putting the j in jjosh

One of my favorite blogs, and the first "portal" (a la boingboing, metafilter, etc) I ever came across is waxy.org. It’s a bit tech-y perhaps, but I kind of love that…over the years he’s been pretty consistent with updating his links to interesting stuff, but not so consistent at posting blog entries. Fair enough, the links are great fun, and the blog posts would be fun when they showed up.

But now he’s trying to post daily(?!) and he’s turning out some good stuff. For instance, he’s got a great post crunching some data concerning Academy award screener DVD’s and pirated copies of movies that show up online. The graphs are fun, but the gist of the post is that more of the Oscar-nominated films than ever are available as DVD-quality pirate downloads, but that they don’t tend to be Academy screeners.

Interesting. Mark, Laura and Lila were visiting last weekend, and when, in the name of research, we downloaded No Country For Old Men, the quality was pretty amazing, and the film seemed to be all over the net. Lila loved it.

Waxy mentions that a lot of the pirate copies are due to overseas Region 5 DVD’s, or R5’s…as Waxy says: 

These DVDs transferred directly from the film source were intended to help them compete with pirates by providing high-quality retail copies of films at the time of the film’s release. Instead, it’s created a huge new method of acquiring films before screeners are even released.

check the definition of R5’s here, at Afterdawn. This sure seems like a weird way to try and defeat the pirates, doesn’t it? Seems like it would help them more than hinder them. I wonder if some massive pirate cartel has a man on the inside at the MPAA, doing their secret, dark bidding.

In the future where anything that can be copied will be stripped of value, anything that cannot be copied will become more valuable. I can see how this will work with music, where the performance will become something to pay for, something that can’t be replicated. But what’s going to happen to films? I suppose the cinema experience can’t really be replicated…although giant tv’s and surround sound are doing a pretty good job.

Also microwave popcorn.

I have this hazy memory of New Year’s Day 2008 and it’s about 3 in the morning and we stumble back to 1806 Lamont St, and Gillanders asks me if I’ve heard of Li’l Wayne. And I have, but just what I’ve been reading online about how he puts out a ton of material, and people like Sasha Frere Jones are geeking out over him. I haven’t actually heard any of his stuff.

Gillanders plays me some tracks, and some are just o.k., but some are mind-buggling.

li’l wayne – la la la

[audio:lil_wayne-lalala.mp3]

So basically Li’l Wayne is a kid rapper, and then gets mad skills, gets pumped, grows dreadlocks and starts dropping masses of tracks on the internet, do I have the story right? He has some quote somewhere about how "they’re always leaked anyway so I figure I’d do the leaking"…kind of like Radiohead with In Rainbows. He hasn’t released an official album in 2 years, but he’s flooded the net with tracks to download. And I guess if you’re just giving the tracks away for free (and aren’t Danger Mouse making some kind of Grey Album) no one minds who you sample?

li’l wayne – help

[audio:lil_wayne-help.mp3]

I’ve been downloading his stuff, and there’s so much! I need someone to go through it all and pick out the really great tracks for me, but I realize that the only person who can find the Li’l Wayne that I like is me. But there’s so much…Vulture tries to help, but I don’t know if I agree with them…even if they do contribute the best description of his voice, saying he sounds like he "just crawled out of a bong"…

Juno – C

How exactly did Juno get nominated for an Academy Award? I know everyone keeps talking about the "Little Miss Sunshine" effect, but c’mon! Was anyone else as underwhlemed by that film as Maxine and I were? Indie by the numbers. Some good stuff in there, but sort of underwhelming overall. Maxine really didn’t like the character of Juno — said her (the character’s) voice and tone seemed very unreal. 

There’s a good piece in the Voice about a new Romanian film that just came out, and the writer uses it as a jumping off point to discuss the recent spate of pregnant films (Juno, Knocked Up, Waitress) and talk about them as very basic fantasies…

I’m not doing the piece justice, you can read it here.   

Before Juno came out, when the buzz started and all that Diablo Cody stuff was floating around, I thought it was really going to be something special, but yikes. I just don’t think Jason Reitman has a good sense for comic timing, or for interesting directing. Though he’s been nominated too, hasn’t he. Don’t get me wrong, there were some funny moments, but overall the film fell flat. 

Far funnier were the Michael Cera and Jason Bateman press junkets for Juno (they get better as you move down the page). Why wasn’t the movie as funny as these small pieces of improv?

I confess I did like the Kimya music though. How come those songs weren’t nominated? Nothing for Kimya, one song for Once (which had some amazing songs) and 3 for Enchanted? Well, to be fair, I haven’t seen Enchanted. Yet. I kinda want to, not sure why, and can’t help myself. We’ll see how it goes.

Every year I like the Oscars less. At least this year there were lots of fantastic films they couldn’t ignore like No Country and TWBBlood…