Thursday, 27 January 2005

Bits And Bobs

Over at Making Light Teresa maintains that "My readers are the best thing about this weblog. If you’re not reading the comments, you’re missing half the fun." It's true and her recent post on an Onion piece is a case in point. The comments start off as "Ha ha, I thought that was funny, too" and quickly evolve in to a discussion of whether it's duck or duct tape. The answer, of course, is it's Gaffa Tape, any musician knows that.

Also after reading those comments, you'll never forget what "apocope" means. I now need a good reason to bring it up in conversation.

Speaking of comments, I got my first comment in ages -- since the great Making Light spike, in fact -- from Chris over at Splinters, perhaps I should be horrible to people more often[1]. I'll answer it soon, but I need to think a little more clearly than I am doing today. I keep wanting to defend The Incredibles partly on box-office performance and I don't want to get into that.

Box-office is a lousy way to review movies and I don't really get what it means to a movie as a work unless the movie was created simply to make money. David Poland's Hot Blog does this quite a lot, and I guess that's his right, but I don't know how reading, for an example, "Closer added about 30% more screens and will see a gross increase this weekend of about 15%" tells me anything about Closer as a movie. What it does tell me is that the idea that accountancy has replaced creativity in Hollywood sometimes applies to critics, too.

So, anyway, this being a bit of a round-up, I'm going to mention my referrer logs, feel free to skip to the footnote.

No really hilarious ones recently, though a Google for '"pubs to avoid" in Newcastle" (oddly, I don't show up on this anymore) made me smile. An AOL search for "PASSIVE AGRESSIVE VIOLENT BEHAVIOR" made me realise that, perhaps, I should spell-check the cut-n-pasted stuff, and the Google for "age effection of solving a puzzle" made me realise I should spell-check my own stuff, too.

I do get links from other Blogs, too, but most of them are from that "Go To Next Blog" button at the top of Blogger pages. I got one recently that seemed to be a blog solely set-up to provide links to a dog company's website. Frown-worthy behaviour at the very least.

By far the most links I've had recently are for "Samarost Walkthrough" (which again I don't show up on any more, is Google purging its Blog links?). Now, there are some hard games on the 'Net. I've been stuck on quite a few. Samarost is not one of them. Just click things and, eventually, you'll click them in the right order, also if you've clicked something once it doesn't mean you can't click it again.


[1] Splinters is a great site, though. It will always have a special place in my heart for being the first place, that I read, to point out how "Arts & Letters Daily" had slipped from "must read" artices to "this agrees with my politics" ones. Now that was a rant worth preserving.

2 comments:

Chris said...

"I keep wanting to defend The Incredibles partly on box-office performance"...

I think you just lost the argument already.

Paul said...

Yeah, that's what I was getting at. There's really not much past "I found it fun and so did my friends" and then justifying that with and "look at all the other people who saw it". Then I checked the IMDB's top International Box Office of All Time list:

1. Titanic
2. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
3. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
4. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
5. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
6. Jurassic Park
7. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
8. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
9. Finding Nemo
10. Independence Day

There's at least two of those that are offensively bad.

So what do I have against the rant. Well, I just find it misplaced. The Incredibles is a light confection that is fun and mostly mindless with the occassional worry that it's made to tie in to the inevitable X-Box game. The idea that it represents a new nadir in CG films, for me, just doesn't hold, not while copies of Final Fantasy exist, anyway.

Probably the most worrisome idea is that Shrek leads anything. It has one or two laughs but often seems to trade on "insider" jokes -- that were all pointed out in the reviews, so that we could feel we're insiders too -- in lieu of actually having any ideas and pop-culture references almost entirely for their own sake. Fairy tales have their own capacity for darkness that was untouched, giving more of an impression of being "spiritually sodomised by marketing executives demanding something more "wholesome" than The Incredibles could ever muster.

Plus, you know, demerits for having that bloody Smash Mouth song in...

I don't know. As I've said before Pixar seem to purposely make it so you can read in to their films what you will. Perhaps that does show a failure of resolve, but The Simpsons creators often claim that their strength is not judging the actions of their characters, letting them work through their issues while trying not to be too one-sided, and Brad Bird does come from that background.