THEY SHOW US THE ONCE-LER IN THE GOD DAMN PREVIEW!

Why would this upset me so?

First off, I can't read this story to my children without choking up a little remembering my mother reading it to me. I had so much fun just imagining what the Once-ler might look like. The mystery of the Once-ler's appearance made the character really, really engaging and got me asking how can he be doing this bad stuff when he's so smart. Look what he can do, what he can create, the cool stuff he can invent like the super-axe hacker. Why isn't he listening the the Lorax?

I identified more with the Once-ler than the kid in the story, partially because I saw what the kid looked like. He was just some run of the mill curious kid.

I learned a great deal about obsession, ethics and responsibility from the Once-ler's mistakes. The Once-ler is Howard Hughes, Orson Welles, Preston Tucker, Victor Frankstein, not some lanky-looking teenager!

To be clear, this upcoming movie might be cute, but that the producers failed to recognize the perfection of the source material's ambiguity and brevity is a sad irony in itself. I'll spell it out. As I understand the point of The Lorax is don't do stuff to excess just to make money and just because you can. So the filmmakers take a short story, expand it into a full length movie with big-budget computer animation because they can and because they hope it's going to make a shit load of money. 

Yup, that's cynical, but that doesn't mean it's incorrect. 

No, I don't think the film makers had bad intentions and in the end children will probably still get a positive message from the movie - whatever that means I just couldn't say.

It might seem like I dislike all the movies that the mainstream loves and I love the movies the mainstream hates. But that isn't true. I just don't like hype.

When mainstream audiences flip for a movie, it is deemed a great movie -- except most of the time it's just an average movie. When mainstream audiences hate a movie, it's deemed a rotten movie -- except most of the time, again, it's just an average movie.

In my last post I ranted long about the overuse of the term fanboy, how its misuse resulted in trivializing their psychosis while elevating their status as barometers of pop culture. My claim was that Hollywood has made true fanboys far more influential than what they are due. And I stated that I have proof.

A theme which I seem to repeat frequently is the value of source material in movies and entertainment. What is source material, anyways?

Apparently, if you are a studio executive, source material is comic books.

Approximately 25 years ago I began playing with sound on the computer. The hardware and software has come a long way since then, but sometimes I long for the good old days, before the dark times... Before the Empire. Sorry, Star Wars geek moment. What I mean is who doesn't hear an 8-bit video game soundtrack and grin a little?

I recently purchased the Blu-Ray edition of Steven Spielberg's classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind and finally got around to watching it this past weekend. The disc contains three versions: the original theatrical release, the special edition and the director's cut. I went right for the director's cut, having seen the other two versions many times.

The other day fellow dirty sprocker, Derek Olson, popped around the corner at work and declared that another fellow dirty sprockizen Shawn Werner had it figured out. Shawn's post titled Subtle is Sexy consistently draws the most search engine traffic of any on the site, although its bounce rate (that's the length of time a visitor stays on the page) is 100%. This means that some freak or bot out there is googling Dirty Black Hills Sexy (number three for those terms), and when they don't see any naked boobies, they depart before the page has even finished loading. Don't you just love web analytics?

I'm not jumping on the Avatar bashing train, especially since I haven't seen the James Cameron epic and probably won't for a couple weeks, but I'm really getting sick of all the hype placed on the supposed advancement in cinema technology.

Recently, I been playing with Carrara Pro, a 3d graphics program. I've been using this software since version 1, when it was Ray Dream Designer. I even remember talking to the company president on the phone when I upgraded to version 1.5. You'd think that after all these years I'd be better at 3d. The truth is I've never committed to the steep learning curve to go from novice to intermediate. From what I can tell, the basics of 3d graphics are easy, anything above that, no so much. The difficulty is in the complexity, so many simple little cogs necessary to make Dr. Manhattan.

I purchased an Epson PowerLite projector a couple years ago and planned to setup a home theater in my basement. I used it many times, projecting onto my unfinished basement walls and testing which video source worked best. I took it to a few Corduroy Vinyl gigs and projected some visualization generated using software called G-Force. Even without having ever setup a formal home theater I've definitely gotten my money's worth.