Category: media

“The film is brilliant PR — smug and simplistic but effective and energising. James Cameron, who won an Oscar for sinking the Titanic, now wants to save the world and may just succeed in converting the next generation,” who are seeing his movie, and absorbing his message, in droves.

“[I]n 1895 when a 21-year-old named Alice Guy proposed using cinema to capture more than parades and trains, her boss indulgently called it ‘a young girl’s thing.’ … [T]hat girl became the first director and head of production at the French studio Gaumont and an early entrepreneur in the American movie industry.”

The city of Los Angeles “can’t afford to neglect the looming crisis that’s been building for more than a decade in the film and TV industry. The studios, of course, always whine about their problems…. For Los Angeles, however, the problem is not the industry’s distress but its success.”

Director James Cameron “had predicted that the film’s 3D technology would deter online theft, but almost one million pirate copies were downloaded within seven days of its release.”

“It proved something of a grand folly for David Lynch, whose 1984 adaptation was a commercial and critical flop … Now [Frank Herbert’s] Dune, the bestselling science-fiction novel of all time, looks set to be revamped for the 21st century with French director Pierre Morel at the reins.”

“[T]he film offers a blatantly pro-environmental message; it portrays U.S. military contractors in a decidedly negative light; and it clearly evokes the can’t-we-all-get along vibe of the 1960s counterculture.” Right-wing logic holds that this is at odds with mainstream America, “and yet the film has been wholeheartedly embraced by audiences everywhere, from Mississippi to Manhattan.”

“[W]ithin his body of often-dismissed films there is a submerged narrative of unrealized potential and unexplored talent. Amid the flotsam are films with talented directors and actors in which Presley showed glimpses of startling sincerity and emotion, a true actor in the making.”

“An amazing number, but Avatar isn’t exactly a business model. Hollywood can’t live on a ginormous hit once a decade. And if the studios chase the success of Avatar, they’re [liable] to throw a lot of bad money after good.”

The National Society of Film Critics on Sunday selected “The Hurt Locker,” a film about an elite Army bomb squad unit that works in Iraq to defuse improvised explosives while under the threat of insurgents, as the best picture of 2009.

“In view of the current economic downturn, entertainment industry representatives say they are not opposed to a charge for the use of municipal buildings. But they question how the city arrived at the $3,200 figure and say that and other aspects of the new fee have unnecessarily complicated a heretofore cordial relationship that, in their estimate, generates about $5 billion a year for the local economy.”