Category: media

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association is hardly what one would call a collection of great film reviewers. In fact, “the association has repeatedly rejected applications from prominent foreign publications while accepting freelancers for small publications in Bangladesh and South Korea. Members need write only four articles a year to maintain active membership.” Nonetheless, HFPA members are lavished with attention and gifts by the Hollywood elite throughout the year, and are treated as if they were movie stars themselves, despite repeated reports of boorish and bizarre behavior. And all this because the Golden Globes, presented by the HFPA, get good television ratings.

Primer, a decidedly low-budget sci-fi thriller, has won the top dramatic prize at the Sundance Festival. The film, directed by Shane Carruth with a miniscule budget of $7000, is about two men who invent a time machine. The award for best documentary went to Dig!, which follows the frontmen of two cult bands embroiled in a bitter rivalry. “Morgan Spurlock, who spent 30 days eating only food from McDonald’s and then chronicled its impact on his body in Super Size Me, earned the directing award for his efforts.”

In the last fifteen years, independent film has become big business, thanks in large part to Robert Redford’s Sundance Festival, and to Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax Studios. Still, current conventional wisdom holds that, far from elevating indie film to new heights, Sundance and Miramax have in fact dragged much of the indie scene down to Hollywood’s shallow level. But has “independent film” really changed as a genre, or is it merely that we have broadened our definition of the term to such an absurd degree as to encompass directors and films which are in no way independent of Hollywood’s movie machine?

The Golden Globe Awards will be handed out Sunday night, and you can be sure that the organizers will do their usual bit of proclaiming the ceremony to be the precursor to (and predicter of) the Oscars. But in reality, the Globes are handed out by a collection of fawning entertainment “reporters” from random countries who care more about sucking up to studio chiefs than honoring serious film. As Hollywood honors go, the Golden Globes should be closer in prestige to the People’s Choice Awards than to the Academy Awards. So why does everyone continue to buy into the hype? Because the Golden Globes people are smart enough to put together an entertaining show, that’s why.

“Five movies about culture clashes and strangers in strange lands collected nominations on Thursday for best original movie script from the Writers Guild of America. Among the contenders for best original screenplay were Bend It Like Beckham, about the daughter of a traditionalist Indian Sikh family in Britain who dreams of playing soccer; Lost in Translation, with Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson as lonely Americans in a Tokyo hotel; and Dirty Pretty Things, about a Nigerian immigrant who uncovers grim dealings in the underbelly of London. The other nominees were The Station Agent, about a dwarf who makes friends despite trying to isolate himself, and In America, the director Jim Sheridan’s semiautobiographical tale of an Irish family struggling to survive in New York.”

French filmmakers seem to have an obsession with the French Resistance which is all out of proportion to the effect the movement actually had against the invading Germans during World War II. Worse yet, France’s film industry seems decidedly unwilling to confront the ugly truth about the country’s collaboration with the Nazis. It’s not that movies portraying the truth of the situation don’t get made – they simply don’t get screened with much frequency.

Several U.S. film studios and the Motion Picture Association of America have taken their anti-piracy crusade to Nordic lands, informing officials at Oslo University that Hollywood expects the school to bar certain specific students from its IT program as a result of the MPAA’s suspicion that the students have been illegally trading copyrighted films online. The university has suspended the students’ internet privileges temporarily, but Norwegian privacy advocates are incensed at the tactics.

Bernardo Bertolucci’s new film, The Dreamers, premiered at Sundance this week, sporting an eye-catching NC-17 rating. It’s the first film in years to carry the adults-only rating, normally considered a death sentence by studios, and Bertolucci is eager to take on the MPAA for the criteria it uses to assign ratings to films released in the U.S. No movie has ever been rated NC-17 for violent content, no matter how gory, but certain sexual content makes the rating automatic. Bertolucci’s view: “an orgasm is better than a bomb.”

“The Recording Industry Association of America is suing 532 more individuals it says are illegally sharing copyright music over peer-to-peer networks, the group announced Wednesday. It’s the largest group of copyright-infringement lawsuits that the music trade group has filed since it began its crackdown on file traders in September. The latest batch of traders targeted by the RIAA are accused of distributing, on average, 858 music files. Currently the RIAA doesn’t know exactly who these people are, so it must use a ‘John Doe’ process to obtain the names of those it says are illegally sharing music. Defendants are identified by their IP addresses.”

Privacy advocates and computer users may not be wild about the music industry’s decision to combat illegal file-sharing by suing individual downloaders, but don’t expect the tactic to go away anytime soon. The fact is, the well-publicized lawsuits are doing more to stem the tide of piracy than anything else the industry has tried, and a global crackdown on the websites that facilitate the downloads may be next on the agenda.