Category: media

A new genre of movie features extreme violence and gore. “The Big Disturbing Set-Piece Scene Of Violence has become its very own raison d’être, irrespective of its place in any supposed narrative order. It’s the one scene that will have them running for the exits, the one that will kick-start the controversy, and the one that will ultimately immortalise the movie. ‘We’ve reached a point where there is excessive pressure to show us what we haven’t seen before, with or without – but increasingly, without – dramatic or narrative support’.” What’s behind it?

Does the BBC play music that “glorifies the gun, homophobic aggression, male chauvinism and drug culture?” The founder of a London recording studio thinks so. “There is no programme of positive black awareness, and there are no music programmes reflecting the large influence roots, lovers’ rock, jazz and dub had on Britain.” He added that “the producers of certain music shows should share some of the guilt every time a black youth dies by the gun in Britain”. The BBC denies the charges.

Is the latest movie installment of the “Lord of the Rings” racist? “In the nearly five decades since “Lord of the Rings” was first published, Tolkien fans were willing to overlook parts of the text some condemned as racially insensitive. In “Rings,” it was argued, race was never directly addressed in the book, and physical descriptions of enemy humans were rare. Better to focus on the “Rings'” main themes: of courage, hope and love, of friendship, loyalty and spiritual strength, in the face of a fearsome threat. But like the ghostly faces in the Dead Marshes, that irritating issue of race always lingered just beneath the surface” and with the new movie, some critics are raising the issue.

“Rarely does a Hollywood film get made just once. The real business of Hollywood is creating that most desirable of products: the franchise. It’s reaching the point where audiences might not see a film any more unless they’ve watched an earlier instalment.” But are sequels ever as good as the first time around? Not usually. But it doesn’t seem to matter. People will shell out for tickets if they’ve seen it before…

The smashing success of the first two installments of the filmed version of JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy points up a fundamental irony in the story: the movies could not pack the emotional and visceral punch they do without the use of state-of-the-art digital technology, but Tolkien, a vehement Luddite, would undoubtedly have despised the computer-generated effects. “Tolkien’s hatred of technology was central to his conception of Middle Earth. The good hobbits are classic old English villagers, content to cultivate small plots of land and smoke their pipes… The evil wizard Saruman, by contrast, is a kind of demented Henry Ford, with a ‘mind of metal and wheels’.”

The nation’s largest corporate radio conglomerate, Clear Channel Communications, has told its stations that they must individually bear the cost of broadcasting their signals over the internet, causing 150 of them to yank their webcasts entirely. The cost of streaming a traditional radio signal has become increasingly prohibitive with courts issuing rulings mandating payments to musicians and actors whose work appears on the streams.

Okay – so all the critics are complaining about the BBC’s lack of arts programming. But over on BBC4, the so-called culture channel, there appears to be nobody home… “While the main terrestrial channels calculate their audiences in the millions, BBC4 has to talk in thousands, tens of thousands and – if they are lucky – occasionally hundreds of thousands.” With ratings like these, how do you justify more of this programming?

“Unfortunately we live in an age where people learn their history from feature films. This has not served our memories well. It may be too much to ask film makers to tell the most complete, unwholesome aspects of a story. But it’s worse when they focus instead on a more palatable, yet unrepresentative slice. The risk is in misleading the audience, trivializing the horror, and reducing the madness into something mundane.”

A Norwegian court has acquitted an Oslo teen of video piracy charges levelled against him by Hollywood studios. The teen had broken the encryption code on DVDs he had purchased in order to play them on his Linux-based computer. The court ruled that no one can be convicted of breaking into his/her own property, and that the charges were without merit. Free speech advocates hailed the ruling, while the studios said that they were examining their options for an appeal.

Nearly everyone not employed by a media giant or a congressman would agree that the 1996 congressional deregulation of the U.S. radio industry has resulted in an epidemic of predictable, generic, and (for lack of a better term) bad radio. The Telecom Act of ’96 also gave rise to such radio monoliths as Clear Channel, which consider it part of their mission to do to small, independent stations what WalMart does to mom-and-pop dime stores. But now, the dynamic duo that brought you the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill appears to be on the verge of introducing Senate legislation to rein in corporate radio, and return at least some of the airwaves to the public.