Minor Multi-Faceted Movie Rants

The BBQ Pit
1

Meddling producers and other assorted scum at the studios piss me off. I recently saw I Am Legend at the theater. The point where the writers were told to radically depart from the source material they were adapting to adopt an “audience friendly” ending is blindingly obvious.

The last 10 minutes of this otherwise darn good movie sucked warthog ass as a consequence. It wouldn’t have been a problem if the movie people hadn’t tried to tack on MEANING to the developments at the end. They built up a main character with incredible determination and drive, with nice touches of real weaknesses and coping strategies, who is able to continue to work toward a goal even when the world has basically ended and he is completely isolated, and then

supernatural bullshit pops up out of nowhere, his painstakingly gathered research notes and samples are summarily destroyed, and only the “magical” serum — which should be presented as the product of one man’s obsessive hard work, dammit — survives to save humanity.

Forced or out-of-tone endings don’t work well artistically, and audiences don’t always like them. The original ending for 28 Days Later was hopeful, but the audience reaction to that was so negative that Boyle filmed a new, and in my opinion, superior ending that followed the logic and tone of the film better. Children of Men managed to have both religious notes and an ambiguous ending that offered some feelings of hope, and both of these felt integral to the plot instead of tacked on after the fact.

The other part of this rant is one I’ve been saving up for a while. The MPAA and associated international organizations can kiss my hairy brown pucker. I almost don’t mind the warnings about what types of display you can legally do with a purchased or rented video or DVD, though I do get a bit pissed off when I can’t skip or fast-forward past them. Some kind of notice is reasonable in that showing a movie in certain circumstances might not occur to the average person to be a breach of license. And the parameters what’s allowable are also relatively reasonable.

I do mind being treated as a potential criminal when watching a movie that I paid between 1,200 and 1,800 fucking yen to view in the theater. The stupid commercials they used to show featuring the crying girl (sorry, couldn’t find a video link) were so ridiculously overblown that they were actually almost entertaining:

(While piano music in a minor key plays gloomily in the background, a cute 20-something girl clouds up, pouts prettily, and a single tear flows down her cheek, turning black as it drips and reflects the image of a skull. Then the message comes up saying that the movie industry/the girl is going to die because people are illegally copying movies. You don’t want to kill the pretty girl, do you, you soulless intellectual-property stealing monster?)

They still suffered from the logical flaw that if you were watching the commercial you had almost certainly paid to see the movie, making things nice and legal, thus gutting the point of the ad. If you were going to steal the damn movie, you probably wouldn’t be there in the first place.

The most recent ones have explicit exhortations to inform the authorities about criminals who might try to record a movie during viewing. These are still-frame storyboards with crude artwork and a message that makes wartime propaganda posters look almost subdued and refined in comparison. The frame featuring the guy with the video camera, leering disgustingly as he records while an hysterical woman protects her young child from the sight of this horrible criminal is especially tasteful :rolleyes: At least they didn’t make him look like a foreigner.

The warnings are absolutely ludicrous when Japan gets movie releases later than every major industrialized nation in the entire fucking world. When I was waiting to see Lord of the Rings, the only places that got a release later than our official theatrical release were Egypt, India, and Bulgaria. Nothing against those places, but they aren’t the second (or third, depending on whether you count the EU as one entity) largest economy; they aren’t even close to being in the same economic ballpark as Japan.

The Philippines had a limited release three months earlier than the Tokyo premiere, around the same time as Guatemala! You could see it in Thailand by the end of December, 2001, while the real release date in Japan wasn’t until March 2, 2002. And premieres here are only a two- to three-day teaser, brought out a week or more before the official release. They’re supposed to build anticipation through word of mouth and media reports featuring those early movie goers. Part of the culture here is that you must find out what other people think before you make a decision on something.

Who are you going to bootleg Japan releases to, the Kalahari Bushmen? The Yanomami? They’re possibly the only people who wouldn’t have the official DVD release by the time you’d get a J-bootleg out.

Adding the insult of late releases to injury, even with months of lead-time, the subtitles for the first theatrical release of LotR were so bad that my wife (then girlfriend) who speaks quite good English turned to me a few times to get confirmation that her WTF?! reactions weren’t just due to her misunderstanding something. People actually created a petition to try to make sure the same dumb cunt didn’t screw up the next one. Unfortunately, the petition didn’t work.

It’s a stinking wonder how major Sony Pictures movies somehow (ahem) manage to be released here practically on the same day as in the US. Hard as it may seem to believe, Spider-man was almost as unknown in Japan as Frodo, so it’s not like there was a big built-in audience for seeing the web slinger. And even hugely successful franchises like the last Star Wars movie are released in Japan dead fucking last behind the rest of the civilized world. The Republic of Macedonia? Really? The former Albania is more in touch with mainstream entertainment than Japan?

Maybe the reason movie companies are so concerned about bootlegging is that DVD prices in Japan are between 2 and 4 times higher than the US, and even higher than the official, sanctioned Hong Kong releases. They have to pay around ¥3,800 for a regular release, upwards of ¥10,000 for a special release or box edition, and bootlegged versions wouldn’t have Japanese subtitles or dubbing.

Not that any Japanese I’ve ever met has so much as heard of peer to peer programs, DVD cracks, or even legal multi-region DVD players. But even if they did know about technology that circumvents the usual release machinery, they almost certainly wouldn’t use them because if I’ve learned one thing by living in Japan it’s that in spite of an average 6 years of universal English instruction most Japanese can’t either speak or read English worth a damn. An English language release, even with English subtitles, would be next to worthless to the average Japanese.

Argghgh, the concentrated stupid of the Japanese movie industry burns like superheated sodium! Despite the glares similar to that mentioned here from people who are already seated when we get there, I count myself lucky when we enter a theater late enough to miss the commercials, but early enough to see the trailers. Lately, I reserve theater-going for the few movies I really, really want to have a theater experience with, and that subset gets pared down more when I remember all the pre-movie guilt trips and the danger of last minute dreck being spliced into the film to spoil the ending.

Tangent:
This kind of bullshit makes me want to boycott the entire industry rather than support them with my money anymore. I’m hoping that one of the outcomes of the writer’s strike is that someone creates a direct-to-download or micro-patron studio, similar to what some independent musicians have been doing in the last few years. I’d rather give my money more directly to the people who create things, rather than the cunting middlemen frantically trying to keep themselves relevant.

I have, in fact, donated money to people who write things I like (blog: Daring Fireball, webcartoons: Something Positive, Queen of Wands) and have bought branded merchandise, books, CDs and DVDs made from several different works that originally were released only on the internet. It’s where things are going, but some media are being legally hemmed in by people with more money than sense.

Especially when — dudes, get a fucking clue — people would practically throw money at you if you got it even halfway right. Anybody remember how analysts scoffed that iTunes couldn’t possibly make money off stuff that was already available for free? How many billion downloads have they reached now?

2

Well, you do get electronics before everyone else…

3

Well yeah, but where else in the world can you buy squid flavoured cheese at the snack stand?

4

When you opted for the country with the freshest used schoolgirl panties, you forfeited the right to complain about how stale anything else is.

5

Yeah, the dubbing and subtitling is pretty atrocious over there. One that stuck out for me was the Nicholas Cage vehicle Snake Eyes a few years back. In the movie, an assassin has been hired to kill someone, without realising that he’s been set up to be killed himself. The original dialogue ran something like:

“Did he know it was a suicide mission?”
“He does now.”

The Japanese dubbing butchered the second line to “Hai.” {Yes}, which made no sense whatsoever, since the erstwhile assassin had no idea he was a patsy set up to take a fall.

6

I think this will be possible in the future but difficult. The ‘cost’ of creating a blog or cartoon vs the cost of creating a downloadable movie are quite different.

7

We just saw “I Am Legend” this weekend, too, and I think we were picking up on the same religious bullshit that you were, Sleel. Sure, she can be all “I’m an omen/messenger from god/whatever,” but you have to build what actually happens on some kind of proper platform, not just her really, really wanting something to be true.

And the shaky camera has seriously got to stop. It’s not cinema verité, it’s cinema nauséa.

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Do they? My several strolls through Akihabara have left me with an impression of a Fry’s Electronics from two years ago that is four times more expensive.

9

I got that from a documentary on the Travel or Discovery Channel that said Akihabara district get things “years” before other countries. They showed some things that I’ve never seen before, but electronics aren’t my bag anyway, so if you’ve been there and its not true, then maybe they were stretching it for dramatic effect. They did show a really futuristic 5000 dollar talking/heated/sanitizing toilet though. :slight_smile:

10

They certainly have things that are not sold in the US (and probably never will be) but that’s a marketing issue, not a high tech issue. Talking toilets, embarrassingly enormous PDAs and cell phones, inconveniently tiny laptops and USB storage drives shaped like various edibles.

11

Like groman said, they have stuff you wouldn’t want to buy, and they don’t get other gadgets that other countries have had for ages. The iPhone still doesn’t have an official release date here, while it’s been on sale in the US for close to three business quarters already. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that technology companies use the domestic market as a testbed for what works and what doesn’t, adapts the best and most foreign-friendly things, and then polishes them for export. Much of what’s new and “cool” in Akiba is stuff that’s so faddish that it’ll disappear in a matter of months, and is often buggy, and always overpriced to boot.

If you want a phone with a TV receiver, that can also edit pictures with nauseatingly cute characters and border themes, and that accesses the internet ghetto of mobile-optimized web pages known as iMode (for DoCoMo), then you’d be in heaven. They’ve only got about 4 handsets that can be used overseas though, and those are usually clunky and almost always do not have bluetooth. The one I’m aware of that does have bluetooth and GSM as well as 3G is a Motorola adapted for this market.

Me, I haven’t bought a new phone in over three years, and wouldn’t have switched from my old Sony, with the best predictive input function and smoothest input I’ve used yet, if I hadn’t dropped it in the toilet. The handsets have dozens of functions, but the interfaces are often so bad as to make them inaccessible unless you dig, and 90% of them are what I, and probably most of you, would classify as useless crap. The cool new thing is using the phone as a credit card, which necessitates biometric locks so that someone can’t just steal it and hack it to get access to the money. Being able to read my fingerprints isn’t my idea of a feature I can’t live without. You can’t even use these things in many places yet, though the access points first started showing up over three years ago.

The other hot thing is viewing and recording TV programs, to the point where Sony’s Bravia TV brand is being used as a selling point for the screens. Ugh. If you think TV in the US is bad and brainless, you haven’t seen Japanese TV. When I came here several years ago, the phones were way better than anything in the US. Now, they feature boring design, bad interfaces, and have more useless features than useful.

Even the best games aren’t Japanese anymore. The Wii’s fun-factor is based on the idea of interaction, but the games that have come out are almost entirely roughly thrown-together capitalizations on older games adapted to the new platform. The few games that don’t suck are mostly the original launch games developed in-house. The Wii online community is reportedly more vital outside Japan than in, which is no surprise considering that most people here aren’t even buying the things. They’re selling three, to almost four times better in the US than here.

The PS3, too, has fuck-all in the way of decent games. At the Tokyo Game show last year, there were more booths set up talking about mobile phone games (only available here; believe me, you wouldn’t like most of them) than for Xbox 360 or even Nintendo games. You’re way better off with a US version of pretty much any game console than a Japanese one because the US is where the good games are going to be coming from, by and large.

12

The Japanese are serious about their toilets, it seems. Mitsuwa, the local everything-Japanese store (groceries, manga, otaku, electronics, sushi, liquor, dubious seafood, kitchen stuff, etc.), is littered with big, colorful ads full of apparently excited rhetoric about amazing toilets. Those things are expensive, too. I’ve always been a little bit afraid to ask exactly what they do.

How far the mighty have fallen. I’ve also heard that, similar to how you described the electronics situation, Japanese-made video games get released as much shittier versions first in Japan, and then get cool stuff tacked on for their international release, and that nobody wants the Japanese versions anymore.

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If there’s something the US needs to take from Japan, it’s heated toilet seats. There is nothing bad about these things in any way.

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There’s like a dozen different heated toilet seats at my local Home Depot for a couple hundred $. I personally wouldn’t take one for free, maybe a cooled toilet seat, but definitely not a heated one. Sweating is quite possibly one of the last things I want my ass to be doing in the bathroom :slight_smile:

15

Most of them just have a bidet (often separate “front” and “back” sprays) with an adjustable strength, and a seat heater. Fancier ones will have a built-in fan with charcoal filter, and I’ve seen one or two with a warm air ass-dryer. The basic ones usually run around $600–1,000 and vary mostly on manufacturer, I think. I’d have to check if I wanted to know for sure, and frankly, I couldn’t be arsed. (I love UK slang sometimes :slight_smile: )

Yeah. When I went looking for more good RPGs for my wife, I found out that the Final/Ultimate Mix versions of Kingdom Hearts, released for the US, had better voice acting, more stuff added, sublevels and other content, and were generally all around better than the original Japanese version.

I don’t get the whole region coding thing with games. The powerful platform-makers could probably iron out the licensing mess that sprang up because of a segmented market, but they haven’t. There’s no technical reason to restrict markets that way, and if they just made games universally playable by default they might actually sell more copies. Normal people will still wait for localized versions of their games, assuming you can’t just do the localization before release. Only hardcore otaku types will want to play the Japanese version of the game.

I mean, I can function in Japanese on a normal level (i.e.: less than literary language) and I wouldn’t want to deal with something as complicated as an RPG in Japanese most of the time. I played through much of Ocarina of Time in Japanese a few years ago, and learned a bit doing it, but no way would I have been willing to do that if I didn’t already know the language pretty well. I like having access to the original dialog in cut-scenes though, so my preference would be to use subtitles for those, with no dubbing.

I got the Japanese version of the Xbox 360 for Christmas (Elite! Did I mention that I’ve got, like, the best wife ever?) because generally the games are compatible one-way; the Japanese 360 will usually play the US games, but the US one won’t deal with the Japanese games. I don’t know the technical reasons, but I’ll bet that some of it has to do with text encoding issues. Some of the Japanese game publishers also seem to have enabled the region coding, whereas most of the US publishers haven’t bothered.

One cool thing I’ve found is that the language of the game changes depending on the language set as the default for the system. If I change the language to Japanese, Beautiful Katamari has Japanese dialog, if English, it shows English. Obviously this is easier with mostly text-based games, like Katamari and not all of them are likely to be system-aware. I haven’t been able to try any games with lots of voice acting to see if they’ll select different audio tracks based on the language setting. My suspicion is that some games already do have localized audio included.