Category: media

“Hollywood is fat and happy, but the Summer of 2007 left me (and maybe you, too?) feeling oddly alienated, as if the big party had been going on somewhere else. More than ever, if you don’t belong to one of Hollywood’s cherished demographic groups, you’re simply not invited to the dance. This summer, teens ruled, especially teen boys. And not just teen boys, but teen boys at their pimpliest, stutteringest and downright geekiest.”

“Hollywood didn’t seriously explore the Vietnam War until years after it was over. … Four decades later, filmmakers are responding to America’s various fronts in the ‘war on terror’ while the bullets are still flying and bombs exploding. Many of these stories are anything but black and white, with their murky moralities, shattered families and questioning of U.S. policy.”

Will this be the season in which the line between mainstream TV sex and porn is finally blurred into irrelevance? It’s sure looking like it… “[The] escalating emphasis on explicit scenes as well as themes is the result of seismic changes already rocking Hollywood and the larger society, say culture watchers: the competition for market share in a spiraling world of entertainment choices, the mainstreaming of pornography, and the explosive growth of an unregulated Internet.”

So, what’s the hot ticket at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival? Um, we can’t tell you. Well, we can tell you, but we can’t tell you its name. Or more specifically, we can’t tell you one of the words of the title of the film that is making the first-time filmmakers who made it overnight sensations on the festival circuit. Oh, the hell with it: the flick is called Young People F***ing.

With his extensive Hollywood background, could presidential candidate Fred Thompson become the first Republican to gain widespread financial support from LA’s notoriously liberal entertainment industry? Um, don’t bet on it. “The place that made the former Tennessee senator rich as an actor cannot be counted on to pour cash into his presidential run, especially if he’s going around bashing gay marriage and Roe vs. Wade. The minute he comes out strong against embryonic stem cell research — a fervent Hollywood cause — he’ll be banished from every cocktail party north of Sunset Boulevard.”

“I think what I find so incredibly discomfiting about these pictures is their suggestion that, no matter how talented a woman is, how many plaudits she has received, how intelligent her reputation, how garlanded she has been for depicting one of the most talented writers of the last century while sporting a huge prosthetic conk on her noggin, at the end of the day, if she wants to stay in the public eye, if she wants the magazine covers and the leading roles, she has to be willing to reduce herself to tits and arse.”

“Over the next couple of years, nearly 6,000 Starbucks coffee shops will be turned into digital entertainment centers selling music and movies on Apple’s behalf — the perfect complement to Apple’s wildly successful chain of retail stores. If the rollout proceeds as planned, the deal could be a paradigm shift, a big nail in the coffin for the CD, and for brick-and-mortar music stores.”

“It found that instances of violence had increased 52.4% since a similar study in 2000-2001 and that sexual content had increased 22.1%. Networks argue that families have many other options for children, given the increasing number of cable and satellite channels and the ability to watch recorded shows on DVDs or digital video recorders.”

The BBC has scrapped plans to air a special program on climate change which would have involved viewers in a mass “switch-off” to save energy. Executives are concerned that the show might violate impartiallity guidelines. “It is absolutely not the BBC’s job to save the planet,” warned Newsnight editor Peter Barron at the Edinburgh Festival last month.

“In many accounts, the BBC’s current woes are conflated with the pervasive malaise afflicting the TV industry. This is not to excuse the BBC, which should neither have been caught up in ‘Crowngate’ nor have faked competition scams. But the wider problems have been worsening for a decade, and they affect the BBC because the corporation is inevitably influenced by the wider broadcasting ecology.”