Tragedy, Triumph, and Tasteless legwear

Saturday, the secret project kinda fell apart.

I mean, I’ve been working on the secret project since, um, August. One night, on a whim, I decided to just start writing a thing in a specific medium, and then over the course of the next few weeks, I worked on it more. And I’ve been working on it, in some form, since then. And Saturday was supposed to be a really big culmination of everything. And then it snowed. Due to scheduling issues over the course of the next, um, month and a half, we won’t be back on track until some time in January. I’m thinking late January. Luckily, I had a bunch of booze in my apartment.

So, I was able to complete some other aspects of the secret project on Saturday; just not the monolithic glorious clusterfuck that Saturday was supposed to be. And then I got drunk.

Long story short: Matty in cutoff shorts at a bar.

In other news (hey, remember that?!?), Veronica Mars is one of the best TV shows ever created.

Saturday night…live?

This is extremely brilliant. Live sketch comedy? Who knew? I think it could be a hit.

In other news, I went to see Beowulf in 3D at the imax tonight. Sure, it was $14, but it was pretty dang stunning. It pulled no punches (actually, it pulled Angelina Jolie’s cgi nipples. Wait, “pulled [her] nipples” makes it sound like they actually pulled on…I mean, her nipples weren’t in the movie.), and it was honestly good to see something that was stylistically similar to Shrek have some extremely overt sexual overtones.

What follows is a discussion on “suspension of disbelief” in film.

I’m not entirely sure if the “motion capture” cgi accomplished anything in terms of adding to the film, except for the idea that entire landscapes can be facsimilated more easily than they could in live action. But, if Lord of the Rings has taught us anything, it’s that enormous live action fantasy epics are possible. The thing about film is that suspension of disbelief is not nearly as required as it is on stage, or in graphic media, or even the written word. On film, what you see is what you get, and since your mind does not need to fill things in (thereby, since the origin of the image comes from within the beholder, the beholder is more likely to believe it), what appears on film needs to be believable. Now, this can be circumvented in animated film by having something realistic (a princess, for instance) next to something fantastic, yet stylistically congruent (a dragon). This all changed with Jurassic Park putting live action on screen with cgi dinosaurs. The use of dinosaurs as the subject of the cgi made the process much easier to digest, since they weren’t human. CGI humans are still not perfect, and therefore somewhat distracting. In The Matrix: Reloaded you could tell in the fight between Neo and the 100 Agent Smiths when it stopped being Keanu and started being cgi Keanu. And it was distracting. And with Beowulf, where all of the characters are cgi, it’s hard to not think about that. I feel that a film like A Scanner Darkly utilized “rotoscoping” to make the trippy drug-addled hallucinations more believable, and it worked well. I’m just having trouble trying to figure out why Robert Zemeckis made the decision.

I haven’t had a ciggy in a week.

The Union, forever.

I support the writers’ strike. For two reasons:

1) The strike is happening due to a dispute between the writers guild and the studios over “residuals” from “new media”. Residuals are to the film medium what royalties are to music; musicians get a percentage from sales of their song usage, and film writers get some percentage from every time TBS shows their movie, or you buy the DVD. Basically, the last time there were negotiations over residuals was before DVD and the internet, and when it came time to decide what amount of the sales from video distribution of TV shows (specifically) went to the writers, the WGA conceded since releasing season sets on VHS was, pretty much, pointless, and the writers got no residuals from VHS distribution of TV shows. Now that there is DVD, as well as streaming video of entire episodes of TV shows on the internet, writers aren’t getting any residuals from DVD sales or internet, aka “new media”. Keep in mind that most TV writers aren’t along the lines of the “superstar” writer-producers like JJ Abrams (Felicity, Alias, Lost) or David E. Kelly (just about every lawyer show on TV, ever), but pretty much middle-class no-name writers. Residuals keep food on these people’s tables, not Hummers in these people’s multi-car garages. So this isn’t rich people going on strike to make themselves richer (although the rich are, actually, on strike, and they will get more money when negotiations go through, but they seek to gain about as much as any other writers). Rather, it’s people trying to protect the interests of middle-class writers who aren’t getting their due from the extremely lucrative DVD releases of TV shows.

2) Production is halting on many TV shows, and that scares me. According to the SAG (screen actors’ guild), actors are required to continue to work, in their capacity as actors, as well as the DGA (Directors’ guild of America), requiring that production staff (everyone from executive producer down to the production assistants) continue to work in their production capacity. However, how does that fare for writer-actors or writer-producers? Particularly writer-producers who really can’t oversee production without tweaking a script. And improvisational actors, such as Steve Carell, who “write” their lines and a lot of their actions during filming (and who, as a member of the WGA, supports the strike). Additionally, only half of the episodes for this season of TV have been written so far, so come January or February, no more shows. Late-night TV is already done. So, TV kinda dies in two months. And that sucks. But by supporting the strike, I hope to expedite the process.

So, on principle, I support the strike, but as a fan, I’m kinda bummed that things have to stop. The last strike lasted about five months. Let’s try to make this one shorter.

So, to show your support, sign this petition:
http://www.PetitionOnline.com/WGA/

I’ve been busy, okay?

Lots of DVD purchases of late. Wow. I got a job and lifted my trade embargo with Best Buy. I’ve also been working on projects. But first things first.

I bought many seasons of TV. This is what I’ve been doing while not blogging–watching episodes on top of episodes. I watched the last season of the Sopranos in a day. I just love TV as a medium. Thank god for The Sopranos. I really think that show made people think differently about TV, more than any other. And the world owes a debt of gratitude for showing what a TV series can do. I mean, yes, there have been series before that blew apart boundaries and did some crazy different things, but it was the first show that was really popular in that vein, and it made TV studios pay attention. I don’t think TV would have half the quality it does if it hadn’t been for the risks taken there. It used to be that TV actors rarely made the jump to the more revered silver screen, and that TV writers and producers were nameless, faceless figures. Now, you’ve got screen actors jumping to TV, JJ Abrams directing Mission Impossible III on the strength of Alias. It makes me really happy. And I’ve bought, like, ten series on DVD. I’m very happy.

Which reminds me, the secret project begins execution this weekend. I still won’t talk about it on here. Yet. But it’s going. And it’s going well. And that’s the other thing I’ve been working on. I should be able to talk about it in about a month. Then, I’ll be talking a lot about it.

I don’t know how to put this.

Um. Ok.

Parker Posey is in a sitcom.

And not, like, an interesting one. A laugh track, multi-camera sitcom.

Dianne Wiest, apparently, plays her mom.

On a sitcom.

On Fox.

I’m really confused.

But you can watch a preview at the Fox website.

It looks…funny.

Which is the strangest part of all.