1. This time around, the video game anniversary of note is the Playstation, which has turned 15, and Joystiq celebrates with gifts of not just one but two infographics. This also makes it a good time to ask if classic video games still hold up. We’ll see if Madden on Facebook will hold up. I’m 100% certain The Room Tribute Flash game will; how could it not?

2. The music industry continues to struggle with sales, and while on iTunes music is still central, apps downloads may soon surpass song downloads (though The Oatmeal has a great cartoon about how we really feel when buying apps), and music labels aren’t cooperating with Ping but are cooperating with Google. Maybe Iron Maiden has the solution to the music industry’s problems.

3. Paste Magazine was among the print casualties this fortnight, and Arthur Sulzberger announced the New York Times would be one someday. Right now, newspapers are struggling to maintain their advertising share, and Gawker is beating all newspapers but the New York Times in online hits share, while Vogue is working to make both its print and online sources more advertiser friendly, and Playboy has become more blind-reader friendly.

4. It’s Hollywood summer summary time: summer was slow, attendance was down, ticket price gouging was up, there were summer trends and summer winners and losers, but Kick-Ass wasn’t the loser many first thought.

5. In indie cinema, it’s been a good year for documentaries and a good summer for women in art house seats and behind cameras, but it’s been a tough summer for specialty crossover hits and a tough everything for Terry Gilliam’s Don Quixote project. What it’ll be for I’m Still Here is being hotly debated.

6. Redbox hit its one billionth DVD rental, and now it’s looking to a new horizon: streaming. Google wants to compete in that realm too, one that has helped to make Netflix’s CEO a very rich man. Blockbuster actually has an advantage over the others in being able to offering certain rentals earlier, but it might not have the money to market that fact to consumers. iTunes and video-on-demand consumers can see Freakonomics earlier than even theatergoers can, and David Ehrlich believess such a model can actually help theaters in the end.

7. Twitter now touts 145 million registered users worldwide, but still has yet to truly go mainstream. It’s increasingly a key news platform, however (the Ford Explorer verdict story is especially striking), as well as a music industry factor, and for its alchemy with Werner Herzog and Kanye West (or so we presume) alone, we have to be grateful it exists.

8. Jaron Lanier doesn’t like social media forms; Pepsi loves them. Jim Louderback doesn’t like viral videos; Arcade Fire loves them. Nicholas Carr doesn’t like hyperlinks; Scott Rosenberg loves them.

9. The new Digg got criticized by old users and pwned by Reddit users, part of a larger trajectory of decline for Digg, which has responded to its latest problems by firing an engineer and asking users to chill out, while Reddit has responded by preparing for expansion. No matter who claims supremacy, it’s tougher than you might think to measure online traffic. YouTube Instant certainly got a lot of traffic, so much that YouTube’s CEO offered its undergrad student creator a job. Maybe he could help YouTube finally turn a profit.

10. Some good News for TV Majors links from the past two weeks: Bordwell Says Don’t Bother, Univision Wins 18-49, Please Don’t Call It a Recap, State of Network News, Ramadan TV, Too Much TV?, Smaller Channel Squeeze, Comcast Charity, Done Deal, Apple & Amazon News, TV the New Cinema?, Emmy Coverage.



Bryan Lee O’Malley’s indie comedy/action/romance series Scott Pilgrim has cultivated a rabid fanbase quick to shove the first book into the hands of any non-comics reader expressing even the vaguest interest in the medium. As they should. Because it’s glorious. Get in on the action before Universal’s film adaptation arrives this month.

Scott Pilgrim’s storyworld operates akin to a sort of 8-bit videogame magical realism in which a heartfelt “I love you” gives the protagonist enough experience points to gain the “power of love” achievement bonus . . . and a flaming sword to wield against his enemies. The series, told across six digest-sized graphic novels (starting with Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life in 2004 and culminating in last month’s Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Moment), propels itself forward with a bombastic Ritalin-and-Pixy-Stix mania perfectly at ease with inhabiting the space between Street Fighter and Gilmore Girls. It follows twenty-three year-old slacker hero Scott Pilgrim’s effort to find love, employment, a venue willing to book his band Sex-Bob-Omb more than once, and generally get his act together.  The impetus for change comes when Scott meets and (so very awkwardly) woos oversized mallet-wielding street samurai and Amazon.ca delivery girl Ramona V. Flowers. Before he can win her heart, however, Scott must first defeat her seven evil exes in physical combat, which isn’t as unlikely as it seems in a world where your prowess playing beat-‘em-up video games directly translates to your fighting skills in real life, and in which your opponents, once vanquished, burst into a shower of coins familiar to anyone who’s ever played Nintendo games in the 1980s.

O’Malley chooses a deceptively simple style for the series, combining expressive manga-tinged character work with a visual representation of Toronto faithful enough to inspire at least one “Scott Pilgrimage.” His ability to convey the series’ cartoonish action is impressive, but O’Malley’s capacity to capture his cast’s emotional motivations and reactions—subtle and outrageous—is key as they negotiate an ever-increasing spiderweb of interpersonal relations threading in and out of multiple timelines.  Dozens of characters populate O’Malley’s work, both as part of the Toronto scene’s larger social circle and several subcliques (every primary character has his or her own group of friends and rivals), all realized with their own backstories, impulses, and quirks, united only in their penchant towards highly quotable buffyspeak. Indeed, perhaps the most treasured page of the series is the map at the end of the third book (the halfway point) that traces out the top dozen characters’ relationships with each other. It, for instance, reminds us that minor player Julie Powers is on-and-off dating Sex-Bob-Omb frontman Steven Stills, loathes band hanger-oner Young Neil, and wants to re-friend college roommate (and Scott’s ex) Envy Adams now that she’s  famous.

Scott Pilgrim’s status within the canon of comics is assured. Excitement over the movie and the final volume is at a fever pitch. The former, buoyed by a pair of Apple.com-crashing trailers, a series of seven video remixes featuring original music and previously unreleased footage as part of a massive internet marketing campaign, and above all else, director Edgar Wright’s reported obsessive adherence to the source material, has driven fans to extremes of anticipation so great that Wright himself has attempted to temper their excitement. The series currently occupies the six top spots on the New York Times’ Paperback Graphic Novels list, and the final volume ranked #5 overall in Books (topping the Julia Roberts film cover edition of Eat, Pray, Love) and #1 in Comics and Graphic Novels at Amazon on the day of its release. All that said, Scott Pilgrim might very well end up being more of an orphan than progenitor—despite it’s success, few, if any, creators have attempted to replicate its success in either style or content in the half-decade since Oni released the first volume.

To put it simply, there’s absolutely nothing out there like it. Those interested can find a lengthy preview of the first book here.

Jaoui has always been a tough nut to crack. Her latest, Let it Rain (the original translates as the more evocative, Speak to Me About the Rain), is a comedy of manners that is supposed to illuminate the rampant class divisions in modern France, with an ethnic twist. The only problem is that no character is particularly stimulating or interesting. Not even Jaoui herself, the ostensible protagonist, whose lack of many sympathetic qualities I suppose we’re supposed to read as self-critique. I can’t say that I’m convinced. What’s more, the movie is so blandly filmed without any sparkle to its images that it’s difficult to see the profundity in Jaoui’s wit.

Hansen-Löve, meanwhile, may have a bit more to offer. A bit. Her newest is The Father of My Children, a narrative bifurcation that depicts a movie producer (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) at the end of his financial rope, and then how his family copes with grief. Hansen-Löve is clearly the product of her mentor (now-husband), Olivier Assayas, in the way in which she sensitively depicts the dynamics of a family, and in how she keeps her camera constantly roving, searching and exploring space. However, she doesn’t transcend the sum of her influences. Colleagues have told me that the manner in which each family member copes with death is the true meat of the film, but all I see are cliches re-hashed. Although I will admit that some imagery is quite breathtaking. Her Assayas-isms allow for the film to breathe, but I’d take Summer Hours and Late August, Early September over this any day of the week.

I wouldn’t try to claim that this new generation of Frenchie cinéastes has no purchase on their country’s movie legacy; Assayas, Claire Denis, Serge Bozon, Philippe Garrel, Arnaud Desplechin, and others are all post-New Wavers still making great work. (I am aware that most of these directors are over the age of 50, but I digress.) For the purposes of this New York summer, though, the old guns ruled the day. Exhibit A: Resnais’s best film in god knows how long, Wild Grass. Resnais company players Andrè Dussolier and Sabine Azèma are on hand as potential lovers whose paths continually cross, and the balance of whose passions continually exchange. Forming continuity with Resnais’s favorite new-generation filmmaker,  along with fleshing out his cast, are Desplechin regulars Anne Consigny, Emmanuelle Devos and Mathieu Amalric. Borders between reality and fantasy, especially as to how they relate to desire, quickly dissolve thanks to Resnais’s elegant, balletic editing, using past inserts and slow-motion images of the future to suggest violent, cinematic passions roiling inside Dussolier’s smitten stalker and AzÈma’s flighty dentist. A beautifully systematic color design along with allusive dialogue suggest even further temporal breakdowns, but with an effortless glee that defines a certain strand of late film: the “I can get away with anything, so I will” type. Or perhaps the little girl who just wants to be a cat dreamed the whole thing up. Who knows? Does something so lithely beautiful require such answers? Christopher Nolan had better take note.

Finally, we turn to Rivette. While the Americans are calling his newest Around a Small Mountain, I prefer the original French, translated as 36 Views of Saint Wolf Mountain. It’s Rivette’s shortest film by about 45 minutes, and for a guy who once made a 12 -hour opus, that’s no small thing. There are few directors who know how to capture the texture of space, and Rivette achieves this once again. How is this achieved, you might ask? It’s done via slow tracking shots that examine and reveal new spaces, sound design that makes dialogue and bird songs part of the same landscape, and natural light that has physical weight to it. This is pure filmmaking. The Rivettian thematic tropes are all there too: performance as identity, mysteries that must be unraveled, sheer joy from using performance as play. Jane Birkin, Sergio Castellito, and the rest of the circus troupe seem to be having great fun with what they do. Maybe it’s slight or minor, as a friend said to me over post-screening drinks, but it sure ain’t no “abortion,” as one old woman said as she exited the theater.

No trends, no grand speculations, no in-depth analyses; just some whimsical, subjective ideas from a man who will be sorry to see his Gallic summer end. Here’s to hoping all four of these movies show up outside major metropolitan centers; sadly, I am much less convinced of that little thought.