The Mega Kickstarter Review Post, Part 1

Kickstarter is a source of almost endless fascination for me. I performed on a comedy show at SF Sketchfest this year that challenged each performer to write a new set on the topic of obsession, and so I got to say a bunch of things about Kickstarter to a paying audience. Click above to see how that went. Click below to read brief reviews of the Kickstarter projects I have backed as I attempt to establish my own Kickstarter Happiness Index!

The Kickstarter Happiness Index

The Kickstarter Happiness Index, or KHI, or KkrHppdx, is derived through a simple formula: it is the ratio of projects I still happy I backed by the time they were over (denoted by the thumbs-up symbol, or 👍) to the total number of projects I backed (denoted by a number, like 51).

Yes indeed, I've backed quite a lot of things on kickstarter. I daresay it's become my number one use of irresponsibly spent discretionary income. I don't buy a lot of movies or games these days, but sometimes I buy one that doesn't exist yet for too much money. In order to simplify this process a bit, we're going to look at these projects in categories. What's more, because we're both such busy people, we're going to spread these categories over a few posts this month.

Projects I Worked On

As a general rule, I don't feel comfortable contributing to projects I am scheduled to work on. There's some kind of conflict of interest there, and anyway, I think it's weird to buy myself a job. One of these was the award-winning short film Broken Things. Others, I have sometimes given a donation of $1, just to lend moral support or get the backer updates. These include:

• Underground Comedy - a documentary about improv comedy in Los Angeles. I am, at times, an editor and a consultant on this project, which just funded a couple months ago, and is not yet complete or delivered.
• Diani and Devine Meet The Apocalypse - I originally pledged a ton of money on the first day to help them appear to have momentum on their huge $100,000 ask, then shamefully backed down towards the end to simply the DVD level. I got the last film we made together in a clearance sale at a Blockbuster Video, but I can't count on that working again. The film has been shot, is currently in post-production, and has yet to deliver. 👍 (Although this project is far from complete, I stand by my 👍. I openly suspect this movie of becoming the best feature film I've ever worked on.)
• Help The Selling get a Theatrical Release - This was that previous film. We had a lovely screening at the Egyptian in Hollywood. 👍
• Jim Bruce: I'm Dying as Fast as I Can - a stand-up comedy special. I don't have an official DVD of this yet, even though I created it and they were delivered. I did attend the taping, do a whole bunch of post production work, and get an official poem by the artist. 👍
• A Show with Ze Frank - I didn't actually work on this, but I wanted to, and I thought I ought to be a backer in order to seem like more than a mere opportunist.
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Robotic Edition - Another project from the DDMTA / Selling team of Diani & Devine. I backed this out of friendship, but ended up making their book trailer. 👍

Other Projects I Backed out of Friendship

This hasn't happened nearly as much as I might have thought it would. As a big kickstarter user, and a guy who lives in LA and mainly knows people who seem to be struggling to make things, I don't know how I've gotten off so lightly.

• Relatively Prime - An audio documentary series about math(s) by my friend Sam. Not only did this project deliver, but a campaign for a second series is underway right now!

That's it.

The Price is Right Projects

These aren't so much excellent deals as they are situations in which I bid $1, usually for moral support or just to keep tabs on how they turned out.

• Penny Arcade Sells Out - this was somewhat controversial at the time, and I wanted to follow the updates. Except, there really weren't any, and I stopped reading their site a long time ago. 👎
• Renovate the Brattle Theater - I've never been to this reperatory theater in Boston, but a friend used to be a regular, and I'd like for such things to exist. 👍
• Code Hero - A game about programming. They update sometimes, and might even mean well, but this project is widely regarded as being somewhere between a black hole of ineptitude or an outright scam. (To be fair, if I'd seen it in time, I probably would have been duped by the lockpicks too.) 👎

Today's score: 10 projects backed. With 5 happy returns, I'm going to guess that my ratio so far is better than the final score will be, but maybe that's because a lot of these projects gave some of their money to me.

Next time I'm going to cover some projects I backed without personally knowing anyone involved, and maybe how I totally use Kickstarter as a store, even though they explicitly say not to do that.

#2,077: Gone Girl

This week, the reviews are pretty low on critical thinking. I'd apologize for that, but I'm too thoroughly employed to do anything about anything at the moment.

Devil in a Blue Dress - ★★★½☆
A fun companion to a recent run of movie club movies that included LA Confidential, The Long Goodbye, and Changeling. Good movie. Bad title. Makes me want to start a letterboxd list called "We were SURE this was gonna be a franchise!"

The Drop - ★★★½☆
Went into this one cold. It's pretty good! Pleasantly surprised to see it's written by Dennis Lehane. My favorite thing about Hardy and Rapace are that I don't really know what they look like yet, so I don't have to spend the first twenty minutes of the movie waiting for the character to take over in my head from the big star. (Ahem, Devil in a Blue Dress, ahem.) Movies like this are tough to give a score though, because while I liked it, have no real complaints, and would recommend this movie to YOU, I don't think I will ever want to see it again.

L.A. Confidential - ★★★½☆
I think all I knew about this movie was the clip shown on the Mystery Science Theater 3000 Vice Presidential Command Performance Academy of Robots' Choice Awards Preview Special, so I thought it was going to be a lot of boring standing around and saying cryptic things with Kim Basinger, who turns out to be in this movie about as much as Danny DiVito is in the poster.

Instead, I liked La Confidentiál, and that I'm glad it was made in the 90s so that it didn't turn out to be Gangster Squad, which I have not seen but I'm willing to assume puts more emphasis on speed ramping the camera than an intriguing plot. I look forward to seeing that movie in 2029 and coming back to write about how wrong I turned out to be.

Gone Girl - ★★★★★
My experience with this movie is similar to Inception, in that I liked it, I'm glad I saw it very close to release day, and I dread most of the inevitable internet conversation to follow.

I didn't know anything about Gone Girl until a week or two ago when my twitter feed started to bubble over with equal excitement for the director, Fincher, and the editing system used, Adobe Premiere. That's probably because of how much I've cut down on reading movie news blogs. If the result of that choice is movies like these popping up out of nowhere and being great, then it was an excellent choice.

#2,073: The Unbelievers

American Psycho - ★★★☆☆
I hadn't seen this for at least a decade. I'm not sure there's a lot more to it than I remembered, or than people love to write about on their blogs every now and then. Christian Bale has excellent elocution. His diction and intonation are what I suspect people really like about this movie, if all people who like things about this movie are me.

Lilo & Stitch - ★★★★★
Man, this is just great. The way some people feel about Glengarry Glen Ross and The Aviator, I think I could go on about Lilo & Stitch. Lots of great lines and moments. A sense of things going on outside of the frame. A little darker or odder than I think you'd think a potential 'Disney Classic' might be. I missed this movie.

Justice League: The New Frontier - ★★½☆☆
Watched on the suggestion of a friend who considers this (and the books it's based on) to be the definitive version of the JLA. While it is a really solid take on the origin of the team and some of its members, it's still yet another origin story, and one I'm tired of hearing.

The Unbelievers - ★★☆☆☆
I see what the subjects of this movie are trying to say, but I don't see what this movie is trying to say. The movie doesn't make a case for atheism; if anything, it makes a case that Krauss and Dawkins need a vacation. I thought we might be getting a LET AMERICA LAUGH type doc, showing them dealing with people they met on tour, but it's not that. It's more like a video yearbook of the fact that there was a tour; a sales pitch video for their speaking agents to use.

Don't miss the credits, which contain a trailer's worth of footage from a more interesting documentary.

#2,071: Justice League: Doom

The Conversation - ★★★½☆
A character study of a man eavesdropping on a Hitchcock film. Another movie I appreciate more now than I used to.

Do the Right Thing - ★★★☆☆
I watched this because it was a million degrees in my apartment and I was feeling freaked out about what's going on in Missouri and I wanted it to help. I think maybe it did, but not for the reasons I was expecting.

The Long Goodbye - ★★★½☆
I like a movie whose world has things that are true and universally accepted, even if those things are not necessarily true in our world. It doesn't create a sense of realism, exactly, but it makes their world seem more complete. Brothers Bloom did that well. This movie does it well. I liked this movie.

Nymph()maniac - Vol. 1: ★★★☆☆ - Vol. 2: ★★½☆☆
I haven't seen all or even most of Lars Von Trier's movies, but based on what I have seen, this was lighter and funnier than I was expecting. Volume 2 is a littler drearier. Like Kill Bill, you get most of your fun in volume 1, then volume 2 is just talk talk talk, comment on the inevitable nature of man, et cetera et cetera.

Justice League: Doom - ★★★★☆
DC beats Marvel by a long shot when it comes to direct-to-dvd / OVA type releases. Even the bad ones are generally higher quality than the Marvel releases, and this was a good one. It's a much smaller, easier-to-digest story than say, Superman: Doomsday, which did a great job with the first half, and then tried to cram 50-some comics into the last half hour.

I think DC has a tougher time explaining their characters solo books with the JLA / team books – like, it doesn't seem as though the shadowy urban legend-type Batman would also hang out in space or coach the JLI, and so their solution is to just ignore it. Batman can be and is everything for everyone at some point. The Batman in this story comes off a bit like a grumpy teen, but at least I could imagine him existing in both spheres. Between that and the illustrated difference in power levels on the JLA, the characterization was nicely handled here.

#2,067: Tim's Vermeer

For a couple weeks there, it was looking like I was going to be editing a feature-length documentary. Scary stuff. I watched a lot of documentaries while the threat was looming.

20 Feet from Stardom - ★★★★☆
It's fun to know that record producers in the day weren't just aping one another with soundalikes, they were actually just hiring the same singers to do everything. You always hear about folks picking sides between the Beatles or the Stones, and although I don't really care about the Beatles, I don't think I'd ever considered that I might prefer the Stones until I saw this. On the production side, the clearances department did as amazing a job as anyone on this. It's one expensive-lookin' movie.

Particle Fever - ★★☆☆☆
I guess my main draw to this project was the editor, as I struggle myself with editing a documentary. I think Walter Murch's presence was more noticeable in the sound design. It seems like there must be interesting stories in and around CERN, but this movie was a little bit snoozy. Another review said it felt more like late night cable and I think I agree.

Also, I'm worried about how close I might be to having a haircut like a physicist.

Downloaded - ★★☆☆☆
I just let netflix play me this one after Particle Fever. They did a fine enough job telling a story in a doc that looks like a doc looks in the age of DSLRs, but it's all pretty old news. So, technically apt, but kind of unnecessary. And now I'm all distracted by that song from Fallout 3 in the credits.

Tim's Vermeer - ★★★½☆
This story is better than this movie. I was kind of intrigued by how low-fi it is. Scenes in England seemed unnecessary, and there's a touch too much Penn; those were the places where the movie wanders a little, and I would have rather had more time to spend on Tim's work. (For instance, after all the worry about how many hours of usable daylight there would be, I would have liked to have been told the answer!) A good example of a doc that needed to be made at the time it was made. For one reason, if the process works, he's not going to want to repeat it for a film. For another, with a movie in the works, Tim is now making two pieces of art, and suffering for one might just help the other.