April 11, 2008

liberation liberated, sort of

How ... interesting.

So apparently that whole "all your gay media are belong to us" model didn't work out so well for PlanetOut.

PlanetOut would not seem to have done well by Liberation, one wya and another. Even allowing that Specialty Publications was making most of Liberation's money and wasn't included in the purchase of LPI, I can't imagine that Specialty was doing so well that it would have made up $30 million in the price difference. (I had heard, though I might be mistaken, that Liberation had already sold Specialty's video division to Channel One Releasing, or that they were considering it; that may have been mistaken information.)

I have to admit, I'm surprised that here Networks is buying LPI, or what remains of it. Buying two national magazines in a bear advertising market would not necessarily seem to be a great decision -- though, if you have the money, I can see wanting to keep Advocate and Out alive for historical reasons -- and Alyson seems to have profoundly lost its way in the past few years. (It may just be that the local stores only buy what people want and that's almost all I get to see, but it seems like most of what Alyson publishes these days is porn, and fiction and nonfiction books have moved in surprisingly large part over to Kensington -- the book publishing arm of journal publisher Haworth -- and other small companies, with a few large publishers also poaching a bit on the territory. That may just be perception and not reality, though.)

Something of a side note, but I'd also love to know how here's move to subscription style pricing, rather than their previous on-demand model, has worked for them. (I freely admit that here's change has annoyed the snot out of me; if I'm going to pay subscription prices as though it were a premium channel like HBO or Showtime, I want it to be a channel, something I can find simply by punching in the number. If it's going to be on the on-demand menu no matter what I do, then I want to pay per-item and on-demand. But I digress.)

If nothing else, there may be a bit more synergy between LPI and here. Here might be able to go through the Alyson library for material for shows, for example, or produce co-branded television news magazines for the channel, like CBS News on Logo. (Honestly, as a pure business decision, it would make slightly more sense for Logo and here to merge; there really isn't enough quality product to support both of them. But again, I digress.)

It's going to be interesting to see how this works out for all concerned. For all that PlanetOut is now concentrating on its core websites, with the sale of its travel business and most of its publication arm ... there's not really a lot left of it, is there? And the web has expanded a lot in even the past few years. I can remember making PlanetOut a daily read, once upon a time, and now ... I can't remember the last time I deliberately went to PlanetOut. There are just other places out there that work better for the types of stuff I used to read on their site.

Anyway, here's hoping it works out well for all concerned.

Posted by Iain Jackson at 12:25 AM | Permalink

October 10, 2007

damages: rip, ray fiske

So when the FX series "Damages" started, I kind of sort of enjoyed it. Heavily serial, jumping back and forth in time, the occasional really obvious clue surrounded by all sorts of obscure clues, it was sort of fun. After a while, though, I started getting irritated with it and paying less attention. This was for two reasons, at the time. (1) I agree with whatever reviewer it was who said that as the show really got moving, they kind of forgot to give Glenn Close anything to do but lurk sinisterly in the background. (Is "sinisterly" a word?) And then (2) they made what I think of as the "Lost" mistake; they kept winding the serial elements -- and winding them really hard, given that they had only 13 weeks and a known endpoint -- without giving a lot of payoff. Or when a question did get answered, it would lead directly into a more confusing question. And, seriously, sometimes I just want a question to be answered, to sit as a pointer for whatever else is going on, and to just be done.

But what really started getting me recently was how they were handling Ray Fiske, Frobisher's lawyer. It started to become obvious at one point that he was probably maybe really gay, and attracted to Gregory Molina, recent corpsicle and one-time waiter and witness, and that was fine. Let's face it; we're all massively attracted to a person at one time or another in a situation where, for whatever reason, we do nothing about it. It may be perfectly obvious, it may be a little pathetic, depending, but it happens to everyone. Not, in and of itself, particularly objectionable. But then it became more and more obvious that he had done something -- something quite criminal, as it turns out -- and he had made himself known, and he had been turned down, and then he wound up married and and and ... so by the end of things, he was pathetic and sort of weakly predatory and closeted and, oh yes, married with a wife who apparently didn't know. Really nice woman, it seems, too. And, you know, I get that they wanted to weigh him down with everything in his life. They needed him to despair enough to end up where he did. But you know, frankly, they could have easily stopped at "guy who did something for lust that he really shouldn't have." He didn't need to be married, he didn't need to be closeted. The romantic rejection paired with the really serious professional compromise would have been enough.

Sad thing is, I kind of liked the way Zeljko Ivanec was playing Fiske. He really worked as a character who was trying very hard to thread a very difficult ethical situation, and that situation was clearly eating him alive. It worked even before we knew for certain that he'd been rejected by Gregory, or what he'd done to try to win his love. (And, frankly, that gift? Makes Fiske out to be terribly stupid, not because it constituted the worst kind of insider trading -- both in the gift and its later sale -- but because he compromised himself for nothing. By that I don't mean that Gregory should have said, "Hey, stock worth thousands! Now I'll put out!" I mean that he gave a major gift to someone he really didn't know that well, even took him on a vaguely romantic getaway, in the hope that it would make him put out. That's seriously stupid, and seriously pathetic. And, of course, on said vaguely romantic getaway, Gregory went and boinked Katie. Had to make Fiske really swell, that.)

Eh. I'll probably take next week off, and then come back for the finale. I do want to know who done what and why; I'm just kind of tired of the trip.

Here, a little somthing to cheer everyone up: Stayin' Alive (... OK, perhaps "cheer" isn't quite the right verb in this case.)

Posted by Iain Jackson at 01:56 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

September 04, 2007

live hard, die young and leave a beautiful corpse, then rehab live on saturday night!

Apparently, the good (and also the bad) really do die young(ish).

Mind, it does seem to be a case of both a small sample biasing the data, and having enough people clumped at the very young end to seriously depress the average age. Granted, 10 percent of a sample is a notably higher mortality rate than the general population in a given age group. And I think the accident issue may confuse things a bit; how many of the accidents are directly attributable to the rock-n-rollness of it all?

(Though, looking at it, what I wonder is how many of the rock'n'rollers wind up taking other people with them. Does associating with these musicians shorten the lives of hangers-on and other people?

And, given that the mortality rate of younger popsters is dropping, apparently the whole Just Say No thing is sorta kinda taking hold -- Lindsay Lohan aside. Apparently, younger popsters are indulging at ever lower rates.

And for those who don't say no, there's always Celebrity Rehab! ...No, really.

No. Really.

REALLY.

I can't even begin to enumerate all the ways in which this is a relentlessly bad idea. For one thing, people who wind up in rehab have generally done things that are, at a minimum, terribly embarrassing, and sometimes actually illegal -- apart from the drug thing itself, I mean. And while I would think that the therapy sessions would be terribly juicy -- "So, Mr Sizemore, were you in a nondrugged state when you decided it would be a good idea to make a porn movie in which you dissed your administering judge? In fact, were you in an unaltered state to make any of the porn movie? What about all the stuff you did after the porn movie? Really, you might as well just talk about the porn, since you haven't done anything of note since then. Perhaps you and Ms Carey could just make a porn vid right here and now!" -- I'm also surprised that anyone even pretending to be a reputable therapist or rehab center would have anything to do with this show. It can't possibly do their reputation any good, and I can't imagine that it's not going to bias the treatment in some ways.

I also can't quite imagine a therapy group with Andy Dick and Tom Sizemore going terribly well. And of course, these people would all be their own therapy group; nobody with a lick of sanity would sign up to go through their own personal hell on camera with these people, though I would imagine that VH1 desperately wants a few normal-ish people to fill things out, just to contrast the massively out-of-control behavior of our average addicted celebrity. I do hope they don't get it.

Have to admit, I wonder how many people might tune in just to see who beats Andy up this week.

Questions? Comments? Miscellaneous drug abuse and rehab recommendations?

Posted by Iain Jackson at 04:20 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

August 10, 2007

flash! aaa ... eh?

Tragically, grievously and most unfortunately ... apparently, SciFi lied to us! They lied! Instead of using the older theme, with all its exuberant cheese, they decided to use some vague, bland instrumental thing.

The pilot is sort of vague and blah for about 90% of its length. The lead actors are playing the material as if they were in Battlestar Galactica, when the writing clearly was aiming for the cheesiness of the 1980 film, or maybe even the earnestness of the original serial. And unfortunately, the only actor with a major role that seems to have had the "Good god, this is incredibly cheesy, so I might as well ham it up" revelation is the guy who plays Zarkov, although a few of the supporting players seem to have gotten a clue. Everyone else is acting their socks off in material that really can't support it. (...Well, OK, except in the first fight scene, which is so desperately absurdist that even they can't take it seriously. It involves a frying pan, a blender that doesn't get used, an electrifying thing, a ray gun that misfires, Flash punching an alien in the helmet with his bare fist, with said alien later dissolving once it gets electrocuted... But then, once the fight is over, they're serious again.) Flash is written to be terribly, terribly stupid, giving away information to people whom he knows -- he knows -- killed someone on earth and attacked his mother (They then torture him decoratively.).

The last 10-15 minutes, though ... It's as though everyone finally got a clue and realized just how cheesy the material is and how to play it. And judging from the upcoming episodes section, apparently there will be scantily clad men everywhere (including, of course, Flash), which is always an encouraging sign.

But still, it really needs a good pair of leather shorts.

Posted by Iain Jackson at 11:09 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)