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(not my) Best Pictures

Posted on Friday, February 5, 2010 11:05 am.

I love and hate media awards ceremonies like The Grammys and the Emmys.

What are they measuring, really? Whatever is “Best”? Best how? Most commercial? Strongest technically? Most likable?

Voters of the various academies aren’t any more interested in thinking hard about the merits of “Best” any more than the guy that sat next to you on the bus. They nominate and vote for what they like, and they like what they know.

Does that occasionally highlight the best work in a year or coincide with the zeitgeist? Sure. But one look at the Golden Globes and the Grammys tells us that’s not necessarily the case.

The Oscars are the one set of awards that can still excite me. The one that at least nominates the most worthwhile performances and works, even if some genre fare slips through.

However, equal to that excitement, the Academy Awards also introduce skepticism to my film diet. I love a great many event movies, serious movies, and indie movies, but I have a contentious history with Best Picture nominees. It’s a good year if I like 2/5 of them.

Maybe it’s because I already pre-judge movies pretty harshly – before they get heaped with incongruous praise. If I haven’t seen a movie before it gains steam as an Oscar front-runner I become commensurately more skeptical that it’s actually any good. I enjoy being proven wrong (The Queen, Juno), but more often my prophecy is fulfilled and I’m either ambivalent (Michael Clayton) or I hate the movie (The Wrestler).

In this year’s field of ten (of which I’ve only seen the pair of sci-fi flicks) that movie is The Hurt Locker. It may be great; I haven’t seen it. However, my sneaking suspicion is that it will be a tedious movie about THE REAL WAR (TM).

I guess I’ll see. Eventually.

(Seeing only the sci-fi flicks in cinemas is characteristic, as I hardly ever pay theatre prices to watch talking heads. I can safely say neither were best.)

(Okay, maybe Avatar, but not the heavy-handed, lazy bullshit of District 9. )

What should win? I’ll tell you next year, when I’ve seen most of them.

What might win? If Avatar doesn’t neatly sweep it will be splitting heavily with Hurt Locker, leaving an outside shot for one of the smaller films which isn’t too similar (i.e., District 9 and Up are both splintering Avatar votes just on genre/style).

What am I rooting for? I already know I universally despise Coen Brothers movies, and I could care less about Push, so of the remaining films I suppose I’m pulling for Tarantino, even though I suspect I won’t like his movie very much. I suspect I’ll like An Education the best of them all.

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For what it’s worth, this was my take on 2008:
- Benjamin Button, my favorite director and lead actors, but it was shitty, pointless, and overlong.
- Frost/Nixon, a decent documentary that was really a movie.
- Milk, stunning, beautiful.
- The Reader, still avoiding, sounds soul-crushing.
- Winner, Slumdog Millionaire, a middling crowd-pleaser.

Filed in flicks | | Comments (3)

Comfort Films

Posted on Thursday, February 4, 2010 4:19 pm.

I’ve been watching Star Wars for days.

Lest you wonder, “You mean, instead of going to work?,” allow me to explain: I’m home sick for the second day in the row – a relative rarity for me.

I’ll spare you the details and state simply that I’ve been relatively couchbound for over forty-eight hours, aside from when the constant heavy knocking on doors up and down my block (which I have begun to attribute to daytime drug deals), drove me to sloth up to the bed (there only having to contend with barking dogs).

My non-sleeping couch time has been spent watching Star Wars: A New Hope. Not the ooky remastered version. No. The original, unretouched theatrical cut that comes as a bonus in the box set.

I haven’t made it through it awake a single time, yet.

When I was home sick as a child – as sick as I have been this week – the Beta machine was my only comfort. On it my mother had amassed copies of every possible children’s show or movie shown on VHF, UHF, or HBO from 1981 forward. Muppet Movies, The Last Unicorn, Flight of Dragons, Here Comes the Grump, Neverending Story, Dark Crystal, and many more that I can’t remember at the moment.

And Star Wars

Being sick in college wasn’t the same. When you’re sick you just want something you like. You want comfortable clothes, comfort ford, and comfort films. I’ve seen hundreds of movies since then, but none really qualify (save for maybe Lord of the Rings – we did have a tape of The Hobbit, after all).

Having heard my stories of being home sick, E started buying me those movies on my first birthday when we were dating. We’ve continued to fill in the gaps over the years. Having just recently acquired the Star Wars Original Trilogy, all that remains outside of my grasp are the Muppet Movies.

I know this is ridiculous, but I don’t think I would have gotten better so quickly without Star Wars. It kept me couched and calm, intermittently napping – just like it did twenty years ago. Only now in my more mobile state am I interested in modern fare.

Do you have any comfort films?

Filed in childhood, only childness, thoughts | | Comments (3)

Take Me To Vegas, Baby!

Posted on Tuesday, February 2, 2010 1:34 pm.

1. When I first bought the most recent Kings of Leon album – Only By Night – upon its release, the song I immediately gave five stars was “Use Somebody.”

2. In September after two weeks of the NFL season I declared (to no one in particular) that the Superbowl would be between the Saints or the Vikings from the NFC against the Colts or Denver for the AFC.

3. When Blogger.com launched Blogspot I reasoned (and frequently blogged) that Blogger was moving away from its core users that had previously driven word of mouth and feature development to appeal to a wider audience, and that eventually they would phase out the core users entirely. Today Blogger released an email stating that FTP support for domain blogs would end on March 26.

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Trolls Under the Bridge

Posted on Wednesday, January 27, 2010 12:42 pm.

As I spend more time working on Social Media projects at work and at home, one of the most recurring topics is “Trolls.”

It’s a broad topic. Trolls can be anything from vociferous-but-reasonable dissenters to people with an agenda of annoyance and an axe to grind. Each species merits a different reaction.

The Air Force created a terrific Web Posting Response Assessment – effectively, a Troll Taxonomy Tool & Decision Tree – to aid in selecting a response. (Here is a PDF of a recent version, for your reference.)

It’s a great tool – it distinguishes between several layers of negative responses. There are true “Trolls” (negative purely for the sake of it), but also responders are who “Misguided” (negative based on incorrect info) and “Unhappy” (negative based on a corresponding negative experience).

This simple, one-page chart has been a sanity-saver on a few projects in 2009. It forced my teams to stop a cycle of second-guessing – evaluate, respond if-needed, and move on.

That’s why my thoughts went to the assessment last night, when I received a comment notification on one of my videos. The comment was to the effect of “this dude can’t hit a note.”

I tried to objectively place my responder in the tree. Clearly he had a negative experience listening to me. He’s also misguided, because I’m definitely hitting many notes quite well in the video, and his comment wasn’t subjective.

Ultimately, though, he’s just a garden-variety Troll – spreading negativity for some intangible reason it’s impossible to dispute. So, per the Air Force, I’ll monitor it, but won’t respond.

That’s the success of more than my crack Air Force training. Three or more years ago that sort of comment would cripple my confidence. I would probably apologize for his negative experience without ever assuming he was misguided. And I would stop playing the song, probably for months!

Yesterday, he just made me smile. These days I’m a lot bigger than one or ten trollish comments. I sound how I want to sound; if I didn’t, I would have never posted the video.

That’s the same confidence you must have in your brand to make good use of the Air Force tool. If you’re unsure of the product or service you’re offering, every dissent turns into a potentially reasonable complaint.

From there, it’s all apologies, and you’ll be overrun with Trolls.

Filed in corporate, essays, self-critique, singing, thoughts | | Comments (4)

Brown Bag Demos, Vol. 1

Posted on Monday, January 11, 2010 11:34 pm.

I could write a post about how – even after a weekend primarily comprised of sleep – I am still a veritable vegetable after a week of near-all-nighters capped by two gigs.

I could write about how perfect a storm my Tin Angel gig was, but how already I know it wasn’t enough to fulfill this year.

I could write about a slew of interesting links I’ve flagged over the past two weeks.

Instead, I am writing to let you know that my first proper album in nine years is released to the internet at large today – for free, for the moment.* I am exceedingly happy with it, and still on my walk home could find previously unheard nuances in each of my performances. 11/12 of it appeared originally on the blog, although 8/11 of that has been significantly remixed or remastered since its original appearance.

Brown Bag Demos, Vol. 1

It is called Brown Bag Demos, Vol. 1, as a nod to the lunch sacks E inspired me to distribute them in, and also in a nod to the fact that there will probably be more of these before the year is up. Hell, as Arcati Crisis we released three of them in 2008, so I have to match that before it’s even vaguely impressive.

* It costs $3 for a physical copy at the moment, and I think I have it a bit backwards, because the physical one doesn’t have bonus tracks. But, the physical one does have the hours of hard labor, the stunning disc faces, and the hand-assembled brown-bag slipcase, so if you’re the sort of person who likes to own physical CDs $3 seemed like a reasonable threshold.

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