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Category: media
Inside The Weinstein Company When The Stories About Harvey Broke
“As they gathered, someone mentioned that The New Yorker story was up. The assembled employees read in silence. They listened to the tape. They knew that voice too well. Some began to shake, and many of them wept as they contemplated the roles they might have played as accomplices, unwitting or not.” Dana Goodyear talks to current and former employees, many of whom insist that they knew Harvey Weinstein was “a bully, a screamer, a yeller, a thrower, a pig – not that he was a rapist.”
The Real Problem With Making Good Movies Today Isn’t “Rotten Tomatoes.” It’s The Audiences Hollywood Is Trying To Capture
“The real problem is much bigger than Rotten Tomatoes—it’s that so much of Hollywood is now fixated on capturing the widest audience possible with every film. Blockbuster action movies, superhero franchises, jolty horror pictures, and animated family films that can draw large crowds are the order of the day. Even mother!, which was light on actual scares but heavy on mood and allegory, was marketed as a horror movie in an attempt to pull viewers; theatergoers who felt misled by the advertising may have contributed to the F CinemaScore rating.”
New Film ‘The Death of Stalin’ Is A Madcap Farce – But In Russia, They’re Not Amused
The satire by Armando Ianucci (creator of Veep) is getting great early reviews in Britain (The Guardian‘s critic called it the movie of the year). The Russians beg to differ – even though no one there has seen it and the distributor hasn’t even applied for a license for it yet. A pro-Kremlin newspaper pro-Kremlin newspaper called the film “a nasty sendup by outsiders who know nothing of our history”; one politician said it was a “planned provocation” and another described it as an “unfriendly act by the British intellectual class … [part of an] anti-Russian information war.”
Historian Gives The Real Story Of The Death Of Stalin – And Argues That A Film Comedy About It Was A Bad Idea
Richard Overy points out where Armando Ianucci’s new The Death of Stalin gets the history wrong but allows that cinematic license could be legitimate. But the caricature, he writes, is just wrong, and not only because Stalin’s victims deserve better: “The presentation of Stalin and his cronies as a collection of foul-mouthed misfits … will certainly not help to understand the Russia of the 1950s while it mocks by implication the Russia of today, a country still shaped in some ways by the legacy of Stalin’s modernisation drives and the operation of the Stalinist state.”
Modern Movie Cowboys Are Redefining Mythology Of The Old West
“A last gasp of the old west duly became the first movie western. But from there, the task quickly became mythmaking. The western turned inexorably towards the past – or a version of it. Soon came the movies that defined the genre, tales of heroes in stetsons and dastardly “injuns” somewhere between propaganda and mass hypnosis. The west had to be won, most westerns said, to save innocence from savagery. There were exceptions, and some of those were fantastic films – but the racism stuck. Eventually, there was a reckoning – an apology even.”
The Filmmaker Who Put Korean Cinema On The World’s Screens
“Park Chan-wook … combines dark humor, a painterly sense of composition and lots of gore. But beneath the violence lies a deep humanity – and a love of the absurd.”
Netflix Won’t Say How Many People Watch Its Shows. So Nielsen Figured Out How To Count Them
“Nielsen announced the initiative on Wednesday morning, but it has been collecting Netflix viewership data over the last two months in a kind of test run. The company said it was able to determine how many viewers were streaming Netflix content through audio recognition software in the 44,000 Nielsen-rated homes across the United States.”
The Movie Industry Thinks Rotten Tomatoes Has Ruined Criticism. But Has It?
“The question then becomes, are the scores on Rotten Tomatoes just reflective of the history of criticism, and thus of conventional opinion? Or are the Rotten Tomatoes contributors themselves the critics who prop up these reputations, and thus pave the way for smarter conversations about film online?”
Weinstein Company Saved From Financial Ruin As Harvey Faces Criminal Charges
“The mini-studio announced Monday that it has entered into an agreement for [Los Angeles billionaire Thomas] Barrack’s private equity firm, Colony Capital, to provide a cash infusion to the New York company. … They have [also] entered a negotiation period for a sale of all or part of the beleaguered firm’s assets.”