Tag: audience

Movie Round-Up: March 5th, 2010

Reviews

Brooklyn’s Finest:

Saw the trailer, looks interesting, has lots of actors I like… but I’ll probably wait and see this on DVD mostly because while it looks very good, it’s not a big action movie or horror or comedy, the three types of films that I think really benefit from being seen on the big screen and/or with an audience.  But, if you want to go to the theater and see a new movie this weekend, I can think of worse ways to spend your hard earned dollars.  Speaking of…

Alice in Wonderland:

I suppose it may be that I am just weary.  Weary of Tim Burton and Johnny Depp working together.  And the Helena Bonham Carter triumvirate too.  I got to see a screening of this and I’m glad I did because it saved me the $20 it would have cost for the wife and I to go see it.  I was bored.  The story is extremely predictable, and the settings are predictably vibrant and odd.  You know what this movie is going to be before you go in and it makes no effort to surprise you.  Alice goes back to Wonderland, she meets all the people you expect her to meet, she fights, she wins, she goes home.  This was the biggest let down to me.  There are a number of good reimaginings of the Alice tale that would make good films (for example: Frank Beddor’s The Looking Glass Wars) but instead Burton just rehashed the same old stuff with his penchant for weird by making people have large heads, over-sized eyes or lengthened limbs.  Oh, and like 95% of the people in this movie are pale.  And I don’t mean pale as in “light skin with a pink hue” but instead “pasty powdered makeup white”.  I suppose paleness appeals to some, but it doesn’t to me.  And, this movie is also in 3D.  Now, I’ve seen a bunch of 3D movies over the last few years as digital 3D has become all the rage, and Alice in Wonderland is probably the least effective use of 3D ever.  It doesn’t add much depth to the image at all, and in fact it feels more gimmicky because the only two or three times I noticed the 3D was when they stabbed things at the screen.  Unlike, say, Avatar, where they never did any “Hey look! 3D!” screen stabbing that I recall and instead the world just felt deep, because it was.  I didn’t hate the movie though.  It is probably great for families or die hard fans of Burton’s brand of oddness, but I’m glad I was able to see it for free and I don’t think I’ll ever see it again.

Movie Round-Up: July 24th, 2009

Reviews

G-Force:

Seriously?  I guess its okay that all I want to do is mock this film since I am clearly not the target audience… but, super-spy gerbils?  Really?

Orphan:

I managed to find passes to a screening of this film, and I’m glad I did.  I’m not sure I’d want to pay for this one.  Its not complete crap, and in fact it is quite enjoyable… solid performances by all the actors, and the dialog is decent enough, and I even thought the “secret” was clever.  But it wasn’t very scary.  In fact, most of the audience was laughing through much of the film.  Sure, there were a couple of scenes that made you jump, and a couple of things that made you cringe, but it just wasn’t scary.  A little creepy maybe.  If I were you, trying to decide where to spend my hard earned wages this weekend, I’d hold off on Orphan and spend it somewhere else.  Catch this one on DVD or cable.

The Ugly Truth:

“Tonight… we dine… in Heigl!” “This!  Is!  Dating!”  Sorry, couldn’t resist.  But if I have to admit to a man-crush, it would be Gerard Butler, even before the whole 300 thing.  And I’ve liked Ms. Heigl since “Roswell”, so this movie already had two things going for it.  Throw in the fact that I’m a sucker for battle of the sexes romantic comedies and you’ve earned my $10.  I didn’t get to see an early screening of this film, and so I’ll be paying my way like everyone else this weekend.  I don’t see any way this movie could possibly be disappointing.

I Hate You

Random Thoughts

No, really, I do. If you are one of those stubborn people who haven’t been watching Jericho or Veronica Mars, I hate you.

Veronica Mars, currently finishing up its third season, is probably one of the best shows on television. While other shows that ran season long plots often wound up with entirely unwatchable episodes that could never be watched alone, Veronica Mars managed to have every episode contain its own plot while still throwing clues and furthering the main season plot. It was smart and funny. And it has been cancelled because of people like you.

Jericho is in the same boat. When I first read the plot of the show, I was skeptical, but after watching it, they really managed to pull off the “Terrorists nuke a bunch of cities and throws the US into chaos” world brilliantly. Like Veronica Mars, every episode was tight and contained its own mini story, a plot resolved in one episode, while also serving the greater overall plot. It too has been cancelled.

Of course, I cannot lay all the blame at your feet. This season, the networks, and I mean all the networks, really screwed up by putting so many shows on a multitude of hiatuses. Seasons broken in half or in thirds, shows constantly bumped in hopes of getting higher ratings from specials and game shows. The one thing they don’t seem to understand is, the main reason a high rated show stays high rated is the ability of the audience to find and watch the show. Jericho did great until the hiatus… it never recovered. Even powerhouse Lost slumped in the ratings after a promising start. Standoff might have done better if they’d ever actually put it back on the air. It ran 11 episodes up until December 12th when it got put on hiatus to return on March 30th… wait, April 6th… now, June 8th where it will be on Friday instead of its original Tuesday slot for its remaining 8 episodes (maybe). Fans like me just wanted to watch the show, but I can’t watch it if they don’t air it.

As it is, many shows don’t even get that far. Runaway, Kidnapped, Vanished, Studio 60, The Black Donnellys, Drive, Day Break, Happy Hour, Justice, The Nine, Six Degrees, The Wedding Bells, Smith, Raines… Lots of these shows didn’t even start with full order seasons, or even half orders. Networks are often hedging their bets by ordering 6 or 7 episodes, and as a viewer if I know that a show may only run 6 or 7 episodes I am going to be less likely to tune in. Its seems that gone are the days of building an audience, if a show doesn’t come out of the gates booming with success its not likely to stick around, and with prospects like that is it really any surprise that the viewers aren’t showing up?

TV has one more season, if this fall is a repeat of last fall with all the show cancellations after one or two airings, they are going to lose me as a customer. They might get my business on the back end when a show goes to DVD, but they’ll never get my ad revenue dollars.

I honestly think the business model has to change. At a minimum, Sweeps Weeks need to go away. Networks should be rated for their advertising based on viewership average for the entire year. Maybe that alone would go a long way to ensuring that they took care of their shows all year long instead of just a couple a months scattered throughout. After considering it a while, I’d be willing to pay as much as $1 an episode downloaded to my TV without commercials through and On Demand like system, even on my Xbox360 if it had to be. Maybe networks should consider going that route, dump this 24/7 programming model that is full of trash anyway and focus on making a handful of solid engaging hours per day.

Whatever they do, mostly they need to recognize, you can’t have loyal viewers if you are not loyal to your viewers. Someone has to start, and since it would be stupid to ask viewers to watch things that don’t interest them, the networks have to start by letting shows that don’t launch fantastically stick around to see if the viewers can find it.

A Game Design Tangent

Gaming

I was reading a post over at Broken Toys… here… and the topic is interesting, but something in one of the comments caught in my brain, and its been knocking around all day, so I decided to poor it out.

Wanderer said:
A lot of people play golf.

Yes, alot of people play golf. And it stands to reason that someone who has played golf for three years is going to be better at it than someone who just picked up his clubs (barring natural talent and people who never learn). MMOs with level disparities can’t be compared to golf unless you segregate golf courses so that only people with certain handicaps, lifetime averages, or particular sets of clubs can play on them. If that were true, then a guy who just bought clubs won’t be able to play on the same courses his new friends who’ve been playing for three years can play on.

Golf isn’t like an MMO because it is inherantly designed on different fundamentals, and in most (if not all) MMOs, there are time consuming or otherwise daunting barriers between people who have invested time and people who have not. Even “casual” MMO players will eventually achieve a position where the barriers between them and new players is too big for them to comfortably ignore (I don’t care how nice and giving a person you are, if you are level 60, sitting around “helping” a level 10 eventually gets mind numbingly boring). Unfortunately, most (if not all) of these barriers are the rewards of playing the game… so the game is designed to divide players. Sure, it may encourage them to work together in small groups (anywhere from 2 to 200), but overall the rewards of them game serve to divide those that succeed from those who fail or have not yet tried.

Back to golf… yes, a lot of people play golf. But on the flipside, a lot more people don’t play golf. The rules of golf do not change to try to lure in more players (club regulations maybe, but I haven’t seen a golf course set all its holes to par 15s just to make people feel better about their golf game). Game designers need to take that approach. You are designing a game for a certain group of people, the people who enjoy the kind of game you design. That group might be huge, or it might be tiny. The goal of funding a game is to only spend money in proportion to the size of your intended audience. You don’t spend $300 million to build a game that 5,000 people are going to play, and if you manage to spend $4 million and 6 million people show up… well… you win. But more important than the money is to define your audience, design for them, and release a game.

Once the game is out there, you have to observe what people do with the game you made. Some of them are going to silently enjoy the game. Some will loudly complain that it sucks. Some will find ways to “break” the game. Some will loudly praise it as the second coming. Overall though, to some degree, you have to ignore the people who are angry and playing your game wrong, but don’t ignore the people who are having fun and playing your game wrong because even if its not what you intended, they like what you did and it may be time to learn from them instead of trying to tell them how to play. But above all else, don’t try to make everyone happy. You will fail. Just accept the fact that some people will play your game, and some people will play golf.