Category: media

Koreans – North and South – are objecting to how Koreans are portrayed in the latest James Bond movie. “The MGM hit proves that the US is the ‘headquarters that spreads abnormality, degeneration, violence and . . . corrupt sex culture,’ said North Korea’s Secretariat of the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland.”

“The Gin Game”, D.L. Coburn’s 1978 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, has some salty language. But really – compared to your average movie these days, it’s rather tame. But “in a bow to any skittish affiliates, PBS plans to provide alternate editions of the production: original as well as one that deletes some of the swear words uttered.”

Technology companies and the entertainment industry have been fighting over whether laws ought to be enacted preventing requiring anti-copying hardware in machines. Now leaders of the two industries have made a deal. “Lobbyists for some of the nation’s largest technology companies will argue under the new agreement against efforts in Congress to amend U.S. laws to broaden the rights of consumers, such as explicitly permitting viewers to make backup copies of DVDs for personal use or copy songs onto handheld listening devices. In return tech companies – Microsoft, Intel, Dell, etc – will actively campaign against digital piracy.

Even if they wanted to put movies online, movie studios aren’t able to, and it’s not likely to happen for a long time. Why? “Clearing rights to movies is the biggest single hurdle to Internet video on demand today. The studios would like to give us more, but can’t clear the titles. There are strange clauses attached to almost every film because the Internet either wasn’t contemplated or the contracts were loosely worded.”

“Selling films threatens to become even more direct and personal with the interactive poster. An American company, Thinking Pictures, is developing posters that interact with patrons as they walk past. They would even match their taste in films, registered on smart cards in return for discounts, with trailers and screening times.”

As consumers are increasingly finding ways to rocket past commercials, TV “advertisers are demanding to have their products and brands integrated into shows, to be part of successful entertainment rather than just to sit disconnected alongside it.” Major networks are happy to oblige. “They approach the advertisers just as often as they are approached.”

“These are rotten times to be a movie critic. In a bad economy, an independent voice delivering judgments on a multibillion-dollar industry that represents a tremendously lucrative source of ad revenue is likely to be perceived as a detriment. It has become increasingly common for critics to be pressured by their editors (who themselves may be under pressure from the sales department) to change their opinions. Pressure that no paper would think to bring to bear on their Op-Ed writers is routinely applied to movie critics. This has nothing to do with the quality of a critic’s writing but solely with the content of their opinions, the area where a critic is supposed to be given free rein.”

With the economy down, maybe it’s not such a good time for a film festival? Actually, hard times often make for great personal films, and that’s what the Sundance Festival is counting on when it opens this week. “Independent filmmaking is tough out there, and most of these films are works of creative passion, and are works that take a great deal of tenacity and, essentially, determination to get made. You see a lot of work that has a kind of idiosyncratic creativeness to it. That’s something that drives these works into existence, rather than saying they’re driven by commercial considerations.”

“Despite concerns about diminished corporate and government funding, PBS President Pat Mitchell insisted Friday that public television’s structure – as a loose confederation of independent stations – will be an asset in the face of a rapidly consolidating media landscape.”

So viewers are skipping TV ads with their Tivos? Okay, let’s just do away with the pretense that programming is anything more than filler between commercials. The WB network is planning a new show in which the ads will be built right into the show itself – product placement on steroids…