Category: media

“These charming, deadly immortals are everywhere. And as a result, they’re spilling as much green as red — about $7 billion since the “Twilight” film franchise bowed less than two years ago, according to THR estimates.”

“Quicksand once offered filmmakers a simple recipe for excitement … a plot device unburdened by character, motivation, or story.” Now it just seems quaint, “an analog fear in a digital age.” Yet the Internet (of course) harbors a thriving subculture of quicksand enthusiasts.

Russia Today, a state-funded cable news network available to about 20 million American viewers so far, has begun broadcasting six hours of programming covering events in the U.S. Says one Moscow analyst, “The Americans have a view of Russia and they show it to us. Russians have a point of view about America, too, and we want to show it to you.”

“Fifty years ago, death on the silver screen was typically quite decorous.” Women expired in their beds, men died in battle, and “anyone who was murdered – gangsters and ‘bad’ girls, for instance – generally got what they deserved.” Then along came poor Marion Crane. “A nice girl wasn’t safe in her own shower. A filmgoer wasn’t safe in his seat, the rules of narrative having been shattered.”

English tabloid The Sun called Tom Six’s new horror flick “sadistic and vile” and asked if it’s “the sickest film ever?” Lots of commentators are echoing the sentiment; so are the movie’s marketers. Ah, but what about The Exorcist? Antichrist? The Passion of the Christ? (Gigli?)

“Before Airplane!, jokes in comedies came along reliably though intermittently – but watching Airplane! was like being strafed with a joke-howitzer. There was no time to stop laughing before another dozen jokes came at you.” The movie’s creators tell their story.

“While no one predicts the end of film ads on TV — strong visuals still attract attention on the small screen — time-shifting is one reason why film-marketing dollars have increasingly flown to the Internet in search of real “engagement” in a fragmented media world. “

“Since the beginning of Hollywood, filmmakers after an exotic or romantic effect have taken their stories abroad. Since the advent of sound in the late 1920s, this tendency has created a little-discussed problem: How to represent foreign speech?”

“The risk in having a rapidly aging audience is that the networks may become less relevant to advertisers, the backbone of their business. Increasingly, that’s a way of thinking that itself is getting old.”

“In the movie business, writers hand over a screenplay and creative power to a director. In television, the writer rules. They also possess a little-talked-about power: the written word as a way to settle scores, keep high-maintenance actors in line and poke fun at anyone who gave them a hard time in junior high.”