Also discovered in an old Dartmouth Jack-o-Lantern: this parody of a comic strip in the campus newspaper circa the year 2000. The actual strip was called “Badly Drawn Girl,” written by a student named Mindy Chokalingam. I wonder whatever happened to her…
(sadly, I can’t remember which staff member came up with that)
Just spent some time looking through old issues of the Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern, a college humor magazine I wrote for way back in the day. I created a lot of stuff for them, but for some reason I never put my name on my favorite thing of all: Rejected Smurfs (Volume 1)
It was only here you could find such unsung heroes as…
And the dynamic duo of…
Not to mention my personal favorite…
Why aren’t the smurfs blue, you ask? Because we couldn’t afford color ink.
Bonus (re)discovery:
My absolute favorite headline from our campus news parody issue…
(That was written at a time when students — specifically those on the college newspaper — treated every decision by the administration, no matter how insignificant, as an assault on the school’s ever-sacred fraternities and sororities)
I’ve recently added my thoughts on The Nest Thermostat, the new Redbox Instant service, and the first of a multi-part post on choosing the right DSLR camera.
And when I say “caught up” I don’t just mean on the last few episodes. I mean I’ve caught up on ALL of them. (Well, all of them since the show returned in 2005, that is.)
Warning: There are some broad spoilers below.
Note: This is something I originally wrote for another site that I’m reposting here…
The 2012 election might be upon us, but there’s still one aspect of the ’08 election that’s bugging me. A LOT has been said about how Obama won that election — the Palin factor, the ’08 economic collapse, McCain’s mysteriously missing balls — but not much has been said about HOW Obama got in the position to win in the first place. Like how, you know, the Borg helped elect him.
No, I’m not talking about the collective of singularly-minded young people who stormed across the nation, assimilating the masses in the name of hope & change. I’m talking about the actual Borg from Star Trek. Specifically, I’m talking about this Borg…
That’s “Seven of Nine” on the Star Trek series Voyager.
Jeri Ryan is the actress who played her. Before Voyager, Ryan’s biggest claim to fame was finishing as the third runner up in the 1990 Miss America pageant (she was Miss Illinois) — an honor that quickly got her a plum job dealing blackjack at casino-themed charity events. After landing the “sexy cyborg” role, she immediately became a fan favorite and the subject of much tabloid fodder.
When Voyager ended in 2001, super-successful TV writer/producer (and I’ll presume Trekkie) David E. Kelley created a part just for her on Boston Public.
People who follow Illinois state politics already know where this going. So here it is for the rest of you:
Just a typical day in the comment section of almost any film-centric website…
I always cringe a little when I hear people say anything to effect of “Hollywood has run out of ideas” or “there’s no originality in Hollywood anymore.” Not just because they’re lazy criticisms typically uttered with disdain, detachment, and smugness (and by someone who acts like they’re the first person to say it), but because it’s not even true. The film industry has never been about original ideas, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
The main formula of “Hollywood” has always been 4 parts something familiar plus 1 part something different (to give you a reason to pay for it again). That’s the way it’s been for over a century.
Case in point: 1939
When I first started writing this blog post, I wanted to examine “the greatest year in the history of American cinema.” Two years kept coming up over and over again in my searches. The first is 1939, because a startling number of films produced that year have truly stood the test of time. Here are the ten movies nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards that year: Gone with the Wind - Stagecoach - Wuthering Heights - Dark Victory - Love Affair - Goodbye, Mr. Chips - Ninotchka - Mr. Smith Goes to Washington - Of Mice and Men - and The Wizard of Oz.
Though Dark Victory (with Bette Davis, Bogart, and Reagan) and Ninotchka (a Lubitsch/Billy Wilder collaboration) have failed to leave an indilible mark on the cinematic consciousness of America, the others easily rank amongst all-time classics — movies that are constantly referenced as high points of their genre.
Now, you might say: “Exactly, Hollywood has tried to imitate those eight other films to death! So I’m right. Hollywood is unoriginal.”
Except, of course, for the fact there’s a stunning dearth of “originality” on that list.
1. Gone with the Wind – based on a novel.
2. Stagecoach – Both a genre film and an adaptation of a short story ”The Stage to Lordsburg”
3. Wuthering Heights – Novel.
4. Dark Victory – Based on a play.
5. Love Affair – Look, an original story for the screen!
6. Goodbye, Mr. Chips – Novel (though it should be noted this movie wasn’t made by “Hollywood” — it’s British)
7. Ninotchka – An original screen story.
8. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington – Based on an unpublished story.
9. Of Mice and Men – Novel.
10. The Wizard of Oz – Novel.
So of the best picture nominees from one of the most historical years in movies, 8 were adaptions of preexisting material. But you know what? I’ll knock it down to 7, since the original story for Mr. Smith was never published. So there you go. 7 out of 10, and no one has ever called Gone With The Wind or The Wizard of Oz unnecessary adaptations. And as for Love Affair… It may be a classic, and it may be original, but you know what’s considered even more of a classic? The 1957 remake: An Affair to Remember.
Also noteworthy about Love Affair, its success led to two more films starring the same leads (Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer) being produced soon thereafter. Hollywood did that a lot in the pre-home video era. To satisfy the audience’s desire to see certain actors together again, when they couldn’t make a sequel they’d just pair them up again and again in other (very similar) films. In other words, the golden age of movies was filled with a lot more You’ve Got Mail’s than Sleepless in Seattle‘s.
If Hollywood had as much of a habit of doing that today as they did back then, what would the internet call them? Faux-quels?
A lot has been said about the controversial Mormon practice of baptizing holocaust victims after they’ve died, so I won’t say anything more on the matter. I’m just going to print this “conversation” that came to me in a dream; a conversation that I think sums up the feelings of those who support the practice (and allowed me to see this issue in a much better light):
I don’t have a podcast. I’ve only been a guest on one a couple times. But I listen to a lot of them, and if I have one piece of advice for would-be podcasters it’s that…
Listener fatigue is real. You really can have “too much of a good thing.”
I know what you’re thinking: ”But Eric, podcasting is cheap and there’s no restriction on length or posting frequency, so I’ll just put as much out there as possible and let my listeners pick what they want to listen to!”
First off, if that’s what you’re saying… you’re a liar. Every podcast of yours that isn’t getting downloaded will send you into a tizzy. If you don’t believe me… well, just ask anyone who’s been podcasting for a while.
I know I’m not the first person to do this — in fact, I’m probably closer to the 2 millionth person — but I thought it’d be a fun experiment nonetheless. On my recent honeymoon to Italy, I took pictures of some locations with both a DSLR and an iPhone 4. Can you tell which is which?
Burano
Venice
How do you surprise someone who wants to be surprised? That’s the problem I faced proposing to my girlfriend. If I did anything out of the ordinary, she’d be suspicious.
I knew I wanted to do it around New Year’s — which would give us enough time to have a summer wedding — but as that day grew closer, I still found myself without any good ideas. Should I use some of my old childhood magic skills to make the ring “appear” somewhere unexpected? Should I use some tricks I learned in film school to do it with a heartfelt video? At the time, I was just getting into the tech consulting biz. Should I do something high tech?
Three days before my target date (Saturday, Jan. 1st), we went out for sushi. My eyes kept wandering onto a TV in a corner of the restaurant. And it hit me. I pictured us sitting down to watch a Netflix movie at home. Mid-way through the flick, a character would get down on one knee to propose to another, and that’s when I’d get up, walk to the TV, reach into the film, and pull the ring out of the movie world and into ours. And then I’d propose with THE RING THAT WAS JUST IN THE MOVIE. No way she’d see that coming.
I had no idea how I’d do it exactly, but I knew it’d require a little bit of magic, a little bit of filmmaking, and a little bit of techie know-how. As soon as I got home, I started working on the following plan:
On Saturday, when I’m at her place, we’d get a disc in the mail from Netflix. But what disc? It’d have to be both a movie that’d realistically be on our Netflix cue, but also something with a half-decent proposal scene. I rented a bunch of DVDs, scanned through a bunch of movies, and settled on…
Leap Year, starring Amy Adams. It was a romantic comedy that came out within the last year that neither of us saw in theaters, so it could realistically be on our Netflix cue. It had a proposal-like scene in the 1st ten minutes. Perfect. I’m not going to wait two hours to do this thing. Also, Melissa always falls asleep twenty minutes into every movie we sit down to watch together. I mean always. I had to beat the clock.
I’d rip open the envelope, pop the disc into the DVD player, and we’d sit back to watch the movie. Ten minutes later, Amy Adams and Adam Scott would be on the TV, dining at a super-fancy restaurant, where Amy thinks Adam is going to propose to her (Spoiler Alert: He’s not, but Melissa doesn’t know that). So basically, their situation is the exact opposite of ours in every way.
Adam reaches into his pocket, pulls out a small jewelry box, and places it on the table.
Amy looks down at the box and lights up. This is the moment her character has been waiting for her entire life.
And it’s at that exact moment the DVD will start to get glitchy…
After a moment of skipping, the DVD will freeze on the image of a jewelry box on a restaurant table.
Melissa will think the DVD is scratched. I’d say “let me take a look at it.”
Then, as I reached behind the TV to “fix” it, Melissa will see…
…my hand and arm, reaching into the movie, grabbing the jewelry box, and pulling it out into the real world.
“I found the problem,” I’d tell her. “This isn’t for Amy Adams. It’s for you.”
At least that was the plan. And for the most part, that’s how it went down. Read on to find out how I did it, what went right, and what went wrong…
