First-person-shooter games came out before the modern action-camera craze, but it turns out the GoPro footage of a practical-shooting stage looks just like a video game.
Now we’re getting first-person-shooter action movies:
FPS Action Movies
Friday, November 21st, 2014The Giver Giveth and the Giver Taketh Away
Friday, November 21st, 2014Doug Lemov discusses film adaptations:
A few weeks ago a transatlantic flight finally caused me to watch Saving Mr. Banks the story of how Walt Disney won P.L. Travers’ trust and warmed her cold, cold heart just enough to get her to gift the ages with a Disney version of her book Mary Poppins.
Decent movie, that Saving Mr. Banks. If nothing else it offers compelling proof that history is a tale told by the winners. The winners being movie makers in this case. It turns out that when you leave it to a movie studio to tell the story of what movies do to books — really nice books — you get a very nice tale indeed, in which the books get really-nicer. Don’t you see? A movie is just an act of love for a book. A movie only wants honor a book and bring it to life — make it live forever, and maybe add a little music. Is that so wrong?
No, the movie tells us. No, it is not wrong at all. It is right! In the end even the curmudgeon-ish author is shown to see it.
But If P.L. Travers told the story of the movie-fication of Poppins it might sound different. After all, she did cry at the official release of Mary Poppins, but it wasn’t tears of appreciative joy. In real life, she cried to see what they had done to her baby.
And in a lot of ways she was right to cry. The movie is fine. Not much wrong with it except Dick Van Dyke’s unconscionable effort at an accent. And the fact that it ain’t the book. That’s the big one. I read the book with my kids a few years back and was stunned, so incredibly stunned, to find it nuanced and complex and rich and fascinating. It was beautiful: anything but schlocky, light years better than the movie, even if I read it in a horrible garble of Van-Dyke Cockney. But I only found out by accident that the book is a jewel. Having a song-and-Dick-Van-Dyke version of the movie out there made me assume for years that I should not read the book. I mean, with a hokie movie like that, who would?
He’s not going to see The Giver.
Super Revenue
Tuesday, November 18th, 2014The real superhero money comes not from movies but from licensed products, where the real hero isn’t Batman, Superman, or one of the Avengers:
It’s actually Spider-Man who is the superheroic earner, with licensing profits that in 2013 outpaced those of the Avengers ($325 million), Batman ($494 million), and Superman ($277 million). The Hollywood Reporter lists the data reported by the Licensing Letter.
According to the data, Marvel also sees far more licensed products shipped than DC does.
Arthur Rankin Jr. Dies
Tuesday, November 18th, 2014Animation legend Arthur Rankin Jr. has died. He and his partner, Jules Bass, produced many classics — especially holiday classics:
- Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
- Frosty the Snowman
- Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town
- The Little Drummer Boy
- The Hobbit
- The Last Unicorn
- Thundercats
Creator of “Choose Your Own Adventure” Dies
Tuesday, November 18th, 2014R.A. Montgomery, co-author and publisher of the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, has passed away.
His partner, Edward Packard, was considered the better writer, but Montgomery had his strengths:
Montgomery, on the other hand, often eschewed internal consistency in favor of big ideas, and his books have their own bizarre charm. While Packard was writing the standard sword-and-sorcery story The Forbidden Castle about dragons, knights, and princesses, Montgomery unleashed the berserk House of Danger which involved super-intelligent monkeys plotting to destabilize the world economy via counterfeiting, psychic detectives, Civil War ghosts, alien abduction, holograms, age regression, cannibalism, secret environmental conspiracies, and one ending that has the reader turned into Genghis Khan.
Glen A. Larson Dies at 77
Saturday, November 15th, 2014Glen A. Larson just passed away. The Mormon TV producer was an only child who went on to father nine children by three wives — ordinary, Hollywood, sequential wives, not polygamous sister-wives.
His Mormon beliefs influenced his sci-fi hit, Battlestar Galactica.
He also helped bring the novel Cyborg to TV — as The Six Million Dollar Man.
Female Secret Service Bodyguards
Saturday, November 15th, 2014Female Secret Service bodyguards are not as awesome at hand-to-hand combat as you might expect from watching TV, Steve Sailer notes, citing this New York Times account of the White House intrusion a few weeks ago:
As the officer stationed there tried to lock the doors, Mr. Gonzalez “barged through them and knocked her backward.” She told him to stop but he continued on to the East Room.
“After attempting twice to physically take Gonzalez down but failing to do so because of the size disparity between the two, the officer then attempted to draw her baton but accidentally grabbed her flashlight instead,” the report said. “The officer threw down her flashlight, drew her firearm, and continued to give Gonzalez commands that he ignored.”
Mr. Gonzalez entered the East Room, but then exited, heading down the hallway. Two officers stationed in the White House, assisted by two plainclothes agents who had just finished their shifts, tackled him.
Too Many Cooks
Friday, November 14th, 2014Adult Swim’s Too Many Cooks “intro” takes our pop culture to yet another level of weirdly meta self-reference:
Ten Hours of Princess Leia Walking in NYC
Friday, November 14th, 2014Dogs Playing Dungeons & Dragons
Friday, November 14th, 2014Dogs Playing Poker is fine, but Dogs Playing Dungeons & Dragons is better:
Bee and PuppyCat
Friday, November 7th, 2014I do not “get” Bee and PuppyCat:
Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.
The (now) highly anticipated YouTube series followed this recipe:
Create one 10-minute episode. The fans go wild. You realize you don’t have any more money, so you host a Kickstarter. Raise way more than you expected–over $900,000. Do Comic-con. Sell tons of merchandise. Then you create four more episodes, and schedule them to premiere 15 months after the first one.
[...]
To date, the initial “Bee and PuppyCat” short has garnered 10 million YouTube views. That only tells part of the story. For example, fans flocked to the show’s Comic-Con panel last month dressed like show’s the characters. The online retailer We Love Fine sells dozens of Bee and PuppyCat-branded items, ranging from handbags to t-shirts. There are “Bee and PuppyCat” Squishable stuffed animal toys. The show has sparked a robust Tumblr fan art community. Keep in mind there has only been one episode.
[...]
“Bee and PuppyCat” was created by Natasha Allegri, an artist who dropped out college about five years ago to work in animation. She eventually landed a job as a staff writer for Cartoon Network’s trippy show “Adventure Time.”
“I just wanted to make something that I’d like and other girls would like,” she said of “Bee and PuppyCat.”
Still, Mr. Seibert said he initially turned the show down. Then he showed it to his wife. “She went crazy for it.”
So Frederator committed to make the initial short, along with a slew of others.
New Bill Watterson Comic
Friday, November 7th, 2014Bill Watterson has produced a comic for the poster for the 42nd annual Angoulême International Comics Festival:
3 Million ‘Frozen’ Dresses Sold
Thursday, November 6th, 2014More than three million “Frozen” role-play dresses have been sold this year in North America:
Disney Consumer Products, which released that “Frozen” nugget on Tuesday — an unusual step for the company — did not disclose corresponding dollar sales. The princess dresses, frilly in light blue for the character Elsa, earthier tones for her sister, Anna, sell for $49.95 to $99.95 at Disney Stores.
According to the National Retail Federation’s 2014 Halloween consumer survey, an estimated 2.6 million children dressed up as one of the characters from “Frozen,” an animated musical that took in $1.3 billion at the global box office.
The federation estimated that 3.4 million children dressed up as princesses of some type; the most popular costume for boys was Spider-Man — also a Disney-owned property — with 2.6 million.
Peter Thiel Is Wrong About the Future
Thursday, November 6th, 2014Peter Thiel is wrong about the future, Virginia Postrel argues:
The obstacle to more technological ambitions isn’t our idea of the future. It’s how we think about the present and the past.
Americans in the mid-20th century were not in fact sanguine about the future. Anxieties about the march of technology were common. In February 1961, a statistics-filled Time magazine feature warned that automation was wiping out jobs and, worse, “What worries many job experts more is that automation may prevent the economy from creating enough new jobs.” At least nine episodes of the original “Star Trek” series were about threatening or out-of-control computers. (Still others involved menacing androids or ominous artificial intelligences whose exact nature was vaguely defined.) Movies such as “Colossus: The Forbin Project” (1970) and, of course, “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) picked up the scary-computer theme. Nor was the space program as universally popular as we nostalgically imagine. Americans liked the moon race, but only in July 1969 — the month of the moon landing — did a majority deem the Apollo program “worth the cost.”
Meanwhile, back in those good old days people were already voicing worries about technological stagnation that sound a lot like Stephenson’s and Thiel’s. “Before 1913,” Peter Drucker wrote in 1967, economic development “was taken for granted, but since then we’ve apparently gone sterile. And we don’t know how to start it up.” He noted that “with the exception of the plastics industry, the main engines of growth in the past 50 years were already mature or rapidly maturing industries, based on well-known technologies, back in 1913.”
[...]
The reason mid-20th-century Americans were optimistic about the future wasn’t that science-fiction writers told cool stories about space travel. Science-fiction glamour in fact worked on only a small slice of the public. (Nobody else in my kindergarten was grabbing for “You Will Go to the Moon.”) People believed the future would be better than the present because they believed the present was better than the past. They constantly heard stories — not speculative, futuristic stories but news stories, fashion stories, real-estate stories, medical stories — that reinforced this belief. They remembered epidemics and rejoiced in vaccines and wonder drugs. They looked back on crowded urban walk-ups and appreciated neat suburban homes. They recalled ironing on sweaty summer days and celebrated air conditioning and wash-and-wear fabrics. They marveled at tiny transistor radios and dreamed of going on airplane trips.
Then the stories changed. For good reasons and bad, more and more Americans stopped believing in what they had once viewed as progress. Plastics became a punch line, convenience foods ridiculous, nature the standard of all things right and good. Freeways destroyed neighborhoods. Urban renewal replaced them with forbidding Brutalist plazas. New subdivisions represented a threat to the landscape rather than the promise of the good life. Too-fast airplanes produced window-rattling sonic booms. Insecticides harmed eagles’ eggs. Exploration meant conquest and brutal exploitation. Little by little, the number of modern offenses grew until we found ourselves in a 21st century where some of the most educated, affluent and culturally influential people in the country are terrified of vaccinating their children. Nothing good, they’ve come to think, comes from disturbing nature.
Optimistic science fiction does not create a belief in technological progress. It reflects it.
Disney Princesses as (Imperfect) Feminist Role Models
Monday, November 3rd, 2014Caroline Siede sees Disney princesses as (imperfect) feminist role models:
Yet it’s women who are the titular characters in these three films. The leading ladies get the memorable songs, the iconic costumes, and the emotional journeys, while their male love interests are generic — often unnamed — supporting characters. The princes may do the physical rescuing, but they are very much presented as “prizes” for our heroines to win (albeit through conventional means of being beautiful and suffering silently). While contemporary blockbusters struggle to populate their worlds with more than one token woman, these early Disney films offer a wide range of female characters. Snow White’s Evil Queen, Cinderella’s Stepmother, and Sleeping Beauty’s Maleficent remain three of Hollywood’s most memorable female villains. And long before Frozen celebrated female friendships, Cinderella and Aurora relied on female fairies for help, guidance, and encouragement. These films troublingly imply that only beautiful women can be heroes, but it’s still a fairly progressive step to depict women as romantic leads, villains, and supporting characters all in one film.
Today we celebrate The Hunger Games, Lucy, and Divergent for proving that female-driven films can be blockbusters. But we’ve known that since 1939 when Snow White’s $6.5 million international gross made it the most successful sound film of all time. (It was quickly displaced by another female-driven blockbuster, Gone With The Wind.) Perhaps that’s why — after enduring a period of critical and commercial failure in the 1970s and 1980s — Disney once again returned to the princess genre to revitalize itself.
The Little Mermaid kicked off the Disney Renaissance and launched a whole new breed of more overtly feminist princesses. Ariel is feisty, adventurous, and defiant. She’s more recognizably flawed than the princesses who came before her and more adamant about achieving her dreams on her own terms. But as Disney’s first return to the princess genre in three decades, the film is very much a transitional one. While Ariel’s personality is more realistic, her narrative still follows the underdeveloped love-at-first-sight arc from the classic era. But with a bonafide hit under its belt, Disney pushed its feminist storytelling even further during the 1990s.
Belle is defined by her intelligence and love of reading. Princess Jasmine — the only supporting character in the entire princess line — openly declares she’s not a prize to be won. Mulan disguises herself as a man and saves China from invasion. Tiana goes from waitress to business owner thanks to her own determination. Merida and Rapunzel reject the limiting lifestyles their parents try to force on them. Like Snow White, these female-driven films found massive success at the box office, and like Frozen they actively subvert expectations of Disney princess storytelling.
And while Moana deserves ample praise for centering on a woman of color, Disney has actually done a fairly good — if delayed — job diversifying its princess line. So far the company has turned a Middle Eastern princess, a Native American chief’s daughter, a Chinese warrior, and a black business-owner into four of the most recognizable characters in pop culture with remarkably little fanfare. Meanwhile, we’ve yet to have a single superhero movie centered on a character of color.