Videobloggery: Pointless Bullshit

Videobloggery: Pointless Bullshit from Tom Dickinson on Vimeo.

In this blog I discuss pointless bullshit and throw my headphones offscreen.

Videobloggery: Fanfare for the Common Videoblog

Another new videoblog. Hurrah.


Videobloggery: Fanfare for the Common Videoblog from Tom Dickinson on Vimeo.

It's rather short, but it took about the same amount of work as any of the others. Luckily some of that work is something that's going to be reused over and over.

Had some issues uploading it but I worked around them. As a result, I think the video quality is a little lower than usual. Oh well. You'll manage.

Nathan Fillion is King of this Castle

(I feel like lame puns in headlines are part of the tradition of TV reviews, and now I'm part of it)

Last night ABC premiered its new mystery show Castle, starring Stana Katic as a young and attractive but tough female detective and Nathan Fillion as the crime novelist who's brought in by the NYPD to act as a consultant while he does "research" for his next novel. Of ocurse, this "research" consists of helping solve the crimes while hitting on his partner. Good times all around.

The show's premise is strong enough to lift it above the class of ordinary procedurals, and the mystery (of the first episode at least) is twisty and turny enough to keep you entertained throughout the entire hour. However, the dialogue isn't always as witty or smart as it could be, and the supporting characters are written (and played) by the book and uninterestingly.

What makes the show stand out, and gives it a shot at being a big hit, is the charisma and chemistry of the two lead actors. The over-the-top grandeur of Nathan Fillion's performance as Rick Castle is no big shock to fans of Joss Whedon. He's as smarmy and cheesy as he was in Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, but he brings the intelligence and wit of Captain Mal from Firefly and Alex Tully of Tim Minear's short-lived FOX drama Drive, without any of the intense gravity of either of those characters. He sells the immaturity of the character well, without making us doubt that such a man-child could be a prolific author of crime novels.

Meanwhile, Stana Katic, who I know only as "Wireless" from the first season of Heroes, is suitably uptight as the genercly-named Kate Beckett, without feeling cold or unlikable. Her character seems to be getting the short end of the stick, however: she's clearly competent, but always wrong, and it's Castle's brash, sloppy intelligence that wins the day.

Here's hoping they mix that dynamic up a bit as the series progresses. Beckett complains that Castle's like a child, but he's clearly perceptive and bold enough to solve the show's mysteries. Beckett takes on the function of playing nanny to the brilliant but uncontrollable genius, like Peter Bishop to his father Walter on Fringe. That's a relationship that works well on a science fiction show, but on a cop drama like this, I hope that we'll come to see Castle and Beckett as equal partners.

I'm not a huge fan of procedurals, but I think I'll be keeping an eye on this show for a while. Even though I don't think the first episode hits it out of the park, it has the makings of a hit. I suspect that ABC is trying to do for mystery procedurals what FOX did for doctor procedurals with House: Create a show with a sense of humor and a charismatic lead actor that delivers top-notch procedural drama week after week but focuses on character drama as much as plotty cases-of-the-week. ABC failed with Pushing Daisies and Life on Mars, which brought in fantasy elements, but can the not-quite-as-bold Castle be that show? I think it can be, but I'm not sure whether it will be. The ratings for the first night were fairly strong, but nothing to brag about. Either way, I'll be keeping an eye on it.

Unfilmable? Spoiler-Free Thoughts on Watchmen

Just for the record:

Putting aside my glib and dismissive tweet, which you see above, I really disliked Zack Snyder's Watchmen not for any of these specific issues, but because it was in general an artistic failure.

It seems to me that the essential core of what Watchmen is, more so than most comics, is tied to the form of the graphic novel. So when you try to lift things straight out of the comic and plop them into a film, such as for instance trying to take the text of Rorschach's journal and make it into a voice-over narration, or trying to preserve the juxtaposition of an interview with an action scene, or trying to turn Dr. Manhattan's flashbacks into something that's coherent on the screen, you're losing the core of what made it work in the first place. It just ends up looking like any old third-rate, fairly stupid superhero movie, albeit one with a high budget.

Look at Lord of the Rings, for a counterexample. Friends of mine are aware that I'm not a great fan of Tolkien's novel or Jackson's films, but I'd call those films successful as adaptations (not just critically and commercially but artistically as well). I think that the essence of what Lord of the Rings is all about is in a very real sense tied up in its textuality, much like what I said above about Watchmen, and so trying to "faithfully" adapt it in the way Zack Snyder has "faithfully" adapted Watchmen would have been stupid. Instead Jackson made a film about the same characters, events, and themes, but he made something that was as much tied up in its film-ness as the original was in its textuality.

Can that be done with Watchmen? Maybe not. If that's the case, then a film adaptation should never have been attempted. It's been said by many, including Alan Moore, that Watchmen is unfilmable. Whether that's actually true is irrelevant, because an adaptation isn't a matter of "filming" a book. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings was unfilmable, and so they didn't try to film the book, they tried to make a movie. And in a lot of ways it worked. Zack Snyder tried to film Watchmen, and in a way he successfully did just that, and it was awful. But perhaps its a good thing that they did, because I've always held Lord of the Rings as an appropriate example of what an adaptation should be, and it's nice to have a counterexample of a movie that is an utter failure.



And that, in general, is the problem I had with Watchmen. I also had a lot of more specific problems with it, but they matter less, and most of them are either general problems that a lot of movies have (awful acting, uninteresting direction) or just specific manifestations of the general problem I've discussed above.

You'll probably go see the movie regardless of what I say, as well you should. This was my opinion; get your own. I just hope you'll check out the graphic novel first so you know why Watchmen is special, and why it's so disappointing that this movie isn't.

Skittles Experiment

Skittles recently changed its website in an interesting way. Skittles.com currently redirects to a twitter search for Skittles. This has led to people spamming Twitter with Skittles-related messages, that also contain other content, such as anti-Scientology slogans or links to a blog. But how effective is such a thing, really?

This is an EXPERIMENT to see whether this works. Please note that I AM NOT MAKING MONEY OFF OF THIS. There is no adsense on the site.

I just wanted to see what would happen if I tried to spam skittles.com. Would I be able to get lots of extra traffic? For this purpose I created a new twitter account, whyskittles. FOR SCIENCE!

8:33 PM Eastern: First tweet sent out.
8:39 PM Eastern: Nine hits have resulted from it. Hmm.
8:41 PM Eastern: Second tweet sent out.
8:46 PM Eastern: Five more hits. A couple of them have viewed multiple pages but most haven't.
8:52 PM Eastern: I got an @ reply! I replied back and included the link again. So far my stats for today is 28 visits, 35 page views.
9:03 PM Eastern: I've been spamming a bunch and it's getting results. Usually I'm lucky to get five hits a day, but so far my traffic today is 64 visits, 76 views.
9:07 PM Eastern: I haven't been tweeting since that last update, and my most recent one has fallen off the skittles main page. My current stats are 89/107, and I'm going to give it a rest to see if it tapers off.
9:13 PM Eastern: Yeah, definitely a drop-off in traffic after getting pushed off the front page...
9:19 PM Eastern: I tried a dirty trick and I made a tweet with a variety of other highly popular keywords, but it didn't work very well and I haven't gotten any new hits from those searches. Current stats 97/116

CONCLUSION
It's 9:23 and my stats are 98 views and 117 page hits. And I'm just about done. I've come to the conclusion that through pointless inane advertising, I was definitely able to bring a lot of people to the site, and a couple of those people even viewed multiple pages, but in the end, I don't think it really matters.

As I suspect we already knew, cheap tricks like this are good for some quick traffic, but what you really need to do is something that's going to keep people coming back, and the Skittles Experiment doesn't really offer that.

So, I'm officially calling the experiment over.

Feel free to post in the comments.

Videobloggery: This is the Remix

Another videoblog, this time a fairly short one.


2 March 2009: This is the Remix. from Tom Dickinson on Vimeo.

Since the term "Videobloggery" doesn't seem to be in wide usage, perhaps that should become the official title of my videoblog? Something to think about.