If I may make a distinction without disagreement --

In purely semantical terms, professional just means that whatever you're doing is your primary source of income. There are professional wedding editors, professional corporate editors, and even professional YouTubers (I'm not one of them, for the record). And there are individual freelance editors who make their livings cutting shoestring indie projects out of their bedrooms.

However, when speaking of the professional editing market, that specifically means the environment you're talking about, the one with hard deadlines and serious budgets. The freelancer, however talented or successful, can afford to dick around with uncooperative software, because it's not really critical whether the client gets their DVD tomorrow or the next day. They can wait a couple weeks or a couple months for the functionality that they can fake with workarounds for now. The broadcast professional has got three hours until that shit has to go on the air, and anyone or anything that they so much as suspect is going to stand in the way is going to get served walking papers.

FCPx may be suitable for certain niches of "professional" editing. Broadcast and major studio features that have release dates before they have scripts are not two of them.

Yeah, I'm pretty bummed to have missed an apparently magical commentary, but I was given the chance to stick around for SHAWSHANK and I declined, so I've got no one to blame but myself. But now I have something to look forward to hearing.

Well, in that sense I'm of the opinion that true science fiction is always a period piece, a time capsule of contemporary hopes and fears with a fantastical gloss over it.

Sadly, I don't think there's anything exclusively 16th century about imperialism.

There was also quite a bit of it when they discontinued Express34 slots on the MacBook Pros other than the 17". The abandonment of pro users has been happening for a while, it's just that FCPx is the final, definite confirmation.

Because that's one of the shittiest things a company could do, customer relations-wise. "Dear most loyal, long-time users, who kept us solvent through the lean times, and defended our brand fervently when Macs were essentially a joke to everyone but creative professionals: we have iPads now. Please continue buying our expensive hardware to run someone else's solution, but we're not going to concern ourselves with you any more. Fuck you very much."

Maybe it makes economic sense (though I don't imagine it would hurt their bottom line to serve both markets equally well, rather than backsliding on one in favor of the other). But it's hardly surprising that the reaction has been "Fuck us? Fuck you, man."

I mean, me personally, if I'm not using FCP, I'm really not sure I have a reason to stick with Apple when I buy my next workstation.

While it's a fair point that FCP7 didn't stop working yesterday, the problem is that it will stop working eventually. What happens when Apple releases an OS that will only run 64-bit software (FCP7 is 32-bit)? Do they stick with the last OS that ran it? What happens when Apple eventually releases new hardware that they can't install that old OS on anymore? Are professionals really to be expected to work on 10-year-old computers with 15-year-old software that's no longer supported or developed for? How could they possibly deliver or remain competitive?

That's why many FCP professionals are pissed. Not because their software stopped working yesterday, but because as far as it seems -- at least at first blush -- their software stopped advancing yesterday. And when you're running a company, you have to think in terms of what your roadmap is going to be in 5, 10, 15 years, and if you're going to invest in a particular vendor's software you need to be able to trust that the software is going to be there for you and keep pace.

Apple just violated that trust with a lot of post houses, and given the way they EOL'd Shake -- after years of halfhearted development, and despite the fact that Shake was legitimately the industry standard in professional compositing at the time -- I'm not surprised a lot of pros are scrambling for the lifeboats at the first sign of trouble.

It's mostly going to go back to Avid. I'm certain I'm not the only person who has a knee-jerk scoffing reaction to the idea of working in Premiere, regardless of the fact that they've appended "Pro" to it. Most such people won't even bother to investigate Premiere's contemporary feature set to discover that maybe the designation is actually earned.

I do, however, follow a number of professionals on Twitter who are scratching their chins thoughtfully about it. I think the smaller companies and individual artists will be looking very closely at Premiere, especially folks like me who wind up doing a lot of round tripping to AE on various projects (and probably own Premiere already, since it's actually cheaper to buy the CS5 Production Suite than After Effects and Photoshop a la carte); whereas larger companies are most likely going to go with the reputation and multi-user stability of Avid.

I decided not to do the big Avid crossgrade when it was offered and take my chances with FCPx. Annnd, here we are.

Aside from FCP7 still being around for a little while, I'm thinking maybe it's time to stop turning my nose up at Premiere. We cut RVD on Premiere, but then switched to Final Cut and never really looked back. Premiere was cute and all but it wouldn't really behave properly (couldn't make it not interlace on export, no matter what we did, for one example). But now that there's dynamic linking between the Production Premium apps (i.e. easy AE roundtripping) and Premiere seems to actually be pretty decked out with pro features, I think I'm gonna finally go ahead and bother to install it on my machine.

Toad in the Hole

This is what I was referring to insisting it was called Toad in the Hole -- which it is -- and that it isn't what V is making -- which it isn't.

This is what V makes:

Egg in the Basket

It does note on the Wiki article that Egg in the Basket is also called Toad in a Hole, as opposed to the sausage dish, Toad in the Hole. So apparently the indefinite vs. definite article makes all the difference. Which is dumb. So I'm gonna stick with Egg in the Basket. And try making it tomorrow.

Which...is what Alan Moore did with V4V? So if you count that as a right directors/screenwriters have, it is in fact also a right authors have. It's not something most directors/screenwriters are willing to do, though, because disavowing their credit also waives their right to any residuals. Alan Moore happens to be principled/crazy enough to refuse the trucks full of money that would otherwise be his due as the original writer.

BTW, if you're wondering why Alan Moore couldn't refuse to let them make the movie from his story, it's because it's not his story. It's a story he wrote and sold to DC Comics in exchange for getting it published. They own it and can do what they want with it.

Stephen King is still credited, in all the sequels, as the writer of the original "Children of the Corn" story on which the movie franchise is based. They just don't put his name above the title on the posters anymore.

The reason King was able to (and fought to) get his name completely off LAWNMOWER MAN was not simply because the film had no similarity to his original story, but because the filmmakers had not paid for the film rights to that story. Technically they didn't have to buy the film rights since the movie had no relationship to the story, and you can't copyright a title, but they tried to have their cake and eat it too by using King's name in their advertising without paying him for the privilege.

It can be shitty, but it's also business.

What you have to understand is that the screenwriter who owns his script is the screenwriter whose script will probably never be made into a movie. In order to make the script into a movie, he needs the resources that a big company has at their disposal. But a studio isn't going to put those resources into someone else's movie. So in exchange for the possibility of his work becoming a for-real film, the screenwriter sells the rights to the studio. It's not licensed or loaned. The studio owns it.

If you paint a self-portrait and I buy it from you, the painting is mine. You can't sue me if I decide to paint a big vaudeville mustache on it. I own it. It's mine. So it is with a script when you sell it to a studio.

A director also doesn't own the film and, unlike the writer, never did. The director is a hired gun, brought in by the studio to do the job of making the film for them. If you were building a house, you'd hire an architect to build it. But if you foot the bill, it's not the architect's house at the end of the project -- it's yours. The architect can take credit for having built it, but if you want to knock down some walls or fill the pool with cement and turn it into a garden, the architect can't stop you because it isn't and never was his house, it's your house. He made it for you and has no rights to it.

Now, if the screenwriter and/or director is also the producer, especially the executive producer (i.e. money guy) then there IS a claim to ownership and an element of creative control. A director with some clout can negotiate such a thing as having approval over the final cut of the film, and a screenwriter with some clout can negotiate such a thing as veto power over the director. But those are not by any means the rule.

Sorry, I have to rule against you on this one. I enjoyed the film a great deal myself, it's exciting and funny and the pacing, at least in the first two acts, held me rapt. But a "perfect movie" -- as we use the term -- isn't a measure of how enjoyable a film is. It's a measure of whether or not there's a solid payoff for every set-up (aka "keeping every promise it makes"), and this movie fails to do so in some significant ways.

For one thing, the friggin super 8 film from which the movie takes its title. The setup is that the kids have inadvertently gotten footage of the subject of a major government cover-up. You'd think that the reel of film containing this highly sensitive information would be, like, important to the plot. You'd think a great big chunk of the plot would be the government trying to find and suppress this information. That's how it was sold. That's how it's set up. It's the name of the movie.

But...no. The super 8 film reel with the alien on it actually has almost no bearing on the story. We already know it's a creature by the time it's revealed, and the more significant revelation comes later, watching the teacher's old footage. The government really never discovers or cares that the film exists. The only thing it really does is convince the main character's dad that some serious shit is going down, which 1) he already kind of figured out, just without the monster part, and 2) happens offscreen.

That little reel of evidence should have been the film's MacGuffin. Have the government turning more and more fascist on this little town trying to cover up this info that they can't ultimately suppress. And/or, have the government confiscate the footage without the kids knowing why, and so they go on a single-minded, irrational Goonies mission to get it back from Big Gubmint because goddammit, that was the END OF THE MOVIE and we CAN'T AFFORD TO RESHOOT. And in the process they unravel this conspiracy and end up helping the alien get home.

Instead, as it happened, if the super 8 film hadn't caught the creature -- if the kids hadn't been present at the crash at all -- very little would have to be altered to make essentially the same movie.

Next item. As soon as they found all that footage in the teacher's trailer and they heard the bit about how the touch produces a psychic connection and a two-way understanding between creature and human captive, it was obvious (to me, anyway) that the alien was going to touch the main kid, realize that some humans are good and pure, and chill the fuck out.

But when it happened, it didn't actually have an effect on the plot. The alien was already just minutes away from reconstituting his ship; the kids (and we) already knew that the alien was just homesick and misunderstood. Nothing was actually accomplished by having that moment between kid and alien, other than that it prevented the alien from eating his head. But if he hadn't been there at all, the alien would still have reconstituted his ship and departed exactly when he did. If the kids had not been involved in the plot at all -- if they had simply not existed -- it would all still have turned out the same for the "alien vs air force" plotline. That's not good plotting.

Okay, there was a little bit of something about the kid finally understanding, in that moment, that you have to let go of the past; but other than having the locket he wasn't really emotionally crippled by his grief, not particularly filled with resentment or despair, not letting the past cast a shadow on his present or future. He was happy and active and fun to be around, probably the most well-adjusted character in the entire film. In this case it's a payoff without much setup.

I think the psychic connection moment should have come at the end of act 2, not act 3, and represented the turning point from the kids seeing the alien as a monster, like everyone else does, to understanding and deciding to help it (which they didn't do in any meaningful sense at all). Instead this movie, which has been built as a mystery, loses a lot of its steam because the mystery is answered and there's not much left for the movie/characters to do, aside from the save-the-damsel plot device. There was some interest in seeing the kids help the alien, but again, they ultimately didn't do anything to that end.

I probably would have had the little ship-cube stay in the boy's room instead of shooting across town (why even have the kid take the cube? It's another thing that had no purpose in the story. Aside from that we knew something was up with the water tower, but what did that gain us? They found the creature's lair through the cemetery, not the tower). Then the kids would have to go back into the quarantined town and get the last cube so the alien could finally put his ship together (because he'd need every single piece, naturally) and leave.

(BTW, if the air force is trying to prevent the alien from reconstituting his ship, has been doing this as its full-time concern for the last 40 years, why did they drive the all the trucks full of ship-cubes into the center of the quarantined area where they knew the alien to be at large? For that matter, why would they transport them on the same train in the first place? Durr.)

It's a fun summer movie. I enjoyed it. It's exciting and well-made on a technical level and I like the characters. I'd watch it again and buy the Blu-Ray and watch the featurettes and probably even listen to the commentaries, which I rarely do. But no. It's not a perfect movie by a long shot.

GOD ZARBAN IT WAS CLEARLY VOODOO MAGIC THE ENTIRE OPENING IS ABOUT THAT YOU OBVIOUSLY WERENT PAYING ATTENTION

Full disclosure: WEEKEND AT BERNIE'S II is a perfect example of a film that I recognize is ridiculous but love it anyway. Why? Because the way the dude dances around is fucking hysterical.

Also SHOOT 'EM UP. That's a movie I'll totally buy (and put forth) the argument that its over-the-top absurdity is what makes it.