Category: media

Critics of the 55-member National Society of Film Critics have named “The Pianist,” the biography of a Polish-Jewish pianist and Holocaust survivor, as best picture of 2002. The movie also won best director, actor and screenplay awards from the society Saturday.

Lead times for getting big movies into theatres are getting longer. “The familiar proclamation ‘Coming soon!’ no longer means what it once did. Indeed, the film biz is a long way from the comfortable days of picking a release date with a finished film in the can. The studios’ battered parent companies, desperate for predictable revenue, find plenty of virtue in long lead times, but it isn’t an easy adjustment for film execs accustomed to procrastination.”

The Chinese performance artist shown in a UK documentary seeming to eata stillborn baby, has defended his work: “An artist does not give answers, but possibilities. When facing an issue, we must try to allow people’s debate of an issue to produce a deeper discussion. Only if people did not curse it, did not detest it, would there be something wrong. They are right to scold.”

A documentary aired in the UK that showed a Chinese performance artist “apparently eating a stillborn baby” sparked only 15 calls of protest to the TV station. “An estimated 900,000 tuned in to see the documentary, which went out at 2300 GMT on Thursday. It was beaten in the ratings by the 1997 movie Beverly Hills Cop II, which attracted 3.4 million viewers.”

“In a breach-of-contract lawsuit filed this week in federal court in Los Angeles, Disney alleges that starting in 1997, Blockbuster Inc. failed to account for missing videos, improperly charged the Burbank-based company for some promotional costs and prematurely sold videos before their rental life was finished.”

In a great and profitable year for Hollywood, it was a great (and profitable) year for small independent films. “Movies such as “Bowling for Columbine,” “One Hour Photo,” “Monsoon Wedding,” “Empire,” and even the obscure French film “Brotherhood of the Wolf,” made 2002 one of the most successful years ever for specialized fare.”

“PBS has always held exclusive claim to being ‘the arts channel,’ of course, mainly because networks shrink from fine-arts programming as ratings poison. But even so, the marriage between public broadcasting and the arts has, at times, seemed a superficial one.” An experiment at Maryland Public Television illustrates the problems, starting a debate “ranging from how producers can compellingly cover the arts, to whether anyone will watch it, and ultimately, if art and television can get along at all.”

Every nation has had its tyrants, and China had a doozy 2,200 years ago in the emperor Qin Shihuang, whom historians have compared to Stalin in his ruthlessness and diregard for his people. But a new film by acclaimed director Zhang Yimou is making waves in modern China for its sympathetic portrayal of the emperor. The film, Hero, “despite its complicated subject, has delighted Beijing’s mandarins, who are submitting it as China’s nominee for best foreign film at the Academy Awards. And it has infuriated some Chinese critics, who have panned Mr. Zhang’s plot for promoting a philosophy of servitude.”

Many are touting the movie “Chicago” as a return to movie musicals. But in truth, the movie musical never really went away, it adapted. “Though Broadway adaptations have largely fallen on their dancing feet since ‘Grease’ became a $378 million hit in 1978, the spirit of the musical is alive and well on film, from ‘Moulin Rogue’ to ‘Billy Eliot’.”

A filmmaker is engaged in a court battle with three Hollywood studios over whether his documentary on Tinseltown’s bizarre and undeniable obsession with death and killing will ever see the light of day, or the dark of a screening room. Peter Livingston’s film uses clips from the 25 most-watched movies of all time, and notes that “only four had no humans killed at all, 16 showed dead people being resurrected, just two showed natural deaths, only one had a birth in which the baby survived, and some portrayed mass killing to such an extent the total came to nine-billion corpses.”