instead decided to treat all their customers as criminals. Why else would they sell products deliberately designed to interfere with their easy use? What sane business would sell a CD with copy protection designed to crash a computer that attempted to play it? None I know of and yet this actually happened with Celine Dion's latest album (although part of me wants to say that the people buying that album got what they deserved).
So now Disney is planning to sell movies that will become completely unplayable after two days. Why? Supposedly to save you the hassle of having to return a rented disc. That strikes me as odd since the entire rental business depends on people returning movies then renting more movies. Further, if the returning of a DVD is so difficult a task, wouldn't people turn to Netflix, which allows customers to rent by mail? Clearly the idea behind this has nothing to do with consumer convenience or helping out businesses dealing in DVDs. No, clearly the point here is to cut out the middleman and allow Disney to essentially rent movies directly. This idea means they need no infrastructure to deal with returned discs. The chemical nature of the discs means that it can be hacked by programmers. All they have to do is ship them to virtually any kind of store in the world and wait for the cash to flow in. Consumers would supposedly benefit by getting a movie dirt cheap with no return hassle. But the price would have to be astoundingly low to make it seem better than the typical rental arrangements available now. This is a money grab by a studio, plain and simple. The only beneficiary is Disney and Flexplay Technologies, which invented the self-destructing discs. Hopefully history will consign this idea to the same hall of shame that DIVX resides in.
Random observation
Is there a better actress out there right now than Frances McDormand? In the course of a week I watched Laurel Canyon which features her as a rock producer and Almost Famous: Untitled as the worried mother of a fifteen year old rock journalist. The two roles are polar opposites and yet she inhabits each with such ferocity and honesty that both are thoroughly convincing and intriguing. Just thought I'd toss that out there...
24
First off, let me congratulate everyone involved with the series 24 on a job well done. In particular Dennis Haysbert and Kiefer Sutherland for crafting characters I've grown very attached to. That said I was just a hair disappointed with the season finale. It's hard to put a finger on it because by no means do I think it was a bad episode, but perhaps there is such a thing as building up too much to a finale. In the previous episode it seemed like Jack Bauer was a modern day Sissyphus, doomed to an impossible task. In this episode though, virtually everything went right for once and everything wrapped fairly smoothly. I guess I just expected a bit more chaos after everything that preceded it. Kudos though for one of the biggest cliffhangers of all time. It makes a real difference knowing for certain that the show will back for another season I guess.
News
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: The BBC interviewed actor Chris Rankin about the change from director Chris Columbas to Alfonso Cuaron. As expected, a new director means a distinct change of style and tone, which hopefully will help the series mature along with its characters. Rankin says, "His style is completely different to Chris Columbus', he's going for a real dramatic, tension building to a climax kind of film which I think is going to be perfect for Potter three. I think the way Alfonso is doing it, the way he's shooting it, the style of camera work we're using – just everything is reflecting a slow and dramatic build up to an amazing end. I shouldn't talk about it really, but it's all going to do with the camera shots and lengths of takes. When we did dialogue with Chris we'd never do more than three or four lines at a time before we changed a camera angle, stopped for a break, change a light over or something like that. With Alfonso, the scene we did the other day we did as one long take. It was all done on one camera and that scene was four minutes long without a change in angle or anything like that. I think that's how it adds to the tension. It might change in editing to how it is now, but it certainly seems the ways he's doing it is much more ominous."
Hulk: There's a nice article on why Ang Lee made the seemingly bizarre jump to blockbuster action movie from his more typical sensitive films over at SFGate. He isn't too thrilled with the fans who have been harassing his progress on the film either. "I would like to think that the fans, as loud and earnest as they can be, I hope they make up, like, 0.1 percent of the audience," Lee said. "I wanted to embrace (the comic), but I also wanted to feel free to create my episode of the Hulk. If I got opinions from other places, I would be very distracted."
Bad Boys II: The full domestic trailer is online and avaiable at:
Timeline: Here's an odd bit of news. According to JGOnline, Jerry Goldsmith's score for the Michael Crichton based action flick has been rejected by the studio. With Goldsmith unavailable for further work on the score, Brian Taylor has been called in to take over the job.
Casting Couch
Sean Hayes (Will and Grace) is close to joining the cast of Win a Date With Tad Hamilton!. He will star alongside Kate Bosworth, Josh Duhamel, Topher Grace and Nathan Lane. (The Hollywood Reporter)
Nicole Kidman grudgingly agreed to in Lar von Triers next two films. She would be reprising her role from Dogville which apparently featured legendary fights between the two. Triers goaded her into accepting at a Cannes Film Festival press conference so it may not hold up. (The Hollywood Reporter)
Is Heath Ledger being considered for the lead in Christopher Nolan's new Batman project? That's the rumor being floated at AICN. While I have my doubts about virtually anything written on that site, I have to say I like the idea. Ledger has considerable screen presence and a dark intensity that could be well suited to the Bruce Wayne/Batman role. We'll see...
New Projects
Onimusha: Davis Films signed a deal with videogame maker Capcom for the film rights to its game Onimusha. The live action project is budgeted at $50 million. "It's samurai fighting against demons -- it's very close to this simple pitch. There's also a love story woven in. It's a big adventure movie with lots of special effects," said Davis Films head Samuel Hadida. Yay. Another video game based movie. You know how well those always turn out. (The Hollywood Reporter)
Dan Leno And The Limehouse Golem: Mad genius and former Python Terry Gilliam is going to be adapting Peter Ackroyd's novel Dan Leno And The Limehouse Golem for the big screen. The book is a murder mystery set in Victorian London. Stephen Woolley and Elizabeth Karlsen will produce. (Teletext)
Reviews
Bruce Almighty
The Matrix Reloaded
Smallville: "Exodus"
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