January 2012
28 posts
“52. Super 8 (JJ Abrams)- Like most other people, I preferred the kid stuff to the monster stuff. Abrams is so good at telling you everything you have to know about a character within five minutes; the characterization of and the interaction among the young boys is stunning. Elle Fanning, for that matter, would be up for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar if people weren’t so narrow-minded about what types of performances deserve that. Of course, once we get to the genre elements of the story, everything gets hokey. I’d love to see a scaled-down JJ Abrams drama, but I’m not sure we’ll ever get one.”
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From A House of Lies: The Best Films of 2011, Part 3: Flawed but Likeable.
AKA, why I don’t really write movie reviews any more: because this is everything I think about Super 8, but about 5x as concise as my version would have been.
“That’s one reason we want to fund startups that will compete with movies and TV, but not the main reason. The main reason we want to fund such startups is not to protect the world from more SOPAs, but because SOPA brought it to our attention that Hollywood is dying. They must be dying if they’re resorting to such tactics. If movies and TV were growing rapidly, that growth would take up all their attention. When a striker is fouled in the penalty area, he doesn’t stop as long as he still has control of the ball; it’s only when he’s beaten that he turns to appeal to the ref. SOPA shows Hollywood is beaten. And yet the audiences to be captured from movies and TV are still huge. There is a lot of potential energy to be liberated there.”
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Paul Graham’s venture fund ycombinator is now actively looking to invest in companies that threaten the movie and TV industries.
Should The Times Be A Truth Vigilante? →
publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com
I hope this is a joke. The New York Times Public Editor wonders aloud if their journalists should be reporting the truth.
Seriously?
“I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.”
Oh my god, this is embarrassing. This is like if your office was preparing the end of the year report, and you realized that, instead of methodically gathering useful data about your job for twelve months, you’ve just been putting boogers in a cup on your desk. And then you bring up your booger cup in at the staff meeting and ask if that was the right thing to do.
