According to Reuters, FCC commissioners voted 5-0 today to proceed with crafting a “net neutrality” rule, sending the current language (which would strip telecom companies of the right to control how they use their own property) to the printing office for public comment. Comments will be accepted until January 14th.

The Notice of Proposed Rulemaking is available online here [PDF].

You can upload your comments using ECFS here, using proceeding number 09-191. You can read others’ comments on ECFS here.

I’m writing comments to submit right now. I’ll post my comments here when I finish. I encourage everyone who loves the Internet and doesn’t want to see it become the Postal Service of the 21st Century to do the same.

I’m looking forward to James Cameron’s Avatar just like everyone else. But when I saw this photo on a Drudge Report headline about the film, I got a little upset.

Photo by John Shearer, Getty Images, 2009

Is that person in the aisle seat of the second row videotaping the movie off the screen? Am I the only one who sees this?

Never ever ever videotape a movie in the theater. That’s called stealing, and it’s wrong. Never ever ever encourage this kind of behavior by downloading movies off the Internet. That’s stealing too, and just as wrong.

As for the guy with the pizza, I’m going to assume he asked for and received permission from the theater to bring that in. For more on food in movie theaters, listen to Dr. Diana Hsieh’s Rationally Selfish Radio, Episode #10: Rules and Property Rights.

Update: It turns out that this photo was taken during a Q&A session, not a test screening. Which makes sense, because no one would ever get into a legit test screening with a video camera and a pizza. They wand you for those things. Even still, I doubt videotaping the Q&A session was a good idea, especially since the 3D glasses everyone is wearing suggest that footage was shown. The point about not videotaping or downloading movies is still valid, however. Don’t do it.

Via Prawfsblawg, a story from Reuters India reports that a British official has asked California Governor Schwarzenegger to shut down a Website that she says encourages prostitution in the UK. Prostitution is legal in the UK. Quoth the official,

Surely it can’t be too difficult for “The Terminator” to terminate Punternet and that’s what I am demanding that he does.

Patently, Ms Harman is not acquainted with our First Amendment, which is precisely what prevents “The Terminator” from “terminating” such a Website. The Website’s owner responds with a brief lesson in free speech, then thanks Ms Harman for the beneficial effects of her ignorance:

In closing, I would like to thank you for the huge influx of traffic to my website which your actions have caused. I am sure that the ladies who are a part of the PunterNet community thank you as well, as they will no doubt benefit financially from the many new clients who might otherwise never have found them.

Being unemployed, I can go to the cinema on a Tuesday morning and see three pictures in a row. This is precisely what I did this week. I saw three films. The theater was also playing Michael Moore’s latest barf-fest, but I decided that I’ve had nothing to say about Michael Moore for years now and wouldn’t want to ruin a good thing.

Zombieland

I’ve never liked zombie films much, mostly because they are within the post-apocalyptic survival genre I could never get into, since they invariably involve some self-sacrificing dipshit who gets himself killed in order to save the others, or “heroically” gets himself infected so he’s got to be shot before he goes all zombified. Ugh. So it might not sound sufficiently impressive when I say that I had more fun in this zombie film than I’ve ever had in any other zombie film. In fact, it was extremely entertaining. It wasn’t very deep, but it did manage to make it all the way through itself without a single sacrifice. That’s a bit of a spoiler, but you should know by now that when I review movies here, they contain spoilers.

Paranormal Activity

This was made in 2006 and eventually made its way to Steven Spielberg who, after viewing it, returned his copy in a trash bag declaring it to be haunted and claiming to have had to call a locksmith after he was mysteriously locked in his viewing room while it was running. I think this is one of those stories distributors put about to increase interest in low-budget spooky movies, rather than something that, in reality, actually happened. And I think that’s part of the problem with rational people going to see movies that rely on the viewer’s irrational fears for most of their impact: we see through them and thereby miss out on a lot of the entertainment factor. That’s what happened for me with The Blair Witch Project, with which this film shares many features. Blair Witch, aside from having too many characters and being shot mostly in nauseating Franco-Soviet ShakyCam, had no substance left to it after one stripped away all the irrational nonsense. Paranormal Activity, on the other hand, is better, though still short on much meat for those of us who aren’t captivated by the prospect of demonic possession. For one thing, Paranormal Activity has only two significant characters, so both are much more developed and interesting than the Blair Witch gaggle. Additionally, most of Paranormal Activity was shot from a tripod. There is quite a bit of handheld still, but overall the image is much more controlled and comprehensible.

The best part of Paranormal Activity was the disintegration of the relationship between the two characters. They started in what I think is a fairly typical boyfriend/girlfriend relationship: she is a cute but not beautiful emotionally and financially needy student, and he is a hunkalicious but flaky professional day-trader who works from home. Everything they have– the big house, the expensive TV, the fancy video camera– is his. Her only source of income appears to be making and selling jewelry with a friend. She is wholly dependent on him, which allows him to take advantage of her over the course of the film. He thinks he knows more than she does, but she’s been living with her demon for her whole life. Nevertheless, he refuses to yield to her superior experience. He refuses to listen to her pleas for restraint. He latches on to how “cool” the whole thing is and completely neglects her emotions– something I think he has probably been doing since the beginning of the relationship. Instead he insists that he can control it if she will just let him. This is a man who must control everything and everyone around him– even his day-trading suggests a refusal to allow anyone else to control any part of his life for more than a few hours. Consequently he has a serious problem with letting his girlfriend into his life except in a superficial way. A way that works only until they encounter something beyond his control.

Watching this movie made me think of many couples that I know who fall into this sort of relationship framework, where one partner is emotionally dependent on the other, who uses that dependence for control. It males me wonder if the movie isn’t so much about demonic possession as it is about domestic abuse. So it rates as highly as it does because I believe that there is some richness there underneath the demonic possession schlock.

The Informant!

This movie was interesting, but unremarkable. Melanie Lynskey gave a very nice performance as Ginger Whitacre, and was probably the second most memorable part of the film, despite her limited screen time. The most memorable part of the film was the absolutely gorgeous Nagra SNST. The title sequence is pretty much Nagra porn. I’m definitely looking around on eBay for one of these babies.

Photo by Matt Blaze, 2008.

Just remembered I forgot to comment on the recent capture in Switzerland of notorious international fugitive and child rapist Roman Polanski, who apparently also has directed a number of quite good movie-films.

Lessons Polanski should learn from this affair:

1. Don’t rape children.
2. Don’t skip bail.
3. Don’t plead guilty if you aren’t willing to do the max.
4. DON’T RAPE CHILDREN!