Northrop Frye the Canadian literary academic had a theory that there are only a few plots that get endlessly recycled in different stories.    

Looking at the vampire genre  it sounds pretty plausible because there are just so many vampire story and film variations.   

IMDB actually includes 685(!) vampire-related movies dating back to the silent era around 1910 (including foreign language and ’straight to video’ releases) some of which are tempting just because of the sheer ridiculousness of their titles. Fancy ”Batman Fights Dracula’ (1967) for example? Or in an equally light-hearted ‘vein’ how about the recent  “Vampires Suck” parody complete with its ‘Team Jacob’ and ‘Team Edward’ (the two male protagonists in Eclipse & New Moon) references?   

Even if you just stick to more major titles you end up with about 284 vampire movies  (based on a list at Washington State University, Updated) made over the last 100 years. AND about sixteen vampire movies scheduled for 2011. 

Bram Stoker and Dracula’s children

Thinking back even just over the last 20 years there is an amazing range of variations on the standard vampire plot:  

• Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) based closely on the the 1897 novel that really started the modern vampire film. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, with Keanu Reeves and a certain amount of thinly disguised moaning from Winona Ryder, the more sophisticated film took double its US box office takings from foreign Box Office earnings and is still one of the biggest vampire blockbusters of all time.
• other  thoughtful vampire flicks like 1987’s underrated Near Dark cowboy version or 2007’s Rise (might be described as ‘intellectual vampire movies’)
• race exploration crossovers like Eddie Murphy’s Vampire in Brooklyn (1995), itself a remake of a 1972 black Dracula movie Blacula,   (a nice attempt to re-colonize the ‘whites only’ vampiric world) or True Blood’s (2008) strong references to race issues in the American South.
• vampires in space and Alaska: 2007’s 30 Days of Night embedded in a claustrophobic snowbound world
• splatter-fests/martial versions like 1996’s From Dusk Till Dawn set in a stripper’s bar, or 1998’s Blade with Wesley Snipes and its equally commercially successful sequels
• Tom Cruise’s Interview with the Vampire (1994), based on the Anne Rice novels, an imagined less European (and more American) history of vampires (“we can  have cultured vampires in America”)
• adolescence and vampirism going back to 1987’s The Lost Boys,  Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) and Twilight (2008)  
• combo horror with Vampires v Werewolves: Underworld (2003), and the New Moon (2009) and Eclipse (2010) instalments of the Twilight series
• borderline zombie/vampire variations (zombies are not ‘undead’ but infected with a bloodborne virus): 2002’s 28 Days Later or 2006’s Ultraviolet
• ‘bleed-through’ vampire sub-plots in TV series like Supernatural, Doctor Who, Smallville, Charmed and The Simpsons to of course being the main plotline in series like True Blood (2008) or The Vampire Diaries (2009)

Take your fangs off my wallet

Huge interest in vampires equals huge earnings at the box office and in associated merchandizing (Amazon is currently even selling ‘Bella Swan Replica Jewelery’). Box Office Mojo estimates total vampire flick box office earnings at almost $2 billion since 1978 and puts the average takings of each vampire movie at over $35m, making a vampire film one of the safer bets a movie producer can take.    

The rising tide of blood

 Based on Google Trends data (going back to 2004) the level of search interest in the term ‘vampire’ has more than doubled over the last 5 years, with significant peaks coinciding with the Twilight phenomenon (major vampire title release dates and their level of box office takings shown in green). 

Both Underworld: Rise of the Lycans and Daybreakers might well have done better had they not coincided with the two Twilight Saga release dates.   

The Twilight series has also joined another select group: that of films where the sequels have grossed more than the originals such as the Lord of the Rings film trilogy.

Why do we (and Bella Swan) love vampires?

No doubt having a decent looking lead actor like Robert Pattinson or Taylor Lautner is helpful but vampires also play to our obsessions about disease, mortality and sex. It’s a potent mix and one that will be considered in the next article in this series.

Love them or hate them, the vampire theme is important in our culture.

• those 140 page Annual Reports you have to read occasionally
• various frivolous and not-so-frivolous blogs that you’d love to keep up with
• mainstream news sites like the New York Times or the Economist where most of the major stories are actually carried for free online
• niche news sites you’d like to be able to browse occasionally
• 30-40 page PDFs that you have to read for work

If this sort of content appeals to you then it has definite implications for what sort of e-reader / e-book you buy.   For example, the following e-book features bear watching if you expect to be reading other things aside from books:  

• screen size: a lot of news websites and large PDFs contain tables and images. Unlike standard text, tables become meaningless when you can’t see the row labels.  You need an e-book with a 10 inch screen to handle this type of A4 content to be able read effectively, but  most e-books come in significantly smaller sizes. Screen size is measured diagonally so an average size e-book with a 6″ screen actually has a screen width of around 3 and a half inches … you won’t see an A4 width table in that – you really need at least a 5 inch wide screen (which roughly equates to a 10″ e-book screen size).
• battery life: as effectively a substitute printer you need a long battery life. You aren’t just going to be picking up your e-book as you sit back in bed at the end of an evening . Battery-draining features like wireless connectivity or colour LCD displays such as the new iPad provides need to be weighed up against battery life.
• page-refresh rate: on the Sony PRS-505 page refresh rate is about a second. This is probably the maximum tolerable if you are going to be reading a lot of content. Make sure the page refresh rate is faster than a second.
• data charges: if you’re going to avail yourself of all this valuable free content (if that’s not an oxymoron) do you really want to pay ongoing 3G charges for your reader? When you switch your machine on you will have dozens of publications to choose from all continually refreshed daily automatically by just plugging your e-book into your PC.  A current (or in the case of Amazon ‘implied’) 3G mobile data charge just doesn’t seem necessary.  Assuming you have a smartphone if you really want time-sensitive web content you can always use that.
• rich media support: closely related to the above issue, a 3G connection where you pay volume-related data charges could turn out to be quite expensive if your e-book supports rich media like video (for example the Apple iPad). Many of the news sites you are likely to use contain rich media (or in the case of blogs badly optimized large images) and you could even find that you’re paying to watch rich media ads!

At least at the moment your choice of e-readers that fit these criteria is pretty limited (a nice comparision table, from which the simplified table below is derived, can be found on the MobileRead website).  The iRex Digital Reader probably claims the high ground with a 10 inch display but has a notoriously short battery life and at over $800 is quite expensive. The Kindle DX at 9.7 inches looks better price-wise and it’s claimed it will run for 2 weeks with wireless off – but it seems likely that Amazon will impose some sort of data charge as their Terms and Conditions state:  

“You may be charged a fee for wireless connectivity for your use of other wireless services on your Device, such as Web browsing and downloading of personal files, should you elect to use those services. We will maintain a list of current fees for such services in the Kindle Store. Amazon reserves the right to discontinue wireless connectivity at any time or to otherwise change the terms for wireless connectivity at any time, including, but not limited to (a) limiting the number and size of data files that may be transferred using wireless connectivity and (b) changing the amount and terms applicable for wireless connectivity charges.”  

If you need an e-book now (and if information you read is a key part of your job it’s worth  it!)  then probably the Kindle DX is the only option (and at the moment anyway the data charges are not an issue because you can leave wireless switched off and there is no annual charge imposed by Amazon).   However if you’re prepared to watch and wait, there are other large-screen devices emerging – devices and their estimated release dates below (see the MobileRead site for more):

It’s distributing your blog to your readers.

Distributing your blog

Talking about distribution seems kind of odd in a way. Kee-rist, this is the world wide web isn’t it? Surely there are no problems there?

Well of course there are.  The majority of the population rarely read blogs at all. Blogs aren’t exactly a core part of their reading habits.

On commercial sites the volume of RSS-sourced subscriptions and even email-subscription  page reads usually make up the minority of traffic (RSS is barely a rounding error) and the ever present big brother Google accounts for 75% of traffic.  And of course Google readers are not ‘regular’ readers are they? They just happen to be doing a search where your blog came up.

RSS news readers, while they are available in all sorts of flavours (dedicated desktop software apps and web based ones like Google News Reader), are still the province of the technorati or news junkies.

The big hope for bloggers is of course the burgeoning electronic book reader market. With estimates that Amazon has sold about 1.5m Kindles so far  and 6m new e-book readers expected to be sold in the US alone this year, e-book readers are fast becoming mainstream, but at this stage a lot of e-book readers seem just that:  mainly for buying books (ignoring the Amazon hype that they sold more electronic books on Christmas Day than real ones – what exactly did anyone expect).

We can all buy books in hardcopy – we obviously can’t get blogs that way.

For bloggers the Kindle and Sony Reader were still relatively problematic as a distribution method because Amazon charged a subscription for you to subscribe to your favourite blog (imagine Dell charging you every time you downloaded a web page!) and required the blogger to sign up for the Kindle program for which Amazon generously gives you 30% of the revenue they earn.

And Sony’s reader has only just gone wireless with the ‘Reader Daily Edition’ targeted at newspapers.

Both the Sony and Kindle readers rely on an ongoing 3G connection which must be paid for somehow. The Sony PRS-900 unit (currently on back-order since they’ve sold out) for example is a minimum $15 per month.

Of particular interest for would-be bloggers wondering how they are going to get distributed to a mainstream readership is an e-book which does not require you to sign up for some sort of subscription for wireless access (a notable issue at the moment given the number of competing e-readers emerging, many of which are unlikely to exist in 5 year’s time), and being able to make a blog available all the time on the device.

Calibre

The most interesting development in this regard is not the hardware e book devices at all but public domain sofware that is emerging that will enable you to keep your e-book (whatever it is) synchronized with the bloggers you wish to follow (usually via RSS).

Finally, in following up on a concept that emerged way back in the mid 90s, you really can have a customised newspaper (for free) that is just as portable as your normal newspaper.

This missing piece in the jigsaw that gets you your customised newspaper effortlessly on your ebook today is a piece of free public domain software called Calibre, which has already been downloaded 500,000 times. Calibre is cross platform – for example it supports both Sony and Kindle readers as well as others.

Calibre: free, cross-platform blog and news management for your E Book

As with podcasts, Calibre will automatically synch free RSS versions of blogs (as well as log-in versions of major publications like FT.com or the New York Times by supplying your username and password during configuration) with your e-book. All you have to do is plug in your e-book to the PC and Calibre squirts all the content across (and with the WiFi e-readers emerging like PlasticLogics it is likely you won’t even have to do that at some stage in the near future).

While the new Plastic Logic e-book for example touts about 30 news sources Calibre out of the box already supports 400 mainstream news sources for free - in multiple languages at the time of writing with more being added every day. And it is simple to add an additional news source of your own like your favourite blogs just by telling it the location of that blog’s RSS feed. Then tell Calibre when you want to synchronise (once a day at 9am for example) and you’re done!

You don’t have to wait: you can put together a customised newspaper template for yourself out of your favourite blogs today, and you can do it without paying a subscription charge with practically any e-book out there. If your e-book reader is WiFi or 3G equipped then the hyperlinks that show up in the publications that you’re reading will be active, but if you’re using say a more basic e-book like my Sony PRS-505 you are still way ahead of the non-e-book world.

PS If you use Calibre already (or after reading this article) you are reading publications where the ‘recipe’ has been written by Darko Miletic. To help him keep purchasing devices to test recipes on you can contribute here (Chip In below).

A great case in point is the film “The Jane Austen Book Club”. Despite the title you really don’t have to know anything about Austen to appreciate this film.

Written and directed by Robin Swicord its dialog sparkles along at a pace that it makes typical action pics look slow. With more layers than wedding cake you could watch it half a dozen times and still not pick up on all the jokes and nuances.

Ok it is a romantic comedy but it’s also a labor of love because behind a lot of the excellent jokes and gags are some serious and subtle points about relationships.

Labelled a ‘chick flick’ any man would enjoy the byplay in this film - there are a raft of muscular characters here and not just Sylvia’s gay daughter Allegra.  It is also full of surprise twists and shocks - you’d defy anyone to come up with anything so true-to-life awful as one of the opening scenes with Daniel and Sylvia in the restaurant.

Great film – terrible box office takings

 But the thing that is really most shocking about “The Jane Austen Book Club is how such a good film did so relatively badly at the box office taking only $7 million in revenue.

“Four Weddings and a Funeral” (which is a veritable pastiche compared to ”Book Club”) took $245 million….  Even Swicord’s previous film “Little Women” took $50 million.

Narrow it down to Austen literary territory and the comparisons look equally bad:

• “Bride and Prejudice” took $24 million
• Keira Knightley’s 2005 “Pride and Prejudice” took $121 million
• Emma Thomson’s 1995 “Sense and Sensibility” took $134 million
• and the  recent biopic about Austen herself “Becoming Jane” took $37 million

Perhaps one could argue that Austen fans like their adaptations as close as possible to the original based on the above but it is still interesting to ask why ‘Book Club’ did so comparatively badly (unless you think all of the above are so much better than it is).

What went wrong with this movie?

Here are a couple of guesses which have more to do with marketing than anything else:

•  why-oh-why did they call it “Jane Austen Book Club”? It’s like holding up a large sign to say “don’t come to this unless you are a) a woman and b) you ‘read’ with a capital R. Well, that’s 3/4ths of the filmgoing population gone then… What about Truths Not Universally Acknowledged? Read My Lips? The Club? Anything would have been better. Was Swicord so shocked when a producer said yes to her pitch (“I have this idea about a film about a book club…”) that she felt she had to stick with it?
• nobody seems to have really liked Fowler’s book amongst my acquaintances although I appreciate that somebody liked it in order for it to end up on the New York Times’ bestseller list for 13 weeks.  Was the film too closely tied to the Fowler book but actually aimed at a different demographic?
• did it need a more bankable star – would it have been the same movie with someone else as the female lead Jocelyn? It seems thoroughly unfair to even suggest this as Maria Bello played the role so well but would a Cameron Diaz or Michelle Pfeiffer have had more drawing power?  Would a better known male lead in the place of Hugh Dancy have delivered better box office returns – and again Hugh Dancy played Grigg’s role to perfection so it is unreasonable to suggest this on anything more than marketing grounds.
• did it need to be rewritten to appeal to a slightly younger audience? As a 16 year old said the other day “it didn’t speak to me” – with it’s acutely drawn portraits of middle age as delineated in the Daniel sub-plot did it just leave a younger audience too much in the cold?

We’ll never know the answer of course but someone should look beyond the box office results above and give Robin Swicord more money to make another film, this time with a better marketing plan.

The only strangely Austen-ish happy ending outcome of all of this was that the film was nominated for the Gladd Media Award and lost to another greatly unappreciated film which Drivelry has also reviewed, Stardust. The co-stars of the two films, Hugh Dancy and Claire Danes, announced their engagement this year.

If you read the plot summary for this play you’d probably think it was terrible (so don’t). Stop.  Don’t Google it. In this case ignorance  is bliss.

To give anything much in the way of detail would ruin a play that for its surprise value, clever construction, and important issues, deserves an audience expecting nothing but to be impressed by something wholly original.

The Sydney Theatre Company production we saw starred Justine Clarke (from Playschool) who had the perfect demeanour to carry off the silliness and seriousness required.

My only way around the dilemma that I began this with is to point in the direction of other texts that are on this wavelength (at least part of it).

This is not a children’s play but remember ‘The Phantom Tollboth, about a boy called Milo who sets off in his car through an allegorical world with a dog called Tock?

If you’ve never come across TPT then ‘Alice in Wonderland’ is probably another text whose fantasy world will live with you a long time time, like ‘The Wonderful World of Dissocia’.

It’s a must-see and so well written that even a high school production would probably be thought-provoking.

 ’an expectation that there will always be a job out there and that you should be able to get to the top job of any average organisation in under 2 years.’

That sort of criticism may be a little more muted now that we are watching a synchronised world economic downturn play out and Gen Y’s adjust to a different world, but, one of the most interesting things about the criticism to me is actually what it says about the (usually) baby boomer speaker.

I am fascinated by the mindset of baby boomers (those born during the post war baby boom between 1946 and 1964) because arguably all of us afterthoughts born after ‘64, whether generation X (60s-70’s) or generation Y (80s onward), are not so different, in that we have lived lives relatively similar to our parents the boomers.

What do I mean by this?

I mean that the mindset of most kids is not a little based on the mindsets of their parents… their expectations of economic achievement, friends, and the general threat level in the world is picked up by osmosis from Mum and Dad. 

However in contrast to Gen X or Gen Y the baby boomer’s parents had an almost unimaginable mindset. Imagine you are a baby boomer, born in say 1947. Your parents, and their parents (your grandparents) saw:

• two world wars
• the holocaust
• the Great Depression
• the post war Spanish flu epidemic (which in 10 months in 1918 killed 22 to 40 million people worldwide)

My parents the boomers are arguably the guilt generation of the last 100 years. 

They must subconsciously or not spend a bit of time thinking to themselves ‘how did I deserve such an easy life when my parents had a so much harder one?’ They didn’t have to fight a war (in most places), struggle to put basic food on the table for their family through a depression, or watch swathes of people they knew die in an epidemic whose death toll was highest not amongst the elderly, but in the 15 to 40 age group. Their parents had to live through all of this stuff.

What impact might this have had – and this is not a rhetorical question – if you have a view I’d love to hear it.

Are boomers striving to prove something? Are they still expecting the sky to fall, which had fallen on their parents? Is their civic identity (their propensity to join political parties for example) a reaction to their parents who needed to stick together in their social group to survive the adversities thrown at them? Just how much of their value system is based on values that were needed to survive in the world of their parents?

And yep, if you haven’t already guessed, we all need to understand our parents.

The Case for the Prosecution: Leisureville

There is also a view that the boomers are selfish, self obsessed, and just a trifle ’up themselves’ as they say in the Antipodes.

The case is made well by Andrew Blechman in ‘Leisureville’ a sociological exploration of a couple of gated retirement villages in the US where 55+ year olds drive round in golf  carts, children are banned, and Viagra has led to a re-run of the 60s.

As an early 40s type participating in late parenthood the zero children tolerance policy is somewhat appealing; many is the time where I have had those one sided conversations with parents of young children where they spend their entire time watching their kid, make no eye contact, and wouldn’t have a clue what you’d said.

Leisureville is somehow unconvincing however if you are of a live-and-let-live disposition. As many reviewers said, if you paid your taxes all your life and that’s what you choose to do then so be it. Let’s face it for every golf obsessed retirement community like this there are a hundred that you would never wish on your nearest and dearest aged parent.

It seems no more less appealing or worthy of moral judgement than baby boomers wandering from coast to coast in their RVs or caravans as they visit parks and scattered children: if they want to do it, great.

Personally, I could not help wondering re Leisureville, “I wonder if my parents would like something like this?”

With a cast including people like Robert de Niro, Peter O’Toole, Ruper Everett, Michelle Pfeiffer, Ricky Gervais, and Claire Danes you might suspect that it is unusual to appeal to such a diverse crowd of actors.

Stardust, the film, on Amazon

Like the first Shrek this film takes a lot of the conventions around fantasy/sword and sorcery and turns them totally upside down in a hilarious way. Nothing is predictable and half the characters you expect to come out on top are dead by the end of the film.  If you think you’ve seen every plot device in the fantasy genre this film will make you think again.

Visually beautiful with excellent special effects it is however the characters and dialogue that really sparkle. Why is it that films based on well-written books are often so much better than those that are not?

And despite the wonderful performance of Michelle Pfeiffer as the uber-witch there is nothing that is likely to really frighten the under-eights and everything there to delight your teenagers and yourself.

It’s difficult to understand how such a great film could be so obscure compared to the more pallid recent child-friendly offerings like Harry Potter, Chronicles of Narnia, Horton Hears a Who, Spy School etc etc.

I saw it on Foxtel and the programme guide described it as:

 ”in a countryside town bordering on a magical land, a young man makes a promise to his beloved that he’ll retrieve a fallen star by venturing into the magical realm.”

With such a description (which appears on IMDB as well) I can’t even imagine why I recorded it… And if that’s the tagline it was marketed with perhaps that helps explain why such a great gem is so obscure.

Oh, and of course, with a title like ”Stardust” it sounds like a high school muscial!

So little time, so much dodgy marketing.

For more in the way of spoilers (and for this film it really matters because there is a lot to surprise you in it) take a look at IMDB or Amazon.

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell - further reviews on Amazon

I have a feeling I may be about to break the code of conduct of the Royal Society of Book Reviewers (if they’d have me as a member) because I feel compelled to comment on Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers before I’ve even finished it.

Sloppy indeed. It’s just that it plays to all my prejudices. It’s one of those ‘a ha!’ moments where something you’ve suspected without a shred of evidence might actually have a grain of truth in it.

You remember Malcolm Gladwell?

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell on Amazon

The Tipping Point, a story about how there were a few ’super communicators’ around who spread the news, a sort of codifcation of the ‘in crowd’ and the ‘out crowd’.

Sounded plausible but later I listened to a devastatingly nice rebuttal of the whole concept on NPR’s ‘On The Media’ podcast (Brooke and crew you’re so nice I sometimes gag in my iced coffee listening to you). The interviewee essentially said there was little evidence that there were a few super-connected types around who were somehow enormously influential.

In Outliers though, Gladwell looks at something close to my own mean-spirited heart, the concept that perhaps some of the super-successful were not especially gifted, instead a series of ‘outside’ forces came together to put them where they were. Something that Karl Marx would no doubt have agreed with, but Malcolm Gladwell’s angle is somewhat different.

To turn what is a very readable book into a 5 minute parlour sketch Gladwell argues that it is often historical accident or significant practice that makes someone successful. For instance it is ‘accident of birth’  that many top Canadian hockey players have birthdays around the beginning of the year because when they are ’streamed’ into hockey teams at school the slightly older kids have an edge which then is widened as they receive special training. It is both accident and ‘practice’ that Bill Gates was succesful because he had access to rare computing resources (for that time) as a teenager and then spent thousands of hours programming. Gladwell also looks at why kids of ‘engaged’ parents (often from upper socioeconomic brackets) gain a sense of their own entitlement (and are more successful) where kids of ‘disengaged’ parents (often from lower socioeconomic brackets) tend to be less successful in negotiating obstacles in life.

Why this struck a chord with me though about Gladwell’s book is that you so often hear echoes of the alternative (‘everyone is equal’) around well-heeled dinner parties e.g. “well if those guys down the street struggling away just exercised a little initiative then they too could have what we’ve got.”

The problem is that there really are advantages that are given to many in our society which really are just accidents of birth or circumstance as Marx was keen to point out when he talked about ‘class struggle’.  Fred can take career risks because he’s got parental cash to fall back on, Maisy has a generally more positive outlook on life (which is often associated with success) because she has an upper middle class upbringing where basically she’s never had anything really awful happen to her, Andrew just happened to be the right place at the right time in technological cycle or economic cycle.

Yep, we’ll all like to think that our own status (modest or not) is a product of our own cleverness but sometimes it’s just dumb luck. If you don’t believe this (or even if you do) Gladwell’s book is worth a read.