Category: media

The Gemini Awards, celebrating Canadian television, take a shine to “Human Cargo”, the three-part drama about the plight of refugees. The show won 7 of 17 nominations, winding up seemingly in a class of its own.

Film production is dying in Ontario. So where is the new Hollywood North? Saskatchewan. The province offers generous tax credits and has seen production soar 2,400 percent in the past few years. “The co-operative movement is rooted here, so people know if you don’t work together you ain’t getting nowhere. If we don’t have experience in the province we can deem someone from another province or country a Saskatchewan resident. And unlike other tax programs, we can pay it out above the line, that is, on producers, key cast and directors.”

Time was when Hollywood made movies idealizing Christmas. Not anymore. “Nowadays you make fun of Christmas. I think it’s more current now to say that Christmas is this dreadful family occasion where relatives who don’t like each other come together and get drunk and start fighting. A lot of Christmas movies are rather like that.”

The “morality” wars being played out by the FCC seem to be at the instigation of a tiny minority. “If 2004 was the year the Culture War became a scene out of ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ we now know that scare tactics and chest-pounding about moral values came from the finger-clicking of a relative few and found their way up through the FCC and out of the mouth of President Bush. Just remember, you might feel like you’re in Helms Deep right now, but when you look out at the vanquishing horde of conservative watchdog goons, it’s really just a CGI illusion. Which means there’s hope in beating back the censorship rampage of a very tiny minority.”

Director Peter Bogdanovich says today’s movies are lacking. “There isn’t the cumulative effect of beginning, middle and end, and an impact that grows. There’s no craft left. Maybe I sound old-fashioned, but I’m proud of it.”

Pixar’s postponement of its next feature to summer indicates a new reality in the movie business. “The DVD tail is now wagging the movie dog. There is so much money to be made from the fast-growing home DVD market, studios are beginning to plan their movies around the DVD release, not the theatrical one. Many movies now make their money not from the theatre, but from the living room and rec room, where box-office disasters frequently turn into cash cows — and people are much more willing to buy a DVD than they were the old VHS format.”

The FCC has asked the NBC television network to turn over tape of the opening ceremonies of last summer’s Olympic Games, so that the agency can investigate viewer complaints about its content. No one seems to know exactly what portion of the Athens ceremony raised hackles with American viewers, but it may have something to do with the partially unclothed state of some of the traditional Olympic poses adopted by actors in the show. Or maybe it was the woman wading in a puddle who “appeared to have been impregnated by someone who was radioactive, but we cannot say with certainty whether that was Greek or just weird.”

The evolution of cell phone technology is looking an awful lot like the early days of television, when no one was quite sure what direction the new medium would take. At the moment, the strategy of most companies seems to be to throw every available technology at the consumer wall, and see what sticks. “The increasing power of cellphones is shaping innovative forms of compact culture: micro-lit, phone soap operas and made-for-mobile dramas that can be absorbed in a few glances.”

Some FCC commissioners have been taking the broadcast regulation biz on the road lately, hosting public forums in cities across the country. A stop in St. Paul revealed a growing public discontent with corporate consolidation of American mass media, but little consensus over what should be done about it. In Minnesota, where the biggest media presence is actually a public radio network, some activists are stressing the importance of diverse community involvement, while others lament the decline of programming that serves rural residents, such as farm news.

“Just three years removed from a rash of bankruptcies and cinema closings, [St. Louis’s movie] theater business is growing again. By early 2006, a building binge will add at least 56 new screens to the region’s western edge… In a transition that’s been far from painless, theater operators are continuing to move to these newer, larger cinemas. The trend takes amenities that debuted in the 1990s, such as stadium seating, and makes them standard theater fixtures. As a result, modern megaplexes are replacing smaller theaters from the 1970s and ’80s.”