Unfettered Blather

Just to jump on the bandwagon, here are my bold predictions for 2008.

GAMING -
Microsoft will continue to release special editions of the X-Box 360 that will cost more than a regular edition but not come with anything worth the extra $50. Gamers will buy them in droves.

The X-Box 360 Arcade will be discontinued. The price of the 360 and 360 Elite will drop by $50. The PS3 will not drop due to Sony’s reluctance to lose anymore money on the console. The Wii will probably not drop in price since it will still be cheaper than any of its competitors.

Wii total sales will surpass the X-Box 360 in America. Not much of a prediction since it already leads in Worldwide sales.

In 2008, Sony will finally hit a higher per month sales average of PS3’s than the 360. It will not be enough to get them second place though.

Christmas 2008 will be Sony’s year, as people who held off to get a 360 and a Wii should have them. Also, as Blu-Ray continues to win studios consumers will finally begin to pick sides, making the PS3 attractive at last. Blu-Ray will end up selling more PS3’s than the PS3 will sell Blu-Ray.

Wii shortages will continue for the first quarter of the year, with demand and supply finally levelling off around or after March. Sales will continue to go strong even as demand decreases and supply increases. The Wii will outsell every other console January through October. The holiday season is the only time it will be vulnerable.

Sony will regret sacrificing the gaming market to push Blu-Ray, especially as they find out that victory will be through the studios and not through hardware sales or consumers. Expect more shake-ups at Sony this year.

PC gaming will take a major hit as current generation consoles enter more homes. Companies will finally figure out that very few MMORPG’s are successful and so one of the last bastions of PC gaming will slowly subside until only a few established brands remain. Expect PC games to get even less respect from retailers than ever before.

TECHNOLOGY -
High Definition will continue to be pushed, but will still not see mass market acceptance. The format war between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray will add to this problem. HD TV’s will continue to drop in price and pave the way for widespread acceptance in 2009. Thank an early adopter, you’ll owe them big time.

Blu-Ray will win the format war. Toshiba will not rise to Sony’s challenge and the widespread studio exclusive acceptance of Blu-Ray will be the death knell of HD-DVD. The format war will not be decided by consumers who will be more than happy to watch movies on DVD’s until the format war is resolved. Instead, Sony will use its considerable muscle and resources to strike deals until HD-DVD is simply pushed out of the market.

Microsoft will have to make some major changes to Vista, and consumer acceptance will be lower than any other OS they’ve ever released. Even non-tech savvy consumers will balk at the system resources Vista demands. Despite all these problems, Apple will still be largely ignored by most PC users.

Netflix will be bought by Blockbuster. Blockbuster may also make a move to buy Hollywood Video again. Regardless of what happens, the video rental market will continue to decline as more cable services offer movies on demand at low cost and at the same time DVD’s are released. What few advantages Blockbuster has left will finally be stripped away as more people adopt DVR technology and cable services strike more advantageous deals with movie studios. Blockbuster will post a big loss.

ENTERTAINMENT -
The Writer’s Strike will be resolved in the first three months of 2008, but no one will be happy with the deal. Despite being the least culpable, writers will be villified while the celebrities who make the real money will come off smelling like roses and the Writer’s Guild, which is more of a culprit than the actual writers, will be mostly overlooked. The WGA and the media will attempt to make studio bosses into the bad guys, but people will continue not to care.

The Writer’s Strike will have a drastic impact on how we watch TV. Many viewers will find alternatives to watching regular TV shows and simply not come back. Ratings will not recover and the industry may finally look to changing the outdated model of “seasons” as a way of producing TV shows.

2008 will have a glut of reality TV even after the strike is over. This will be the worst year ever for reality TV.

Studios will get tired of celebrities in crisis and careers will be ruined much faster than ever before as everyone finally gets tired of people who make too much money being willing to throw it away for stupid reasons.

Studios will continue to lament how movies don’t make any money while the stars will continue to demand greater residuals and cuts of the profits in addition to their regular salaries. Despite this obvious problem, writers will get most of the blame this year as a result of the strike and nothing substantial will be accomplished.

Movie theaters will see a big decline in attendance this year as more homes get High Definition sets and people can actually get a better experience at home than most theaters can ever hope to provide. Look for a big push for new technology to give theaters a better picture and more studio seating, but consumers won’t care.

POLITICS -
The media will finally have to admit the surge is working and things are looking better in Iraq. George W. Bush will still get credit for none of it though and conservative pundits will froth at the mouth over it. Unfortunately, Afghanistan will continue to decline, partly due to the media focus on trying to make Iraq look like a failure.

Michael Yon will get snubbed for a Pulitzer despite giving the best war coverage of any correspondent in the last 30 years.

Congress will get another major shake-up as voters decide they’ve finally had enough. Some major incumbents will finally lose office. Neither party will have significant sway after the 2008 elections as voters finally get fed up with partisan bickering. Ironically, the end result with a closer margin in congress will mean more partisan bickering and they’ll repeat all of the same mistakes of the current and previous Congress.

Despite being everything conservatives have asked for, Fred Thompson will not get the nomination for President. He will be considered and may even get the VP slot for whoever ultimately wins.

Voters will say “Enough!” to divisive candidates and Clinton and Huckabee will be jettisoned midway through the primaries. Clinton supporters will throw a massive hissy fit.

Obama will win the Democratic nomination and prove to be much more popular with swing voters than conservatives will admit. Even if Obama is defeated this year, he will become a formidable opponent in the 2016 race, with this election cycle providing him much of the experience to become a political juggernaut in coming years. Unlike John Kerry, Obama will not fade into the woodwork if he is defeated.

I never could get into Ally McBeal and this latest show Brothers & Sisters, that my wife has been watching, isn’t really grabbing me either.

I simply do not get Ms. Flockhart as an object of desire. I have no problem with skinny women, but she is just too skinny. She has the body of a ten year old girl. I don’t find her attractive, I want to buy her a sandwhich, perhaps get her a blanket, and give her directions to some people that can help. She’s cute in her own way, I’m not making any insinuations about anorexia or the usual snide contemptuous comments, I just don’t buy her as someone that men would fall at her feet for.

This is something that seems pretty common in a lot of Hollywood entertainment, where you have a primary female protagonist surrounded by more attractive, more interesting, and/or more intelligent women than her. Yet somehow they want me to believe that this less engaging woman is somehow more highly sought after. My suspension of disbelief just won’t stretch that far.

Some might say “Hey, it’s not all about looks”. I’d agree if Ms. Flockhart played characters that didn’t drive me over the edge in frustration. Ally McBeal was an exercise in recovery from self-inflicted wounds. I never understood the appeal of a show about a woman who continually makes bad choices and then acts as if life is so unfair. Maybe it’s something a lot of people could identify with? Now she is playing the part of what Hollywood sees as a typical Republican pundit. Droll, boring, and hypocritical. Ok, she’s nailing the part, but the character is not interesting at all.

Perhaps it’s just a clever campaign by Hollywood to show us that there are better women in the real world around us all the time. Naw. They’d never be that clever.

Go here for unintended irony

I love this article because either the person who wrote it is oblivious to the irony or they are very clever indeed. There is an interesting parallel between the top salaries of actors on a TV show and when those shows entered their final season. Of course, most shows don’t end until the ratings drop or they go for so long that one of the primary actors doesn’t want to do it anymore.

The funny thing about Hollywood is that people rarely ask what their talent is worth, but rather try to get what they can regardless of the long term outcome. Nevermind that asking for more money might just be another nail in the coffin. It reminds me a little too much of the dotcom days when programmers with little experience and dubious qualifications could ask for outrageous amounts of money, and would often get it. I’m sure we all remember how that turned out, right?

I read constant complaints from the industry about how expensive it is to make movies or television shows anymore. Well sure, if you’re paying anyone a million per episode that incurs quite a cost right there. If you’re largest expense is paying your stars, that’s your problem right there.

Who am I supposed to feel sorry for anyway? If you get even $100,000 per episode that is still going to be around $2.6 million per year. Not bad money for any line of work. I don’t doubt that people in entertainment work hard, but how exactly do they justify that kind of pay? How many people would accept so much less to basically work in a fantasy all day?

At the end of the day I don’t care how much the industry pays, but I’m pretty deaf to their cries of high production costs. I’m also pretty deaf to actor’s complaining about only making a paltry million per year when their are starving actors out there more than happy to fill in for them. I’m also pretty unsympathetic to actor’s who demand outrageous salaries and then find themselves out of work.

Something happened and I didn’t even realize it was happening. You see, I don’t get Cartoon Network these days and I also don’t geek out and follow every little message board and tidbit of news even on the things that interest me.

I knew that Justice League Unlimited was in its final season and I even knew that it was airing it’s final episode. What I did not know until yesterday was that the next series, the Legion of Super Heroes, was not going to be a continuation in any form of what the fans call the DCAU (DC Animated Universe). Like Teen Titans or The Batman, it stands alone in its own little pocket of new super hero stories based in the DC Universe. I am not commenting on the quality of the show, but simply lamenting that something wonderful and overlooked in animation has come to an end.

The DCAU started with the original Batman cartoon series started in 1992. It was an attempt not only to modernize the Batman animation franchise but also to capitalize on the interest generated by the new movies. After Batman had his run we received Superman, and more followed. All-in-all we had two distinct Batman series that were linked by the same continuity, Superman, Static Shock, Batman Beyond, Zeta Project, Justice League, and Justice League Unlimited. The actual number of shows depends on who you talk to as some consider Superman to have had two series and some people think everything Justice League related is actually one series. Regardless, we’re talking multiple series spanning a period of 14 years that had an interlinking continuity and regular cross-overs. Even the original Batman series, despite its different art direction than everything that followed, was directly linked to the next Batman series.

We essentially had one big story that someone could come into fresh knowing only the most basic information about the DC Universe and be introduced to a much wider universe beyond the regular staples of Batman and Superman. This was so big that we had a spin-off in the form of the Zeta Project and even tapped into DC’s more ethnic Icon offerings with Static Shock. I don’t know if the goal was to cover such a wide range once Batman became a huge success, but they did nevertheless. Not only did we get the contemporary heroes, but thanks to Batman Beyond, Zeta Project, and a number of episodes in the Justice League Unlimited, we also get to see what the future holds or might hold.

This was ground-breaking work and most people don’t even know about it or really appreciate it. In 14 years and multiple incarnations, most people have probably seen a piece of the DCAU here and there, but rarely stepped back and saw the whole thing. In my opinion this was the new comic book, where we got to see not only our favorite heroes in action, but many different scenarios explored and fantasy crossovers were executed. There was creativity abound.

Yet it’s over and there is nothing that is there to replace it.

I’m not exactly crying in my beer here despite the melodramatic tone I am writing with. I will do just like I did with Firefly. Collect the DVD’s and cherish them. Except with the DCAU I can at least watch them with my children without concern about the content. Bruce Timm, Paul Dini, and others outdid themselves time and again. It’s a shame that most only recognize their individual achievements and not the grander scheme they actually accomplished. I hope that someday we’ll see the like of it again, maybe even from Marvel. That would be an awesome thing indeed.

Steve Carrell is an interesting actor to me. He’s likable enough, and he certainly has talent. He’s also one of those actors who never seems to be in anything that really interests me. Still, I have to give him his due, he’s a star who has recently arrived in a big way, and he deserves it.

Even so, I just cannot stand to watch “The Office”, the show is almost physically painful to watch, and I mean that literally. For starters, I really can’t get into the “awkward” style of comedy. It doesn’t strike me as funny, it generally comes off as sort of embarrassing, as if I wish I could leave the room on behalf of the characters involved. Not that it can’t be carried off well, just rarely.

That is but one strike against it. No, the real problem is Steve Carrell and his damnable talent. See, in the show he plays this middle manager guy who thinks very highly of himself but is actually completely oblivious to the fact that he is a complete jerk who is not respected by his employees and they appear to be able to get along just fine without him. Carrell plays this part to the hilt, he does an excellent portrayal of this character, which just makes it all the more painful.

See, I know that boss, I know people who had that boss, and I felt great sympathy for those employees. You know the kind of boss that I am talking about. Not one that got his position for their leadership abilities, but rather because they were basically ambitious enough and stood out just enough that they were somehow chosen for a position of minor responsibility. When this person became a low-level manager, instead of taking an interest in the company goals and their employees, they instead begin running their group like their own little fiefdom, convinced that the serfs they routinely step on actually respect and like them. Nevermind that their employees snicker behind their back and feel that this person is an impediment to their job.

Now, I’ve had some bad managers in my day, but I have never had that guy, I just saw other divisions and groups that did. Their employees were miserable, failure was constant, and despite this the manager kept blaming other groups or their own employees. Not only did they not realize they were the root of the problem, they were incapable of making that realization because it would require a level of introspection that they did not have the capacity to do.

So when I watch Steve Carrell’s excellent depiction of his character, all it does is dredge up bad memories of worse days. Maybe it’s funny to laugh at the situation you’re in, have been in, or maybe can’t imagine actually being real. To me, it’s just painful. Ironically, Carrell’s performance is so good that it largely what makes the show unwatchable for me.