Author: Greg DeLiso

A Dig Through Walmart’s Bargain Bin

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I never go to Walmart.  Not out of some liberal hatred for it or anything, though. I don’t go because here in Michigan, we have a superstore called Meijer which makes it unnecessary to shop anywhere else.  (The people here call it ‘Meijers’ by the way—it’s a stupid, Michigander thing.)  Anyway, last night I went to Walmart with some friends, because they wanted to go to Walmart, and I was at their mercy, so I went.

Walmart has a bargain bin.  A real one.  Meijer phased out their bargain bins a while back, which sucks, and is really the only thing that sucks about Meijer.
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Greg DeLiso’s 2013 in Film

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I haven’t been to the theater much lately.  And by lately, I mean since I was a kid.  I’m basically waiting for them to make movies again (see The Idea of What a Movie Is). I mostly deferred to John’s list to see what even came out this year:
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Rocky vs. Raging Bull

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Since Hollywood decided to do Rocky vs. Raging Bull, I figured I’d do the same.

Stories are a template. For practical purposes, the story is the plot (it actually isn’t, but just bear with me). A story is only as good as the way it’s told. Rocky has a decent story, a story we’ve heard a million times, but it’s told with care and craftsmanship.  Rocky, the story, executed as the film Rocky, is transcendent—whereas Rocky, the story, executed as the film The Mighty Ducks, is okay I guess.  Raging Bull is not a story—it’s information about a guy, dressed up stylistically. That doesn’t make it bad, but, it makes the two difficult to compare.
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An (Imaginary) Interview with Steven Spielberg

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I’m not really sitting with you right now, Steven Spielberg, but I want to be.  There’s really nothing I could think of that would be more of an achievement.  To be honest, I don’t think about your movies enough anymore, and I don’t reference you enough in my pieces on this site.  It’s because talking about you is kind of old hat.  You are unequivocally the most successful, and the most household name-y of any movie director in history.  You created my childhood, and millions upon millions of other childhoods.  Your name had as much market value in the 80s and 90s as McDonald’s and Reebok.  (I made that last sentence up but it sounds real!)

So anyway, yeah, I’m sitting here (not really) with the most iconic living legend filmmaker of all time, Steven Spielberg:
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I Want To Talk About The Internet

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When YouTube started to happen, it seemed like the great leveler.  Kids in their basement suddenly had distribution equal to that of the major Hollywood studios.  And following in the wake of cheaper and better video equipment, it looked like the control of all media had shifted from ‘The Man’ to the everyman.

The results of this have been dismally revealing.

Thanks to the internet, and YouTube, we now have confirmation that 99.999% of all art completely sucks.  Before, we could only look to the establishment and their putrid output to see how bad everything is.  But with every person on earth making stuff, and throwing it up on there, we now have proof that almost nobody can make anything good.
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