The film features people like Robin Williams and Neil Gaiman talking about the impact Harlan has had on the world of writing, and there's a great amount of attention to the idea of writing as a real job where you have to roll up your sleeves and dive in,. And we see that work. Even at 73 years old, he still sits down at a manual typewriter and pounds out a daily living. While Ellison claims not to be rich, he does live in a spectacular house he calls The Lost Aztec Temple of Mars on 200 acres in the San Fernando Valley, so he ain't suffering.

However, the film doesn't touch on many of the controversies surrounding him, barely mentioning two of his many lawsuits, the fact that he was fired from Disney on his first day on the job, or the controversial boob-grabbing during the World Science Fiction Convention two years ago. In fact, the hardest line of questioning comes from Robin Williams at the beginning of the film, who runs through a laundry list asking Harlan if some of the things he is credited with doing are true or not.

There's no question about the impact of Harlan's writing, and the sheer firehose pressure of material he's been able to output over his lifetime, but we would have liked to see a more objective look at the man that didn't attempt to just hero-worship him for an hour and a half. It's a decent look at his current life and lifestyle, but it breezes over his early days as a writer. You may come away feeling like you've just gotten a better look at the "Harlan Ellison" that he presents to the world, almost like an act he puts on for others. Is there a real Harlan Ellison behind this guy? The film sure doesn't let us know.

We also attended the "A Conversation With Harlan Ellison" panel earlier in the week, which was mostly a chance for people to watch Harry Knowles from Ain't It Cool News attempt to interview Ellison. Eventually things got interesting when Ellison started ranting. While he was mostly all bark and no bite, he did leave us with a lot of choice quotes which we've compiled below. Fortunately he didn't break anyone's pelvis, although he did bleed all over himself at one point.

He spent a good amount of time talking about the William Friedkin film Sorcerer, which is one of his favorites. In fact, he's written an entire book of movie criticism called Harlan Ellison's Watching, which compiles 25 years of his film writing.

When asked if he enjoyed the documentary, he said "Well, I thought to myself 'That's a weird funny old guy that I'd like to be friends with!'"

He also noted, "I've only been an asshole to assholes!"

When Harry Knowles confessed he was one of those kids who loved Star Wars back in the 70s (which Ellison hated), Ellison said "I didn't hate people like that, I just didn't want to be around them!"

He loves the Coen Brothers, but hated the movie Fargo, which he said was "Deifying morons."

Once at a book signing when a woman asked for a special favor, he said no and she refused to buy the book. He told her "I'd make more money if I killed you and sold your body parts!"

He said screenwriter Ron Bass was "a whore among whores."

When asked who were the top five public figures he currently hated, he said "George Bush and Dick Cheney (they count as one), the head of ABC Programming, Jerry Falwell, Ann Coulter, and Bill O'Reilly.

However, later he said "Who do I hate? What time is it?"

One of his favorite works for film or tv is the Outer Limits episode "Demon With A Glass Hand."

He says that he has a "great fucking life" and is glad that he owns his own house, has a ton of books and music, and has a great wife. Plus, "They just made a fuckin' movie about me, so I can't be that goddamn obscure!"

Harlan hopped down off the stage at one point to show off a book he was selling at the panel, and when he went back to the stage he tripped and fell onto his knees, and then did a "BIlly Barty impression" (according to Harlan) as he walked on his knees back to his chair. However, one of his knees started bleeding and when someone from the audience offered a band-aid, Harry remarked on how amazing it was that he had a band-aid on hand. Harlan said, "No Harry, amazing would be if he had a yak." Touché.

Hewlett Packard used a service called PayPerPost to pay bloggers to create posts or viral videos to promote Hewlett Packard's new digital camera. One woman had her children smash a Fuji camera with a hammer, filmed it, and put it on YouTube. The video didn't actually catch on virally, but did represent a strange and disturbing new phase in the evolution of advertising. A woman who clearly just wanted to feed her kids actually used her kids in a specious ad campaign in order to earn cash. This isn't the only time companies have tried this kind of stunt — paying bloggers a pittance to develop advertising for rich advertising firms — and it's bound to become more popular as more people get their entertainment via places like YouTube. In fact, Hewlett Packard had a much more successful viral ad campaign two years ago, in which people playing "finger soccer" on their desks at work and uploading the vids to YouTube were eventually outed as part of an ad campaign to make HP seem as cool and fun as Apple. By the time the outing happened, however, hundreds of people had spontaneously joined the "finger soccer" campaign just for fun, not realizing that the videos they uploaded were part of a viral advertising effort.

Another recent ad campaign that tried to use Web communities to generate artificial buzz was internet hardware manufacturer Cisco's "human network" campaign. You may remember seeing the phrase "human network" in Cisco ads, but Cisco wanted to do more than create a slogan. They wanted people to start using the phrase "human network" as everyday slang for the internet — the idea, I think, would be to cement a connection in people's unconscious minds between Cisco, the internet, and a kind of Utopian "human network" (which Cisco hardly is, given that its technology is what makes the Great Firewall of China possible). According to digital marketing blog ChasNote:

Since the "human network" isn't yet a well-defined phrase, [Cisco] enlisted thought leaders to volunteer their own definitions, without guidance from Cisco or Ogilvy. Contributors included a handful of FM authors, such as Boing Boing's David Pescovitz, 43Folders's Merlin Mann, Metafilter's Matt Haughey, GigaOM's Om Malik, Wi-Fi Networking News's Glenn Fleishman, Newsvine's Mike Davidson, XYZ Computing's Sal Cangeloso, TechCrunch's Mike Arrington, Searchblog's John Battelle and Make's Phil Torrone. These authors penned their thoughts and plugged them into Cisco ads on their own sites. The ads then invite readers to visit a Cisco landing page that hosts definitions from other thought leaders and gives them an opportunity to vote for a favorite. If they don't see a definition that gets it right, they can also click to the "human network" page at Wikia (a collection of freely-hosted wiki communities built on the same software as Wikipedia) to edit the definition there.

Why are these campaigns a harbinger of things to come? First of all, they are directly engaged with a form of media — social networks — that are only likely to grow bigger as time goes on. Advertising can't only be those little tiny Google ads that go up the side of the page, and advertisers are going to do everything they can to become part of the content on a YouTube or Facebook so that they are more closely woven into the fabric of those networks. After all, you go to YouTube to see wacky videos, not to read the ads. So if advertisers can infiltrate the videos and make you watch their stuff, it's as if you've voluntarily tuned into a TV ad.

This is more disturbing than what I guess you could call traditional advertising mainly because a lot of it is extremely misleading. Ads that are "teasers" are one thing — you know, putting some cool phrase or image out there, only to reveal that it's an Altoids ad three weeks later. But ads that pretend to be real endorsements from regular people? That hide their corporate sponsorship, and use the ideas of underpaid people? It's like turning YouTube into a marketing sweatshop. Advertising dystopia, here we come.

You don't think of virtual worlds like Second LIfe as sensual — after all, there's no sense of touch at all — but watching the lush footage in Second Skin and hearing people talk about their hunger for Worlds of Warcraft may change your mind. Immersive virtual reality might never live up to the hype, but already more and more people are pouring so much of their hearts and minds into virtual worlds that they seem to "feel" their experiences in them.
Director Juan Carlos calls it "An Inconvenient Truth meets Errol Morris," which sounds like he's swinging for the fences. If Carlos was on death row, he'd pick Weird Science as his last movie to watch:

I've always really loved that comedy. I mean John Hughes is great, and he's made a bunch of good movies, but Weird Science to me gets the fan favorite award. The idea behind that movie was so inventive and hilarious. Plus there is just something awesome when aliens come to crash a party in the middle of a teen comedy. So I'd laugh to start, and then get a little Zen.