Allen Holt

Day of Corporate Munging, Take Two: Disney Buys Pixar

Posted by Allen on January 24, 2006 under Movies | 2 Comments to Read

Back on December 27th, I got to talking about Disney and Pixar and the rumors that The Mouse was going to buy Pixar outright rather than simply renewing their soon-to-expire distribution deal. I had some qualms, I said:

I might be less concerned if they installed John Lasseter as Almighty Inscrutable Pixar Overlord and left them alone, but I have trouble imaginging Disney buying a new toy and not wanting to play with it.

Well, the deal’s done — Pixar is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Walt Disney Company. Steve Jobs just made himself somewhere north of $3 billion (yes, that’s billion) and finds himself the single largest shareholder in Disney (which could mean some interesting corporate synergy ‘twixt Disney and Apple, I’d imagine).

But the most important part of the buyout?

John Lasseter, the highly respected creative director at Pixar who had previously worked for Disney, will rejoin the House of Mouse as chief creative officer for the company’s combined animated studios and will also help oversee the design for new attractions at Disney theme parks.

I swear to ${god}, that sentence almost made me cry when I read it.

Not only does installing Lasseter as CCO help insure that Pixar will get to keep on keepin’ on as they have been, it also might mean a rebirth of traditional 2-D animation from Disney. Lasseter has said he’s a fan of old-school animation — might we get to see Disney return to producing new hand-drawn animated features? It doesn’t seem like it would make much sense to have two separate computer animation facilities, especially when one would so clearly outclass the other. Former CEO Michael Eisner was the oatmeal-brained idiot who decided Disney should get out of the cel-animation business; now that he’s gone and Lasseter’s in charge, maybe Lasseter can reverse that decision.

I’m sure his buddy Brad Bird wouldn’t mind. I know I sure wouldn’t.

Link: Yahoo! Maps Beta

Posted by Allen on under Web | Be the First to Comment

Seen the new Yahoo! Maps? Much more Google Maps-like, but with some nice twists: I like the real-time traffic updates and the navigation box in the top right showing a larger-scale view of the area you’re looking at. Even more impressive is the ability to click on a particular step of directions from one place to another and see that segment highlighted on the map — very handy. It doesn’t have the satellite views that Google Maps does, but what it does do it does pretty damn well.

WB and UPN: Goodbye and Good Riddance

Posted by Allen on under Pop Culture, TV | Be the First to Comment

Effective this fall, Warner Bros. and CBS are munging the WB and UPN together into one new network, to be called CW. (Yeah, makes me think “country-western,” too, but hey, they didn’t ask me for my opinion.) The best shows of each network (such as Smallville, Gilmore Girls, Veronica Mars, Everybody Hates Chris) will all wind up on CW.

I’m personally a big fan of this development for a couple of reasons. One, those two networks were something of a waste on their own, especially the terminally-wretched UPN.[1] Neither youth-skewing network ever really took off, though the WB did far, far better than UPN. Combining the networks will, as Brian said when I told him about the merger, “take the decent 25% of shows on one and the decent 25% of shows on the other and make one network with 50% decent programming.” And that’s going to put it right about on par with the four major broadcast networks — and probably a better rate than NBC.

Secondly, it means I’ll actually get Gilmore Girls and Smallville at the times they’re actually shown. As it stands right now, Providence doesn’t have a WB station at all — and we have two UPN stations. Apparently we used to have one of each, but shortly before we moved here, the WB station switched over to UPN… and the other station stuck with UPN, too. One of them shows the more popular WB shows at bizarre times after they’re done with all of the shitty UPN programming. (So will both of those stations show CW programming this fall? I wonder.)

This new network might have a chance at doing what both UPN and the WB wanted to accomplish but neither could on their own: become a legitimate fifth major network.

More Kilts, Fewer Robes

Posted by Allen on under Books, Movies, Pop Culture | Be the First to Comment

OK, maybe everyone else who’s read the Harry Potter books caught on to this fact before me, maybe I should have noticed this or thought about it more or what-have-you — Terry says she knew this somehow, but isn’t sure how or why she knows it. But I hadn’t realized that Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry is located in Scotland.

Makes sense, of course, especially when you see the mountainous landscape as represented in the movies; that’s certainly not the gentle rolling hills I have in my head as making up most of England. And that train ride from King’s Cross Station to Hogsmeade sure does take a while. It had just never occured to me and kind of threw me for a bit of a conceptual loop when I saw a reference earlier today to “Hogsmeade, Scotland.”

Sort of like when I first read that Metropolis is supposedly is in Delaware. I mean, c’mon… that’s almost as bizarre as saying that Paragon City, the setting of City of Heroes, is in Rhode Island. That’s just ludicrous, right? Right?

Seven Sevens

Posted by Allen on January 19, 2006 under Memes | 3 Comments to Read

My head, it is filled with cotton balls. Too many different thinkies battling brutally for supremacy in my brainspace. So in an effort to give the ol’ noggin some semblance of direction, I now present a slightly modified version of The Meme of Sevens, which I promised Michelle I’d do a couple of weeks back.

Seven Things To Do Before I Shuffle Off This Mortal Coil

1. Watch both of my daughters reach adulthood happy and healthy.
2. Travel extensively outside the United States.
3. Learn to speak a foreign language fluently.
4. Get a comic-book script I’ve written published.
5. Publish a book. Not necessarily a novel.
6. Attend Comicon International.
7. Get us completely out of debt.

Read more of this article »

Monday Photo: The horror…the horror

Posted by Allen on January 16, 2006 under Photography | 4 Comments to Read

When my mother came to visit us this past week, she brought with her a fairly massive number of old pictures for me to scan, color-correct and clean up as much as I could. A lot of these pictures were of her family, pictures of her mother’s and father’s families, pictures of people whose names I’ve heard but have never met–some of these photos went back as far as 1925. (I might post some of the more interesting ones here eventually.)

But the majority of the pictures, of course, were of me. And very few of them were in any way flattering.

I wasn’t the most graceful or, shall we say, well-groomed of children. To call me awkward would be much akin to calling Courtney Love “a little odd.” Because mothers are rarely accurate judges of such things, mine argued with me about this fact, of course (and believe me, it’s fact, not opinion)–she tried to insist that I wasn’t a tremendous dork, when I know damn well I was. (And yes, I am using the past tense on purpose there. Shut up, you.)

So as proof of my staggering levels of dorkhood, I’m giving you guys something a little bit different for today’s Monday Photo: instead of a picture takenby me, it’s a picture of me. This piece, snapped by my amateur photographer father in the backyard of the house in Florida where I grew up, was likely taken in 1982, when I was 11. I call it “Dork By Poolside.” I hope you enjoy it.

Review: Walk the Line

Posted by Allen on January 13, 2006 under Movies, Pop Culture, Reviews | Be the First to Comment

In the opening moments of Walk the Line, Johnny Cash (Joaquin Phoenix) gently thumbs the edge of a buzzsaw in the wood shop of Folsom Prison moments before his infamous concert before its inmates. The blade of this saw, an instrument which altered the course of Cash’s life when he was eleven years old, sums up all of the man’s struggles in one simple visual. His desire to do right by the people he loves, his desire for forgiveness and love and acceptance and redemption—those desperate wants are the thin line of a saw blade, and with every fall off the edge, the cuts run deeper.

It’s difficult to discuss Walk the Line without comparing and contrasting it to 2004’s Ray. Not only did both movies deal with roughly the same periods in the lives of their subjects (Ray Charles, obviously, in the case of Ray), but the subjects themselves were far more similar than they might have seemed from looking only at their album covers. Both Charles and Cash grew up dirt-poor in the South; both lost a sibling as a child, and both felt responsible, though neither truly was; both were revolutionaries within their chosen musical styles; both suffered through drug habits that threatened to destroy their careers as they were riding the peaks; both were shitheels to the women who loved them. Walk the Line even feels like Ray, like the second episode of “VH1 Presents: Musical Genius Drug-Addict Shitheels. From the South.”

The direction by James Mangold wasn’t flashy (which might be my only complaint about the movie, minor as that is). It felt as if Mangold was employing the “turn the camera on and get out of the way” approach to film direction, and in this case that proved to be a shrewd choice. Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon both learned to sing and play their instruments for this movie, and that work pays off: knowing that the actors were really performing the songs added a gut-level believeability to their parts that wouldn’t have been there had they been lip-synching to the original tunes. [1] That detail allows Phoenix’s Cash to feel less like an impersonation than Jamie Foxx’s Charles. [2]

Phoenix was the perfect choice to play Cash—the dark hair, the solemn set of his face, the depth and darkness that always seem to play just beneath his features, even in lighter moments. Phoenix has a gravitas to him, that particular screen presence that can’t be manufactured, and that weightiness fits the role of Johnny Cash perfectly. It wasn’t all black and heavy with Cash, though, and Phoenix lets the softer side of Cash come through, a much larger softer side than one might have expected from the man’s image and music. The Oscar nomination coming Phoenix’s way is well-deserved. Just a fantastic performance—the image of pure joy on Cash’s face as he sings on stage with June the first time stayed with me for awhile after the lights came up.

Reese Witherspoon freed herself from the breezy comedies she’s been largely confined to over the last several years and showed once again what she’s capable of when given strong material. Witherspoon’s assignment for this movie was a difficult one: she had to play a performer whose public persona was airy, theatrical and a bit silly—but more importantly, had to play the private June Carter, a woman for whom none of those words applied. Witherspoon’s natural charm makes it easy to see why Cash falls so hard for her—as does Jerry Lee Lewis, June’s two ex-husbands and, undoubtedly, most of the men who met her—but in addition, she conveys the inner strength and resolve of June Carter beautifully. She’s certainly more than earned her own Oscar nomination for her performance.

I was also pleased to note that Cash’s first wife, Vivian (Ginnifer Goodwin), isn’t played as the villain of the piece: she’s not simply the woman standing in between John and June. [3] It would have been easy to portray Vivian as a shrew, to make the audience root for John to leave her and run into June’s arms, but Mangold and Goodwin don’t go for the easy way out, presenting her instead as a woman coming to grips with the fact that she and her husband have different wants out of life. Goodwin plays pained very well; her realization that John has been in love with another woman for years was as heartbreaking for the audience as for her.

Walk the Line ends at a point which I would have imagined would have occurred far earlier in the movie: it ends with the coming together of Johnny Cash and June Carter. (That’s not a spoiler—this isn’t a will-they-or-won’t-they story. And, anyway, it’s biography. You already know they’re going to get married.) When the credits roll, the audience knows there’s still plenty of story left to tell, but we’ve know we’ve been told the important parts—the parts that made Johnny Cash the man and the musician he was. Anything more would have been crossing the line.

Technorati: Walk the Line

Double-dipping birthday wishes

Posted by Allen on January 12, 2006 under General | 6 Comments to Read

More of the never-ending January Birthday Shoutouts–two of ‘em this time, both going to roughly the same place. Happy 33rd to both The Fabulous Miss Sandy and The Fabulous Miss Rebecca. (No, neither one is a drag queen–they’re both really just that fabulous.) I may adore both of these women for completely different reasons, but adore them both I do.

The cool thing about their shared birthday? It’s not just the January 12th-ishness of it they share–they were actually born in the same hospital on the exact same day. They shared a nursery together as newborns. And they’re not even twins! Nor even related! At all! Groovy, huh? How many of you out there can say that you were nursery-mates of any of your friends?

So happy birthday, Rebecca, and happy birthday, Sandy. (And apparently, happy birthday Howard Stern, too, though he’s nowhere near as fabulous as either Sandy or Rebecca.)

Oh, how I wish this were real.

Posted by Allen on under TV | Be the First to Comment

Dammit, this credit sequence for the doesn’t-actually-exist sixth season ofAngel just pisses me off. As much as I already miss the show, thinking about what it could have been had they actually added the three new characters featured in these fake credits as regulars makes me weep with mournful frustration. It could’ve–would’ve–made a great show just that much better. Two of the characters were some of my favorites in all of the Buffyverse, and the other had some serious potential (and I’d always imagined their role would eventually be amplified, anyway).

No, I’m not going to tell you which three characters they added, though all three had appeared on Angel before. Just watch.

And (spoilery, kinda) I’m sorry, but Gunn shouldn’t have been in those credits–there’s no way he survived the big finale at the end of Season 5.