Tagged: OWNERSHIP IS THEFT RSS

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  Plagiarist Gregory 11:48 am on April 26, 2010 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: adaptation, childhood, Comics (2), OWNERSHIP IS THEFT, Real Genius, remakes   

  Dept. of NOOOO!!! (A Rant) 

  “You see Mitch, I used to be you. And lately I’ve been missing me so I asked Dr. Hathaway if I could room with me again and he said sure.”

  For some reason, I normally don’t get all up in arms about remakes of beloved films, the same way I don’t have fanboy fits about film & TV adaptations of favorite books or comics. I like to view them as riffs on the original idea, making it into a sort of canonical document that can be interpreted and reconfigured for further generations. And, let’s be honest, the remake of The Texas Chainsaw massacre isn’t for a moment going to eclipse the original.

  Kent: You’re all a bunch of degenerates.
  Chris Knight: *We* are? What about that time I found you naked with that bowl of Jell-O?
  Kent: You did not.
  Chris Knight: This is true.
  Kent: Look, it was hot and I was hungry, okay?

  It’s possible that reading comics, especially at the time I started, with all the ret-conning and reimaginings and updated origin stories, planted an early seed in my brain about the possibilities inherent in updating a great idea/character/story for successive generations. And doing theatre, with its impermanence and need for immediacy and new interpretations probably fed into this. It’s probably the same attitude that led in part to me being part of a group called The Plagiarists, that make adaptation and reconfiguration part of our mission.

  “Moles and trolls, moles and trolls, work, work, work, work, work. We never see the light of day. We plan this thing for weeks and all they want to do is study. I’m disgusted. I’m sorry but it’s not like me, I’m depressed. There was what, no one at the mutant hamster races, we only had one entry into the Madame Curie look-alike contest and he was disqualified later. Why do I bother?”

  Anyway, all this is meant to defuse any perception of me as a raving purist or nostalgic old fuddy-duddy when I stand athwart history and scream “STOP!” at the group of maniacs who have decided they want to remake Real Genius. Not only is this one of the defining 80′s comedies (an era that was rife with great comedy, as I have argued many times before) it is a film of great personal value to me and many others. For an enormous nerd with social awkwardness issues, Real Genius provides a relatable protagonist (awkward Mitch), hope for the future (handsome genius-prankster Chris, Mitch’s relationship with Jordan), and roadmap for mentally healthy living (fight the man – non-violently, pick a field that fascinates & challenges you, don’t be a dick, and preserve your sense of humor at all costs). Plus, it’s funny in an offhand, not-even-trying way that recent films seem to have lost track of.

  Mitch: You know, um, something strange happened to me this morning…
  Chris Knight: Was it a dream where you see yourself standing in sort of sun-god robes on a pyramid with a thousand naked women screaming and throwing little pickles at you?
  Mitch: No…
  Chris Knight: Why am I the only one who has that dream?

  I have heard the complaints about George Lucas and Transformers and GI Joe and all the talk about “raping my childhood” and not taken it particularly seriously until now. Now, they’ve finally come for my childhood, I guess. Seriously, remake The Breakfast Club or House Party or whatever, even make a stupid sequel but leave Real Genius alone. Bastards.

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    Lucy Robinson 12:15 pm on April 28, 2010 Permalink

    i love watching GI Joe, both the cartoon series and the movie. I am hoping that they would make a sequel. :

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  Ian 2:01 pm on January 12, 2010 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: OWNERSHIP IS THEFT   

  The Madness of Crowds and an Internet Delusion

  I was struck by how the essential argument of this essay was focused through the lens of a consumer rather than the creator. Not that Jaron Lanier didn’t write about the creators of media. Just that NYT author, John Tierney spends the bulk of the article dwelling on the sad wasteland of the internet from the perspective of the user rather than the author. This kind of talk reminds of a jaundiced Rupert Murdich telling the kids to get off his lawn and quit stealing from him.

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    Plagiarist Gregory 11:11 am on January 13, 2010 Permalink

    The article is small, but still weirdly, totally wrong, conflating open source projects with piracy with re-mixing and blog culture, which are all radically different. It’s like nine arguments about twenty things all pretending to be the same. This idea that culture stopped with the internet is indefensible, unless you live in some kind of digital cave where you can only watch supercuts and listen to remixes.

    Also, once a gain, a major media source fails to address one of the primary rationales behind music piracy – that many people don’t view it as stealing from the artists, but from the record company. And record companies by now have amassed an enormously nasty record (haha) of abusing and manipulating both artists and consumers. From contracts that steal copyrights from artists to the totally artificial & engineered rise of Limp Bizkit, not even mentioning the amount of just plain crap they try to stuff onto an album with one hit single, major record companies have been breaking every single social contract they can for years in the pursuit of a buck. I’m not excusing music pracy or pretending that it doesn’t affect an artist’s bottom line, but the fact is that the music industry as a whole has acted so badly for so long that the public, especially the music-saavy consumer who would buy the most music, is unmoved by seeing them fail.