Around the Intertubes – Page 5 – Geeking Out About.com

Marvel announces same-day digital delivery; brick-and-mortar stores, fans freak out

Posted on 7 June 2010 by admin 1 Comment

After Marvel Comics announced last Wednesday (aka, the day that most comics hit the stores in the U.S.) that it would be offering Invincible Iron Man Annual #1 as a digital download on the same day as its regular print release, the blogosphere went into a tizzy and hasn’t fully recovered yet.

Written by Matt Fraction with art by Carmine Di Giandomenico, the annual will include a story about the Mandarin’s origins, which to date has never really been explored.

Reaction hit the ‘net on Friday, and I think the best place to find a nuanced argument would be courtesy of Dirk Deppey at The Comics Journal‘s Journalista! who today writes:

[You] need to keep in mind that no legacy media, — film, television, music or print — has found a proven and stable way to make the Internet pay for itself in the same way as has their previous business models. While it’s difficult to get firm music-industry statistics without paying for them, Wikipedia notes that record sales shrank by close to 40% in the United States between 2000 and 2007. A 2009 Yankee Group report makes the claim that television advertising revenue is dropping faster than the increase in advertising revenue for online video. This isn’t a swamp into which a content publisher leaps lightly, especially is you’re a division in a larger company, and doubly so if that larger company in turn is owned by Disney.

I personally don’t have a large enough cellphone screen to make reading comics on it a rational decision, but I can totally understand and get behind being able to get the newest release of a favorite book or series fed directly to my computer on a subscription basis. Once I finally decide between an iPhone and a Droid, however, this is definitely something that will become a concern.

Quick Cuts: Paul Rudd is an Idiot Brother, and other stories

Posted on 2 June 2010 by admin Leave a Comment

Paul Rudd has just signed a deal to be the star of the Jesse Peretz-directed comedy called My Idiot Brother, about a sunshine-spewing optimist who brightens up the lives of his three sisters and overbearing mother. Written by Peretz’ real-life sister Evgenia and her writing partner David Schisgall, the film will start production in New York in July, even if the sisters haven’t been cast yet. (Source: The Hollywood Reporter)
Dustin Lance Black (Milk) is turning his writer’s and director’s eye towards comics; he will be doing both for the live-action adaptation of 3 Story: The Secret History of the Giant Man. Originally a graphic novel from Dark Horse by Matt Kindt, the plot will concern the relationship between a daughter and her father–who just happens to be suffering from a strange medical condition where he can’t stop growing. Warner Bros. will be producing/financing. (Source: The Hollywood Reporter)
James McAvoy (Wanted) has been signed to star in X-Men: First Class as Professor Xavier; still no word who will be his star-crossed Magneto. (Source: Entertainment Weekly)
“Community” star Donald Glover has started a grass-roots campaign to get himself an audition to be in the Spider-Man 4 movie and all I can think of is that scene from the very first episode of “Boston Legal” where the Reverend Al Sharpton gave Alan Shore his rabbit by giving a speech in the courtroom which featured this line: “Give us an African-American Spider Man!” Glover, if you’re reading this, your people totally need to talk to Sharpton’s people (and the “Boston Legal” writing team). (Source: Donald Glover’s personal blog)

Trisha’s Link of the Day: Why Riker is the man

Posted on 29 May 2010 by admin 2 Comments

In full disclosure, I haven’t seen all of Star Trek: The Next Generation yet, but if/when I am able to cherry-pick which episodes I watch, “The Outcast” is high on my list, and artist Jess Fink explains why in this comic.

I was really blown away by the frankness of the dialog in this episode too. Apparently Jonathan Frakes pushed for them to hire a male actor to play Soren but the producers didn’t think TV was ready for dude-on-dude action.

I would pay good money to see that episode re-shot the “right” way, wouldn’t you?

Trisha’s Quote of the Day: When flavor text goes wrong

Posted on 26 May 2010 by admin 1 Comment

Meanwhile, Wilhelmina the gnome wound up at the bar with a hoary ancient mariner, who had a very strange story involving albatrosses, and kept buying him drinks, with the end result that poor Kevin had to read most of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, in character, which he did with great style, except that the gnome wouldn’t let him stop.

GNOME: This is fascinating! Tell me more!
GM: Now you’re just fuckin’ with me…
GNOME: I need to know more! I eat more chips and buy him another drink!
GM (wearily): One by one, by the star-dogged moon…

This continued on until after 11 pm, whereupon we called it a night. And then Kevin pinned my arm and insisted on reading another half dozen stanzas at me, because he claimed to be suffering from poetus interruptus.

—Ursula Vernon has a weird paladin, but an even weirder GM.

Ghostbusters 3 filming in NYC?

Posted on 18 May 2010 by admin Leave a Comment

Well, not exactly:

This bit of midday surreality has been brought to you by the fine folks at Improv Everywhere, who gave me 1 or 2 of my allotted 15 minutes of TV fame when their re-enactment of a U2 concert made a VH-1 “Top 40 greatest pranks” show and clips of my screaming like a crazed fan made the show.

Trisha’s Link of the Day: When urban exploration hits the water

Posted on 4 May 2010 by admin 2 Comments

I’ve got more than a few friends who are photography geeks and one of the things they share in common on their Flickr sets are some pictures dedicated to urban exploration, that wonderful past-time where hiking, history, research, the unknown, possible paranormal activity, and the threat of being arrested due to tresspassing combine to showcase places and sights that almost no one gets to see on a daily basis.

However, I don’t think any of my friends have ever been out to see this New York Harbor ship’s graveyard.

Brought to us by the folks at Tugster, their photographers were able to get close to these rusty and broken old ships and boats by kayak; I wonder what someone with a dive master’s certificate and a camera could do?

Trisha’s Video of the Day: When Hitchcock and Peeps meet

Posted on 5 April 2010 by admin 2 Comments

It’s the day after Easter, which means that it’s party-time for people who love Peeps, those sugar-coated pastel-colored marshmallow candies that are a mainstay of this season. However, one does need to be careful of what happens when Peeps go bad:

Crafted by the folks at Wooden Nickel Shorts, a little digging found this cute vlog (that’s “video blog”) entry from one of its members Dan Milano, who wrote a treatment for Ghostbusters III when he was in the third grade and managed to get Dan Aykroyd to sign it.

(My only questions are: What in the world was Aykroyd promoting? Is it just me, or did those containers look like skulls?)

Dissecting the possibility of Rounders 2

Posted on 6 July 2009 by admin Leave a Comment

MattDamon-poker It’s not very often that I write up a post based on comments, but I’m actually very glad that I did.

At the beginning of this year, I linked to a few entries about why all the poker bloggers seem to think that movies about playing poker suck, except for 1998’s Rounders—which starred Matt Damon as a wunderkind whose dream to make it to the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, Nevada gets sidetracked by a wisecracking Ed Norton and a bad beat at the hands of John Malkovich and is said by many to have been a major contributor to the rise of online poker.

In the comments to that entry, a reader named Gordon (who is not the same person as my dear editor) linked to a recent Matt Damon interview conducted by the folks at PokerListings.com as he was on the red carpet before the third annual “Ante up for Africa” charity poker tournament at the WSOP, where he, Ben Affleck, Mike Tyson, and others bumped elbows with bonafide professional poker players in an attempt to raise money for the victims of the violence in Darfur.

The “money quote” comes almost halfway through the video, where an unseen interviewer asks if there’s going to be a Rounders 2:

Damon: “I told [Brian] Koppleman and [David] Levien, the writers, that they should write it. They actually wrote Ocean’s 13 and we were sitting on the set one day and I said, “You guys wrote the wrong sequel; we should be in Costa Rica doing Rounders 2.

“I think that everybody would probably come back. The actors all had a really good time working together. I know Edward would want to do it. We had a blast working together. John Dahl, the director, I’m sure would like to do it. Maybe someday it’ll happen.”

However, and I am so ashamed for having missed this, not only has that script already been written, Damon and Norton might not have anything to do with it.

Back in June, /Film.com picked up the news that Paramount Pictures had optioned an untitled script by the duo, and that Leonardo diCaprio was attached to star, it would be produced through his Appian Way studio, and the story was all about (you guessed it!) the world of Costa Rican-based online casinos.

I really have no idea how the two could make a movie about Internet casinos compelling because all the action takes place online and it’s only when you get the online players out into “meatspace” do they become interesting. For example (and I hate to keep bringing her up) one of the best European poker players in the entire world is a girl named Annette Obrestad whom no one really knew when she was playing online as Annette15, but when she became the youngest person to ever a win a World Series of Poker live tournament event and the poker news media discovered that she’d been playing since she was 15 (hence, her handle) she became an instant celebrity.

There are tons of great stories surrounding the controversies surrounding online poker and why almost all of the casinos are now based in Costa Rica; the problem in turning it into a movie is that not even the poker media wants to cover that story, as Pokerati.com‘s California Jen wrote yesterday when Congressman Barney Frank arrived to hold a press conference about the future of online poker in the U.S.:

But while the general reception Frank received in the Amazon Room was positive, it also gave an indication of what kind of struggles his efforts face. Beyond having to deal with the self-promotional shenanigans of Phil Hellmuth and all he brings to the table in the name of poker (for better or worse), behind me on the rail were some poker players/fans/bigots who made hateful gay jokes during his entire short-but-semi-important speech.

Nearing the 1pm start of the press conference in the Full Tilt Chris Ferguson suite, there were about 5 reporters present. No kidding. By the time Frank began speaking, there were possibly twice that, excluding PPA representatives and Full Tilt Poker bigwigs. Of the 5-8 media outlets represented, ESPN got their headshot early and left, before the speech had hardly started.

Well, I’ll be definitely keeping my eye on this story, but am also not holding my breath that this unnamed project will be the next great poker movie.

Trisha’s Quote of the Day: Figuring out Michael Bay’s id

Posted on 1 July 2009 by admin 2 Comments

Could you sum up the film in one line of its dialogue?
“I am standing directly beneath the enemy’s scrotum.”

—Topless Robot‘s Rob Bricken (and my former managing editor at Anime Insider) tries to explain everything you never needed to know about Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen

Trisha’s Quote of the Day: How to foretell your own doom

Posted on 2 June 2009 by admin Leave a Comment

“Most of my films have disturbed people,” he says. “They are being taken down roads they don’t want to be taken down. That’s why they get angry. They go to films to be reassured — the car chase, the fireball, like pop songs they are comfortable with. One of the reasons I was never into drugs was that when kids in the Sixties were taking acid and telling me about their experiences, I would say, ‘Well, I see the world like that anyway!'”

—Terry Gilliam, on why he doesn’t think his movies can ever be real commercial successes.

[Incidentally, I can never see Twelve Monkeys ever again because of how bleak it is. It’s a brilliant movie and I loved every bit of it, but once was enough for me.]

Trisha’s Link of the Day: Observe and Report’s rape controversy

Posted on 16 April 2009 by admin 10 Comments

observe-report Anyone who knows me knows that I’m not a prude when it comes to sex in films. However, apparently there’s a scene in Seth Rogen’s newest film Observe and Report and which is featured at the end of the red-band trailer that makes even me a little bit squeamish.

Jezebel.com explains one reaction to the scene the best (and most sarcastically) here:

[Seth] Rogen explains that everyone in the theater then lets out a good long chuckle. See, even though she’s probably blacked out and has no idea what she’s saying, it isn’t rape. (And Brandi’s kind of a dumb slut anyway.)

Now, I know I probably should have commented on this when we posted the trailer last month. To be honest, though, Report‘s not my kind of movie, I normally wouldn’t be seeing it anyway, and I’m definitely not going to see it now.

However, the part that troubles me the most is that casting a scene like this as comedy pushes society’s views on rape further backwards—and it’s even worse when it’s prettied up for drama.

Take a look at this article from The Curvature, and think about the early scenes in The Reader, wherein we are told and shown that a sexual relationship between a 36-year old woman and a 15-year old boy is a good thing.

I really wish filmmakers would really just think a little bit more about what impact they have on the world, don’t you?

UPDATE at 1:59 EST: I’ve been challenged to see this movie to see the scene in context, and I’m going to try and be as objective as I can. Will report back next week.

Trisha’s Clip of the Day: Two more Dragonball live-action movies?

Posted on 14 April 2009 by admin 4 Comments

The reason why I don’t like posting links to video content as the main portion of a post is that it’s so hard to pull quotes from them without having a video editor and some video capture programs.

However, I encourage you to sit through this Reelz Channel fluff interview with Dragonball: Evolution stars Justin Chatwin (Goku), Emmy Rossum (Bulma), Jamie Chung (Chichi) and James Marsters (Piccolo) just to get to 1:43…

…where after the stars reveal they’ve been signed on for two more sequels, Marsters reveals his familiarity with the DBZ universe.

A Marsters fangirl would probably squeal with excitement, thinking that it’s a sign that he’s just as geeky as she is…which is exactly what I’ll do.

Link of the day: Why do Internet people think content people are stupid?

Posted on 25 March 2009 by admin 1 Comment

boxing-match Such was the question that HDNet chairman and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban asked recently on his blog. The gist of Cuban’s argument is as thus:

Now I dont know about you, but for HDNet and my other content companies, we tend to be very nice to those of our customers who pay us every month. Commentary from cable networks and their content producers are saying the same thing. They can’t afford to upset the people who pay the bills.

Which is exactly why, as I have said before, Jeff Bewkes, of Time Warner’s model of TV Everywhere is the EXACT RIGHT MODEL for content creators, cable networks, and video subscription providers like your local cable, telco or satellite provider.

Of course, when Cuban called out Boxee CEO Avner Ronen in the very first sentence of his blog entry, based on this article from Contentinople.com—which wins for having the most clever blog name I’ve read in a while—where Ronen said that viewers and consumers should have the freedom to pick and choose what movies and TV shows they want to watch, when they want to watch it, he couldn’t let it go, so Ronen responded in the comments to Cuban’s blog… and then helpfully reposted the entire exchange in his.

Personally, I stand on the side of the “stupid” Internet people, especially this paragraph of Ronen’s here:

The issue is not switches and hard-drives. The issue is the open nature of the Internet eco-system. The cable companies can come up with Tru2way, EBIF or any other catchy name, but as long as they decide what innovation gets through to the consumers’ screen it has FAIL written all over it. I guess they can try re-inventing the Internet. Good luck.

Billionaire makes jazz flicks his way

Posted on 18 March 2009 by admin Leave a Comment

armstrong-bolden If Forbes magazine named you one of the 400 richest Americans (estimated worth: $1.9 billion in 2008), what would you do with that money? If you’re billionaire Daniel Pritzker, you make a silent movie about a jazz artist.

According to Variety, the first-time director wrapped a year-long shoot on a pair of flicks, with Louis being a silent film about the youth of legendary trumpeter and singer Louis Armstrong (complete with title cards) and Bolden detailing the life of cornetist Buddy Bolden whom some are saying “invented” jazz music but of whom no recordings exist (yet).

One of the quotes from the article I find the most fascinating is this one:

“I’m in the extremely fortunate position to be able to do this my way,” Pritzker said. “No studio was going to do this, especially now with what’s going on in the economy. Even if this dream dies with me right here, I’m sure happier having my money into these two films than having given the money to Bernie Madoff.”

And while I’m tempted to jump on Variety writer Michael Fleming’s wagon and wonder why a rich white Jewish son of hotel magnates is making films about influential black jazz musicians, when I learned that Pritzker is a musician, too, it started made sense. I mean, how else would he have been able to get jazz artist Wynton Marsalis to not only compose a lot of the music for Bolden but to also be a producer for it as well if he wasn’t able to explain his love for the art form?

No word on if/when/how these flicks will find distribution but if Pritzker’s as ballsy as this article is making him sound, he’ll probably finance the distribution himself. And if that means more money flowing into indie movie theaters across the nation, Pritzker can do whatever he likes with his money.

Three more key roles cast in The Last Airbender

Posted on 16 March 2009 by admin 10 Comments

mandvi-toub-curtis In a press release from Paramount sent out on Thursday and reported by Dark Horizons.com very early on Friday, they announced that four more actors have joined the cast of the M. Night Shyamalan-directed The Last Airbender (based on the hit Nickelodeon TV series “Avatar: The Last Airbender”):

Aasif Mandvi: Best known for his correspondent work for “The Daily Show,” Mandvi will be playing Commander Zhao, a leader for the Fire Nation army.
Shaun Toub: Last seen as the doctor who helps Tony Stark build his first suit in Iron Man, Toub will be playing Uncle Iroh, a father figure to the Fire Nation’s Prince Zuko.
Cliff Curtis: Best known for his leading role in the New Zealand indie Whale Rider, Curtis has been cast as Prince Zuko’s father and lead villain Fire Nation Lord Ozai.

Also cast in the film has been Keong Sim, who will play one of the Earthbenders. Sim’s IMDB bio isn’t very extensive, but since he’s a New Yorker, I’m definitely going to keep my eye on him.

Now, for the uncomfortable part.

So far, I haven’t taken an “official” stance in the ongoing debate over Shyamalan and Paramount’s Airbender casting choices, and I don’t think I’ll do so in this post either, because that’s not what it’s for.

If there’s anything that both the argument about racism in the science-fiction and fantasy genres (colloquially known as RaceFail ’09) and Jon Stewart’s televised evisceration of Jim Cramer and CNBC taught me is that the idea of trying to tackle a large important issue in less than 500 words in a forum that isn’t built for such things isn’t fair to anyone to whom this really matters—which should be everyone in the entire freaking world. Hell, there are over 3,800 words alone in this LiveJournal post of “key” links about Race Fail ’09 alone, and that’s only the titles!

However, I’m not going to keep you from wanting to post your opinions, as long as you can be mature about it and refrain from being trollish or total dicks about it. There have been a lot of interesting comments made to the original post about the lead Airbender roles being cast, and I, too, am eager to see if anything will change as a result.

Thanks for your time.

Category: Around the Intertubes