Ancient Logic

The only question I had sitting down for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, was not whether or not page 113 was faithfully adapted (I'm going to take a wild guess and say it wasn't), or whether or not three hours is a bit excessive for the first part of slim children's book (it is), or whether or not there's much point to the exercise at all (I think there is, more on that later). The real question in my mind was whether or not Peter Jackson would have settled for making a movie called "The Hobbit," or would he make a film called "The Hobbit." First a few words on the difference between movies and films. A movie is entertainment, a film is art. A movie serves the purpose of filling seats to make money for a film studio, its success or failure can be determined by how well it convinces people to plunk down $10 to $15 for the chance to see the spectacle. Once the movie has been watched, it has been consumed, its meaning is no more significant than th...

I'll start off by saying today's post is going to be purposefully rambling. I've had an entire weekend of nerdery, and the only thing that one can do after such a weekend is bask in the afterglow.  Went shopping yesterday for alleged Christmas gifts. I say alleged because when you hand select your gift -- no, let's go further than that -- when you stand next to the person buying the gift for you and obsess at great length about the storage capacity, color scheme, and screen protector options for said purchase, you are no longer going to be the recipient of a 'gift.' You are taking part in a transaction for a good to be received at some future specified date. Not that I'm complaining. The gift is pretty awesome. From there, I went to hang out with friends and played "Brass," a European style board game our little group has been trying to play for about a year and a half. Check out the game for your self on this link if you're curious but ...

Previews are an under appreciated art form. And they are an art form: anything involving the application of tremendous amounts of creativity, craft, and effort for the purpose of generating an emotional response is art in my view. So let's just put that aside for the moment. And yet, I don't know of any awards for movie trailers, and very rarely do they get written up appreciatively for their own merits. Mostly, when trailers are referenced in media or popular culture, they occupy a strange crepuscular role as proxies for the topic people really want to talk about -- the movie itself. I had my eyes opened to the idea of trailers as an art form, distinct from the cinema they represent, by an article I read a long time ago in the NY Times (back when I read the Times in dead tree form). By peeking behind the curtains of the production team that made the trailer for M. Night Shyamalan's "Signs," it became clear trailers aren't really about the movie. They cont...