This article in the LA Times is a great reminder of just how stupid Hollywood studios are. They are shocked to learn that DVD sales, one of their main sources of income is declining, and the more terrifying is that its the poor quality titles that are the ones with the steepest drop off in sales. You know despite the media blitz trying to flog crap, people seem to have better information from other sources about said crap and are refusing to buy it. "...alarming, especially for studios that have thrived on seducing moviegoers into seeing mediocre product, is the realization that audiences are becoming more quality conscious. In the past, if a forgettable action film hit pay dirt at the box office, it would perform correspondingly well in DVD, allowing studios in greenlight meetings to provide a conversion rate -- i.e. that if a movie of a certain genre made $100 million in the theaters, that would equal X millions of units in DVD. But judging from recent DVD sales figures, films ...

Newspapers are dying apparently. There is various analysis and commentary floating around on the webs to suggest so: Wall Street Journal about to go bankrupt, Chicago Tribune times, etc. The fear from this, to summarise from what I've read elsewhere, is that it will mean the death of quality in depth journalism. The traditional business model provided the resources, through classifieds, advertising, entertainment info, etc to fund the expensive but socially necessary investigative journalism. Of course, the content that supplied the income had little relationship to the important political, social and cultural content of papers, which was in a sense free. We've only tweaked to this since new technology has broken apart that model, striping out the revenue sources and providing them cheaper and better through other means (ie eBay, Craigslist, online personals, entertainment directories, etc). So who pays for the good journalism now? Only governments and corporations have the mon...

So I, err, 'obtained' a copy of S. Darko, and now aren't you glad that I did, because you don't have to wait your turn. I mistakenly presumed that Richard Kelly, written/director of the original Donnie Darko was involved somehow, I imagined that perhaps given the less then stellar performance of Southland Tales (neither a critical or box office success), that he had returned to the Darko universe for a little comfort. I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, because I actually thought Southland Tales was good. Believing that when watching the film made for a strange experience above and beyond the self-consciously contrived actual strangeness of it. All of these 'Kelly-esque' were there, but it was like the film-maker didn't know how to put them together. Which would have been odd if Kelly actually had a hand in it, but he didn't. Not even some vague EP credit, nothing. He basically disavowed the thing that was created by the studio that owns...

Aah, Tuesday night television. First there is Two and a Half 'men' . What crap. It disturbs me that this show is popular, and it's just ruined Holland Taylor for me now, I used to like her in The Practice and Ally McBeal . Then there is the absurdly awful 10 Years Younger in Ten Days . Why do I feel that the show was made in Sydney. Maybe because the goal seems to be to make real people look plastic and fake, and possibly make the yuppy aging producers feel better about themselves. One of the few make-over shows that makes me want to vomit when they do the reveal at the end. Perhaps I just don't watch enough of them. Turning people into alien latex heads might be amusing, if it wasn't so depressing that they are so willing submit themselves to such hideous humiliation. So are the contestants on Hell's Kitchen , which is somehow supposed to justify Ramsey's behaviour. Oh, they chose to be treated like shit, so it's ok. Never mind the fact that he is a fu...