* I’m still over at Robot 6–if you’d like, you can click here to see all my posts so far.
* TheOneRing.net reports that the Tolkien Estate and New Line Cinema have reached a settlement over revenue from The Lord of the Rings movies. When oh when will some brave soul stand up to the Cult of the Author?
* This week’s League of Tana Tea Drinkers best-of roundup features a diverse lot of horrors for your reading pleasure: Blackest Night, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Mother’s Day posters, Shrooms, Faces of Death, and post-millennial “road horror” movies.
* God knows I’m a sucker for good World of Warcraft blogging, so I dug this little Matt Maxwell piece about a particularly well-imagined and exciting final boss of a particular part of the game. Besides effectively communicating the baroque, multifaceted maneuvers you need to pull off to survive the fight to a noob like me, he also emphasizes how a good game will catch you off guard even when, as is the case with many WoW players, you’ve been hacking away at it for a very long time. Also there are giant insects.
* Curt Purcell’s epic comparison of Blackest Night and The Great Darkness Saga continues with an examination of that most underappreciated of tools available to the cosmic-comic artist: the generic planetscape establishing shot.
* Having finally watched the final three parts of Matt Zoller Seitz and Aaron Aradillas’s five-part video essay on the evolution of the modern blockbuster via the summer movies of 1984 and 1989, I have to say it really only lives up to the latter half of that particular billing. If there is a case to be made that the smaller movies they talk about–pioneering indie films like Do the Right Thing and sex, lies and videotape; teen movies like Heathers and Say Anything; mainstream Hollywood movies with no explosions like Field of Dreams and Dead Poets Society–did any sort of cross-pollinating with the big movies they discuss–Batman, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Lethal Weapon 2, The Abyss–to lead to “the modern blockbuster” as we know it, they don’t make it. Nor do they specifically cite Batman as the kick-off for the way we think of Summer Blockbusters today, which is always how I’d remembered it; nor do they discuss what kind of audiences went to these movies, which I figured was where the linkage with all the teen movies they were talking about would come. But that said, it’s still a fun tour of what made all these flicks tick, and anything that touts the brilliance of Tim Burton’s Batman, still the best superhero movie ever made by a comfortable margin, is okay by me.
* Alright, alright, I’ll go see Paranormal Activity if it comes out anywhere near me this September. You win!
What do you mean, The Cult of the Author? Is it what I think? Are you suggesting that the movie is a (mostly) separate intellectual property than the books, and thus the estate of the author have fewer rights to any proceeds? I promise I’m not trolling, I’m not sure what I think of these issues myself and there’s not a lot of reasoned discourse on it (at least not places where I go).
Dustin, I was making fun of that crazy person who got in Tom Spurgeon’s face when Spurge defended the Siegels and Shusters re: the Superman copyright dispute by saying that Spurge and others like him are part of “the cult of the comic creator” that is ruining comics because these characters REALLY belong to all of us, not the greedy creators or their families. Sorry that the lame in-joke confused the issue. Believe me, I want every person in the Tolkien family to go to sleep every night on a bed made entirely out of stacks of hundred-dollar bills, all of which are changed daily.
Hm, okay yes that guy was nuts. BUT I wonder how far the whole line of copyright and IP-ownership extends? I’m with you on Tolkien, although mainly because (like you) I love those books like crazy. But if you were to tell me that Walt Disney’s descendants deserve a ton of money from Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse stuff, I would wonder–most of that world was built by guys like Carl Barks, et al. Do Carl Barks’ descendants deserve a piece of that pie?
I’m thinking of this stuff lately mainly because I’m thinking of what my first long-form comics will be, and am thinking a lot about public-domain stuff like Paul Bunyan, Greek myths, fairy tales, etc.
Specifically: Paul Bunyan was created by some logging marketer, the Brothers Grimm collected folk tales, etc.– what is the correct way to treat intellectual properties, vis a vis fair recompense for their creators, versus fair use issues out in the world?
Hey, Sean–
Thanks for the kind words.
I feel a bit awkward admitting this, but the “Evolution of the Modern Blockbuster” tag wasn’t my or Aaron Aardillas’ idea. It’s was our editor’s, who was understandably looking for a hook that was a bit more definite and splashy than, “Five essays about movies the authors happen to find interesting, from a couple of summers that we picked because they occurred exactly 25 and 20 years ago.”
We’d always conceived of the series as simply a look back at the summers of ’84 and ’89, period, with some social and political commentary strewn in amid the film analysis. The goal was a lot more modest and personal than the packaging makes it sound.
Matt: First of all, HOLY MOSES, MATT ZOLLER SEITZ! You are my favorite film critic. I’m honored you dropped by.
Secondly–ah-ha! Now it all makes sense. It’s a terrific series regardless.
Thanks, Sean. I’m actually a fan of the site and have been reading it somewhat regularly for a few years now — it’s a great way to learn about aspects of popular culture that I’m now too obsessed with movies & television to follow. I haven’t chimed in before because I didn’t feel qualified. But keep up the good work, and my thanks again not just for watching and reading, but for always having an unvarnished reaction to whatever you’re writing about.
This means an awful lot to me, Matt. I’m beyond flattered. Thank you so much!