rare pattern thoughts in a blog

Some items are must-haves for any science fiction fan (and aren't all geeks and geekettes to some extent sci-fi fans?). We already know that Battlestar Galactica is the best show on television. Now we can celebrate not just this fabulous show in high-definition video, but those shows and movies that led to its creation (according to me -- Ron Moore may have different ideas).

Let's start at the top:

1. Battlestar Galactica - Season One [HD DVD]

   If you've stumbled across the show broadcast in HDTV on the UHD cable channel, you know that Galactica is really something else when you can see all the detail.

   Price: $69.95

2. Blade Runner (Five-Disc Complete Collector's Edition) [Blu-ray]

   Caprica Six, meet your cinematic ancestors -- the angry existentialist Ray, the touchy Leon, the cheerfully desperate Pris and the ass-kicking Zora. And, of course, Rachel. (I couldn't be offering a spoiler on this 1977 movie, could I?) You have to wonder if we'd have Battlestar Galactica if we didn't have Blade Runner. Remastered, re-edited by Ridley Scott, this is the definitive edition.

   Price: $27.95 for the 5-disc Blu-ray set, $66.95 for the Blade Runner (Five-Disc Ultimate Collector's Edition) (aka the special edition with dead tree material added)

3. Firefly - The Complete Series

   The mood of Galactica wouldn't be possible if it weren't for Firefly, which aired a few years before. This sci-fi classic series was ill-treated by the television, but lives on in gorgeous DVD video that upconverts very nicely, thank you.

   If you haven't seen Firefly, you're in for a treat. These characters you will love -- they will be your friends for life. I swear!

   Price: $39.99

4. Cowboy Bebop Remix, Volume 1

   You couldn't have Firefly without Cowboy Bebop. This anime series manages to surprise you. And the music is pretty cool, too.

   Price: $17.49

   Happy Holidays, Space Cowboy!

This is part of a larger holiday geeky gift guide I posted on BlogHer.

Until today, The Railyard has been one of the great secrets of Boulder. Simply put: They have the best steaks in Boulder. Forget the way overrated Boulder Chophouse -- that place may have been good once, but now it's just a fancy joint serving sub-par Sizzler-caliber steaks -- The Railyard is the place to go.

My only real quibble is that they have these blue-daylight-colored energy-efficient bulbs lighting their dining area. Warmer colors would definitely improve the atmosphere.

Otherwise, their staff is very friendly -- and it's clear that they are proud of the food they serve, for good reason!

The reason The Railyard not a great secret any more is that it is located in the 29th Street Mall, right next to the the new Century Theatres complex, which opens today. These pics are from Wednesday.

Nice design, I think.

It's been a long long time coming, a modern movie theatre in Boulder. I'm looking forward to checking out movies there.

So in Boulder now, steak and a movie, that's the way!

When it comes to post-mortem publicity rights, this decision is BIG:

The Southern District of New York has just issued a bombshell decision in this area. In Shaw Family Archives v. Marilyn Monroe LLC, it held that Marilyn Monroe's heirs cannot claim post-mortem publicity rights because she died before the enactment of the statute that creates them in California (and, for reasons that are not important here, Indiana). So, according to this Court, her image, likeness and persona are all in the public domain. Put it on a t-shirt. Or a bottle of wine. Use it to sell widgets. No permission necessary. (But please remember, copyrights to the photograph you might want to use are a whole spearate issue.)

Is this a big deal? You bet. Licensing dead celebrities is a multi-million dollar business. But California -- the center of the celebrity universe -- only passed the statute creating post-mortem publcity rights in 1984. Lots of the hottest dead celebrities (licensing-wise) died long before that, and millions of licensing revenue stands to disappear under this decision.

Intellectual property lawyers in Hollywood will now have plenty to worry about, and therefore plenty of job security, for years to come.

This gets to the heart of the new "ownership society" in which we've found ourselves, where people's images, ideas, even naturally-occurring genes are claimed. It's like watching 2nd grade boys claiming territory in the sandbox. "First dibs!"

(Are there sandboxes on playgrounds any more? Let's ask the lawyers.)

If I come across as a tad cynical about this, that's because I'm getting the sense that the claims being made by media corporations and other interested parties are not helping to encourage innovation, but rather are working to stifle it. --Not that the prospect of seeing more Hollywood golden era stars dancing with vacuums has anything to do with innovation one way or the other.

This is going to be an interesting story to follow. And you can be sure the news media will cover it. After all, such things are their bread and butter.

[Comments are now closed due to relentless "nancy miracle" spam]

So Jeremiah Owyang has started a media consumption diet meme, and Marianne Richmond has tagged us BlogHers, so here goes....

• Web: I used to use NetNewsWire Lite for RSS, but I tried Shrook and found it to me easier to use, with some of the features NetNewsWire makes you pay for. Shrook is easy enough, so I'll stick with it for now. Do I need to mention Firefox? For search, I use Google pretty exclusively (I find myself wondering how Yahoo! gets by, what with all the barriers they put up for people to get listed in their index) and if I'm blog-hunting, I go to Technorati. I blog using Drupal for platform and either Performancing or ecto for blogging client (though neither is optimal -- Performancing repeatedly loses my drafts and ecto keeps embedding cruft into my html, even when I define the tags myself). For online video, I find YouTube too useful to ignore. It can be a bit hard to take, though, just browsing at random.
• Music: I've started trying out Pandora, but in some stations they keep trying to push the strangest things -- sorry but how do you get Foreigner or Journey from Led Zeppelin? -- and they limit how many songs I can reject in a given time. (Am I just too persnickety?) I have several of my old CDs burned to mp3 files, which I play on my desktop iTunes, but as I've moved from my nearly-dead PowerBook to two iMacs to my current MacBook Pro, it's been a challenge carrying those 20GB of files along for the migration ride. (It doesn't help that some of the discs were defective bulk coasters.) I haven't signed up for the iTunes Store, though, because the DRM restrictions and poor audio quality make downloads there less than appealing, no matter how appealing and easy-to-use the GUI is. Stop treating me like a criminal guilty until proven innocent, Apple and RIAA, and you'll have my business. Meanwhile, as CD music continues to fade away at the big box stores, I'm finding my music horizons diminishing, and that's a terrible place to be. My whole live is defined by soundtrack.
• TV: I don't have much time to watch television, especially the commercial variety -- I think I'm more and more intolerant of commercials. I will watch the NewsHour if I'm home early enough, the Daily Show if I'm up late enough (and thank goodness for the 9pm rerun of last night's show), Frontline if I stumble across it and (of course) Battlestar Galactica. I don't do cable news -- it strikes me as an entire industry getting excited about the lint in their own navels. However, since getting HDTV on Comcast, I've found that I'm more likely to just watch anything as long as it's high-def. Well, not anything at all, but it's amazing how much more interesting Nova or Discovery (or reruns of Battlestar Galactica and Firefly) are when you can see so much detail on the screen. (Ironic that local news is in high-def, but most network shows are not; the Rose Parade was in high def, but the Macy's parade was not; sports are in high def but arts typically are not; and all HBO seems to play on their single high-def channel is Rome [though it could be worse].)
• Communication: My cell is a Palm Treo 700p, but I hardly ever use it. It comes in handy when I need to keep up on email or check something on the web, but I'm realizing the touchscreen I so wanted (and thus the reason I rejected alternatives like Blackberry or Q) is pretty over-rated. Ah well, live and learn. The phone part is actually great for clarity and reception, but I don't use it as a PDA at all, as the 320x320 screen is just too damned small. Other phonage is Vonage. I haven't had a land-line phone in quite a few years now. --Not that any of this matters, because I really really hate talking on the phone unless it's necessary. For IM, I use Jabber (via Adium), which we have set up on one of our domains, and the sadly unavoidable Skype, which as a relay is an absolute bandwidth hog even when it's just sitting there.
  I don't use Skype much for voice, since so many people seem to have so many problems configuring it to work well. We thought it'd be great for talking to clients overseas to save a few pennies a minute, but all too often it was too much like the Cone of Silence. I use Apple Mail for email, mainly because Thunderbird on Mac is too slooowwwwww (I wish it weren't).
• Movies: Once upon a time, I saw several movies a week, sometimes several in one day, but now that they blast commercials in your face before showing generally sucky movies -- not to mention the overpriced junk food, sticky floors and noisy patrons -- it's just not worth it. It's not fun any more. So I watch movies on DVD, where I'm not limited by the, excuse me, crap selection of the week, and which on an HDTV plasma is an entirely new experience. I tend to buy, not rent, because rented discs always seem to have scratches that make the flick skip or freeze.
• Magazines: I subscribe to Post, HOW, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Macworld and occasionally Wired. I rarely buy a magazine off the rack. It amazes me how many magazines are in print. Do people actually read all these things? Somebody must. I have to say, however, that the supermarket tabloids do keep me informed. I mean, I could've gone for weeks or even months without knowing that Brittney Spears shaved her head or that Brad sent a note to Jen! Eeep!
• Books: I live for novels, but it's hard for me to find writers I like, so I'm stuck with the five or six authors who could write just about anything and I'd read it. Maybe if my life weren't so fast-paced, I'd be able to relax enough to get into a new writer's style, but usually I can't get past the first paragraph, so I do without. Meanwhile I'm reading more non-fiction than any time since I was in college. How She Does It, Blink and Designing Interactions are three of the most recent delights.
• Newspapers: I love reading off paper, but unlike magazines I don't hold the same love of newspapers. I like the print design of the New York Times, but I hate getting newsprint all over my fingers, and at a buck a pop for something I may not even have time to read that day, it becomes a dead-tree guilt and a recycling burden more than a source of news. 15 years ago that wasn't the case -- I loved getting the paper! How life changes in these times! I still read the "newspapers" online, including the NY Times, the Mercury News and the odd site that happens to have the AP wire story I want to read.

So there's my consumption in a nutshell. Now in the tradition of tagging, and because they are such an eclectic group of geeks and artists, I'd like to tag everyone on Planet Drupal.

Technorati Tags: media consumption diet

So last night I saw 13 Going on 30 on DVD, and while I enjoyed it, the movie left me in something of a funk. It took me a little while to figure out why. After all, the movie was funny, Jennifer Garner was really terrific -- what a shock that this is her first big comedic leading role in a feature! -- and the tone at the conclusion was uplifting. But I was just ticked off after the movie.

And then it hit me.

The really schmaltzy, supposedly romantic ending. That's what did it. That's what made the movie utterly depressing. Not because it was romantic, but, well....

Okay, here's the obligatory spoilers warning, for those of you who might want to spend the 5 bucks for the bargain DVD and check it out....

The movie goes fine, all the way through the sometimes very funny learning curve the now-30 year old "Jenna" has in catching up to her fabulously successful fashion magazine career, and continues on fairly solid light comedy footing all the way up through the point where Mark Ruffalo's character, "Matt," turns Jenna down and marries the other girl. They were childhood pals until the moment Jenna jumped from 13 to 30 years old. Apparently in the intervening years, Jenna had become a total bitch liar and backstabber, and Mark couldn't forget.

"I've moved on," he says. And for the movie, it's a powerful moment.

It's after this that the movie turns south. Jenna goes outside and in tears wishes herself back to 13 years old. She stays buddies with young Matt, and then 17 years later they get married and move into their pretty suburban house.

And I'm sorry, but that is just total bulloney. Or at least that's the part that I found so depressing!

After all, in life there are no do-overs. Sure, it's nice that Jenna gets to do over her life, but the real empowering ending would have been to see her move on, and rebuild her life despite the mistakes made in the past.

As it is, the movie gives the lesson that (a) a woman cannot succeed in a career without being a conniving witch, (b) if a nice girl slips through, she's backstabbed by some other conniving witch of a career woman, and (c) the only happy path for a woman is to never have gone into a career and instead stayed the sweet girl and married the childhood sweetheart.

The Devil Wears Prada smacks of a similar kind of message, though the movie (unlike the book) has the good grace to end on a little ambiguity as to whether our heroine really does choose her loser, jealous, spiteful boyfriend and other so-called friends over the career she's dreamed for. (Prada deserves a post of its own. Hopefully I can someday.)

What about the woman who wakes up to the awful life she's living, and remakes her life without ditching the career, without running to the boy, without flashing back to June Cleaver's kitchen?

Warning: Spoilers. (Not much, but hey, I warned you.)

So I saw Aeon Flux on DVD the other night. Given the mediocre reviews and lack of box-office love the film, um, enjoyed, I really didn't expect much. I wanted to see it mainly because of the production design I saw in the commercials. And because of Charlize Theron. And (okay okay) because I'm something of a scifi nut.

What I didn't quite expect was the heart of the story being driven by female characters. As you know, the norm in sci-fi movies is to have maybe a couple of interesting, perhaps powerful women who have their moments of personal power, but in the decisive cumination leave matters to the (male) hero. Not so in this movie. Aeon is unmistakeably the motivator of just about all the action here, and she's the one who comes through again and again, all the way up to the conclusion. (And, for the most part, the other major action characters are women as well.)

Charlize Theron brings a lot of presence to her performance. Her intensity practically leaps off the screen right at you. You can see it even in the NLE exports (i.e., raw out of the editing system) used in the making-of featurettes on the DVD. She doesn't phone in the performance, like some actors would in a similar movie, and she doesn't go for the easy campy out. She plays it straight, and as a result she carries this movie. Without her and the wonderful-yet-minimalist production values, this would be yet another forgettable B-movie you see only on the Internet Movie Database but never in the store, let alone theatres.

She's also astonishingly graceful in what is an extremely physical performance. I imagine the guys will appreciate her outfits even more. Very skin-tight, boys. But I thought more interesting was what she does, and how she does it. Aeon is a character of intention and purpose -- which, of course, is perfect for a story where all the certainties are not quite what they seem.

Still, first and foremost it's an action movie. The culmination isn't all that unusual. Explosions, guns -- lots of guns (though not the orgy The Matrix offers).

No, Aeon Flux is not a scifi classic. But it's a heckuva lot better than most of the stuff that passes for scifi on the big screen these days. And it's nice to see a women's vision of the future, without the usual phallic imagery and gizmo obsession. (I assume the fact that the producer, director, storyboard artist and star are women plays into that.) It's worth seeing, in my book.

Unfortunately, the website is yet another web 1.0 wonder, replete with Flash domination, un-asked-for music (so don't go there with your speakers turned up, or you'll rattle your monitor off the desk) and the usual brochure-ware offerings. If it weren't for some deliberate search-results skewing by Google, I doubt the site would even merit any pagerank. (Too many generations of website cloning, it seems. Wink wink. It'll make sense if you've seen the movie.)

This little gem turned up as the top video in Technorati this morning.

Hardcore fans will recognize the episodes, but compiling it all here adds a new dimension of whimsical fun.

Do I really think Star Trek: TOS has a hidden homosexual agenda? Of course not. (I hope not. William Shatner is just too cute in the 1960s.)

But given Paramount's tassled-loafer inspiration of re-doing all the special effects in the classic series, they're almost begging for slashy and other take-offs. If they don't respect their own cultural treasures, why should anyone else?

Meanwhile, regarding the rumors of William Shatner's participation in a rumored Star Trek prequel, TrekWeb quotes "Bill Shatner" from WilliamShatner.com:

"I know nothing except that where there's rumblings there's gas, and in this case the gas is coming from J.J. Abrams and none of it seems to be directed in my direction. If any gas comes my way, I will post it immediately and you all will know. Until then, hold your breath -- because this gas is odiferous."

On that movie, Lance Mannion has an interesting take -- except for the part about Leonardo DiCaprio as Christopher Pike. Noooooo! The star of The Beach should stay far away from Star Fleet Academy (though maybe he'd be okay as a Romulan).

I look at this, and marvel at how he has not changed, yet has.

Watch the eyes.

I'm left wondering which frame captured 9/11/01.

They don't make movies like this anymore. Like many kids my age, I saw it may times on Saturday afternoon television, full frame with lots of cuts and lots of car commercials (which somehow weren't so obnoxious back then). It was fun enough just because of the characters. For a western, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly didn't take itself so seriously -- mainly because Eli Wallach's weasely Tuco was so compelling.

But what I saw wasn't the real movie. Sergio Leone made widescreen movies, and he used the entire frame. What I saw, with pan-and-scan and interstitial advertising, was a Cliff's Notes version of the film.

Having recently watched on my 20" iMac the DVD of the restored version of the film, I can say it is a different movie. The iMac is not HDTV, and standard DVDs, though they have much more resolution than televisions can provide, are not HD DVD -- but even so, the movie offered what a lot of more recent movies do not:

Cinema.

Recent flicks like Batman Begins and even the well-done Good Night and Good Luck seem to lack the cinematic sense. Perhaps they're too much products of the TV age, shot for pan-and-scan and edited to keep things moving, rather than to give the next piece of the visual story.

And it really shows on high-resolution widescreen presentations. Last year's talk was the purportedly incredible effects of  King Kong. I had problems with the commercials, where Kong is batting cars around like Tonka trucks, when really, if you think about it, it should have been more like batting around Christmas ornaments. (How is a car that shatters upon 60mph impact with a wall going to not shatter when a wall-like hand smacks it at 60mph?). No, I was not impressed. It looked like The Incredible Hulk with fur.

Even so, I was pretty shocked when I saw how fake Peter Jackson's film looks on HDTV. Perhaps it's the contrast compression or the flicker effect, but really, Kong looked like a cartoon. (Oh, the ideas, like the dinosaur stampede down the ravine, seemed interesting. But realitic?)

By contrast, in another example of the power of cinema trumping the power of special effects, a much lower-budget movie that plays well on high resolution screens is the cult classic actioner Mad Max (which without the appalling American dubbing actually had some indie movie charm). George Miller's sequel, The Road Warrior, also holds up -- as do much older, cinematic, visual films like Lawrence of Arabia, The Searchers, and even the staid 2001: A Space Odyssey (whose special effects amounted to clear plexiglas, some inventive stage construction and old-fashioned matte photography.

How well will today's special-effects epics be regarded in 2 or 3 decades, as the technology gets better?

As HDTV catches on, and more and more people watch movies on screens that recapture a bit of the cinematic aesthetic, it's my sincere hope that we'll see more movies that use visual language to tell the story. The overwrought, overscored, over-effected hyperviolence of today's epics (which are always made with an eye directed at the almost-square 19" television set) already leave me tired. Maybe that's why, rather than see the latest effects fantasy from the boy-executives in Hollywood, it's The Devil Wears Prada that gets me out of the house for the first time since Master and Commander.

If the Hollywood movie distribution system ever grows up and gets back to making cinema, I'll celebrate with trips to the movie theatre. Until then, I'll stick to my DVDs and wait for the convergence. And remember not to hold my breath.

Smell lovers, rejoice! Just in case being assaulted by department store salespeople armed with perfume bottles isn't enough of an olfactory assult for you, now you can get spritzed with various fragrances during movies.

--At least if you're in Japan....

A new service from a major telecommunications company, NTT Communications Corp., will synchronize seven different smells to parts of "The New World," starring Colin Farrell.

A floral scent accompanies a love scene, while a mix of peppermint and rosemary is emitted during a tear-jerking scene. Joy is a citrus mix of orange and grapefruit, while anger is enhanced by a herb-like concoction with a hint of eucalyptus and tea tree.

The smells waft from special machines under the seats in the back rows of two movie theaters, which create different fragrances by controlling the mix of oils stored in the machines, company spokeswoman Akiko Suzaki said Wednesday.

This isn't a one-off thing, either. Apparently the scentifying is done using syncronized fragrance emitters which can run different scenting sequences:

Theaters will be able to download from the Internet different scent sequences for other films, Suzaki said.

The company began a similar service for homes in Japan last year. Owners of the $620 home version can download different programs to emit smells to accompany a horoscope reading or work as aromatherapy.

If this really catches on, it doesn't take much imagination to see where this could lead: Scent resampling, alternate odifying and even organic smell-o-rama.

It's not too hard to imagine the multinational media corporations getting upset if a market emerges for alternative scent programs and formulae for mainstream movies. This could take Mystery Science Theatre 3000 to a whole new level.

Related: Answers.com on the history of smell-o-vision.