It’s kind of a made up job title anyway

As someone who until recently bore that title, I have to laugh at Hugh Macleod’s series of “social media specialist” drawings:

You’re a Social Media Specialist?

SMSs Waiting in Line

Celebrating Diversity

Corporate Dude

Potential Client

OBEY!

Too much information

Sarah Perez is having a crisis with people who over-share items through Google Reader. Too much, she says, and it makes it hard to find the interesting/valuable content amidst so much clutter.

This is really annoying, yeah, but not nearly as much as those times when people have entire conversations through the Notes feature on the same item that gets shared, like, 30 times as we they all have to try and top each other with the latest witticism.

Googleing down the nostalgia path

Sarah Perez indulges in a little bit of backward thinking about the first time she and others were introduced to Google.

My first exposure came, yeah, about nine or 10 years ago at a Chicago young professionals seminar. There was a little giggling in the room about the crazy name but as soon as I used it the day after I was instantly hooked and haven’t looked back since then. A good portion of my online life is now managed through Google products and the company continues to grow in my estimation, despite a few questionable hires by them along the way.

Well of course it is

Of course social media is more measurable than traditional media, because there’s a definitive action that is tied to that media. It’s not dependent on 3X multipliers to determine readership or anything ridiculous like that. How many times did someone read it? Well check the numbers.

Duhr.

DVD Review: Star Wars – The Clone Wars

Back around 1991 Star Wars fans were introduced to the “Expanded Universe” with the publication of the novel Heir to the Empire. Where there had been a scattering of novels and a couple of animated series that had told a handful of Star Wars stories, this seemed to be different…bigger. This was a story involving all the major characters which picked up well after the end of Return of the Jedi, the first such story to be told. After that a swell of novels, comics and other media were released which told various stories in, for the most part, the post-RoTJ timeline.

But there was a sense that these stories would be confined to anything but movie theater screens. That was emphasized with the release of the Prequel Trilogy. Anything that was on the big screen was canon, anything that wasn’t wasn’t.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars changes that equation to some extent. While the movie wasn’t really meant from the outset to be a movie but instead was spliced together from the first three episodes of a new TV series, it did appear in theaters and so, rightly or wrongly, has to be judged against the six existing cinematic entries in the saga.

Against that measure it does not hold up particularly well. The Clone Wars is an interesting enough story (the Jedi have to rescue Jabba the Hutt’s son in order to maintain access to travel lanes that are important to the war effort), it’s unfortunately weighed down by too many things that seem out of place in the Star Wars universe.

Chief among them is Ahsoka, a teenage girl who is assigned by Yoda to be Anakin Skywalker’s Padawan learner. Right there we have a couple of problems. Not only is Ahsoka never mentioned in Revenge of the Sith (she therefore logically bites it at some point in between) but Anakin is not a Jedi Master and everything up to this point says only Masters can have Padawans. Anakin is only made a full-fledged Knight just before RoTS (in the “Clone Wars” animated series from a couple years ago, which adds even more confusion to the situation – where does *that* story fit into this timeline now?) and giving him a Padawan seems like a cheap excuse to wedge in a sassy teen character.

And it’s that character that is the other chief problem. There’s NO WAY someone with this sort of attitude gets past Master Yoda. She’s disrespectful, reckless and just plain annoying. Almost immediately she begins referring to Anakin as “Sky Guy” and throwing around all sorts of attitude that seems pulled straight from a Tiger Beat demographic survey. It’s best just to ignore her when she’s on screen.

It’s a shame that she’s around for so long because aside from her the story is actually alright. It’s certainly not on the scale of the other six Star Wars movies but does work if you view it as a TV show. The action is fast-paced (the Clone Troopers actually wind up being the most interesting characters) and the animation certainly is top-notch.

Overall The Clone Wars is a good lead in to the series and is probably best for an audience that doesn’t obsess over where events happen in the Star Wars timeline and other issues like that. If you can get beyond those problems it’s a pretty enjoyable part of the Star Wars saga.

DVD Review: Kung Fu Panda

I’ve never been a huge fan of Dreamworks Animation’s features. While the first Shrek was, at the time, kind of funny the subsequent films have just been loose excuses to hang a bunch of too-cool for the room pop-culture references and off-color humor that just stops shy of being inappropriate for young audiences.

That’s why Kung Fu Panda is such a refreshing change and, honestly, might be one of the most enjoyable movies I’ve seen this year.

KFP is the story of Po, a panda who works with his father (a goose, a disconnect that’s hinted at just enough to be funny without being beaten into the ground) in a noodle shop in a small village. But in between slinging noodles Po dreams of being a kung fu master, idolizing the Furious Five, a group of kung fu prodigies who protect the village. Through a variety of circumstances, Po comes to be chosen as the warrior who will ultimately defeat a former student of master Shifu who turned to evil ways when he felt he was being overlooked.

The great thing about Kung Fu Panda is that it’s free of all the things that have cluttered the computer-animated features from just about everyone but Pixar. No characters break into Godfather lines, no one all of a starts laughing at a Star Wars joke. And, most surprisingly, there aren’t 78 crotch or poop jokes. Instead Po is good natured and well meaning and, while he’s not the most talented cat on the block, he never ridicules those who are more skilled than he is. He just keeps trying.

That’s why I’m so anxious to watch the movie with my kids. It’s completely appropriate for them, without any content that I would find objectionable or which I would worry about them emulating, resulting in my telling them to stop it. If there is it’s so miniscule I didn’t even notice it. That sort of situation has been in rare supply outside of overtly moralistic properties like Veggie Tales (which we love, just for the record). Everything is either completely, almost condescendingly pure or all about the fart jokes and telling people to shut up.

The DVD, available now, comes packed with extras that are geared toward kids, including activities and fun little featurettes that go behind the scenes of the movie and its characters. Some editions also come packaged with a bonus disc titled “Secrets of the Furious Five.” That short feature (about 22 minutes) goes behind the stories of the others that Po is training with. It’s animated in a more traditional style, one that’s very reminiscent of Japanese paintings and art. It’s quite enjoyable in and of itself, though obviously more so if you’ve seen the main movie. That disc has its own batch of bonus features that further expand on things.

I enjoyed Kung Fu Panda to a great extent. As I said, it ranks right up there with Iron Man as one of my favorite movies of the year and it’s highly recommended.

DVD Review: Mystery Science Theater – 20th Anniversary Edition

If you’re a fan of Mystery Science Theater you’re going to absolutely love this 20th Anniversary Edition box set. The set features four episodes of MST3K: First Spaceship on Venus, Laserblast, Werewolf and Future War. While these might not be the best of the best of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 vault they are definitely solid entries and perfectly representative of what the show was all about in its tenure on television.

It’s always good to go back through the old episodes of MST3K. Since I made the decision to ditch the vault of VHS tapes full of episodes taped off of Comedy Central and then Sci-Fi, my collection has (until now) been limited to Mitchell, Manos the Hands of Fate and MST3K: The Movie. And honestly it had been too long since I had pulled any of them out. So watching these four episodes was, not to sound too corny, pretty sweet and very much needed.

There are two things about this set, aside from the episodes themselves, that make it completely worth owning. First is the cover art for the individual discs. Tom Servo and Crow T. Robot get illustrated in a pulp comic style along with some characters from the movie. The images are absolutely fantastic, much better and much more unique than just the movie’s poster or something like that.

The second is the main extra that’s spread across the first three discs, titled “The History of MST3K.” It’s a series of interviews with just about everyone who had something to do with the creation of or glory of Mystery Science Theater, from Joel Hodgson to Mike Nelson to Mary Jo Pehl and everyone else you can think of. Some of the stories you’ll hear in those segments are repeated in the main bonus feature on the fourth disc, a video of the cast and crew’s 20th Anniversary Reunion Panel at this year’s Comic-Con. But even so some of that might be familiar, the banter between them and moderator Patton Oswalt makes it enjoyable in and of itself.

If you’ve got a Mistie (fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000) on your list of people needing Christmas presents, this set will make their day.

DVD Review: Hellboy II – The Golden Army

I wrote a full review of Hellboy II – The Golden Army over at SpoutBlog. It’s sort of half a review of the movie and half an examination of how Hellboy fits into the pantheon of stoic, emotionally stunted male action heroes.

The three-disc special edition I received to review contains a digital copy of the movie you can transfer to iTunes, possibly my favorite feature that’s being added to DVDs right now.

In Hellboy’s case, his laconic “Oh crap” is a massive sarcastic understatement when he’s faced with, as in one scene in The Golden Army, a massive flower god that’s spreading itself all over Manhattan. But while he works to betray little in the way of uncertainty in situations like that, the thing that’s causing him the most pain – his relationship with the human fire-starter Liz Sherman played by Selma Blair -  is always at the tip of his tongue. The fact that he can’t figure out her wants and needs continue to be the one problem in his life he can’t punch away, and that’s incredibly frustrating to him.

At the end of the first movie the narration intoned that embracing his love of Blair’s Sherman had fully made Hellboy a man. But he continues to act out in a decidedly immature way throughout the second movie. That changes, though, when he finds out that Sherman is pregnant with his child. That knowledge is, quite literally in the story, what gives him the will to live. Even though at that point he still acts first and thinks things through later, he does step up in the final showdown and embrace, if not his role as destroyer of worlds, certainly his role as the leader of the societal subset he and his cohorts inhabit.

DVD Review: Tropic Thunder

There’s little that’s not completely and utterly offensive about Tropic Thunder, aside even from That Issue, the one that got a lot of headlines and attention, but which is such a small actual thing in actuality.

The movie, of course, carries the title of the movie that we’re watching being made. And the movie we’re watching being made is going horribly, horribly wrong.

A bunch of stars – a cocky action star whose stock is falling, a flatulent comic looking to break out a from his rut and a method actor willing to fully immerse himself in a character – set out to make a Vietnam war movie with a first-time director at the helm. But when egos get in the way and the movie is being threatened with shut-down, the director decides to take those pampered stars out into the real jungles and shoot the movie in what he hopes will be a more realistic fashion.

Things, of course, go badly.

What works the most about the movie is that every one involved seems fully committed to the roles they’re playing. Stiller is completely believable as a Tom Cruise-ish actor with a huge ego and little talent. Downey, as the method actor who undergoes skin-pigmentation surgery in order to play an African-American, never winks at the audience about the absurdity his role. Even Black, famous for his inability to not mug to the camera, makes his role as the broad comic work on a level it really shouldn’t.

Adding to that are small roles by Tom Cruise (oh shut it – it’s not a spoiler at this point) as the profanity-heavy studio boss and Matthew McConaughey as Stiller’s character’s agent, obsessed with making sure his client has his on-location TiVo.

The funny thing is that I actually don’t think Tropic Thunder works very well as Hollywood satire. That’s largely because there’s simply too much of it in the movie for most of the jokes to actually have time to land. Instead it’s the performances that shine through. So it’s a good thing those performances are so strong.

Movie Journal: The Incredible Hulk

As a longtime fan of Marvel Comics characters I’m having a blast with all the movies that have been coming out in the last eight years or so, going back to 2000’s X-Men. But while they’ve been alternately fun or exciting it’s just now that it’s getting interesting, with Marvel now tying all their movies together in anticipation of 2011’s The Avengers.

The Incredible Hulk is quite good, and this is coming from someone who actually more or less enjoys 2003’s Ang Lee-directed Hulk. Edward Norton does a good job as Bruce Banner and everyone else, including Liv Tyler, is enjoyable as his love interest Betty Ross.

What The Incredible Hulk manages to do is both be more serious and be more of a comic book movie. It’s fast-paced and exciting. Plus there’s a lot of inside Marvel stuff going on, including a lot of stuff about the Super Soldier serum that’s likely to tie into the upcoming Captain America movie.