A Little Of The Old In And Out



(image via scifipulse)

In: J.J. Abrams. It is only Tuesday, but the buzz is building for Star Trek. This morning Howard Stern -- no stranger to all things geekish -- declared the film quite possibly the best sci-fi film ever. Newspapers across the country are saying the same. And according to a press release, theaters are feeling the pinch, "J. J. Abrams' Star Trek doesn't open till Thursday night around 7 pm, but Fandango, the nation's leading moviegoer destination, is reporting that the film already accounts for 81% of daily ticket sales on the site. Star Trek has sold out more than a hundred opening weekend show times across the country from New York to Los Angeles, from King of Prussia, Pennsylvania to Colorado Springs, Colorado."

There may be a larger trend at work. This may also be the beginning of the rise of the "avids" (a nice way of saying geeks). When Bryan Singer directed Superman and Ang Lee directed The Hulk and Joel Schumacher directed Batman, each very nearly destroyed their respective franchises (cryptogeeky Quentin Tarantino, though, is in the minority of geeks pro-Superman Returns). They couldn't fake the funk; each were inherently cool Hollywood A-List Establishmentarians hired to capture comic book lightening in a bottle.

None of those guys know the teen anxiety of waiting for the next Detective Comics issue will come out to determining the fate of Batman. But when true blue geeks like Sam Raimi in Spiderman, JJ Abrams in Star Trek and Bronx High School of Science grad Jon Favreau in Iron Man are given the bat -- they hit home runs. The geek love in the aforementioned cases that those directors have for the subject is so evident in a way that it so obviously was not the case between Ang Lee and his Hulk. How odd that the A-List Hollywood director -- the coolest vocation on the planet -- is a job description slowly being conquered by the nerds. And the geek shall inherit the world (And isn't that, ultimately, the core narrative of the whole superhero aesthetic?).



Out: The Webbys. Hmm. Does the fact that a media Establishmentarian Kurt Anderson coveted -- and won -- a Webby suggests that the award has jumped the shark? A Webby, from this day forward, can no longer be properly construed under the category of "Indie." From Popwatch:

"The winners of the 13th annual Webby Awards -- 13th? God, I feel old -- were announced today, with Sarah Silverman, Seth MacFarlane, Jimmy Fallon, and Trent Reznor all picking up 'special achievement' awards. Thank God for the Internet, otherwise all these people with their own TV shows and platinum-selling albums would not have a voice."

Ex-ACT-ly.