Watch Out! I’m on a rant.
Posted By Kathleen David on August 25, 2006
This is a rant blog about some stupidity that I have recently seen or heard about.
Tom Cruise may have 100 million for his company to make a movie but he is missing one critical element for that film. He has no distributor for the film. Right now with digital technology just about anyone can make a film. Some films that are being done by rank amateurs are apparently quite good. The editing software available to the public is as good if not better than what they have in Hollywood. Yea Film! But none of these films (or very few) have a distributor that will put them into theaters so that they can make money in the theaters. Yeah, I know that there are DVDs that never see the movie screen but that is not the point. Tom has screwed up big time and he was cut lose by Paramount Studio and given a set amount of time to get his people off the lot. Now here is the twist, Spielberg, who is Dreamworks and directed two films with Tom, was not told of what was about to go down and is apparently “not happy” by how the situation was handled. Remember that the talent agency that reps Tom is CCA which is owned in part by Spielberg. So this is a big mess with more fallout in the near future because Tom acted like an idiot in public and got called on it. I think he and Mel Gibson need to go sit in the corner in a serious time-out until they realize what they did.
I use wonder why no one signals anymore for lane changes but no more. I can’t tell you the number of times I have signaled to change lanes and have all my space judged only to have some asshat speed up to fill the gap just enough that I can’t get over. This has been especially heart stopping when trying to merge into traffic from a highway entrance ramp. Thank goodness that I follow the look rules to check my blind spot one more time before moving over or I think I would be a grease spot on the highway right now.
Apparently JK Rowling’s lawyers are sniffing around the internet and warning those who do Potter Pørņ to either knock it off or hide it. The defense that really burned my goat was the one that said that all their slash Potter Pørņ happened after the characters were of the age of adulthood according to Rowling’s Wizard world which is 16 I believe. The owner of the characters has asked you not to do something or at least not in public forums and you come back with why it shouldn’t matter? Here’s a clue by four upside the head which might knock a clue lose. When I was reading fanfic I can tell you all the Doctor Who stuff that was even suggestive was put in a private area of the internet with a couple of passwords on it to keep the Beeb from shutting it down. To the list owners who allow Potter Pørņ, lock it down and get it out of sight or you might find yourself on the wrong end of a cease and desist order. Remember she is published in just about every country on Earth and therefore has access to lawyers just about anywhere. Fanfic is only alive because of the good graces of the owners. Don’t make them regret it.
I am grateful that I got all the eyes done on the puppets yesterday.
“I use wonder why no one signals anymore for lane changes but no more. I can’t tell you the number of times I have signaled to change lanes and have all my space judged only to have some asshat speed up to fill the gap just enough that I can’t get over. This has been especially heart stopping when trying to merge into traffic from a highway entrance ramp. Thank goodness that I follow the look rules to check my blind spot one more time before moving over or I think I would be a grease spot on the highway right now.”
This reminds me of a routine a saw stand-up comedian do about driving in Houston: “A lot of people talk about how hard it is to drive in Houston, but I’ve never had a problem. If you want to get off the freeway, you just signal LEFT. When everybody moves left to block you, you just exit to the right.” And it’s so true. Some people are just asshats and will be inhumanly rude to get themselves another tenth of a second ahead of everyone else.
On the other hand, I drove into Austin in five o’clock traffic back in 2000 and was shocked by the politeness of the drivers. Poeple would actually make space for you to get into the lane you needed. Best big-city driving experience, ever.
Here are my rants, semi-related to what you’re talking about. I remember when I was a teenager and the law was changed so you could make a right turn at a stop or light AS LONG AS NOBODY WAS COMING. At what point did that change to, you can make a right turn as long as you can pull out fast enough in front of the guy who’s going straight, even if you pull out in front of him going 20 miles an hour and he has to jam on his brakes, even though he had the right of way?
Whenever I’m in London and my wife is driving, I always marvel at the way most British people have to drive in the narrower streets, where there is an unspoken agreement that the person already coming down the street the farthest has the right of way, and the other person politely pulls over to let him go by. I can’t help thinking that would never work in America, where the driver in the biggest car would probably feel they have the right of way.
In the UK, they have crosswalks that are nicknamed ‘zebra crossings,’ with big blinking lights to point them out to drivers. The law is basically if somebody is crossing the street, you stop. Simple, right? Here in my New Jersey town, they recently installed several crosswalks, along with signs pointing out that the law meant you had to stop for pedestrians. Over the past several months, I have never seen one driver stop to let a pedestrian cross; not walking, not on bicycle, not even in wheelchairs (we have a number of disabled in my town, which was probably the reason for putting in the crossings in the first place.
Here is my method of balancing the New Jersey state budget without taxing anyone. Adjust the cell phone law so that a policeman can pull you over for talking without a hands-free. The first time they give you a ticket, 50 bucks. That’s reasonable, even for people who pretend they’re unaware of the law. Keep the records on the police computers so they can run your driver’s license. Second time, 100 bucks. After all, you have no excuse after the first ticket, right? Third time 200 bucks, and every time you get pulled over, the fine doubles. Just the number of first-time fifty-dollar tickets alone would easily make up the budget shortfall. And eventually you link it all up state-to-state, so if you got a ticket in New Jersey for talking on your cell phone, they’d have a record of it when you got pulled over in New York or Pensylvania.
Regarding slash fiction, I’ve never really understood it, but my attitude has always been live and let live, although a few SF actors I know were less than enthusiastic about being presented with words or images of their television alter-egos engaged in sexual escapades they were never meant to be in. But I think it should be treated like any fan fiction: play around all you want, but when the people who represent the film or TV product ask you to stop, you stop. You don’t own the characters; they do. It has nothing to do with censorship or freedom of the press. If you really want to be a writer, go create your own characters and you can write whatever you want.
As for Tom Cruise, once an actor gets to the point where his off-screen antics distract me from his ability to create a character on screen, I have no interest in seeing them in a film. Mel Gibson might be able to get away with it, but I’m not sure Cruise is that good an actor, with the possible exception of Born on the Fourth of July. In this case, not only has he ruined his own career but I wouldn’t be surprised if he killed Katie Holmes’ career as well. Witness the folks running the Batman franchise dropping her like a hot potato as soon as her boyfriend started couch-jumping.
Frankly, whether or not Paramount want to stay in business with Cruise has nothing to do with my day to day life, so I really don’t care. But considering that Cruise had something like a ten-million dollar fund that paid all his production expenses, and he was getting something like a quarter of a film’s grosses, I think the studio is entitled to make a new deal with somebody who hasn’t been earning his keep. When Cruise was promoting MI3, I didn’t see one interview in which he discussed the film. It was all Tom-Katie-baby-Tom-sonogram-engagement-pregnancy, to the point where I would just change the channel. And I never saw the dámņ movie anyway.
Finally, I think Scientology is the slash fiction of religions: I don’t care if you want to indulge in it, but please don’t try to shove it down my throat. Bbut I’ll never really understand how people subscribe to a made-up religion created by a second-rate pulp sci-fi writer in order to make a couple of bucks Maybe I’m in the wrong business.
Can you tell I’m in the mood for a rant tonight too?
I have never seen one driver stop to let a pedestrian cross; not walking, not on bicycle, not even in wheelchairs
Well, I’m not absolutely sure it’s the same in every state, around here cyclists are not pedestrians. A bike is qualified as a vehicle and is subject to traffic laws.
-Rex Hondo-
Rex, I take your point; what I should have said was a person with a bicycle trying to walk it across the crosswalk. I think the thing that bothers me is that I’ve seen people actually speed up approaching a crosswalk as though god forbid, a pedestrian might actually make it across the street in time.
>Regarding slash fiction, I’ve never really understood it, but my attitude has always been live and let live, although a few SF actors I know were less than enthusiastic about being presented with words or images of their television alter-egos engaged in sexual escapades they were never meant to be in. But I think it should be treated like any fan fiction: play around all you want, but when the people who represent the film or TV product ask you to stop, you stop. You don’t own the characters; they do. It has nothing to do with censorship or freedom of the press. If you really want to be a writer, go create your own characters and you can write whatever you want.
As a fellow Media Fan, I couldn’t have said it better myself, Joe! Like you, I’ve been constantly baffled over the attitude of The Slash Club regarding “ownership” of their derived works as though the characters portrayed in them are their personal sex toys to manipulate as they choose! While the creators had a tendency to be flattered when the fans can wrote stories that remain true to their conceptions, I’ve always considered them heroically tolerant when it came to the “slash” stories. Instead of umbrage over being warned to “pipe down,” these people should be grateful that they weren’t sued into oblivion before now for copywrite infringement!
Regarding The Latest Hollywood Headline, while I agree with your personal perspective of how a “movie star” behaves in public determines whether the films that he appears in are worth seeing, I don’t believe that The General Public will be deterred from watching any film that Tom Cruise OR Mel Gibson will appear in now or in the future regardless of what’s said about them in the press. If anything, Paramount making Cruise a “free agent” could increase his financial draw rather than reduce it.
How many times have movie mags printed stories about how restrictive film studios have been with leasing out their “stars” when a rival studio wanted them to appear in one of their films? In this case, we’re talking about an actor that has brought in an average of $1 billion per film. How many other studios wouldn’t jump at the chance to sign him up for contracts that obligate him to star in even a limited number of films, like publishers have done by setting up 5-book contracts with best-selling authors like Stephen King?
Unless Paramount has a monopoly on film distribution, which doesn’t to the best of my knowledge, this could re-define the concept of Star Power in Hollywood. Remember SKG and Miramax?