I think I’ve just stopped buying CDs. The digital rights management Sony appears to be including on their new CDs more closely resembles an aggressively invasive virus. Rootkits are serious business, even if this one isn’t designed to hand control of your computer over to an attacker (which is what most rootkits are designed to do). The fact that Sony would even play around with a technology designed to attack your system is appalling, and absolutely not worthy of support. According to the DRM virus creator’s press site, even independent labels are using the rootkit virus; beware of any CD released by Upstairs Records, as well as Sony BMG and EMI releases. Upstairs Records is distributed by Universal; for added safety, steer clear of anything released by Universal as well.

The scariest thing about all this is that independent labels have signed on as well. Previously, the lack of copy protection was yet another reason why it felt good to buy a CD from an independent label. But back in 2002, Arts & Crafts put out a pressing of Broken Social Scene’s You Forgot It In People with DRM. To this day I haven’t been able to rip the MP3s off the CD; I had to borrow a friend’s CD, thankfully without DRM (an earlier pressing), and rip the MP3s off her album. I even posted about this before, only to have Jeffrey Remedios from the label email me, asking for an address so he could send me a new version of the album without DRM. I haven’t heard anything from the label since.

That was just Cactus Data Shield, a fairly old DRM technology; if indie labels start using viral techniques to protect their music, then as far as I’m concerned, all bets are off. It’s not worth the time or effort to erase your malware from my system; I’ll just wait for the cracked version and download the MP3s, specifically so I can avoid giving you any money. If that means your artists starve and you go out of business, fine; you should’ve thought of that before you threatened to fuck around with my property.

Pitchfork can occasionally (or often, depending on your level of hipster bitterness) miss the mark entirely when it comes to music criticism, but there are also the occasional moments when they get it totally, completely right. If you were like me and spent half of high school listening to bands like Go Sailor, Heavenly and the Crabs, then Twee as Fuck is one of those moments:

“In all honesty, its about time the rock kids got their forward-looking tear-it-up moment: the indie world of the past decade has been far too content to strum its way comfortably along, going nowhere. But one side deserves the other, and there’s every chance that during the next few years we’ll need more of that homespun pop�not professional bedwetters like the Decemberists, but more of that proud, decentralized underground. If you’re young and starry-eyed, here’s your chance to get in ahead of the game: Grab a cheap guitar or a cheap keyboard, a four-track or a boombox, and make what you can. Someone, somewhere, will love you for it.”

(or, I swear this will be the last time I write about that damned movie)

With a domestic gross of about $20 million, Serenity has about met Universal’s box office expectations but fallen short of nearly everyone else’s. CHUD has a good wrap up on what Devin Faraci calls the Browncoats’ five stages of grieving. And in effect, that’s what the past two weeks have been for many diehard Firefly fans: a period of grieving. Because after a financial performance like that, there’s little chance that Serenity will receive a sequel of any kind. Add to that a certain finality in the movie itself—suffice it to say, it’ll be hard to continue the franchise the way fans of the series once imagined—and you have the recipe for a decent burial to what might have been a decent science fiction franchise. Well, that’s the way things go sometimes, and in many ways Serenity is more than the Firefly fanbase should have ever hoped to expect. So chalk one up for the good guys.

What’s interesting, though, is the story of a man in Vancouver, Washington, who gave away 320 tickets to a screening of Serenity. Faraci makes a good point here: “Your duty, as a fan, is to enjoy the film. Maybe bring in a friend. But that should be it, and you should never feel that you’re letting a film or a filmmaker down because you only recruited fifteen people.” In fact, much of the discussion over Serenity’s release seems to deal with how many times a fan’s seen the film, or how many people they were able to convince to go—not just because they thought it was a great film, but also because there was the perception that if they didn’t work hard enough and feed enough dollars into the machine, then Serenity would be the end of the line. That’s it—no more. As anyone who’s paid any attention to the plight of a cancelled show can attest, it’s very hard to tell dedicated fans, “no more.”

There’s a Whedonesque thread about the Vancouver man. I haven’t read the whole thing because, let’s be honest, I’m afraid of Joss Whedon fanatics. But the basic substance of the discussion is that one guy sees a problem with one person paying so much to get people into the theatre because the money could be better used elsewhere, and everyone else is arguing that the guy did the right thing. On the surface, this seems like an extremely troublesome discussion for some of the reasons Faraci describes: namely that once you get to that level of fandom, you’re practically proselytizing. Whether or not the people on the Whedonesque boards get this or not, I don’t know, but to the rest of us there’s something undeniably discomforting about this sort of promotion. In fact, various reactions I’ve seen to the efforts of the Browncoats suggest to me that the overall effect of the rabid Whedon fans may have been to put off potential viewers rather than encourage them.

I loved Firefly the series, wanted it to come back to some network other than Fox, and was euphoric upon the news that a Firefly movie was being made. But I’ve only gone to see the movie once. That’s what I do; I go see movies once, perhaps twice if I know a bunch of people who missed it the first time I went. I find the idea of dragging all my friends to see it faintly embarassing, because I know a lot of them won’t find it to their tastes; to pretend otherwise is stupid. And I’m not going to go see the movie seven times because I frankly don’t have the money and energy to do so, and besides, why should I if I don’t feel like it?

Like it or not, these sorts of tactics skew the box office results even more. Yes, Serenity’s second weekend dropoff was better than most other sci-fi films. But that’s because there was a concerted effort by Browncoats to fill seats on that second weekend, not because word of mouth had spread and convinced other people to go. The way this industry works, you need broad appeal to get anywhere, and when rabid fans decide to go to six or eight screenings to up the dollar total, it’s simply more evidence that Serenity does not, in fact, have that broad appeal.

One more thing and I’m done. The hard-fought campaign to fill seats by any means necessary is the dark side of Serenity fandom, but there is a silver lining as well. Before the movie was announced, and even during pre-production, there was an alternate solution proposed: new episodes of the show could be funded through presold DVDs or even subscriptions, thus creating a dependable revenue stream and bypassing the networks entirely. As things currently stand, this isn’t a viable option; the amount of money needed to produce even one episode of Firefly is high enough that you’d need to guarantee a lot of DVD sales. And yet, that Washington man standing outside the movie theatre giving out tickets is part of the same philosophy, that one’s own dollars can contribute directly to a show or movie’s production. Both are examples of a form of patronage rarely seen in the television or cinema world these days; not even cable channels like HBO are so direct in handing audience dollars over to the production of content. The frustration in the Firefly community over the movie’s less-than-stellar returns is in part frustration at the inability of the current system to cater to their specific needs. If capitalism is a democracy of dollars, then think of the Firefly fanbase as the vocal minority who voted for the runner-up. Is there a way to meet their needs through a more direct form of patronage? Can these people, who obviously want to see more adventures with the crew of Serenity, literally support an artist and his works? With Serenity, they’ll never find out. But perhaps, one day…

The Tom and Jerry era is truly over. Broadcaster Tom Cheek, who is and always will be the voice of the Toronto Blue Jays, died this past weekend after a 16-month struggle with brain cancer. I first found Cheek not through the many games he called for the Jays—he called play-by-play for 4,306 straight games, beginning with the very first home opener at Exhibition Stadium—but through the team history and memoir he penned shortly after the 1992 World Series win. In lavish and loving detail, he wrote about his early radio experience, the path that led him to the Blue Jays, and the seventeen years of triumphs and defeats since then. The man had innumerable insights into the inner workings of the team, from the way a rookie George Bell would order lunch (not knowing much English, he’d point to the picture of fried chicken on the menu) to Cito Gaston’s reluctant acceptance of the manager position. More than any other person in the team’s history, Tom Cheek was the Blue Jays; he knew everything about them, full stop. I don’t really follow the team any more, but even I know Tom Cheek is a legend that will be sorely missed.

SNAKES ON A PLANE

Beaks: One of those films that you’re working on right now is… well, it’s called Pacific Air 121—

Samuel L. Jackson: Snakes on a Plane, man!
Beaks: Exactly.
Jackson: We’re totally changing that back. That’s the only reason I took the job: I read the title.
Beaks: Snakes on a Plane! That’s everything!
Jackson: You either want to see that, or you don’t.

Roger Ebert responds to a reader’s criticism of Flightplan, whose plot apparently falls apart upon further consideration. Ebert’s response: if the movie doesn’t start to fall apart until after you’ve left the theatre, and does a good job of entertaining you while you’re still inside, then it’s doing something right.

Funny, you could say exactly the same thing about Jodie Foster’s last movie, David Fincher’s Panic Room.

And now I’m gonna waste all your time with a review of Serenity, a movie I expect nearly none of you are interested in seeing. Feel free to leave the auditorium.

Still here? Good. There will also be spoilers.

Now that I’ve scared all of you away, let’s begin. Contrary to popular belief, if you haven’t seen Firefly, the late and lamented Joss Whedon television series upon which Serenity is based, I actually think you’ll enjoy the movie more. Of course, if you’re a raving lunatic Joss Whedon fanboy/fangirl, that’s a different matter, but I tend to put that sort of behaviour up there with hand-crafting little Tori Amos dolls to sell at her shows. But if you’re a fan of the show and yet able to see Whedon’s work somewhat objectively, I think you’ll get the worst deal of them all.

Not to say Serenity is a bad movie; it’s probably the best scifi film this year, and probably would be even if there was more competition for the title than the third Star Wars flick. By all accounts, it’s a well-executed and polished B-movie. Which is precisely the problem if you’ve seen the show; Firefly’s entire existence was founded on the idea that the Star Trek template had grown stale and was no longer worth watching. In its place, Whedon took several steps to distance Firefly from the usual scifi template. The main cast was a mercenary crew, not a military crew or a part of an organized fleet. The technological utopia of Star Trek was replaced with a more incremental model, where technology remained with the wealthier planets and frontier worlds had to do with horses, carriages and food rations. The ship was no miracle, and would break down at a moment’s notice. Even the small things—the shakycam CGI effects, the skewering of hackneyed clichés, the banjo music—spoke to a new template that wasn’t fashioned from the whole cloth of Star Trek and its successors.

Serenity, by and large, dropped this. It also dropped a lot of character backstory and even seemed to forget the events of episodes from the original series; much of the movie’s first half essentially rehashes “Objects In Space,” with the same arguments about River’s future coming up. Take a close look and Serenity looks a lot more like your standard scifi film than Firefly. The CGI shots are far steadier (an interesting choice, considering how enamoured of the shakycam style Whedon was), the camera movements are far more “arch” (to use his term; again, Whedon’s talked about avoiding showy or superfluous camera movement), the characters are far more one-dimensional (the price you pay for shifting from TV to cinema, alas) and the pacing far more straightforward and action-oriented.

The end result is not quite a movie version of Firefly, but rather a more conventional science-fiction film wearing a Firefly facade. There’s a lot of obvious expositional dialogue, a lot more straight takes where there shouldn’t be (River’s reaction to Simon’s questions about Miranda are a good example of the right take on events) and various issues that are poorly and inadequately explained. Mr. Universe is the most glaring example of the latter; he’s the closest Serenity comes to a character-as-plot-device, there solely to serve as a placeholder until needed for a crucial plot point at the end of the movie.

Finally, the endgame was thrilling but the goal was atypically heroic and epic. While the new insight into the history of the Reavers is a welcome addition to the backstory, the revelation that leads to the final showdown is also an odd choice for a Firefly plot. One of the biggest strengths of the show was that the crew was barely able to survive, let alone expend any energy on doing the Right Thing; as a result, the crew most often took the easy way out rather than the heroic way out. This is a nice antidote to the Star Trek syndrome where the Enterprise is the only solution to every single problem in the universe; the Serenity crew are, indeed, tiny ants on the giant swirling ball of mass that is humanity. To have them play the pivotal role in unravelling the central conspiracy of the film—one that will have major repercussions throughout the Alliance home worlds—is very unlike the show.

So, in essence, Serenity fails as a direct extension of the Firefly franchise (which is not to say it fails as a film). You get the sense that Whedon compromised his original vision in order to make a movie that would play well to both the initiated and the newcomers alike. As the low ratings of the television show attest, this is not necessarily a bad thing—something even Whedon will admit to. And for someone used to dealing with the smaller scope and more luxurious timeframes of television, Whedon did an admirable job in distilling Firefly’s essence into two hours of action. But it’s obviously not the same beast we’re dealing with.

This is only slightly more legitimate as a criticism of the film as the charge that a movie adaptation is less than faithful to the book upon which it is based, and should probably be taken with a similar grain of salt. In any case, a good movie, though absolutely not the best of the year (there’s them fanboys and fangirls exaggerating to holy heaven again).

Even if you’ve been following the ongoing catastrophe that is the aftermath of Katrina, you might not know exactly how bad it still is down there, even though the Bush administration is congratulating itself on getting relief down to New Orleans (though not in an organized fashion, or in nearly enough numbers, or being at all close to restoring a semblance of order to the city).

The media, long unwilling to toe the party line or rock the boat when it comes to the administration’s many failings, has finally broken ranks. Crooks and Liars has a number of illuminating clips, including CNN’s Anderson Cooper excoriating Lousiana Senator Mary Landrieu; Paula Zahn shocked to hear that FEMA director Michael Brown had only just learned of the refugees in the New Orleans Convention Centre; and perhaps most frightening of all, utter meltdown on Fox News’ “Hannity and Colmes” from Geraldo Riviera and Shepard Smith, both practically pleading on their knees for the refugees of the Superdome.

And then there’s the whole Kanye West thing, which is really just a testament to how fucked up things are, that he not only seems serious but that we wonder if he could be right. And lest you get away with thinking things are much better now that a truck convoy has driven past the Superdome, Louisiana’s WWL-TV reports that New Orleans is still a ghoulish nightmare:

After several days in the street with little water and less food, people around the convention center began imagining that the storm was somehow a vehicle for ethnic cleansing. One black man insists that authorities want everyone corralled into the convention center – not to facilitate an orderly evacuation, but so police can ignite the gas and blow them up.

“They want us all crazy so they can shoot us down like dogs!” a woman shouts.

Already I’ve heard people talk of the possibility of riots in other cities if the current state of affairs continues. There’s still no idea of how many people might still be in New Orleans or how to deliver aid to them, let alone evacuate them; no one has a clue what the death toll is, or how long it will takee to rebuild, or even IF it makes sense to rebuild. And now the tide is turning; where once was shock and horror, there’s now nothing but seething anger and outrage.

The gold standard post on Metafilter, and arguably the post that defined the shape of Metafilter as we see it today, was the September 11th thread. With its frantic mixture of up-to-the-second news, rumour, speculation and reaction, it displayed for all a phenomenon everyone in North America must have gone through in microcosm, in their living rooms and their offices: a group of people struggling to comprehend catastrophe.

Since then, there have been other such posts—the blackout of 2003 was probably a lot of fun for anyone who actually had power. Unfortunately, another such moment is on its way, and the effects will be more devastating than just a couple of days without power. Hurricane Katrina has been upgraded from a Category 1 all the way to a Category 5 in the space of three days, and the mayor of New Orleans ordered a mandatory evacuation—an unprecedented move because of the difficulty, especially for those without transportation, of getting out of the city before the storm. Metafilter readers are offering shelter to anyone who needs it, perhaps the most obvious shade of the 9/11 thread. People have started joining Metafilter for the express purpose of asking for a couch to stay on.

Someone from the government offices handling the levees in New Orleans advised television viewers to take an axe with them to the attic if they have to bunker down, because in all likelihood they’ll have to chop their way out after the flooding. Because 20% of domestic oil production passes through New Orleans, oil prices have already shot up to over $70 a barrel, and are likely to continue their rise in the coming days. The more dire predictions suggest that when it’s all over, New Orleans will simply cease to exist, crushed by a resurgent Mississippi River, diverted around the city for so long. Nearly everyone expects the city to be 20 feet deep in water come Monday, heavily polluted because of leaked tocins from destroyed industrial facilities. The National Weather Service in New Orleans is saying “most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks, perhaps longer… power outages will last for weeks… water shortages will make human suffering incredible by modern standards.” And then there are the casualty projections: one source guesses 50,000 dead, one million homeless.

Up-to-the-minute updates on the Wikipedia entry on Hurricane Katrina.

Cripes. At least he got to see the first copies of his book, but cripes. I had no idea. A message from his wife.