Category: media

Michael Eisner’s decision that Disney wouldn’t allow distribution of Michael Moore’s new movie was a blunder. “Eisner’s ill-conceived decision has managed to accomplish a rare feat in today’s poisonously partisan times: He has aggravated the left and the right simultaneously. Liberals are crying censorship while conservatives want to box Eisner’s mouse ears for giving Moore — an obnoxious publicity hound and longtime thorn in the right’s side — a tidal wave of sympathy and free ink.”

Michael Moore says the Bush White House tried to stop release of his new film Farenheit 9/11. “The director told a Cannes audience the Bush administration wanted to keep the film off screens in the run-up to November’s US election. The film examines the Iraq war and alleges connections between the Bush and Bin Laden families.”

“However it was cooked up, the confrontation between Disney and Michael Moore looks like a ready-made scenario for one of his films, since it casts him, once again, as a populist Paladin going into battle against a corporate enemy. It hardly hurts his cause that the company in question, in spite of its widely beloved, universally recognized brand name, is currently headed by Michael Eisner, one of the least beloved of modern chief executives.”

“Cannes 2004 may be only a few days old, but already, it seems, the winds are blowing in a different direction than Cannes 2003 — one of the more roundly criticized in many years. Last year’s Cannes was faulted, largely by American journalists, for slights to Hollywood and for too many lousy art films on the schedule — something the programmers, especially festival head Thierry Fremaux, seem to have taken to heart. Brad Pitt, Orlando Bloom and director Wolfgang Petersen of the multimillion dollar epic “Troy” have already provided much of the Hollywood star power critics said was missing in 2003.”

The almost-anything-goes world of shock-jock radio has turned upside down since Janet Jackson’s infamous “wardrobe malfunction” during the Super Bowl halftime show. Since that fleeting glimpse of Jackson’s mostly obscured anatomy, the Federal Communications Commission has issued more than $1.5 million in fines. Moreover, with the U.S. House of Representatives recently passing a bill allowing fines of $500,000 for each instance of radio ‘indecency,’ with the White House voicing support and the U.S. Senate considering even more draconian measures, the climate for provocative speech on America’s radio airwaves has changed dramatically and swiftly.”

Should Canada enact a quota that would force movie theatres to show a certain percentage of Canadian movies? The idea, writes Dan Brown, is “based on a false assumption: that the average ticket buyer actively seeks out Canadian movies. The young performer might like to believe this is true, but this is not how the majority of movie lovers behave in the real world. Before the average person goes to the theatre on a Friday night, they don’t say to their friends, ‘Is there anything Canadian playing? I’m in the mood for something domestically made.’ Instead, they say, ‘Is there anything good playing?’ The public has moved beyond making its choices based on a film’s nationality, if that ever truly mattered.”

Why is there so little imagination in movie “special effects”? “Part of the problem, I think, is that technicians get excited about techniques that stretch possibilities, for strictly technical, not to say geeky, reasons. We could never do that before, so it must be cool. Trouble is, what looks cool to the person who stretched the technique doesn’t necessarily look cool to someone who doesn’t realize that the technique has been stretched. Whenever a director comes along with a really striking new look, a striking new way to imagine the future, we see the same look replicated over the next couple of years, until someone comes up with another look.”

“Twelve days of moviegoing on the French Riviera in springtime can be only so miserable. But this year you will hear no whining from this quarter. At least not yet. The 57th Cannes festival has, in its first few days, showed signs of fulfilling the fantasy of what it could and should be (though it will never, to some old-timers, be what it once was). It has been full of drama, spectacle and (literal) fireworks. There have also been some good movies. And to think that it almost didn’t happen at all.”

“The 57th Cannes Film Festival has opened on a raucous note with a public culture clash between Quentin Tarantino and the British actress Tilda Swinton, who argued that his brand of Hollywood blockbuster was drowning out equally valid voices in the movie industry.”

The US Congress says it wants Nielsen Research to delay full implementation of its new electronic TV ratings meters. “Nielsen, which has a monopoly on counting TV viewers, is switching to an electronic system for measuring local habits that it contends will be far more accurate. Currently, 500 households in a city are asked to record their TV viewing in a diary kept during four “sweeps” months. Nielsen is increasing its sample to 800 homes per city and measuring viewing every day through a “people meter” device attached to televisions. Some critics say dry runs of the new system have shown sharply lower ratings for some programs popular in black and Latino homes.”