Author: Mike P. Lewis

Teddy Roosevelt Inspiration

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When your chips are down and things are not going your way, you can take some comfort in the words of Teddy Roosevelt:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Now – onward and upward….

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The Hurt Locker is a Great Film

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Last night i saw The Hurt Locker and i have to say that it is a great film.  It’s a great story about a man, William James (Jeremy Renner), who diffuses bombs ibilden Iraq under enemy fire.  It’s an absurdly dangerous job and he rellishes in it.  The movie starts with a quote, “War is a drug” and it couldn’t be more true for William James.

You could view William as a type of artist for he approaches a Flow-like state when he’s diffusing – all time stands still and like a surgeon he achieves the utmost clarity and focus.   He understands bombs inside and out and does it day after day after day until he could do it in his sleep.  He also tries to understand the bombers. He loves his job and could be the best in the military at it.

This movie is exciting – not because of the action scenes but because of the people – the characters.  There aren’t any big speeches but rather you can see each person examining their soul as the war takes it toll.  I felt as if i was truly watching someone feel the war.  The direction of this movie was top notch.  There weren’t lame quick cuts in the action scenes but rather the camera dwells on the situation at hand and allows the viewer to experience the situation just as the soldiers are.  It’s not action – it’s suspense.  It’s great and you can see why William James needs his drug.  It’s an approach to war i’ve never seen before

I thought that this was the first good film about the Iraq War that i’ve seen.  It shows how the troops are integrated in the streets and how tough it is for them to police in a city that doesn’t necessarily want them nor understands them.  I’ve talked to a few veterans and one of them has specifically mentioned the kids in the cities and how hard it is to look at someone and both want to help someone and also be afraid of them killing you.

This is a great film.  It’s on my list for nominations for Best Picture, Best Director (Kathryn Bigelow) and Best Actor (Jeremy Renner)

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Best Movie of the Decade?

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I was listening to a debate going on the BS Report about the best movie of the past 10 years.  It’s 2009 and the era called “the aughts” or “the zeros” is almost over.  One thing that is really troubling to realize is that the best movies of this decade are noticeably worse than the movies of the last decade.  Looking at the top movies of the past 10 years you’ll see that very few of them are going to be timeless classics. On the flip side, the movies of the 90’s are extremely re-watchable and seem to be much better:

Picture 4

The reason i believe is something I heard from Chris Connelly and that TV is the new indie movie. Shows like The Soprano’s, Band of Brothers, The Wire, and Mad Men – those are the best movies of the last decade.  Granted they didn’t come out on the big screen but this is where visionary directors are going to produce character-driven creative stories.   Cinema today is all about either (1) Big budget action movies or (2) formulaic stories in a specific genre whether it’s horror, comedy, romance, or thrillers.   It’s interesting to see that TV is picking up the slack that films are leaving.  This could also be why people are picking up TV DVD’s much more.   The production quality, the music and the cinematography is way better in these tv dramas than they ever were in 80’s and 90’s television – it’s no wonder that they can compete head on so well.

Personally, if i had to pick, i’d choose The Departed or No Country For Old Men as the best movies of the 00’s.  What do you think?  First, what is your top movie of the past decade?  And do you agree that TV is the new Indie film?

Why YouTube’s Losses Are Much Smaller Than Expected

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Picture 3There’s been a lot of buzz about a month ago about how YouTube loses money and is a horrible business.  Most of these articles came after Credit Suisse’s published an estimate of YouTube’s losses at $470M a year.  This is a large number and people pounced on it. However, there is a good report i just read (PDF only and downloadable here) that challenges Credit Suisse’s assumptions with some more accurate numbers.  For instance, Amazon Web Services could provide storage for 50% of the costs included in CS’s study.  The survey ends with:

Regardless of what you may hear, YouTube costs are a fraction of any other company running similar operations. Most of Google’s bandwidth is free or near-free; its hardware is cost-optimized; and its data center costs are mostly committed or sunk. The top customers of our sourcing advisory service, whose prices are on average 20% better than the average market level, cannot deliver content as cheaply as Google’s massively scaled operation. Surprisingly enough, the ones that come closest are often thosethat leverage the scale of others through using cloud services.
But even if a fair accounting of its costs showed a loss, YouTube gives Google the ability to achieve needed improvements in lowering cost of other operations. Loud stories about YouTube’s losses can only help deter copyright lawsuits and demands from content owners. Skepticism is warranted — but be ready for surprise news of profitability in the future.

The article does explore the upside of allowing the market to believe the YouTube business is quick unprofitable.  With license-holders eager to renogotiate and reap larger profits, it’s better to all them to perceive that it’s much too expensive to host and deliver these files and thus license payments should be low.

But this is clearly wrong.  In yesterday’s earnings call, Google had this to say about YouTube:

“Monetized views” on YouTube have more than tripled over the last year, said SVP Jonathan Rosenberg. Executives would not say whether YouTube was profitable, although they did say it was on a trajectory to become a “very profitable business for us” in the “not too distant future,” giving a collective heart attack to analysts who have speculated about how much money the site is losing. In a follow-up call with analysts, CFO Patrick Pichette said that the company wanted to reaffirm that YouTube’s business model was credible. “There’s been so much press with all these documentations of massive costs and no business model,” he said.

Interesting to think about next time someone speaks up about how horrible the YouTube business is.

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Spying on Myself and LifeTracker

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Picture 3Fred Wilson had a post this weekend about MyWare and his love of it. I couldn’t agree more as i’m a huge proponent of tracking my own activity. For instance,

Fred wrote that he likes to keep this data because, “I am interested in this sector of implicit behavior data. I believe that publishing the things I do on the web will allow web services to get smarter about me and give me better experiences.” I keep track for different reasons.  I actually like to keep data about myself. I find it interesting and i use to remember events of my life.

But i see it going even further.  What i wrote was:

When i look at the web, i see people trying to capture experiences. They capture photos on flickr, videos on youtube, and notes with people on email. Their life is being tracked but not in a comprehensive way.

I could imagine a site – call it “Lifetracker.com” which tracks all the things you do. You plug in last.fm, gmail (or other email), google voice, flickr/picassa, twitter, credit card (mint), youtube and other web services. I then matches 3 things: the data, the contacts, and the time. It creates a timeline for you and marks who you’ve been interacting with and when. There’s an API so each new web service you start using you can plug into it.

There are several benefits: (1) as you mentioned, you can give this data to services for recommendations; (2) you can search your life. If google is web search, twitter is real-time search, this would be “me search”; (3) just like we don’t remember phone numbers anymore b/c we put them into our phone to retrieve any time we want, we can start throwing information into lifetracker such as meeting notes, audio recordings of phone calls, etc. so we don’t have to write stuff down and remember it. Use the cloud as a memory storage instead of your brain

I see this coming and it’s really exciting to think about it.

I do think it will happen.  What do you think?

Thoughts about Bruno

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sacha-baron-cohen-bruno-gq-july-2009-cover

Saw Bruno last night and here are some thoughts:

  • The trailer was hilarious BUT gave away way too many scenes.  Watching the movie, I found that there was a setup and you already knew what was going to happen.  This was true for the camping trip and the military attempt. Similarly, he gave away too many jokes from the movie on the Today show too which i posted about yesterday.
    • Trailers giving away too much of a movie is a monstrous pet peeve of mine.  I hate that films do it. I understand that it helps get people into the theaters more but it really degrades the actual experience.   This is a whole other post for me.  But man does it tick me off.
  • With Borat, they explained the camera because they were filming everything for the station back home, and you could tell when there was a hidden camera.  For Bruno, there was no explanation why the camera was following Bruno around for most of the time.  There are some scenes where you wonder how they are filming it – like the swingers party scene.   It made the movie feel less authentic and more fictional
  • There are some great scenes that really show the insanity of America and of Hollywood.  Some parents should be totally ashamed of themselves for how they pimp out their kids.  Bruno is able to expose the absurdity of LA really well.
  • The movie is lot like the movie Jackass except instead of doing anything just to be dumb, Bruno does gay things just to be dumb and films the reaction of other people.   There’s actually quite a lot of similarities between the two
  • I found that the narrative of the movie was pretty contrived.  It was more a series of funny events strapped together than an actual story.  Sure it tried to be a story of Bruno’s attempt to become famous but that is not really an arc.
  • This is the best marketed movie i’ve seen in a long time.  Everywhere i looked it was Bruno.  His appearance on Letterman and The Today show were great.  I really felt that this movie was an event which resulted in me marching out on opening night. I have to hand it to them – really great marketing.

So, i think as you can see, i felt the movie was hyped up abit too much for me and didn’t fully deliver.  I still think it was pretty damn funny.  I laughed a lot.  But, i think it’s more of a Borat sequel than another innovative step.  Personally i think Borat was better or at least more novel.  I’m going 7.5 out of 10

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Bruno This Weekend

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I’m headed out to see Bruno tonight and i’m pretty excited as i’ve read some great reviews and saw that it’s at 71% at Rotten Tomatoes.  Ebert says:

Here is a film that is 82 minutes long and doesn’t contain 30 boring seconds.

that’s a pretty good endorsement – especially from someone who isn’t in to sophomoric comedies that much. I like Borat so i’m expecting great things. I actually think that people are much more outwardly homophobic than racist so i can imagine that Sacha Baron can have much more fun with peolple with Bruno than he did with Borat.

I got even more excited when i saw Bruno go on the Today show and talk about Isreal and Palastine and his war on carbs.  It is hilarious:

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Marc Canter’s Big Plan

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I last saw Marc in Paris
I last saw Marc in Paris

Over the past 8 years i’ve become friends with Marc Canter. I first met him while working at AOL as we needed new and fresh ideas there and boy did he have them.  We asked him again to come and help us out at Ruckus and he delivered again.

Marc lives in the San Francisco area – or at least he did. Marc has announced that he’s leaving heading to Ohio. You heard that right – OHIO. Why? Because he has big ideas and sometimes the best place to do them is not in the Bay Area. He’s also planning on tapping into some US resources that haven’t been utilized – unemployed people. His plan involves the unemployed force, a non=profit, private equity, grants, and lots of new ideas. You can read about it more here

I wish him the best of luck and hope to drop into OH soon to hear more about it.