ASTRO BOY: THE AWKWARD TEENAGE YEARS

Saw this a couple of weekends ago but never got around to writing it up. And that’s obviously why yr all here. So let’s talk about:

Astro Boy

Even before I bought the ticket, I had a bad feeling about this, primarily because I thought Astro Boy looked awfully old in the poster. But I thought, well maybe that’s just bad poster art.

Turns out it’s not, and that’s the biggest problem with this version of Astro Boy: they deliberately made him older (which creator Osamu Tezuka objected to) strictly to make him appeal to the middle-school demographic, which I gather they had to do because you can’t get an all-ages rating when the main character is essentially built to replace the dead son of a scientist driven mad by grief.

That said, credit to the writers for at least keeping that part of the story. Also, while the overall story is simplistic and borderline schmaltzy at times, well, so was the original comic. Doesn’t mean it works as a 90-minute film, though.

It’s not all bad, mind. Some of the battle scenes are really good. But too much of Astro Boy looks like it’s trying to throw in elements from other CG movies and making it relevant to today’s kids – which may or may not work for the kids, but if you grew up with Astro Boy as a cartoon icon ... well, you know that video of Watchmen as a Saturday morning cartoon? It’s like that. Only not funny.

More than human,

This is dF

CHEERLEADERS + BEACH = PARTY

Good morning, Americans.

It’s Monday. Yr depressed about yr favorite football team’s track record. Yr thinking you need a new recruitment strategy to acquire better players. Team Def has a suggestion:

Send in the cheerleaders.



Why not? It worked in the 70s.

DISCLAIMER: Team Def cares not for football or cheerleaders. But some of you do, and we’ve got a blog to run here.

Rah rah rah,

This is dF

BAD COVER VERSION: LITERAL EDITION

ITEM: The Royal Mail (that’s the UK post office, if you didn’t know) plans to launch a new limited stamp collection set featuring ten (10) classic British album covers.

Here are my personal faves of the bunch (all of which I also have on CD and/or vinyl):





Overall, though, I have to say it’s a bit of a letdown. Royal Mail supposedly did a lot of research into “best album covers” polls and music magazine editors, but still, of all the Pink Floyd covers to choose from, how could you go with The Division Bell over, say, Wish You Were Here? And surely there should be at least one Beatles album cover? And honestly, what is Coldplay doing there?

I’m assuming the decisions were influenced in part by licensing/copyright/royalty issues. Still – and I know it’s a matter of taste – but for my money, if you’re going to do iconic album covers by British bands, you really ought to have Roxy Music’s Country Life in there.

First class, indeed.

Anyway, the Hammer/Carry On series was better.

Lick it up,

This is dF

OBSCENITIES FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

ITEM: A federal appeals court has decided that a national community standard to define Internet obscenity is more appropriate than a local one.

BACKGROUND: For those of you who don’t know (or aren’t Mass Comm majors), the current standard in the US for declaring a song, photo, book, magazine, TV show, film or whatever legally obscene – and therefore exempt from First Amendment protection – is the Miller Test, which contains three criteria for determining if something is obscene, two of which are decided based on the current standards of the community where the item was found to offend.

The reason, of course, is because what might shock people in small-town Arkansas might be no big deal to people in Chicago.

The Internet, however, has been a grey area because it has no physical locality. So how do you apply “community” standards to a distribution mechanism with no physical borders?

The judges in the appeals case ruled that you can’t, so there should be a national standard instead – at least for Internet content.

Granted, that doesn’t really make sense either (suppose yr being sent obscene material via servers in Ukraine or Brazil, for example?). But then the current case is strange anyway, as the plaintiffs in question were found guilty of spamming porn and convicted under the CAN-SPAM Act – in which case the obscenity of the content is irrelevant. One of the plaintiffs was also charged with not having Section 2257 records verifying the age of the performers in the porn, but that doesn’t have anything to do with obscenity either. I gather this specific case is some separate attempt by some DA to add insult to injury – or possibly some attempt by the DOJ to justify its authority to censor the Internet.

In any case, I’m not sure if a “national standards” benchmark for Internet obscenity is a good or bad thing. I take the point that local standards are useless in the digital age. On the other hand, I never was a fan of outlawing obscene media anyway. The harder it is to get a conviction, the better. (And for the record, I don’t include kiddie porn in that because the creation of it violates existing pedophilia laws anyway.)

Anyway, it’ll be up to the Supremes to make the call on this. It’ll be interesting to see which way it goes.

Disorder in the court,

This is dF