Tuesday, July 22, 2008

It's Important To Be Akuret (See What I Did There? No? Oh.)

It seems to be around 7 that the tiredness starts to creep in.
Apparently being awake for more than 12 hours is too much effort.
Of course I can’t go to sleep that early – not anymore, anyway – so I have to find a way to stay awake for at least a few more hours, and in doing so I seem to shake the tiredness off just in time to go to bed and toss and turn before finally falling asleep.
Fun stuff.
Not much of note has been happening. It’s pretty much just been work, come home, get sleepy, stay awake, go to bed, toss and turn, etc.
Following on the heels of my entry about fact-checking, I encountered a post on Wired blogs about the continuing trend of comic book movies that was just rife with errors, illustrating my point about even more perfectly than the review that inspired the entry.
The worst part was that they were mistakes that didn’t have to be made, as they were details, or more accurately, attempts at details that didn’t need to be included.
For example, in discussing the Frank Miller-directed adaptation of The Spirit, he made a reference to the “fact” that Miller had cast an actress who had appeared in the big screen adaptation of Miller’s Sin City. This was an unnecessary detail.
Oh, and it was wrong; he stated that Eva Mendes was the actress in question. Eva Mendes who appeared in Sin City as Miss Not Appearing in this Film.
There was no reason to make this mistake, as there was no reason to mention that someone who was in Sin City will be appearing in The Spirit.
(He was half right, though; Jaime King, who played Goldie/Wendy in Sin City, is appearing in The Spirit.)
Speaking of Miller, the author of the blog post also went on to mention that another of Miller’s works – Hard Boiled – is currently in development, and he correctly stated that Hard Boiled was published in 2000.
Of course, he only “correctly” stated that if you allow a margin of error of plus or minus ten years, as Hard Boiled was actually published in 1990.
Those are just a few of the many errors contained in the post, and while it may seem nit-picky, if I’m spotting that many errors in what he writes about properties and projects that I’m familiar with, how can I trust anything he writes about properties and projects that I’m not?
Here’s the thing. I’m not a journalist. I don’t make any money off of this blog, so I’m not really under any sort of obligation to provide accurate information here. The purpose of this blog, ultimately, is just for me to ramble on about whatever I damn well please, so I don’t owe anyone anything. If I want to say “Citizen Kane was the best movie Stanley Kubrick ever directed,” no one really has legitimate grounds to complain, because I’m just some unpaid jerk-off writing whatever he feels like writing and who doesn’t have to answer to anyone. Beyond that, this isn’t a film history blog or, really, any sort of special purpose blog, so there’s no reason to think that the promise of any kind of accuracy is even implied.
And yet, when I’m writing an entry, I pretty much always have Wikipedia and IMDb open in browser tabs to that I can verify that any claims I make that can be verified are correct. How hard can it be to do that when you’re getting paid to write something and you do have a responsibility to be accurate?
I don’t really mean to harp on this, but I’m sort of at a loss for anything to write about, and it was just funny that I stumbled across the post so soon after writing an entry about exactly that sort of problem.
On a less preachy and serious note, I’ve been neglecting to share one of the more clever things I’ve said of late, so I will rectify that oversight now.
Last week one of my conference calls, the person I was talking to said, “I guess I’m just a nerd at heart.”
In response, I said, “I’m a nerd at skin.”

1 comment:

Merlin T Wizard said...

Hear hear!