What Fresh Hell Is This?
First came the news that there’s a computer program that evaluates the merits of a script by comparing its “creative elements” to previously successful films in the same genre to assess how audiences might react to specific scenes. Now we hear that Disney will not finance films costing more than $100 million unless the project can demonstrate its characters can be sold around the world as merchandize. All this does not bode well for originality or creative breakthroughs.
Inception – Where’s the manual?
Still scratching my head over Inception, Chris Nolan’s cross between a James Bondesque large-scale action thriller and a Matrix-like metaphysical videogame (or possibly Glass Bead Game). It’s absorbing in a three-dimensional chess kind of way, but never really emotionally involving, because the viewer (well, me anyway) is always going “wait a minute. What level are [...]
Feels Like 1930 All Over Again…
From FDR’s first inaugural address:
Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Primarily this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated. [...]
