I found it interesting yeasterday when I read this AP headline in my Yahoo news feed. Since Armando pointed it out on DailyKOS today, I feel moved to comment.

Hollywood is far too formulaic — nobody does anything original any more. Every month we get spoon-fed another crap movie about some girl who falls in love with some guy, then she’s mean to him, then he get’s mad and tells her to fuck off, and then at the end he turns into a chump and begs her to take him back. I understand that hopelessly romantic women who hate the man they’re with (women are never single) eat up the fantasy, but Hitch and How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days don’t come anywhere close to Cassablanca or Gone With The Wind. Instead of churning out a mass-produced girlie film every month, maybe they could slow down and write a good movie.

Every two months we’re force-fed another ridiculous movie spun out of a comic book. If I have to see another Spiderman, Hulk, X-Men, Fantastic Four, Daredevil, Hellboy, League of Extraordinary Gentleman, or Underworld, I can’t be responsible for my actions. It was done well 25 years ago with Superman, and 10 years later with Batman, and then 5 years later with The Crow, but they always ruin a good thing with a string of sequels that aren’t good at all. Now, it’s a new comic book movie every two months, and they’ve run out of good comic books to base it on so we’re just getting the comics that nobody ever heard of.

Every three months Hollywood makes a 2-and-a-half-hour festival of special effects and shoves it down our throat without any kind of plot to wash it down. I’d rather shave my genitals with a cheese grater than sit through another 200-minute epileptic seizure like The Day After Tomorrow, Lord of the Rings – Return of the King, Star Wars – Revenge of the Sith, The Matrix Revolutions, and I, Robot.

So why are the box offices in a slump? Well, let’s look at the line up. This week at the cineplex my options are: Batman Begins, Bewitched, Cinderella Man, Herbie: Fully Loaded, Land of the Dead, Honeymooners, The Longest Yard, Madagascar, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Perfect Man, The Sisterhood of Travelling Pants, and The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3D. Are you kidding me? After reading that list, there is actually a question about why people aren’t going to the movies?

Here’s an idea, Hollywood: if you want to bring in more viewers, how about if you get rid of Adam Sandler, Kate Hudson, Will Ferrell, Brittany Murphy, Owen Wilson, and Ashton Kutcher, and make a little more room for actual actors. What ever happened to Edward Norton? Diane Keaton? Sean Connery? Steve Buscemi? Harrison Ford?

Here’s an idea, Hollywood: if you want to bring in more viewers, why not try something new, rather than remaking yet another old tv show? I really don’t want to see The Dukes of Hazzard, or Bewitched, or Starsky and Hutch, or The Honeymooners, or Charlie’s Angels, or Fat Albert, or Scooby Doo. You can’t do it better, and you’re not even trying. Thank the gods for Quentin Tarantino, David Fincher, and Paul Thomas Anderson for giving us something new to watch once in a while.

Here’s an idea, Hollywood: Farenheit 9/11 made almost $24 million on opening weekend on 868 screens, while Batman Begins brought in $48 million on 3,858 screens. In other words, a DOCUMENTARY was worth $27,500 per screen while yet another comic book action movie is worth $12,600 per screen. (Incidentally, Supersize Me earned $12,600 per screen and it showed on only 41 screens nationwide.) I think you’re missing the big picture, Hollywood. Americans want to see Morgan Spurlock and Michael Moore, at least as much as some guy in leotards with a cape… almost twice as much in Michael Moore’s case.

Instead of putting Supersize Me on a lousy 41 screens… instead of limiting Farenheit 9/11 to 868 screens… instead of pushing all that CRAP onto us with 4,000 screens per film, maybe you could try giving movie watchers what they want to see. That might be just the thing to get your box office numbers to go up. After all, people spend more money on things they want than they do on things they don’t want.

One of my favorite things to use in photography is shadows. It’s often too easy to pay so much attention to your subject that you miss the shadow they’re casting. Each person’s body, arms, legs, head, and hair combine with posture to form a unique shadow unlike that of anyone else, and as a photographer, each subject’s shadow can be very interesting.

I like to think of it as playing shadow puppets with a whole body. You can make a a hedgehog, or a witch, or a statue.

I rolled up my coin collection this week… a project that took almost two full evenings. I was pleasantly surprised when the total was a dollar short of $500. Not bad for money you don’t think about.

www.soulcapturephoto.com

For Soul Capture, the idea was to create something that leaned toward the creative, since photographers’ sites are rarely built around information. Web site organization was kept simple, as there is not a great deal of information to organize.

A redesign is on it’s way, however. The site will be going toward a blog-centric ideology. Stay tuned…

Yesterday, the House of Representatives approved a Constitutional amendment to ban desecration of the flag by a vote of 286-130.

This is the seventh time the House has approved an amendment since 1989, when the Supreme Court ruled the federal Flag Protection Act unconstitutional. The bill has been endorsed by all 50 states, but keeps getting shut down in the Senate.

Folks, this is scary.

Look, I have my complaints about this country, but it’s still my home. The American flag represents a lot of good things. I’m not saying that we should burn, or soil, or defacate on the flag… I’m only saying that we should always have the right to do so.

The Constitution gave me the freedom of expression, and included in that is the freedom to make photos like this. But once we allow laws with words like “desecration of the flag”, it opens the door for every thin-skinned nutbag who thinks he (or she) knows what’s best for everyone to call what I do “desecration”. Trust me, it WILL happen.

Don’t let the government silence the expression of artists. Call your senator. Call your state government. Don’t let the Republican party start silencing your freedom of speech.

Phillip Greenspun has a new article up offering some advice to beginners who want to get started in digital photography with a digital SLR.

Go to my photography section to see them.

Feldgrau

Most people would probably run for cover and reschedule their shoot if it started to rain, but I chose to press on and the band didn’t have a problem with that. This is one of those times when having a bunch of old, fully manual film cameras was far better than some modern digital wonder. My digital stayed dry in the car while I churned out film in a torrential downpour. I’m glad I did, too, because this is my favorite photo from the shoot.

Click to see more.

After some relatively “tame” swimsuit photos, we brought an end to the normalcy and pulled out the fishnet and gas mask. This is what I love to do, and I was happy to see my model felt the same way. “I like making pictures that piss people off,” she said. I think we got a few of those.

See more photos in Pixel’s gallery.

Generally, people think of rainy overcast days as dreary or ugly. To the photographer, however, this couldn’t be more wrong. Cloudy, overcast days are often the best days to get out and shoot.

The sun gives off very bright, very hard light, but on overcast days the clouds act as a giant diffuser spreading the light around making a big, soft light source. This gives you excellent contrast and saturation without the hard shadows of normal daylight.

Overcast skies often accompany rain. Rain has an added benefit of giving you beautiful reflective surfaces. Not only are wet, reflective surfaces nice to look at but they also help to further increase contrast throughout an image.