What is Radio Free Id? Simple. RFI is a collection of links relevant to movies or the movie industry that strike a chord with me. Somewhere in here you’re bound to find something that entertains, enlightens, or at least amuses… and if they don’t, you can get a refund at the door.

I’ll be posting these every Monday, but with rare exception, I will not be talking about box office scores. I may occasionally bring them up if the data is relevant to something else, but the B.O.-spotting that goes on across the web and print media do nothing but help the studios play their little ego-stroking games. Go somewhere else for that.

So:

1) Esteemed movie blogger Jonathan Lapper is not crazy about CGI. He understands his knee jerk disdain is probably irrational, but that’s not exactly something you can fault him for; movie lovers are, to a man, deeply irrational about something. (You couldn’t pay me to see a post-Twin Peaks David Lynch film, for instance.) In the comments for this new post he discusses his problems with CGI in live-action films:

Also, it still doesn’t quite look like it’s there to me. What I mean is when it’s combined with live-action ala Lord of the Rings, Phantom Menace, Harry Potter the CGI always sticks out for me. LOTR probably did the best of the three I mentioned with Jar Jar in Menace and the troll in the first Harry Potter looking almost as pathetic as if someone had scratched them onto the frames of film with crayons. Oddly, one of the very first ever, Jurassic Park still looks better than most I see today. Maybe because it was so early in the game they focused much more on the mechanical movements of things.

I couldn’t agree more. Jurassic Park looks better than almost anything that came after it, and it was made (by today’s standards) for a song, though its budget was awe-inducing back then. Animation has natural advantages over live-action films. The reason the amazing superheroic powers in The Incredibles looks so damn great while looking like crap in Fantastic Four is that animation is a deviation for the latter and a natural extension of the former. When one of the Incredibles does something, er, incredible, we are merely seeing that animated person continue to do something animated. When a human being does something incredible, we become aware of the disconnect between the character – who suddenly becomes an actor – and the clearly impossible. We become aware of the effect. To remind your audience that they are watching something artificial, that they are not participating in a story but just witnessing a group of people putting one on, is storytelling death. It is a failure.

Animation has the power to show us things that are literally impossible to see in real life. This is another reason I find 300 so compelling and, ultimately, important: it is the closest thing I have seen to a live-action movie with an animated aesthetic. The literal was made symbolic.

2) Warner Brothers has chosen to go exclusive with the Blu-ray format, which many say tilts things in Sony’s favor in the format wars against Toshiba’s HD DVD. The Dubya B’s massive market share makes this a devastating blow to Toshiba, but wait! Porno is siding with Toshiba, so they have that going for them. Who will win? U DECIDE!

A couple thoughts. One: physical, portable media storage is becoming increasingly obsolete (as, for instance, the Writers Guild of America is very aware, hence the strike.) Services like Netflix and On Demand already deliver TV shows and movies directly to cable boxes for viewing, and sooner or later the major distribution companies will wise up to the inevitability of internet distribution and create a market there. Sony may win this round, but ultimately it won’t get them anywhere.

And, really, I’d just like them to lose. It seems that about every ten years Sony gets a bug up its ass and creates a proprietary format to compete with whatever else is out there. The end result: consumers sit it out while the companies unzip and whip out their rulers. No one benefits. Do you remember Mini Discs? How about Betamax? These and other success stories were also brought to you by Sony. But now it seems that, for once, they might actually win. For all the good it will do them.

3) Remember when everyone was putting Fergie in their movies? Man, am I glad that’s over with. She’s 40 miles of bad road attached by neck to a partnership between the silicone and airbrush industries. And she’s the kind of brainiac that needed to hire someone else to come up with the lyrical genius of “My Humps.”

4) SAG members will not be attending the Golden Globes. No presenting, no accepting, not without some kind of deal worked out between NBC and the WGA similar to what David Letterman’s done for his show. What the DGA does is still up in the air, but the message is clear: the unions aren’t caving, and the seriousness of the strike becomes that much more apparent to the AMPTP… and, more importantly, to the shareholders of their parent companies. That the AMPTP has been abusively bullheaded up to this point is nakedly obvious. Let’s see if they can still play hardass when the Oscar nominations are announced…

UPDATE: The Golden Globes have been cancelled. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association will merely be announcing the winners.

Damn.

On the plus side, that takes one more piece of ammunition out of the “let’s forecast the Oscars” silliness that happens every year.