Every week my browser gets cluttered up with tabs for stuff that I stumble across and figure I might be able to use as a Question of the Day or a WTF Thought for the Day or grist for some other post. And inevitably, I end the week with most of that material unused. But there’s no reason to let this stuff go to waste: I can still share it with you, for your amusement, and start the new week with a clean slate.
Herewith this week’s leftover links, in no particular order:
Science Fiction Teaches You How To Create A Male Sex Slave
“Again with this Southwest shit, sir?” Yes, sir: but this is just about their lying, scumbag business practices. (Kevin Smith on the Southwest Airlines debacle)
Cut … all change at Oscars as winners are given just 45 seconds to say thanks
Martin Scorsese on the Difficult ‘Shutter Island’ Shoot: “It Was Too Much”
European theaters threaten to not screen ‘Alice in Wonderland’
Movie Marketing Madness: Shutter Island
Exclusive: George Lucas Directing Drastic Red Tails Reshoots
Matthew Macfadyen: ‘I do have a good eye’
How to Trim the Oscars to a Cool 30 Minutes
Wall St. Sets Its Greedy Eyes on Shaking the Silver out of Hollywood
J.K. Rowling faces another plagiarism suit
‘Funny Or Die’ leaps to TV in new HBO series
Gibbs: President Obama “Would Love” To Appear On Daily Show, But Not Colbert Report
‘Father of Rock Criticism’ Paul Williams Stricken with Early Onset Dementia
James Cameron to Write Avatar Novel
FlashForward’s good/bad news: More show runners, fewer episodes
The coolest sci-fi home theaters ever: Beam us up!
G.I. Joe 2 Won’t Fix Things That Aren’t Broken
Kristen Stewart Says ‘Twilight’ Role Is Harder Than People Think
The funny thing about the JKR lawsuit is it’s really not a new suit. This author’s family has been trying to sue Rowling for 6 years, and it’s never gone to court because they can’t prove she’d ever read “Willy the Wizard.” In fact, if they can find anyone who has read it, it’d be a miracle. They’re trying to stop Bloomsbury from printing and releasing anymore copies of Goblet of Fire because “Willy the Wizard” is also about a wizard who competes in a wizard competition and wins.
Wow – don’t they know that you can’t copyright ideas? It doesn’t matter how many wizard contests, wizard trains, wizard chess matches, wizard flying games, etc, feature in Willy the Wizzard – the fact is that their expression is entirely different in the Harry Potter series, the writing style is entirely different, the plots are entirely different – even if JKR had happened to have read the book (doubtful) her use of the ideas themselves are entirely different, and original. They haven’t got a hope of winning.
I live in semi-rural Colorado, south of Ft. Collins, so I have to ask: in what markets are movies being exhibited in theaters 3 months after their release dates? Daybreakers didn’t last 3 weeks anywhere from Boulder to Cheyenne. And Avatar is don to 2 screens at most at any multiplex – and even then only because one 3D and one 2D presentation.
These people should go to TVtropes.com and see how useless it would be to copyright fictional ideas. Everyone would be using everyone right and left and the whole artistic process would shut down from the legal fees alone. It would be like Dicken’s “Bleak House,” where a lawsuit over a will is fought for so long that the whole estate is eaten up by legal fees.
I can’t help but find it funny that professional writers like Esther Friesner and Terry Pratchett–who also wrote wizards in school long before the Harry Potter books came out–have generally found better things to do than to try and sue JKR. Perhaps it’s yet another example how them who can do and they who can’t sue…