Category: media

The new movie about Vermeer is more of a mockumentary than a documentary. “The Vermeer film’s pedestrian seriousness and fustian reverence are their own eventual parody: I found myself giggling in the intervals when I wasn’t fidgeting. Biopics like this are the cinema’s equivalent of putting a blue plaque on a wall. “Vermeer slept here”. So may many moviegoers. Nothing wrong with serious style of course, except when married to a stupefying triviality of content. As an exploration of art’s pains and processes, Girl with a Pearl Earring has all the profundity of a Mills and Boon novel.”

The conventional thinking in Hollywood says that you can’t release a movie with an NC-17 rating if you want anyone to see it. And it’s true that many theaters won’t show NC-17 movies, and many publications won’t carry ads for them. But Fox Searchlight Pictures is testing the theory with a major release making its debut at the Sundance Festival. Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers features full frontal male nudity and a steamy sex scene featuring a brother and sister, will be released in February, with the controversial rating still attached, and the studio is convinced that Americans won’t be scared away by the ‘adults-only’ label.

Robert Redford’s little independent film festival isn’t remotely little anymore, and with the major Hollywood studios clamoring for ever more inclusion, “the question of whether Sundance has become too big and too co-opted seems ever more on point… And yet. There are more foreign films on hand this year than ever before, and despite premieres of such mainstream studio fare as The Butterfly Effect” – featuring Ashton Kutcher playing hopscotch with his past – Sundance continues to be mostly about the singular vision of the lone filmmaker.”

With the campaign by the American recording industry to eradicate online music piracy through lawsuits against the pirates having a demonstrable chilling effect on sites which enable illegal file-trading, the British Phonographic Industry is saying it will soon begin a similar campaign of its own. As industry-backed download sites such as Apple’s iTunes begin to gain market share, the record companies have more interest than ever before in wiping out the myriad no-pay alternatives, or at least steering the bulk of music consumers away from them.

Corporate sponsorship for PBS is up, but no underwriter has yet been found for Masterpiece Theatre, despite much looking. “I have no answer on why we haven’t been able to attract an underwriter to replace Exxon Mobil, expect for the obvious answer it’s a pretty high price tag. We are all concerned and unhappy about it,” she said, vowing the series will continue for the next two years no matter what.”

The Conan O’Brien Show banning the National Post in Canada from access to a visit to the show’s set in Toronto is a sign of how celebrity journalism is compromised. “Banning the Post, or even threatening a ban, from something that the taxpayers are funding merely gives it more ammunition. It’s unprofessional and out of line. It’s bad publicity. And it’s undemocratic.”

People are lining up to pay $26.50 to see the sing-along Wizard of Oz on the big screen. “Oh, sure. You get a little goodie bag at the door — bubbles and a magic wand for when Glinda the Good Witch appears and a kazoo and noisemaker for … well, we’re not really sure for what. There’s a comedian/singer/emcee who oversees a parade of those audience members who come in costume. And then there’s the film itself — a digitally remastered version equipped with lyric subtitles, just on the off chance that you blank out on the words to ‘Ding-Dong the Witch is Dead.’ But, as Dorothy herself might say, why oh why would someone pay three times the going rate of a movie just for the pleasure of singing along?”

“VHS rentals plunged by 29.8 per cent last year, according to Oregon-based Rentrak, but nearly making up for the drop were rentals of DVDs, which were up by 52.1 per cent.”

The Conan O’Brien show is going to Toronto for a week. The city lured the late night talk show north in an attempt to promote the city after the SARS scare last summer killed the tourist industry. The government is giving the O’Brien show $1 million for coming, and some Canadian critics are unhappy that public money is being used to subsidize the show. And – after printing stories critical of the deal, the National Post was told by O’Brien producers they would be frozen out of interviews or access while the show was in town.

“While 2003 was a year marked by the further consolidation of power by a handful of mega-media companies, the audience is not without some power to fight against them. The more we reject embarrassing big-ticket stunts like “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle” and “Coupling,” the riskier it becomes to produce bloated would-be crowd-pleasers chasing after a theoretically homogeneous crowd. Vanity — and perhaps the possibility of found money — might even drive the media giants to bolster their output of more diversified, less costly and perhaps better products that speak to our various niches.”