Marketing Geniuses

src=\”http://dunyazad.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/1188400167-hr-13851.jpg\”

The original Halloween was released on October 25th, 1978. It went on to become one of the most profitable movies ever. It was made for a mere $400,000–with most of the budget going to Dean Cundy\’s Panavision camera and to Donald Pleasance–and went on to gross over $100 million worldwide.

In its rush to remake Halloween, Dimension Films has overlooked one key element in the original film\’s success: its release date. The seasonal nature of Halloween is a lesson that even the meanest of Halloween\’s imitators learned early on. Hence, films like April Fool\’s Day, Friday the 13th, Silent Night Deadly Night, all released to coincide with a specific point on the calendar. This really only ever worked for Halloween and Friday the 13th movies because those two dates have sinister implications that put audiences in the mood for horror movies.

The folks at Dimension Films are hold-overs from the Weinstein\’s tenure at Miramax. The Miramax marketing crew was famous for its ability to garner Oscar nominations, but their record with the genre films released by the Dimension division was never very good. I mean, what the hell kind of moron releases a Halloween movie in August? And here\’s the stupid part: this is a mistake they\’ve made before. Dimension also released Halloween: Resurrection a couple of years ago. That film tanked, in part because they released it in July. When they snuck it back into theaters in October, it tanked again (in part because the folks who saw it in July had already spread the word that the movie itself sucked).

Now, I realize that getting a finished film before a paying audience as soon as possible is important to movie studios. An unreleased movie is still going to generate interest payments for the studio whether it\’s on the shelf or in theaters. But, really, this is just ridiculous. This is not rocket science.

As for the movie itself? I question the need for a remake of Halloween. I mean, there\’s not a lot to improve upon, and it\’s not a movie that requires a lot of special effects. I\’ll probably see it eventually–I see even the crappiest of horror movies eventually–but I\’m not rushing out to see it. I hated Rob Zombie\’s other two movies, so if this is more of the same, I\’m just going to have to say no…

Marketing Geniuses

src=\”http://dunyazad.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/1188400167-hr-1385.jpg\”

The original Halloween was released on October 25th, 1978. It went on to become one of the most profitable movies ever. It was made for a mere $400,000–with most of the budget going to Dean Cundy\’s Panavision camera and to Donald Pleasance–and went on to gross over $100 million worldwide.

In its rush to remake Halloween, Dimension Films has overlooked one key element in the original film\’s success: its release date. The seasonal nature of Halloween is a lesson that even the meanest of Halloween\’s imitators learned early on. Hence, films like April Fool\’s Day, Friday the 13th, Silent Night Deadly Night, all released to coincide with a specific point on the calendar. This really only ever worked for Halloween and Friday the 13th movies because those two dates have sinister implications that put audiences in the mood for horror movies.

The folks at Dimension Films are hold-overs from the Weinstein\’s tenure at Miramax. The Miramax marketing crew was famous for its ability to garner Oscar nominations, but their record with the genre films released by the Dimension division was never very good. I mean, what the hell kind of moron releases a Halloween movie in August? And here\’s the stupid part: this is a mistake they\’ve made before. Dimension also released Halloween: Resurrection a couple of years ago. That film tanked, in part because they released it in July. When they snuck it back into theaters in October, it tanked again (in part because the folks who saw it in July had already spread the word that the movie itself sucked).

Now, I realize that getting a finished film before a paying audience as soon as possible is important to movie studios. An unreleased movie is still going to generate interest payments for the studio whether it\’s on the shelf or in theaters. But, really, this is just ridiculous. This is not rocket science.

As for the movie itself? I question the need for a remake of Halloween. I mean, there\’s not a lot to improve upon, and it\’s not a movie that requires a lot of special effects. I\’ll probably see it eventually–I see even the crappiest of horror movies eventually–but I\’m not rushing out to see it. I hated Rob Zombie\’s other two movies, so if this is more of the same, I\’m just going to have to say no…

Snakebit part Deux

It seems we’ve finally settled our automobile situation, which is a good thing with my trip to Atlanta looming. I will not be leaving Felicia in the lurch. A friend of ours sold us a four-cylinder 1996 Geo Metro. We were able to sell her 98 Mazda Protege to the guy who lives across the street from us. He fixes up cars and resells them. He has a lift in his garage and is a handy guy to have around. He paid us $150 for the Protege, which, in turn, we bought for $190. In essence, we paid $40 bucks for a car that gave us 18,000 miles of life. I’m not complaining. I don’t even feel betrayed by the Protege’s transmission, which conked out just north of 200,000 miles. The Protege got us through our troubles with MY car, so I feel a certain amount of affection towards it.

My own car came out of the body shop last month as good as new. Which brings me to the latest manifestation of my automobile curse. I was shopping for groceries on Sunday and when I returned to my car, someone had keyed it. Not a minor scratch, mind you, but a deep gouge the length of the car. I just about lost it. I was in a near-homicidal rage for the next thirty-six hours and if I had caught the miserable piece of excrement in the act–surely some dumbly malicious little shit of a teenager–I would have done him grievous bodily injury and the legal consequences be damned.

But I didn’t catch him or her in the act. So far as I can tell, this was a random piece of vandalism. I don’t have any enemies that I know of. I suspect this is the Universe getting in one last dig before I fall off the radar of whatever Lovecraftian entities control the fates of automobiles.

I’ll fix this myself. I don’t feel like paying a body shop for this. It’ll be a useful learning experience.

Two years to the day…

It’s the second anniversary of this blog, and I still have an interest in it. This is a good thing. Woohoo!

For the start of year three, I’m going to be a bit more, um, activist. A couple of days ago I had an email from one of my senators. I had written to my senate delegation as part of the Human Rights Campaign’s push to defeat the nomination of Judge Leslie Southwick to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals–and, really, anyone reading this blog ought to contact their senators, too; this guy is an asshat of the first order. A couple of days after I wrote to them, I got this email from Senator Claire McCaskill:

Dear Ms. Benedict:

Thank you for contacting me regarding Judge Leslie Southwick, President Bush’s nomination to Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. I appreciate hearing from you, and I welcome the chance to respond.

On August 2, 2007, the Senate Judiciary Committee concluded its review of the nomination of Judge Southwick, and narrowly voted to report the nomination to the full Senate. Senate Majority Leader Reid has announced his intention to schedule debate and a vote on Judge Southwick’s confirmation.

I look forward to this debate because I have some concerns about Judge Southwick’s record during his 10-year tenure as a Mississippi state judge, particularly regarding his record on civil rights. I will continue to give careful consideration to the nomination of Judge Southwick, and I will be sure to keep your thoughts in mind as the issue is debated on the Senate floor.

Again, thank you for taking the time to share your concerns with me. Please do not hesitate to contact me if I can be of any further assistance.

All best,
Senator Claire McCaskill

I was not very enthusiastic about Senator McCaskill when she was running against Jim Talent last year. Although I couldn’t vote for Talent based on his voting record, I was impressed that he answered his email with something other than a form letter. I’m told that he’s a really nice guy, too. But I voted for McCaskill. The above message may very well have been written by a staffer, but it’s not a form letter. So for the time being, Senator McCaskill has put herself in my good graces. I’m also pleased that she addressed me as “Ms. Benedict,” though that doesn’t mean anything.

I should note that I also wrote to my other senator, Christopher “Kit” Bond. What have I received from his office? Silence. But then, I’ve thought Bond was an asshat for years.

Thoughts of a Diva

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Miss Oreo, lounging, thinks: \”I could kill you without a thought with the laser beams in my eyes…\”

Thoughts of a Diva

src=\”http://dunyazad.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/1187961079-hr-1369.jpg\”

Miss Oreo, lounging, thinks: \”I could kill you without a thought with the laser beams in my eyes…\”

Hit and Run

Here are some things that I’ve been thinking about this week, none of which really deserves a blog on their own.

Football: I think the Kansas City Chiefs are nuts for signing running back Larry Johnson to the new contract they just gave him. If they grind him into the ground again like they did this year, he has, maybe, a season and a half of life left in his legs. What they SHOULD have done is trade him now while he has some value. The Chiefs ain’t making it to the big show this year, so why not get a quick start on rebuilding and avoid the rush.

Social Issues: I’ve been dealing with my insurance company over coverage for my arm injury earlier this summer, and my experience with them has moved me firmly into the socialized health care camp. I was already drifting that way after watching the health care sector of the economy hold every other part of the economy for ransom. My more libertarian friends are aghast at the notion, but I’m not a libertarian because I think that there are clearly things that SHOULDN’T be left to the free market. One of them is fire departments, for one interesting example. We don’t talk about socialized fire departments–it’s all in the way one frames the debate, I guess–but if you know anything about the history of fire brigades, you’ll know why this isn’t left up to free-market capitalism. Take a look at Scorsese’s Gangs of New York for a soft-pedaled history of fire departments as criminal gangs during the early days of the Republic, or better still, dig up a history of the fire departments of ancient Rome, who would show up to a fire and stand around until the owner paid them before lifting a finger (often at fires they themselves set).

In any event, my beef with my insurance company is an example of how friggin petty insurance companies are. The amount we’re dickering over is less than fifty bucks. I don’t want to pay it–under my policy, I shouldn’t have to–and the more they want me to pay it, the more it becomes a matter of principle.

More Museum Thoughts: I neglected to mention it in my post yesterday, but I think the new extension of the Nelson-Atkins Museum looks like an airport concourse. That’s not a compliment, by the way. I didn’t see it during our trip, but allegedly, the building looks spectacular when lit from within at night.

Movies:While I’m sure that the arrival on my doorstep of Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole (1951) conciding with the Utah mine disaster currently in the headlines is purely a coincidence, it’s a creepy coincidence none the less. The movie is unusually prescient, which, of course, is why it has survived its underground existence (if you’ll pardon the pun). In some ways, it’s a film that makes me place Wilder in a continuum with Alexis de Toqueville as an outsider commenting on America and Americans rather than with his filmmaking contemporaries. And Wilder’s is a bitter commentary, at that. It’s a film that has the most in common with a cactus: it’s nothing but barbs and you dare not get close to it. The amazing thing is that the scathing commentary of American media culture isn’t the nastiest thing in the movie. I mean, we see these kinds of “big carnivals” every couple of years. The nastiest thing is the beating heart of the circus found in the amoral relationship between Kirk Douglas’s Charlie Tatum, the ringmaster of the circus, and Jan Sterling’s slattern wife of the victim. Their motives are at the heart of the American experience: these two are the dark side of capitalist ambition. Of course this film was a failure. How could it have been otherwise? Later in the 1950s, Satyajit Ray visited the set of one of Wilder’s pictures with Marilyn Monroe. Wilder greeted Ray by saying: “I hear that you’re an artist. I’m not an artist. I make pictures.” Ray’s description of the workings of the set were instructive. Wilder was Charlie Tatum, it seems, and Marilyn Monroe was his ace in the hole.

Sometimes the Sun Shines on a Dog\’s Ass…

src=\”http://dunyazad.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/1187655840-hr-13561.jpg\”

I\’ve been to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City a couple of dozen times since I\’ve lived in Missouri. In all the times I\’ve visited the museum, Caravaggio\’s St. John the Baptist in the Wilderness (pictured above), has never been hanging in the spot allotted to it in the Nelson\’s baroque gallery.

(My SO, upon entering the baroque gallery: \”If it\’s not baroque, don\’t fix it…\”)

But I\’m getting ahead of myself.

Earlier this summer, the Nelson opened their new addition, The Bloch Building, where they have moved most of their modernist holdings and where they are currently holding their special exhibitions. The current exhibition is \”From Manet to Matisse,\” a collection of paintings owned by the Bloch family (whose name adorns the building, natch). They haven\’t added any show-stoppers to the modern collection since my last visit, but I always enjoy seeing Duane Hanson\’s photorealist sculpture of a security guard, and I love, love, love Marcel Duchamp\’s sculpture of himself contemplating a chess board.

Momentary digression: Marcel Duchamp, one of the major figures in Twentieth Century art, retired from art to become a chess player. His stated reason? \”All chess players are artists, but not all artists are chess players.\” That\’s about my third favorite thing a twentieth C artist ever said, the top two being: \”Simplicity is complexity resolved,\” from mimimalist sculptor Constantin Brancusi, and \”Silence is so accurate,\” from Mark Rothko. Speaking of Rothko, the Nelson\’s Rothko seems to be degraded slightly from the last time I saw it several years ago, which is not a surprise to me. Rothko is a challenge to museum curators and preservationists because he used such crummy materials that many of his paintings are deteriorating right before our eyes. I wouldn\’t be surprised if Rothko is a \”lost\” artist sometime within the next hundred years.

The Impressionsts in the Bloch exhibit are fine, but taken in conjunction with the Nelson\’s own impressionist holdings (including one of Monet\’s water lily paintings), my opinion of impressionism continues to erode. Especially when you can turn the corner to be confronted by this painting:

This is a portrait of Mrs. Cecil Wade by John Singer Sargent, who did everything the impressionists did, minus their silly insistence on omitting black paint from their palettes, and wound up painting rings around almost all of them. This is made painfully apparent when one stands in front of the actual paintings (as opposed to seeing them in a book or on a calendar). I have a soft spot for Sargent, by the way, though not because his portraits are so dazzling, but rather because his watercolors are so amazing. As a watercolorist myself, I find that I appreciate them more than big show-piece oil paintings. The Nelson also has a Turner and a Constable, which, combined, suggest the reason that Impressionism never gained much of a foothold in England. After these two, what more does Impressionism have to offer?

Related, I got to see two more Renoirs in the flesh, so to speak, and nothing in them to change my mind about Renoir. A colossally bad artist, and I don\’t care how many calendars he sells.

Possibly my favorite painting in the Nelson is this one, by the American painter, Raphaelle Peale:

This is a tromp l\’oeil, or \”fool the eye,\” painting, intended to demonstrate the sheer hypocrisy of the practice in the American art scene of the day of painting classical nude–the title of the painting is \”Venus Rising from the Sea–A Deception\”–only to cover them with a cloth when \”respectable\” company was around. There is also an apocryphal story about the painting being intended as a prank to yank the blue nose of Peale\’s wife. In any event, it\’s up there with Magritte\’s The Treachery of Images as a summation of painting as pure abstraction.

So, we entered the baroque gallery, and lo and behold! The Caravaggio was right there on the wall. Right there! Woohoo! And, let me tell you, reproductions don\’t do it justice. Seeing the surface, the depths of the thin glazes Caravaggio must have used to get the warmth and translucency of his subject\’s skin…there\’s no way for a reproduction to capture that. Even though we didn\’t get to the Asian gallery (the Nelson\’s Asian collection is astonishing), I walked away from the museum fully satisfied for maybe the first time, because sometimes, the sun shines on a dog\’s ass.

---

And sometimes it doesn\’t, by the way. My first shot at this particular post got swallowed by Yahoo a couple of days ago. I was so steamed that I had to stay off 360 for a couple of days. Here\’s hoping this one actually sticks.

Geronimo.

Sometimes the Sun Shines on a Dog\’s Ass…

src=\”http://dunyazad.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/1187655840-hr-1356.jpg\”

I\’ve been to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City a couple of dozen times since I\’ve lived in Missouri. In all the times I\’ve visited the museum, Caravaggio\’s St. John the Baptist in the Wilderness (pictured above), has never been hanging in the spot allotted to it in the Nelson\’s baroque gallery.

(My SO, upon entering the baroque gallery: \”If it\’s not baroque, don\’t fix it…\”)

But I\’m getting ahead of myself.

Earlier this summer, the Nelson opened their new addition, The Bloch Building, where they have moved most of their modernist holdings and where they are currently holding their special exhibitions. The current exhibition is \”From Manet to Matisse,\” a collection of paintings owned by the Bloch family (whose name adorns the building, natch). They haven\’t added any show-stoppers to the modern collection since my last visit, but I always enjoy seeing Duane Hanson\’s photorealist sculpture of a security guard, and I love, love, love Marcel Duchamp\’s sculpture of himself contemplating a chess board.

Momentary digression: Marcel Duchamp, one of the major figures in Twentieth Century art, retired from art to become a chess player. His stated reason? \”All chess players are artists, but not all artists are chess players.\” That\’s about my third favorite thing a twentieth C artist ever said, the top two being: \”Simplicity is complexity resolved,\” from mimimalist sculptor Constantin Brancusi, and \”Silence is so accurate,\” from Mark Rothko. Speaking of Rothko, the Nelson\’s Rothko seems to be degraded slightly from the last time I saw it several years ago, which is not a surprise to me. Rothko is a challenge to museum curators and preservationists because he used such crummy materials that many of his paintings are deteriorating right before our eyes. I wouldn\’t be surprised if Rothko is a \”lost\” artist sometime within the next hundred years.

The Impressionsts in the Bloch exhibit are fine, but taken in conjunction with the Nelson\’s own impressionist holdings (including one of Monet\’s water lily paintings), my opinion of impressionism continues to erode. Especially when you can turn the corner to be confronted by this painting:

This is a portrait of Mrs. Cecil Wade by John Singer Sargent, who did everything the impressionists did, minus their silly insistence on omitting black paint from their palettes, and wound up painting rings around almost all of them. This is made painfully apparent when one stands in front of the actual paintings (as opposed to seeing them in a book or on a calendar). I have a soft spot for Sargent, by the way, though not because his portraits are so dazzling, but rather because his watercolors are so amazing. As a watercolorist myself, I find that I appreciate them more than big show-piece oil paintings. The Nelson also has a Turner and a Constable, which, combined, suggest the reason that Impressionism never gained much of a foothold in England. After these two, what more does Impressionism have to offer?

Related, I got to see two more Renoirs in the flesh, so to speak, and nothing in them to change my mind about Renoir. A colossally bad artist, and I don\’t care how many calendars he sells.

Possibly my favorite painting in the Nelson is this one, by the American painter, Raphaelle Peale:

This is a tromp l\’oeil, or \”fool the eye,\” painting, intended to demonstrate the sheer hypocrisy of the practice in the American art scene of the day of painting classical nude–the title of the painting is \”Venus Rising from the Sea–A Deception\”–only to cover them with a cloth when \”respectable\” company was around. There is also an apocryphal story about the painting being intended as a prank to yank the blue nose of Peale\’s wife. In any event, it\’s up there with Magritte\’s The Treachery of Images as a summation of painting as pure abstraction.

So, we entered the baroque gallery, and lo and behold! The Caravaggio was right there on the wall. Right there! Woohoo! And, let me tell you, reproductions don\’t do it justice. Seeing the surface, the depths of the thin glazes Caravaggio must have used to get the warmth and translucency of his subject\’s skin…there\’s no way for a reproduction to capture that. Even though we didn\’t get to the Asian gallery (the Nelson\’s Asian collection is astonishing), I walked away from the museum fully satisfied for maybe the first time, because sometimes, the sun shines on a dog\’s ass.

---

And sometimes it doesn\’t, by the way. My first shot at this particular post got swallowed by Yahoo a couple of days ago. I was so steamed that I had to stay off 360 for a couple of days. Here\’s hoping this one actually sticks.

Geronimo.

Another Transitional Entry…

My SO and I are on vacation this week. We are planning a couple of day-trips around our region this year rather than a long trip somewhere–there’s a LOT to be said for sleeping in your own bed on vacation–but so far, our vacation has been…curtailed. Why? Because it’s a hundred and three degrees out, that’s why. And while some of my friends in warmer climes might think I’m being a wuss, that kind of temperature in the desert southwest is entirely different than it is here. I think our heat index yesterday was near 115 degrees with a 90% humidity. In any event, it sucks. Hard. We have no desire to traipse around the Ozarks in this heat, or wander around the Country Club Plaza in KC. By the time the heat breaks, our time off will be ended. Felicia is a little bit cranky because I’ll be taking another week off next month for SCC–she has never gone to SCC with me because, as an English teacher, she can’t exactly take the first or second week of her semester off. Be that as it may, we should be hitting the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in KC on Thursday at the very least, assuming our car doesn’t overheat on the drive up. I’m looking forward to seeing the new addition. And the MAC store. We’re definitely going to the MAC store.

---

In other news, I had my second session with a therapist on Friday. I’m not entirely sure of what I’m supposed to be getting out of this, but she’s pleasant to talk to. She has suggested that I read women’s literature to get my mindset adjusted to how women live and relate. We’ll see how that works. She suggested that I read The Red Tent by Anita Diamant. When I told her that I had already read and enjoyed it–well, I listened to it on CD last year, anyway–she suggested The Elegant Gathering of White Snows by Kris Radish. I stopped by the library a couple of days ago and read the first thirty pages or so. Long enough to realize that my therapist and I aren’t going to see eye to eye on literary matters. I don’t know about any insights into gendered behavior or feminine experience, but the prose style was awful and the plot contrivance reminded me of the film, How To Make An American Quilt, which I hated. Here’s the stumbling block: I’ve always valued the aesthetic experience in my life to an out sized degree, eclipsing even my sexual peccadilloes. Lacking any firm belief in God, it’s my substitute for religion. As such, it’s quite divorced from my gender expression or my expectations of art to connect to my gender. I’d rather experience something aesthetically transcendent in art that is completely alien to and disconnected from my worldview than something that connects me directly to my chosen gender or my quotidian existence in general, but is never the less bad art. How do I explain this to her? Hell, I’ve probably failed to explain it here.

I might not explain it. I might just tough it out, say that I read it, and say thank you for the recommendation. And then, to head things off, I’ll tell her that I’ve picked up Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding for my next project (a book already own, in fact), and that I’m probably going to read Anne Tyler’s Breathing Lessons for an encore. I’m not opposed to reading “women’s literature” or literature by women–many of my favorite writers are women. But I think there’s a difference between “women’s literature,” which might be best exemplified by someone like Margaret Atwood or Iris Murdoch, and “chick lit,” which I suspect that Ms. Radish writes.

In any event, I’m not seeing a therapist for a book club, and the rest of our session was devoted to my plan for transition. The standards of care require three months of therapy before one can be approved for the medical stuff. I told her that, while I’m looking forward to HRT, I’m not quite ready to jump into it. This is where the plan comes in. Some years ago, I made a critical path chart for my transition. At the time, it was a thought experiment as I was learning to use Microsoft Project, but for some reason, I left it on my computer even unto the present moment. Step one was financial stability–which I’ve accomplished within the confines of my income. Buying my house helped considerably. Step two was hair removal, which is ongoing. Step three was therapy. HRT is step five, and I won’t commence step five until step four is accomplished. They are antithetical to one another. If I skip step four, I can’t come back to it later. Step four is a visit to a sperm bank. Mind you, I don’t want children at this point in time and, to an extent, my window of opportunity is closing on having children. Both my SO and I are now 40, and if we don’t have kids by the time we are 45, we aren’t going to have them. As I say, I–or rather, we–don’t want them at this time. But I don’t want to change my mind sometime during the next five years only to find that HRT has made me incapable of it.

On the other hand, and as I told my therapist, the point may be moot. Back when I was in college, I subsidized a good deal of my collegiate lifestyle by donating plasma. One day, I got the bright idea of donating sperm–it seemed like a good gig: $45 for jerking off into a cup? And they provide the magazines? Unfortunately–actually, fortunately (for reasons I’ll keep to myself)–they rejected me and told me that I was going to have life-long fertility problems. This was twenty years ago, and I know the state of the art in reproductive medicine has improved dramatically. Anyway, this is all off the point. I’ll be visiting a sperm bank this fall, and I’m targeting December or January for the start of my HRT. My therapist thought that that schedule was eminently sensible, so I don’t foresee her denying me the letter to get it going. She’ll probably even direct me to an endo with experience with transsexuals.

All of which makes this seem very much more concrete and real than it did two months ago. I’m no longer freaked out about the whole process. The serpent has uncoiled from around my stomach. I think I’m at peace with it.