Tiny Money Land

HE HATED, HATED, HATED THESE MOVIES: Roger Ebert has put up his picks for the top ten movies of '04, along with his list of the 10 (well, really 11) worst. Since he declined to re-rag his picks for the worst, and his webmaster only linked half of the original reviews, I will do so as a public service (or a space filler...your pick):

1. (tie) "Troy"
1. (tie) "Alexander"
2. "Christmas With the Kranks"
3. "The Girl Next Door"
4. "Dogville"
5. "New York Minute"
6. "The Grudge"
7. "White Chicks"
8. "Resident Evil: Apocalypse"
9. "The Whole Ten Yards"
10. "The Village"

Note if you will that White Chicks and New York Minute garnered less stars than the top two, yet another example that Ebert's star ratings are relative to their genre and whatnot. And my usual disclaimer applies: I haven't seen any of these movies. Terminally broke people have to measure their entertainment dollars.
 

ANOTHER BAD SIGN FOR "FAT ALBERT": The "coming soon" blurb for Fat Albert on RogerEbert.com contains a point that doesn't bode well for the film: "Originally scheduled for release December 25, 2002, Albert has sat on his fat behind for two years." Very rarely do GOOD major studio films sit in the can for that long. Brenda Starr sat in the can for three years, and (oddly enough), it was also story about a cartoon character coming to life. I can't remember it ever making it to a theater around here, although it obviously played somewhere. Another "licensed cartoon character coming to life" story, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, was above water for awhile before sinking again.

Although I haven't seen either of those movies (Brenda Starr wasn't released, it escaped, and I respect the Bullwinkle cartoons too much to watch him become a CGI nightmare), they point to a trend: stories about cartoons jumping off the page are bad news. Just because Roger Rabbit pulled it off doesn't mean your property will have the Midas touch.

Let me spin a nightmare scenario for you: coming soon to your cineplex, IT'S THE REAL WORLD, CHARLIE BROWN! The story about a kid with a big round head and flesh-colored hair who one day misses the football a bit too hard and comes flying off the page! In the real world, he becomes a celebrity as the first cartoon character to "jump the gap", and finds out that yes, he really is loved and respected...he even manages to pitch a no-hitter. But without him, the cartoon strips are spinning out of control (Lucy runs out of crabby things to say, Snoopy won't eat, six whole weeks of Peppermint Patty and Marcy staring at each other...insert your own joke here), as the Peanuts kids realize that Charlie Brown is the focal point of their stories. Armed with this knowledge, they take an adventure into our world (with lots of heavy-handed celebrity cameos along the way) to lure the King of the Blockheads back to the funnies.

Now really, as somebody who's never lived in a world without Charlie Brown, finding something like that on the big screen would be akin to raping my childhood ([TM] George Lucas Detractors of America). There's something vaguely unsettling about taking a self-contained world, with clean lines and pleasant graphic design, and dumping it into ours, where "clean" is a relative term. My Fat Albert movie would go back to the original routines on Cos's records and rethink the cartoon characters in real world terms, the whole "kids on the block" thing instead of "cartoon characters go 3-D". Of course, maybe that's why I don't have a development deal with Universal or Warner Brothers, so there you are.

But as I reread the scenario I've written for the Peanuts characters, I fear I may have unleashed a plausible plotline on the world. Plenty of angst, tears, and, of course, lots of Dolly Madison snack cakes. Roger Ebert will find it "quirky", cartoon fans will scratch their heads until their scalps bleed, and the Charles Schulz Estate will take out a contract on me if it's ever used. Either way, since I thought of it first, I want a big, fat movie check when it goes into production. I'm not a greedy man, though...I'd like at least enough to pay for the round of therapy which will inevitably follow.

Anyway, the moral of this diatribe is "When a movie is held back for two years for no reason, there's usually a reason."
 

BUT ANYWAY: Now that I spent the morning talking church, I'd like to lower the tone a bit. Patrick Storck of Movie Poop Shoot posted a honey of a column, allegedly about finding the true meaning of Christmas. Apparently, the road to discovery involves being an utter bastard/bitch/psycho/insert your own term here. I know some of you were planning on doing that anyway, but there ya are.
 

WORD ON THE STREET: I know you weren't expecting ruminations on modern Christianity from a blog that gets more hits from people (wrongly) looking for porn than anything, but 'tis the season...

We've been getting a lot of plugs around here for a local church's production of "Word on the Street", the ads on the local classic rock station calling it an "edgy, contemporary" version of the story of Mary and Joseph, with lots of singing, dancing, and "a powerful message" at the end.

Apart from the mind-bogglingly hard task of reconciling "edgy" with "the story of the Nativity" (the birth of any baby, even THE Baby, doesn't really have much of an "edge"), the bad thing about trying to make the church "trendy" is that you run the risk of making faith as disposable as a trend. The reason your standard church/synagogue/what have you is the cornerstone of a lot of communities is that in spite of the filigree, the base of it has remained unchanged for as long as anybody can remember. You go to the chapel on Sunday (and maybe a few other days if you're really involved), sing some hymns, and listen to the sermon in the company of other believers who help reinforce the idea that you're not alone.

It's very simple on the face of it, although like any endeavor run by people, it often ends up more complicated than it has to be. That's where the "trendiness" comes in, and that's where the trouble begins. In most churches, the "now" elements are an overlay, rather than the base, and when the cycle on the "now" runs its course (as it inevitably does when you dwell in the "now"), there's a distinct possibility these new people drawn in won't stick around when the focus goes back to the "eternal". Or even worse, they won't pay attention to your core at all.

An example ripped from real life: a guy I used to work with (let's call him Goofus) went to a youth revival event, with a Power Team-style martial arts group breaking boards and spreading the Good Word. This was inspirational enough to turn Goofus to the Lord...to a point. I asked him if he'd started going to church, too. "Nah, church is boring," he answered. I was--and am--a supreme backslider in that area, but that was the warning sign. Since he was as dedicated to his Lord as he was to his job (and that wasn't meant as a compliment), it was only a matter of time.

That summer, he took a trip to New York state and got his first lapdance, and that was the end of that.
 

REALITY CHECK: Okay, let me see if I can get this straight...a guy I've never met who lives in a city I've never even been to kills his pregnant wife, who I've also never met, possibly with the help of a woman who died of unrelated causes, and the body is found on the shoreline of a beach where I'll probably never go.

Okay? So far, so good...now that we've established all of the above, give me a reason why anybody outside of the victim's community should've paid any attention to the verdict.

If you find an answer besides "bloody minded rubbernecking", I'll be waiting in the News/Not News Lounge.


 

AIN'T NO SIN TO TAKE OFF YOUR SKIN AND DANCE AROUND IN YOUR BONES: Have you ever wondered what the bone structures of your favorite anatomically irrelavent cartoon characters looked like? Of course you didn't, but Michael Paulus took a few favorite characters with some decent shelf life and stripped the flesh and muscle off of them. Nicely done, funny in a weird sort of way, and you'll never look at the Powerpuff Girls in quite the same way again.
 

AND IN OTHER NEWS: The Center for Disease Control has detected toxic levels of self-importance in the so-called "Internet wrestling community", and has issued a statement warning non-infected individuals that "you really, REALLY don't want to go there."

Symptoms include writing website columns which include the phrase "Vince McMahon, I KNOW you're reading this," the usage of an acronym (IWC) in every paragraph, and in extreme cases, book deals.

For those who believe they've been infected, officials at the CDC recommend a regimen of going outside, meeting real people, or (failing all else) hardcore pornography.

Remember, I'm doing this because I love each and every one of you.

If you followed the "self-importance" link (and let's face it, since it's coming from me, why would you?), you'd find a lot of Inside Pulse readers and contributors writing about why the wrestling fanbase on the Internet is stagnant at best, falling apart in the worst case scenario. My theory is that the writing was on the wall when they started referring to themselves as (urgh) the "IWC", like fandom is something worthy of putting up on CNBC's stock exchange ticker. Also, if you take the time to read these posts, everybody is either a columnist or writing like they're auditioning for a slot. While I won't deny there's some appeal in a well-thought-out post, a full-length essay on a message board is something else again. Could it be that they've lost their way because at some point it stopped being a conversation and started being about waiting for the other person to stop talking so they can prove how clever they are?

Yeah, they're not all that bad, but the squeaky wheel always gets the grease.

One of the biggest headscratchers I've found so far would be the guy who says the current situation with the columnists' downtime is similar to the biggest WWE-based stars going off and making movies. Analogies are fine, but please take this away with you if you leave with nothing else: Writing about pro wrestling and being a pro wrestler aren't the same thing. A guy who blows off his deadline one week on a news-and-views column he writes for free because his manager wanted him to work double shifts on the cash register isn't the same situation as the Rock taking long sabbaticals away from the ring to make big-budget Hollywood movies. If you can't (or won't) make it pay, what you're doing is technically a hobby (hey, like what I'm doing here!), and you only have as much obligation to it as your personal interest mandates. You aren't in "the business" just because you have a buddy that feeds you headlines from the dead-tree version of the Torch, and no amount of wishing will make it so. If that's the way your thinking runs, you DO need downtime just to ground yourself in reality.

If it's getting too hard to content yourself with the small pleasures where you find them until the next anticipated upswing, I suggest we all do what J.R. "Bob" Dobbs recommends for the endtimes and have some hellfire jollies at the prospect of the end of the road. Then we can all move our interests to things that never go in cycles, like good books, snow cones or (yes, here it is again) porn. Anything would be better than what I've been doing during most of the recent WWE TV shows, which is catching up with my sleep.

(Oh yeah, for the person who asked for no flaming after somebody ragged out Chris Hyatte, you should be aware you're denying Hyatte one of his four food groups by doing that. Suggestions for the other three can be left in the comment box, as always. )
 

PRELIMINARY REPORT: Got the Tom and Jerry Spotlight Collection last week, and although I haven't had a chance to look at everything, it looks fairly promising, but there are a few things worth noting. For those of you who got the Looney Tunes collections, the T&J restoration isn't quite on the same level as the digital scrubbing Bugs and company got, which is a bit unavoidable, since the original negatives were lost in a vault fire decades ago. What we have are some very nice 35mm prints, marred occasionally by emulsion scratches (the same dots and colored lines you'll see on the Cartoon Network versions), but being raised on 16mm prints on the "cartoon carnival" TV shows of the 70s and 80s help a guy appreciate what he gets here.

The cartoons shot in Cinemascope are shown at the original aspect ratio, showing that the thick linework we've seen in the pan-and-scan versions looks better when the cartoons are shown the right way. The producers even managed to track down a stereo soundtrack that was prepped and unused for a cartoon back in the day, a sweet trick. My favorite extra was the mini-documentary about Scott Bradley, the man who scored the MGM cartoons, which included some scene-specific commentaries read from an article he wrote on cartoon scoring back in the 1940s. It's a very nice touch I wish we'd see more of.

The cartoons themselves probably don't need my nudge; you already know what you think of T&J. In my eyes, they're solid entertainment, not a fiercely ambitious cartoon series like the Disney Silly Symphonies, but very enjoyably done. This two disc set is a decent start to another collector's series, and worth dropping a few bucks.