Content, Themes And The Dream Factory

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I recall part of George Michael's original spat with Sony Music was triggered by his sense of deep outrage at their insistence on referring to his music, his creative output, as 'content'. Railing against what he considered to be this most egregious phrase, our George was clearly onto a loser from the get-go.

Never a great movie buff, I have not disgraced a cinema in many a year, I prefer to watch my films on EK on the basis that a) I wasn't doing anything else for those 120 minutes, just sitting in an aluminium tube five miles up in the stratosphere breathing the foetid air expelled by some 500-odd other carbon-based lifeforms b) it's not costing me Dhs35 c) I can switch off (if not walk out) any time I want. This arrangement suits me fine, given that 99% of the films on offer on Emirates' impressive ICE entertainment system are clearly total drivel. The other 1% turn out to be mostly drivel on viewing. This is not, I hasten to add, because Emirates offers anything other than the brightest, spangliest, newest films out there. Rather, I suspect, it is precisely because they do.

On the flight to Blighty last year, I watched Guy Ritchie's 'Man From UNCLE', which was a stylish, if obvious and stilted, pastiche. There were many visual treats on offer, some annoying split-frame sequences and a exhilarating lack of intelligence, plot, wit and dialogue. This didn't stop the film from being mildly entertaining, a little in the spirit of an indulgent uncle finding the clunky piano playing of a favourite niece entertaining. I must hasten to add that I do not have a piano playing niece. Drums, yes, but the ivories have so far been thankfully untinkled.

I also watched 'Bridge of Spies', a Spielberg classic in which Tom Hanks plays Tom Hanks brilliantly. Mark Rylance puts in a wonderfully understated performance as Scottish-accented Soviet spy Rudolf Abel. There are some obvious bits that make you writhe in your expensive seat and threaten to upset your tray-table, but otherwise the film is a fine entertainment that underscores the obvious fact that our system was so much better than their system and we should Be Thankful For Our Great Democracy and the values we represent which are so much more fundamentally good than the other side's. It takes, of course, Tom Hanks' great humanity to bring this point home because our guys in authority insist on behaving in the same way as their guys  in authority. But I cavil - the film is well worth watching.

On the flight back I was horrified to find, despite it being not only a new month but a new year, the film selection hadn't changed. Having watched the only two films in the whole 70 million item catalogue that didn't look woeful, I was reduced to the prospect of spending eight hours staring at seat back, talking to my wife or something even more terrible. The comedy channel on ICE, incidentally, features no comedy whatsoever unless you are a protozoic life form whose brain has been replaced by expanding foam and who considers the very zenith of humour to be 'Family Guy'. And there's no 'Top Gear', of course. Damn. Not, you understand, that I consider Top Gear to be the best thing since sliced Hovis. It just gives gentlemen of my age hope that they could become rich and famous even this late in the game.

Reduced to sheer desperation, I watched 'Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials'. It might not be called this, but I can't be bothered to Google the title. I'm probably better off not wasting your time in describing the film much at all, really, other than to note that it's utterly shite on every level. There's a great deal of running around, peppered by people shouting 'Come on' and 'Hurry' frequently. There are swathes of rubbishy CGI victims of a virus who have been turned into zombies who screech and vomit black ink for some reason. The love interest looks like an anthropomorphic egg with a wig on and the baddies are called WICKED in case you didn't know they were really bad. I made it through to the end and sat back feeling guilty and abused, a little like that feeling you get when you've eaten a Big Mac.

I tried to watch Mr Holmes, which is about Sherlock Holmes as an old person. He's played by Ian McKellen, who looks a lot like a benign alcoholic tortoise with a very big nose. He's got dementia, which was last years' Great Theme for the entertainment industry. If you'd written a book back then about someone who can't remember things and thinks family members are there when they're not, you'd be quids in, mate. The film starts with a small boy mistaking a wasp for a bee, much to McKellen's dislike as Retired Holmes is, we find out quickly, a bee-keeper. I got to the third episode of forgetfulness and switched off, trying not to feel self-importantly angry because my father died of dementia and I didn't like to see it trivialised. I failed in this.

I also tried to watch 'Mad Max: Fury Road', which didn't go so well. I'm embarrassed to tell you I watched the original Mad Max as a teenager and loved it. It was the film wot launched Mel Gibson's career, a low-budget Australian sci-fi effort which went what I suppose we'd call viral today. Looking back at the original, it's amazing how much impact it had at the time, because it's incredibly clunky and low-key. But I recall how mad and, well, just 'out there' it was. The sequel was equally brilliant, adding a huge amount of pizzaz to the dystopian style of the original. By the time Tina Turna pitched, I'd fallen off the bus: style had eclipsed content and the whole point about the original Mad Max is it was a brilliantly and stylishly told story of brutality and revenge, not just a collection of shinies trotted out like a dumb game show's glittering prizes.

Fury Road isn't even that. It's just lazy, woeful pants. The trouble is, for a work of imagination ('content') to turn into something wonderful, it needs to be anchored in reason. Even dystopia needs reason - the trick, ask William Gibson, is to warp the reason and build tottering towers of suspended disbelief on that twisted logic. There was no reason on offer in this film, just a lazy freak show that reminded me more of Duffo than Gibson's vengeful cop. I got as far as the flying car with four drummers on the back and a CGI bloke playing a flame-shooting flying V on the front bumper before switching off. I was amazed, in retrospect, at my staying power.

I tried not to let myself be plunged into black depression. Looking out at the dawning sun over the dark cloud, I was in awe. So this is the best the Dream Factory can conjure up? The greatest stories mankind can tell itself? It likely is. It's probably my fault. I'm clearly out of step with everyone else.

Thank God for the Kindle. That's all I can say...

Half Thought...

Serial on BBC iPlayer, see The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As a wayward youth (and you can be assured I was suitably wayward), I once found myself walking back from London with a pal in the dead of night. We'd been 'celebrating' and were hitching because we'd missed the last train. We got picked up by an old guy in an Aston Martin who was smoking a spliff. In all other respects he was unremarkable - friendly enough, took us up the road and dropped us near enough to our respective homes, which was kind of him.

But it did rather leave me wondering how unfair was a world where you had to be that age to own a car like that, when clearly it was a car more suited to someone my age.

I was reminded of this the other night purely because a load of programmes Sarah had downloaded from the BBC's iPlayer timed out before either of us had time to view them. And yet The Niece From Hell is jacked into iPlayer 24x7. She's got all the time in the world to consume content and wastes none of it getting about the business of being perma-connected.

It's not fair. Why don't I have all the time in the world to consume content and she does? Come to think of it, how come I don't have an Aston Martin, either...

Blag

An interesting debate on copyright and content theft on the Internet over at Charles Arthur’s blog had the effect of making me think about this stuff more than I would normally and I happened to want to put up a post last week that quoted some lyrics from a Stranglers song. With that in mind, I trotted off to try and find the publisher to ask permission. After a vast amount of time-wasting searching, which had the result of delaying my post by 48 hours, I finally found a company which appears to own the publishing rights to the Stranglers’ back catalogue, Complete Music. They have a single email address, info@complete-music.co.uk. The mail bounced.

At that point I finally gave up and posted anyway, reckoning: 1) It’s part of a larger work and a partial quotation of the original work. 2) It is used for illustrative purposes, attributed and linked back to the artist 3) Sod them. If they ask me to take it down, I will.

In this fast world we live in, where we all slap up posts on blogs that are frequently of great currency and rarely of any commercial (or even intellectual!) value, tracing down rights ownership does all seem a little redundant. And, as I found out, not easy. For instance - how do I obtain permission to quote from The Guardian? How long does it take? Surely in 99.9% of cases, by the time the permission request has been processed and granted, the posting finger has, as it were, moved on. AND the vast majority of posts have a lifetime of 24 hours before the next post comes along - so by the time you’ve granted your permission, I’ve moved on to something totally different and so have my (two) readers.

As long as we’re not distributing whole works of value and charging or distributing saleable property for free - and we’re crediting and also linking back to the rights owner, surely we’re doing enough? It seems to be impractical to impose the standard of rights/permissions regime that you would impose on, say, The Guardian, on individuals having ‘a conversation’.

And so it is: most people are perfectly happy that you quote them and link back to them. The debate, however, was triggered by Charles taking exception to the fact that a number of bloggers had ripped an entire article along with its illustrating photograph from The Guardian. If you go doing that, a link back to the source of the content would, indeed, seem redundant. But the line between acceptable use of other people’s content and unacceptable use would appear to be particularly ill-defined – and that doesn’t even touch the issue of how you could possibly enforce your rights when you’re dealing with the multi-country, multi-jurisdiction Internet.

If you look at current UAE legal practice, for instance, I think you’ll find pretty much anything electronic is going to involve high risk, a lot of court-appointed experts and a great deal of wasted time. Like two years of it.

So I guess it's lucky that we're such honest little bears, isn't it?

Pirates Waive the Rules

I've always loved that headline: it was above the first piece I ever filed in a publication, a column in Arabian Computer News - back in 1986, would you believe it.

Showtime TV has called for content piracy to be eradicated in the Middle East according to Arabianbusiness.com, that most wonderful of Middle East business focused websites. With Showtime and Orbit having a massive vested interest in the cessation of the widespread satellite TV piracy in the region, you'd have thought they'd have made a damn sight more fuss about it years ago: we were working on (successful, natch) campaigns, for the BSA, to change the region's intellectual property (IP) laws so that the ICT industry in the region could survive. I can't say that Showtime et al have been anything like as active or inventive - and calling on regional governments to do something that's in your unilateral interest is something we learned (many, many years ago) simply won't work.

What fascinates me, he who is to be moderating a session on broadband adoption at next week's Media and Telecoms Convergence Forum in Amman, is that the TV companies have absolutely nothing to sell the telcos. The telcos desperately want ready made streams of content to make their DSL offerings relevant and to build 'value for money' bundles for subscribers. The TV companies want to sell content to subscribers. But in the Middle East, the TV companies have got no reason to trust telcos to become their delivery platform and the telco's can't sell subscribers something they're already getting for free. It just ain't happenin'...

Sure, content piracy in the region has got to end. What I think might be interesting is if it ends because nobody wants the pirate content as a conseqence of our already finding something much more interesting, relevant and vibrant - the content we create for ourselves.

Will Web 2.0 rule? Or will we all troop obediently back to Desperate Housewives and game shows at $20 a month?