April 5, 2005

The lead story in Variety is Britney Spears finding a new way to whore herself on UPN.

The Hollywood Reporter leads with crazy James Sensenbrenner suggesting that criminal courts should be handling cable obscenity issues.

In other words, we're in a movie news dead zone again.

I am finding myself endlessly fascinated by the unanswerable question of "what's next?" We just added RSS feeds to Movie City News, Movie City Indie and The Hot Blog (The Hot Button is being linked on the MCN feed every day). My computer weighs less than four pounds. I have hundreds and hundreds of channels on my DirecTV, attached to any one of my three Tivos. My DVD burner has got me burning too many DVDs to watch. I'm in love with my various iPod machines. And I just signed up today for an XM radio 3-day trial after seeing that they finally came up with… oy… a portable radio.

Yes, there are still those moments with 500 channels and nothing on. But really, if I can't find something worth watching, it's my fault. I'm a little unique, I guess. Not everyone got two great Almodovar DVDs dropped on the front door this morning and has a library of a few hundred DVDs on the wall, none of which I paid to own. The only reason I haven't taken my friends at Netflix up on their offer for a free membership is that I don't have the time to watch any more.

Thank God I find myself a bit repulsed by the new PSP. It's not that is isn't the greatest portable system ever invented. But why I'd want to watch movies on a 4" inch screen is beyond me. My iPod Shuffle does a great job with music to travel by. And I enjoy a video game now and again, but I don't need to be plugged in 24/7. I remember being bored as a kid, traveling by car. But I also remember the sound of the air and the experience of the view and the connection to the world that I had by not being plugged into distraction at all times.

The wonder of the future also speaks to the business of covering movies. What's next? As I read about Drew McWeeney finally getting a theatrical greenlight at Fox and the absolute impossibility of blaming any journalistic malfeasance on AICN ever again, given that pretty much every studio has a financial involvement with someone attached to the site, my main thought was, "What is next?" Proud as I am of MCN, we don't serve the population that AICN does. But that group, for all of the blogs and newsgroups, has got to be hungry for the next emerging leader o' the geeks on the internet. AICN was revolutionary in its day, but the adjustment has been made. Empowering the fans and exposing the process has been done. What's next?

Every time a new, great tool emerges to simplify the management of this insane amount of daily information floating about, another tool emerges and soon, you need something to manage all the management tools.

Part of the appeal of yet another subscription service like XM Radio is the release of absolute control. Even with 10s of 1000s of songs on your iPod, the taste for surprise continues. Podcasting, like blog chasing, will eventually become overwhelming, just as the Tivo stares you in the face with hour after hour of programming that you are interested in, but just can never find enough time to watch.

The nature of our lives still demands that a certain percentage of our input remain passive and a certain percentage is active. There is downside to getting all those Academy screeners every year… there is an inherent pressure to watch them.

Yesterday, I had some surprisingly free time and I wanted to go to the movies… to go to a theater, to pay money, to sit with strangers and to have the theatrical experience. But I had a hard time pushing myself to pick a movie and to commit the time, even with at least five films at my nearby multiplex that I had not seen to choose from. And had I gone, could I have made it through Guess Who without checking the Blackberry? (I forgot about the damned Blackberry on my list of electronica above.)

It is all a bit like the supermodel whose ugly husband cheats on her. It makes no sense from the outside… just as no one has yet to make a movie in which cheating on Richard Gere makes much sense. But, as noted in a wonderful New Yorker review of two books by food critics (which I read today and will link for you as soon as its available), critics get sick of rich, glorious foods… film critics become contemptuous of what they can anticipate, losing track of their natural compass of what is good… and the sexiest woman in the world can stop turning you on if passion becomes ritual.

Not everyone has all this access, but so many of us have an unending stream of available entertainment and information. I'm old enough to remember the launch of HBO, before the one station of the network was even on 24 hours a day and before Showtime or others. A teen, I watched the same movies over and over and over and liked it. I remember the thrill of being able to listen to baseball on the internet or to the sports talk show in my home town.

And I know that I have forgotten the thrill of wanting some of these things and have become jaded by the utter availability of ALL of it, upset only by the 40-odd Yankees games a year that are not available on DirecTV's package.

It's that moment in DisneyWar when Michael Eisner pushes to buy Fox Family Channel so the studio/network can repurpose programming without realizing that the rights had already been sold to others. The company's channel probably made more sense for most shows. But that wasn't the system.

Things continue to evolve. How much longer before Apple and XM team up to build an iPod that is also a satellite radio… and a phone and a personal organizer too?

Oh, our collective eyes are so much bigger than our collective stomachs. And now we need it all in Hi-Def.

Next!

READER OF THE DAY: THE M writes: "David, I saw Downfall today and found it stunning and chilling. I had read a criticism that suggested that the film was too kind to some of the individual SS officers. That's a specious argument. By humanizing the SS officers, the allowed us the opportunity to try and understand what drove them. That is why art and even fiction can explore the heart and mind in ways cold history on a page cannot. Bruno Ganz was amazing as Hitler.

Demonizing the German officers in the film out of a knee jerk condemnation, had that happened, would have prevented us realizing how Nazism had infected an essentially normal German society. It may sound trite, but if we don't understand what motivates or drives ordinary people into extraordinary collective behavior, we're bound to repeat it by not recognizing it as it happens.

This film was chilling enough without being hit over the head by stereotypical Nazi conventions. I'm still processing the film emotionally and intellectually, remembering the chilling images very clearly.

What does it have to do with Willy Wonka? That, inexplicably, it was a preview before Downfall."

E-ME: Are you overwhelmed yet?