Twitter. I utterly fail to see the appeal of Twitter. Understand that I am someone who is online a lot – I am not offering up the standard crank “why you kids playin’ with those danged computers dang it” rant here. But this need for total connectedness is beyond me, and frankly it’s not even total connectedness because it’s entirely a one-way conversation: you blather whatever into Twitter and other people see it, but you don’t have to listen back to them. Which, come to think, is pretty ego-driven communication in a passive-aggressive sort of way. You can tell people what you’re doing and you don’t have to listen to their responses, and not is this the expected norm, it’s the driving design principle!
What the fuck is up with that? People have suggested this is the evolution of the Facebook status message, but Facebook exists primarily for the purpose of two-way communication, obsessive as it might be. (Well, that and Scrabulous.) Twitter in essence takes the self-absorption that the connected lifestyle demands (all the co-presence of a community, without the niggling demand of learning to tolerate the in-person social quirks of others) and caters to it.
All of this might be forgivable if Twitter produced clever, interesting communiques, but it doesn’t – it’s an endless parade of banalities. Another way of looking at Twitter’s general pointlessness is to consider how many Twitter messages would be worthy of mention when replying to the question, “so how was your day?” Easily most would not qualify, because in person when someone asks you that, you don’t tell them about the thousand little annoyances in your day; it’s just the (relatively) important stuff.
The “Green Arrow goes to supervillain jail” movie. People recently started talking about this again and I just don’t see the appeal. The concept isn’t bad, but I can tell you right now the execution will be hamfisted dogshit.
Why will it be hamfisted dogshit? Well, other than Green Arrow being a terrible superhero concept (“has a bow”), this is the sort of movie that demands immense, immense amounts of exposition to explain what the hell is going on. The problem is that most filmmakers are really, really bad at delivering details of a differing world without simply vomiting up a horde of banal, boring, patronizing explanatory dialogue.
(This is one of the things that people who mock the original Star Wars trilogy really miss – Lucas created an entire expansive universe and, unusually so for him, resisted the temptation to explain anything more than necessary. It is a rare achievement, which is one of the reasons the original trilogy is so good and the second prequel trilogy is not.)
This is not to say that the movie might not be good. It might well be good. It just very likely won’t, because it’s setting itself up for failure right from the premise by choosing such a difficult focus, and let’s be honest, you are not going to get a Bryan Singer or Christopher Nolan making this movie. This is the Steel of this generation right here, people!
Also, “Supermax” is a terrible, terrible title, sounding not unlike a giant Japanese fighting robot. GO SUPERMAX! ELECTRON JUICE ATTACK SUPREME! Et cetera.
People who bag on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. It’s a better movie than Last Crusade, people – a movie which gets by mostly on Sean Connery’s charisma and the extra import added by the Holy Grail. (And I like Last Crusade, people, so don’t start.) Yes, Kate Capshaw is kind of annoying. Yes, Short Round is a questionable character idea. But it’s got the best action in the entire series – moreso than Crusade and even Raiders – and its closing sequence is easily the best, most exciting in the series. It’s simply the most daring movie of the franchise.
Grey’s Anatomy. It’s like Scrubs, except not as funny, not as good at the dramatic moments, and twice as long.
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Grey’s Anatomy is not very good, but for some reason I’ve been suckered into being somewhat emotionally invested in the life of characters that I kind of sort of hate. My wife wants to kill me because I keep pointing out how sloppy the surgeries are connected to the personal lives of a doctor.
I want the same exact show as Grey’s Anatomy except set within a computer helpdesk to show how annoying this actually is.
I always liked Temple of Doom best out of the trilogy, myself. I loved the scene near the end on the bridge where Indy’s stuck between two sets of Ram’s guards, Ram calls his bluff on dropping the stones…then Indy wraps his feet in the ropes and decides to REALLY make things interesting.
“Mola Ram…prepare to meet Kali…IN HELL!” *chop*
Anyone who can’t enjoy Temple of Doom doesn’t appreciate good filmmaking.
I for one think “Temple of Doom” is the weakest, but I still really enjoyed it.
Anyway, Green Arrow is as solid a superhero concept as any other. He’s hearkening back to a classic vigilante of Western folklore. It has less ridiculous elements than a futuristic super-team of teenagers with cardboard, expository code names. And I’m not saying Legion is bad, just that it requires more ridiculousness to be swallowed than Green Arrow, especially with the more recent incarnations of Green Arrow.
Temple of Doom wasn’t a bad movie, but it was nowhere near Last Crusade. You can’t just write off a movie because Sean Connery raises the bar for acting by half a mile. “Oh yeah, you only liked it because that one guy gave a fucking fantastic performance. Beyond that, it was merely awesome and so this other awesome movie is – by extension – better.”
Temple of Doom was a series of incredibly cool moments, but the adventury premise was a bit thin. Jones was emotionally invested in Last Crusade. He was just out doing his job in Temple of Doom. Not to mention – and this is key – Last Crusade had, like, 95% more Nazis. It even had Hitler. And an exploding Hindenburg. I mean, it was just a totally different level. Everyone in Last Crusade knew they were out to make a blockbuster. Temple of Doom was just trying to remake the success of Raiders.
I liked the action sequences in Temple of Doom just fine, but come on, Willie was the Jar Jar binks of the 80s. I’m firmly of the opinion that a comic relief character can be useless OR annoying, but never both. Short round at least contributed to beating the bad guys, Willie did nothing but whine the entire movie and to me that’s a deal breaker. Add to that the scenes that existed only to highlight her and her whining (The camping scene? the dinner scene? the stuff in the bedrooms? do not want!) and the action becomes more of a relief then anything else. I watched the first three this weekend to get ready to see the new one, and I had to force myself to not turn Temple of Doom off in the middle.
On a related note, kingdom if the Crystal Skulls was a fairly servicable action flick, but not a good Indiana Jones movie.
It’s like Scrubs, except not
asfunnyThere, fixed it for you.
I have to absorb more of that show than I’d like, and God, the characters make the cast of Seinfeld look like the Waltons. I’m all for unsympathetic characters, but the degree of stupidity, selfishness, vapidity and immaturity the ensemble reflects has to be some sort of record. I’m not sure if Pompeo is an awful actress or it’s just that her character relentlessly acts like a child, but none of her narration has ever rang true for me — I can’t believe that that character could possibly have such ruminations that aren’t even deep but just not superficial. And the dramatic action isn’t as much telegraphed as delivered by Goodyear blimp with the message blazing in lightbulbs along the side, writer fiat couldn’t be more obvious if they had Shonda Rhimes in a picture-in-picture typing away in the upper-lefthand corner of the screen. It’s hot docs hooking up in whatever order they haven’t paired up heretofore; that’s the show. Feh.
That said, in retrospect, Temple of Doom had some really great moments. It was a perfectly serviceable addition to the series, just not fantastic. It didn’t suffer as much from the sentimentality of Last Crusade, which took itself far too seriously (the over-dramatic transition from Phoenix to Ford, the literal ride into the sunset), but still featured Connery at his crotchety best.
I mentioned this in my review of Crystal Skull, but I think the main problem with Temple of Doom is that it doesn’t really fit in with the flavor of the decade it takes place in. In the other two, you know it’s the ’30s. In ToD, not so much. The nightclub scene in the beginning is the closest we get to that feel.
(I still love Temple of Doom. I love them all.)
You DO realize that in terms of What The Kids Do These Days you are basically just waving your fist and shouting ‘get off my lawn’, right? J00 is OLD, man. Don’t worry about it. 🙂
These things get tried out, and stuff that sticks to the wall sticks to the wall. But crazy shit must go out into the wilderness to get a little Darwin on.
I use Twitter sometimes, but I must agree that it is rather pointless.
Well, I guess reading bits from Jenny Holzer and the Leisure Town quotes feed makes it somewhat worthwhile.
I think you’ve misunderstood the ways in which people use Twitter. Yes, the way it’s set up seems designed to encourage people to witter on in short bursts about everything and nothing without ever listening to anyone else — but what would be the point of that? In practice, there tends to be significant overlap between followers and followed, and there’s a lot of back-and-forth chatting that goes on (see any message that begins “@username”), so that for a lot of people it ends up being more like asynchronous IM than anything else, or a really really really stripped-down version of LJ, where the way to make a comment on another person’s post is to make a new post of your own. It’s less demanding than an actual IM conversation, for sure, but it’s not as egotistical as you’re making it out to be.
Plus, you get to see Warren Ellis and Matt Fraction exchanging zombie visions. That’s entertainment.
…they’re planning a Green Arrow movie now? Huh.
The problem with Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull is that it doesn’t fit in the Indiana Jones franchise. The Indiana Jones films are about uncovering and evoking the magic of the past. The Crystal Skull itself, and the entire end of its movie, comes from a (rather cheesy) future.
The film had great character moments, terrific action scenes…and still left me disappointed.
RE: Supermax
Hey, if it gets us Deadshot in a feature movie, I’m all for it.
If you actually get into the characters and whatnot, Grey’s Anatomy is the most depressing show ever. It’s just episode after episode of horrible things happening to everyone. Every time something good happens, you know it’s just setting up some despicable tragedy. That’s why I quit watching it.
Well, that and the fact that Meredith Grey is a whiny, irresponsible, selfish imbecile who doesn’t deserve good things.
Oh, and yes, I’m with you 100% on Twitter and its absolute lack of redeeming features.
The future Mrs. Spielberg, in Temple of Doom, was the most shrill, horrible, useless character imaginable. There wasn’t a single scene in the movie, after the opening sequence, which would have failed to benefit from her absence.
There are a lot of reasons I think Temple of Doom is the weakest of the franchise, but they’re all forgivable – Willie Scott isn’t.
All week I’ve been arguing with many, many people that Temple of Doom is the most awesome Indy film (not best, mind, but awesome). Every time, I have to concede defeat, as each argument ends with someone quoting Willie Scott.
Just joined Twitter at a friend’s request, and so far, it’s not quite for me. To get the most out of it, I’d likely need far more advanced tech to send stuff a-twitter while mobile.
Temple of Doom better than Crusade? It has decent action, yeah, but the driving force of the Indy films is the character interaction, and in that regard Temple of Doom is clearly the worst of the lot. I mean, Raiders had Karen Allen and John Rhys-Davies, Crusade had Connery (which actually is reason enough for it to be my favorite), and even Crystal Skull had decent performances by Allen and LaBeouf (sp?). Doom had… Kate Capshaw and Indy’s Asian child servant.
*That being said, I do want to see Short Round and Mutt get into a fight in one of the future Indy films. Preferably of the “to the death!” variety…
Why Green Arrow is the doing prison routine…
1.) Green Arrow didn’t really become an interesting character until they wrote him as something more than “Batman with arrows”.
2.) They did this by making himself something Batman wasn’t — a frothing radical communist.
3.) Is anybody is Hollywood going to portray a frothing radical communist as the hero?
4.) Damn, we need something new to write Green Arrow as…
While I generally agree with you about Twitter, http://twitter.com/Othar completely justifies the existence of the service, even if you’re not a Girl Genius fan.
Carter, couldn’t disagree more.
With something like Legion people expect to suspend their disbelief a great deal. Sort of like X-men in SPACE!
“That one shoots lighting! That chick reads minds! That’s the smart one! And together they fight mind controlling starfish! IN SPACE!”
With Green Arrow you have to explain who he is, what his laaaaaame concept is (Boxing glove arrows? Really?), and then explain why the audience should pay to see this guy do a movie with a bunch of super villains so utterly craptastic that they start the move already caught.
I mean, I sure ain’t hyped to see this thing.
That Jenny Holzer uses Twitter is indeed a redeeming feature. Another redeeming feature? Jhonen Vasquez.
I’ve been trying to figure out how “Supermax” would work, and the best I can come up with is “It’s Die Hard set in a Supermax prison, with characters cranked to eleven.” Why, it’s not just a Good Cop Done Wrong, it’s a famous vigilante! Why, it’s not just a gang of vicious criminals, they’re super-villains!
Why, it’s not a retread of Goyer’s earlier movie, the Jean-Claude Van Damme movie Death Warrant, it’s a whole new Goyer movie about an over-muscled and violent good guy trapped in a maximum-security prison and fighting against the violent, psychotic inmates! Because this time, instead of karate, the hero has a bow and arrow!
Genius!
I actually like the Supermax concept (not the name) and for a Green Arrow movie I think it’s a brilliant, especially if you’ve read the script review which goes a long way in answering some of the lingering doubts.
1.) He’s already an established GA in the first 10 min of the movie. Apparently there are small flashback sequences that shows how he became GA during the course of the movie (taken from elements of the original and the exquisite GA:YO), but I like that it’s not the standard origin story- which would suck for a GA film. He’s outted and framed for murder by a rival trying to take over his company and gets sent to the prison for meta-humans because the judge thinks that someone like him would be able to escape a normal prison. A good set up without a ton of exposition needed.
2.) By putting it in a prison you can have a slew of B and C-list villains appear without having to worry about goofy looking costumes, explanations, etc. Fans will know who they are right away. Regular audiences will just focus on “Oh wow, that guy can shoot lightning out of his arse!” :-p Plus there are, in the script, cameos by famous comic villains like Lex Luthor, The Joker, and the Riddler that most people will recognize assuming they actually do it. My friend and I thought it’d be cool if they had the Joker make a cameo but have him being rolled in Hannibal Lecter style so you can’t see his face but with him laughing under the restraints. Overall I think it’s a great way to do things without having to worry about a lot of the typical problems that come up when making a comic adaptation.
3.) GA is a decent choice for the lead (besides say, Batman, who the concept was originally for before Begins took shape. It was going to be about Batman being locked up in Arkham and having to break out. The concept script is still floating around out there somewhere.) GA has a fun personality which will make him entertaining considering it’s not about the costume and he’s a normal guy up against people with powers. It’ll force GA to have a bit more going for him than just the arrow bit, which he does in the comics (at least now he does). Plus the idea of a superhero having to work along side villains he put away to escape could be interesting if handled correctly.
If they get the right people to do the film it could be really good. If not, then yeah, it’ll be total dog crap. However from reading the script review the concept does have me excited.
I purchased the trilogy on DVD, and while I feel Temple of Doom is the weakest film, it’s by no means bad. I never liked it as a kid because it made Indy a giggling sadist that smacked Short Round and was going to sacrifice Willie. . .okay, because he smacked Short Round. Baddum-bum.
Seriously, I have not walked away from an Indiana Jones movie and not been entertained. Temple of Doom has it’s moments of awesome (the opening, Indy in silhouette as he stares down the slavers, the mine kart chase, the bridge), it’s just not my favorite of the films.
They need to get off their bums and make a damn GA series on the WB. I’d watch that.
If you hate Twitter (as you should), you should check out Pownce.com
Start-up from the people that brought you Digg. Essentially, it’s a way to have the Twitter ego-stroke, but you can also post media to share, and it *GASP* has the ability for people to leave replies to posts! Decent community, and it doesn’t quite feel like the empty shouting into the internets that Twitter is.
3.) Is anybody is Hollywood going to portray a frothing radical communist as the hero?
According to the gang at Libertas, isn’t everyone in Hollywood supposed to be a frothing radical communist?
If you’re trying to understand Grey’s Anatomy by comparing it to Scrubs, of course you’re not going to get it, because Grey’s Anatomy is a soap opera and Scrubs is a sitcom. They are entirely different genres.
That’s not to say that Grey’s Anatomy is good, because mostly it’s not (this coming from someone who watches it regularly – shut up it’s a guilty pleasure) but it’s not meant to be a show that’s “like Scrubs” at all. “Like ER” would be a better comparison.
Don’t get me wrong, I like ‘Temple of Doom’ just fine in its place (which is fourth on the list of Indy movies. 🙂 ) But dismissing Short Round as “an unfortunate character choice” is like dismissing Snails from the ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ movie as “a bit of a backwards characterization.” Everything about Short Round just screams “unfortunate racial stereotype that nobody had the balls to tell Lucas and Spielberg ‘Hey, this worked in the 30s because everyone actually was racist, but you can’t just drop it into a movie made fifty years later’.” The pidgin English, the spontaneous and unexplained knowledge of martial arts…I’ll admit that all the Indy movies have their share of cinematic stereotypes (Sallah has his share of “cinematic Arab” character tropes, plus he’s a Middle Eastern character being played by a Welshman) but none of them manage to be as blatantly offensive as Short Round. Hell, just read his name and cringe.
The same movie without Short Round (or with him about ten years older, speaking better English, and with a proper name and backstory) gains ground very quickly on ‘Crystal Skull’.
Twitter…
Not for me at all, but I recall hearing one VERY redeeming thing from it.
It helped coordinate responses to the San Diego area fires a few months ago. And I thnk it helped coordinate things with the recent Cheng-Du Earthquake as well.
“Why Green Arrow is the doing prison routine…”
Because he’s just a dude with a bow and arrow, and the cops shouldn’t have any trouble locking his merry ass away.
Seriously, though, I think it’d be a bad idea to make a Green Arrow movie because he doesn’t have the profile the other big names have. Putting him in prison with a lot of B and C list villains . . . you’re just setting yourself up for another ‘The Shadow’ or ‘The Phantom.’ Do you want Green Arrow to ‘slam evil’? Do you? Do you want him hitting the ‘bullseye’ of evil with his ‘green arrow’? Schumacher style?
Twitter itself, I couldn’t care less about, but it’s innocuous enough and doesn’t directly impact me in any way, so I can simply ignore it. Seems like the sort of thing people who are wired 80% of the time but don’t have the time to IM/text message as much as those who are wired 95% of the time would be into.
However, what really bugs me is when people on Twitter use LoudTwitter, etc. to dump their banalities and their side of Twitter conversations into their blogs. The only thing worse than reading boring Joycean prose is reading half (or less!) of a conversation written entirely in boring Joycean prose. IT’S CALLED CONTEXT, PEOPLE!
Penny arcade has the right of it as far as Twitter goes.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/4/23/
Dude. Twitter. Totally. Awful.
To my mind, the failure of Crystal Skull comes down to the filmmakers’ failure to understand genre. The previous Indy films were all fantasy, while the current release is science fiction. The two really don’t mix all that well when the only thing similar is the central character.
Well, I’m of the opinion that the entire series, as pulp adventure, can easily encompass sci-fi as well as fantasy as long as both are subservient to the overall adventure tone. So, Indy in Space would be bad, but Indy finding ancient astronauts is okay.
I don’t get twitter either. It’s basically a logging API. I’m a human, not a webserver, I don’t need a logging API.
Also annoying is that sometimes interesting information gets passed on it, which would have been captured and be searchable if it had been posted on a blog. A bunch of Mac programming blogger types have pretty much stopped posting interesting technical stuff, and now instead trade little blurbs that are mostly content-free and lacking in context.
“Start-up from the people that brought you Digg. Essentially, it’s a way to have the Twitter ego-stroke, but you can also post media to share, and it *GASP* has the ability for people to leave replies to posts! Decent community, and it doesn’t quite feel like the empty shouting into the internets that Twitter is.”
Hey, pretty soon they’ll have reinvented Usenet.
But this need for total connectedness is beyond me, and frankly it’s not even total connectedness because it’s entirely a one-way conversation: you blather whatever into Twitter and other people see it, but you don’t have to listen back to them. Which, come to think, is pretty ego-driven communication in a passive-aggressive sort of way. You can tell people what you’re doing and you don’t have to listen to their responses, and not is this the expected norm, it’s the driving design principle!
You have accurately described blogging.
“But blogging doesn’t HAVE to–”
Ahhh, now we’re on to something.