I’ve been quote-mined!

Well now I know I’ve made it.

Particularly popular in pseudoscience and politics, a quote-mine is when you take a small portion of what someone has said and remove it from the surrounding context to make it sound like that person has said something dramatically different, even diametrically opposed, to what they were actually saying.

When a creationist busts out a Darwin quote appearing to say that he believed the eye was too complex to have evolved, that’s a quote mine. Last election cycle, Democrat Alan Grayson ran an ad showing his opponent appearing to say that he believed his wife should submit to his authority as prescribed in the Bible; that too was a quote mine.

Hell, even movie posters do this, or potentially can. If you see a blurb on a poster of someone calling a film “…a shining example of the genre,” for all you know what the critic actually said was “If flinging shit against a wall can be considered a genre of film, then this movie is a shining example of the genre.”

Typically this is used because the person being quoted is perceived as giving some weight of authority to the matter at hand. So like I said, I can tell I’ve truly made it now that I’ve been quote mined for my opinion on The Hunger Games. Down towards the bottom, under “reviews,” the only entry is the single most positive sentence from my post on the subject.

I love me a good theme party, so despite my overall personal distaste for the Hunger Games series (or rather the bad taste it left in my mouth), I certainly don’t begrudge any interested folks from having themselves a Hunger Games party — although I am amused by the irony of throwing a dinner party themed around a book series which devotes a great deal of time condemning the privileged class for throwing frivolous parties. It’s a bit like having a book club party for Sinclair’s The Jungle by throwing a barbecue. (Which I’d totally do, but I’m fucked up like that.) I will say, in fairness, there are very clever ideas for the theme party and the menu looks both tasty and on-theme.

I’m just surprised that, despite all the other people raving about the books across the web, and despite positive reviews in the New Yorker and one by Stephen King, they chose only to take a portion of my not-totally-negative-but-distinctly-non-raving review out of context. Apparently someone has decided my opinion is so authoritative, it’s worth excerpting on a website even if they have to twist its arm a little.

Suck it, King!

UPDATE: They’ve updated the page with additional reviews now, but mine is still at the top. Go me!

In all seriousness, I think it is kind of cool that this website completely unrelated to me took notice of my review enough to share it with their readers, and as has been pointed out in the comments they are linking back here, so in no way obscuring the context from those who care to look. I think it’s a neat site and I wish them well.

Gotham High

I’m not a comic book geek. Not hating or judging, I totally get it — you see how I am about movies — that’s just not my niche. So I’m not hugely precious about comic book properties, which is why I think this abandoned concept for a “Batman in High School” cartoon series, Gotham High, is hilarious.

We all go through incredible changes as teenagers: growth spurts, bad skin, a sudden insatiable need to uphold justice and avenge your murdered parents…. Well, that is if you’re Bruce Wayne.
As if being a freshman at Gotham High wasn’t tough enough, Bruce’s insomnia and technological fascinations are taking their toll. Instead of spending his time studying, he has begun to obsess over an emerging personality trait: Batman. But under the watchful eye of his guardian and steward, Alfred Pennyworth, Bruce is forced to put his intelligence to good use: graduating high school. But given his classmates, can Bruce survive Gotham High?

There’s some artwork on the site showing character designs and the overall art style that the animation would have had. The commentors are split between loving it and clutching madly at their pearls over this abomination.

Let me just say that despite not being a major comic aficionado, I watched the 90s animated series and I’ve absorbed enough of the Batmythology from the culture to know that this idea makes no sense at all. I think that’s what makes it awesome.

Someone accused them of essentially pitching a real version of Watchmen Babies, which I think is a fairly spot-on observation (although Batman is not, in general, quite so cynical as Watchmen). Whether it’s a compliment or critique, however, depends on your point of view.

My point of view, in turn, depends on the tone. If they were going to play this straight, a la Batman: TAS or Batman Beyond, no way it would ever fly. But if they did this fairly tongue-in-cheek, recognizing and playing with the inherent absurdity of it all, I think it could have been great. I said I watched the original animated series — I also grew up with 60s Adam West Batman, and loved it.

I mean, this is just rife for satire for your typical high school drama. If the writing was of a caliber akin to, say, Clone High (of which this is obviously a close cousin), I think this could have been something really special. Poison Ivy as the slutty cheerleader whose ex-boyfriends have a tendency not to come back to school after the break-up. Joker being all emo and taking everything seriously. And a very special episode where star wrestler Bane struggles with steroid abuse.

Don’t get me wrong, this would be hard to get right. Let too many network executives give it the Bad Touch in its bathing suit area, and it could have gone down as the biggest trainwreck in modern animation history. But if they’d managed to ride the razor’s edge, between reverence for the source material and irreverence for the format, it might just have been gleefully crazy enough to work.

Mr. Plinkett: King of the Critics

So there was this movie that came out almost 12 years ago called THE PHANTOM MENACE. You’ve probably heard of it. And you probably also know that it’s widely considered one of the biggest botch-jobs in cinematic history.

After more than a decade of derision, it seemed like everything that could be said about the movie, had. And then there was Plinkett.

I’m actually very late to the party on this post, as Plinkett’s review of THE PHANTOM MENACE went off like a truth bomb over a year ago on YouTube, and most of my readers have already seen it. If you haven’t, it’s a 70-minute takedown of Episode I, point by point, available in its entirety on his website, RedLetterMedia.com.

Pokémon Apokélypse

After my posts earlier this year regarding treating “silly” material with a level of dignity that can make it work as a real movie instead of the usual high-budget, low-coherency crap we end up with instead, and praising “Mortal Kombat: Rebirth” as a great example of this principle, I would be remiss not to address “Pokémon Apokélypse.”

IRON BABY

This is pretty damn cute. And an impressive FX piece.

They fixed it!

What a great way to start the decade. I’ve complained before about the frequent misuse of the term “irony,” which has sprung up for me yet again in reading SAVE THE CAT! (review forthcoming). 

But all is not lost. The CollegeHumor folks have heard my cry and produced Actually Ironic, a version of the song that alters the lyrics to make the random and simply unfortunate events listed, you guessed it, actually ironic. 

WordPress still doesn’t let me embed easily, so for now, the link.

Total Eclipse of the Heart (Literal Version)

I love this meme.

Unfortunately, this is how it works

Down in Front!

I was going to write a fancy blog post full of backstory and nuance, as you fine readers have come to expect, but I’m tired and I need to get to the Terminator Salvation midnight showing. So instead, the short version:

I’m co-hosting a new movie podcast called Down in Front with three other fellas as the regulars, and over time we may add/swap others in for particular films, or as one or the other of us is unavailable for a recording session. 

What is Down in Front? Each week we release a movie commentary, which you can sync up to a DVD or digital copy and listen to us discuss the film as it goes. Just like a regular DVD commentary, except it’s a group of dudes on a couch for movie night rather than the director or lead actors. When we love a film, we talk about why. When we hate a film, we try to focus our rage into coherent syllables. I may be biased, but I think it makes for very interesting conversation. 

Now, I know that many of us are busy and don’t have the time to sit down and watch a whole movie with commentary by random yahoos, especially movies we’ve seen before. Not to worry: although we give the listener a sync point so that they can view the discussion to picture, we’ve had a lot of feedback letting us know that many people find the conversation interesting without needing to watch the movie. We often take what’s happening onscreen simply as the springboard to start a discussion/rant, and so they’re really more like “movie reviews in context.” As long as you have a general familiarity with the film in question, you should be able to listen to it like any other podcast and follow along just fine. 

We’ve got a number of commentaries already up, with more recorded and even more in the queue. It’s hard to pick favorites, but if you need a recommendation, I will say that The Phantom Menace, our flagship episode, was and is a great place to start.

If you like it, tell your friends. If you don’t, tell your enemies.

Songsmith is the new Swede

Thankfully, something to lighten the mood a bit from this morning.

For those not familiar with Sweding, it comes from the Michel Gondry film Be Kind, Rewind, referring to a popular film re-created in approximately five minutes via blatantly low-budget means (the characters in the film claim that the films are imported from Sweden, hence the term). 

Sweding became briefly popular on YouTube, but has since become somewhat rare. But now a new, similar meme has sprung up around Microsoft’s latest crime against creativity, Songsmith. 

A few months ago, the following ad appeared on the interwebs. The only reason I was able to get more than ten seconds in was that I thought it was from The Onion. But some quick research and I discovered that this is an actual Microsoft advertisement for the product. 

See how far you can get into the video without having to stop it and take a few deep breaths. 

You probably still don’t believe me that this is real, and I don’t blame you. But you don’t have to take my word for it: here’s the official Microsoft product page.