This doesn't seem like a great idea, but then again, who asked the audience? "Items can be digitally added to almost any movie or TV show. For example, advertisers could put new labels on the champagne bottles in Rick's Cafe in Casablanca, add different background neon advertising signs to Ocean's 11, or get Charlie Chaplin to promote a fizzy...
Just as Chloé Zhao seems a near-lock for Best Director, the predictions are ... that no one watches this year's Oscars ceremony. "At a time when the traditional film industry is fighting for its primacy at the center of American culture — with at-home entertainment soaring in popularity and pandemic-battered theater chains closing — a collective shrug for the Oscars would send Hollywood deeper into...
The flagship theatre was special for multiple reasons, but one is that Hollywood often doesn't seem very, well, Hollywood. "The ArcLight Hollywood, by contrast, represented the living, breathing movie industry. It accomplished the rare feat of melding Hollywood the real with Hollywood the ideal. With its costume and prop exhibits in the lobby and its Q&As with actors and...
Not just irrelevant, but worse. HBO is celebrating, of course, but "whatever about HBO, how do the rest of us feel about Game of Thrones turning 10? Is our nostalgia tempered, for instance, by the fact the final seasons are now agreed to have been pretty dreadful? What, moreover, of the casual use of sexual violence as a plot device?...
Well: "Changing the Academy Awards, a 93-year-old American institution, has typically proven an exercise in futility. Tweaks have been tried along the way, yet the basic format has been stubbornly immutable." Maybe this year will be different? Hope dies hard in Hollywood. - Boston Globe (AP)
Right now, though not only right now, there's an issue with Black horror. "Black horror faces a distinct paradox: The genre has long been a valuable tool for creators of different backgrounds to process their traumas, and for audiences to reckon with their own. Some Black writers and producers in America use horror and science fiction as a lens through...
Yes, it's Philly. Despite how much those of us outside the area might think we know it, "the characters in Rocky don’t talk like they’re from Philadelphia. Neither do the ones in Silver Linings Playbook or The Irishman. For all the stories that have been set in and around the city, there’s a pronounced lack of authenticity when it comes to speaking the...
TV networks spend about $100 million a year in developing pilots for series. Only a small number get to the schedule. Even fewer become ratings successes. So there's an awful lot of very weird failed pilots out there... - Tedium
Last week the video-rental-service-turned-streaming-giant paid an estimated $1 billion for five-year exclusive U.S. rights to Sony's theatrical releases and right of first refusal for the studio's direct-to-streaming productions. If Netflix is going to spend that kind of money, shouldn't it have just bought Sony outright? It's what many people expected, and all the other major Hollywood studios have been...
Through the trade group Video Advertising Bureau, the networks are perplexed by Nielsen statistics that show the percentage of Americans who watched their televisions at least some time during the week declined from 92% in 2019 to 87% so far this year. - Toronto Star (AP)
Censorship ain’t what it used to be, including in Ireland. Here, as elsewhere, it’s been replaced by a different C-word. The last Irish film censor, John Kelleher, was instrumental in seeing through legislative reform which in 2008 renamed and redefined his office: he was now a Classifier of films. As a result, the curtain was finally lowered on a...
"Pacific Theatres announced on Monday that it would close all of its locations, which include the ArcLight Hollywood and the historic Cinerama Dome. Not as well known is that the theater chain also owns the Cinerama technology. The three-camera filming technique was introduced in 1952 in response to the rise of television, and was virtually obsolete by the time...
Novelist Mohammed Hanif (A Case of Exploding Mangoes) writes about the strange case of Sarmad Khoosat's film Zindagi Tamasha ("Circus of Life"), which has won multiple prizes at international festivals, was cleared by three Pakistani boards of censors, made the country's official entry for the Best International Film Oscar, glommed onto as a political football by people who hadn't...
"The celebrity endorsement is a three-way relationship connecting the star, the product and us, and the internet has worked to draw all of its participants closer and closer together. We’re all mingling on the same platforms, our photos pinned to the same timelines. Social media influencers have narrowed the distinction between celebrities’ claims to fame and their ability to...
Univision, the largest producer of Spanish-language in the United States, and Televisa, Mexico's largest media conglomerate (and one of the world's biggest single producers of broadcast material in any language) will combine their content operations to form Televisa-Univision, which could become the dominant media force in the entire Hispanophone world. - Variety
