Some End of Year News and Links

This post contains 7 links. The first set has some handy and funny sites or posts that any film fan should want to check out. The second set contains some news articles that came out during my break; I consider these special enough to point out, even if they're no longer timely. I can be fickle that way. I have one more post set to come out this month, doing a similar catch-up on videos that I would've put up if I had not been on a break.
First, I was really happy to find this tumblr blog that sketches out the future according to many, many old and new films. The picture it contains is on the right side of this post, and you can just check that out if you want. I like a nice timeline of what's supposed to happen to the world according to Back to the Future, Minority Report, Blade Runner, and Robocop, among others.

That handy picture is probably trumped by a should-be classic question, how many explosions have there been in Michael Bay movies? This is important to ask, if only in that it charts just how badly this successful hack needs to work cheaply just to "capture" his audience. The total is 992, and this answer speaks for itself. I'm not even joking - the number for Transformers alone is 128!

Finally, AV Club introduced me to a nifty site called Can I Stream It? It's an extremely handy way of knowing what videos are available for online viewing, and where they're available. It's not perfect, and I actually probably won't need to use it, but I'm sure many folks want access to a nice database with exactly this sort of info.

Moving onto the news, on Halloween, Netflix announced a big deal with Disney-ABC. This deal may have added a lot of new content, and assured that Netflix kept a lot of material it might have lost. Of course, a lot of these acquisitions also went to Amazon's Instant service, so you should decide for yourself whether that's a win, loss, or tie. No wait, it's probably an overall loss, considering that there's a class-action lawsuit against Netflix and Walmart for fixing the prices of online rentals...

Or you could be annoyed by the Universal Studio's President admitting that they make lots of garbage. It's a sad day when a person in the job of selling anything just flat-out states that the quality of their product doesn't matter. It's not only awful to express something like that when you're talking about art; it's a lot worse to talk about your customers in an insulting way. And yet... and yet, the numbers bear out, don't they? Of all the ways the world might seem broken, at least this one is non-violent, right?...

And now that you're thinking about all those mindless remakes, cheap youth-audience pandering, and lame, overdue product-based movies, I'll admit that my cynicism is mostly an act. I couldn't possibly predict that there would be a Where's Waldo movie in the works. At this point, I should expect some Dreamworks pic about the owl from Wise potato chip packages. What's next, Bazooka Joe: Origins?

Here's that Michael Bay infographic, in case you didn't follow the link above.

There has been plenty of film-related news over the last spell. I simply wanted to make sure that I gave some much-needed attention to this material before the year is gone. Tomorrow, my last post of the year will highlight some videos that I found during my break. Hopefully, you'll get at least as much joy from those as you did from this. Happy holidays, everybody!