Failure has many names: Waterloo.  Pets.com.  The Bush Administration.   And last month, released on DVD for the first time is yet another name for failure: Howard The Duck. 

It's been over twenty years since Howard The Duck graced the silver screen and became one of the biggest and, apparently, most expensive flops of all time. And it really should have been better. The comic the movie is based on is a classic, in-your-face masterpiece.  Produced by George Lucas (Doesn’t he wish he skipped this one),  Directed by Willard Hyuck and co-written by Hyuck and Gloria Katz, the writing team behind Lucas' classic American Graffiti.  Starring Leah Thompson.  Music by Thomas Dolby, for chrissakes. 

So what happened?  Little of Howard's original personality remains; the depressive tendencies replaced by Catskills-quality wisecracks.  The pointed social satire of the comic watered down to variations of a single joke—he's a duck!—and repeats it for nearly two hours to the accompaniment of explosions and Jeffery Jones. former Ferris Bueller Principal mugging for the cameras yet again.

I remember seeing it opening night, and the only thing I found even remotely humorous was the Bar-B-Que Sushi restaurant sign.  Seeing the sliced and diced film on cable TV has only hardened my view.

Sure there are worse films out there.  But this one always feels like a slap in the face.  Or beak.  Or whatever. 

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OOPS! From the Business Insider:  Looks like a disgruntled employee went and leaked a DVD-quality rip of Fox's first big summer film, the X-Men origins movie Wolverine, minus a few special-effects shots.  Embarrassing, to say the least.  What makes people think that it was someone who had happiness issues in the Fox Republic?  Just the fact that the leaked film was a clean, perfect copy (no watermarks or anything). 

So now comes the question – how will this affect the box office?  Fox, of course, is all ready saying that this piracy will cost them dearly, as in tens of millions of dollars over the opening weekend.  Drew Mc Weeny at Hitfix writes,

"The exact demographic who would open this movie is savvy enough to have the film on their hard-drives right now if they want it.  And if they hate what they see, I can't imagine they're going to pay to see it again when it opens."

What he's saying is, there's a chance the movie's only chance for success is tricking people into seeing it because they might not know how bad it is? Isn't that the way the market works? You make something crappy, and it fails. That's not bad. Fox should be in the business of making good movies, not tricking us into seeing bad ones (and God knows I’ve been tricked into seeing a lot of bad films in my lifetime).

But let’s step away from the issue for a moment. This movie seems to have had a target on it from the get-go.  There were reports of extensive reshoots in January.  Kubrick-esqe sized reshoots.  Not good.  There also have been reports of Fox basically going around the director, Gavin Hood, and micro-managing like they always do.  Example: some sets were re-painted because it's what the execs wanted, not what Hood wanted.   Add to the mix the talk that Hood was looking for a more gritty (read R-rated) version and FOX wasn’t (read PG-rated).  Which would explain the heavy handedness of the Fox brass in the making of the film.

Now there are two theories I can go to.  First, the conspiracy theory:  How better to deflect attention while furthering your industry agenda than by having the movie pirated before release? Think about it. When the movie tanks, which if everything about its production is true, it will, they now have piracy as a scapegoat. The fact it's most likely a garbage film won't enter into it. It will be all those nasty pirates, not those executives who tried to direct a film and failed horribly.

The second theory is based on a report from Spill.com is that the leaked version is an earlier cut of the film before the film's reshoots were brought in. Could it be possible the leaked version may not be anything like the version that will be coming out?  Almost like the way that Fiona Apple’s “Extraordinary Machine” finally saw the light of day before Sony decided to bring in a new producer after the album was done and then release it.  If that is the case, then it may be possible that the leaked version is a basic cry for help-For people to see what should have been before FOX executives mutated it into a dog instead of Wolverine.  It could also explain how a clean, sharp, watermark-free version found it’s way onto the internet.  face it-not many people have access to such a thing.  That should narrow the list of suspects, you would think.

I guess we’ll have to wait and compare the two later this summer.   But I won’t be there on the first day.  Maybe day three. 

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“We all live in a little Village… Your village may be different from other people's villages but we are all prisoners."

Patrick McGoohan has died.  For those of us who do not know who he is, Patrick McGoohan was the creator and star of the TV show “The Prisoner”.   Just 17 episodes of the original Prisoner aired in 1967 and '68.  Yet, ‘The Prisoner’ is often called "Television's first masterpiece." and is a cult classic.

The actor, who was born in New York and raised in England and Ireland, came to screen prominence in TV series “Danger Man”, in which he played a secret service agent. The program later aired as “Secret Agent” in the US. After “Secret Agent” finished, McGoohan was considered for the part of Dr. No, but was working on “The Prisoner” at the time.

“The Prisoner” tells the story of a former British agent who is never identified by name and the exact nature of his job is never explained.  When the agent abruptly resigns from his position, he is kidnapped and is held captive in a small village by the sea by an unidentified power that wishes to establish the reason for his resignation. 

The Village functions as a prison but in the form of a closed society. Everyone there is assigned a number in order to remain anonymous.  The leader of The Village is a constantly rotating Number 2.  Free-thinking is banned. Blending in and following the arbitrary rules is the only way one could survive without being subjected to cruel mistreatment. The character (known as Number Six) spent the entire time attempting to escape from The Village and finding out the identity of his captor, the elusive Number One. He repeatedly declared: "I am not a number - I am a free man!"

The show is about the story of a man who would not give in to conformity and is determined to remain in control of his mind and soul in the face of unyielding challenges. He endures torture and mind control in order to maintain his dignity.  The show contains at times some of the most surreal footage seen on television for its day.  McGoohan also wrote some of the episodes himself, under an assumed name. 

What is ironic was that yesterday WIRED ran an article about the making of the series into a TV miniseries.  Number six will be missed. 

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From TG Daily:  Take 16 young, creative, tech geeks, make them live together in a loft in Brooklyn and have them compete in a contest that can be watched either online or on television.  "Real World" meets a high tech "Project Runway"?  Not quite.

Now these tech geeks are not going to be building actual useful stuff, no, this is MTV, so the 16 will be broken up into 4 teams which will design and produce digital artwork.  Digital artwork. 

OK.  So what about the living together part?  Are we going to see some geek boy get drunk and hurl Star Wars laced insults to all the other cast mates?  No.  It will not be a long winded drama like the Real World; instead, episodes will be quick five to seven minute clips that will last over a period of seven weeks.

So we're talking about a group of digital artists living together and making art in five minute increments.  Just enough time to focus in on the Sponsor's (HP) product and show bits and pieces of what you can make it do if you were as good as these kids.  Not enough where you might actually learn something about the person or the process, just enough to get that product in front of you.   They don't call it Empty-V for nothing, folks.

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There is a group called Improv Everywhere.  If you visit their site, you find that Improv Everywhere is based in New York and "causes scenes of chaos and joy in public places."  Such scenes include thousands of "agents" not wearing any pants on subways across the world at the same time, a spontaneous musical in a mall food court and the more famous "Frozen Grand Central" where 200 people suddenly froze in place at New York's Grand Central Station for a period of time.

"OK, a bunch of frustrated theatre majors" you say.  Maybe so, but there has been one instance where this group of folks has at least got me misty eyed, what they called "The Best Game Ever."  The fine folks got together with Goodyear and NBC to turn an everyday little league baseball game into a major event, complete with more cheering fans than are usually at a little league game, hotdog vendors (food was free), a jumbotron,  team mascots, legendary NBC sportscaster Jim Gray to call the game AND the Goodyear blimp.  After the game the "fans" sought out autographs from the players, and there was a news conference for both teams afterwards. 

What a wonderful memory to gift these children and their families with. Also, kudos to NBC and the Goodyear Blimp folks for their contributions to this most extraordinary event.  These young boys will be telling their grandchildren about this someday.

OK, I'm going to let the fan boy out for a moment and tell you that if this movie is one tenth as good as this trailer, then this is going to be huge.  Who thought that Robert Downey Jr. could be a superhero?  From what I'm seeing, he has Tony Stark nailed.  Period. 

I remember Format War I, where the forces of the Betamax were roundly defeated by the People's Republic of the VHS.  It was surprising.  The Betamax was much better.  But the VHS was cheaper and while the quality wasn't the best, they eventually won.  Much content was lost, never to be able to be played again.  The world buried it's dead content and vowed "no more". 

Then came the PC/Mac Conflict.  There were skirmishes, but neither side went for a full-on war.  Diplomacy saved the day.  While never finalized, a semi-conditional "truce" continues to this day. 

Then came the Hi-Def crisis and we asked ourselves "Could this happen again?"  But before cooler heads could prevail, the Format War II had started.  And it hasn't been good.  First the pr0n faction went over to the HD-DVD side, quickly followed by Paramount, DreamWorks and Universal, and it looked as though Blu-ray was going to go down the path of the Betamax. 

But then the mighty kingdom of Warner Brothers stepped into the fray. And it looks as if all things WB will soon be Blu as Blu can be. 

But the real question is does this all really matter?  With the model even now moving away from disks to pay-for-downloading, people may decide to make this silly assed war moot.  All I know is that I'll continue to deal with low def until the war is over. 

Comcast has announced that it wants to bring opening night into your home.  Just think, instead of being bothered by ringing cell phones or loud talking from total strangers, you can have your family and friends over to do the same thing - and for only $29.95 to $49.95 per movie.

"Wow", you must be thinking "I can sit in my living room watching Shrek the Third  on my crappy TV in my underwear, for the cost of the movie ticket, a bucket of stale popcorn AND the DVD? Why, this must be paradise!"

But wait a minute.  Like all things Utopian, there has to be someone who just doesn't want to get with the program.  The two largest movie theater operators, Regal Entertainment and National Amusements, have banded together to express their displeasure, with Regal's CEO saying: "We're not interested in playing anything that makes its debut in the home and at the theater at the same time."  In a way, I've got to agree with him.

After all, most of the stuff you see in the theatres should be direct to DVD anyway.