Pah

Chapter the Second

In which: a public house is considered; beer is appreciated; and, a cinematographic projection is evaluated.

The pub. Nestled in every city block like a pigeon roosting. Melbourne, early on, seems to have to have decided that it might one day lack in pubs, so there is a surfeit, variegated. But all pubs are variations on a theme, the word for which comes from Britain.

‘Public house.’

A house, a space. And public, open. The important thing is that you don’t buy this space. ‘Of course,’ you (probably) cry, ‘you buy the beer.’ True, but I don’t think pubs are about beer.

It seems strange to realise and point out that pubs are created public social space. Pubs are where you kick back after a hard day at work, or where you carouse with uni mates, or —. That is what you go to a pub for. Beer, music, food, etc, are incidental to this purpose.

I said to the bar last night, ‘you should pay your band to play elsewhere,’ which elicited a laugh. The beer I chose takes a long time in the pouring and the bar debated the relative merits of the brew. There is no external interest here, yet, as you (may have) pointed out, this must be their internal concern if they are to profit and continue.

What’s going on here?

(A hint, first.) You don’t pay for newspapers; advertising pays for newspapers. You don’t pay for television; same. In both cases you are “paying” by (maybe) watching ads and (possibly) buying products. All unrelated to what you want when you’re ingesting your daily media.

What we’re seeing are different business models to either the service- or goods-based models with which we’re most familiar. Yet we see them every day and they’ve been around forever.

Dot coms would do well to remember this.

Um.

So, on Tuesday (Fr.: Mardi) I saw X-MEN. (Films are one of those popular media that you pay for, despite the ever-increasing wealth of advertising behind them.)

X-MEN. (Capitalisation fans note this is due to my refusal to recognise “man” as gender neutral, call me wacky.)

What can I say? Eh.

I am long familiar with and a fan of the (Uncanny) X-MEN. I actually thought this was the perfect film for Hollywood. Change any history, kill any character — the comics do it every few years. Reviews were coming in from fan and action fan and non-fan alike that this was a good’n’.

But it wasn’t to be.

The filmmakers didn’t ruin X-MEN. In fact, they obviously went out of their and bent over backwards to make this a faithful adaption. Unfortunately, like John Peel (of Doctor Who and Star Trek novels infamy) they’re earnestness cannot compensate for their lack of talent. There is no vision, intelligence, wit, or skill here.

If you had a thousand monkeys with a thousand Hollywood hits and a thousand non-linear editing boxes, this is what you might get. It’s not so much a story as a collection of familiar references to other stories so that you know when to boo, when to cry, etc. It’s all so small and dull and disappointing. Automatic for the people.

And like the makers of ST:TNG, but even more guilty for they are following directly in the footsteps of the Great Changer (Chris Claremont), they don’t realise that X-MEN is neither action nor thriller nor “superhero” film. It’s a soap. More on that tomorrow.

Fortunately, X-MEN is fertile ground for the sequels that will no doubt come given its popularity, so we can look to the future and be thankful for that at least while we wait.

Tomorrow: more! Plus, Beer!

Coming: What if pubs were Dot Coms? And why do we Capitalise dot com?