- James Cameron doesn’t like Piranha 3-D:
I tend almost never to throw other films under the bus, but that is exactly an example of what we should not be doing in 3-D. Because it just cheapens the medium and reminds you of the bad 3-D horror films from the 70s and 80s, like Friday the 13th 3-D. When movies got to the bottom of the barrel of their creativity and at the last gasp of their financial lifespan, they did a 3-D version to get the last few drops of blood out of the turnip..
Something tells me he’s going to hate Jackass 3-D.
Frankly, though, it’s films like that — cheap horror movies with visceral, jump-out-at-you scares — to which I think 3-D is actually most ideally suited. Cameron may be throwing his full weight behind it as a tool on the artistic palette, but even in Avatar I thought the 3-D was a lot less impressive than advertised. It has its uses, but even at its best, I don’t think it rises above a gimmick. (For which you trade a not-insignificant amount of brightness and comfort.) So a film like Piranha, which embraces it fully as gimmick, may actually be exactly what the technology is meant to do.
- Eye chart for geeks.
- And interesting look at Yiddish in America:
The survival of Yiddish in America is an on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand story. Yiddish, once the language of the Jews of Eastern Europe, is undoubtedly moribund, with its last full-throated speakers, Holocaust survivors, now well into their 80s and 90s. (A smattering of their children speak it through sheer willpower whenever they can buttonhole a comprehending ear, but some, like this writer, grew up nagging parents to speak English and regrettably saw their first language wither.)
On the other hand, the language is booming among Hasidim, for whom it is a lingua franca, mushrooming so prolifically that by some estimates the ultra-Orthodox will form a majority of American Jews by century’s end. [via]
- Have you been reading Kaleidotrope contributor Jason Heller’s weekly Frequency Rotation posts at Tor.com? You really should be.
- And finally, based on this clip, I would totally buy Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Alexander Hamilton rap album. [via]
movies
Tuesday various
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“More of this is true than you would believe.”
Woke up first thing this morning to the sound of a barking dog, our barking dog, wanting to be taken outside. When you make a habit of occasionally stealing things off the kitchen table like, say, several rolls, you can maybe expect a little gastrointestinal distress a few hours later. But we came back in, and I went back to bed. I left him downstairs, but I can only presume Tucker did too.
I didn’t do too much with the rest of the day. I went to the library. I got a quick haircut. I read a little for Kaleidotrope. I wrote a little, too. And tonight I watched The Men Who Stare at Goats, which was okay but not great.
And that’s really it.
“We are Sex Bob-Omb and we are here to make you think about death and get sad and stuff.”
It was a slow day at work, but at least it was a half slow day, so there was that. I did manage to get several hundred books pulped before the end of the day, so I guess it wasn’t all wasted.
Actually, what happened was, earlier this week, I noticed by chance that one of our older titles, inherited from another publisher, was being sold in both its first and second editions. This isn’t standard practice; when a new edition publishes, the previous edition automatically goes out of print. So, by bringing it to the attention of production and getting the remaining stock of the first edition pulped, I was essentially just facilitating a process that should have happened a few years ago as a matter of course. Still, it feels kind of strange to be sort of directly responsible for destroying all those books.
But it was just a half day at work. The rest of the afternoon, I spent seeing Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Which, you know, is just ridiculously silly and infectious fun. I think the things that have sort of been turning me off from the comics — I’ve been halfway through the first book for many, many months now — are the characteristics of the title character we’re supposed to not like. I’m not really much of an old-school gamer or indie music/comics geek, but the movie was great fun. I’m having a tough time thinking of a recent movie that’s handled its special effects so expertly. (You could almost call the movie the anti-G.I. Joe in that respect.)
I figured I should see it now, before it’s gone from theaters altogether. There were only two shows on one screen at my local multiplex. The movie has been kind of a bomb (and not a Sex Bob-Omb) at the box office, and lots of people have been wringing their hands about why it’s a huge financial failure. It’s a shame, because the movie is a lot of fun, but it’s also not entirely surprising that it hasn’t caught on with a wider, more mainstream audience. I mean, the fact that a big-budget Hollywood movie was even made from a quirky indie relationship comic about twenty-something musicians in Toronto is kind of remarkable. And maybe it’s just that geeks have been getting spoiled by the mainstreaming of ComicCon and superhero movies and the like, but it’s not exactly like an indifferent mass audience and disappointing box office are unfamiliar territory. Yeah, the big box-office winners are increasingly drawn from the geek crowd, but it’s the Star Treks and the Iron Mans, not the Serenitys and the Scott Pilgrims.
That said, I had a blast. Probably not quite as much as the half dozen other people I saw it with, some of whom were reciting dialogue and singing along with songs, but I’d definitely recommend it. Hopefully it will play as well on the small screen as it did in theaters, because I think that’s the only place most people are likely to see it.
And that, really, was my Friday. Last night, I finished reading the last book in the Joe Pitt Casebooks — not bad, and a fitting enough ending — and today moved on to Paul Auster’s Invisible, after buying a copy on impulse at Penn Station. Auster used to be a real favorite of mine, but his recent novels have been a case of ever-diminishing returns. But the reviews on the jacket copy were quite positive, and so far it’s not bad, so we shall see.
Monday various
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