Ntuple Indemnity

Well, wouldja look at that: Chicken Little hits the sweet spot, a $40M figure that could be spun for good or ill depending on who’s doing the publicity. I was going to crunch the figures and pull up a few comparisons, but as usual, Jim Hill has already done it.

My review of Jarhead is in today’s Gateway, and the editorial staff is as on the ball as ever when it comes to excising my litany of tasteless puns and Mock Turtle simile soups. As always, if you have a grip on what my blogging style is like, you can probably identify what’s mine and what’s not. My impression of the film remains intact, though: amusing as a style piece and an evening’s entertainment, but in attempting to be more serious and dramatic than its only cinematic cousin (David O. Russell’s outstanding experiment, Three Kings), conventional to a fault.

There’s also one specific item of trivia I don’t mention, because it doesn’t belong in a review, let alone any piece for a general audience. It is, if at all possible, even more obscure than Docking Bay 327 in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, which I alluded to under nearly identical circumstances.

Jarhead has, to my knowledge, the first explicit reference to Metroid in a theatrical feature film. It’s a bit of a throwaway, because… well, it’s actually in error, though made as a figure of speech and not with the presumption of being factual. One has the impression that William Broyles had a little gap in his screenplay marked, “Name of popular video game from circa 1990 goes here.”

The scene runs thus: the marines are sitting on a jumbo jet to Iraq and discussing what is it they’d be doing instead if they weren’t gallavanting off to defend freedom and pop some ragheads. “Sitting at home trying to get to the ninth level of Metroid,” one says. “You know what happens when you get there?” replies another. “Nothing. You go back and do it all over again.”

Thematically, it hits the nail on the head when it comes to encapsulating Jarhead‘s attitude towards war: escalation, redundancy and repetition. Only Metroid doesn’t have levels; in fact, the series is so notoriously nonlinear that there’s an entire video game subculture dedicated to exploiting pathways unintended by the designers. So the point is totally lost – it’s no different from claiming rock and roll had stale chord progressions, and mistakenly citing the Beatles – but hey, they tried.

Tetris would have been a better example. On the original Game Boy release, the ninth level was murder.

In other news, Nintendo’s worldwide Mario Kart DS servers are online (though nobody has the game except for Nintendo and the press), and their Wi-Fi service website is live, and the documentation reveals a lot about how it will work. Hits: day-to-day, game-by-game stat tracking on the Web; a sporting interface not unlike the software that comes with most wireless LAN cards; WEP key setup that doesn’t suck aside from the pain in the ass of having to punch in my entire 128-bit hex key instead of my clever passphrase. The promised one-touch setup only applies to proprietary Buffalo routers at partner hotspots, though I suspected as much.

Misses, neither of which apply to me: the drivers on the USB connector for those without Wi-Fi are Windows-only (presumably under the assumption that since Macs have built-in wireless, users probably have a network going already – or maybe it’s just shortsightness); and for those of you who care, no WPA. The website also gives pretty bad layman’s advice for securing a home network (using your phone number as a hex key? Please!) but that’s the price of selling cool toys to the non-technical.

Also, if the Wi-Fi configuration software is embedded in the game cartridge, does this mean I have to punch in my setup all over again come Animal Crossing in December? Or does it write the profile settings into the DS firmware? If they haven’t finalized the Wi-Fi implementation until now, I’m guessing it’s the former, which would be a pity.

I have Mario Kart DS on pre-order, so I’ll give it a spin next week. Whether or not I report on the experience here will depend on the length of said spin, or perhaps its angular momentum. For now, it’s back to civilization – or maybe just back to Civilization.

I’ve been a lifelong sucker for computer animation. As a teenager I fancied the idea of going into the business myself. I won science fair medals for conducting raytracing experiments that I don’t even fully understand anymore. There was a time when I could have claimed to have watched every all-CG feature film to be released in North American theatres. I can still name the exceptions: Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, Jonah: A Veggie Tales Movie and Valiant. I expect the claim to give way sooner or later, because in spite of how CG productions take years, the market is overflowing with them nowadays and reaching a saturation point where it simply isn’t enough for a movie to be a digital representation of three-dimensional space. It has to be more.

I’m also a Disney fan, albeit a repatriated one. It’s a pity that so many people, particularly those with disposable income, have a perverted obsession with outgrowing things. The majesty of the Disney classics is that they improve with age. You’ve only truly grown up when you have learnt to fall in love with them all over again. That’s what makes them classics.

Remember when the Magic Kingdom had brand power? The flat one, with a chorus of strings playing “When You Wish Upon A Star” – not the 3D one over music by Randy Newman, which I think has been subverted by the mischievous hopping lamp that follows it everywhere.

Those were the days. þæt wæs god cyning.

Things have changed. For one thing, I’m not going to see Chicken Little this weekend.

It isn’t because the promotional campaign makes it look both terrible and shameless about it. It could always be better than how it’s sold, and I’ll know for sure when I see it next week, or the week after that. Bad advertising (badvertising?) is a common sight when it comes to animated features. One wouldn’t have thought Shrek or The Iron Giant were any good from the trailers alone. Sadly, only one of them made money.

It isn’t because it’s not on the top of some imaginary list of mine this weekend. As a matter of fact, it is; V For Vendetta was moved back to March, and I saw Jarhead on Wednesday.

I’m not going to see Chicken Little this weekend because I want to do my part. See, I firmly believe that a low box-office take this weekend is a good thing. At best, I expect it to be a modest hit with no shelf life. Most of the pundits are calling it at $38M, and I think that’s generous – though of course, releasing it on 3600 screens guarantees a decent aggregate figure. And I’m not going to help unless it actually turns out to be any good as a movie, because I like the message this would send.

I haven’t cared about opening weekend grosses in a while, but this is one that actually matters. Let’s examine the possible scenarios.

Chicken Little is a hit. Either it opens above $50M, or it has enough staying power between now and Christmas that a $200M total is within reach. Consequences: Disney laughs its way to the bank. Pixar loses a whole wad of chips at the negotiating table now that WDFA has proven to be a viable competitor with a hardly competitive film. They never get their sequel rights back, and Circle 7 finishes their own Toy Story 3 directed by Bradley “Pocahontas II” Raymond. The next round of Disney trailers feature the titular American Dog, Wilbur Robinson and Rapunzel shaking their respective booties to disco music. Rumours of a return to cel animation are squashed for a full decade more. Bob Iger joins Michael Eisner in hell, but on the plane of the corporeal, the suffering continues.

Chicken Little makes money, but generally disappoints. This is what I expect – an opening under $40M, and run-of-the-mill drops of 40-50% a week before ending up with Shark Tale figures, or maybe even as low as Robots territory. Here we’re talking $130-170M – big, but not for a CG film with the Disney label, and not in 2005. Consequences: Pixar has an upper hand in negotations, because Disney is no longer so sure it can afford to have them as a direct competitor. We might even see some big, lopsided concessions; the best-case scenario has sequel rights going to Pixar and Circle 7 shutting down Toy Story 3 – a huge loss for Disney and a huge win for the consumer. Future WDFA projects reevaluate their ability to out-Shrek DreamWorks, and stop trying so hard to do just that. We will hear rumblings of greenlighting cel animation again in the post-Rapunzel pipeline, and maybe the company will stop blaming the medium.

Chicken Little bombs harder than the Enola Gay. This would be an opening under $20M and a total gross well under $100M, comparable to Disney’s figures in its waning years. We’re talking about sub-Dinosaur numbers here. It isn’t going to happen. If it does, Disney will be on its knees begging Pixar to come back – a good thing. This isn’t all rosy, though. Disney’s stock price will plummet. The detrimental effect on the brand name may carry over to hurt the success of future releases, regardless of whether or not they are any good. Investment in the computer animation industry as a whole will drop. We still have no guarantee of a return to traditional 2D animation, either. It’s just as likely that animators will be fired in droves, and the Disney legacy dies a horrible, horrible death.

I think the second scenario is the optimal one here, though none of its effects are guaranteed. It would certainly cause a lot of unease; in fact, the cold critical reaction to Chicken Little is already having some effect on the company.

This morning, the news came in that Disney has halted production on Rapunzel Unbraided. Word is that the shutdown is a temporary one to rework the project from the ground up; just how temporary, time will tell. But I like what I’m hearing: less of the pop-culture trash nobody cares about. In essence, less of the Unbraided, more of the Rapunzel; less of the Shrek and more of the Disney.

I have never once seen Disney try to be wacky and hip and come out of it looking good. A Glen Keane film deserves to be better. Keane is a legend, folks. Every day of the year, mascots and stage performers around the world hop around in costumes based on stuff he drew. He created Ariel in The Little Mermaid and Aladdin in Aladdin. He designed the Beast in Beauty and the Beast, the most iconic sympathetic monster this side of King Kong. And I’m sure the five of you who saw Treasure Planet fondly remember the seamless cel/CG hybrid that was his Long John Silver – half scurvy pirate, half Howl’s Moving Castle.

The visual concept behind Rapunzel Unbraided – an oil painting that moves in 3D space – is one of the most exciting developments I’ve heard of about the future of the now rather unexciting movie business, which has with few exceptions become aesthetically stagnant now that the wonders of technology are peaking.

But it’s all for naught if the film has to work against an abrasive and annoying screenplay that plays for cheap laughs. This is supposed to ring in the next Disney Renaissance, after all. I’ll agree it’s not a wholly reasonable expectation, but I’ll sleep better at night knowing that they care enough to try.

And all it took was for the critical community to call Disney on the carpet and tell them their bespectacled gallinaceous emperor has no clothes, let alone groove. Imagine what would happen if the public agreed. All that needs to happen is for Chicken Little to fail by just enough, and we’ll hopefully see some meaningful change of the same bent.

Whether or not the film is any good is immaterial. I’ll answer that question later this month.

It’s probably a measure of how out of touch I’ve been lately that I didn’t know about the new biweekly two-page supplement in The Gateway until this morning. Let it be known that Le Miroir is neither as backwards as its name implies nor miserable and inadequate as its host language suggests. There’s no online version, but as happenchance would have it, one of the contributors to its debut spread lives within striking distance of my Linksys router and has kindly (or narcissistically) provided a sample hither.

I welcome the campus broadsheet’s latest appendage with open appendages of my own. Part of it is that it will assist me in slowing the atrophy of my aptitude for comprehending the loverly language of diminuitive Alp-crossing conquerors. French is fun to read even when it’s not relegated to demanding hefty Austro-German reparations, and I find it encouraging for the paper to declare itself “tout simplement francophile” in its mission statement. And beyond that, Thursday’s Miroir, tucked into pages 10 and 11, looks terrific – it’s typeset in the standard Gateway style, fitting right into the same InDesign templates, but the absence of intrusive advertising materials makes a huge difference.

Disregarding content for now, the only really visible copyediting problem is in an opinion piece by some bloke who calls himself Carl “Le Cat” Charest. No, not the unordered-list formatting problem – that’s a lesser concern. Let me put it this way: I don’t know if using italics AND all caps for emphasis (particularly the latter) is as frowned upon in the other langue officielle as it is in mine, but I always figured it was the case. It hurts us, preciousss.

Allow me to reflect.

I’m not a prolific writer by any means, on the web or in print. Part of it, by my intention or not, is that I’d rather read than write – a preference that I think should be a property of all writers irrespective of their level of seriousness or the prestige of the medium they call home.

Lately, I’ve neither read nor written to any nontrivial degree. I’ve been playing Scrabble. But there’s a common principle at work that applies to both activities: you can’t do something well if you don’t know what it means to do it well.

Writing without reading is bad writing, and to a discerning observer the deficit is as discordant as a karaoke regular who has never heard a real singer in his life. Then again, real singers are hard to come by for the modern layperson when record labels are actively engaged in marketing superstars on the basis of their being tone-deaf. It’s become a house style. And a world where Kenneth Gorelick making like a prehistoric glowworm and flopping his way around an ill-selected blues scale is enough to outsell every real jazz artist on the globe is a mad, mad, mad, mad world indeed.

The funniest thing I’ve read in the last little while comes from a controversy I thankfully slept through a few years ago, and have only discovered now. It seems that Mr. Kenny G decided to overdub a few of his trademark saxopharts over Louis Armstrong’s “What A Wonderful World”. This prompted a reaction, I would call it, from none other than Pat Metheny himself (only the man who defined the sound of contemporary jazz guitar, if you don’t know who he is), who called the endeavour “musical necrophilia” and then some. Metheny’s talent for obloquy is as lyrical as his proficiency for the Ibanez electric. It even spawned a song.

(Permit me to make a brief and self-congratulatory pause as I admire, in the above paragraph, the best word I’ve coined in at least a fortnight. Google returns no hits for the word or a variant of it spelt with an F. This one’s mine, baby.)

Anyway, to return to the topic at hand: every time I think of writers who don’t read nearly enough, the one that comes to mind is Robert Jordan. When I was fetching the new Snicket at Chapters last week, I passed by another freshly-delivered penultimate volume of a more thickset build – Jordan’s Knife of Dreams, the eleventh of a projected twelve books in his popular series of sword-and-sorcery paperweights, The Wheel of Time. I quit the series after seven out of having better things to read, though I no longer sleep as well as I once did; Jordan’s prose was a panacea for all forty-two flavours of insomnia, and I recall missing at least one bus stop on its account.

Now that I’ve discovered a really schlocky bestselling writer, who is as terse as Jordan is grandiloquent, he doesn’t seem so bad. I still can’t justify resuming where I left off, of course, because I simply have better things on my shelf, and his common penchant for pluralizing gerunds could have a detrimental effect on my word study.

But I digress. (Almost as much as he does. Oh, snap!) I meant to bring up Robert Jordan in conjunction with the topic of how reading and writing interact, because I remember one particular interview with him where he comments on the same. I’ve dug up the relevant excerpt:

I had always said, “One day I will write.” Then when I was 30 I was walking back from a dry dock to my office, and I had a fall and tore up my knee very severely. There were complications in the surgery, I nearly died, I spent a month in the hospital, and I spent three and a half months recuperating before I could walk well enough to go back to the office. During that time I reached burnout in reading. I remember picking up a book by an author I knew I liked, reading a few paragraphs and tossing it across the room and saying, “Oh God, I could do better than that.” Then I thought, “All right son, it’s time to put up or shut up.”

And so I wrote my first novel. It has never been published although it’s been bought by two publishers, and a lot of good came out of it, including meeting my wife.

And you know, I respect that. It’s true that the extremity of consuming words in hopes of fueling the production of them is a life of consumption that produces very little. I think a lot of writerus blockitis comes from ambition and perfectionism. Robert Jordan has the good fortune of suffering neither.

He’s an odd example in the sense that he is, in a manner of speaking, a writer who reads. (We’ll ignore for now that according to Amazon’s “Significant Seven” interview, he names as his desert island book his own work-in-progress.) But judging from his own writing, if he thinks he can do better than the authors in which he was once so engrossed, either he’s not there yet, or his influences clearly weren’t very good.

It’s easy to tell when a writer is an overly selective reader – one who only reads in genre, or one who refuses to read in genre; one who only hits the pulps, or never hits the pulps. I find that writers who read develop a writer’s identity, or voice as some would call it, through a balance of controlled mimicry and improvisational distortion; and just as the most revered figures of the great improvisational art form, jazz, draw on influences from gospel to swing to stride to bebop to post-Romantic to chain-gang country blues, writers can only benefit from reading diversely.

Then you have the likes of Umberto Eco, who is so well-read that it makes his fiction impenetrable because of all its a priori dependencies. Predictably, his non-fiction critical discourse fares much better, but even in fiction he conceals a treasure trove of content, not fluff, behind a tattered verbal curtain. In Robert Jordan’s case, after some early books that are pleasurable for their escapist manoeuvres if not their style, the content is wholly subsumed by a textual torrent that begs for a stopper. One wishes the author spent more time reading the works of others instead of treading water in Narcissus’ swimming pool.

I hear that Knife of Dreams cleans up some of the muck, but considering how much of it must have accumulated in the interim (in addition to how much was floating about already), it sounds like a book for fans’ eyes only. I’ll not make judgments by covers, of course.

There is more to say about literacy that needs to be said, but I have midterms to swat.

Edmonton: 9-5, +418. I’m a little disappointed; while I finished exactly as I was seeded (second in the eight-strong Division 2) and with another $60 in pocket money that made up for an overbudget weekend spent on Coltrane records and tickets to Elizabethtown and A History of Violence, the losses sustained were heavier than they should have been. As the only registrants in the top division were myself and U of A librarian Huguette Settle, a very strong player who has always hovered around my rating level for the past two years or so in spite of a more potent vocabulary than my own, we were moved down to the second division with a partial refund on our registration. The way the probabilistic Elo-style ratings work meant the two of us had to win practically all our games just to retain our positions in the NSA rat race.

Huguette did it in style and won the tournament with a 12-2 record, clinching the trophy three rounds before the end of the event. She went 2-0 against me, too – though she lost a turn challenging a particularly beautiful bingo of mine that I snuck in as part of an almost-comeback, ALIENEES down the O-column parallel to four other letters. She received a neat little trophy for her trouble, one that I thought would have looked nice on the mantlepiece next to Nemo and Mike Wazowski. Next time, Gadget, next time.

(Writing that, I was sure I’d honoured Dr. Claw in another post before now. I was right.)

Personal favourite play of the tournament: going out with aCQUIRER on a double word score for 90 points. I don’t think it was the highest-scoring play I made all weekend, but it was probably the coolest.

So not to obscure my other present thoughts with a surfeit of Scrabble-talk, I’ll make tonight’s update a two-parter.