WHEN I was in tenth grade, I won a $250 gift card to Best Buy through a city essay contest. The awarding of the prize was held in the morning, and before my dad drove me back to school, I made him take me straight to Best Buy so that I could spend every dollar. This, of course, was in an age when “recession” and “Suze Orman” were not ingrained in the area of my brain where everyday decisions concerning the satisfaction of wants are made. Were I to stumble upon a windfall like a $250 gift card to Best Buy today, or even a $20 gift card to Chili’s that someone bought for me at CVS along with his cough drops, I would deliberate prudently as to how I could optimize the return on those dollars.

This prize, it turned out, became the seed money for what is now my unwieldy DVD collection. I bought about fifteen movies that day—movies that, to a mind exposed only to American cinema of the 1990s and later, were the greatest of all time: American History X. Requiem for a Dream. Dumb and Dumber. Jerry Maguire, once my number one pick. I did venture a little out of this territory to get The Graduate and also Citizen Kane, which I’d seen once on VHS after it topped the American Film Institute’s first “100 Movies” list. These films, along with the bare-bones Annie Hall that I’d previously bought at a Suncoast store for almost thirty dollars, formed the cornerstone of a library that I would drag with me each time I moved to a new place.

From 2002 to the middle of 2007, I only purchased movies that I truly enjoyed and wanted to be able to watch at will, like Being John Malkovich, the two Kill Bills, and Boogie Nights. This, I assume, was the most common intention when a consumer in the first half of this past decade bought a DVD: to own a certified classic, whether in his eyes or those of the international film community; a childhood memory, the repackaging of some indelible coming-of-age theater experience; or maybe a warm and fuzzy favorite, or a puzzle that had to be revisited. In short, DVDs were not meant to be watched once, and they surely weren’t meant to sit shrink-wrapped in a pile on a random side table at home with their $9.99 price tags intact.

But something happened in the middle of the decade, perhaps as early as 2002 for some people—but for me it was 2007, as I started my first full-time job and lived in my own place: home movies became ridiculously affordable. Consumers could blind-buy new releases, watch them once, and not worry about the inventorial consequences. A DVD is light, compact; its digital content degrades infinitesimally compared to the tape of a videocassette. It is a beautiful product, sure to be a cherished relic of the ’00s. No longer did you have to be a cinephile collecting Criterion laserdiscs to boast a decent film library. Digitizing home video has democratized film education in the same way that digitizing the production, post-production, and distribution of film (with flash-memory HD camcorders, video editing suites, and YouTube, respectively) has democratized filmmaking. Quentin Tarantino and some of his contemporaries famously learned their craft by watching myriad films on VHS, but it’s clear that our present technology makes it even easier today. Thanks to digital media, we can all learn film, and we can all make film.

After my final exams in 2007, I was looking for something to do in the downtime before commencement. Not one to participate in pub crawls, I found, on sale on Amazon, Fellini’s Amarcord and Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander (the former an excellent reissue; the latter a sumptuous box set for less than thirty dollars!), and my world thenceforth was never the same. In a mere two and a half years, I blind-bought so many classic films through Amazon sales that I bloated my modest Jerry Maguire collection tenfold. I have amassed an inventory so large that a queue of movies was implicitly formed; I will be halfway to retirement before I can find the time to wade through all of them. And that’s assuming I stop collecting DVDs now.

I DID not expect that cessation to occur so soon, but it mostly has. With my very late adoption of Netflix two months ago, there has been another epochal shift in how I watch movies, in what it means personally to collect. At first, I bought the movies I loved. I would pop in my first DVD, Annie Hall, just to hear Diane Keaton sing “Seems Like Old Times” over the wistful final sequence. During the next phase of DVD buying, I acquired movies that I thought were canonical, significant enough to have to be referenced. Imagine the delight to my fledgling-moviegoer mind when I watched Raging Bull and found out that Paul Thomas Anderson had paid homage to its final scene in his own last shot of Boogie Nights. Equipped with my movie arsenal, I could compare “I’m the boss” to “I’m a star” immediately. But the Netflix paradigm goes further for me. I don’t have to reconstruct the film canon in my apartment. I don’t need the physical media cluttering my shelves to make straightforward comparisons. Furthermore, the ability to stream movies obviates the need to even insert a disc into a player, let alone to buy a disc. Netflix is there to collapse my DVD library into a virtual presence, a dynamic list of titles, a collection of bytes.

Need to catch up on the films of Michael Haneke or Jacques Audiard? Rent them all! Aching for a season-four marathon of Punky Brewster? Not a problem! (No, there’s nothing wrong with Punky Brewster. TV on DVD is a marvel unto itself. There’s an episode of The X-Files called “Triangle” that I’ve been dying to see since its first air date in 1998; TV on DVD and Netflix make it possible.)

The digitization of media extends beyond my favorite realm of film. Advances in digital music collapsed a CD and record collection into a pocket-sized iPod filled with mp3 files: long gone are vacations encumbered by a flipbook of CDs, a disc player, and enough AA batteries for a hurricane preparedness kit. The Amazon Kindle and other e-readers are poised to try the same for books and print media. But there are portentous implications and difficult questions that come with all this digitization. It’s still hard for me to imagine the obsolescence of the tangible book, the extinction of dust jackets and deckle edges, the fading magnetism of a well-designed trade paperback. But if we ever get there, what can adequately succeed the first edition/first printing of a book, a form of media that has survived so much longer than the DVD will? Will it mean anything to have a Kindle edition of Philip Roth’s latest novel downloaded on release day versus ten years after? I have been buying Pynchon first printings on the chance that my grandchildren will inherit them and think I’m cool. My coolness won’t be on display with an undifferentiated e-book.

For the music industry, in which the transition started long ago, circa Napster days, we might wonder what has become of the conception of the album as a cohesive musical whole. But sadly the album has been dying for a while, as the current business model revolves exclusively around producing a hit single. Look at a list of the number-one singles in any of the past few years and grasp the shrewd efficiency of making money this way: I find it hard to believe that it actually took more than twelve minutes to concoct “3” or “Right Round.” And nowadays the album—that antiquated, lofty notion—can be retooled with “deluxe” or “platinum” editions after the fact to promote a new single not in the original studio release. So what remains of the integrity of the album? Do we really need an upgrade, upgrade of I Am…Sasha Fierce just so that somebody can cash in on her slapdash Lady Gaga remix? Picture Bob Dylan releasing Blonde on Blonde – Deluxe Edition just because he had visions of Rihanna that he wanted to add as a bonus track.

AT THE beginning of the decade, we are on the precipice of what may be an extraordinary expansion of our digital media. Already corporations are coming to grips with the financial ramifications. Warner Bros. recently struck a deal with Netflix to delay the rental availability of its titles by one month. How that will increase the revenues from their home video sales, I don’t know. I don’t really need to watch The Hangover the day it appears on Blockbuster and Best Buy shelves. I think distributors simply need to stop worrying and love what is actually an astonishing innovation, and a boon to anyone who loves film. It is an inexorable transition.

There will always be the theater to enjoy that communal moviegoing experience, which Manohla Dargis described recently in regards to Avatar. (I’m proud, for instance, to have screened Antichrist at the Chicago Film Festival, just to have shared in the “experience” of genital mutilation.) And there will also be physical media like Blu-ray or its successors for those who cannot accept anything less than the highest quality at home, unless we can develop the technology to affordably stream the huge amounts of data contained on these discs, too. Incidentally, I am still collecting Criterion DVDs and Blu-rays, which are lovely anyway, “Watch Instantly” be damned.

But my dream is that, by 2020, I will have the option to stream all of my home movies. Film lovers around the world would be able to access some global digital repository to watch The African Queen or Pather Panchali or the restored Metropolis at three in the morning if they wish. We will have made a copy of the corpus of film history from museums, universities, studio vaults, and art houses and pasted it into our homes.

For more of Joel’s writing go to his blog Canny Management.

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Writer-editor Robert Kanigher created Sgt. Rock as the first recurring feature in DC’s line of war comics, beginning in Our Army At War in 1959. Kanigher designed Rock to be largely a composite of several other lead characters he had used to that point in various previous stories. Originally named “Sgt. Rocky”, with the nickname “The Rock of Easy Company”, Kanigher revised his lead’s name within a few issues and positioned him as the platoon leader at the same time that reknowned artist Joe Kubert came onboard to take on art responsibilities.

Kanigher gave Rock an origin in 1963, within the pages of Showcase, saying that Rock had enlisted as a private during the early days of World War II. Rock later rose to the rank of sergeant after he held Easy Company’s position on a hill despite a German onslaught that killed the other men in his unit. In subsequent years, Rock would routinely turn down offers of promotion, choosing instead to remain on the battlefield with the other “Combat Happy Joes of Easy”, as they were commonly referred to due to their propensity of finding their way to the thick of the battlefield.

Rock was joined in Easy Company by a wide variety of other G.I.s, including the three named in the above strip: Wildman, Four-Eyes, and Ice Cream Soldier. According to Maurice Horn in his ‘World Encyclopedia of Comics’, the Sgt. Rock feature was also notable for introducing one of comics’ first non-stereotyped black characters, Jackie Johnson.

Why these nicknames in particular? They came from the characterizations that Kanigher and Kubert created for the Joes of Easy. As stated in DC’s Who’s Who series, “Private Phil Mason hated the heat, but turned out to be a perfect “Ice Cream Soldier” when it came to combat in freezing weather. A soft-spoken history teacher became a “Wildman” when pushed too far…”Four-Eyes” was Easy’s bespectacled sharpshooter…” and so on. The list is long; Kanigher and Kubert knew that sacrifices are made during war, and the ever-changing line-up in Easy Company reflected that awful reality.

The Rock stories dealt with their subject matter deftly and with compassion, highlighting their battles in the European theatre and the personal strains that infantry members endure in wartime. These aren’t always easy stories to read, as a result of this, but still, they should be read.

Via Source

Sgt. Rock Cover Gallery

Find the above plus more HERE

And check back later this week to see how Silver Pictures is going to kill this great character on film.

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There are nerds. And there are science fiction nerds. And then there are American fans of Doctor Who — those who dare to combine the exquisite dweebery of Anglophilia with the delicious dorkdom of old-skool SF. I’m of that last tribe, a real Who-head. I can tell you what Tardis stands for (Time and Relative Dimensions in Space), and, more important, I can say “Tardis” over and over again — not just with a straight face but with reverence. Bargain-basement BBC production values? Alien monsters made from trash cans and toilet plungers? Anachronous kibitzing with Shakespeare and Dickens? That’s my flavor, mate. It’s the sort of thing that’s hard to find on this side of the pond (especially now that Syfy has foolishly ceded new Who episodes and specials to BBC America). I suppose US culture simply isn’t advanced enough to appreciate the longest-running, most successful (and, yes, also the cheesiest and chintziest) science fiction series in television history. And by advanced, I mean defeated. Luckily, that may be changing.

Before you brand me a Benedork Arnold, let me explain: There’s a fix I just don’t get from mainstream American science fiction, perhaps because of its grinding obsession with the imperialistic (and its depressive sibling, the dystopic), not to mention its wearisome push for ever-shinier effects. Like its not-so-distant cousin American religion, American sci-fi is fixated on final battles, ultimate judgment (particularly on questions of control and leadership), and an up-or-down vote on the whole good/evil issue. Even the most morally restless imaginings — the Losts and Battlestars — eventually prolapse into Bruckheimer-esque excerpts from the Book of Revelation. As an antidote, I turn to the Doctor — a fussy 900-year-old neurotic who’s part Ancient Mariner, part Oxford don, with a whimsical fashion sense, a close acquaintance with defeat and futility, and a tendency to rattle on. He subscribes to no Force-like creed. No enlightened military Federation stands behind him, photon torpedoes at the ready — indeed, his race, the Time Lords, is more or less extinct. His signature gizmo isn’t a blaster or a phaser but a souped-up screwdriver. His Millennium Falcon? The Tardis, which looks to the unschooled like an old telephone booth. It’s actually a police call box, a relic from the ’50s, and the ship’s most spectacular feature isn’t artillery; it’s feng shui: It’s bigger on the inside.

Read the rest of the article over at Wired.

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This movie is astounding! It contains multiple scenes that made me choose between revulsion and laughter, and it has a warped sense of humor that is truly inspired. If you like splatter comedy, then you must watch this film.

The story begins with a zoo employee and some local assistants capturing a Sumatran Rat Monkey. Before they can egress from the primitive area that is the species’ natural habitat, a horde of natives surround them. The zoo dork tries to impress the tribesmen with some official papers. Of course, the primitives start throwing spears at the specimen-collecting party. The zoo fellow and his porters immediately run away. During the escape, the rat monkey scratches the zoo employee. I guess that is bad, because the assistants immediately cut off the affected body parts. Unfortunately, one of the scratches is on the man’s forehead…

Not to get off track, but the world is filled with two kinds of people: those who think everything revolves around little paper documents, and those who carry spears. The spear bunch think that the document clique are nincompoops.

Despite the fact that even being scratched by a rat monkey necessitates immediate bloody amputation, the evil little creature is flown back to the New Zealand zoo. That is where the main characters, Lionel and Paquita, encounter the accursed animal. They are visiting the zoo on a date. In fact, they are visiting the zoo on their very first date. It might not be Paquita’s maiden voyage on the good ship “Ikinnawannalayya” (it’s Hawaiian), but the date is a groundbreaking achievement for the young man.

CLICK HERE to read the rest of the review

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