Make that love.

We had some friends over for dinner recently and the discussion, as is common, turned to movies. Everyone’s opinion on what makes a good movie may differ, but there is one fundamental thing a movie needs: movement. For example, my friend Dave said that while he liked “Cloverfield,” he had a problem with the monster itself. It didn’t seem to have a purpose and its movements were random. Now Godzilla, on the other hand, was always on the go. He moved and did it with purpose. He was on his way somewhere. I had to agree. I too liked “Cloverfield,” but the monster’s intent was like its shape, amorphous and random. So what could have been a new, genre-defining monster movie was merely an engaging and likable affair that featured a bit of credibility stretching by using a hand-held camera POV for its duration. There is a world of difference between “like” and “love.”

This year, two movies in particular were competing for Best Picture at the Oscars. One was Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood,” loosely based on “Oil!” by Upton Sinclair, and the other was (eventual winner) Joel and Ethan Coen’s “No Country for Old Men,” based on the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name. Both movies feature sadistic central characters and have a theme of “the times they are a changin’”; the first due to unabated oil development around the turn of the last century and the other to a rising tide of drug running and criminality along the Texas border in 1980. But there’s a key difference to what separates the first movie from merely being an attractive, if long-winded exercise in greed and megalomania, to a thought provoking, riveting, and accomplished feat of storytelling in the latter: movement.
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A lot of hay was made yesterday about a wide-reaching survey released yesterday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. For example, one of the things that got serious play was that about half of the people out there still don’t live their lives around high-tech products.

Instead, I guess, they are living their lives around such mundane things as their jobs, their churches, their families and so forth. Then the survey broke down the actual users into sub-groups, and explained various things about the sub-groups. It was all very interesting and informative, and then I got to the very end . . .

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In light of Microsoft Vista’s tardy, ho-hum arrival–and its incomprehensible, off-strategy “Wow!” marketing campaign–let’s revisit, and hopefully debunk, a commonly held myth about Microsoft, namely, that the company has “bad” technology, but compensates with it’s “good/great” marketing.

Even a cursory trip through Microsoft’s marketing past can serve as convincing testimony that Microsoft’s marketing is often ineffective, and often as strange as the company’s top executives can be at times.

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Like all good media dinosaurs EMI Records is in no hurry to meet the future. The status quo is just too familiar and comfortable; better hang onto it as long as you can. Last week EMI postponed the future just a little bit longer by refusing a $4.1 billion takeover bid by WMG and breaking off discussions with online music services over the possibility of selling DRM-free downloads.

You would think a company that’s rapidly losing market share and issuing profit warnings every month would be taking drastic steps to turn things around, but that’s clearly not the case with EMI. As a card carrying member of the “big four” EMI is one of the last of a dying breed. I’m pretty sure there’s something in The Endangered Species Act that prevents the company from actually going bankrupt.

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For my inaugural ‘Loper report, which I’ve delayed almost as long as Vista, I thought I should tee off on something that really gets my goat. And that is: how companies come up with their positively idiotic names for products. You know what I’m talking about. Those names that sound like they were picked from an eye chart at random.

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Last spring the tech blogosphere was buzzing about the impending release of a new Microsoft product code-named Origami. Like most products with code-names, details on the Origami were sketchy at first. Some speculated that it would be an iPod killer, while others thought it would be a more general purpose mobile entertainment device. The buzz was fueled by the appearance of mysterious video prior to the actual product announcement. The whole thing had a certain orchestrated quality about it.

Origami Day came and went and all we got out of it was a new acronym. Turns out the Origami is a UMPC (that’s short for Ultra Mobile PC). Essentially the Origami is a Microsoft reference specification that third party OEM’s can use to produce portable PC devices. UMPC’s are smaller than a notebook computer, but larger than a Pocket PC. And according to the Microsoft site, UMPC’s can do EVERYTHING.

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When Microsoft announced the Zune last July, we had pretty low expectations for the digital media player. So much about the Zune just didn’t seem right:

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Unversal Music, the mega-major record label that thinks so little of its fans that their CEO, Doug Morris, recently said that iPods were: “just repositories for stolen music,” has evidentally hit upon a new business model: lawsuits and extortion.

Apparently making money by putting good music out there with a price point that might entice people just isn’t good enough. Because, of course, we are all thieves. So instead of that, they’ve decided to go a different route. Instead of using their artists to make money, they’ve decided to fall back upon the lawyers. Hopefully, the lawyers will get a better royalty rate.

Let’s review, shall we?

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On Tuesday Microsoft began welcoming the world to ‘The Social’. It’s Thursday morning and I still have no clue what ‘The Social’ is. I’ve scoured The Google for two full days to no avail. The Zune hype is making me dizzy.

If you’ve been following our Zune coverage here at Medialoper you probably know that we had pretty low expectations for the Zune. As unlikely as it may seem, I think the Zune launch may have actually turned out worse than we expected. Here’s a round-up of some of the Zune “highlights” from the past few days:

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After months of hype Microsoft will finally release the Zune media player tomorrow. We assume that someone, somewhere will actually buy the damn thing. If you’re one of those soon-to-be Zune owners there’s one last thing you should know before you run off to stand in line at the local Best Buy. When the Zune Marketplace launches later this week you won’t be able to buy songs with your local currency. That’s right, your money is no good in the Zune music store. Instead, you’ll have to convert real money to Microsoft Points, and then use those points to purchase songs. Of all of the puzzling Zune “features”, this one has to be the strangest.

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