Category: media

“Television has become obsessed with telling us what is coming up next. Hardly any programme is allowed to approach its conclusion without suffering the rude interruption of an over-loud voiceover, laboured link or fancy graphic signalling the arrival of whatever is due to follow the closing credits. It is as if the viewer is being urged to fixate on the imminent future at the expense of the present: not so much of ‘carpe diem’ as ‘carpe the next diem’.”

Animation has been a driving force behind Disney’s theme parks, retail stores, movies and TV shows. It also has become one of the company’s most confounding problems. The animation division has suffered through three chiefs in four years. Along the way have come wrenching layoffs, deep cost cuts and the studio’s biggest flop ever, last year’s ‘Treasure Planet.’ Although still considered the market leader in animation, Disney has lost ground to rivals, especially DreamWorks SKG.” So on Monday, a new boss of animation “roiled the ranks when he told a gathering of 525 animation employees that he wants them to produce lush, classic fairy tales – perhaps ‘The Snow Queen’ or ‘Rapunzel’ – entirely on computers. His vision was greeted with dropped jaws by the roomful of artists steeped in the traditional style of hand-drawn animation pioneered by Disney.”

The hidden world of movie subtitling is a “challenging, arcane milieu that’s a mandatory stop when launching a new film – or, sometimes, a reissued classic – into the global marketplace. The haiku of the screenwriting world, subtitles are a spare distillation of foreign-language dialogue that are more ‘adaptation’ than ‘translation,’ practitioners say. Artistic license and judgment calls come with the turf, affecting how the movie plays with the audience and the critics.”

Just who is Earl Dittman? He’s blurbed for even the foulest of movies as “absolutely loved it” and declares even the sorriest effort as “a cinematic masterpiece.” “The figment of a movie publicist’s wet dream, an avatar of agreeability who never fails to salute whatever bomb is launched out of Hollywood. No matter how soundly a movie is trashed by critics, Dittman can be counted on to declare it a masterpiece in his ubiquitous newspaper ad blurbs.” But does he really, truly exist? Peter Howell goes hunting…

“As a cultural phenomenon the B-movie lasted for less than 40 years. Its life was extended for a while by the post-war popularity of the drive-in cinema, but it finally succumbed to television and the inexorable disappearance of locally owned independent movie houses.
Fairly rapidly ‘B-picture’ became a pejorative term. ‘B-movie dialogue’ meant a string of clichés. ‘B-movie plots’ were predictable dramas retreading familiar stories. There is some justice to this. Most B-movies are bad and forgotten. But at their worst they have an unpretentious, sometimes camp, charm. At their best they are as different from smooth A-movies as the great pulp writers like David Goodis and Horace McCoy were from the respectable best-selling novelists of the day.”

British drama-makers are learning how to make their projects in a different way, borrowing from lessons learned from reality TV. “Not having words, only outlines, you get a different kind of energy taking off. They are tremendously scary projects — with two or three of these films in the cutting room people have told us they are untransmittable. There is a very fine line between working and not working. That is what is so exciting; this kind of danger in the endeavour has given a new kick of life to the drama scene.”

One thing about all those reality shows dominating the TV schedule – they don’t need writers. And so many sitcom and drama writers in Hollywood are hurting for work…

“No longer content to merely buy time when remote controls and digital video recorders like TiVo make ad-skipping its own participation sport, sponsors are weaseling into programs in a manner that hearkens back to the men of Texaco introducing Milton Berle.”

The new thing in Hollywood movies? Really old. “Beginning in the summer of 2004, a horde of ‘toga movies’ set in ancient times will be poised to invade local cineplexes. As befits the epic scale required by this new breed of old sagas, studios are spending big money on big directors and big stars.”