Technically Incorrect

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but art, it seems, is whatever a court says it is.

The folks at Lucasfilm, creators of the "Star Wars" franchise, took the designer of the original Stormtrooper costume to court in the UK and had their light sabers thrust right back at them.

According to London's Times, Andrew Ainsworth, the man who originally created the helmets and armor for the first "Star Wars" movie, decided to capitalize on his design by selling replicas made from the original mold online.

Lucasfilm clearly thought Ainsworth's view of copyright was from a very strange planet. So, after taking him to court and winning in the US in 2006, it thought it would strike a further victory in British courts.

However, Britain can often show itself to be a constellation like no other.

So perhaps one should not be entirely surprised that Mr. Justice Mann and, subsequently, three more justices in the Court of Appeal, decided that Stormtrooper uniforms are not art, but mere industrial design. You see, art enjoys British copyright protection for 70 years. But industrial design is only worth 15 years of protection.

But is it art?

(Credit: CC Andrew Rueda/Flickr)

Lucasfilm promises it will now send its legal Stormtroopers all the way to the British Supreme Court. The company told the Times: "The judges in the case dismissed the creative efforts of film designers and prop makers in general, saying that props are the work of people who 'did not make it as artists' and not fine art that should be valued under the law."

Ainsworth was, at the time of the costumes' creation, an industrial designer. This is what he told the Times of his design: "I didn't even know it was for a film to begin with." At the time the costumes were made, the machine Ainsworth used was, he told the Times, "churning out kayaks and watersports stuff."

Almost every court case in the world these days seems to be about money rather than art. So it's hard to imagine that these fine judges didn't scratch their rather beautifully designed wigs and feel sympathy for Ainsworth, as he faced the conglomerated Darth Vaders from Northern California.

Surely they had heard that every part of moviemaking is supposed to be art-- even the making of bacon sandwiches on set. So their interpretation is, indeed, an interesting one.

If Britain's Supreme Court doesn't offer Lucasfilm relief, what might the Lucas Army do?

Perhaps it will create a new "Star Wars" movie--entitled "Star Wars: Attack of the Clones II"--in which the bad guys are movie prop makers who attempt to create a parallel universe called Replica World.

In the pulsating finale, The Jedi Master would take on the Prop Master in a weird industrial design facility somewhere west of, um, London. Surely you can hardly wait.

Perhaps space travel has become old. Perhaps people have come to take it for granted. It's been seen in so many movies. So many space shuttles have taken off and returned to Earth that we think little more of them than we do of jumbo jets.

NASA therefore has to use its imagination to persuade tomorrow's generations that space travel continues to be a large step for man.

One small step in this process is a new public service annoucnement featuring that fearsome space creature, "The Rock." Dwayne Johnson himself, a man who has appeared in so many scientifically concocted movies such as WWF SmackDown, WWE Backlash, and WWE Crush Hour, is now telling kids that NASA is cool.

Why Johnson? Well, he plays Captain Chuck Baker in the new movie "Planet 51." The voice of Chuck Baker, to be precise. And that seems to be a sufficient connection for him to tell us that all of the clever things NASA discovers in the dark and beyond are also put to use here on the mundane round lump called Earth.

I know Johnson is trying to inspire, but when he tells us that NASA technologies allow us to enjoy the freeze-dried fruit in our cereal, I wonder how many viewers will look at their Raisin Bran with a jaundiced eye and quivering lips.

The Rock is a professional. He convinced when he played Agent 23 in "Get Smart," just as he did when he when he played Rick Smith in "Reno 911."

But even he struggles with the last line of this PSA. For reasons best known to someone, somewhere, perhaps even out there, Johnson is required to end this PSA with the words" There's no space like home."

Oh, goodness. He's Dwayne Johnson. He's the Rock. Couldn't they have got him to deliver an NASA smackdown? Or are we all just trying to nice-ify our images to the point of blandness?

I once asked a happy couple I knew why they loved horror movies. "It's exciting to be scared," the wife explained. So I suggested three large henchmen would be arriving shortly with all sorts of farming implements in order to slice them both into small, but even pieces. They didn't seem to find that exciting at all.

Still, people seem so able to divorce their fantasies from their realities that one should not be agog that "Paranormal Activity," a movie whose sole purpose seems to be to part your nervous system from the solar system, is a success.

However, one might offer a little agogness to the socially networked marketing methods that helped it along its way.

You see, the makers of this movie, which CNN reports cost around $11,000 to produce, didn't bother making something you might describe as a conventional trailer. Instead, they made a little clip largely about how defibrillators were inadequate during test screenings in college towns.

The initial victims seem to have enjoyed leaping out of their vintage Levi's so much that they began to Twitter about the experience. And that gave the movie studio some online marketing ideas.

Originally, the movie fell into the lap of Dreamworks (part of Paramount Pictures) after its success at the 2008 Slamdance Festival (which is, I believe, an event where a lot of people get drunk and frighten each other with fire extinguishers).

After seeing the startling amount of word-of-mouth buzz the movie was getting, it seems that Paramount's first inclination was to pat writer/director Oren Peli on his head and bottom and reshoot it with, you know, famous and expensive people. However, Steven Spielberg suggested this might not be necessary since the movie was already resonating with early viewers. Hence, after a little editing and the addition of a new and, guess what, scarier ending, they organized some midnight college town screenings.

Once the college town tweeters began to champion its cause, Paramount launched ParanormalMovie.com, a cheery little site that encouraged thrill-seekers to threaten their local movie theater owners with phantasms, limb severance, and immolation if they did not agree to screen "Paranormal Activity".

OK, I might be slightly exaggerating about the limb severance and immolation. But, with the same kind of dexterity employed by British Prime Minster Tony Blair when, upon the death of Princess Diana, he described her as "the People's Princess," this lovely little film became the People's Movie.

ParanormalMovie.com claims that it received more than 1 million demands from moviegoers, which is why "Paranormal Activity" is, according to the site, "the first-ever movie release demanded by you." (This is obvious nonsense as I and several of my friends and former amorous consorts demanded another idiotic Nicolas Cage "searching for treasure" movie and it appeared almost before we had finished speaking.)

Still, CNN reported that the online buzz created such a haunting atmosphere that "Paranormal Activity" frightened $7.1 million out of the public's pockets last weekend, while only gracing some 200 theaters.

So a movie that enjoys innovations such as inviting you to tweet your scream appears set to swamp your screens with its happy happenings. The Paranormal folks are equal opportunity social networkers, of course. You can also express your screams on Facebook at Facebook.com/paranormalacitivity.

Paramount's Josh Greenstein offered CNN some fun marketing speak to describe the online groundswell that was, well, very cheap: "When people saw the movie, they loved it so much and there is such a slow build of terror that you have to sit through to experience the full effect of the movie, so we changed the marketing techniques in advertising and online to make it more experiential."

Should you choose to partake of this slow build of terror, please be warned of the effect it might have on you. As Facebook screamer Phil Osher declared: "had to crawl into bed with my friend."

If the potential of this behavior doesn't put you off, please let me know how it was. As I would rather remove my body hair with a chisel than watch this no doubt highly enjoyable movie.

It used to be a long day's journey into night.

Great writers would craft feature-length scripts worthy of the performers who would swallow each word as if it were their own, give it full dramatic meaning, and lift the whole spectacle to sublime levels.

Then the Web came along to debase the art that was pornography.

According to a report in The New York Times, some of the finest pornographic actors are bemoaning and bemoaning and bemoaning the demise of the great 90-minute carnal classic.

Steven Hirsch, co-chairman of Vivid Entertainment, one of the apogees of pornographic production, told the Times: "On the Internet, the average attention span is three to five minutes. We have to cater to that."

The Times' report claims that three years ago almost all of Vivid's productions were full-length movies. Each, no doubt, had deeply nuanced characters whose dramatic arc curved across the 90 minutes like a rainbow over a hilly horizon.

How sad that the scope of their parts has become reduced.

(Credit: Sico Activa/Flickr)

Yet now, the purveyors of porn are resorting to subscription-based business models. Apparently you have to pay a monthly fee and the sites have to boast about the frequency of new, shorter uploads. (Some estimates, the reports says, suggest that sales and rentals of porn DVDs are down by as much as 50 percent.)

Is the Web and the supposed ADD of its users to blame for this? Perhaps, though somehow the sound bite and the visual bite seem to be more the creation of television in its joyous heyday.

However, is it possible that what the Web has done to mess up these delightfully lucrative porn businesses is that it has ushered in the advent of that nasty little disease called free?

Purely in the cause of researching this vexing question, I called those who live and breathe this world and asked them what the equivalent of YouTube might be for those interested in pornographic exploration.

Remarkably, I was told there is something called YouPorn. And several other sites whose veins are entirely similar, in that they offer pornografree.

These sites appear to enjoy films of varying length and depth. Some last a mere 29 seconds. Others go on for as long as an hour.

Some, indeed, are abbreviated versions of movies that the more vivid of porn producers would like you to pay for. Others are merely real people who would like it very much if you could share some of their more blissful moments.

The most viewed movie on YouPorn this week, at the time of writing, lasted 335 seconds and had been espied more than 1.5 million times. However, the third most viewed, with more than 1 million clicks, lasted more than 30 minutes.

Which might suggest that decreased attention span is not the whole story.

Indeed, is there any evidence that the vast majority of viewers, even in the times of the 90-minute porn extravaganza, didn't merely fast forward through the dialog in order to gain immediate access to the, um, action scenes?

Perhaps you could ask your friends for me.

When you're going through difficult times, perhaps it's wise to reach for a gay foreigner in a mesh T-shirt.

This, at least, seems to be the strategy for MySpace.

The company has divested itself of a considerable number of employees in the past week and is, perhaps, hoping that Sacha Baron Cohen and his extremely tight hot pants will sprinkle a little glitter where the sun has not shone for a while.

"Bruno: Delicious Journeys Through America for the Purpose of Making Heterosexual Males Visibly Uncomfortable in the Presence of a Gay Foreigner in a Mesh T-Shirt"--the "fake working title" Cohen gave his latest movie--represents a considerable investment on the part of MySpace.

MySpace will feature prominently in the movie, according to a report in AdAge. Indeed, the "Bruno" trailer was launched on the site, and the hilarious meinspace.com/bruno has brought a new dimension to social-networking profiles.

While it is delightful to learn from MeinSpace that Bruno is currently looking for "a guy whose skin colour is between butterscotch und camel," you begin to wonder whether Cohen's snigger is hissing happily in MySpace's direction.

Don't you just love that little red thong?

(Credit: CC Current New Stories/Flickr)

The beauty of Cohen's characters is that they are wonderfully forthright and, well, jerks. You laugh at them and with them. Through them, you're laughing at how baldly stupid so many things in life (and so many people) are.

"Borat" was the most vivid incarnation of the Cohen method. But, as "Bruno's" publicity itself declares: "Borat was so 2006." Cohen also did a deal with MySpace when "Borat" was launched. There were special advance screenings, for example, that were open only to MySpacers.

However, it's hard to see that MySpace's image has done anything other than slide like the Kazhak economy over the last three years.

Of course, one movie isn't going to reverse strategic missteps and Facebook's tolerant, cheery coffee bar of friendship.

I can't help wondering, though, whether "Bruno's" embrace of MySpace might leave you with the notion that of course Bruno would be on MySpace. After all, he's ein person you wouldn't exactly want at your first-born's christening.

Cohen, you might think, has the upper hand in the relationship with MySpace. The deal certainly hasn't excluded the current darlings of social networking. On MeinSpace, you can still link to "Bruno's" Facebook page. Indeed, he somehow managed to nab facebook.com/bruno in the recent vanity raffle.

MeinSpace also lets you link to Bruno's Twitter feed, the fabulous Twitter.com/brunovassup. Here's just one Bruno tweet: "Just back from uncle's funeral - had fight mit egomaniac priest - apparently it's rude to ask for ze church wi-fi password during a service."

Bruno's social-networking numbers to date are very interesting. While on MeinSpace he has more than 330,000 freunds, he has only 53,768 on Facebook and 18,515 on Twitter. Might that trend change as he gears up toward the July 10 launch? I suspect not.

One can hardly wait to see how Cohen has inserted MySpace into his opus. However, as always with his movies, whom will the joke be on?

Do you think better of Eminem after Bruno welcomed him at the MTV Movie awards with his bottom?

In fact, don't Eminem and MySpace have quite a lot in common? Put it this way, Eminem's Greatest Hits album was so 2005.

Chances are, many of you will be going next weekend to see He's Just Not That Into You.

Some will see this, already America's No.1 movie, willingly, even enthusiastically. Others will perhaps grimace and bear it in the commitment to a higher cause.

However, while you are enjoying "I'm a Mac" icon Justin Long channeling his inner Vince Vaughn with the aim of keeping women at torso's length, you might also notice that MySpace plays a role in the movie. One that might best be described as the sleazy character that no one loves and everyone wishes would just die.

I don't want to spoil the plot too much for you (because it has so many surprises, you'll have troubled maintaining consciousness), but I was persuaded to spend a couple of hours in the company of He's Just Not That Into You this weekend. And rarely have I seen a brand so tersely derided on the wide screen.

(Credit: CC d70Focus)

One of the characters, Mary, played by Drew Barrymore, is an ad sales lady looking, as all ad sales ladies seem to be, for love. She is attempting to find it by meeting people on MySpace. However, she is advised by her nearest and very dearest (yup, gay co-workers- this is a Hollywood movie) that MySpace is something of a sleazy joint in which to be casting for pearls.

Then, near the end of the movie, I could have sworn that she finds her ultimate love liberation in closing her MySpace account.

Which led me to wonder (only for a moment or two, but still) whether MySpace was aware of this shining portrayal in advance. Perhaps it's a post-post modern attempt at self-irony. Or perhaps whoever wrote the script had a difficult and perverted experience on the site and needed to eke out his or her pain.

Of course, there's also the extremely cynical idea that the movie was produced by New Line Cinema, a division of Warner Bros, while MySpace is the full brother of 20th Century Fox. But I can't believe anyone would stoop so low merely for commercial reasons.

I am sure you all have your own views of MySpace. Just as you will all have your own views of this star-crossed filmic homage to Jane Austen by next Sunday morning. (Saturday's Valentine's Day. What do you mean you didn't know?)

It is, quite literally, a cliff hanger.

The Italian Job gang has stolen the gold. But their bus is hanging over the edge of a cliff. Michael Caine, who survived to become Batman's batman, utters the words: "Hang on a minute, lads. I've got a great idea."

So how can the gang save themselves and their illegally obtained life savings in this '60s cult classic? Now the Royal Society of Chemistry is asking the world's engineers to find a solution to one of the great movie endings--no helicopters allowed.

The rules are quite simple: Assume that in 30 minutes, the truck will topple down the mountain. As a very clever engineer, you provide a strictly mathematical calculation, coupled with an accurate diagram and, perhaps most difficult for some engineers, 150 words of explanation.

A Mini homage to The Italian Job.

(Credit: CC Exfordy)

Professor Chris Pearce, fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, offered this frightfully imaginative solution to the Daily Telegraph: "I would suggest that the gang get out of the coach, let it fall, and get down the mountain as quickly as possible to retrieve the gold from the wreckage. That is the only logical thing to do, as it preserves their lives, and the gold isn't going to bother about the fall."

Now here's the thing. Michael Caine, who played the lead character named Charlie Croker, actually revealed the ending The Italian Job's producers intended a few years ago.

"The next thing that happens is, you turn the engine on," he told the BBC. "You all sit exactly where you are till all the petrol has run out, which changes the equilibrium. We all jump out, and the gold goes over the cliff. And at the bottom are the French mafia, sitting, waiting for the gold."

You see, the point of the cliffhanging ending was to prepare for a sequel. The second movie was to tell the story of the gang's quest to retrieve the gold from those devious onion-garlanded, bereted mafiosos.

However, Americans didn't mob movie theaters to see The Italian Job in sufficient numbers, so the sequel tumbled off the production pile.

Still, there is a spectacularly stingy prize--three nights, surprisingly, in Turin--for the fine mind that can bring this classic cult movie to a dramatic and scientifically accurate conclusion on the 40th anniversary of its release.

You have until January 1 to prepare your case. Involvement in the so-called Bridge to Nowhere does not disqualify you from entry.

It's not easy being a bank employee these days. You don't know what your bank will be tomorrow. Perhaps it will be a different kind of bank. Or even a former bank.

So perhaps it is unsurprising that Geoff Harmer, an IT chap at Barclays Bank in Basingstoke, England (a little like the nice parts of New Jersey), decided to invest $90 and his artistic talent into making a Star Wars movie.

The opus is entitled Overtime and the action takes place around the bank cubicles, in an elevator (where the protagonists encounter a tall bald man who has something of Chewbacca's gutturals) and, um, around some more cubicles.

The acting might best be described as determined, with the Emmy going to a female employee who manages to brandish two lightsabers with all the grace of Uma Thurman in Kill Bill. Well, some of the grace.

Will the world's Star Wars fans support this movie?

(Credit: CC Official Star Wars blog)

The film lasts just over eight minutes and is confidently followed by a taster of the employees' next movie, entitled OT2. Time an' a Half, which seems to involve another female brandisher with far more black make-up and significantly less black clothing.

I won't spoil the twisting, cerebral plot which acts as Overtime's spine, but there is some quite stunning news. The movie has been accepted into the 41st. POL-8 Film Festival in Poland.

Held in the small Siliesian town of Polanica-Zdroj, POL-8 celebrates the amateur film maker. And, in case viewing the movie with a large audience fills you with excitement, it begins this Thursday. Flights are still available, though you'll have to get something of a puddle-jumper from Warsaw or Krakow.

You might think that any old amateur digitalia is accepted by the Festival. You'd be mistaken. The Festival Committee viewed 76 movies and only admitted 48. Last year, a Czech film, called At the End of Time walked off with the first prize.

Perhaps the judges are partial to subject matter that considers end-of-the-world scenarios.

Let us hope that is the case. And let us hope that the world's IT community will keep its collective digits crossed for its fellow artist.

With suitable tragi-comedy nuance, Netflix announced this week that it made more money in the 2nd quarter (yes, profit went up 4%) and that it was closing Red Envelope, its film financing and acquisition company.

It so happened that over the last couple of weeks, I happened to have three Red Envelope movies fly from my Netflix queue, via a deeply philosophical USPS mailman, to my door.

Did Netflix really have to take this depressing decision? All these three movies were surprisingly good.

I have no recollection whether the Netflix's insidious secret service, with the deviously credible Stan Lanning as one of its chief agents, actually recommended these movies because of my predilection for, say, Talladega Nights.

(Credit: CC SWRuler 9284)

But 'No End In Sight' (a documentary about a soupcon of Iraq War bungling), 'Protagonist' (a documentary about four men who latch on to strange obsessions in their lives. And none of them are techies) and 'Private Property' (a drama about a woman with a son more hideous than tasseled loafers) could all be termed, at the very least, classy.

Despite such successes, Netflix admits to giving at least 4 Red Envelopers pink slips. (Although I have also read that up to 75 employees might be released.)

I got the first part of that last sentence wrong. It is precisely because of such successes that Red Envelope is being shut down.

It appears that the Red Envelopers were rather good at picking the right movies behind which to put money. Which made the fabulous munificent studios that put vast sums behind dreck rather than Shrek incredibly hulkish.

After all, Netflix relies on deals with those studios to distribute all of their content. So Red Envelope had to be killed off, before even reaching its Second Act as a company.

One can only hope that the smart people this company employed can still practice their craft elsewhere. Such as in one of the fabulous munificent studios that put vast sums behind..ah, yes, we have a storyline dilemma here.

So here's a plot twist.

Perhaps Red Envelope consistently outbid the studios, but then never made any money.

I will walk into the sunset and contemplate that one.

The End.