Oh, we piss people off.

The schedule for the next few months is posted on flyers outside the theater, and on December 15, we’re doing It’s a Wonderful Life. There was already some internal conflict about it, and some anonymous wag wrote on one of the flyers: “It’s not a bad movie, you S.O.B.s!!!” With three lines under S.O.B.s, so we’ll know they mean business.

Yeah, some people don’t like Bad Movie Night so much.

Me, I do. It’s my baby. I didn’t create the show—that honor goes to Jim Fourniadis and Ty McKenzie—but I was there on the first night: Red Dawn, March 27, 2005. Coincidentally, I broke up with my girlfriend of seven years earlier that afternoon. As a result I almost didn’t go to the show at all, but I was looking forward to it, and the point of the breakup had been (among other things) so I could go do the stuff I wanted, and Bad Movie Night was very much the stuff I wanted to do. I became a frequent co-host, eventually weaseling working my up to de facto curator. It’s still the most fun thing I do on a regular basis.

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As you obviously know, the Writers Strike started this week. And it looks like it’s going to be a long, hard slog that may not be resolved for months — maybe not even until the Actors and Directors contracts are up next June. That’s a long time, and while there are any number of articles discussing the anticipated consequences of the strike, what about the unanticipated consequences?

By definition, of course, those are impossible to predict. Which is why I’m going to predict them. So, without any further ado, here are six unanticipated consequences of the writers strike.

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So it follows the course of human events that popular (and not-so-popular) novels are made into movies (prompting the ever-after statement, “The book was better.”). Once upon a time, books and movies, rightly, occupied different spheres. How would they meet? It’s not like they sold books in movie theaters or screened films in bookstores.

Ah, to return to those innocent times. The joy…

Seriously gang, it’s 2007. Nearly 2008. A new age has dawned and all that. So it makes perfect sense that one key way to promote books-made-into-movies is to, well, you know, work both sides of the media spectrum. Cross-promote, build on the audience of one for the other. Use modern technology the way the Internet gods intended it.
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It’s the big sci-fi movie of my childhood, the one against which all others are judged. Watching it still gives me a warm fuzzy feeling. I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve seen it, but it’s a whole hell of a lot, and I can quote lines or do entire scenes. I recognize that it’s a highly flawed movie, and for the most part I liked the rejiggered effects in the “Director’s Edition.” At least they didn’t try to shoehorn in bathroom jokes like the later, much suckier movies in the series.

Even if you haven’t already read the title or seen the accompanying picture, in this post-ironic age you’ve probably figured by now that I’m not talking about Star Wars. Instead, I refer without irony to Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

I can hear the witty rejoinders already: “You mean Star Trek: The Motionless Picture, don’t you?”

Yeah. That one.

Thanks to my family having remarkable taste (which also resulted in a lifelong love of The Beatles and Dylan), I’ve been a Star Trek fan from a very young age. Most of my fellow Generation X’ers hate the movie, though. As do Boomers. I haven’t asked any Millennials, but I’d gather that for them, Star Trek movies start with the Khan one, and they all kinda suck anyway. Story of my life, loving something everyone else hates.

Actually, I don’t know anyone who actively hates Star Trek: The Motion Picture. (Though I imagine a few haters will chime in in the comments section. Hello, haters!) Most people just dismiss it as “the slow and boring first movie,” even if they haven’t seen it in a decade or three. It doesn’t raise the well-deserved ire of the underbudgeted, poorly written and incompetently directed Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, or the overbudgeted, poorly written and incompetently directed Star Trek Nemesis, the latter being the one Trek movie I cannot sit through. Gods, Nemesis was horrible, so talky and unwatchable. (Irony alert: many people feel that way about The Motion Picture.) At least The Final Frontier has a certain ramshackle charm to its badness. Watching it can be like a parlor game: there’s something wrong with practically every scene, every shot, every line of dialogue. See if you can spot them all! Just be sure it isn’t a drinking game, lest you have alcohol poisoning by the time Spock plays “Row Your Boat” on his lyre. It’s like the Turkish Star Trek with a thirty million dollar budget, and I mean that as the highest praise.

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It’s no secret that people who write these types of online journal thingies pay attention to our traffic. And occasionally an old post that we figured was long dead and buried rises out of the morass and gets a lot of traffic. In the last month, a post I wrote back on February 3 called “Harry Potter and The Gynormous Spoiler” has become our third most-visited page.

Because the piece itself is pretty much a trifle — it’s essentially me whinging about how I’m sure to be spoiled on Harry’s fate prior to actually finishing the book, poor me! — I’m surprised that it got any traffic at all. But I think that it just reflects the public’s appetite for and anticipation of the ending of these books, an appetite that has suddenly ramped up, and is just about to explode.

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The A.V. Club started out as what seemed like a weird afterthought. I first noticed it as a link from its parent site, The Onion. Given the name and the context, I assumed that it would be full of fake news about popular culture. Instead, what I found was straight commentary on popular culture — snarky, for sure, but sincere.

It felt out of place to me. After all, The Onion itself was so full of irony and snark, that an adjunct that was essentially straight-ahead pop culture commentary seemed, well, like a bit of a joke in and of itself. But it wasn’t, and over the years, the writing became sharper and more focused, and the A.V. Club became a brand in and of itself. I’m not sure when, exactly, but I’ll bet it was when they started tossing out high-quality content on a daily basis. That always helps.

So while I still don’t know exactly why it exists in the first place, I do know this: in the past couple of years, it has become one of my very favorite places to visit on the entire Web.

Here are nine reasons why:

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If you’re a fan of independent or foreign films it can be surprisingly difficult to track down new and interesting movies. You’re pretty much limited to catching films at the local art-house during the first run, waiting for them to run on IFC or the Sundance channel, waiting for a copy to become available on Netflix, or splurging on a DVD of a movie you may only watch once. Any way you look at it, there’s a lot of waiting around involved and it can be difficult to figure out what movies are worth seeing. A new download service called Jaman might just change all of this.

Jaman claims to have the rights to legally distribute over 1,000 foreign and independent films for download. That’s far more than iTunes or any other legal movie download service. Through partnerships with a number of film festivals Jaman also offers films that are currently on the festival circuit. For example, several of the movies currently screening at the Tribeca film festival in New York are available right now on Jaman, and films from the upcoming San Francisco International Film Festival will be available on Jaman next week.

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As is my sometimes habit, I ventured out into the real world this week to take the pulse of real people who use real new media. Nobody was paid nor bribed in the course of these discussions and all opinions reflected here represent the opinions of my (anonymous as they shun fame and fortune) focus group, expanded this time to include a few voices from the legal profession.

So here is what they’re saying out there in reality. Remember, real people with real money to spend on goods and services:

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Now that a major record label has finally consented to sell music without DRM restrictions it would be easy to portray Steve Jobs as a hero of the anti-DRM movement. After all, it was just two months ago that Jobs published his scathing letter criticizing the music industry for its reliance on DRM.

The problem is, Steve Jobs isn’t really an anti-DRM crusader. In fact, he has a pretty obvious double standard when it comes to DRM. Jobs has made it clear that when we talk about the death of DRM we’re really only talking about the death of DRM for music. As Jobs said during Monday’s press conference:

“Video’s pretty different than music because the video industry does not distribute 90% of its content DRM-free — never have. So I think they’re in a pretty different situation.”

Spoken like the single largest shareholder of the Disney Corporation.

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According to the L.A. Times, the release window between the time a film is released in theatres and the time it is released has shrunk another 10 days in the past year.

And while that’s enough to make the National Association of Theatre Owners very nervous, that’s still not nearly fast enough. The fact that there is any time at all between the time a film is released in theatres and the time it is available for DVD, pay cable and downloading is swiftly becoming an anachronism.

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