Category: media

The movie western is 100 years old. But it’s not in good shape. “There hasn’t been a mainstream Western in eight years and no successful Western since Clint Eastwood’s revisionist epic Unforgiven appeared in 1992. For anyone who as a child was enthralled by Gary Cooper in High Noon or John Wayne in one of a dozen great movies (Red River, She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Searchers) this has been a sad, even mournful, state of affairs.”

“Do not believe overpaid actors who cry poor mouth. Overstuffed programs in Venice, Montreal and Toronto have recently proved there is no such thing as a faltering economy in the movie business. Hundreds of new films are upon us like carrion birds, but why do the ones nobody will ever see again (or want to) reliably turn up in the New York Film Festival, and why are they always so lousy?”

A film festival in Moscow showing movies “highlighting massacres allegedly committed by Russian troops in Chechnya” is canceled just before it was to start, as cinema organizers say that films that were to be shown are too political. The cancelation feeds fears that censorship is on the rise in Russia. “With [former president Boris] Yeltsin, we didn’t have this. There was corruption and social disorder, the same as now, but at least nobody was afraid to tell the truth.”

American TV is showing more and more sex. And it’s not just on cable anymore. “Experts say increased competition from pay cable channels and a general social acceptance of sexual matter has led to a loosening of standards for what gets on the air.”

TV’s ability to stereotype is an awesome thing. “Women on television are still sometimes squeezed into demeaning caricatures (or at least inappropriate clothing: surgeons, homicide detectives and high school teachers all wear low-cut tank tops to work). But increasingly, so are men. The new fall season shrinks the number of belittling stereotypes they may occupy to just two: cads or dads.”

Most people don’t think of Mel Gibson as a controversial movie star. But his new tribute to the last days of Jesus has the religious world in an uproar. “The Passion has unleashed one of the bitterest disputes to envelop the filmmaking industry for years, with many leaders of the Jewish community in the US, as well as many Christian leaders, describing the film as an all-out attack on both the Jewish community and the teachings of the mainstream Catholic church.”

The religious controversy swirling around Mel Gibson’s Christian opus, The Passion, is remniescent of the furor that enveloped another famous film, writes Geoff Pevere. “Thirty years ago, William Friedkin’s adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s 1971 bestseller not only touched off a fire-storm over the film’s depiction of a 12-year-old girl’s horrific possession by an ancient demon, it contained possibly the most graphic juxtaposition of sacred and profane ever seen by a mass audience — the image of a crucifix being violently shoved into the possessed girl’s vagina.” The Exorcist may have had far different aims than Gibson’s devotional flick, but the pious outrage that greeted its release was awfully similar.

“The race for this year’s Academy Awards has been thrown off stride by a move by the major Hollywood studios to curb movie piracy. The studios hope to halt the distribution of thousands of DVD and VHS copies of Oscar-contending films to those whose votes decide the winners. Such a move may hurt the Oscar chances of smaller, independent studios, which have come to rely on the videos as a means of getting their films seen by Academy Award voters.”

At those times when truth is stranger than fiction, you can bet that Hollywood is going to want to make a movie about it. In fact, the film genre known as the ‘biopic’ – a movie based on the facts of a real life situation, but not necessarily adhering to them strictly – has gained increasing popularity with both filmmakers and moviegoers in recent years. But the subjects of these films are almost never compensated for having a fictionalized account of their lives playing at the multiplex. Worse yet, many media outlets sell the film rights to biographical articles, without ever consulting with the subject. It’s legal, sure, but is it ethical? More importantly, does anyone care?

Method acting is arguably America’s greatest contribution to the world of film. But these days, many method actors seem hesitant even to admit to using the techinique, which involves the complete immersion of oneself in the character. In fact, the term “method actor” seems to have become synonymous with “difficult prima donna.” And that’s a shame, says Geoff Pevere: “As derided as the method has historically been as the refuge of spoiled, unwashed and overindulged millionaire bohemians, it stood for something which has now apparently been pronounced dead: The presumption that there was more to a performance — and to the movie that contained it — than what appeared on-screen.”