Little luxuries - the essentials of life

One of the things I'm looking forward to, once I have a regular income again, are a few of the little luxuries I had to cut back on. It's one of the truly soul-crushing things about tough times - having to cut out even the tiny things that make life not just pleasant, but bearable. When you're literally watching every penny, scraping together enough money to pay the water bill before it gets shut off, then everything non-essential has to go. Your whole perception of household economics gets changed: if you have to go to a job interview 20 miles away, you find yourself calculating whether to take the toll road and spend a buck each way on tolls, or whether the extra gas from sitting in traffic on the main road will actually cost you more.

In those circumstances, you're reduced to nothing more than what you need to survive. Life becomes bland, boring and depressing. You say no every time your friends invite you to something, and you make up excuses because you don't want to be embarrassed that you can't even afford the gas to get to the event, let alone tickets or food. Everything that made life fun has gone away, and it becomes harder and harder to motivate yourself and present the right attitude to potential employers. You work your butt off chasing jobs, and at the end of the day, you don't even get to reward yourself for whatever you do achieve.

Just those few little moments of happiness that brighten up your day can totally change everything. Much though I'd love to say that the best things in life are free, and you don't need money to find happiness, it's not entirely true. Some things, you need money for. Not a lot - a few bucks is plenty - but there are only so many invigorating walks you can take before they lose their power to make you smile, especially when you live in suburban Florida and don't have gas money to go anywhere.

2013 is looking much brighter. I'll still be paying off debts for a while, and dealing with some of the neglected maintenance on the house and vehicles, so it'll be a while before any of the big ticket items are going to happen, but there's now room in the budget for a few little luxuries, mostly under $10. I don't see them as luxuries, though. They're something to look forward to. They make me happy, and when I'm happy, I'm less prone to illness, more productive, and more motivated. They're what gives me a reason to keep going.

The first little $5 treat I bought myself, last Tuesday, was a small jar of Marmite. I'm not one of those expatriates who has to have all the comforts of the home country, but I do like to start my day with toast and Marmite. On Wednesday, everything was different. It felt right. It felt like the bad days had come to an end, and things were finally picking up. I felt like me again. Tastes can do that - they're comforting, and they touch a very deep part of the psyche.

My plan is that every week I'll pick up one more little tasty thing for the cupboard. I'm not talking about a bottle of wine or other things that are gone right away, although those are nice too. I'm talking about things that will last for a while, and which you don't think of as luxuries until you can't afford to replace them.  A weekly visit to the Winter Park Spice & Tea Exchange for a $5 treat is definitely part of the plan.

• Truffle salt. A little of this sprinkled on scrambled eggs turns breakfast into a delicious taste explosion.
• Vik's Garlic Mix. Add to olive oil, and dip home-made bread into it for a Mediterranean style snack. 
• Saffron. Add to fruit salad and it takes it to a whole new level. Put it in a curry, and make a mind-blowing korma.
• Medjool dates. My favorite snack. Regular dates just don't taste the same.

And then there are other little luxuries. Not everything in my life is food-related!

• Some decent shaving oil, so my face doesn't feel like it's been sandpapered. And knowing I can change the blade in my razor as soon as it starts to get dull, not seeing if I can make it last another week, or two, or three...
• New shirts. Sure, I have smart shirts, but they're old and worn, and wearing them to the office makes me feel unprofessional. Two for $6 each in J.C. Penney's sale last weekend? That'll do nicely. I don't need new ones, but I feel better, I work better, and I'm sure that's unconsciously reciprocated by the way my clients treat me.
• Replacing the power supply in the stereo for the hot tub, so we can listen to music and relax. Actually, one of the first things we did was get the hot tub going again. We had it powered down after solstice because we couldn't afford to keep it running, and we couldn't afford to change the water either. The hot tub's not really a luxury either. Both of us suffer with back problems, and a daily hot tub is far cheaper than a regular visit to a doctor or massage therapist. 
• A set of steel files. Decent model-making requires decent tools. I managed okay on Kong with just a knife, but the joins weren't as smooth as I wanted. $6 in Hobby Lobby with a coupon, and I'm ready to start making models again. On a similar note, I'll be taking a trip to Office Max and getting them to print out the next cardboard model. 
• Going to a dollar movie. One freaking dollar is all it takes for a few hours of escapism. Last weekend, we saw Cloud Atlas. Lincoln and Skyfall will be coming up soon. Eventually we'll be able to afford going to the Enzian again, but for now, this will do.
• Buying a bunch of flowers for my wife. A little romantic gesture can go a long, long way.

As hobbies go, it's pretty damn cheap, but even making things out of paper isn't free. 

All the above adds up to well under $100 over the next two months. It's not really a lot of money in the big scheme of things, but those few little items are worth everything to me. It's the difference between enjoying my life, and enduring it. 

I was only out of work for a few weeks, although things were tight for a while before that. I was lucky - I had good contacts and a good resume with skills that are in demand. I know how much this affected me in that period.  Some people have to go through unemployment for much longer - six months is nothing unusual. I can't imagine how it would feel to go through it every single day for months on end, knowing there was nothing to look forward to except another day of living in a culture devoted to telling me about all the things I can't have, being told by employers I'm no good, and being told by society I'm clearly lazy and useless. 

Luxuries aren't just luxuries. They're the rewards we give ourselves for getting through the daily grind. In moderation, they're essentials. 

Stuff'n'nonsense #7

No blog yesterday. Did you miss me?

• OK, movies. Watched two documentaries, Food, Inc and Urban Explorers. Food, Inc didn't really tell me anything I didn't already know, but seeing it on screen really turned me off eating a lot of what's in the supermarkets. Urban Explorers was interesting, but could have done with being half an hour shorter. Still, well worth watching just for the pretty images of abandoned places. I just wanted to know who the hell simply walks away from a fully furnished castle and leaves it to rot?
• Here's one I may or may not see when it reaches Netflix. Atlas Shrugged could be fascinating, or could have me throwing things at the screen. This review intrigues me: A Movie This Demented Should Be Against The Law. I have to admit, I've tried to read it and failed. And Ayn Rand's philosophy pisses me off. But I'm prepared to give the movie a shot.
• Game footage is getting more and more like movies. Check out this latest Unreal demo. And remember, this is real-time in-game footage. This is not a cut-scene. This is not pre-rendered. This is gameplay.
  And while your jaw hits the floor, I'll just tell you that this is taking not one, not two, but three top of the range custom nVidia graphics cards to run it. So don't expect it to work on your laptop. Don't even expect it to work on your current generation super-duper video production PC. Figure on getting a whole new machine when this comes out in two years.

• I spent much of yesterday browsing Wonderland, a hugely entertaining blog that talks about games of all sorts. What initially caught my eye was this glorious Lego steampunk TIE Fighter. Neat, huh?

• Also from Wonderland, an excellent post on social mechanisms in games, based on a superb talk by Raph Koster, who I should follow more closely than I do. He "explained how societies work, how humans work, and how we interact as beings with each other, described as social mechanics and how they could be applied (and are sometimes applied) in social games. [Here's] his list of the 40 essential social mechanics that have ever existed, in order that game designers need never have to reinvent them again." Bloody brilliant stuff.
• It's a damn shame I missed the Muppet Art Show last night. Woulda liked to see that, and it looked like people had a lot of fun.
• Damn shame I missed the hillbilly burlesque last night too. Looking forward to the next Kitschy Kittens show.

I'm still wondering whether to continue with this long blog format. It doesn't generate anything like the responses I used to get with FB posts, and it doesn't feel like many people are actually reading these. I'm seriously considering whether to revert to just sharing things on FB or take a vow of social media silence and focus on writing proper stuff.

Last week I had to do some research into Twitter, and came up with some depressing facts.

• The average person on Twitter gets 2700 messages a day. A year ago, it was 400, and I thought that was a lot. Math: if it takes 5 seconds to read a tweet, it would take 3 hrs 45 minutes a day to read your Twitter feed.
• Most people log in once a day, and only read their direct messages, @messages, and whatever's been posted in the last 10-15 minutes. Math: most people only read 1% of their feed. In other words, if you post something on Twitter, there's a 99% chance that a given one of your followers won't see it.
• Click-through rates on Twitter links have dropped from 38% a year ago to 14% now. So given that hardly anyone is going to read your tweet, the number of people who will actually click on a link is near enough non-existent (o.14%). Math: if you have 500 followers, then maybe ONE of them will actually click through.
• Retweet rates have dropped from 25% in 2009 to 17% in 2010 and 11% now. Math: if you have 500 followers, maybe ONE will RT your post. And if he has 500 followers, maybe one will click through and/or RT it.

In other words, it's Babel out there. Everyone's talking, nobody's listening. It's not a conversation any more. It's no longer a viral way of spreading information as transmission rates are so poor. It's just noise, pretty much drowning out all the signal, and the only response people have is to turn up the noise. In December, I wondered what Twitter was for. Now, I'm none the wiser.

Well, that's not quite true. I am. In December, I had a hunch that Twitter was becoming useless. Now, I have the stats to prove my hunch.

Stuff'n'nonsense #6

I'm writing this one while watching First Orbit - the movie. It's a real time recreation of Yuri Gagarin's pioneering first orbit, shot entirely in space from on board the International Space Station. The film combines this new footage with Gagarin's original mission audio and a new musical score by composer Philip Sheppard. It's over 90 minutes long, and it's as close as you'll ever get to seeing that incredible historic moment when mankind first left this planet. Sit back, fire it up full screen on the biggest device you've got, and enjoy the incredible feeling of an entire space mission. Just imagine what it must have been like for Gagarin, up there for the first time, seeing things no human being had ever seen before.

They've disabled embedding, so you'll have to just click through. Oh hang on, wait, read the rest of my blog first!

• Today is a moment I've been waiting for for about six years. My friend Damien Valentine, announced that his new feature film, Chronicles of Humanity, will be released on April 26, and will have its theatrical debut at the Little Theatre Cinema in Bath. It's a sci-fi epic featuring several of my friends, and also Felicia Day, who you may recognise from The Guild, Dollhouse, Dr Horrible, and so on. That's pretty damn cool. What's even cooler is that he funded and made the whole film himself.
  And coolest of all, from my point of view, he did it with Moviestorm. When we started creating it, we said that one day, we wanted to see a Moviestorm movie in the cinema, and now it's finally happening. Damien - thanks, and congratulations!
  If you can't make it to the cinema, don't worry, you can watch Chronicles of Humanity online as a Web series.
• One of the films I'm most looking forward to is Luc Besson's The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec. Described as Indiana Jones crossed with The Mummy and Amelie, this looks right up my street. I love the close of this review: "I wouldn’t hesitate in recommending this film, I’m just not sure who to." Me, that's who! Looks like a perfect date movie for us.

• I stumbled across this book today after seeing a tweet about it. Oh My God What Happened And What Should I Do? It's a neat book about digital marketing, well-written, concise, and informative - well worth picking up. What's really clever is that you can buy it for money from Amazon, or buy it for free if you tweet about it. Err, no-brainer. I'll have it for nothing, thanks. And because I'm lazy, I'll leave their default tweet "This Book helps you to move into the Digital era of awesomeness. Download it for free: http://bit.ly/4R9rth" instead of writing "I haven't actually read this book yet but it looks cool and it's free if I write this tweet." Cunning, huh? And they've shifted 150,000 copies that way. Made no money, true, but they've built an audience very, very fast.
• Now this is something I like. Your Taxpayer Receipt, courtesy of the White House. Punch in some data on how much tax you paid, and it'll tell you where all the money is going; how much on defence, hospitals, schools, etc. More governments should do that.
• Did you know Newfoundland has its own time zone? They're an hour and a half ahead of Florida.
• Got writer's block? Deal with it.

I appear to have done something bad to my foot, which got slightly squished during the kitten-trapped-under-garage-door incident a few weeks ago. It feels much like it did when I fell off a motorcycle many years ago - not broken, but possibly a cracked bone, which hurts like hell and isn't going away. I've now got it bandaged up, and am trying to walk or stand on it as little as possible.

At least we have a mostly quiet weekend ahead of us: the main event is Ginger and Joe's Florida wedding reception on Saturday. They got married last weekend up north, and are having a second do down here this weekend.

We're also meeting with a bunch of people to kick around ideas for future art shows in Orlando. There's been a sudden resurgence of enthusiasm, mostly thanks to Ben Sawinski, and a whole load of new opportunities have started popping up.

Apart from that, I'm thinking I'll spend the weekend with my foot propped up, either catching up on movies, reading, or maybe even writing something at long last... Well, when I say writing, I mean other than my blog (6 articles this week), corporate stuff (28 articles) and emails (178 since Tuesday). I mean like maybe a story, or a script, or some lyrics.

Oh, and if you were wondering, we never made it to the Colombian restaurant. There's still a pile of paperwork on the office floor, so we haven't earned it yet. Damn.

Now you can go and watch Gagarin orbit the earth.

French cinema 2010: a playlist from Lucy

I may have given the impression a few weeks ago that I'm an uncritical fan of foreign movies. For example, last week we went to see Inspector Bellamy, starring Gerard Depardieu and directed by Claude Chabrol. It was billed as a "witty homage to the mysteries of Simenon by France's master of the suspense thriller", and had received excellent reviews from critics and fans.

Frankly, I think a better description would be "a tedious and poorly filmed character study of a cop and his family based around a non-mystery with no twist at the end." I really can't understand why it was so successful. It felt like the sort of film buff's movie I was supposed to appreciate, based purely on the pedigree of the director and star, but I didn't find anything in it to enjoy.

After I posted this on Facebook, my friend Lucy Georges sent me this, which she's allowed me to reprint. She's English, but has been living in France for many years.

Your blog post prompted me to write some thoughts on French films from 2010, just in case you're looking for ideas on what to watch over the next few months...

Comme les cinq doigts de la main: A good action film about a Jewish family and their run in with organised crime.

Des Hommes et des Dieux: The only one I hated. This is an overhyped true story of the monks that were assassinated in Algeria, and was a raging success in secular France where people have a strange love-hate relationship with religion. Unfortunately, while both the subject and location should have provided ample opportunity for beautiful photography, this was sadly lacking. The scenario was dreadful, and full of clichés. Only the acting saved the film in my view. It was however a roaring success, but if the average age of the spectators is anything to go by, you need to be at least 55 years old to appreciate the movie.

Elle s'appeleait Sarah: Kristin Scott Thomas, another expat, in one of the year's two films about the 1942 event at the Vélodrome d'Hiver. Interesting narrative technique.

Imogen McCarthery: Based on Exbrayat's short novel, this is an amusing story of a Scottish girl who unwittingly becomes a spy. Worth seeing for the very French view of the British Isles!

La rafle: The other Vel d'hiv film, featuring Jean Reno. You need hankies ready for this one.

Les émotifs anonymes: I haven't seen it yet, but as soon as the snow melts, I'm on it. With Belgian Benoit Poelevoorde, it looks to be a box office hit.

L'arnacoeur: Handsome Romain Duris stars in this romantic comedy about a team of swindlers who break up couples.

L'illusioniste: The one I missed, and will be buying as soon as I find it on DVD. Jacques Tati did the scenario, and the animation is by the maker of Les Triplettes de Belleville.

L'immortel: More Jean Reno as a Marseilles gangster type trying to get out of his past life. A good action film.

Les Aventures Extraordinaires d'Adèle Blanc Sec: A superb adaptation of the Tardi comic books by Luc Besson. Great fun.

Pièce Montée: Rom com about a disastrous wedding. Some very funny scenes.

Potiche: Catherine Deneuve is back on form in this humourous tale about life in the seventies for a bourgeois wife. Also features Depardieu and Luchini.

Serge Gainsbourg Vie Héroique: An innovative take on the biopic with a dreamlike element which brings out another facet of Gainsbourg besides the provocative aspect he's famous for.

Simon Werner a disparu: A first film worth seeing for the experimental narrative technique. It wasn't an enormous success, but I think we might see more from Fabrice Gobert in the future.

Thelma, Louise et Chantal: One for women over forty. A comedy road movie.

Tout ce qui Brille: Another first film about life in the 'banlieue' and two friends trying to escape.

Une exécution ordinaire: Based on a novel, this tells the story of a female doctor forced to leave her life to become Stalin's personal medic.

Une petite zone de turbulences: This is based on the British novel, A Spot of Bother, and features Michel Blanc in the main role. Funny.

There's definitely a lot there I want to see. I'm particularly looking forward to the Besson film, and if it turns up in any of the local cinemas, I'm right there. I'll also be on the lookout for the Jean Reno films, and the one about the doctor looks interesting.

I'm off to check out how many of those are on Netflix, while I watch a Thai pirate movie, Legend of the Tsunami Warrior.

The soporific screen

I don’t know what it is, but these days I find it almost impossible to watch an entire movie without – quite literally - falling asleep. Whether I’m in the cinema or at home, I can’t make it all the way through. Sometimes I can’t even get through a single episode of a TV show. It’s becoming really annoying.

I don’t think it’s just tiredness, though that certainly doesn’t help. I find myself dozing off in matinees or when watching something late afternoon or early evening. It’s certainly not boredom – I end up dozing through the end of films I’m really enjoying. It’s not that I can’t concentrate for two straight hours – I can read a book or play a game all day without dropping off, but half an hour after a movie starts, I start to feel sleep creeping up on me.

I thought for a while it was a reaction to darkness. Dave & Darien both prefer to watch movies with the lights off, so I tried insisting that we leave the lights up. That certainly made things better, and now I can usually get most of the way through a movie or into the second episode of TV before drifting away. I tried changing my posture, and that makes a difference too. If I’m lazing on a couch with my feet up, I tend to crash out fairly rapidly. Sitting upright in an armchair or sitting on the floor helps. However, neither of those is sufficient.

I was fascinated to read in Wired this week how using the Internet is changing the way our brains process information. We’re becoming more and more adept at skimming, at multi-tasking, and at dealing with rapidly changing data sources. After working in machinima for seven years, I now find myself thinking of a ten-minute movie as a long piece, and am getting more and more used to two-minute movies. Watching a full-length feature is rather like trying to listen to an opera or a symphony after being immersed in a culture of three-minute pop songs and advertising jingles.

There was a time when I would sit in a chair or lie on the floor and just listen to an hour-long symphony. Nowadays I’d want something else to do with my hands and eyes while I was listening, and would probably be getting restless after the first movement. When I listen to music now, I’m usually cooking, reading, web-surfing, chatting online, working, or doing housework. (Or, more likely, several of these at once.) I’d probably stay awake through movies if I treated them as background in the same way.

Part of the problem, I suppose, is that watching a movie is completely passive and non-interactive. With a book, at least I’m turning the pages, I control the pace at which I read, I can easily skip back a few pages, and I can get up, make coffee, and read anywhere. I'm imagining the scene, turning words into mental images and sounds. With a movie, I’m completely captive. It demands my attention, but requires that I do absolutely nothing else and gives me everything I need to see and hear. As a result, when I watch a movie, it’s as if my brain is saying to me as soon as I relax, “nope, nothing to do here, Matt, might as well go into stand-by mode”.

Strangely, I can sit by the shore of a lake, in a forest clearing, on a beach, or on top of a hill, and just sit, silently, thinking or meditating for hours without going to sleep. By contrast, I can lie in bed in the darkness for hours, and my brain races insanely, no matter how tired I am. My preferred insomnia cure is to get up, put on a movie, and fall asleep on the couch.

It's perplexing. And, as I said, annoying.

This Film Is Not Yet Rated

This is a fascinating documentary about the American movie ratings process that anyone interested in either film or censorship should watch.

As a European, I have to admit I found several aspects of the movie completely baffling.

Let’s get this one out of the way first. It’s a well-known issue that Europeans are reasonably tolerant of sex in movies, but tend to shy away from extreme violence, whereas Americans will accept almost any degree of violence, but are comparatively puritanical when it comes to sex or bad language (despite having the world’s largest porn industry). As a result, the criteria by which films are rated are completely different to what I’m used to. Movies I think of as suitable only for adults are kids’ movies here, and movies I’ve watched with my kids are deemed shocking and unacceptable because there’s a hint of boobage or some bad language. However, that’s not what struck me this time.

The whole basis of US ratings seems to me to be useless. When we watch movies at home, we usually end up looking at the European ratings to find out whether they’re suitable for our 12 and 15 year old kids.

For the benefit of my fellow non-Americans, the US ratings system goes like this:

• G: kids of any age can watch this movie
• PG: kids of any age can watch this movie (but it may contain material some parents may consider inappropriate for pre-teens)
• PG-13: kids of any age can watch this movie (but some parents may think it’s inappropriate for pre-teens)
• R: kids of any age can watch this movie (but the cinema may require them to have their parents with them)
• NC-17: for over-18s only (and probably won’t actually get released or broadcast because the studios and distributors won’t touch it)

In other words, anyone can watch anything unless it’s NC-17. The PG-13 category is so broad that some movies are fine for 10-year olds, others – in my opinion – aren’t really suitable for a 15 year old, and would probably be classified 18 in the UK. Kids change hugely between 11 and 18 as they go from pre-puberty to adulthood, and there’s absolutely no indication in the rating of where on that scale a PG-13 fits.

The thing that feels truly weird is that Americans simply don’t have mass market movies for grown-ups or older kids. In the UK, we’re quite comfortable with the idea of having major movies that you have be to 15 or 18 to see. In America, if the theaters can’t get the 14-16 year olds into the cinema and sell them popcorn, they simply won’t show the movie. As a result, an NC-17 rating is basically the kiss of death for a movie. It relegates it to the status of a porn flick.

The strange side-effect of this is that when film directors are arguing for an R rating rather than an NC-17 rating, what they’re actually demanding is that scenes that we would think are suitable only for adults are actually fine for teenagers or even younger kids. In other words, they’re saying that young kids should be able to watch people being tortured and dismembered in graphic close-up, anally raped, having a drug-fuelled orgy with crucifix-shaped dildos, screwing donkeys, or whatever else they want to include in their story.

They’re not actually saying that, of course. They’re just trying to work with this broken ratings system.

What they’re actually asking for is two different things. First, they want the artistic freedom to make the movie they want to make. Well, they already have that freedom. They can make the movie any way they want, and they have the option of releasing it as NC-17 or unrated. Nobody's stopping them making the movie, as long as they can get the funding for it. That puts them in the exact same position as every other artist.

More importantly, though, they’re fighting for a commercial opportunity for that movie, and that’s where they have the problem. There is no commercial market for NC-17 movies in the US. That’s down to the decision by the studios, distributors and exhibitors not to show NC-17s. Wal-Mart and Blockbuster won’t touch them either. As a result, they have to get that R rating from the MPAA one way or another, or the movie is pretty much dead. So either they have to cut the adult scenes the MPAA doesn't like, or they have to argue that the adult scenes are acceptable to kids.

What the US needs, as far as I can see, is to accept that some movies really aren’t suitable for kids, and that there is a place for adults-only movie entertainment that isn’t porn. It’s perfectly accepted in other areas of the entertainment business. Nobody has a problem with putting on a burlesque show and saying over 18s only. Some art exhibitions, theatrical performances, variety acts and gigs don’t allow minors in. Kids can’t get into bars. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, and most Americans are quite comfortable with that policy.

So why do the distributors and exhibitors have such a problem with movies that are unsuitable for minors? An NC-17 movie should be no different to any other form of 18+ entertainment. If they were happy to show NC-17s, there would be less pressure to include increasingly hardcore adult material in R-rated movies, and that, surely, would be more in keeping with their mission to protect kids from unwholesome movies.

Now that's show business!

Awards season is here again, and the annual furore over which movie won the Golden Globe has really kicked off this year. The reaction to Avatar's win was truly shocking. I've never seen such bile spewed forth, and I've been on the Net for 20-odd years.

Putting aside all the juvenile and ill-informed vitriol, why do people take these awards so seriously? Quick test. Here's a short list of films. What do they have in common?

• Network
• Annie Hall
• Coming Home
• Kramer vs Kramer
• Ordinary People
• Unforgiven
• Terms of Endearment
• Million Dollar Baby

They all won at least three of the big six Oscars (Film, Director, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor & Actress), and they're all, as far as I'm concerned, eminently forgettable. In fact, of the dozen or so movies that have achieved this feat in the last 35 or so years, only two of them have really stood the test of time: Gandhi and Rain Man. There are other good films in this select group, like Amadeus and Silence of the Lambs, but they're not what I'd call great films. So, frankly, why do we care? The award only means that this group of people, at this time, liked that movie better than the others. It's not an enduring mark of greatness.

So what does make a great movie? Well, there's one simple measure of any form of entertainment. How many people went to see it? Box office may not be a measure of great artistic merit, but it does certainly tell you that this film appeals to a lot of people. And that, if you're in show business, is what pays the bills. Come on, making money ain't necessarily a bad thing. Films wouldn't get made if they weren't commercially successful. And that arty flick you like probably wouldn't have got funded if the studio hadn't made a ton of moolah off one of its blockbusters. It's been that way for a long, long time.

"We don't make films to make money. We make money so we can make more films." - Walt Disney

There's a great list of highest grossing movies over on wikipedia. It's worth a look.

Honestly, how can you not respect a man who makes the highest grossing film of all time, and then spends ten years to make another one that's just as huge, even without a massively popular hit single to help sell it. (Currently, Avatar's running #2 with $1.6bn, behind Titanic's $1.8bn. Anyone seriously want to bet that Avatar won't take the top spot?) Yes, it's a derivative story. So what? Show me any film in that list that doesn't have a derivative story. Actually, show me any book, comic or anything else that doesn't have a derivative story. That's what makes Avatar work - it takes familiar elements and reworks them into a fantastic storytelling experience. Just like Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Pirates of the Caribbean, Batman, Spiderman, Shrek, and so on. That's why we love them.

More interesting, though, compare what it cost to make the movie with what it made at box office, a bit further down the page. There's a fairly simple rule. To be one of these mega-blockbusters, you need to be one of the biggest budget movies of the year, and you'll make back 3 to 10 times what you invested.

Except, now look at Rocky. Cost, $1.1m. Box office, $225m. Holy crap, Batman. That film made back 200 times what it cost, which is truly phenomenal, and that doesn't even cover the video & DVD sales or the TV money, let alone the merchandising. Now that, my friends, is the kind of box office returns movie producers dream about. How many other films got made by UA because of the money they made from Rocky? It may not be the best movie ever, but it shows that someone really knew exactly what the public wanted and gave it to them. That's where the business comes into the show.

I therefore nominate Rocky as the most successful movie ever made. And you know what, I've never even seen it.

My favourite movie of the year

2009 has been a pretty good year for me and movies. I've seen more films in the cinema than I have for ages, largely because the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse and the Enzian Theater are such fantastic places to go to. I've begun to watch a wider range of movies at home than normal as well, thanks to Netflix streaming. (They should be paying me, the amount I go on about them.)

Anyway, here's my top three.

#3 Red Cliff

I've loved the Dynasty Warriors games since I first saw a PS2. John Woo's Red Cliff is an epic film based on one of the historical battles depicted in that game, so I was fascinated to see what it would be like. I wasn't disappointed. I was stunned to see how close it was to the game, in terms of both the story and the visual design of the characters and the places. They're both drawing on the same sources, and they're both treating it remarkably faithfully. As you'd expect from John Woo, it's a full-on spectacular action film, and the set-piece sequences are jaw-droppingly good. Costumes, sets, and cinematography are all fabulous, in the way that top-notch Chinese movies seem to have mastered these days. I still haven't seen the full 280-minute Asian release, only the 148-minute Western release, but I certainly intend to.

#2 Avatar

It's a tough call, but I'm going to have to put Avatar in second place. In the last three weeks we've seen the popular response go from "it can't live up to the hype" to "wow!" and then to "yeah, but the story's lame, what's the big deal?" The big deal is this. It's breathtaking. It uses 3D like no movie before it. The animation is incredible. The visual design is astounding. When you see it on a big IMAX 3D screen you become totally immersed in this beautiful, fantastic, magical world and in the film, and you want to reach out and touch it. You get vertigo while sitting in your seat. As for the story, personally, I loved it. It weaves together things from so many sources I've enjoyed over the years: Ferngully, yes, but also Deathworld, Starship Troopers, Aliens, Dragonriders of Pern, Emerald Forest, Dances With Wolves, and a host of classic SF stories. It wasn't at all what I was expecting, but I was absolutely entranced throughout. It's without a doubt the best thing Sigourney Weaver has done in years. It's taken Cameron 10 years and $300m to create Avatar, and he's exceeded all my expectations. It's a true landmark film.

#1 Moon

At completely the opposite end of the spectrum to Avatar, this low-budget sci-fi movie from Duncan Jones is my top pick of 2009. It's the best hardcore sci-fi I've seen in, well, as long as I can remember. It's an engrossing psychological thriller, with just one actor (more or less) and a robotic voice. I'm not going to say anything at all about the plot: I knew nothing about it when I saw it, and was absolutely hooked. It's only 97 minutes long, but you have no sense of time in this eerie world, and you feel completely sucked in. It's even more incredible when you know that it was made for just $5m, and it's Jones's debut movie. The special effects shots are superb, and I was amazed to learn that they're nearly all model shots, not digital, because it was cheaper that way. There's a lesson in there for movie-makers.

There are some good-looking movies coming up in 2010, and I still haven't seen Sherlock Holmes or Me And Orson Welles. I'm really looking forward to Alice in Wonderland, Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Clash of the Titans, Legion, The Lightning Thief, Dante's Inferno, Prince of Persia, and Eagle of the Ninth - and those are just the big movies I know about. Who knows what the indie movie scene or the Florida Film Festival will reveal?

Happy New Year, everyone. Whether you're making or watching movies, have fun!

Bye bye DVDs, hello Netflix streaming

I've always had a comparatively large collection of videos and DVDs, numbering well into the thousands. Even before I inherited my uncle's movie collection, I had a lot, but then it got ridiculous. However, when I came to the US, I left my entire collection behind apart from about a dozen I couldn't bear to be parted from. I was a little apprehensive about how I'd feel about that, but as it happens, it's worked rather well.

Recently, we've started using the Netflix streaming more and more, ever since we got a disk that allows us to stream video on demand through the PS3 directly onto our TV (as well as being able to watch on our computers). The quality's fine, with just the occasional hiccup, it's very affordable ($15 a month, which also gets us unlimited DVD rental), it's convenient, in that we can watch stuff wherever and whenever we want, and the range is staggering.

Right now, we have about 200 items queued up, including the following:

• The whole of Xena, Heroes, Jeremiah, Californication, Weeds, Star Trek: TOS and many other American TV series I never got round to watching or which didn't make it to the UK
• Classics like You Can't Take It With You, The Palm Beach Story
• A bunch of silent movies, including Fritz Lang's Destiny
• A huge selection of foreign language films, covering not just European movies, but Moroccan, Israeli, Korean, Japanese (live action & anime), Chinese and lots of Bollywood musicals
• British film & TV ranging from Merchant Ivory classics and BBC dramas like Pride & Prejudice to Mighty Boosh, Eddie Izzard, All Creatures Great and Small, Coupling, Little Britain, and Dr Who from Troughton to Tennant
• Weird indie & art-house movies I've never heard of but which look like they could be interesting, or which I loved and want to see again, like The World's Fastest Indian
• Documentaries galore, from Ken Burns to Walking with Dinosaurs
• A ton of kids' movies and kids' TV, from Golden Compass to Prince Caspian by way of The Storyteller and High School Musical.

There's more appearing every day, faster than we can possibly watch them, but it's quite manageable, because their recommendation system is quite astoundingly good. It really does seem to have a handle on what we like: it will suggest things like "period romantic movies with a strong female lead", and as often as not, it's pretty well spot on. We never have problems finding something to watch, although making a choice is sometimes hard! We don't have cable, and we don't miss it. Between this and music, we're pretty well covered for evenings in.

Obviously it doesn't have everything on here that I could possibly want to watch - it's noticeably short on recent blockbusters, but I can still get those from Netflix on DVD - but that's not the way to look at it. My DVD collection, extensive as it is, doesn't have everything either. However, Netflix' collection is growing a damn sight faster than mine, it has stuff on I wouldn't mind seeing but don't necessarily want to pay even $5 to own, and it has more than enough to provide me with entertainment whenever I feel like it. And, to be quite honest, I can find things a lot faster electronically than searching through shelves and shelves of boxes. It's also completely legal. No torrenting, and no overnight waits.

Since between all four of us we probably watch about five things a day on average, that works out at 10c per item. (That's 6p in English). Or, to put it another way, we watch about 150 movies for the price of owning one or two. When I look at it in those terms, I'd have to really, really like a movie to make it worthwhile buying it.

I've said for a while that eventually we'll get to a point where we can watch videos by paying a flat rate subscription to watch anything we want on demand. That's nearly there. I don't really see much future for DVDs, Blu-Ray or the like. The only real advantage of a DVD is that it has extras which I may (but usually don't) want to watch. This is cheaper, more convenient, more extensive, doesn't rely on a platform that may become obsolete (like the thousands of VHS videos that ended up in landfill) and doesn't fill up my house.

So close...

I had the strange experience today of giving up on a book 20 pages from the end. It was a harmless enough book, The Execution Channel, a thriller about a series of terrorist attacks in Britain - or are they in fact the start of World War Three? It's billed as science fiction, but it's not really what I generally think of as SF. It's in a slightly alternate universe (Gore won), but otherwise it's just technically literate: these people communicate via blogs, understand the net, and so on. Anyway, that's not the point.

I read some of it last night, and then carried on this morning. About an hour before starting work, I got up to make coffee, and by the time I got back to bed, I realised I didn't actually care about what happened in the end, and couldn't be bothered to read the last 20 pages. That's a really odd feeling. I mean, having got that close to the end, why not finish? Or if I really wasn't enjoying it, why didn't I give up earlier and read one of the other dozen library books by the side of the bed?

I'm actually very intrigued by what it is that makes us decide to give up. How long do we persist with a book or a movie before we decide it's not worth going on? What is the trigger point that causes us to make that decision? If you quit too early, you miss out on all those experiences where the start's a bit slow or a bit lame, but once you get into the characters or the story, it's a thoroughly enjoyable experience. And what about those acquired tastes - movies or pieces of music that you don't much like at first, but gradually grow on you - how many times are you prepared to sit through something you don't like in the hope that it'll start to become enjoyable? (Like Shostakovich string quartets or 1950s French movies.)

This is hugely important for what's happening with TV. Many shows take a while to get into. The first few episodes of a new show are often slow, while you're getting into the characters. Firefly and Dollhouse were both good examples. So you watch 4 or 5 eps, it's looking OK but nothing great - do you continue? You've just spent 4 hours on this show, and you're not really enjoying it. That's a big investment of time, and logic says give up. So you give up. Viewing figures drop, and the network immediately respond by canceling the show. Meanwhile, the hardcore continue, and then the word of mouth starts to go out that it's worth persevering, because by ep 7 it gets brilliant, but it's too late, and you kick yourself for not sticking with it, and everyone screams at the dumb network for canning such a superb show. Well, that's scenario 1. Scenario 2 is where it doesn't get any better, and you mentally file it under Shit I've watched on TV when bored out of my skull.

TV networks are desperately chasing ad money, and that means having to respond very fast to audience figures. If people stop watching a show, they'll can it within weeks. With so much available at the click of a mouse these days, you only have to lose your audience for a few moments and they're gone elsewhere. That's a harsh world to be in. So, for a writer, or anyone else creating entertainment, it's critical to understand what it is that makes us decide not to watch the next episode, or not to turn the next page. I don't think anyone's figured that out yet, except perhaps the teams behind X Factor and the like. Part of their secret is that they're working live, so they can judge the audience on a day by day basis, and adjust their show to fit the audience's mood. Mind you, the audience eventually turned on Big Brother, so reality TV doesn't have all the answers. I sure as hell don't.

Oh, and by the way, it wasn't a bad book. I'm sure if I hadn't got up for that coffee, I'd have finished it quite happily. It was more like that feeling of getting up to answer the phone near the end of a meal, and when you get back to the table, you just can't be arsed with the last couple of mouthfuls.