Quotes of the Week: Early Edition

I'll be on the road on Saturday, so here's some quotage today.



Seriously guys, she’s like, twelve years old ... This is what she should look like. Seriously. Also, she is very nice, and wants to help people.
--Paul Tobin, in an open letter to "all the artists who draw Mary Marvel, and the writers who write her." I've never liked the "Dark Mary Marvel" concept, but I tolerated it with the (perhaps misguided) understanding that she'd eventually change back. Now, thanks in part to Tobin's reminder, I'm at the point where I can't even stand to look at Dark Mary drawings and costumes any more. I'm no longer interested in her journey on the "return to innocence." Once she gets there, I'll start reading about her again.

It's not that audiences conclude that the criticism is inaccurate, so much as it is that the box-office fate of the movie is immune to even accurate bad reviews. There are good movies where stuff blows up, and bad movies where stuff blows up; some people enjoy stuff blowing up whether the movie is good or bad, and they'd tell you so.
--Linda Holmes, non-judgmentally addressing the alleged mistrust that audiences are supposed to have for all critics and further securing the crush I have on her. When discussing my reservations about Transformers 2 with my friends, the overwhelming response I get from them is that they're in that group of people Holmes mentions. And I agree with her that there's absolutely nothing wrong with that, even if it doesn't describe my own tastes.

We have to change the negative things into positive. In today’s Japanese film industry we always say we don’t have enough budget, that people don’t go to see the films. But we can think of it in a positive way, meaning that if audiences don’t go to the cinema we can make any movie we want. After all, no matter what kind of movie you make it’s never a hit, so we can make a really bold, daring movie.
--Filmmaker Takashi Miike, as quoted by Warren Ellis who applies the theory to comics. I've heard Ellis make that quote before, but I can never find it when I want it, so I'm copying it down here. If past experience is any indication, I'll need to refer to it about 800 times before Ellis quotes it again.