Well that’s all over now. We’ve all seen all there is to seeand all there is to imagine; we have experienced every story under the sun. Who wants to see a “great performance” by the latest Hollywood slut of some old clunker we’ve seen a hundred times?

The only chance for a revival is IMAX, a technology controlled by some of the least competent businessmen on the planet. They have built a better mousetrap and cleverly placed it on a raft in the middle of the river, the one place the mice can’t get to. Without new technology, you are looking at a medium that is as dead as live theatre, a medium it took 4,000 years before a more effective alternative became available. Movies lasted a hundred years before video games. Time flies.

Computer games is where it’s at. Face it.

As an opinion, studios cannot buy the IMAX corporation because of the old “consent decree” whereby studios were stripped of theatre ownership. Unless and until this technology can be harnessed for the general good….fuhgedaboudit.

I had my doubts when I read this…

While I don’t want to sound churlish to iFilm, it’s a sad state when DVD is the only available forum for a new movie.

…and this…

Indie success is now when a lousy movie like Memento enables the director to make a bigger, even lousier movie like Batman Begins.

…confirmed them.

Once upon a time, before video, Roger Ebert campaigned on his TV show to get this movie, which he wanted to see, released. I put Kwik Stop in my Netflix queue. Product availability is not the problem it once was.

Product quality is a different story. However, dissing a movie like Memento and failing to discuss why Sundance rejected the movie you’re praising is, I think, a poor way of making your case that the product you’re flacking is a quality one.

With the recent improvements in keyswitch technology, strong typing is nowhere near as important…

Barry, Hollywood talent began applying itself to video games years ago. “Fallout” was published, what, 8 years ago? A wonderful interactive story-type game, and among the voice cast were Richard Dean Anderson, Tony Shaloub, and several supporting cast actors from “The Simpsons.” One of the sequels, “Fallout Tactics,” made extensive use of R. Lee Ermey. Videogames tied in to movies or TV shows very often use the original actors; Ian KcKellen recorded voice-overs just for Electronic Arts’ Lord of the Rings videogames.

10 years ago (jeez, has it been that long?) I took a UCLA Extension course on writing for video games. One of our classmates was a screenwriter, not a wannabe, but someone who had some credits under his belt. He obviously saw a possible alternate career path here. Sound thinking on his part, but he seemed to have more trouble than anyone grasping the concept of story trees, rather than a single story arc.

I do think the “Hollywood is dying” chant has been made before only to see Hollywood go on to make lots of money. I do think there’s a role for regular Hollywood movies, albeit in a less dominant way. Meaning it will be a smaller player in some ways. It could still be a successful model.

Also some of the Hollywood talent will surely find its way into videogaming. There may be a role for good scripts and directors and other technicians in the video game world. I accept what you and Paul are suggesting vis a vis videogames, as I think this form of entertainment will continue to improve and be accessible to everyone in one form or another. I also agree that its future success cannot be taken for granted.

I wonder if Hollywood will blend or merge with the videogaming gaming world in more formal ways (sort of like AOL Time Warner-admittedly an imprecise analogy). There’ll be talk of synergies, etc. Maybe Hollywood will come to be seen as where the games (if that’s what they’ll still be called or forms of entertainment that blend gaming and movies could emerge gamo’s or mogam’s) emenate from, while Silicon Valley, etc. will be the technical people. Hollywood would have to reinvent itself, but in some ways that’s what it’s in the business of doing.

Why? Unless you’re writing device drivers, finite state machines are mercifully going the way of the Dodo.

Hmmm… I find they turn up in algorithms that have an adaptive flavor or that are driven by input streams. Perhaps there are better ways… programming isn’t my profession, I just like to keep in touch. Thanks for the pointers.

Thread hijacking is a time honored way to have a bit of fun.

By the way, a “statically-typed Python” sounds an awful lot like IronPython.

I sat next to Jim Hugunin at a conference dinner shortly after he went to work at Microsoft. I do wonder what he is up to now, as the ironpython list stalled out shortly thereafter. ISTR that he remarked that if he were writing numpy now he would do it for C# or something to that effect.

Lisp has always been interactive, like Python, but unlike Python to this day, Lisp has also been compiled to native code for decades now.

I keep hearing these tales and they make me think that someday I will have to learn something about Lisp.