Good Is The New Bad – Film Reviews And More

Ladies and gentlemen, since nobody likes to have their time wasted, let’s start the official ‘best of 2009′ year-end review with the best film of the year.

The Hurt Locker.

One of the few movies of 2009 to deserve every ounce of the praise that’s piled on it, Kathyn Bigelow’s story of a EOD (explosive ordinance disposal) unit in Baghdad is relentless from the very first frames and barely rests until the final fade out. It scores the best picture of 2009 award because it does two things to perfection. First, it is wall-to-wall with old-school Hollywood suspense. There’s no digital armies of zombies, or ridiculous CGI acrobatics with military hardware and indestructible super-soldiers. The whole film is wired like a bomb that could explode at any second. [Read more →]

In this week’s New Yorker, James Surowiecki takes a brief look at the contradictions (mostly on the Republican side) of health care reform.

American politicians—as well as American voters—have a confused, and often contradictory, set of beliefs about how health insurance should work. The wayward, patchwork plan that we seem likely to end up with is probably a good reflection of the wayward, patchwork opinions that most legislators have on the subject

Surowiecki’s single-page essays are almost always an inspired read. After some trenchant analysis, he points out perhaps the biggest contradiction in the current health-care reform package: [Read more →]

Avatar is ridiculous.

I’ve been chewing it over for the better part of a week (or at least attempting to chew it over – a movie this digitally amplified is so vaporous as to almost refuse mastication), and I’m tempted to upgrade my reflections to ‘fucking ridiculous’. I hold back on the profantiy-enhanced judgement largely because Avatar isn’t solid enough to bear the insult. To label this trifle ‘fucking ridiculous’ would be an insult to the films that are truly fucking ridiculous.

Normally a movie this slender wouldn’t even be worth mentioning, except that the specific gravity inherent in a $300 million USD price tag and the megalomaniacal boasts of its creator that it will change cinema forever warrant an appropriately slight response. So ridiculous it is.

First, hasn’t anybody else choked on the irony that hundreds of millions of dollars were spent to deploy state of the art computer technology to tell the story of a bunch of barefoot people running around in mud worshipping a tree?

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I realize this is off-topic (and perhaps the first steps in retooling my focus here), but this needs to be said. Ticketmaster is evil and should be destroyed.

In the August 10 & 17, 2009 issue of the New Yorker, John Seabrook analyzes the root of the Ticketmaster/Live Nation monopoly. The full article is not available online (unless you’re a registered New Yorker subcriber). While his overview of the concert business and how Ticketmaster rose to power is insightful, he overlooks one incredibly vital fact that makes Ticketmaster an evil scourge on the music industry. It’s the sort of oversight that completely changes the discussion, and by its simple omission, almost allows Ticketmaster to seem like a reasonable service entitled to charge a fee for its services.

Much of the article talks about the sale of Bruce Springsteen tickets for two shows at the Izod center in the Meadowlands. A Ticketmaster glitch re-directed ticket buyers to TicketsNow, a Ticketmaster owned ticket re-seller where they were offered tickets at inflated, secondary market prices while regularly priced tickets were still available. The outcry prompted a Congressional investigation and nearly derailed the merger of Ticketmaster and LiveNation, it’s only reasonable competition.

There are some fascinating numbers that the article throws out. There is an active secondary market for concert tickets, and in a textbook example of free-market capitalism, the open price wars for a limited commodity generate a lot of money. A lot. Seabrook puts one estimate in place that suggests Springsteen lost a potential $4 million in ticket sales on those two shows at the Izod center alone by selling tickets with fixed prices. That’s $4 million that goes straight to scalpers that the artist, venue, or promoter could lay a reasonable claim to deserving.

Ticketmaster is none of those, but has found insidious ways to horn in on that action. To get their cut, they add in ticket “convenience fees” that can run as high as 20% or more of the actual ticket price. To the average consumer, that’s pure parasitism. The ticket price and the overinflated t-shirt costs go to the artist. The over-inflated parking and beer costs go to the venue. The prices are nuts, but at least the money is going to the parties with a tangible interest in creating the event at hand. It’s the $10 per-ticket fee that goes to Ticketmaster who simply charge for the privilege of buying a ticket that has no sensible frame of reference for the consumer. [Read more →]

 

The sixth installment of the series, Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince is simultaneously the best and the least satisfying of the films to date. The story has been pared down to the barest of bones and almost nothing of note happens. The evil Voldemort appears only in flashback, and impossibly chaste teenage romances carry the day. What’s new in this installment is an emotional richness that’s been absent from the previous installments. The end is near, and in the shadows of an upcoming mountain of noisy exposition, the filmmakers take a moment to exhale and let the kids be kids.

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