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This was on Saturday:

I wasn’t planning on writing anything else here until after the holidaze, but Annette, Will, and I went to see Avatar this afternoon and I felt compelled to write some thoughts before going off to bed.

Before I get to the (potential) spoilers, let me say this:  I enjoyed the movie quite a bit– perhaps not as much as Will and Annette, but still quite a bit.  It’s certainly worth seeing in the theater, preferably in 3-D and in an I-Max theater.  It looked absolutely fantastic and that in and of itself made the whole thing worth it.  Though one problem I have with the 3-D is that I wear glasses, and I have to say I don’t think the glasses over the glasses thing works that great.  I’m looking forward to the not so distant future in which the glasses are not necessary. Go and see it, you’ll be glad you did.

That said, I’m not sure this was a “great” movie or this generation’s Star Wars or whatever other hyperbole you want to apply.  I think the main problem/limitation I saw in the movie is that is completely derivative of so many other movies over the last decade or so.  More on which movies– along with many MANY spoilers– after the jump.

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This evening, Annette and Will and I went to see a special showing of Where the Wild Things Are, which was a fundraiser for the very excellent 826 Michigan. It was a fantastic event.  We were at the Michigan Theater far too early (5:30-ish) because it was a sell-out and we wanted to make sure that all of our ducks were in a row.  There was already a good 40 or so people in line all waiting for their “will call” tickets when some semi-official person came out and told the crowd that no one with a cell phone that could take a photo would be admitted.  My plans to take a series of still pictures of the movie from my iPhone was thwarted.  Of course, while in the theater and during the movie, I saw PLENTY of people with iPhones and cell phones, but never mind that.

Anyway, after a quick dinner, we got ourselves situated in our seats and enjoyed Michigan Theater organ music.  The movie was a sell-out, but not completely; the balcony was closed, as was the back part of the main level.  I overheard someone who seemed to know what they were talking about who said something about how Warner Brothers (the movie’s distributor) set some pretty strict limits on how many people could attend these preview screenings.  Still, I’ll bet there was close to 1,000 people there.

After some introductions about 826 Michigan, Dave Eggers and Amy Sumerton (who is the program director person for 826) came out for a little small-talk and Q&A about various things about the movie.  My favorite question was actually asked by my wife, who asked what did Maurice Sendak think about all of this.  Apparently, Spike Jonze (the movie’s director and co-writer with Eggers) has known Sendak for quite a while, and he gained Sendak’s blessing for making the movie.  Eggers also said that Sendak was involved in the process pretty much throughout, from commenting on aspects of the script to the film itself.

Then FINALLY, showtime, after a rather amusing little short film with Sendak telling a story about himself attending the World’s Fair back in the 1930s.  A short review and some very modest spoilers after the jump, but I will say this:  it’s a great, beautiful, complex movie, and one well worth seeing on the big screen.  Apparently, there is an IMAX version, and I could see that being worth the experience.

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This is amusing, though with Glen Beck and fellow tea-baggers not understanding that various governmental czars are not really “Czars,” it strikes me as rather risky.  I wonder if this will turn up on Fox as being true?

My friend Michelle B. had this on the book o’ face and I thought I’d post it here:

Besides being very true, it also seems like a pretty good example of what could be done very simply for the various movie projects I assign in classes like English 328 or English 516….

The above video is where Barney Frank asks a woman (who asked why he continues to support Obama’s Nazi policy on health reform) on what planet she spends most of her time and where he describes her as being a dining room table. As of right now, there are hundreds (thousands?) of articles out there that have headlines like “Frank fights back” or “Frank unleashed” or “Frank lashes out,” which kind of suggests in a way that he was either flying off the handle or taking some kind of risk in calling this nutjob a nutjob.

I actually think that Frank has done his political calculations quite accurately and he’s set an example for congresspeople across the country and on both sides of the aisle. I mean, what really is the chance that this woman (and other booing protesters at Frank’s town hall meeting) voted for Frank in the first place? What’s the chance that these folks would vote for him in the next election regardless of what he says? It seems to me that what Frank is really doing here (besides speaking the truth about these crazy people) is appealing to his base. Pretty shrewd, if you ask me.

I thought this was a lot of fun to read/learn about (while I should have been doing other things):  First, there’s this amazing water slide video:

This is fake, and I guess that’s kind of common sense, really. But what I liked as much and/or better was this from Juice The Blog:  Unbelievable Waterslide Compositing Walkthrough.  Yet another reason to learn more about video….

This looks pretty cool: via boing-boing, I found David Lynch’s INTERVIEW PROJECT, which is going to be/is a year-long project where David Lynch’s people (I don’t think it is the director himself) goes on a road-trip and interviews everyday people. If the first one and the promo are any indication, the “real people” in question are more or less drifters, which is pretty fitting for David Lynch’s style.

It looks like it might end up being pretty interesting, and it also very much looks like the kind of thing that might work well for something like English 121, especially as I’m doing these student documentary video projects this term. I have no idea how they’ll turn out yet, of course….

The fam took a mini road-trip to Columbus, Ohio Friday and Saturday mainly to see The Cartoonist: Jeff Smith, Bone, and the Changing Face of Comics. I personally am not a particularly big fan of Bone and/or Jeff Smith, but the complete Bone is one of Will’s favorite books, Annette is teaching it this spring in a class, and I generally like comics, though I think I like them more in theory– that is, what they mean in terms of visual rhetoric, teaching with images and words, etc.– than I do as a fan. Though the movie made me think that Bone might be something I ought to give another chance.

One of the highlights for all us was Will getting his complete Bone signed:

Smith was super-duper nice to everyone waiting to get stuff signed, and he chatted a bit with Will, noting that his copy of the 1300+ page well-worn book had obviously been read.

The movie itself was pretty good/kind of so-so, mainly because it was essentially a Jeff Smith love-fest/puff-piece. But I thought it was interesting in a lot of different ways. Smith had an extensive background in making animated television commercials, and that definitely had a major influence on his approach to comics and Bone in particular. Bone began as a self-published comic, and I suppose it still is self-published in the sense that Smith and his wife (and his wife seemed to be the real business brains behind the scenes) still run what appears to be a pretty lucrative operation.

What I didn’t realize before this movie was that lots of the independent/underground comics sold in places like Vault of Midnight in Ann Arbor are self-published, though obviously not on the scale of Bone. Which made me wonder why this hasn’t worked in conventional “words in a row” publishing; I mean, self-publishing a novel or a collection of short stories or poems is pretty much a good way to not be taken seriously, and while I know that’s changing a bit with some web sites, you’re still not likely to see a lot of self-published books even in locally-owned and independent book stores.

I suppose the same is true with academic writing and publishing.

Some of the difference seems to be in the materiality of the comic and the collecting fetish. There were many geeky 30 to 50 year old men waiting in line with Will to get signatures from Jeff Smith, only they were holding stacks of the individual issues of Bone or other Smith comics. In the movie, Smith and some of the other featured comic writers (including Scott McCloud, BTW) spoke a couple times about the physicality and “object-ness” of comics in a way that just isn’t the same with words-in-a-row books, IMO. Interestingly though, one of the ways that Bone caught on and one of the main ways comics continue to be promoted was/is the Internet.

As for Columbus proper: we didn’t get to see much, unfortunately. We had so-so Ohio “Mexican” food in a place in the Short North area, which looked like it would have been a fun place to hang out but which probably involved more “adult” entertainment (e.g., bars and stuff) than might have been fitting for Will. He did have fun in the hotel room though:

And now it’s back to a “working holiday:” stuff around the house today, commenting/grading on papers tomorrow.