Ian McEwan, the distinguished British author of such novels as Atonement and Amsterdam, had this to say recently about online criticism from people who clearly have no idea what they’re talking about:
“I don’t have much time for the kind of [Internet] site where readers do all the reviewing. Reviewing takes expertise, wisdom and judgment. I am not much fond of the notion that anyone’s view is as good as anyone else’s.”
As Barnes reports, “Movie attendance hit a 16-year low in 2011. Star wattage continues to dim. DVD sales keep plunging. Almost none of the films being honored at Sunday’s Academy Awards have struck a mainstream nerve.
Yet Hollywood has a noticeable spring in its step. After all, it’s not the music business.
Instead of Hollywood suffering its own Napster moment — the kind of digital death trap that decimated music labels first through the illegal downloading of files and then by a migration to legal downloads almost solely through iTunes — several deals announced this month have it feeling more in control.
While studios still consider piracy a huge problem and feel stymied by Silicon Valley (and Washington politics), they nevertheless control their content. And now the Web is coming to them.
Google is developing a home entertainment device and several media companies have announced plans for new online streaming services. Taken together, the moves mean no supplier will have a monopoly over the distribution of films and television on the Internet. With more buyers comes leverage, and higher prices for content
‘The mood has shifted from,”Oh, my God, our business models are broken and we’re going to be cannibalized” to something resembling euphoria,’ said Peter Guber, a former chairman of Columbia Pictures who is now chief executive of the Mandalay Entertainment Group, which has interests in movies, TV and sports. ‘Studios see a robust, accelerating online market.’”
It makes sense; with admissions at a 16 year low, the viewers have to be somewhere, and unlike the music business, it seems that Hollywood has figured this out in time for a variety of reasons.
Read the whole piece here; more evidence of the ever changing landscape of cinema.
Martin Scorsese on the set of Hugo.
In today’s Los Angeles Times, Mark Olsen has a fascinating piece on the differences between digital cinematography and working with conventional 35mm film, as discussed by some people who really know what they’re talking about; the 2012 Oscar nominees for cinematography.
As Olsen writes, “This year’s Oscar nominees for cinematography present a particularly varied cross-section of contemporary filmmaking at a time when the very infrastructure of how movies are made and seen is in transition. Consider: 35-millimeter film prints are being phased out in favor of digital projection. Consumer still cameras can be used to shoot high-definition digital video. Video on demand is becoming a popular viewing option. Even the venerable Eastman Kodak, which produces the film stock on which many movies are made, recently filed for bankruptcy protection.
The Scandinavian-modern The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was shot with digital cameras; the World War I-set War Horse was shot on film. Hugo was shot in digital 3-D to portray 1931 Paris, while The Artist was shot on color film, then transferred to black-and-white to evoke the end of the silent film era in Hollywood. The Tree of Life used footage shot both on film and digital and integrates nature photography into its storytelling. (That three-on-film, two-on-digital split is likely an approximation of Hollywood production overall, though changes are evolving rapidly.) As this moment of transition challenges distributors, exhibitors and even audiences, cinematographers are on the front lines of those responding to the changes. Many of them recognize just what a unique window this particular time presents.”
Bray Studios, for many years the home of Hammer Films.
Click on the image above to go to Hammer’s official website.
Hammer Films, arguably the most important studio in the history of Gothic horror films, and home to directors Terence Fisher, Freddie Francis, Val Guest and many others, has begun an ambitious plan to bring their many of the classic films in their archive into the Blu-ray era, working in conjunction with Studiocanal and others. As Nancy Tartaglione-Moore reports, “legendary horror studio Hammer has announced a global restoration project for its library of films. In partnership with Studiocanal, Pinewood and other international players, more than 30 films will be revamped in HD for Blu-ray and other new media supports. Hammer’s original U.S. production partners, 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros and Paramount, are also participating in the project. The first title to be released is Dracula Prince Of Darkness, which will go out in March in the UK. The studio was founded in 1934 and went on to make such titles as The Plague Of The Zombies, Frankenstein Created Woman, The Witches and The Mummy. Since 2008, it’s been a division of the Exclusive Media Group. After ceasing production in the 1980s, Hammer returned to features in 2010 with Matt Reeves’ adaptation of Swedish hit Let Me In. This year, it will release Daniel Radcliffe-starrer The Woman In Black.”
Excellent news! You can read the entire story by clicking right here.
Here’s an interesting list, with links to IMDB, of the “one hundred best directors” of all time, compiled by The Cine-club de Caen. Of course, all such lists are highly subjective, but this seems like a good place to start for anyone, and any list that contains Manoel de Oliveira — though ranked at number 73, much too low in my estimation — seems worthy to me. Worth checking out, if only for the links to IMDB, and thus the links to outside reviews, resource materials, and the like.
Click on the image above to go to Richard Graham’s UNL Government comics website.
Richard Graham, an Associate Professor at the University of Nebraska Lincoln in Love Library, has been assiduously putting together a digital archive of US government comics on a wide variety of topics, all available as downloadable pdfs from the UNL Libraries Image and Multimedia Collections.
As reporter Micah Mertes notes in the Lincoln Journal Star:
“Richard Graham’s first foray into comic books didn’t include Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four or Archie but a 1979 Army training pamphlet for an off-road military vehicle: Operation and Preventative Maintenance: the M561/M792 Gama Goat [. . .] Graham, now a 37-year-old media services librarian and associate professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, has made government comics one of the focuses of his career. A few years back, he began a project at UNL scanning and digitizing hundreds of comics, some of which were already in UNL’s collection, some in his own.”
Boxoffice is one of the film industry’s most respected business journals, and they’ve recently put more than 3,000 back issues of the magazine online, free, as pdfs. Better still, they post five new back issues of the journal every week. It’s a fascinating look back at film history, and right now covers the years 1925 -2010, with a few years missing in the middle, but nothing major.
As the site says: “Welcome to the home for nearly 3000 back issues of Boxoffice Magazine, the theatrical film business’ premier trade publication since 1920. Each week we post five issues from our vast archive which covers everyone from John Barrymore to Drew Barrymore. (Before 1933, Boxoffice was published under different names in various parts of the U.S.)
Have a question? Looking for something specific? Just write us at thevault@boxoffice.com
Once, you had to go to a library and spend days digging through the stacks to find what you wanted; now, here it is, all at your fingertips, the complete commercial history of American film in the 20th century, and the start of the 21st. This is what the web was made for; free access, no ads, a complete and unabridged historical record. Essential reading, and lively browsing, as well.
Click on the image for a related video.
This cheerful image comes from Despair.com, a site that offers a useful if somewhat mordant critique of the current rush to be on every social media site at once. I’ve been working on a piece for the journal Flow on this, which will come out sometime this November — entitled I’m Not Here — but in the meantime, here’s a brief taste of how I feel about the whole “social media” mania. If it’s the latest, is it the greatest? Not necessarily.
As Chennai Social Media notes, “Social networking has become inevitable in the modern life, with many people using it, to stay in touch and companies using them to market themselves. However, the negative aspects of social media are:
Loss of Productivity
Individuals who spend a lot of time on social networking lose valuable time that can be devoted in doing something creative and useful.
Lack of Prioritizing
Checking other’s comments, messages and statuses can result in not focusing on one’s own task, which can lead to poor performance in office.
Diminishing Social Skills
Communicating solely with virtual friends can result in people not finding enough time to socialize with people around them.
Social Media Overkill
Social media, being viral and possessing the potential of reaching out to millions, instantly carries the risk of being abused. Any negative information or content about anyone or anything can be circulated faster through social networking platforms.”
Could this be you? Me? Anyone you know?
Here’s a selection of Public Domain feature films that anyone can view or download legally – an important point here — free of copyright restriction.
Currently the Internet Archive has 2,822 feature films available for viewing — a lot of it is junk, but there are numerous gems, such as And Then There Were None, Scrooge, The Joe Louis Story, Night of the Living Dead, The Fast and The Furious, The Inspector General, His Girl Friday, The Jungle Book (the Korda version, of course), The Lost World (1925 version), Ida Lupino’s The Hitch-Hiker, The Big Combo, F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), as well as the deeply idiosyncratic films of German auteur Lutz Mommartz.
All free, for download or instant viewing. An amazing resource; check it out.
East of Borneo is a rather amazing multimedia web journal on the arts, covering not only film, but music, painting, theater — the whole panorama of contemporary artistic endeavor. Apparently named after George Melford’s 1931 film East of Borneo, which famously served as the raw material for Joseph Cornell’s deeply influential found footage film Rose Hobart, East of Borneo is eclectic, sprawling, and alive with ambition. As the journal’s website says,
“Launched in October 2010, East of Borneo is a collaborative online magazine of contemporary art, and its history, as considered from Los Angeles. East of Borneo offers a new way to research and present the various histories of contemporary art. Its hybrid form—which publishes newly commissioned art writing within a larger context of user generated material—uses the power of networked collectivity to create depth and complexity.
Articles incorporate multimedia footnotes that offer readers immediate access to the primary materials—video, images, links and texts—that the writers have used in their research. Readers can upload additional items of their own, creating a growing archive of relevant content that activates and enriches the editorial material, highlighting unexpected connections and encouraging new lines of thought.
As you navigate the site today, you’ll find a range of content that reflects the sprawling, rhizomatic nature of Los Angeles as well as the broader international art world. Visit us often to watch the site grow in both content and interactivity as we roll out further features. Visit us often to upload that telling image, indispensible text, incredible link.”
You can visit this truly groundbreak journal by clicking here, or on the image above.
Frame By Frame Videos
