Rubénerd!

We've finally got some details about that "Fifth Estate" movie about Julian Assange and Wikileaks, and unsurprisingly it's a piece of propagandistic bullshit. Pardon the French, but this is such a cliché hit piece it's embarrassing.

Assange was understandably angry:

"It is a lie upon lie. The movie is a massive propaganda attack on WikiLeaks and the character of my staff," the Australian Internet activist told the audience at the university's Oxford Union debating club.

Reading from the script, he said the opening scene was set inside a military complex in Iran with documents containing nuclear symbols. [..] "How does this have anything to do with us?"

Regardless of your opinion of Assange, the fact the movie is misrepresenting honest people and advocating war should be unacceptable to all of us. I'm disgusted.

Produced by DreamWorks, the movie is being directed by Bill Condon, the genius behind the first two Twilight movies. I'm not making this crap up.

"We want to explore the complexities and challenges of transparency in the information age and, we hope, enliven and enrich the conversations WikiLeaks has already provoked," he said.

I don't know what's scarier, that he's being paid to say that, or whether he actually believes that's what he's doing. Ditto Benedict Cumberbatch.

Sorry for the serious tone, this stuff just makes me furious. This is important, not that fake Facebook Graph search scandal that merely made public what governments with and without due process have long had access to already. Back to our regularly scheduled programming.

I was a huge fan of The Borrowers growing up as a child, so this was a special treat this evening :).

I was only late by ten minutes!

Earlier this evening the UTS Anime Club went to see The Borrowers Arrietty at the Hoyts cinema complex on Broadway. I had never been there before, which necessitated plenty of Tweeting, directions and Google Maps. I could have asked a person on the street, but... real people!?

Turns out every Sydney university anime club (AFAIK) was represented on the signon sheet. Judging from the quick glance I manage to steal, it seems Sydney Uni and UNSW have the most members, though I'm sure they're not as cool as the UTS club. I'm just saying.

Hayao Miyazaki isn't Japan's Disney, he's better

The movie itself was incredibly touching and heartwarming, as one would expect. The visuals were absolutely stunning, the music was lovely, and the plot gradually developed rather than attempting to throw things at us all at once, as seems to be the current movie trend. Personally, I didn't find it as surreal as Spirited Away et al, but was still engaging and interesting enough even for The Grownups, which apparently according to my birth certificate I am.

As we discussed when we left the cinema, we agreed that one need only suspend their belief in physics to enjoy it ;).

Thanks to Alex for organising the trip for us, we had a great time ^_^.

People are putting up which movies from the IMDB Top 250 they've seen. I've compiled mine, with smilies for my personal favourites :)

Where's Blues Brothers and Star Trek IV!?

The Social Network cleaned up at the Golden Globe awards, and people are... surprised? Upset? Angry? REALLY?

Awards schmawards

Now first it must be said, I don't usually accord award ceremonies with much of my attention, in real life or electronically on this here weblogging platform thingy. I could ramble on about how everything from the Academy Awards to the ARIAs are either rigged, biased, limited and/or flawed, or I could say that people who watch movies or listen to music based on how many awards they win are missing out.

Fact of the matter is, I just find them universally dull. A yawnfest, if you will. XYZ believes ABC was the best movie of the year because they slept with the director, producer or lead actors, got a big sack of cash and several incriminating photos were not used against them. Big whoop.

In this case however, I'm willing to make an exception. There's a joke about programming there, but its too late at night and I'm not feeling terribly witty.

You know what really Grinds My Gears?

First, it doesn't bother me in the slightest that The King's Speech (with its breathtaking acting and story) and Inception (which was such a serious mindf*ck that I couldn't get enough of it) didn't win the big awards. I don't crave the validation or need a stamp of approval by anyone else to thoroughly enjoy watching them, and certainly my opinion of them hasn't changed.

While we're on this subject, I've never understood why people who had no say in the production of a film (or album) take decisions against them so personally. If you liked it, who cares what other people think? But that's for another post!

No, what ticks me off is people are only talking about The Social Network's win in light of Inception's loss, when I believe there's something far dodgier going on, and we're all being played.

Follow the monies!

There's no doubt that these awards are worth something, and that bribing the judges is a small price to pay for the free advertising and future advantages your film will have over all others for that year. It's a profitable thing to do.

In this case though, The Social Network had very little to do with generating funds for box office tickets and DVDs, though I'm sure such perks are also nice in and of themselves as well. The real ticket, if you will, is Facebook's IPO.

Isn't it curious that all these rumours leak out that Goldman Sachs were to invest billions in Facebook, then this relatively mediocre movie is released and is awarded with so much acclaim? Me thinks someone wants the hype machine in overdrive for when those delicious shares go live and a small army of well connected people in the right places can print themselves reams of money.

Will you and I be able to procure some of those initial shares in Facebook? There's your answer!

Mr Con Jecture, please

It's Salt and Anna Chapman all over again, only in reverse. They expel a Russian spy from the US, then it generates far more news and press than it should, then low and behold Salt is released! Speaking of shameless, would you like to buy me a coffee to support the site? ;).

Movies started off as advertising machines with occasional product placements, then obsessive product placements... now the movies themselves are the advertisement. And its only going to get worse.

It's one thing to show me advertising on commercial television, but I've always figured if I watch product placements in a movie that I've parted money with to watch, I should get a discount or at least some free snacks. I like taking those little fruit platter trays you get at the supermarket and a toothpick and just having at it. Schweet.

Yes yes I know it's painful post to read (ze grammar goggles, zey do nothing!!!), but they make a good point.

So some people i heard during some chat (when I was watching Hellsing) said "I love the anime show there so mad awesome like how they they made made the motion and everything."

And this guy just came out and yell "Hells no! Manga is way better they tell you more of what happen and they released way early its better then those anime shows when you have to watch TV so you have to wait next week to see more."

And this happen in anilinkz.com and then they stop cause some guy came in to stop there war raging terror.

To me anime adaptations of manga are just that, adaptations!

People who expect a true to form, purely animated version of a manga are the same kind of people who get frustrated and disappointed when they go to see a Hollywood movie based on a book, then proudly proclaim they left stuff out and they didn't like it. No, really, they left stuff out? Your powers of deduction are incredible! It's as if it's a different medium!

Not that I have strong opinions on stuff like this, and I do concede on occasion some films (and anime) have less in common with the books and manga than perhaps they should if they're to share the same name, I've just been around enough people who seem to make it their mission to point out problems with book to film adaptations, then endlessly complain. One would thing such people would just stop seeing such films if they irritate them so.

Just saw the Singapore preview screening of James Cameron's Avatar. Its now 1am (hence the timestamp of this post showing Thursday) and I have to get up early in the morning so I'll be brief, but my initial impression can be summarised as: whoa.

The protagonists were endearing and their situation believable, my heart ached for them to win which often doesn't happen to me in films. While special effects often don't woo me over these did, the colours especially were stunning. Its message so succinctly summarised in the last scene (which I won't give away) was especially poignant given the Copenhagen summit is going on. It had well placed comic relief, it had nerds being tree huggers and it was unabashedly romantic and pulled it off well :).

I get the feeling I'll be comparing other films to this one for a long time.

Restrained spoiler section

I thought the CEO was a bit one sided and overly stereotypical and he left with a whimper. Aside from him, I thought the characters were all spot on. I won't say anything more until I know more people have seen it.

I'm socially awkward, anxious, terribly shy and I tend to obsess about obscure and unconventional things, but I was like that before I started blogging! That notwithstanding, Dave Winer has an excellent post on Scripting News about the stereotypes surrounding bloggers in Hollywood movies.

[State of Play was a] remake of a brilliant BBC series that was so bad, that portrayed the blogger in such a superficial and humiliating fashion, that I actually walked out in disgust. (A movie has to be very bad for me to walk out on it.)

I'd love to see a movie that captures the heroic spirit of blogging. Like all inspiration, it's rare, but that's why it's worth making a movie about. The story of the nobility of blogging largely remains, imho, untold.

Here friggen here. It probably won't change for a long time though, unless people start developing clichés about Twitter users instead and bloggers are given a break. That could work.

By the way, I don't equate my pointless blog here with people out there doing real work and producing amazing citizen journalism and analysis, but we're all bloggers and I'm as frustrated as Dave sometimes with the way bloggers (and tech people in general) are portrayed in films.

On an unrelated note, I first posted about Dave Winer on my blog here in 2006 when I said he looked a bit like my dad in the above photo (Dave Winer versus Rainer Schade). Turns out they look nothing alike in the real world ;).

Pardon the French, but it's now official if we didn't already suspect it: the people in charge of old media companies are... well, morons. According to Current.com (thanks to @Tarale for the link), Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton had this to say about the internet:

"I’m a guy who doesn’t see anything good having come from the Internet," said Sony Pictures Entertainment chief executive officer Michael Lynton. "Period."

I was going to launch into my own detailed rebuttal discussing how the internet has reduced the barriers to entry for so many creative people and businesses around the world that could not have had their material published and sold before, but why do it when someone else has already said it better. From Slarabee in the comments section:

Of course he does see anything good coming from the internet. Information should only be for those that can afford to buy it, control it and use it to make more money and screw the masses.

If people like Mr Lynton are representing their way of thinking, traditional media companies are in an even more disastrous shape than I ever could have imagined.

Pardon the French again, but... what a jackarse!