Stop Frame

I read once that Thomas Jefferson opposed the very notion of copyright. Despite that, the United States established its first copyright law shortly after its founding. At the time, the original creator of a work held the exclusive rights to that work for five years. Thereafter it entered the public domain. In the centuries since, the situation has gone horribly wrong. It's impossible to argue that it's "legal" to copy and widely distribute someone else's creative work, their intellectual property. Once outside the bounds of Fair Use, we're talking theft, pure and simple. I create a product for sale and you copy it and distribute it over and over for free. You thus deprive me of the income I would rightfully expect from sales. How is that not theft? Intellectual property theft and distribution, piracy for short, is nothing new. The great change is in form and content. Someone could always photocopy the latest best-selling novel, but the copy was inevitably ...

I'm late to the condolences party, but nonetheless would like to express sadness at the passing of a budding talent at such a young age. It's not that I was a huge fan, it's just that he was always enjoyable to watch and never offensive. I first saw him in 10 Things I Hate About You , which was better than it had any right to be in large part due to Ledger's performance. And while The Patriot had issues, Ledger wasn't one of them, easily running the gamut from rebellious son to budding romantic. From the buzz I've been reading, his turn as The Joker is superb, which is surprising given that he has to follow in the footsteps of Jack Nicholson. There are a great many new actors who at first attract and then repel their audience, or at least me. Ledger wasn't one of them, and that alone made him rather unique. While I can't claim that I would rush out to see every film he was in, if I saw his name in the credits I would feel comfortable in knowing that...

Harry at Ain't It Cool said that Cloverfield "is a bold genre-reinvention unlike anything we’ve ever seen before". What a crock. If anything, Cloverfield is a throwback to when horror films threw away their own internal logic so they could shock you at the end. There was an endless parade of such things in the Sixties and Seventies and they oh so sucked. Cloverfield is an homage to them. And it, too, sucks. The most tragic thing about the film is that it didn't have to be this way. I understand that the desire was to make a giant monster film from the perspective of people just trying to survive. Fine. But let's not pretend that this hasn't been done before. Has the world forgotten Signs ? (Well, maybe...) Or, a finer example, Spielberg's War of the Worlds ? While neither of those involved a giant rampaging creature, both avoided the usual POV of such films, namely that of following the military and scientists fighting the alien invasion. Obviously...

Wow. I did not have my hopes up, but I never expected a review like this : A bunch of young, wealthy, utterly bland, similar-looking, Manhattan twentysomethings have a going away party for another young, wealthy, utterly bland, similar-looking, Manhattan twentysomething. After twenty minutes, the party’s finally interrupted by a rampaging “lizard” about the size of Godzilla. This forces the young, wealthy, utterly bland, similar-looking, Manhattan twentysomethings to run through the streets trying to save a young, wealthy, utterly bland, similar-looking Midtown twentysomething. Save your money. Do this instead. Play 1998’s Godzilla on your TV with the sound off and record it with your own camcorder as you dance the hokey pokey. For a soundtrack find four of the stupidest public school educated teenagers in your neighborhood to come over and say things like, Dude, look out. Oh, man, we’re in trouble. What was that noise? And this was after the other Harry loved on Clover...

I didn't know who Matthew Vaughn was until I saw Layer Cake . Even then the name didn't mean much. I eventually found out he was involved in the production of both Lock, Stock and Two Smokin' Barrels and Snatch . I've yet to see Snatch , but I did see Smokin' Barrels . And why am I bringing up all these Brit semi-gangster films? Because while I enjoyed Barrels , I found Layer Cake to be exceptional. It is one of those rare films that once I start watching I can't stop until the end credits roll. It is an excellent film, with any number of things going on, all of which pay off at the end. Beautifully crafted, well acted, on and on. But I gush and what does this have to do with stars? Not stars as in film stars, but stars as in bright balls of gas burning brightly billions of miles away. Stars as in shooting stars. Stars as in Stardust , Matthew Vaughn's insufficiently heralded film from the ancient days of 2007. Whoever was in charge of publicity nee...

I am clearly not an Apple person. Indeed, I’m beginning to believe that Macintosh computers represent everything wrong with the world today. They, like much of the world and especially those who are media-obsessed, are all about style over substance. Reality must be suspended in order to swallow the hype, especially as presented by Steve Jobs. This is such an accepted phenomenon that it has been dubbed the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field (RDF). This was last seen with the iPhone, which is somehow declared to be a “smartphone” yet isn’t. Because of that RDF declaration, Jobs claims the iPhone is a huge market success, with some unholy percentage of the smartphone market already, just behind RIM (Blackberry), and no one else having even 10% of the market. But to buy that you have to accept the iPhone as a smartphone, which it isn’t. And once you realize that it’s not then the RDF collapses and you’re left with a high-priced multi-media phone...

Ever have one of those experiences where things are clicking right along? For instance you are on a great Sunday morning ride along US 1, north of San Francisco. The engine is humming, the pavement is great, the sky is wonderful, and the CHP has taken the day off. Oh maybe there's an occasional gray cloud and a drop of rain, so it's not absolute nirvana, but it is still fun. Ever been there? Of course you have. Now put yourself there and think of what it feels like when it all all goes straight to hell. That's what watching Shoot 'Em Up was like. At the beginning this movie was silly grand fun. You knew from the get-go that this was going to be a silly movie but that Clive Owen would make sure it was a good time. Owen is Mr. Smith, a man who is a crack shot under any circumstance, from whatever pose he might strike or be pushed into. Hell, he's a great shot even with all his fingers broken. And he loves him his carrots, too. He ends up with a baby that he fe...

HD-DVD took a hit last week when Warner announced that they were going to be Blu-Ray exclusive. This leaves only three major players in the HD-DVD field who are exclusively HD-DVD. Everyone else either releases in both formats or is Blu-Ray exclusive. To which I express supreme indifference. This shouldn't be. I should be jumping up and down happy with one or the other, but I remember the introduction of home video cassette players, and the minor war between Betamax and VHS. I loved Betamax but we know how the war ended. In this current struggle I have no idea which format might theoretically be superior to the others -- odds are that Blu-Ray is incrementally superior, but then again it's also supposed to be incrementally more expensive -- because I genuinely don't care. It's all about the money. When I jumped out of tape to DVD I got immediate benefits at minimal cost. I got a more permanent media (my tapes were dying) and a better picture. The player was only ...

I'm always in search of the ideal word processor, or even a great text editor. So I was amused by an article in the the New York Times Magazine that was cursing Microsoft Word.  It, along with other posts and articles it referred to, was a rallying cry to abandon Word. Amusement became peals of laughter, however, when I realized that all of these articles were written by MacHeads. How they avoided choking on the irony is a mystery to me. Why do I say this? Because the Mac drove the industry to its current GUI state. Menu here, fancy font there...on and on. Lovely for an operating system, I suppose, but loathsome for a text editor, for when you just want to do some writing. Which is why these articles were hilarious, because they were all written by MacHeads, complaining about the very state of things their beloved Mac created. Not that they thought of it in those terms. Instead, it was all Microsoft's fault. Beyond the irony, I can sympathize with their plight. Early on i...

Spot on, and I'm not even a major Lynch Fan. Note: He drops an F-bomb near the end.