Bent Corner

The official trailer for the new Star Trek movie is now up on the Apple website and it looks like this will not be a movie for me. Not only does Captain Kirk look to be younger than just about everyone in his crew, it looks like they are building the Enterprise not in an orbiting ship yard in space, but somewhere on the ground here on Earth.

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The superhero movie Hancock staring Will Smith, Jason Bateman, and Charlize Theron made over $107 million this holiday weekend.  The movie had been panned by critics.

The movie website Rotten Tomatoes have it a 37% on their “tomatometer”. That’s where they take published movie reviews and separate the positive reviews from the negative reviews. Out of the 167 reviews for Hancock, 106 of them were negative.

So why did so many people go see Hancock?

The movie studios wont stop making sucky movies if so many of the viewing public continue to go to the theater to watch them.  Going to the theater to see Hancock is rewarding bad behavior.  It tells the movie studios that they can make bad movies and people will go and watch.  Even if the critics let them know before hand, they will still go and watch.

Knock it off.  Do not go watch bad movies.

The new Get Smart movie offends me. It really, truly offends me. It bothers me that anyone would take a true masterpiece of comedy goodness from the 60’s and rehash it into a movie for theater goers in 2008. If there was ever an old TV show that should have been exempt from a do over it’s Get Smart.

I understand that Hollywood is filed to the brim with uncreative hacks that must constantly tap into the creations of yesteryear to make a living. When they remade The Beverly Hillbillies, Dukes of Hazzard, Bewitched, or even McHale’s Navy, I of course didn’t watch these movies, but it didn’t bother me that they had been made.

Get Smart should have been off-limits.

The rank and file members of the Writers Guild of America still have to vote, but it appears the 14 week writers strike is almost over. From the Washington Post article:

The most immediate beneficiaries of a settlement could be the thousands of production workers — grips, caterers, camera operators, makeup artists — who were thrown out of work when the writers struck. Although movie production mostly continued during the strike, TV shows on both coasts quickly came to a halt when the strike began Nov. 5.

This has been precisely my contention from the very beginning; This strike was highly damaging to a vast amount of people that work behind the scenes on TV shows. People that never stood to gain a single penny from Internet residuals.

Also from the Washington Post article:

On the key issue of compensation for work streamed over the Internet, both sides gave a little. The studios and their network allies originally asked the guild for time to study the issue and declined to offer any residuals for digital media when talks broke off in early December. The guild, in turn, held fast, arguing that writers had to share in the profits of what may become the preeminent way to view filmed entertainment.

But the writers never wanted to share in the profits. The writers have always insisted that they be paid whether their work generates a profit or not. Their cut has always come from the gross, not the net.

Recently actors from the hit NBC television show Heroes picketed outside Universal Studios. Not the part that is a cheesy amusement park with the fake looking giant shark, but the part that is the actual movie studio. Someone from Comic Book Resources was on hand and was able to write about it.

Greg Grunberg, the actor that plays Parkman on Heroes said something interesting. This from the CBR article:

Grunberg characterized the AMPTP’s position on the issues “ridiculous.” “When a musician puts out a record that becomes a CD and then becomes an online digital download, they still make the same amount of money,” Grunberg said. “Why isn’t the same true for a writer?”

This is something I’ve heard said before. B.J. Novak, actor and writer for The Office said something quite similar in the YouTube video I linked to earlier.

It’s not true. The writers have been getting residuals on iTunes downloads all along. When the consumer pays for a download, the writers get their residual just like they would if the consumer paid for a DVD instead of a download.

I’m not sure if this misinformation is perpetrated on purpose or if it’s simply a case of the people involved not understanding the specifics. Most people that read about the strike or watch YouTube videos about the strike know about iTunes. Most of them have probably purchased media from iTunes. I’m sure it resonates with these people when they hear that writers don’t get paid from iTunes downloads they have paid for.

That doesn’t make it true.