Due to New Moon's record-smashing box office over its debut weekend this past weekend, I think I have no choice but to offer my own commentary on the latest Twilight movie offering. I should preface everything by saying that I have neither read nor seen any Twilight books or movies, but I'm not commenting on the depth (LOL!) of the plots or characters so I think I'm good.
In its first three days of release, New Moon made $142.8million. In case you live under an economic rock, that's a fuck-ton of money. So much so that it's the third best opening ever. The only two movies with better debuts are comic book movies (The Dark Night and Spider-Man 3), while the movie that got knocked out of third place was about pirates (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest). Not only that, but these three other movies were released during the summer. Here's some movie trivia for you: big-budget blockbusters are usually released during the summer months because they have a better chance at making more money. By comparison, movies released during the slower months can top the weekend box office with about $15 million or less (for example, Sept 4-7, 2009; Feb 27-Mar 1, 2009; and Apr 4-6, 2008). Movies in the weekend box office pole position generally make in the $30-60 million range (don't quote me on that), so there's a significant difference.
Okay, so there's the non-summer-release box office smashing going on, but there's also another factor that we need to look at. Dark Night, Spider-Man 3, and Pirates all have appeal to both male and female audiences. Not to stereotype too much, but there's some action for the guys and some romance for the girls. You would think with a Batman movie, the audience would be overwhelmingly male; however, for the debut weekend, only 52 percent of the audience was male. With Pirates, the audience was "equally divided" between males and females. I couldn't find gender percentage data for the Spider-Man movie. But with New Moon, the audience was 80 fucking percent female. So if you're male and you went to see New Moon this past weekend, you were outnumbered 1 to 4. That $142.8 million was carried mostly by women.
Now I can't claim to know what the appeal of the movie is or why so many more women than men are appealed, but I'm going to try to theorize. I say that it's the "sex appeal" of the the two leading actors Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner. (Does anyone even know the name of the lead actress?) They have been gracing the covers of so many tween girl (and other) magazines for the past few months that it would be shocking if New Moon didn't make as much money as it did with so much easy publicity. Factor in the widespread critical panning of the movie, and you cannot honestly say people flocked to the movie because it was good. It was due to Pattinson's and Lautner's "hotness" (I put this in quotes because I'm still confused about their hotness ... I don't really think they're that hot. Twi-fan women....).
Of course, the implications here aren't too uplifting. Have hot, sexy, shirtless guys that want to do absolutely anything for the love of a girl put into a movie, and SUPERCRAZYFANGIRLS will ensure the movie's financial success. If you have a bunch of hot, sexy, scantily-scad ladies swarming over one man in a movie by offering to his love slave, what's going to happen? 1) Feminists will go batshit crazy. 2) Where are the death-defying action scenes? 3) Guys have porn for this. (Okay, I'm kidding on number 3 here, but I can't imagine such a meager plot widely-appealing to male audiences. Of course, I might be biased.)
So my question here would be as follows: If we can essentially boil down the appeal of New Moon to the (demure) sex appeal of lead actors ("demure" because, well, is there even any nudity or sex in the movies??), then aren't women's sexualities more visually-based than normally thought-of (i.e., men and women aren't really that mentally-different sexually)? Can women really be this shallow?
The Oatmeal blog post: How Twilight Works: This guy actually read most of one of the Twilight books and maybe saw a movie or two
Unrelated, but here is (one of) my guilty pleasure(s) Australian singer Anthony Callea. He's done other things since this video, but I became a fan of him from this 2004 Australian Idol performance of his of "The Prayer." The single still holds the record the for the highest- and fastest-selling single in Australia.
It goes to reason that people are not unaware of the changing cultural norms and customs regarding online tools. From the third article above, the New Oxford American Dictionary even named the single word of the year for 2009 as a word from the world of the Internet. Not since the dot-com boom of the late-1990s has a word from the online arena been dubbed Word of the Year.
So what makes 2009 different from the rest of the years of the '00s? Arguably, the Internet came to mass appeal in the '90s (which could explain how online-related words claimed the Word of the Year throne for six non-consecutive years during the '90s), but it wasn't until throughout the '00s that it has ultimately fundamentally changed the way people function, work, and interact with one another. Think about it. You can apply to colleges and graduate schools online (some only have online applications). You can apply to jobs online. Email is the preferred method for a lot of professional dialogues. If a company doesn't have a website, it is probably severely hindered compared to those that do have one. The company names "Google," "YouTube," and "Facebook" have all become verbs. Most younger people probably couldn't function without Internet access of some sort. You can watch movies and television shows online. You can go shopping online. You can compare prices between/among various competitors online. I could go on and on.
Ergo, this collection of events has essentially been spiraling toward a point in which the legal/cultural/infrastructural boundaries of yester-decade are being hard-pressed to change. Online tools have changed the population, but the infrastructures currently in place are for a population essentially before the Internet. From the articles above, people are relying on online social networking sites like Facebook for legal alibis, people are turning to the online community for mental help, countries are anticipating some type of new warfare via the Internet, and the laws of today rudimentarily apply to issues in the cyberworld.
So how can all these issues be rectified? The people currenly in power (that is, the older working-age population [ages 35-65]) could hardly be said to understand the Internet as well as those coming into power (i.e., the younger working-age population [ages 15-35]). As with any cultural shift, the effect undeniably affects the younger people much more than it affects the older ones, with the more-affected younguns bringing the changes with them as they age to become the older ones of tomorrow. Therefore, any type of foundational change (legal, economical, etc.) related to these cultural shifts must be implemented by the younger generation coming into power, which of course would take roughly a generation (20-30 years) to occur.
Unfortunately, we are already feeling the strains that the online world have been putting on our legal system since current laws have set geographical precincts. The online world doesn't quite understand national/state boundaries. We'll have to see what happens.
Today's unrelated music video comes from U.K. singer Emma Deigman. I became a fan of her from her acoustic cover of the Killers' "Human" (which you should YouTube ... as well as her acoustic cover of Lady Gaga's "Just Dance"). This video is her official single "It Was You":
I'm calling it. The next phase of popular music will be electronica/dance. We had ballad-y powerhouse songs in the early 90s (a la Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston). We had teenybopper music in the late '90s (e.g., 'N Sync and Britney Spears). We had R&B music in the mid '00s (such as Beyonce and Rihanna). What's in store for the '10s? Electronica/dance, yo.
We're seeing some of the early pioneers of this with Lady Gaga's music. Her music--admittedly fucking bizarre--can definitely be roughly classified as dance-y/electronica-y (I mean, her Wikipedia entry classifies her as such). Here is her latest offering, "Bad Romance":
Two weeks ago, Owl City's first mainstream single "Fireflies" topped the Billboard Hot 100. Owl City is without a doubt electronicky ... and catchy. I first heard the "Fireflies" song on the radio and went mad-crazy when the DJ didn't name the song or artist upon the song's completion. It wasn't until I heard the song a few more times on the radio before I was able to find out these details.
Owl City is a a band led by Adam Young, a Minnesota native. He accumulated fame via his MySpace music page and was the musician with the most listens who was unsigned by a major record label (with something like over 10 millions views). So a record label (or labels? I didn't closely read his bio....) took notice. [Insert commentary about Web 2.0 and how it's changing the "normal" procedure of things. Please note that I want you to fill in the blanks there as I could comment a lot on that, so I'm just trying to save some space. Yes, I'm trying to save virtual space. Please stop judging me.]
Of course, other musicians are not unaware of this changing musical climate. If we look to mainstream artists who have remained relevant through "musical phases" (that is, they have a career that spans at least a decade), we can quickly see that they have observed the shift toward electronica as well.
In September 2009, Britney Spears released the very dance-y song "3":
In August 2009, Shakira released this electronica-like song "She-Wolf":
In March 2009, the Black Eyed Peas released the dance/electronica(?) song "Boom Boom Pow." They might say they're an R&B group, but all their recent stuff ("I Gotta Feeling" and "Meet Me Halfway") says otherwise.
In September 2008, Christina Aguilera released the "futuristic"-sounding song "Keeps Gettin' Better":
Granted, my musical knowledge is not that of an "expert," so I could be completely wrong. I know I'm leaving a lot of "evidence" out. I also realize that some of these songs might be annoying (i.e., "Boom Boom Pow"). But they do help to prove whatever point I'm trying to make. I should also qualify my "theory" by saying that anything that is mainstreamed into popular music will not be true to its home genre, so these songs will be no doubt "pop-ized" with influences from electronica or dance ... or something.
SIDE NOTE: Some of these videos are not hosted by YouTube because those songs can't be embedded outside of YouTube.
I would include an "unrelated" yet cool music video, but there are already way too many videos in this posting. I would have just re-posted the Owl City song at any rate. :-)
In the past two days, two of the many leading stories that have appeared as the "main story" (the story with the biggest picture near the top) on CNN.com have been Web 2.0-related. I check CNN.com frequently throughout the day and the stories usually are more "timely" news stories rather than the feature-like content of the two Web 2.0 stories I noticed. (These two articles are here [on social networking] and here [on cloud computing].)
If you peruse the articles (especially the one on cloud computing), you can't help but feel the informality of the tone of the article (I mean, the picture for the social networking article has a gratuitous KITTEN in it....). They are also both definitely in favor of online technologies. Obviously, CNN has realized the importance of the Internet to people and devoted front-page property to it, even if the articles on it aren't necessarily super-serious and "newsy" in tone.
On the social networking article: The numbers in this article are surprisingly low to me, although the percentages of kids with online profiles is still pretty high (for example, 38 percent of kids age 12 to 14 have online profiles). I think that with most "new" phenomenons, there co-exists an immediate backlash against them focusing on the negatives; social networking websites are no exception. However, as time drudges onward, larger proportions of people realize how silly such negativity really is. (This parallels wonderfully with gay marriage, although homosexuality is not really "new"....) I also have to commend the Bigbie parents in how they deal with their children having online profiles: they don't shun such technology and allow their children to have profiles, but the parents know the passwords. I can imagine the case in which as the children grow to high-school age that the parents allow them more online privacy. I feel that this is great parenting concerning an issue that didn't exist when the parents where younger themselves. The article's inclusion of social networking sites targeted toward younger children as a potential springboard for "older" sites like Facebook was a nice touch.
On the cloud computing article: This was totally not an article; at best, it's a narrative-like column, although I'm not going to discredit the great information it provided. Where the hell are all our online information stored? Are they stored in one place or several places? Is it possible to go to a physical location and see the saved data? How is it even possible to store the massive amounts of information? Lots and lots of question that the author tries incredibly nobly to answer. His attempts are futile though since most of the companies probably want to keep their competitive advantages secret, which is really a shame. People's personal information is being hidden ... and quite well too! It's good to be aware of the few "answers" he did manage to uncover though.
Of course, what does this have to do with the "tech generation," as I've phrased it? Well, cloud computing basically "fuels" social networking sites--since they require lots of storage space with online profiles, photos, videos, etc. These two issues (among others) are closely interrelated, and this is the atmosphere today's youth are growing up in. Little five-year-olds can be more adept at using a computer than a middle-aged or elderly person ever could hope to be! It's downright astonishing!
So we have the Baby Boom generation born from WWII to the 50s. We have Generation X from the 60s to the 70s. We have Generation Y from the 70s to the 80s (wOOt for Gen Yers!). Generation Z then spans the 90s and 00s. So what about beyond? Whomever's idea it was to begin naming generations at the end of the alphabet was not thinking very far ahead. Generation Yers have sometimes also been dubbed millenials or Generation Nexters. Generation Z is still young so it's hard to characterize them, but they and the following generation will no doubt be incredibly connected with the Internet, texting, cell phones, IMs, social networking sites, Web 2.0 tools, and so on and so forth. "Generation Tech," anyone? The Technies?
Unrelated to the "tech generation" stuff: I just discovered the hilarious musical episode "Once More with Feeling" of the cult-favorite series Buffy the Vampire Slayer(Season 6, Episode 7). Lots of hysterical (and catchy) songs. The following video is the clip of Spike singing his one solo song. Who knew James Marsters could sing and sing sexily? I did some light research and found out he had or has a band or something. Needless to say, I'm a fan now. The singing in this video starts at 1:01.
but where is the cheese?
Due to New Moon's record-smashing box office over its debut weekend this past weekend, I think I have no choice but to offer my own commentary on the latest Twilight movie offering. I should preface everything by saying that I have neither read nor seen any Twilight books or movies, but I'm not commenting on the depth (LOL!) of the plots or characters so I think I'm good.
Okay, so there's the non-summer-release box office smashing going on, but there's also another factor that we need to look at. Dark Night, Spider-Man 3, and Pirates all have appeal to both male and female audiences. Not to stereotype too much, but there's some action for the guys and some romance for the girls. You would think with a Batman movie, the audience would be overwhelmingly male; however, for the debut weekend, only 52 percent of the audience was male. With Pirates, the audience was "equally divided" between males and females. I couldn't find gender percentage data for the Spider-Man movie. But with New Moon, the audience was 80 fucking percent female. So if you're male and you went to see New Moon this past weekend, you were outnumbered 1 to 4. That $142.8 million was carried mostly by women.
Of course, the implications here aren't too uplifting. Have hot, sexy, shirtless guys that want to do absolutely anything for the love of a girl put into a movie, and SUPERCRAZYFANGIRLS will ensure the movie's financial success. If you have a bunch of hot, sexy, scantily-scad ladies swarming over one man in a movie by offering to his love slave, what's going to happen? 1) Feminists will go batshit crazy. 2) Where are the death-defying action scenes? 3) Guys have porn for this. (Okay, I'm kidding on number 3 here, but I can't imagine such a meager plot widely-appealing to male audiences. Of course, I might be biased.)
