I'm So Disappointed

Oh God. First, they put the Big Loser Weenie on the cover of Esquire a few months back (on the "Genius Issue," no less), and now his Loser Sidekick has his huge "I Robot" mug plastered across this month's Wired. There's a big bunch of articles on the new high-teching of the Green Movement. The lead-off is an article titled "The Next Green Revolution" which lists "four key principles" behind the re-energized environmental movement.

Three of them--"Renewable energy is plentiful energy," "Efficiency creates value," and "Quality is wealth"-- I can get on board with. They make sense, and you can get a broad range of people behind them, at least in theory. But I fear the fourth--"Cities beat suburbs"-- is more liberal fantasy than than achievable goal. It's a lefty article of faith that downtowns are signs of progress and prosperity and suburbs are basically the first circle of hell made manifest on Earth.

But the idea that all those people who've been turning downtowns into desiccated wastelands in their pell-mell flight to the suburbs will somehow magically turn around and go back is just silly. Urban sprawl didn't happen because millions of people woke up one day and said "I'm bored with the city. Let's go fuck up some pristine wilderness." It happened because there are very real negatives to the quality of city life, and you can't wave those away with a simple, "It's more environmentally sound to live in a cramped high-rise apartment than in a house."

But that's really not why I'm disappointed. The thing is, I got the Special Edition DVD of Peter Jackson's "King Kong" last week, and I'm really bummed. First off, there's no "Making of..." documentary, just a bunch of Post-Production Diaries that were previously posted on-line at kongisking.net, which are old news if you followed the website, which I did. It doesn't even include all the Production Diaries, because they were sold in a separate set.

It does contain two other documentaries, but there are none of the other great bits found on, say, Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" DVD's. No art galleries. No deleted/expanded scenes. No interactive content.

And worst of all by far, so bad that I didn't even realize that it was missing until I went looking for it last night: NO DIRECTOR COMMENTARY. No commentaries at all. The "Lord of the Rings" extended edition DVD's had four commentaries per picture. The reissue of the original "King Kong" had one. Some movies, like "Spider-Man," have a director's audible commentary and a pop-up text-based commentary. The new "Kong" has nothing (and this is not the basic no-frills disk, but the 2-Disc Special Edition we're talking about).

It may be that the movie is just so damn long that they couldn't fit a commentary on the disk without spilitting it across 2 disks, or compressing the video into unwatchable hash, but cripes! I want some commentary, damn it!