Don't worry - it's still an unpopular opinion.    Tarantino himself doesn't have your back on this one.

Confession time - after being a devoted LOST fan from day one, the final season disappointed me so badly that to this day I haven't seen the last two or three episodes.    Once the island became Hogwarts By The Sea, they didn't have to make anything make sense anymore.  So wherever they were headed in the finale, I'd stopped caring.   

I read a few synopses of the finale - since I wasn't worried about spoilers any more - and it sounded about as lame as I was afraid it would be.

And any referral link that leads to an Amazon purchase accrues royalties, regardless of what the purchase actually IS.    So even a link to the Amazon main page can create income, basically a kickback for being the site that sent the purchaser to Amazon in the first place.

Best single-sale dividend i ever got from Amazon was a couple years back when somebody followed a Truly Dangerous link to Amazon, and then decided to buy a TV.   

So if Teague doesn't want your money, I'll take it.  Now follow this link to Amazon and buy something

/the more you know

As we discuss a bit in the episode, BB isn't available in any form of general release yet.    Right now John's making the rounds of festivals and conventions etc, which is standard practice as the first step for an indie project.     

The goal is to collect as many "Grand Prize in the _________ Festival" and "Official Entry in ___________ Festival" as you can, in order to make the project seem all the more worthwhile to a potential distributor and encourage them to want to pick it up for release.

Well, sure - the same is true of a lot of shows, especially sci fi and fantasy.  Ever tried explaining Firefly to somebody who knows nothing about it?  "It's a Western in space, and... hey, come back!"

It's the execution that matters as always, and LOST in its prime was pretty great stuff.   I especially liked how hard they pushed the characters.   Nobody - not even the supposed "heroes" - got away clean. Everybody was messed up, or got messed up, over the course of the show.    And even the worst "villains" turned out to have such godawful back stories that you completely understood why they did such terrible things.

For a while there we had two truly great sci-fi shows on the air at once - Galactica and LOST.  Both of which sound pretty stupid if you try to describe them.

EDIT:  and, admittedly, both of which had their legacies tarnished a bit by final seasons full of foo-foo magical tripe.   But for a while there... golden.

I'm in.

There was that other thread weeks ago where theGreg said advertising is also dead thanks to the internet. 

I still consider that his best work. 

To which I say, I'd love to benefit humanity, but right now my rent's due.   When Star Trek replicator technology is invented, making energy and resources limitless and allowing us to abandon capitalism at last, we'll talk again.

But if you want to set the right example, then whatever you do to make a living please come to my house and do it for free.   Free yourself from those tiresome old business models and show us how that works.  Y'know, for humanity. 

Here I was drafting a reply to theGreg from way back in the thread, and look what's happened in the meantime...  goodness.

Anyway, leaving my intended post aside in order to jump into the thread where it stands now...

Buggy whips may not be the best analogy here, since the market for buggy whips literally disappeared due to technological changes in society.     However, the market for media is arguably bigger than ever, which is one of the good things about the new digital world we live in.    There are more opportunities and options for content creators than ever before, this is absolutely true.

The "buggy whip" that is in most jeopardy is high-end professional content, which as others have pointed out, only comes from a front-loaded high-priced investment of a lot of time and talent.  Nobody will ever make that investment only to give it away for free and hope they get some donations.    Without a reliable revenue stream to support such a risky undertaking, then yes, that industry will die out.

And thus it may well be that  tv networks and movie studios will eventually go away.  There may be a future where "media" is nothing but garage bands and youtube webcam videos, supported solely by donations because that's all they need to keep making them.   However, since all of us DiF panelists make our livings in the buggy whip industry, you can maybe see why we're not excited about that prospect. 

I'll say this though - at the current state of things, the pay-model is still a far better bet than the donation-model, and the obvious example is Down In Front.    Here at DiF we make content available for free on a weekly basis, and only ask (gently) for donations in return.   Only Teague knows the dollar figures, but I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess there hasn't been a huge fiscal return on our three years of effort.

And that's fine, none of us does DiF to make money, nor do we expect to.  But you should note that every one of us abandons DiF on any given week if there's a paying job available instead.     Even with its damn-near-nothing production overhead, it costs every single one of us something to make DiF every week.   Even if it's mostly just time and gas money, that's not nothing.

Now I'll go out on a further limb and bet that if we changed to a paid model, we'd lose most of our listeners... and make a lot more money.    If we switched to a ten-dollar-a-month-all-you-can-eat subscription model, and thus immediately reduced our listener base to a total of seventeen people... DiF would be making more money than it does now via unlimited availability and a donation model.

And although you pointed out some cases where donation models are successful, those remain the exception and not the rule.    Most internet "we made a thing, now give us money if you liked it!" models are just like DiF - unprofitable.

Regardless of whether it's buggy whips or cars or Cloud Atlas or strawberry smoothies: if a thing is available for free, it has no value.  We choose to make DiF free because what the hell, we don't care.     But if you insist on removing the value from things that were intended to have it, you are removing the market incentive to make those things.     You may not miss buggy whips, but you might miss (name of favorite tv show or movie) when it stops being worth making.

EDIT:  Posted before I saw Teague's post, to which I will only say, wow. 

Welcome, Katie - and wow, you're pretty much the exact demographic for a video I made called Fish Guys. 

There's almost no other demographic for that video, but archaeologists seem to enjoy it...

Also worth noting that the charge was not rape, it was sexual relations with a minor - still a crime, yes, and still a bad idea in my opinion, but the "victim" herself never claimed to have been raped.

In a 2003 interview, she mentions that she resented the media, the police, and her parents' actions far more than she ever did Polanski's.

For me a lot of OHMSS doesn't hold up well, but it does have some great action sequences - the ski chase especially - but yes, I would say it rates most highly because of the Tracy plot.   In all the other movies Bond has adventures and saves the world a dozen times and it's usually fun to watch, but that's just him doing what he does.   He's interesting and all, but he has no character arc.   

Which is fine, he doesn't necessarily have to have one, but as we've said numerous times, a truly satisfying movie story is about the most important thing that ever happened to somebody.  And of all the Bond films (up until the Daniel Craig Casino Royale reboot anyway, because a similar thing happens there) what happens to Bond in OHMSS is the most important thing that ever will happen to him.   And they acknowledged that by referring to it in a few of the subsequent movies, too.

Also: Diana Rigg in her Avengers prime ( the REAL Avengers, not the comic book), I mean come on, goddam.

So that certainly sets OHMSS apart from most of the pack, but doesn't make it my personal fave.  For that, I'll go with Living Daylights or Spy Who Loved Me.