• Best rundown I’ve seen yet of where Apple went wrong with the release of the much-reviled Final Cut Pro X. (This issue caused NYTimes tech writer David Pogue to call me “snarkyface” on Twitter.)
• Apparently I’m the only person in Burlington, Vermont (who isn’t a city counselor, that is) who thinks giving city counselors free parking downtown isn’t the worst idea in the history of humanity.
• Steve Benen and Matt Yglesias point out that policy making is a lot easier when the institutions lawmakers work in are not broken.
• The SCOTUS yields yet another 5-4 conservative ruling, this time taking the definition of “free speech” and twisting it into a corporate pretzel. Justice Kagen’s dissent is worth a read.
• Delicious timelapse, motion-controlled astrophotography (which will be featured at the Vermont International Film Festival this year).
• All four parts of Dan Harmon’s exhaustive walk through Community season two are worth your time (link to part one). He pulls no punches about the sausage-making nature of network TV.
• What? Vermont has a toy museum? How awesome is that?

It’s worth mentioning that this blog was the runner-up in the 2010 Seven Days “Daysie” reader’s choice awards again this year. The sisters LeMay took the top prize for the second time in a row. I was shocked to have made the runner-up spot despite the utter lack of any serious blogging around these parts lately. Thanks, if you voted for Candleblog!

I’m a filmmaking fool these days, having just completed the Baruth campaign film (see it in the previous post), and now I’m deep into a short web video for an environmental start-up. Also, the Pants projects are rearing their heads and gaining some slight momentum. I hope to have something good to report on that front soon.

You must now go and vote for my SXSW panel proposal! You have to register to vote and comment, but I swear it’s really quick and easy. My thirst for hanging out with alpha nerds and rock stars must be slaked.

And if you’re not already following Emily’s Tumblr blog, you should go there now and subscribe. It’s a continuous linkdump of cute awesomeness.

And look at this crazy shit!

• Justin Bieber slowed down 800% sounds ethereal and awesome. They should have used this in Inception.
• Wil Wheaton has quit W00tstock in a fabulous way.
• This short film teaches you How to be Alone.

• 13 Ways of Looking at Liz Lemon
• Alien vs. Pooh
• A to Z of Awesomeness
• I feel certain I’ve seen this before, but everyone on the interwebz is linking to it like it’s fresh — the nerd/geek/dork/dweeb venn diagram.
• Photographic evidence of our president’s nerdiness here and here. Can Spock ears be far behind?
• The Sci-Fi Superfan Reference Manual
• Metacritic considers the best and worst time travel movies.
• The Scott Pilgrim trailer is out and it’s teh awesome.

1. I’m presenting this year, which means there’s an added level of nervousness and excitement right there. Plus I have to, you know, prepare for that.

2. A TON of Vermonters are going this year, which is awesome. I remember back in 2006 when it was just me, a couple of jerks from Union Street Media (I kid, they are my best SXSW buds) and one lone staffer from Norwich University. Now it’s a party, by jeezum crowbar! The added local social scene is awesome, but requires more social organizing.

3. Social media is actually really useful this time. Last time I went to SXSW was two years ago when I was but a Twitter noob. Now I have a Twitter list devoted to SXSWers and it’s much easier to keep tabs on folks’ comings and goings, BUT it also means that on top of all of the usual organizing and schedule-making, I have to organize my social media life. And yes, I’d like some cheese with my whine.

If you’re going to be in Austin this weekend, you can stalk me in the following ways:

• Watch this blog. I don’t know how often I’ll be blogging during the trip, but if anything REALLY awesome happens, you can bet I’ll post about it here.
• Follow me on Twitter, and consider following my SXSW10 list. It’s a group of Vermonters, awesome people, and awesome Vermonters who are at the conference with me.
• Join the Vermonters at SXSW Facebook group.
• Check out my SXSW schedule (note that these are tentative – they’re things I’m interested in attending, but I’m also going with the flow, as it were).
• Come to my talk about community media on Monday afternoon!
• And if you REALLY want to send me letters written in your own blood, shoot me an email so we can exchange cell #s.

Now I have to go pack!

With that said, here is my own list of the top ten science fiction movies of the last ten years. For the purposes of this list, I’m allowing myself a fairly broad interpretation of “science fiction” (i.e. I won’t disqualify a film for having wonky physics at work) but I’m specifically omitting comic book superhero movies (e.g. The Dark Knight) and pure fantasy films (e.g. LOtR). Movies on the list must be premised on a specifically science fictional conceit. Here goes…

09 Avatar (James Cameron, 2009). Yes, Avatar makes this list, though it’s at the bottom. It’s possible a little additional hindsight will alter my estimation of the film (moving it higher on the list or taking off the list altogether), but as a science fiction film, it’s got a lot going for it — in particular the depiction of the moon of Pandora. See my review from a couple of days ago for more of my thoughts on the film.

08 Minority Report (Stephen Spielberg, 2002). This is Spielberg’s best SF film, hands down (sorry E.T.). I think it’s underrated by SF fans because it’s a Tom Cruise film but it succeeds despite that handicap, and the supporting cast (Colin Farrell, Max Von Sydow, Tim Blake Nelson, Samantha Morton, Peter Stormare) is outstanding. It’s also one of the precious few good Philip K. Dick film adaptations out there.

07 WALL-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008). The film that (hopefully) created millions of SF fans. The message is good, the look is beautiful, the characters are charming and it’s pure SF. Love it.

06 Serenity (Joss Whedon, 2005). The decade didn’t really have a lot of space opera (outside of the woefully disappointing Star Wars prequels, two of which were in the last decade and are notably absent from this list), but Joss delivers. If I was including TV shows on this list, Serenity/Firefly would likely rate higher up as a set.

05 Star Trek (J.J. Abrams, 2009). The best nostalgic franchise reboot since Casino Royale. This was a sacred cow of mine and I thought Abrams did right by the spirit of Trek. Plus it’s balls-out action awesomeness.

04 District 9 (Neill Blomkamp, 2009). Expect great things from this Neill Blomkamp character. District 9 could have been at the top of this list had it not degenerated into a run-of-the-mill sci-fi action movie in the third act.

03 Moon (Duncan Jones, 2009). Quiet, internal, spooky, existential SF at its best. Sam Rockwell deserves an Oscar. So does Duncan Jones.

02 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004). This one often gets left off of SF lists but it’s totally science fiction. It’s also the best performance of Jim Carrey’s career. I’d like my Christmas present to be Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry promising to make more films together.

01 Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2006). I still think this is a film that’s going to have a rich SF history and may be one that serious critics are talking about decades from now. If this was a list of the most important SF films of the decade, Children of Men would be in the top slot without question.

00 Primer (Shane Carruth, 2004). I watched this film twice all the way through in the same night and then watched it with Emily the next day. The film took the top prize at Sundance and a peek at Shane Carruth’s IMDb page suggests that despite the honor, he’s been unable to make another film since. It’s a science fiction masterpiece but it’s utterly unmarketable. It does everything wrong from an audience-building standpoint. There are no stars, it’s incomprehensible on a single viewing and the real payoff only comes after much post-film cogitating. It’s easily the best SF film of the decade. It’s possibly the best SF film of all time. Too bad nobody will ever know about it.

Looking at the list, one thing becomes clear: 2009 was a pretty amazing year for genre films. Four of the top ten SF films of the decade were from this last year. And this list doesn’t include films like Coraline, Watchmen, Zombieland or The Road. It’s like it’s 1982 all over again!

Feel free to take my list apart in the comments.

Somewhere near the middle of James Cameron’s three-hour long sci-fi spectacle, Avatar, I had to pee. The “medium” Diet Pepsi I’d been nursing was making its presence known in my bladder and the matter was just becoming too urgent to ignore. So I waited until I perceived a relative lull in the narrative, took off my 3-D glasses and exited the theater for the men’s room. In the fluorescent glare of the bathroom it occurred to me that I was experiencing a little meta-moment at the movies. The film is in large part about a guy (our hero) who uses fancy technology to enter a different world and experience things unlike the things he’s used to experiencing. In the course of the film he goes into and out of that new world by connecting to or being disconnected from that technology. And here I was, under the bright men’s room light, having been disconnected from my own fantastic world by disconnecting from technology — my 3-D glasses. The real world (while also technically in 3-D) was vastly less exciting and exotic than the one playing out in the room down the hall from me at that moment. After relieving myself, I went back and reconnected myself to the technology and hence to the virtual experience of the film, making a mental note about this insight so I could blog about it later in yet another virtual world.

This insight about the various layers of reality at play in the modern cinema-going experience may be about as deep an analysis as it’s possible to get out of Avatar. For while the film is at heart a morality play with political and moral messages central to its plot, the politics are overly simplistic and the morals are black and white.

Indeed, this is the primary criticism I’ve seen of the film so far — that it’s messages are trite and it’s characters and politics are simplistic. This is true, but so what? Compare the morality play in Avatar to the one at work in, say, Star Wars. Compare Avatar’s political messages to the ones at work in District 9. Does Avatar fare better or worse in those comparisons? Then look at the rest of Cameron’s oeuvre. The Terminator films, Aliens, The Abyss, True Lies, Titanic. We should know what to expect from this guy by now and it’s not deep, meaningful message-films.

Let’s be honest. Cameron isn’t Lars Von Trier. He’s a director of big budget, Hollywood action-adventure sci-fi films, but of course he’s much more than that too.

I’m reminded of that scene at the end of Die Hard when Holly Gennaro McClane realizes that the “terrorists” were really just in it for the money and she says to Hans Gruber, “you’re nothing but a common thief,” and Gruber crawls over to her and spitefully hisses, “I am an exceptional thief, Mrs. McClane!”

Well James Cameron isn’t just your common director of big budget, Hollywood action-adventure sci-fi films, he’s an exceptional director of big budget, Hollywood action-adventure sci-fi films.

On the level of storytelling, narrative exposition, yarn spinning, whatever you want to all it, Avatar is quite simply a masterpiece. Cameron has built a complete world — the moon of Pandora — and populated it with a dense and deeply interconnected system of flora and fauna and an indigenous culture that seems real (if a pastiche of various tribal Earth-born cultures). He’s also introduced human characters in a sci-fi setting with backstories and a world of their own (a world, it’s worth noting, that seems almost indistinguishable from the one that the Aliens characters inhabited in terms of technology and corporate/military relationships). A lesser filmmaker could not have gotten the audience hooked into the story of the film without a metric ton of clunky exposition and information-dumps. That Cameron was able to get us to care about the characters and stakes and still spend the last act on a giant action set-piece is simply amazing in this light. Leaving Avatar, I had learned a tremendous amount of information about a completely alien world and I never once became awkwardly aware of story exposition.

In hindsight I can see that Cameron took all of the standard expository shortcuts – he told the story of Avatar through the eyes of an untrained n00b so the audience learned about the world along with the main character (both the world of the human science/military project and the world of Pandora). He used voiceover narration in the form of a video log that said n00b was required to keep, thereby allowing Cameron to tell us things about the world rather than having to show us, which takes more time. He used a time-compressing montage during which we understand our hero to be developing his skills as a Na’vi hunter as well as developing his relationship with Neytiri. Again, in the hands of a lesser filmmaker, these tropes would have seemed obvious and clichéd. But Cameron is a master storyteller, and as a result, we audience members don’t even notice the enormous amount of exposition going on constantly throughout the film.

Cameron also lets his actors really inhabit their roles. As stated earlier, the material in Avatar is pretty two-dimensional. The only moral ambiguity present in any of the characters exists in space of their waffling over whether to choose the just and moral path or the craven and evil one. There is no middle road for any of these characters to tread. Some are unambiguously good (Jake, the scientists, and pretty much all of the Na’vi), some are unambiguously evil (Col. Quaritch) and some just need to make up their minds about it (company man Selfridge, marine pilot Chacon). Given such limited constraints on the characters, it’s impressive how real they seem for the most part. Giovanni Ribisi, for example, does a great job of playing the role of the Half Ted company man. Without many lines, he’s able to convey his moral quandary admirably well.

There are a couple of sour notes that are worth noting because they’re just so bad. The mineral that the humans are looking to obtain from Pandora (the mining of which is the cause of the central conflict in Avatar) is called… wait for it… “unobtainium.” Unobtainium is a word historically used “for any extremely rare, costly, or physically impossible material needed to fulfill a given design for a given application.” Okay, so why not just call it “Macguffinite?” Seriously, why not just make Pandora rich in gold? Why make up a mineral?

And while Avatar is much closer to Aliens than it is to Titanic in form, Cameron decided to use a James Horner-composed theme song (ala My Heart Will Go On from Titanic), crooned by Celine Dion imposter Leona Lewis, for the end credits. The Celine Dion song was easily the worst thing about Titanic but at least it sort of fit the material a bit. Here such a song is totally out of place.

It’s too bad that Cameron needs to reinvent filmmaking and outspend the GDPs of most of the world’s nations in order to come out with a film. He’s quite skilled at making these sci-fi adventures. It would be nice to see him do it more often.

Wednesday 7/15:

• Flew from BTV to PDX. Arrived at 1AM local time. Sat next to ACM sisters and brothers from Great Neck and The Bronx, NY on the plane.
• There was little food to be found anywhere near the hotel. Had to scavenge.

Thursday 7/16:

• First day of the ACM conference. Pleased to run into Elliot Margolies right away, whom I remembered fondly from past ACM events (check out his interviews with PEG luminaries here).
• Attended a panel on the Denver Open Media Project, which was the buzz of the conference from my perspective.
• Lunch at a lovely Vietnamese place with Spine.
• Following the conference I met up with my (ex girl) friend Deb for drinks. Spine joined us after he got out of work. (Note: most of my old friends here have become athletes — planning for marathons and triathlons and talking about running/biking half of the time.)
• Ended the day by taking in the new Harry Potter film by myself (Bear elected to stay in), which was surprisingly good.

Friday 7/17:

• ACM day two. The morning session was about building sustainability through documentary work. It was an inspiring panel and I came away with lots of notes to try and implement at VCAM.
• Got interviewed by Elliot for his afore mentioned interview series. Talked about videoblogging classes at VCAM, social media outreach and New Media Office Hours.
• Lunch with Spine, Carolyn and little Jolie at an Ethiopian place.
• In the afternoon I went to a (literal) nuts and bolts presentation on video engineering. I left early because I was losing steam and not getting much out of it.
• Bear and I attended the Hometown Video Awards, at which Bear accepted RETN’s Overall Excellence award. We were seated at the same table with Bill Nolan, author of Logan’s Run.
• After the awards, We avoided the inevitable karaoke. Bear went back to the hotel and I hooked up with Daniell from Telvue and Forrest from Manhatten Neighborhood Network. Thus began my long evening with ACM 2.0 folks — the young guard of community media — comprised of Denver Open Media whiz kids and 20 & 30-something staffers from NY, MA and OR. A hotel room at the Ace Hotel in downtown PDX (coincidentally where I’m typing this post right now) was our locale, and as Daniell said the next day, what happens at the Ace Hotel stays at the Ace Hotel (but of course, I have video).
• I made it back to my hotel at 2AM or so and learned there was a shooting nearby and that Snoop Dog was apparently staying at my hotel (these two events were unrelated as far as I know). Spent 30 minutes relaxing with some ACMers in the lobby before crawling into bed for a short nap before morning.

Saturday 7/18:

• The tension between old guard ACM and the new young turks was palpable at the morning session on open source community media centers of the future, but the moderator (Tony from Denver Open Media) was really great at threading that needle (though his co-presenters were less diplomatic). There is some understandable fear of technological change from traditional CMC folks and some reluctance to embrace a new model of organizing staff and resources — particularly a model that so fervently eschews traditional relationships with technology. It may take some time to sink in, but the DOMP folks “get it” and some older guard folks just don’t quite yet… but they’re coming around.
• The 2nd session I attended was on copyright and creative commons. The presenter was funny and smart, but the information was mostly review for me.
• The keynote luncheon was a panel and I got some good leads there on possible relationships for VCAM to foster and I really think we should have a presence at NAMAC in August.
• Hooked up with Spine in the afternoon and picked up XJ3 and prepped for our excursion to a big outdoor rock show featuring Andrew Bird and The Decemberists. It was beautiful.
• We followed the rock show by heading to a bar where a friend of Spine’s and XJ3′s was celebrating her 40th birthday. I saw a few folks I’d met on previous trips out here and had some yummy mixed drinks.
• We ended the night at a fries cart where I randomly ran into my friend Craig from Amherst Community Television. I enjoy bumping into friends in other cities. It makes me feel connected to things.

Sunday 7/19:

• Slept in, playing catch-up on lost sleep from the previous couple of days.
• Went to brunch with Spine at a great place called The Tin Shed. Best veggie gravy and biscuits ever. Went shopping in a little bohemian district of boutiques and comics shops.
• In the afternoon we met up with XJ3 and Susan at an outdoor theater-in-the-park performance of the classic Trek episode Amok Time. We had great seats and I shot some video, which I’ll post later (it’s on a HD at Spine’s). It was a crowd pleaser. We met up with my old friend Laura there and made plans to reconvene at her place in SE PDX that evening.
• Laura and Adam hosted a lovely summer evening dinner of gazpacho, berries and greens with lots of yummy beer. Deb, XJ3, Spine and some of Laura and Adam’s neighbors enjoyed the cool summer evening together in the back yard. We called it an early evening because Spine had to work the next morning.

Monday 7/20:

• Slept in again (ah… vacation) and spent the day in St. Johns where Spine’s house is. Wandered the village a bit and made lunch in Spine’s kitchen. Read the first volume of Y The Last Man (purchased the previous day).
• Drove Spine’s car into town to meet Spine and take the train downtown to a showing of Moon with XJ3. It was excellent — better than expected even.
• Post-film dinner and discussion was fun and delicious. Said goodbyes to XJ3 and entreated he and Susan to visit Vermont soon.

Tuesday 7/21:

• Today Spine is having his bathroom redone so I left the house with him in the morning and I’ve been spending the day in downtown PDX. Thinking about a matinee, depening on start times.
• Bought a copy of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (finally) and read more than half of it at Powells.
• Our evening plans remain unknown.

I’m taking the red eye home tomorrow night. It will be good to be back in Vermont, despite the despicable weather there this summer (all the more annoying in comparison to Portland’s dry, sunny, breezy summer). See you All back east!

• Attend the national Alliance for Community Media conference
• Visit with new and old friends
• See The Decemberists and Andrew Bird play an outdoor show
• See the movie Moon
• Attend a live theater-in-the-park performance of the classic Star Trek episode, Amok Time. Yes, you read that correctly.

Does that sound like a perfect week or what?

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