Category: media

So what is the new YouTube Red service? Reading between the lines, it is hedged bets, contradictory goals and, as yet, wishful thinking.

“Vulture’s list of ‘Shit People to Say to Women Directors‘ chronicles some of the crazy things that people say directly to female filmmakers’ faces, but behind their backs, there are even more dumb reasons given why women don’t get to direct more movies, and I hear them all the time. Here are five of the most misinformed.”

“What’s worrisome is that this is going to be the takeaway from the October Bloodbath: not the equally loud belly-flops of bloated fairy-tale origin story Pan or kitsch cartoon adaptation Jem and the Holograms, but the underperformance of challenging pictures like Steve Jobs and Crimson Peak. It may stand to reason that the grown-up audience Hollywood ignores the rest of the year is a no-show in fall too. And the implications of that are very grim indeed.”

Matt Zoller Seitz: “Throughout film history, and TV history, casting against type has yielded not just some of the best performances of certain actors’ careers, but some of the defining moments of the show or movie they appeared in. … There might be no better TV example … than Bryan Cranston, who in the mid-aughts was being sent mostly comedic material because of all of his great years on Malcolm in the Middle.”

“In the past five years, 21 Christian films have opened in wide release, meaning in more than 600 cinemas in the United States. All 21 are rated as ‘rotten’ on Rotten Tomatoes … And yet, Sony, Fox and other studios have established divisions for the express purpose of faith-based cinema. Why? Because these movies are produced with a different mindset than your standard narrative fare – and each of the 21 films made substantial profits.”

Viacom Inc.’s New York-based laboratory is concentrating primarily on brainwave activity from test subjects who are given media to watch or interact with, and the project’s core objective is to determine the timing of ads. The general notion behind the research which makes use of electroencephalogram (EEG) brain readings, is that scenes which gain emotional response from expectant mothers might be an apposite queue for baby-related items, or that a scene which makes the viewer feel hungry is an obvious point to present a food-related ad (presumably for a deliverable foodstuff which can capitalise on the transient feeling).

“How do you modulate the effects of technology so that organizations, artists, and audiences remain on equal footing with technology itself, as well as with the companies that provide it? And who will — and who should — have the final say about whether a particular product or protocol is suitable to a particular art form: the presenters, the artists, or the audience?”

“Studio executives often protest that there simply aren’t enough talented female filmmakers to choose from. They are wrong. … Contrary to what Hollywood would have you believe, it wasn’t hard to assemble such an enormous list of smart, eminently hireable female directors. The only difficult part was culling it down to just 100.”

“Can America really be healthy if it wants to watch Survivor, Joe Millionaire, Paula Abdul, the Situation, or the Kardashians? But now that reality TV has been revealed not as some malignant mind fever but another genre of entertainment, as great or foul, good or bad, watchable or unwatchable, as any other, let’s appreciate when it gets this deep.”